“Probe reports it is back in normal space. Elapsed time, fifty-six minutes, forty seven seconds.”
JieMin turned to ChaoLi.
“Call it thirty-four hundred seconds. So seventeen hundred to one for two seconds of thrust,” JieMin said.
“So it would take two years to get to Earth?” ChaoLi asked.
“No, that’s the longest it could take. We don’t know to what speed in hyperspace the probe can get if it continues thrusting. It should be accelerating, and the multiple increasing. Then at some point, the viscosity of hyperspace creates drag on the probe and we can’t go any faster. That will be the multiple for a long cruise.”
ChaoLi nodded.
Borovsky walked up to Huenemann.
“Karl, we’re seeing some red shift in the communication coming back. Not a lot, mind you, but the probe is hauling ass.”
Huenemann turned to JieMin.
“That is not unexpected,” JieMin said. “The velocity leaving hyperspace doesn’t need to be the same velocity it had going in. We think we have methods to determine that velocity by the way we leave hyperspace. Do you have an estimate of the velocity?”
Borovsky nodded.
“It looks like one percent of c or thereabouts. Call it seven million miles an hour.”
JieMin nodded, and his eyes went unfocused as he consulted his heads-up display. Familiar by now with JieMin’s methods, ChaoLi was content to wait.
When JieMin stirred, he turned to Huenemann.
“I recommend flight profile thirty-two for the return, Karl. With two-point-one-seven seconds of reverse thrust and point-two-one seconds of forward.”
“Did you account for the flight time of the command message?” Huenemann asked.
“Of course.”
Huenemann nodded. He turned to Borovsky.
“All right, Mikhail. Send the command for flight profile thirty-two, and parameters two-point-one-seven and zero-point-two-one.”
Borovsky nodded, and walked back over to the team running the control consoles.
“Reverse thrust?” ChaoLi asked.
“Yes,” Huenemann said. “Since we have reverse on the drive, there’s no sense flipping the probe over. We just drive it in reverse. I’m guessing that little bit of forward thrust at the end is to fine tune the exit velocity once it drops back into normal space?”
“Yes. Exactly,” JieMin said.
Huenemann nodded.
“So now they send the command, and we wait another hour?” ChaoLi asked.
“Yes,” Huenemann said. “They send the command, and we wait an hour for the command to get there, then the probe transitions and comes back to us in two seconds.”
“Outstanding.”
The return wait wasn’t as hard as the outbound one, because they knew approximately how long it should take. About an hour after the command message was sent, the communications technician broke the silence.
“The probe has exited hyperspace. It’s here, but it’s still moving pretty fast.”
“What do we have for a velocity?” Borovsky asked.
“The probe can see the planet, and it says its velocity is a hundred and ten thousand miles an hour.”
JieMin was getting more and more refined in his analysis of their predictions as he got more data. He consulted the flight profiles they set up last week.
“Flight profile twenty-six. Parameter one-point-five.”
Huenemann nodded to Borovsky, and the communications technician sent the command.
“One-point-five seconds?” ChaoLi asked. “But won’t that send it careening off again?”
“No. Flight profile twenty-six is minimum ripple, forward – which is against its current velocity – and should be just enough to brake it down to a reasonable exit speed.”
The technician’s voice came from the other side of the room.
“The probe has exited hyperspace. Velocity now two thousand miles an hour. It’s still a ways out, but it should be able to maneuver into orbit tomorrow.”
“Nice,” Huenemann said.
“What’s next?” ChaoLi asked.
“Refine our navigation mathematics with what we learned, then run more tests at longer times, so we can calculate our hyperspace velocity and see how the ratio varies,” JieMin said.
“When can we run the next test?” Huenemann asked.
“I would think this week,” JieMin said.
“We need to go up to the probe, then, and refuel it.”
“That would be wise,” JieMin said. “We’ll get you some new flight profiles as soon as we can.”
More Missing Data
While all the preparation for the test flights was going on, JieMin continued to spend much of his time researching the colony project, letting his hyperspace math group work out the flight profiles. His focus shifted to the financial aspects of the project. Where had all the money come from?
There were good records of the disbursements on the project. Purchasing documents, delivery documents, payment documents. There was a mountain of documents, and JieMin worked his way through a sampling of them.
JieMin found, as he expected, that the financing in the latter stages of the project – particularly the last six years – came from the World Authority. To spend truly monumental sums of money, one needed access to government and its taxes. That much JieMin understood, and the documentation showed that was the case.
JieMin moved further back in the project documentation, following the money flows. Janice Quant, in her inauguration address, had referred to the project as the De Villepin Project, and promised to carry out the previous chairman’s vision, so he expected to find the government expenditures had begun under De Villepin.
