Splinter Faction, page 8
“Turns out there was an equally catastrophic problem with the insurance coverage,” Tor went on. “By the terms of the carriage contract Gane had with the party from Unity who was exporting the goods—and I don’t remember exactly who they were, either, so there’s my senior moment for the day—his company was responsible for making good the losses.”
I whistled. “So he’s suddenly stuck with a bill for millions of bonds. Let me guess—he couldn’t cover it, but The Quiet Room could—in exchange for, oh, maybe something like a majority share in his company?”
“It’s like you were there, Van,” Kay said, smirking.
But I was frowning, hard. “So you’re suggesting The Quiet Room was involved in the murder of that ship’s crew?”
“Notice how I said the crew was presumably lost? It turned out that no remains were ever found. I mean, the ship suffered a fusion-containment failure, so there wasn’t much left of it anyway. But I can’t help but think there might be some former spacers out there who got to enjoy a very early retirement.”
“Yeah, I think that’s exactly what happened,” Tor put in. “The Quiet Room isn’t stupid. If something went wrong, and the scheme got uncovered, then the revelation that they’d effectively paid to have the crew of that ship killed would be—well, a disaster for them. But if it came out they’d engineered the whole thing and paid the crew handsomely to vacate their ship before it exploded?”
“Oh, hey, how do I get in on a scheme like that?” Torina said. “That’s what everyone would be thinking. In other words, just more high-level corporate shenanigans.”
I let my face soften. It did make sense—a weird, twisted sort of sense, sure, but it still made sense. I don’t know if there may be circumstances under which The Quiet Room would engage in murder-for-hire, but my gut told me this wasn’t one of them. But it was a definite warning. I tended to equate The Quiet Room with Dayna, and I liked Dayna. But The Quiet Room wasn’t Dayna, it was a corporate behemoth that made the likes of Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft look like corner stores. They weren’t nice. They weren’t friendly. But they weren’t evil, either. They were just… profitable. And profit was all that mattered. They’d have made the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Quark from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine proud.
And, for that matter, as much as I liked and trusted Dayna, if she knew or even suspected that The Quiet Room might try to pull some sort of Erflos Gane scam on me, I wasn’t sure she’d give me a heads-up. She’d been a high executive level in the bank, in no small part thanks to the business she’d brought in from us, but still. You don’t get to high executive levels if you aren’t loyal to the firm and committed to its interests. And yes, even though now retired, she no doubt used her executive-level contacts to help sustain and grow her new career as high-end financial consultant.
While I doubted she’d actively work against us, she likely wouldn’t go out of her way to help us fend off The Quiet Room’s more predatory instincts, either. But that was fine. We in the Fist of Orion were a big, grown-up star-spanning entity. We should be able to look after ourselves.
“Okay. So if this is your way of warning me not to trust a major bank to look out for anyone but itself—well, sure. But what would you suggest? I mean, the Fist has a few million in disposable cash—”
“Four million three hundred and seventy thousand bonds, and change, as of this morning,” Torina announced.
I blinked at her. “You know that number off the top of your head?”
“Of course. I check the accounts every morning, make sure nothing’s amiss or anything odd is going on. It’s the same thing I do for our personal accounts, Mr. ‘Sure, We’ve Got a Bunch of Money in the Bank So We Can Afford That, Can’t We?’”
I gave her parents a sheepish look. “She runs the family finances.”
Kay just shrugged. “Well, duh, of course she does, just like I run ours.”
Tor glowered at her. “You do no such thing, dear heart.”
“Oh, that’s true. Tor has his account that he looks after—the one that I top up every couple of weeks for him.”
“And don’t you forget it,” he said, beaming.
I chuckled. “Okay, four million sounds like a lot, and I guess it is. But the Fist is an expensive organization to run, and our new banking joint venture is going to be a separate entity anyway. It would be nice to have a reserve, something to back it up, aside from our good reputation and even better looks, of course.”
Kay looked at Tor, who nodded. She turned back to me.
“Well, Van, we might be able to help you out with that.”
7
Let’s talk about promethium.
Promethium is a radioactive metal, atomic number sixty-one on the periodic table, usually considered one of the so-called rare earth elements, and it is extraordinarily rare. In nature, it only forms by the radioactive decay of other, heavier elements and has an extremely short half-life of about eighteen years. In other words, every eighteen years, half of your promethium decays away, turning into other, lighter stuff. Finding more than traces of promethium was essentially unheard-of.
So what? Well, promethium is a vital component in the magnetic containment system used for antimatter. An insanely powerful magnet can be manufactured from an alloy of promethium, iron, cobalt, and a few more exotic but also more readily available metals, all combined in a particular crystal structure. The result was strong enough to hold antimatter safely contained and sequestered from normal matter. These magnets were, in fact, the unsung heroes of interstellar space flight. Sure, the twist drive had to be realized before flight between the stars was even possible, but twist drives are just expensive pieces of techno-sculpture without antimatter to fuel them.
That was, in fact, exactly the situation involving the goofy Swens who revered Funboy as their divine cargo-cult icon—their Stardancer ships had twist drives installed, but no antimatter fuel to power them.
