Cu'ong-Nghien 88, Snark-Boojum intermediary belt region…"...thank you again for having me! I've heard of
Belta habitats, but the ones in the Sol system refuse
any visitors at all, so I've only seen speculations and old recordings." Mia found herself visiting her husband's
other people as a guest.
In this case, a guest of Eljah's paternal grandmother's people.
In some ways, she knew she was looking at the promise of Blake's Will made manifest out here, Technology serving
the people.
Instead of the warmongers.
The ideal promised by the Third Transfer made manifest among a somewhat isolationist minority.
"We're glad you came, Sov Calibarso. Eli's
mother flatly refused the invitation when David married her. You can imagine some of the family gatherings were stressful as a result." Bianh Cu'ong431 was about Mia's mother's age, and suited, like the others here, in a skin-tight pressure survival garment under an overgarment rigged for utility work.
"It must be difficult, keeping ties over this distance."
"It is. Radio only goes so fast, and when you're in an emergency the response time needs to be immediate,." Bianh said. "This burrow's main business is soil bacteria and light materials processing, with some farming. Mostly rabbit, chicken, some Guinea Pig and other small meat animals. Though we've got apple vines thanks to the reflectors and collectors you saw coming in… It began, of course, as a transfer station and assay office for light metals and various gasses."
"It's so busy!"
"Really? It's a light day here, ma'am," Bianh said. "A
busy day would see prospectors bringing in samples from finds for initial stage processing. MY parents taught me that it's not just vital to know HOW something you rely on works, but also
Why it works, and why you need it to work."
That was five days ago.
Mia had been raised inside Comstar. She'd grown up with Comstar's dogma, the preservation of technology, in a sort of 'amber': preserved, revered, but stored away and kept static.
Revered, but not
understood.
Not like this. She realized something else over the last week, as she learned how these people kept themselves viable in the destruction of the Succession Wars. It wasn't that the Rockjacks were secretive. They'd been open about things that would be classified anywhere else in human space.
The problem was more of a social or societal evolution. Arable land and clean water require effort to create and maintain. Every burrow and facility and station was explicitly its own biosphere and ecology, teetering on a razor's edge known as 'maintenance' because without maintenance, everybody dies.
The priorities were simply
different for these people.
"Remember, ma'am,
always have a backup. If you're on your backups, fix the primary so you can still have a backup."
"If you see something broken, stop and fix it. If you can't fix it, do what you can to limit the damage and call for help."
A steady beat, and plenty of visible examples as she was brought from one burrow to the next. From moon bases to free-floating stations.
The technological luxury out here was mere subsistence survival, ingrained over generations of living under conditions where carelessness was a lethal trait. And help, if it was even available, was weeks to months away assuming anyone heard the radio call.
Slowly it made sense why Eli gave her a cargo of frozen red meat, cultured biotics, and unfinished wood to give to each host.
Those were luxuries to people who carve habitats in platinum rich nickel-iron asteroids to sell rare earths and refined metals to population centers on habitable planets.
It turns out, wealth is connected to scarcity, and rarity after all.
They weren't secretive, it's just that they were
different. And the priorities of their lives were different, and despite all the ties this particular group of Belters had with a home-world, they were still
different enough...
But comprehensible. It's just that nobody seems to have understood what those differences
are.
At least, nobody in Comstar did. Five days with Elijah's 'other' people and Mia could see the arrogance of Holy Shroud and The Mother Doctrine. The hypocrisy of her upbringing.
"...good to see Eli's happy again." Interrupted her introspection at dinner.
"Pardon?"
"He was always a bit of a sad boy," Bianh said. "Especially after his grandfather passed. Driven, but unhappy. It's good that he's happy again."
"You knew him?"
"I took him on his first spacewalk," Bianh stated. "Kind of like I took you. Only he was nine years old and as I said, deeply unhappy in ways children get sometimes."
"I was thinking… Why are there no HPG substations out here?" Mia asked.
"Cost and rarity, mostly. Though one of your fiancé's ancestors
tried to get Comstar services back in… oh… twenty eight seventy? That would be Travis Ngo, one of Marjorie's grandsons. If you look out the window on your way to the base on Spider Moon, you can see The Stripe."
"The 'stripe'?"
"By Twenty eight fifty, dropships and jumpships had already been reduced in frequency to the point that space elevators looked like an economically viable port system for places with low enough gravity. So Travis Ngo, who already wanted to move Kowloon's capital to Spider Moon? Tried to build one. The accident ended that, of course. But at about that same time, he was trying to convince the Comstar representative ON Kowloon that a B-grade or SLDF portable facility was viable. The accident ended that, and Jennifer spent sixteen years with a Regent after the accident claimed her father. I recall that the discussions ended with the accident. Not a surprise, really. Travis himself was killed by it… thus, we’re still saddled with couriers, RF, and Newtonian physics dictating our communications ability out here."
"Has anyone else tried?" she asked.
"Dinh's brother Truk dated a Comstar representative a bit like you with Elijah, so he might have discussed it with her. However, not-being-the-Duke? Probably not, or you would likely have been in an office on Hatter or Spider Moon, rather than having to come up here from all the way at the bottom of the Well on Kowloon."
It was an obvious 'in' for her Father's faction of the Order, and for the Word… and Mia distrusted the obviousness of it.
It simply could NOT be that easy, could it?
I need to learn more. "Maybe those talks could be revisited," she said aloud. "Given the inhabited volume and the economic importance…"
***
New Saigon, Dooley's Coffee, 14th avenue and Dragon Street…In the realm of political assassinations most perpetrators fell into one of three categories.
The most common and thus easiest to deal with were the amateurs. These types often say something or do something on some infonet or approach the wrong person and word gets to the security forces and the threat dealt with appropriately. Once in a while this sort does get lucky, especially in the age of interstellar travel where there are more than a few people and organizations willing to leverage them as either a message or a distraction.