But when JieMin followed the finances back, he found an anomaly. Granted, during Quant’s tenure as World Authority Chairman, the financing was all by the World Authority. During the latter four years of De Villepin’s tenure, the financing was increasingly by the World Authority. But prior to that – prior to Janice Quant becoming Vice Chairman of the World Authority – the financing was coming from Janice Quant.
At that point, the World Authority wasn’t involved at all.
That couldn’t possibly be right. It was almost as if ‘the De Villepin Project’ was actually Janice Quant’s project, and she took over the World Authority to get access to its finances and its authority.
Why did his brain supply ‘took over’ for the verb in that sentence?
JieMin kept digging into where the earlier money on the project had come from. The documentation here was much sketchier, almost as if it had been deliberately obscured. He kept running into dead end after dead end. Sometimes he ran into money from unexpected sources. At other times he ran into money going to unexpected places.
The other thing he couldn’t find was a complete payroll. There were lots of people involved in the project – thousands of them, even early on – but it was as if they weren’t getting paid. How did that work?
He brought it up with ChaoLi that weekend, the weekend after the initial ripple drive testing. The kids had gone to the park themselves today, and LeiTao was at the beach with her boyfriend again. That relationship looked like it was getting serious. Then again, she was fifteen, and it was getting to be about that time, by Arcadia standards, anyway.
“I’ve been reviewing the financial documentation of the colony project from before the World Authority became involved with it,” JieMin said.
“How’s it going?” ChaoLi asked.
“Slowly. There are a lot of anomalies in the documentation. There appears to be a lot of documentation missing as well.”
“Well, that’s to be expected, I think. The archives aren’t going to contain corporate confidential information. Those aren’t public records.”
“Yes,” JieMin said. “But there are other things missing as well. Things that should appear in public documents, I think. Like overall payroll numbers.”
“Yes, those get filed with the governmen
t, and at least some of those are public numbers. The ones on corporate reports, for instance.”
“Right. But I am finding corporations with hundreds of employees with no payroll data.”
“Now that is strange,” ChaoLi said.
“Or I’m misreading the reports. Accounting isn’t my field.”
“Do you want some help with it? I have people on loan from JongJu’s group to work the project finances. I’m sure some of them could help out.”
“That might help,” JieMin said. “At least to tell me if what I am seeing is unusual or I am just misunderstanding. But I don’t think I am.”
“If you’re not, what would that mean?”
“That I found more data that was deliberately obscured.”
On Monday morning, an accounting team from JongJu’s group stopped by JieMin’s office. They had asked him for a preview of the anomalies he was seeing, and he told them to drop by. He had to borrow another guest chair from the office of one of his hyperspace math team next door.
Chen MinYan and her assistants sat, and JieMin walked them through some of the documents he had been looking at.
“This is just a small portion, you understand,” he said. “A few examples of each of the things that doesn’t look right to me. There are many more of each type, all across the project and companies associated with the project. I don’t know if this is abnormal, or if it is the way accounting was done at that time.”
MinYan nodded.
“I don’t think it’s normal,” she said. “This looks like someone was cooking the books, but exactly how I can’t tell yet.”
“So this isn’t normal.”
“No. It’s not normal. Some of these things are outright scandalous, if you look at them right.”
“But they were never examined at the time?” JieMin asked.
MinYan shrugged.
“Each document looks OK on its face. As a standalone. You know. It’s when you cross-reference them the way you did that things start looking suspicious.”
MinYan looked at him sharply.
“So what do you want us to do with all this?”
“Find out if they were hiding something. If there is information that was deliberately obscured, and what that information is. Not the contents of the information. That’s probably lost. But what piece of information it was. So that I can try to figure out what they were up to.”
MinYan nodded.
“All right,” she said. “Can you send me the pointers to everything that looks funny to you? Everything you flagged?”
“Of course, but it’s a lot of documentation.”
MinYan shrugged.
“Documentation is what we do,” she said.
“So what are we seeing?” Chen MinYan asked her team leaders on Friday, the end of their third week of looking at the documentation.
“First thing is that Professor Chen was right,” Chen JieLing said. “There are a lot of employee listings or employee counts for which there is no payroll. Sort of a reverse ghost employee situation.”
“Reverse ghost employees?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “I don’t know what else to call it. Normally, a ghost employee is someone who doesn’t exist. Some made-up name is put on the payroll, but their pay actually goes to the fraudster. Here, the person is made up, but they receive no pay.”
“Could it be someone who doesn’t need to be paid?” MinYan asked. “Or asks not to be paid, like a university professor doing gratis work on the side?”
“I don’t think so. Among other things, there are some organizations where the whole organization is fictitious. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people in an organization, and none of them is real.”
“What could be the purpose of that?”
“One thing. Money,” JieLing said. “These organizations were part of the money flow. We think some of them existed just to provide a buffer, to keep it from being obvious that money was going from organization A to organization C. Insert fake organization B.”
