Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  A bus tour ensued, first moving slowly up Embassy Avenue itself with a guide identifying each of the embassies there, then moving on to a four-point global tour. This brought the bus down to see the Eloten Flats facility which almost half the population had visited by then, followed by a low-and-slow swing around the massive ocean plants which turned water into breathable air. The oceans were like sludge, so shallow and thick with algae they could scarcely be described as liquid at all. The smell which filtered through into the bus was such that it was immediately obvious why there was no culture here of going to the beach for leisure.

  The third port of call was a huge siliplas refinery. Siliplas production was normally carried out either in space or on planets already so toxic that the waste products from turning silica into plastic could do no harm. Here on Lundane, though, they relied on the much cheaper but more hazardous method of carrying toxic waste into space and basically firing it at the sun. So far, at least, they’d got away with it without what they considered to be major disaster, just the two historical accidents in which a few thousand people had died. But their safety record now, they said, was very much improved. Hardly any toxic leaks at all.

  Far from reassured by this, the shoreleavers were not sorry to stop cruising over the enormous industrial site and to head over to the capital city. There, there was another low-and-slow tour of the city with a guide pointing out its notable features and telling them something of its history before taking them to the venue Roll’em had secured especially for their visits.

  It was one of his; a casino club selected more for its security than its entertainment value. The Fourth had been allowed to take it over, installing security systems equivalent to those in their own airlocks. Nobody would get in here with weapons, or with any chemicals the Fourth did not know about. And only staff Roll’em could vouch for personally would be allowed in here.

  It might not have been the most thrilling liberty any spacers’ hearts could wish for. But it was somewhere the shoreleavers could get a meal and try pipes – League-legal contents only – and amuse themselves at the casino machines set to take penny tokens, of which all the shoreleavers were given a hundred on arrival.

  And it was to be, in fact, the most that any of them would get to see of Lundane.

  On the second day of shoreleave visits, Luce who came to see Alex, telling him privately that Fleet Intel had lost one of their agents.

  ‘Sella’s been snatched,’ she told him, her manner tightly controlled. ‘She and her partner were on a routine recon, picking up the goss at Luigo’s.’ Alex inclined his head very slightly to indicate that he understood that the agents had been hanging out at Lundane’s biggest spacer bar, listening in on conversations for anything of interest.

  ‘Her partner was distracted,’ Luce said. ‘Just for seconds, but it was enough. Her comms went offline, when he looked, she’d gone. And by the time he’d followed her tracker out through an emergency exit into an alleyway, it had already been cut out of her arm.’ She gestured to her left upper arm. ‘We don’t know who has her,’ Luce said, her tone measured and steady, but her eyes narrowed with anger and anxiety. ‘The methodology looks like PDA, but the Feds sometimes do that, too, to make it look like PDA. Thing is, skipper… whoever has her – I think the reason they took her is that they found out she’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alex said and suddenly remembered seeing Luce with a bubbly, green-haired woman on the interdeck a couple of days before. They’d been chatting and laughing very animatedly, obviously old friends catching up after a long absence. ‘The lady who was here the other day?’

  Luce nodded. ‘We’ve been friends for years, she’s been on the ship, obviously they think she might have information either about our operations or the ship’s technology. Anyway, they have taken her, skipper.’

  Alex grimaced. ‘So – what do we do?’ he asked, prepared to mobilise whatever he had to in order to come to the aid of a Fleet Intel agent.

  ‘Nothing,’ Luce said, with a bitter note. ‘There’s nothing we can do. Fleet Intel here don’t want us involved. Stay out of it, they said. As if we are out of it. But those are the orders I’ve been given. And…’ she spoke reluctantly, ‘It is true enough that interfering may put Sella at greater risk. If this thing follows its usual course she will be returned within a few days. There is,’ she said and this time the bitter note was positively acidic, ‘an etiquette to these things, a tacit agreement on the protocols to be followed when abducting one another’s agents. Keeping them for more than a week, apparently, would be unacceptable.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Alex said, both on principle and because he’d seen for himself how close the two of them were. If that was a good friend of his, he knew, he’d be ready to tear the planet apart to get her back. ‘If I can do anything, Luce…’

  She shook her head. ‘We just have to wait,’ she said and gave vent, then, to the only betrayal of her real feelings that Alex ever saw from her. ‘God,’ she said, ‘I hate this dump.’