Which brings us to the next major category, the organized cabal. These are groups of people with some competence and resources to utilize towards their ends. Properly led and if they keep up good information security practices they can actually be quite the threat. Fortunately, all too often such groups fail to maintain information security and thus fall into the same traps as amateurs or even worse one member who knows too much
is an amateur and from there everything is ruined for all of them.
Then there is the rarest breed. The professional loner. There are no weak links, no communications to eavesdrop. There are a few factors that help keep this sort very rare indeed. It is often very difficult to learn a target’s itinerary, gain access to a suitable location, and be supplied with a suitable weapon without having to turn to someone and thus risk being caught. But for those that can do that? Those are the ones that make bodyguard details sweat at night.
Sitting at a central table at a coffee shop watching a news feed was someone lesser known in the murder for hire business, code name Blue Shadow. She was very unassuming, attractive enough to be given the odd compliment, but not so much so that she drew too much attention. Blue Shadow was almost a family business. She’d taken over for her father while her uncle trained her.
As such she was almost a hybrid. She had a cabal of people she could turn to to help supply her with information, access, credentials, and weapons. But when it came time to work, she operated very much alone.
By this point in her career, she barely remembered what her original name was. But for this contract the name on her credentials was Rose Ostman. She was on Kowloon as an independent travel journalist, highlighting lesser known worlds for the new age of interstellar tourism that was becoming more and more common.
Her target was a challenging one, but not the sort she was unable to deal with. She’d faced off against Ducal security details before and emerged victorious.
For now though, she was sitting, watching, looking for the small tells of an opportunity. Announcements in the media for public events the Duke would attend, notices in the infonets about road closures. And if necessary, she’d even look into gaining access to the outer system to kill her target there. She’d prefer not to. It was much more difficult to kill out in such places without getting caught or causing unnecessary secondary deaths.
She was many things, but she was a professional above all else. She only killed who she was paid to kill whenever possible. And her current employers hadn’t paid her to take out additional targets or cause collateral deaths on this job.
The breeze from a patron entering the shop caused her bangs to fall in her face. She swatted the dirty blond with graying ends back into position. It made her ponder just what her original hair color even was anymore, she’d dyed it so many times, so many different colors. Her full measure of disguise was a few minor treatments to her skin to darken it up only a little and give it a more aged appearance. Her attire was relaxed but still professional. Her normally brown eyes were now a dark green. Her makeup was light. Shoes sensible. All carefully chosen and crafted to look perfectly ordinary and not draw attention.
Just another reminder of the part of the job she hated most: the waiting and the researching. But it had to be done. Soon she’d have an opening and she’d take it. And it would be thanks to doing the parts of the job she hated.
As she drank what passed for coffee on this world though, she realized she was wrong. There was an even worse part of the job for her. Local cuisine. She’d traveled nearly all of Coventry Province and a few places beyond either for training or work, and this was easily the worst coffee she’d ever had.
As she drank it, she filed another entry for the article she was supposed to be working on as part of her cover. The best part was it was real. Some misguided fool really was trying to stir up tourism this close to the invasion corridor this close to the Periphery and it was child’s play to convince them she was the woman for the job. She could be here for another six months on this current identity before she would have to figure something out. Which was plenty of time for her to come up with something if she needed to, but she doubted she’d be on Kowloon that long.
***
White Rabbit Ferry Transfer Point, Boojum Moon system…Elijah met her at the airlock with a kiss. "How was your visit?" he asked.
"It was
amazing, Eli!!" she enthused. "Everyone was so
nice!!"
He gave her a look. "Everyone??" he asked skeptically.
She rolled her eyes. "Okay, so your cousins at the station were kind of cold… And Sov Randall Sithers 344 wasn't kind when he berated me for poor suit discipline in front of the children."
"That sounds more realistic. Randay's got no tact in his entire body, and from what Grandpa used to say when I was a little kid? The man never did." Eli smiled and hugged his fiancée, "I've been missing you, you know that, right?"
"It was only a few weeks!" she squeaked. "Did you get the business done?"
"Still waiting for the Archon's official okey-dokey, but the Navy's agreed to most of it," he told her. "And we've finished Forge seven, and finished pre-run tests. I was only waiting for the ship you rode in from Snark on."
"What's on it?"
"One hundred seventy thousand tons of grade one Germanium from the processor," he told her. "About as much straight mineral wealth as you'll find concentrated anywhere short of Alarion. We'll be ready when Her Majesty drops the buy-order."
They floated through the transfer station to the Boojum-Kowloon Ferry ship.
"So what paid for it?" she asked.
"Eight hundred tons of process-treated Oakhogany, twelve thousand processed steer carcasses, and half a million liters of sewer sludge and manure mix from the Plateau," he said. "They'll be using that last bit at Boojum Two, for the agricultural dome project. I'll be finished paying it when the Barleycornia seed is delivered in May. Sov Nghien is trying to get grain going in the five-card Crater project. I have my doubts. I don't think they'll be able to get decent harvests without hiring an agricultural geneticist, but hey, I'm not a farmer." He smiled.
She hugged close to him as they floated through a connecting lock to the Ferry vessel. "Where to next?"
"Hatter. This is one of those 'it would be nicer if my brothers had lived' moments. I have to step in to handle a claim dispute between two of the Mining families. We're bringing bribes. We'll pick those up at the Kowloon-White Rabbit Lagrange."
"What's the dispute?"
"Unclear as hell, but I figure if I bribe them with the good stuff, they'll clear it up for me so I can render a ruling. I'll likely need to talk to Nedry about why he can't manage a claim dispute without me stepping in. He's been their alderman since before I was born. They just kept re-electing him."
***