“Ah. OK. That makes sense.”
“Yes, but given that clue, we started running every named person we had against a background search, to see how many of them were a real person and how many weren’t.”
“How did you do that?” MinYan asked.
“We looked up everything we had on them. Not just biographical information, but posts on public forums, appearance on membership or officer listings of social groups, all sorts of things other than their professional activities.”
“And?”
“There are thousands of them,” JieLing said. “Public officials. Scientists. Lawyers. Finance people. Even accountants. As far as we can tell, none of them really existed. They were fronts for someone else.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know. That’s the really frustrating thing. Whoever was actually using these fronts kept their hands clean. And it had to be hundreds of people, to front that many ghosts. But we can’t find one of them.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” MinYan said.
“Oh, it gets worse,” Chen FangTao said.
“How so?”
“There was a whole infrastructure of these firms. Especially engineering, financial, and legal firms. For instance, there were a number of investment houses that owned significant shares of stock in firms associated with the project. When we look at their performance, as a whole they were very successful, vastly outperforming other such firms in the marketplace.”
“All ghost firms?” MinYan asked.
“Yes.” He nodded. “And together they had a controlling interest in a lot of the firms working on the project.”
“Wow.”
“Yes,” FangTao said. “It gets better. They also had a controlling interest in the New York Wire, the leading news outlet of the day. The Wire strongly supported the colony project, and ran any number of stories about it, all strongly biased in its favor. And get this. The writers who wrote those pieces? They were ghosts, too.”
“It was a massive conspiracy to carry forward the project.”
“Absolutely.”
“And we have no idea who was behind it?” MinYan asked.
“None.”
MinYan shook her head.
“Unbelievable.”
“And true.”
MinYan nodded.
“Did you find anything else?”
“Oh, yes,” JieLing said. “Some of the money disbursed from these ghost firms – and there was a lot of money flowing here – went to some shady setups.”
“Elaborate.”
“Well, first, there was a lot of ‘spreading around money’ being, well, spread around. There were hundreds of people who were being paid bribes out of this network of ghost firms.”
“Who?” MinYan asked.
“You name it. City council members in various large cities. Judges in various courts. Officials in administrative region bureaucracies. World Authority Council members and their families. Basically anyone who interacted with the project from outside was on the take.”
“And they got away with it?”
“Oh, much of it was disguised,” JieLing said. “All the traditional methods. Election campaign contributions. Contributions to charities. Book deals. Speaking engagements. You name it, they used it. It was like they read the book on how to bribe people, and then added a couple chapters of their own.”
“And all this money was coming out of the ghost firms?”
“Oh, yes. And that wasn’t the only funny business going on. One particularly scandalous bit is a computer project by Bernd Decker, one of the people who kicked off the project. Over more than twenty years, he spent billions of credits of project money on a computer project. There were no papers published. No architecture, no results, no records of the computer being used for anything. Nothing. Just money spent. Lots of money.”
“Was Decker behind the conspiracy?” MinYan asked.
“We don’t think so. While the project was going on, he was busy do
ing other things. Coming up with real computer projects, real advancements in the technology. All the computers we use are derived from Decker’s remaking of the computer industry with a seminal patent in the late 2230s.”
“Where was all the money coming from?”
“The stock market,” FangTao said. “There was a ridiculous amount of money being made. As the project grew and spent money, it spent it all on firms in which it had a controlling interest. The stock market is always forward-looking, and as those firms’ receipts grew due to the project, their stocks soared. They issued more shares, then distributed dividends.”
“Which went back into the project.”
“Exactly.”
“All right. Nice job. Let’s get all this information organized, prepare the exhibits, and write up the analysis. We can present it to Professor Chen next week.”
Interstellar
As testing of the hyperspace probe continued, JieMin and his hyperspace math team were able to work out the acceleration curve for the ripple drive.
As they had expected, the probe’s velocity in hyperspace increased the longer the drive was engaged, until the viscosity of hyperspace that they were pushing against increased the drag on the field. Then the drive held them at that cruise velocity, but could not accelerate the probe any further.
They also discovered that, if the ripple drive were shut off in hyperspace, the probe would slow to a stop in hyperspace due to drag.
In working up a mathematical formalism for all this, they relied heavily on all the work that had already been done in hydrodynamics. As it turned out, the data indicated that hyperspace was incompressible, much like water, and the mathematics was similar. The constants in the equations were different, and the data helped them refine values for those constants.
They used their new mathematics to optimize the ripple-drive parameters, varying the spacing of the ripples and the rate used to move the ripples along the hyperspace field. Borrowing from variable-pitch propeller science, they found that the best results were when the ripple drive rate was started out slowly and then increased as the probe sped up and the flow of hyperspace over the field increased.
GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3) Page 3