Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  Bringing them back to Lundane was surprisingly easy. The asteroids did crack under the impetus of superlight acceleration, but they were contained by cargo nets and soon froze back together under that pressure and the searing cold of deep space. The same applied when they came back into the system, decelerating under their own power and bringing their cargo to cruise behind the weaponless destroyer. Each of the tug-shuttles had brought back significant chunks of ice, each the size of a corvette.

  These would have been no more than moderate icebergs on most worlds and not worth anything at all. Altogether the bergs the shuttles had brought back between them massed 263 tonnes, or 263,000 litres. Water purity was around 94%, so the sale of it would, indeed, give them more than enough petty cash.

  Davie enjoyed himself doing the trading. He particularly had fun with the three water companies going berserk at this flagrant busting of their monopoly, with a number of furious and spurious legal-sounding protests against this unlicensed and outrageous import.

  Davie told them just as frankly what he thought of uber-profiteering on a product which people needed to survive and sent them, helpfully, copies of a book on how to operate a business on Clean and Green principles, ethically clean and environmentally green, making a positive contribution to the world on which you operated.

  Lundane’s business community, however, was in no way ready to contemplate the luxury of clean and green operating principles. Theirs was a cut-throat world and all they could see was a competitor coming in with product undercutting their monopoly and what, they demanded, was supposed to be fair about that. Dark warnings were issued to their customers… buy that stuff from the Fourth and when you come back to us, prices will have gone up. Rumours were even spread that the ice the Fourth had brought back was so contaminated as to be worthless. And it went without saying, surely, that ice from another solar system could not be good for you.

  Davie, though, was a businessman born and bred. He blitzed the competition, pitched the product perfectly and found more than enough customers willing to pay what he asked. And he even, with unexpected results, threw in delivery, free.

  The unexpected result of that was the crowd which came to watch it.

  The bergs, in the end, were being delivered to a facility called Eloten Flats. Davie had found it in his research of the planet’s businesses and had persuaded its owners to open it up the almost defunct facility.

  ‘They used to use it as an ice processor,’ he explained, at command team briefing. ‘The way it worked was that ice was hauled in from the outer regions, chopped down into chunks of about ten tonnes each and fired at the ground from orbit.’ He grinned tolerantly at the immediate reaction to that, a very obvious incredulity. ‘It’s actually a pretty cheap way of getting water from space to ground,’ he pointed out. ‘Given an accurate targeting system and a great big catcher’s mitt in a region that can take that kind of geological pummelling. The mitt is at Eloten Flats…see, this big bowl shape, here. Ice chunks would come in like meteors, as meteors, landing in the bowl. They were spray-coated with a cheap heat-resistant plastic before being fired off, to minimise burn off, but the impact would crack that casing and the water, melted by the descent, would run down into the sand and flow down into the aquifer. I know it looks bonkers, but it was actually quite a workable system.’

  ‘Given,’ Alex said, ‘an accurate targeting system.’

  Davie flicked him an approving grin for picking up on the crucial piece of information, there.

  ‘Around four per cent of their plastic coatings burst during descent,’ he confirmed, ‘often with a jet-effect as water sprayed out, sending them veering off all over the place. Even with as much desert as there is on Lundane, it was only a matter of time before there was an accident. And after a couple of near misses with water bombs hitting near cities, the Lundanians decided the risk was too high. Interesting to note that they don’t pass legislation here to ban something they consider too dangerous. They just impose tariffs on it to make it economically non-viable. Which is what they did to Eloten Flats, imposed an uncontrolled descent tariff which no longer made it viable to fling the ice down from orbit that way. They still use the aquifer for water storage though and the ice-filtering system is still operational. So if we land the bergs here, the Eloten Flats guys will throw anti-evaporation tarps over them, the water will melt down into the aquifer and our forty seven customers can come and fill their tanks. Thirty nine of them are embassies, by the way, also strapped for cash and prepared to buy water from Eloten Flats at half price, even if it was supplied by us. So, a good deal, fair profit and benefits all round.’

