"What gadget?"
Kissur picked up a napkin and drew something on it.
Lore's eyes widened a bit.
"There is such a man," he said, "but capitalist rot has eaten all the way through him. He will not do anything for his brothers, he only works for money."
"Tell him that there is a man who will pay money for his goods."
"How many pieces do you want to buy?"
"I want everything."
Lore's eyes grew suspicious.
"Kissur, where have you gotten the dough?"
Kissur silently presented a three-day-old newspaper to him. It was a Weian paper published in Interenglish and an article about a daring robbery of Weian Industrial Bank, the second largest bank in the Empire, covered its front page.
"We will teach these capitalists a good lesson," Kissur spoke, "we will show them that we can fight for peace not only with our mouths."
Denny Hill worked on a stationary base Nordwest located on a tiny natural moon of Danae planet. Nordwest was the only base constructed on a planet that didn't have either atmosphere or population. It was only fitting that it had assumed an unpleasant role of a nuclear waste garbage pit for all the outdated and not particularly outdated armament of the whole Galaxy. Nordwest storage areas bored through the planet like huge honeycombs. Weaponry was sent there if it became obsolete or banned due to political reasons or due to the activities of peace mongers.
The rumors traveled around the base that the oldest units in storage were shells from the First Moon War. What Denny Hill, a technician at Nordwest, knew for sure however, was that retired Cassiopeia missiles were stored at Nordwest.
These missiles had caused a major military scandal at some point. The missiles were equipped with S-field generators capable of twisting space around them. It meant that, once launched, they could not be intercepted. Any wall, defense screen or field can, in principle, be destroyed. To destroy something, however, you have to interact with it. Interaction means passing through space but it's impossible to pass through twisted space.
Ten years ago, Gera had raised a great hassle demanding the ban of all types of offensive armament equipped with S-field. It had been calculated that the construction of one S-field missile cost as much as the construction of twenty five subsidized houses for the underprivileged.
The world shed tears. Instead of building missiles and employing the same underprivileged as a workforce — that would enable them to buy their houses with their earned income — the Federation signed a treaty offered by Gera and started constructing houses for the poor.
Now Gera now didn't have to build expensive missiles and it put everything into an effort to develop alternative types of S-field that would not be covered by the treaty and would be cheaper.
Some missiles had been destroyed outright and some had been partially disassembled and brought to a "relatively disabled" stage. The missiles from three bases — Arcon, Mino and Delos — had been transported to Nordwest.
The accompanying documentation pointed out that there were one hundred forty six "relatively disabled" missiles. The whole Galaxy thought that there were one hundred forty six of them. Only Denny Hill, a civilian technician at the base, was energetic enough to take a count of the newest (though disassembled) missiles and he found out that there were one hundred fifty eight of them. The missiles were stored in a huge depositary area where the alarm system had been disabled by a local anaerobic life form and Denny Hill was supposed to take a census of the storage once a month. Formally speaking, it should have been a committee made out of three local employees and federal inspectors but the army didn't have any money for all these stupid committees and the base didn't have enough employees. That was why Denny Hill conducted the census on his own.
In two weeks on a planet with the beautiful name of Grace, two people approached Denny Hill who was spending his vacation there. Denny would have ever taken them for students — both guys were well-built and lean like pedigreed greyhounds and the senior guy had an old horrible scar above his neckline. They were Kissur and Khanadar.
"Lore sends you his greetings," Kissur said.
"Hello," Denny Hill said guardedly. "Why are there two of you?"
"You are seeing only one person here. Consider the other one to be his shadow."
Denny Hill was not completely satisfied with this explanation and he continued sipping on his soup silently- the meeting was taking place at a restaurant table.
Kissur sat still. He wanted Hill to start talking first.
"Is it true that you would like to buy goods?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"Twelve."
"Three million a piece."
"One million nine hundred."
"Two seventy five."
"One million eight hundred."
"Two fifty. It's manufacturing cost."
"Nobody sells stolen goods at their manufacturing cost."
"When these birdies fly to their destination, the counter-intelligence will be ready to cough up ten million for information about their original residency."
"They won't fly anywhere," Kissur said.
"Lore told me something else."
"Who cares what Lore said? I am an Emperor's servant. Do you think that a sovereign of the Amaride Dynasty and a man of the White Falcon clan will buy your toys to bust a supermarket? Don't you know that we are a Federation ally? The Federation won't go nuts if it learns that its ally obtained these trifles."
"Well, that's different," Denny agreed. "I want two million a piece and a new passport because I won't like to be here when they start figuring out who should get a medal for providing a Federation ally with military support."
In a month, the next scheduled ship arrived at Nordwest bringing food rations in bright boxes. The ship was going to take retired scanning equipment away. Loading was completely automatic and the only person at the dock was Denny Hill. Theoretically, the regulations required the presence of two people, a civilian and a military operator that would track each other's actions. But only a quarter of the positions was currently filled at the base and the only thing that the regulations were good for was taking memory in the computer.
Denny Hill counterfeited a backup copy of the loading papers and locked it in a safe. He was not able to fake the files in the computer itself — the computer was protected too well.
Three days later Denny shoved Jack the Ripper virus into the computer, the virus overwrote all of the files' headers and Denny's boss told him to clean the computer up and to recover all the documentation from the backup copies.
Denny pulled the fake backup copy out of the safe and wrote it to the hard drive removing the last traces of his real activities.
It took three hours for the cargo ship Antei, license number 284-AP-354 registered at the planet of Agassa, to reach Lakhan spaceport. Lore Sigel was in charge of freight shipping at the spaceport. A while ago, Lore had been a very promising young man but his social-anarchy tendencies interfered with his career. He spent three days in jail for offending the public — he attempted to register a pig bought at a pig farm as a candidate on the presidential elections in Austria. He was a witness at a number of notorious terrorist trials and he had a habit of constantly moving from one place to another. All this finally brought Lore to this small provincial planet where he worked as a cargo department manager.
Lore employed as longshoremen five or six friends that nobody else would hire since the central department of security wouldn't recommend it.
Not surprisingly, the unloading of the ship with license number 284-AP-354 started very late, after the ship's yawning crew walked away to sleep in a hotel next to the port.