  Three days later, a courier firm delivered a crate to the League Embassy, addressed to their military attaché, to be signed for in person.

  The courier firm would deny all knowledge of the contents of the crate. They’d been hired merely to pick it up from a warehouse and deliver it. The warehouse owners, too, would deny all knowledge, asserting that their courier ordering system and loading bay had been used without their knowledge. No evidence would be found to lead any further.

  But the military attaché knew as soon as he saw the crate what it contained and had no sooner signed for it than he was having it taken straight to the Embassy’s medical unit. And there, having prised off the lid, they found the Fleet Intel agent, unconscious, heavily drugged, with a small saline drip in her arm so that the time in the crate wouldn’t actually kill her.

  She would have, they knew, no memory of what had happened to her, even after the cocktail of drugs had worn off. Other than the drugs and the half-healed scar on her arm where her implanted tracker had been removed in the alleyway, she was physically unharmed.

  But she had, indeed, been returned to the embassy nailed up in a crate, unconscious. All in the game at Lundane, apparently. And any agency making a great fuss about it would be both weird and hypocritical. They all did it, after all.

  ‘Not Fleet Intel, surely?’ Alex retained some rather endearing naiveties and this was one of them, his belief that Fleet Intel operated to the highest conceivable standards of ethical conduct.

  ‘Well…’ Luce admitted. ‘We have been known to slip a little something into someone’s drink to make them more forthcoming…’

  Alex went for a swim. He felt that he needed a spiritual cleansing after that brush into the fouler side of intelligence operations.

  Silvie sympathised. She was currently staying on the aquadeck, a voluntary recluse. She had many reasons for that but the main one was that she knew how complex the situation was and that the most helpful thing she could do right now was just stay quietly out of the way.

  ‘It’s so difficult,’ she observed, ‘with so many players involved and you just don’t know who you can trust.’

  That made Alex grin, after a startled moment.

  ‘Oh, I know who I can trust!’ he assured her and ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Roll’em Moffaret,’ he said, ‘the Samartians and Ambassador JDT.’ At her look of surprised enquiry he clarified, ‘They’re the only ones I know are being really honest with me. Everyone else…’ he shook his head wryly. ‘Sorry – didn’t mean to come here griping at you. And I am sorry – I know it’s not easy for you either. I just wish I could take you somewhere where you can swim,’

  ‘What is happening here,’ Silvie said, ‘is more important than my enjoyment or convenience. It is a serious thing, Alex, a great thing to be part of, to see the start of something that may bring such change, the hope of peace, the hope of liberation. And if my part in that is to stay quietly out of it, as an observer, well, that is the
best that I can do to help.’ She grinned at him suddenly, ditching the solemn mood. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘you’re all having so much fun.’

  ‘Fun?’ Alex echoed, really shocked by such an accusation.

  ‘Of course!’ Silvie said. ‘You’re getting to fix problems, which is where you’re at. Davie is getting to bust corporate monopoly and drive in clean and green stuff, so he’s having a blast. And there’s just this huge energy on the ship, such a driving force of commitment and belief in and hope for the future. It’s like surfing a tsunami that goes on for weeks.’ She beamed at him. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she assured him. ‘I’m enjoying it too, riding the wave.’

  Alex was reassured and felt better after a break on the aquadeck, that time-out to a very different world.

  And he needed that, he felt, if he was to come out of Lundane with his own hope for the future intact.