  More benefits, as it turned out, even than Davie had anticipated. They were not picking up Lundanian media. The system’s antiquated comms system genuinely could not cope with any extensive broadcast of live holo-quality signal, so the cost of such things as news broadcasts being sent out to ships was correspondingly expensive. And where the Fourth was concerned, prices were hiked ten times higher again. They had opted, from their limited yill budget, to have a text-only news update from the planet’s biggest news provider, but the quality of this was low. For every paragraph of news they got, mostly incomprehensible references to local affairs, there were three times as many adverts inserted as mandatory access screens so you had to spend at least half a minute on each one before you could get to the item you wanted to read.

  They were, therefore, largely dependent on the information put out by the League Embassy for all League shipping in port. And whether they didn’t pick it up either or didn’t regard it as sufficiently important, they did not tell the Fourth about the crowds which were heading to the Eloten Flats facility.

  The first they knew about it, therefore, was when their tugs were entering atmosphere themselves and scanning the landing site.

  They were coming in very slow and while Eloten Flats was on the night side of the planet, too, so as to minimise the evaporation as the bergs moved through the atmosphere. There was very little burn off. The shuttles were drifting them down as lightly as if they were under massive parachutes, not hurtling them down at high speed. It would take nearly an hour to descend from upper atmosphere to ground, a trip that those shuttles could normally do in a matter of seconds. If they rushed it, though, even on the cold night-side of the desert world, they would have little ice left by the time they reached the ground.

  ‘Skipper…’ Shion was piloting the larger of the shuttles and was able to flash back a message to the ship directly, before they were too deep in atmosphere for their own comms to reach that far. ‘We have an audience,’ she reported and accompanied that with a snapshot of the scans.

  There were vehicles around the Eloten Flats basin. Thousands of them. They were mostly clustered on the southern side for the best view, as the Fourth was coming in on a northerly trajectory, but they were in a ring which ran all the way around the twenty kilometre-wide catching basin. Heatscan indicated that there were in excess of forty thousand vehicles present, with a headcount of around a quarter of a million people.

  ‘Huh?’ said Alex and after staring at the scan data for several seconds, reached over and made a call. ‘There would appear,’ he said, sending the message direct to Ambassador Jilit-Defane-Taracalas, ‘to be approximately three per cent of Lundane’s population at Eloten Flats. Any information you could give would be appreciated.’

  The message came back forty five minutes later.

  ‘I regret that we are unable to assist in this matter,’ the ambassador was stiffly resentful of being asked for information, as if he was at the Fourth’s beck and call. ‘The Embassy does not function as a public information bureau.’

  Alex sent back a bland acknowledgement, keeping to himself the thought that Ambassador Jilit-Defane-Taracalas was about as much use as a jelly umbrella. Rising star, indeed. Fortunately, they had other friends groundside prepared to be more helpful. Jarlner had been talking to the Samartian Embassy and was able to enlighten them.

 
‘They call it rabnak,’ he reported. ‘Things of interest happen here so rarely that when they do, huge numbers of people will jump into vehicles and head en-masse to see it for themselves. A quarter of a million isn’t anything unusual.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alex, fully mindful of the irony that it was a foreign embassy down there they were relying on for assistance while the League one snubbed them at every turn. ‘Please convey my thanks and appreciation to Ambassador Dakael Duvant.’

  ‘It is our pleasure to be of aid,’ Dakael Duvant’s own message to the Commodore arrived just a few minutes later, transmitted with formal Embassy ID but with an evident warmth. ‘Honour and friendship require no less than that we stand ready to assist our allies. It is our privilege to stand with you in the undertaking of this great endeavour.’

  Alex smiled. He had never met Dakael Duvant but he already felt that the two of them might have been friends for years.

