Starbase Human (31 page)

He knew he hadn’t lost the black marketeers’ business. They would be back within a month. There weren’t many safe places inside the Alliance to hold a trade show geared toward the black market.

The thing that Garner’s Moon had that no other place inside the Alliance had was a complete guarantee of safety from external attack. Even if someone found out that a meeting was being held in the Garner’s Moon facility, that someone couldn’t bomb the facility out of existence. The moon was too well made for that.

He had built Garner’s Moon early in his career, when he thought he had money to burn. At the time, he had needed the underground conference space and a safe location to conduct business inside the Alliance but away from Earth’s Moon.

Garner’s Moon was probably the safest place he knew of inside the Earth Alliance—at least for him.

Garner’s Moon joined nearly two dozen other moons orbiting Szokla, the uninhabitable planet below. In all the years Szokla had been part of the Alliance, no group had ever discovered life on it, no matter how life was measured.

The moons—satellites, really—were too small to sustain life, and none had their own atmosphere. Deshin’s technicians had believed that no one inside the Alliance would see the appearance of another moon orbiting Szokla.

Back then, Deshin had believed that the Alliance noticed everything, and he thought his people—or someone—would have to come up with an explanation for Garner’s Moon. But no one had ever noticed, and the moon never showed up on star maps.

He later learned that when the Alliance deemed an area impossible to settle, the organization rarely bothered to revisit it.

Garner’s Moon had seemed like a good plan in the beginning, but he soon learned why no one else of his acquaintance had developed anything like it. Initially, Garner’s Moon had nearly bankrupted him. It had also killed the architect, a dear friend. Deshin named the moon for him in a sad sort of tribute.

Eventually, though, Garner’s Moon had turned a profit, even with the improvements Deshin had had to continually make in the first decade. Now, it was one of the most lucrative properties he had. He just didn’t want to go through that kind of financial stress ever again.

Even though he rarely visited Garner’s Moon, it was still geared to him. He had his own private dock for his ships and an apartment that had all the ostentation that he and Gerda now avoided.

He and his team had settled into the owner’s apartment complex the night before. The people he had invited—humans all—had shown up throughout the day.

The fascinating thing about Garner’s Moon—at least to Deshin—was the fact that no one ever thought of it as his. If the people he had invited had realized they were coming into the heart of one of Deshin Enterprises’s most lucrative businesses, they wouldn’t have come.

But so many groups had used Garner’s Moon over the years that it had felt natural for the invitees to attend, as if Deshin had rented the space for his own private conference.

This meeting would only use one small corner of the convention center, so technically, his staff had been correct: he could have left the black market trade show alone.

He hadn’t, though, because everyone he had invited was wanted somewhere within the Alliance, and everyone he had invited did not want to be considered as a “known associate” of the other people who were attending.

Deshin hadn’t seen some of these people in more than ten years. He had hoped he would never see some of them again. But he saw no choice this time.

The first meeting—maybe the only meeting—would be over dinner. He had invited the representatives of eight families. Eight people, plus their entourages, security details, and factotums. Maybe a thousand people would end up inside the convention center, although only the eight invitees would be inside the luxurious private dining room.

Not even their security details were allowed. If people didn’t like the arrangement, they didn’t have to come. And yet, all eight had said yes.

The security details would have their own isolated rooms overlooking the dining hall. They wouldn’t be able to hear any audio, and the tilt of the isolated rooms—leaning over the floor below at a 20-degree angle—made reading lips almost impossible.

He also insisted that links were shut down for the duration of the meeting. Recording chips were disabled, and everyone who left the room would be searched by Deshin’s people and the convention center’s automated system to make sure no recordings would leave with them.

Deshin, on the other hand, would be able to hear and record every word. The private dining room had a state-of-the-art recording system, one that Deshin and a few others on his security team could link into. He knew from experience no one would test his links to see if they remained on—and if they tried, he would find a way to bar them from the meeting.

Three members of his security team had access to any message he sent from the room. The message would go from his links to the recording system, and out to them.

If he had news he needed to act on immediately, he had the available system.

He could also mentally scream for help if he needed to.

Deshin had excellent chefs who cooked for the high end trade shows, and he used those chefs for this gathering, accommodating all the different eating styles of his guests. He did not allow any servers, so the food sat on sideboards around the room, labeled by cuisine. Each serving bowl and plate had a sensor. When they were empty, they slid through the wall unit and down a narrow shaft into the kitchen below. More food got sent up through a different unit.

Deshin’s security team had allowed all of the other security teams to inspect the food delivery systems before the meals would be served. Some of Deshin’s guests also had tasters, and Deshin gave those guests a choice: they could either watch everyone else eat or let their tasters sample in the kitchens before the food made its way to the sideboard.

Deshin wanted absolute privacy. He knew what he was going to ask this gathering, and just the fact that he was having the meeting could get them all in trouble.

He hadn’t told any of them what this was about, only that they needed to act in concert to stop an ongoing threat. He told them all he would explain in depth when they met.

He arrived in the dining room one hour before the meal was to begin. He had already been to the kitchens. He had approved the wine for those who drank alcohol. He had approved the clearers for those who drank in excess.