  Twenty Three

  They began laying comms satellites the following week, having built up sufficient stock to make it viable to lay out the primary line. This immediately improved comms between Lundane and the one other world in the system which had settlements – the industrial sites and associated settlements on the ice-moon of Aramis.

  This was where both the planetary and asteroid ice-mining corporation had their headquarters and what were often referred to on Lundane as the heavenly cities.

  They were not, in fact, any more than large towns and there was certainly nothing heavenly about them to offworld eyes. Both towns were sited in a combination of duralloy domes and underground housing. Accommodation here was very tight, a typical family living in a two room apartment which would have been considered cramped even by Chartsey standards. Everyone there worked for the water corporations. If at least one member of your family didn’t work for them, after all, you weren’t entitled to corporate housing and the moment you lost that right you’d be bussed back to Lundane and dumped at the spaceport.

  What made these cities heavenly, at least to Lundanian eyes, was that the air there was so cool and so moist you didn’t even need to suck a pipe to stop your mouth from drying out. And rumour had it that there were actually fountains throughout the city where you could get a drink any time you wanted one, for free.

  It went against the grain for Davie to hook those corporate headquarters up to the new network before anybody else. But that had been specified in the contract the Lundanians had insisted upon. And the very last people in the system who would benefit from the new comms provision would be the Fourth themselves. It was as if they feared that the Fourth was only offering the new comms for their own convenience and that as soon as they’d got what they wanted they’d stop, refusing to lay comms to anybody else.

  Davie, therefore, hooked up Aramis and Lundane first and could only watch in disgust as the line immediately blazed with calls from Aramis, using the very comms the Fourth had provided to do their utmost to prevent them bringing in more water. And they were indeed using every dirty trick Davie had predicted, including bribery, intimidation, price-squeezing and the ‘discovery’ of cryptosporidium in the water produced from the ice the Fourth had brought back.

  None of it worked. Thanks in part to Davie’s ‘hundred and one ways’ anti-corporate manual, Roll’em and his allies were prepared for every move the water corporations made. And now that they felt they had the corporations on the run, the Lundanians themselves were coming up with ways to shove them even harder.

  Most of these involved food supplies. The Aramis cities might control all the water, but it was the Lundanians who had all the food. Other than for a very few imported luxuries, all the food on Lundane was manufactured from nutrients processed from the oceanic algae. So if the Aramais wanted to eat, they would have to negotiate on water prices. The Lundanians had never been in a position to do that before, as the corporations had never allowed them to build up sufficient water-stock to take such a stand. Ultimately it had been only too clearly understood that if it came to it, the Lundanians needed water more urgently than the Aramais would need food.

  Now, that balance of power had been shifted in the favour of the Lundanians and they were ascendant.

  ‘I feel like a proud father,’ Davie observed, looking up from reading that day’s business news, official and more privately obtained, ‘Watching my kids learn to toddle.’

  Alex grinned. He might not be au-fait with the intricacies of business or the minutiae of the Lundane stock exchange which was so clear and obvious to Davie, but he got frequent messages from Roll’em telling him when they’d scored a particularly good move against the water corporations. Roll’em was jubilant and that in itself told Alex all that he needed to know about how things were going.

  ‘They learn quickly,’ Alex observed, having seen the Lundanians go from ‘there is nothing we can do about the water situation’ to kicking water-corporate backside in a matter of weeks.

  ‘Oh, they already knew what to do,’ Davie said. ‘They just didn’t have allies prepared to support them. And without that and without any effective independent government structure, they were never going to get anywhere. Now…’ he gestured to indicate that they were taking off like rockets and Alex smiled agreement. ‘I think,’ Davie went on thoughtfully, ‘that the time might be right for me to meet with these Delanceys.’ He spoke the name with contempt, causing Alex to raise an eyebrow.

  ‘I thought you wanted nothing to do with them,’ he observed.