Enter promethium magnets, or p-mags, as they were called for short. Before they existed, antimatter had to be contained in continuously generated magnetic “bottles,” which were power-hungry, cumbersome, and profoundly dangerous. Cut the power, the bottle goes poof, and an infinitesimal instant later, so does your ship. P-mag containment revolutionized antimatter containment. They didn’t need power, so antimatter fuel pods were completely safe as long as they weren’t actually breached.
And it was tough to breach one, since by design they were the most durable part of any ship by far. I’d seen ships largely vaporized when their fusion powerplants or drives lost containment, but the antimatter fuel pods were still fine—so fine, in fact, that they could be put right back into use after a little refurbishing.
So why is this important? It’s because Kay and Tor Milon claimed they had a line on something truly remarkable—a naturally occurring source of promethium, potentially amounting to several tens of kilos of the stuff. If true, it would be worth a fortune. Again, naturally occurring promethium is stupendously rare. Most of the stuff used in p-mag systems had to be synthesized, which was itself a laborious and expensive process.
I did my background research on the stuff with Netty-P’s help and brought her to dinner that evening. We were eating aboard the Fafnir, our go-to place for super-secret conversations.
“So Netty-P tells me that the natural occurrence of tens of kilograms of promethium is… pretty remarkable,” I said as I spooned a stew seasoned with a Faalaxi spice medley onto my plate. Gabby had made it, and it was absolutely my favorite, proving that her already formidable cooking skills had only improved over time.
Tor grinned over a glass of wine. “By which she means that she thinks we’re peddling bullshit.”
“I prefer pretty remarkable,” she replied. “But, yeah, it’s at the very least bullshit-adjacent. The stuff just doesn’t occur in nature more than a few parts per trillion at a time, and most often far less than that.”
Tor pointed to me. “Very true. And yet, we have information that a substantial quantity of the stuff did occur naturally, in a manner similar to meteoric iron. And yes, I know you’re going to now ask where it is, and how that’s possible, and instead of trying to explain stuff that’s mostly way outside our area of expertise—” He turned to his wife, who produced a data chip and offered it to Netty-P.
“We asked for a copy of the data from the person who collected it, a geologist from Perspectus in the Seven—” She caught herself and smiled. “Sorry, the Six Stars League. It’s hard not to say Seven Stars League. Old habits die hard, I guess.”
Torina gave her mother a smirk. “Growing up, I always heard it as the that damned Seven Stars League. And if you were really pissed at them, it would be the f—”
“We remember what we used to call them, Torina, thank you.”
I smiled. Helso had once been a protectorate of the League, which mostly meant the League collected its “fees”—taxes by any other name—and then proceeded to be the only real strategic threat confronting Helso. In other words, it had been a glorified, institutionalized protection racket. The Milons lived with that unfortunate reality most of their lives, so this wasn’t the first time I’d heard the Seven Stars League spat as a curse. I’d used those same words myself to refer to the League on more than one occasion.
Tor went on. “Anyway, this geologist, Tessa Dalsi, did some work in the Delta Pavonis system for the League shortly before she retired. That was a little less than two years ago. And that’s her data,” he said, nodding at the chip.
Kay handed it to Netty-P, who used a fine manipulator to take it from Kay and plug it into one of her data ports. A sudden, anxious thrill shivered me as she did. Past experience with the likes of Calamity had left me wary of anything being plugged into our Created Persons.
Nothing deleterious happened to her, though—not that I really expected anything would. Instead, she spoke up immediately.
“This is… quite interesting. Based on gamma-emission spectroscopy, there does seem to be promethium present, and in strikingly large quantities. Wavelength-dispersive X-ray fluorescence results seem to confirm it.”
I put my wine glass down. “So where is this apparent motherlode of promethium?”
“In the Delta Pavonis system.”
I sat back. “To paraphrase a great man in a great movie, ‘Of all the systems in all the star clusters in all known space—'”
“She walked into yours?” Netty-P offered.
I offered her a thin smile. “Okay, maybe the quote doesn’t work as well as I thought it might. Still—Delta Pavonis.” I sighed. “It figures.”
I’d been to Delta Pavonis only twice in my career. The first time, it had been me and my crew on a covert mission, during which we uncovered the horrific truth about the planet called Level Blue. It was the focus of an illegal osmium mining operation that relied heavily on slave labor. During our brief time there, we uncovered mass graves to rival anything found in the likes of Bosnia or Cambodia. The second time I’d been there had been in the aftermath of huge upheavals in the Seven Stars League, brought about by the parasitic race known as the Tenants. That time had been to ensure the things we’d encountered the first time weren’t happening anymore.
Since then, Delta Pavonis had only come up on radar once, and that was recently. It was in the context of ongoing piracy in the systems around Delta Pavonis, piracy we believed was backed by the Stillness. We’d discreetly deployed Conoku privateers to tackle the problem, while seeking to gain further intel on the Stillness as they did. They’d had some success—more than I’d feared, but not as much as I’d hoped. And a big part of that was because the League had effectively shut down access to Delta Pavonis. You needed specific permission, in the form of what was basically a visa, to legally enter the Delta Pavonis system.