He sampled the foods—at least from the cuisines he could tolerate—and he approved the presentations. He made certain that there were visible poison control kits at every single seat at the table, even though he knew that anyone who would worry that Deshin wanted to poison them would bring their own kit.

Before he had arrived at the kitchens, he had spoken to the high-level security staff—the one that could handle a trade show of assassins without losing a single life—and he made certain they had ways of safe-guarding every aspect of this meeting.

Then he had his own personal staff back up the Garner’s Moon staff.

By the time he double-checked the dining room, he knew that internal threats had been neutralized—at least as best as possible. He assumed someone could stab someone else in the neck with a fork or a chopstick. He figured some risks were necessary.

He stood at the head of the table and looked down its length. There was no decoration, only napkins and placemats that marked each place. The attendees would choose their own utensils and their own serving plates. If they preferred to eat out of bowls using bread or their fingers, so be it. If they would rather use chopsticks and small plates, that was fine as well.

Deshin was being accommodating, at least on the cuisine. When it came to the conversation, however, he was demanding.

He made certain that everyone could hear everyone else, even if they were whispering. He set up seating arrangements so that friends and current business partners did not sit next to each other.

Here, at least, he would use that ancient advice that while friends should be close, enemies needed to be closer.

After all, almost everyone he had invited had, at one time, been his enemy. A few still might count themselves that way.

They were, at the very least, competitors.

He would try to cut through that.

Because they had a common enemy, one they had allowed to remain unguarded for too long.

It was time to go after the Earth Alliance.

And he wanted to do it in a very specific way.

FORTY

MOTHER, YOU HAVE
never been to the Moon
.

Pippa Landau stood in the departures lounge inside the Port of Chicago. Not that the port was actually in Chicago. It was west of Chicago, on a big patch of land that had once housed towns like Oswego, Yorkville, and Sandwich. It was flat here, with lakes and rivers that had been diverted or that went under the port itself.

She had driven there, stunned as always to see a dome on Earth—a gigantic, glasslike dome that would open to accept or send out ships. Even they became visible in the blue, blue sky as she got closer, some ships no bigger than her hover car, and probably no safer.

Her son Takumi was right: Pippa Landau had never been to the Moon. As far as he knew, she had never been off Earth, not once in her entire life.

It’s just a conference
, she lied.
I’m looking forward to it
.

Actually, her stomach was in knots so tight that she was amazed she had been able to eat during the last week. The closer she got to the port, the more frightened she became.

She felt like two different people: the girl who had known how to pilot her own ship, and the woman who had no idea what differences between spaceships were.

She’d had to research her flight—something she hadn’t done in forever—and then she had to consider what kind of commercial vessel Pippa Landau would take, not the kind of vessel that Takara Hamasaki would take.

She had to acknowledge that she was a teacher now, a middle-aged Midwestern woman whose first grandchild had been born just the year before, a woman who would be terrified of this trip, because it was something new.

She
was
terrified of this trip, but not because it was new.

She sank into a chair near the gate. She set her bag on the floor beside her. The bag was filled with three days’ worth of new clothes, all nothing like clothing that Pippa Landau would wear to class or even around the house.

She had cut her hair and had made her eye color match the color of her blouse for the first time since she married Raymond. She couldn’t entirely ditch her Pippa Landau persona because she was traveling under that name, but she didn’t want to be entirely recognizable, either.

Maybe that was foolish. Maybe the entire trip was.

But she had finally settled on a way to travel.

She glanced around the lounge. Right now, it was nearly empty. The ship wouldn’t leave for another two hours. In her very distant past, she would never have arrived this early for a flight.

But she was a school teacher on the trip of a lifetime; of course, she would arrive early.

Besides, arriving this early gave her the chance to talk to her son, without anyone else really knowing what she was doing. She had left messages for her other two children during their busy times at work, and then blocked their links as if she were already on the flight.

But she knew she had to talk to one of them, and she had chosen Takumi because he would be the one to handle things if she didn’t come back.

She couldn’t tell him that, of course. She had decided not tell him anything about this trip, taking that old lawyer’s advice, keeping her true identity secret until the last.

Maybe she would have to publically reveal it on the Moon, but she doubted that. She wanted to get in and get out, to do her duty, and maybe make her nightmares go away.

Mother,
Takumi sent,
these days, the Moon is not somewhere you go for a conference.

She felt her face color as her son said that. Of course. She hadn’t thought through her lie.

All right,
she sent.
I misrepresented it, sort of. When I teach, I teach personal responsibility.

Yes, Mother
, he sent.
I know
.

Fortunately, she couldn’t see him. She didn’t want him to know how she looked as she was traveling. She didn’t want the questions. So she had lied (had she ever lied this much to her children before?) and said that the departure lounge didn’t allow visual links.

Her children had never traveled off Earth, so they had no idea what was allowed and what wasn’t. They were Earthbound, and she was happy for it.

In some of Takumi’s questioning, she could feel the underlying thrum of fear that the Earthbound had for the rest of the Alliance. Space travel was expensive and dangerous. The distances were long and difficult. And the aliens crowded every single non-Earth place, making the chance of breaking Alliance law even greater.