  ‘I don’t,’ Davie said. ‘Given the choice, I’d sooner go for a swim in that foetid sludge they call an ocean. But, well…’ he shrugged, ‘her grace has suggested that it might be beneficial for me to explain the true nature of the Founding Families and what we do, in person.’

  Alex chuckled. He knew how that would have gone. A quiet suggestion from Lady Ursele and then a long period of attentive listening from her while her interlocutor argued themselves from an initial ‘No way!’ into agreeing to do what she wanted. Alex had still not figured out how she managed to do that, other than by the sheer impact of her attentive, patient silence.

  ‘You could refuse,’ he pointed out, teasing.

  ‘I could,’ Davie agreed, with a speaking look back at him. ‘And I could feel that I’ve been completely selfish and unreasonable, letting myself down when I could have done so much good merely by rising above my baser instincts and meeting her grace’s expectations that I will be noble, generous and strong. It is infuriating to be manipulated like this,’ he complained, ‘and to know that you’re being manipulated even as you give into it. But it has to be said – she is brilliant. And she does have a point. A well-timed reality check from a real member of the Families may go some way to helping burst their bubble.’

  It took some time to arrange. Davie would not sully his shoes by setting foot on Aramis, even had it been safe for him to do so. Nor would the Delanceys put themselves into the hands of the Fourth by coming aboard their ship. Venue after venue was rejected by one side or the other until it was eventually agreed that they would meet at President Roll’em’s own house, which both would be able to check out beforehand and bring their own security along with them.

  The Delanceys made a bold showing. It wasn’t the Delancey who appeared. He was a very old man, after all, and hadn’t been seen in public for more than two decades. He had, however, sent his younger brother and his granddaughter to represent the family. His younger brother was, himself, almost a hundred and thirty years old, walking in with the stiff dignity of a man who could no longer stride with the commanding energy of youth.

  His grand-niece didn’t stride either. She came in walking like a bride in procession; one step forward and the other foot brought up to meet it, a strangely halting ceremonial gait.

  There was no familial resemblance between the two. The elderly Delancey was quite tall, though stooped and with a heavy paunch. His features were sharp, with a triangular jaw, flat forehead and small deep-set eyes. His grand-niece was plump, displaying the rounded arms which were the epito
me of Lundanian beauty, and her features were rounded, too, with an oval face, rounded forehead and retroussé nose. Her eyes were set wide apart and they were, Davie noted, of a vivid blue unlikely to be the colour genetics had dealt her.

  And yet all these features, attractive in themselves, did not add up to an attractive face. Animated by her personality, the features were hardened. Those eyes were like pebbles, the nose stuck in the air, the jaw set rigid and the cupid’s bow lips compressed into a thin, tight line. And that hair, the big hair with the cascade of curls tumbling about her shoulders, looked as artificial as a wig. Her great-uncle’s very similar mane certainly was a wig, as nobody of his age was likely to still have such luxuriant auburn locks.

  Their clothes were extraordinary. To Davie’s eye it was apparent that they were mimicking what they believed to be the traditional attire of the Founding Families, silk suits adorned with jewels. The silk must have been imported, as it was certainly not produced at Lundane. But the suits were cut in an archaic style and were far too tight either for comfort or flattery. As for the jewels, well, they glittered like festive decorations, both of them wearing jewel encrusted sashes from shoulder to hip.

  Their retinues, though not quite as gloriously sparkling, nonetheless wore gaudily coloured attire – a kind of livery, Davie recognised. They had brought about sixty people with them altogether, though most remained at the back of the room.

  Davie walked in alone. He did have a security team with him but they were so discreet as to be invisible. Davie himself was wearing an elegant business suit in pearl grey, his hair cut short and brushed back from his face in untidy curls. He was wearing only one item of jewellery, a signet ring with a single fireheart diamond, not large, but flawless. As such, it was worth about five times all the Delanceys’ gems put together.

  And Davie owned the room. From the moment he entered it was as if a young prince had arrived to hold court, granting audience to a rather ludicrously dressed bunch of circus performers.