  ‘Item on the news, skipper,’ said the Sub who had the wretched task of ploughing through adverts to find whatever scraps of news there might be of relevance to them. And there it was – Rabnak at Eloten Flats. Translated from the Lundanian argot, it stated merely that a rabnak crowd was massing at Eloten Flats to see the icebergs landed. That was it; no further details.

  ‘I never thought,’ said Alex, ‘I’d miss League journalism.’

  It might be infuriating, biased, over the top, frequently inaccurate and ramping even the most trivial incident into high drama, but at least League journalism put out a ton of information on any story, with some core agreement on what was going on. Alex wanted to know more – who were these people? What were their intentions? Were they protesting against the ice delivery? Did the Lundanian authorities have the situation under control? What police presence was there? What were the Eloten Flats people doing about it? Was the site secure and safe for their shuttles to land?

  He could only wait, trusting that Shion would handle things, as she had to, as the senior officer on scene.

  And in the event, it turned out, there was nothing to worry about. The crowd was huge, yes, but they were only there as sightseers and rabnak crowds knew how to behave. Going closer, it actually looked as if someone down there was organising the whole thing, with rows of neatly parked vehicles some way back from the rim of the basin and the crowds massing around the perimeter. They were staying back from the rim where the rock dropped away to the dip, as if there was a fence there. But there was no fence. There were no car parks. There were just Lundanians, organising themselves. The first vehicle to arrive would pick a parking spot and every vehicle arriving subsequently would line up alongside them as neatly as if marked bays had been laid out. And when that row was deemed long enough, another row would start up behind. There was no need here, either, for refreshment or lavatory facilities to be brought in to cater for such a crowd. Lundanians would not dream of taking any vehicle out unless it had everything required to cope with an emergency landing in the desert. And as for rushing onto a site and spoiling the event that they had come to see, that would just be rude. Most of them had folding chairs and various kinds of binoculars.

  ‘Rabnak!’ Shion picked up a signal from the Samartian Embassy passing on what they had told the ship. ‘Hah!’ she said and laughed, relaxing. ‘Rubbernecking!’ she translated. ‘They’re rubbernecking!’

  And so they were. A quarter of a million people were straining their heads up and peering through binoculars to catch the first sight of the descending shuttles, with cries of satisfaction and a lot of pointing fingers as their descending lights were identified. By the time they came in to deposit the bergs in the basin a little galaxy of flashlights was going off all around the rim as people took holos. There was keen interest, too, with people telling one another what was happening as the shuttles disengaged the cargo nets and grapnels. They’d recover the cargo nets later, once the bergs had melted. And so, having seen them safely deposited above the aquifer, the shuttles rose slowly, flashed a farewell to the crowd and ascended a lot more quickly than it had taken them to come down.

  Once they’d gone the crowd did surge forward, not on foot but in their vehicles, a horde of them driving over the lip of the basin and across the kilometres to where the bergs were now sitting directly above the aquifer drain. And here, having once again parked their vehicles in orderly lines, they rushed forward again, crying out with amazement as they got close to the biggest blocks of ice any of them had ever seen. And there were, indeed, journalists amongst them; journalists who would duly and dutifully report that when you got close to the ice it was cold and when you touched it, it was wet.

  But they moved back, then, all of them, making way for the Eloten Flats trucks and the crane which would lay the anti-evaporation tarp across the bergs before the sun came up. And that, too, was part of the show and taken holos of before the rubberneckers went away again, quite happy with their entertainment. And that, subtly but importantly, began to shift public perception. The Fourth had become more than the representatives of an intimidating superpower. They were providers of cheap water and of free entertainment. And the Fourth, seeing how well that had gone, put fresh crews on the shuttles and sent them off again.

  Perhaps it was the sight of that and the new perception of them as people with a valuable commodity to trade, but by the next morning Eldovan was able to report that two of the suppliers who’d previously told them that goods were out of stock had now been in touch and told them that they had them in stock again. Prices were high, very high, but they had funds now and they were in business.