But according to the data collected by the geologist, Tessa Dalsi, it was the Delta Pavonis system that hosted the unprecedented occurrence of natural promethium.
“Okay, so I have questions,” I said as we finished dinner and chatted over coffee afterward. “Like, why didn’t this Dalsi share these data with her employer—who, at the time, was the League itself, since she was working for them as a government geologist?”
“Because she despises the League—and that’s why, after she retired, she left Perspectus and moved to Helso. And that’s how we got to know her,” Tor said. “We hired her as a consultant to advise us on some mining interests we were considering for investment, and over time, she became, well, a friend of ours.”
I nodded. “Okay. And I guess it being in the Delta Pavonis system explains why she didn’t just cash in on it herself.”
“Exactly. The Delta Pavonis system is already heavily mined for things like nickel, cobalt, and platinum group metals. That makes it strategically crucial to the League, so the system is well-surveilled and protected,” Kay said. “She simply didn’t have the means or resources to even think about attempting it.”
“But once she got to know and trust you, she thought you might.”
Kay nodded. “We’ve been thinking about different ways of approaching it but haven’t come up with anything workable. Technically, the promethium belongs to the League. Now, that doesn’t particularly bother us, since the League screwed Helso over for—well, the better part of a hundred and fifty years. But we can’t think of any realistic way of even approaching it without likely drawing the League’s attention. And once we do—”
“They’ll claim the promethium for their own,” Torina said.
I nodded. “And the position of the Guild would be that the League is right—unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately is right,” Tor said. “If that’s really promethium, and there are tens of kilos of the stuff there, then whoever ends up possessing it will gain huge leverage over the whole antimatter containment industry. Now, every eighteen years, half of the stuff will just disappear, but considering they’d be starting with so much, that’s many decades of said leverage.”
Torina whistled softly. “Control the containment industry, and you also have at least some control over spaceflight itself.”
“Yeah.” I picked up my coffee but put it down again. “At the very least, it would give the League a huge advantage over its rivals, like the Eridani Federation and Ceti Alliance.”
“And the Guild,” Netty-P said.
I looked at her, then nodded. “Yes, and the Guild.”
“Van, we can’t let the League get their hands on this,” Torina said. “Whether they’re legally entitled to it or not isn’t the issue. We can’t let the League end up with that kind of influence over known space.”
I rubbed my eyes. “No, we cannot. When it comes to the League, outright civil war there is always a possibility. So not only is it internally unstable, it’s ripe for a power grab by someone—” I sat up.
Torina frowned at me. So did her parents. “Van, what’s—?”
“The Stillness. Holy shit. The piracy, the instability in the League, the flare-ups of unrest. It’s the Stillness. They’re trying to destabilize the League so they can plug in their own power structure.”
I sat back again, shaking my head. “That’s what the Stillness is up to. Or it’s one thing they’re up to, but I’d say it’s their magnum opus. They aren’t content just being a criminal syndicate anymore. Now, they want to become one of the bastard powers of known space—and it’s through controlling the League that they intend to do it.”
It was a hell of a theory, sure. But it felt right. Everything that had been happening in the League for years now—probably since the rise and fall of the Tenants and the instability that had provoked—converged into my theory-over-coffee.
It all fit.
The Stillness would do whatever they could to collapse the League into internecine chaos, whereupon a powerful figure would probably arise and restore order. And that powerful figure, whoever they were, would be a Stillness agent. It was The Manchurian Candidate in deep space.
Which meant that getting that promethium out of the League’s grasp was now critical, but it was well beyond that. It was essential. It was crucial. Even if all we could do was chunk that promethium into Delta Pavonis, the star itself, just to keep it out of the League’s, and therefore the Stillness’, hands.
I summoned the rest of the crew to the Fafnir that evening and explained to them what had transpired regarding the promethium, putting it in the context of my concerns about the League. I then asked them to tear my theory apart and find the inconsistencies and logical holes that made it impossible, or at least unlikely.
Silence followed, hanging over the Fafnir’s crew lounge.
Rab finally broke it. “Honestly, Van, I can’t think of a single hole in your reasoning.”
Funboy nodded. “I quite agree. You’ve presented a scenario that is both highly plausible and extremely alarming.”
“Yeah, Van, I hate to say it, but you’re probably right about this one,” Gabby put in. “Any inconsistencies I can see are more likely just the result of a lack of information.”
“And I’ll go a step farther,” Perry said. “Do you remember that, ages ago, we met with one Clynepses Ornitolian-Sprowse, a Hu’warde serving the League’s interior minister?”
“I do. You don’t quickly forget a name like Clynepses Ornitolian-Sprowse—especially when they’re a Hu’warde,” I said. And it was true—I remembered Clynepses well, despite not having met her in more than twenty years. Being Hu’warde, I doubt she’d even have changed much in two decades. Valint, my Hu’warde grandmother, still looked much as she did the first time I ever met her. Clynepses had also had the Hu’warde imperiousness, her people’s casual arrogance. And she’d clearly been ambitious, and ruthless in her ambition. If any single figure was likely to emerge as the strongman—er, strongwoman who would unite a fractured League, it would be her.
