He didn’t enter the meeting hall with his family, but neither did he enter alone. Filing in behind him were Captain Eld and a half a dozen of his people, every one of them visibly armed. The fact their handguns were holstered didn’t do anything to make them look less threatening, and I scooted my chair back from the table, ready to leap either in escape or attack, whichever seemed like the better idea.
“You called for me,” Klaus Hellnick declared, pitching his voice to carry across the room, “and I came.”
“Who are these people?” Grace Kim asked without the slightest hint of fear, shooting to her feet—though, at her height, it wasn’t easy to tell the difference. “Why have you brought armed thugs into our meeting?”
“Grace,” Harold Kim said softly but firmly, shocking me. He put a hand on her arm. “Be at ease.” He nodded toward their children, the toddler sitting on the floor playing with a tablet, the baby still asleep in a portable crib.
She looked as if she wanted to snap back at him, but she looked at her son and daughter and nodded, sitting down.
“I am Iain Eld,” the smuggler captain declared, stepping into the center of the tables, his people spreading out around him. Hellnick pulled a chair out at an otherwise empty table and sat, the look on his face insufferably smug. “And I understand the good people here have some concerns about my business interests.”
Brad Torrey stayed stock-still at the podium, staring at Eld the way a bull bison might stare at a grizzly bear, challenging, not showing fear but wary all the same.
“This meeting is by invitation only,” Torrey said, his voice showing no sign of panic.
“I invited him,” Hellnick snapped, waving a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Let him talk. He has an offer for all of you.”
Torrey chewed on the decision for a long moment, then backed away from the podium, hands on his hips.
“Go ahead.”
Eld nodded to him, the half-smile creasing his dark beard a sign of how amusing he found Torrey’s bravado.
“I’m not going to bullshit you,” Eld told us, letting his gaze linger on our table, on Clines and Vicky and me. “We’re not gathering toys for a Christmas giveaway for wayward children.” His people laughed at the joke, but none of us did. “We’re smugglers. Criminals, not to put too fine a point on it. But we’re not marauders and we’re not here to hurt anyone. I’m a businessman, not a pirate.” He shrugged, an expressive motion that used his whole body, like a theater actor. “My people go armed not because we mean you any harm but because we engage in activities frowned upon by the government, and thus are unable to call on outside help when threatened. If anyone decides to take what we have, we’re on our own.”
“We’re all on our own out here,” I told him, standing from the table slowly, hands at my side, trying not to look threatening to all those armed ’businesspeople.’ It went against my instincts to speak up and paint a target on myself, but he already knew me, knew my name, knew where I lived. “Which would be the reason you chose this place, no?”
“It is,” he admitted, pointing a finger at me, “Lt. Alvarez, right? The bottom line is, the end of the war has opened up a lot of new markets, and my aim is to be the first to exploit them. That requires us to locate new bases of operation. We’re not looking to run the show here or anything. We just made a business arrangement with Mr. Hellnick here to use his property for storage of goods that we will eventually move out to sell elsewhere. We anticipated this might, eventually, draw some attention, but we hadn’t counted on the technical issue we had with our cargo shuttle.”
“Reactor flush,” I guessed. “Probably a bad coolant valve, and then a structural failure from metal fatigue on the vent line.”
“Were you a shuttle mechanic as well as a Drop Trooper, Lt. Alvarez?” he asked, eyebrow arching toward me.
“Let’s just say, when you’re spending a lot of time flying around in a fusion-powered heavy-lift shuttle, you become aware real fast of all the ways they can fall out of the sky.”
“I bet you do.” He smiled thinly. “And yes, our mechanics think it was a bad coolant valve. And it was unfortunate not just because it’s going to cost us time and money to fix, but also because of the spectacle it caused. It pushed ahead our timetable of making some sort of arrangement with the town and the other settlers the same way we have with Mr. Hellnick.”
“You mean,” I interpreted, “you want to pay us to look the other way while you store illegal, probably stolen goods on this planet.”
“And you should care about the legality of it why, exactly?” he asked me. “If I remember correctly from last night, didn’t you mention that you used to make a living on the wrong side of the law?”
“And look where that wound me up. Last time, I ended up facing punitive hibernation or joining the Marines. No war going on this time. What’s to keep all of us from getting our asses slapped by the Man when this all comes out?”
“Who’s to say it ever has to come out?”
“Oh, come on, Captain Eld.” I snorted my skepticism. “I never went to college, never went to the Military Academy, but even in the abbreviated academic courses I took for OCS, I learned a bunch of really useful, scholarly-sounding quotations from famous people. You might not know who Benjamin Franklin was, but he said a shitload of really pithy, memorably things way back like 500 years ago or something. And one of the truest things he ever said was, ‘three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’ There’s a lot more than three of us here, and eventually, someone’s going to talk.”
“You’re a lot smarter than you look, Alvarez.” He shook his head, shaking his finger in my direction. “It’s easy to forget, to think of all of you as dumbass Marines, but you’re not. And you’re right, someone is going to talk. But there’s a difference between saying something and proving something. None of you are going to see what we’re storing at Mr. Hellnick’s except Mr. Hellnick, and he has a vested interest in keeping his damn mouth shut. And by the time any authorities might catch wind of this and decide they care enough to send an investigator out here, which, trust me, will take months at a minimum, everything we’ve brought here will be moved out and headed for a buyer.”
“How much?”
It was Pappas again, no surprise. The woman had frequently been the loudest voice at the meetings, though not the most influential. The civilians outnumbered the vets here, but Torrey and the rest of us had usually been able to sway enough of them to our side of most issues. Never her, though.
“You keep talking about the stick,” she said, rising from her seat, arms folded across her chest. “What about the carrot? You want us to be your shills, what’s the pay?”
There were a lot of objections, some of them shouted, but Eld waved them down and his people took a couple steps forward to reinforce the order.
“A thousand a month for every member of the board,” he told her. “Paid in Tradenotes. Physical, untraceable.”
I shaped a silent whistle. It wasn’t enough to make any of us rich, of course, but Tradenotes had the advantage of being accepted everywhere and for the same exchange rate, while Corporate scrip or Commonwealth dollars were slaves to the vagaries of an interstellar economy I didn’t pretend to understand and were only accepted in these parts by the Corporate Council Marketplace. And like most company stores in the history I’d studied, the Marketplace was overpriced and understocked and mostly designed to peel away as much of a vet’s separation bonus as they could. If we had a thousand Tradenotes, we could have ordered a new autoharvester from an independent shipper for half the price of getting one through the Marketplace.