“Orbex, Incorporated? Yes, but that was only the initial public offering,” I corrected. A little more than a week had passed since our inspection of the Ore-ball Express and this was the first time I’d had to get together with both Isabel and her wife, Jin Tshei. We were sitting under the green and white striped awning of our favorite sidewalk cafe just across the street from the duck pond and within full view of the baleful scrutiny of J. Davis Alexander. Isabel has two degrees in resource allocation management, a high-powered job in the assessor’s office in City Hall, and a fine head for precise figures, even out to two decimal places.
“Once this first shipment to Earth has shown how practical and profitable this method is,” I went on, “we ll have a secondary offering to raise another 225 million buckles. That’s what we’ll use to get the ore-balls into full-scale production.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Jin Tshei, sipping delicately from her kir royale, “is why you’re spending millions and millions of buckles to reinvent the wheel—a broken wheel, at that.” She turned the full wattage of her almond-shaped eyes upon me and I felt my knees quiver. Jin Tshei is the Assistant Curator at the Clarkeville Museum of Art and Human Achievement and, after Miss Grain Harvest of 2273, hands down the second loveliest creature in the Belt—or perhaps the entire Solar System. I occasionally had sharp pangs of jealousy that it was Isabel who was married to this exquisite woman and not me, but for the most part I maintained a reasonable stoicism about the limitations of our informal little triad. “I know we’ve got a model somewhere in the museum of the earlier ore-balls that used to be shipped to Earth. I think they were in regular use up to about 50 years ago.”
“Absolutely right,” I agreed. “And then one of them broke into a million pieces in the upper atmosphere over the Indian Ocean and gave Western Australia the most beautiful shooting star display in history. And 67 million buckles worth of nickel-iron either burned up or sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The insurance companies suggested very strongly that we Belters find another method of shipping our ore. So we started sending it back in nothing but solid cubes.”
“Then how come you’re doing the balls again?”
“Fifty-three years have passed. An entirely new technique for temporarily bonding the nickel-iron molecules together has been developed by Polymer Metals over on Camilla, the company VettiLou Propokov works for. This new ore-ball we’re putting together will have at least seven times the rigidity and tensile strength of the old ones. It’s like comparing a rope suspension bridge to the Golden Gate. This one could be accelerated at a constant 4.6 g’s all the way to Earth if need be. And Orbex has bought 100 percent of Polymer Metals, so no one else will be able to copy our technique—we’ll have the market entirely to ourselves.”
Isabel, who’s about my age, around thirty-one or thirty-two, if it matters, and nearfy as tall as I am but far rounder and smoother in those places of interest to practicing heterosexuals like myself, nibbled pensively at a tiny green cornichon. Through a series of events too tedious to chronicle here, she, Jin Tshei, and I are the proud parents of a gorgeous little six-year-old girl who, for the time being, is unfortunately constrained to live on Earth. So every now an I then the three of us get together at the Café des Mondes and, among other things, discuss which of us will make the next trip to Earth to visit Valérie-France. Which was how we had gotten onto the topic of the Ore ball Express.
“Four point six g’s?” repeated Isabel incredulously. “That’d get it to Earth in a couple of days! What’s the hurry?”
“Well, in general, anything that saves you time will eventually save you money. Those solid cubic blocks of ore we’ve been shipping to Earth for 50 years now could probably withstand the same amount of g’s but it’s just too expensive to rig them with such powerful propulsion systems. Where we’ll kill them on the costs is on the other end, on Earth. Right now they have to put the block into high Earth orbit, attach all sorts of guidance and flotation devices, then send it down to a soft, soft landing. Then they have to haul 50,000 tons of dead weight through 3,000 klicks of Indian Ocean, still sitting in the middle of all its flotation junk, to the nearest factories in Perth or Flinders Bay. None of the countries sitting beside the ocean will let it come down any closer than that.”
I popped my daily gravity pill into my mouth and washed it down with a long swallow of Pernod. “What the Queen of Tahiti wants to do, though, is to land the Express right smack in the middle of her backyard—and it’s a big one. The Polynesians have got 115 islands scattered over 9 million square klicks of Pacific Ocean to use for splashdown. And instead of having to tow the damned thing a couple of thousand klicks, they’re building their own metallurgy industry ten or fifteen klicks away from splashdown.”
“So this whole project is just as important to the Polynesians as it is for you and this new company you and your crooked bosses have floated?”
“Orbex, Inc.? More so. Without the ore, they’ll have built an entire industrial and manufacturing zone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for nothing. I don’t know if they still cook their queens and eat them in Tahiti when things go wrong, but—”
I was interrupted by the beep of my wristphone.
“That was one of my crooked bosses,” I said, setting down my empty glass, “the round, hairy one with the sunny disposition. He wants me back in the office. At least I think he does—he was gobbling so badly I could hardly tell what language he was speaking.”
J. Davis Alexander was still barely coherent when I entered his office on the other side of the park. Lurking behind the foliage of his furry face was something more than simple rage, though, some other emotion I couldn’t immediately put my finger on.
“White,” he croaked, having slammed shut the door and pulled tight the curtains that I had never before seen closed. “Give me your wrist-phone.”
“Give you my… wristphone?”
“Now!” He glowered at the inoffensive instrument as he turned it over and over in his hairy hands as if it were a time bomb about to explode. “Just making sure no one could be listening in on us.” He jammed the phone into his pocket, then gestured me closer… closer… closer—until one meaty arm was clamped around my neck and his fleshy lips were pressed nearly against my left ear. I recoiled from his hot breath—had he finally gone irrevocably crazy?
“White,” he whispered fiercely, “if you ever breathe a word of what I’m going to say, I’ll... I’ll kill you! Do you understand?” His grotesquely powerful arm tightened around my neck.
“Umph,” I grunted, “you are killing me!”
If anything, his grip only tightened. “It’s my nephew Hooten—he wants to kill me! You’ve got to stop him, White!”
“Hooten? Kill you? Then he’ll just have to get in line with all the rest of us.” I pushed with all my strength and managed to wriggle a few centimeters away from his embrace. “You mean your nephew wants to kill you just because you fired him? You’ve fired me dozens of times—and you’re still alive.”
“This is serious, White. You’ve got to save me.”
“From Hooten? I’m an ethical broker & bourseman, remember? Not a bodyguard.”