  Davie, indeed, now that he was started, couldn’t seem to stop himself. The icebergs had hardly begun to melt down into the aquifer before Davie was putting a further business plan on the table for Alex to approve. This one required rather more in the way of effort from the ship, since it would need them to manufacture some three hundred comms satellites.

  ‘Are you..?’ Alex started to ask if Davie was serious, then remembered who he was talking to. ‘Yes, of course you are.’ He looked at the plan. It all seemed pretty complicated to him, requiring purchases from nineteen suppliers and their own SEP working non-stop for a week, the gym being turned into a workshop with at least thirty techs working in there at a time, more techs using the lab for testing and logistics for using the shuttles for deployment. But it did not involve deploying any classified tech or selling any of their spares and it was not, after all, as if the crew had anything else they could be doing at the moment. And the deploying of that satellite network would benefit everyone, all the ships in port, as well as themselves, with greatly increased speed of transmission and data capacity.

  ‘It’s a makeshift, of course,’ Davie said. ‘Nothing like as powerful as the system I already offered them. But it will come in a lot cheaper, it’s a lot better than what they have and they can have it right now. So I expect,’ he said, with more than a trace of self-satisfaction, ‘that I can pitch it.’

  Alex grinned. ‘No doubt of that,’ he said and looked over at the finance officer. ‘Mr Sartin?’

  ‘I believe,’ Jonas Sartin said, with his usual dry caution, ‘that it represents a sound investment, skipper.’

  ‘Hah.’ Davie said, but under his breath and then, looking brightly innocent, ‘and speaking of investment, now that we have some funds, there are a couple of companies here which I think could…’

  ‘No.’ Alex said, knowing perfectly well that Davie knew he was pushing his luck there and was only trying it on out of mischief. ‘Not happening,’ he said and left it at that.

  The Lundanians did agree to buying the comms satellites, after having one to look at. They seemed disappointed that it was familiar tech and a very simple design, too, the kind of thing which could be knocked up by competent techs in any well-equipped workshop.

  ‘We could make these for ourselves,’ one of the Lundanians considering the offer observed, scornfully.

  ‘Fine,’ said Davie. ‘Go on, then.’

  As he h
ad known when he designed the product and put the business plan together, the really expensive element in that was the time of skilled technicians. There was a shortage of skilled techs on Lundane as it was, so even if the cost of their labour hadn’t made the project untenable financially, the lack of workers would make it so, practically.

  It was a good deal and they knew it. Too good a deal to pass up. So the contract was signed and the Fourth went into business building satellites.

  It wasn’t, Alex had to admit, the way that the Fleet normally expected warships to conduct themselves and it wasn’t Diplomatic Corps etiquette, either. But needs must. And it was working – not merely in terms of earning them the money they needed for supplies and operational expenses, but in showing themselves as people who were prepared to come in here without guns, without wealth, without power of any kind, and work and earn and pay their own way. It was too much to say that they were gaining respect, but there was a distinction being made now between ‘The League’, who were obviously ratfink imperialists you couldn’t trust to keep their word for three seconds together and ‘The Fourth’, who at least weren’t throwing their weight around as if they owned the system.

  Attitudes to Lady Ursele were changing, too, as the Lundanian president confirmed that Lady Ursele was a genuine ambassador from the fabled Veiled World, brought here by the Fourth because her neice Shionolethe had been serving with them for some time. They had formally ratified Lady Ursele’s status as the Pirrellothian Ambassador, granting her the next plot along on the Avenue and the usual offer of a loan to cover the costs of building her Embassy.

  Narul, as Lady Ursele’s housekeeper, put the design for the embassy out to tender the following day. The design, in fact, was mostly Shion’s work, assisted by Davie, but it had been approved by Lady Ursele with some small adjustments and Narul was to be the project manager. He had bids stampeding in within hours, every company on Lundane trying to undercut one another for one of the most prestigious builds on the Avenue and all of them promising their very best service. Building the embassy at least ought to be straightforward.