He was flipping through the channels on the holoviewer, mostly reruns with the occasional hologized prewar show, when his wife came out of the dinky hotel bathroom, still vigorously toweling her hair. He immediately did a double take.
“Footy pajamas? You wear flannel footy pajamas?” He managed to keep his jaw from dropping, but only just.
“Sometimes,” she squeaked. “They keep it damned cold in some of these corridors. Besides, I didn’t have my good stuff with me when I booked my ticket up here. They were a present from the girls,” she admitted self-consciously, walking over to the wall heater and fiddling with it.
“I checked. It’s broken. We’re stuck with central ambient,” he said.
She held her hand over the weak stream of warm air coming from the vent, glared at it and gave it a kick. The result was a light dent added to its already battered appearance, and louder noises coming from the thing as it shifted into higher gear. She made a satisfied harrumph and came back to sit on the bed beside him, cross-legged so that the toes of the absurd flannel pajamas peeked out from under her knees. He silently vowed to dispose of the offending garment as quickly as possible. Over against the wall, the heater lapsed back into an apathetic wheeze.
Cally rolled her eyes at it, brushing her hair back behind one ear and looking at him expectantly. “So, what’s it gonna be?” she asked.
“Fine. You’re in. Here’s how the plan goes,” he began. “First, you made Epetar’s ship three weeks late shipping out for Dulain. They needed that money plus their human cargo to pay for a big load of tech gear for Diess. The gear is high-margin — you’ve interrupted an extremely valuable run. I don’t know if you knew it, but when cargo ownership transfers between Darhel groups it’s strictly cash on the barrel head. No FedCreds, just hard value in hand. FedCreds aren’t really Galactic money, anyway. Not the way we think of money. Close, but not the same. So anyway, Epetar’s ship had to wait for more cash to get here, or it would have been pointless to go on to Dulain. From Dulain, that ship’s scheduled to go on to Diess, then Prall, and beyond that is irrelevant for purposes of the plan. The point is it’s a very high profit, complicated route with half a dozen stops before it comes back with a mixed hold of goods for Earth and the Fleet repair facilities on Titan. You don’t see a lot of Galactic goods on the Earth market because — well, never mind. You can’t learn the shipping business in a day,” he said. “Are you following me so far?”
She nodded, gesturing for him to go on.
“The important point from all that is that being late puts the Epetar Group in breach of their shipping contracts with the groups that administer those planets, or otherwise own the cargo. Technically, once the Darhel are in breach, the groups on those planets are free to renegotiate shipping with anyone. In practice, it virtually never happens because the odds of another ship turning up with an empty hold before the late ship gets into port are infinitesimal. Contracts usually only get renegotiated if a ship is lost. Then any group positioned right races a ship there to try to snap up the route. Time is money, so the first group to get there usually gets the agreement. I’m going off at a tangent again. The point is, if another group can get a ship there that can carry the cargo after Epetar is late but before they finally show up, the factor for the Darhel group that owns the cargo will deal with the ship that’s there instead of waiting for the late one. Obviously, the ship poaching the route also has to be carrying enough money to buy the cargo, or the deal won’t happen. Another reason a late ship is usually embarrassing, but not that big a deal. You see where I’m going with this.”
“Maybe not. I think you’re saying the Tong’s getting into the shipping business, but I didn’t know you had even one cargo ship, much less enough money to buy a cargo. You can’t be that rich. Besides, the Darhel would never sell to you, money or not.”
“You’re right, we don’t. What we did was slip the word to a Darhel group with the money and ships they could divert in the right places to take advantage of the chance. It never would have been possible without communications changes since the end of the war. It’s ruinously expensive to send a message on one, but when a message is time-sensitive, it can be worth it.”
“I see how you’ve set up Gistar to screw Epetar, sort of. But what I don’t see is where you get anything out of it. It’s not like one group of Darhel is any better than another. They’re all amoral bastards who would sell their own mothers — or whatever it is they have — to make a buck.”
“Yeah, they are. Which is where we come in. No Darhel captain is going to run from one planet to another with an empty hold if he can help it. He’d end up running inventory on fertilizer sacks on some agricultural planet in the ass end of nowhere. So he’s going to look for whatever cargo he can scrape up quickly to at least show he tried to offset the loss. If he can blame the remaining loss off on some other sap, his career just might survive. The Tong does have one courier ship we lease from the Himmit. Officially, it’s a Himmit courier ship. At the same time we leaked the Epetar intel to Gistar, we also dispatched our courier along that trade route to get our people together assembling cargos we could buy or make cheap and sell dear. Cargos just worthwhile enough to make up all or part of an Epetar captain’s pickup cargo.”
“Then you use the cover to sabotage their ships? That’s insanely risky,” she said.
“Hell no. Business. Think business. We’re gonna shear the bastards like a fucking sheep. If we can swing it with the Indowy dock crews, we’ll draw out the agony by making sure Gistar’s loading and unloading gets expedited, and stalling Epetar after loading starts so they can’t cut their losses and run. Ideally, we figure when they know they’ve been skunked out of Dulain, they’ll skip Diess and go straight for Prall. But maybe not. If we can foist another pickup cargo on them at Prall or Diess, then we get to skin them twice. Or more.”
“So what if they don’t take the bait and you get stuck with all these cargoes on your hands that you can’t sell?”
“No problem. We either ship them out piecemeal as filler around the edges of other shipments, or we sell them locally. Our people are supposed to scrape together things that are salable locally if it comes to that. Admittedly, it could take them a long time to sell off the inventory.”
“Yeah, well. Michelle says it’s all about to fall apart.” She brushed a hand at her hair impatiently. He remembered it as a Sinda trait that had stuck.
“I hope not. I stuck my neck out setting it up. I’d sure like to know how she plans on ‘helping’ without being obvious about it. The stakes are pretty high.”
“You have no idea,” Cally said. Her lips tightened as he looked at her curiously. “No, I’m not bringing you in on all that. Too bad. That’s what you get for using what I said, anyway. Michelle and Clan O’Neal, respectively, have big personal stakes in seeing you succeed.” She seemed impervious to the look he gave her. “No. I needed to know your plans. You don’t have a need to know our reasons. You ought to just be thanking your lucky stars that when you got us caught it was Michelle, and that she needed something from you. Besides, I’m still pissed off.”