The End of All Things (44 page)

A final shift and Rafe was not standing anymore. He was running through the corridors of the
Chandler,
slower than he wanted, trying to avoid whoever it was who had taken the ship, and failing as two of the raiders stepped out of the T intersection ahead of him. Rafe skidded on his heels and turned, falling over his legs in the process. He righted himself and prepared to sprint away and was knocked off his feet for good by a shot to the back of the head.

In the dream as in real life Rafe could feel the shot strike his skin, impact against the bone of his skull, and begin to burrow through into his brain. In the dream as in real life Rafe felt the cold shock of certainty that this was the moment he was going to die, and the thought that rocketed through his brain before there was nothing else at all:

Unfair
.

*   *   *

“All right, I give up,” Colonel Abel Rigney said, looking into the glass-walled State Department conference room at the two unsmiling men sitting there. “Who are they?”

Colonel Liz Egan pointed, using the index finger on the hand holding her coffee cup. “The humorless one on the left is Alastair Schmidt,” she said. “He’s Phoenix’s minister of trade and transport. The humorless one on the right is Jean-Michel Daquin. He’s the CEO and chairman of Ballard-Daquin, which is one of the largest shipping companies on the planet.”

“That’s great,” Rigney said. “And we’re meeting with them, why, precisely?”

“Because Secretary Galeano told me to,” Egan said.

“Let me rephrase,” Rigney said. “Why am
I
meeting with them?”

“Because they want to talk about merchant ships being pirated and what we’re doing about it, and if memory serves, that’s something you know about.”

“Fine, but why do they care?” Rigney asked. “Phoenix’s Minister of Trade and Transport doesn’t have any jurisdiction over interplanetary or interstellar trade.”

“He has jurisdiction over the spaceports.”

“Right, but his interests stop right around the stratosphere. Piracy is a problem, but it’s not his problem. There’s not enough of it to have an impact on his planet’s trade.” Rigney pointed to Jean-Michel Daquin. “Is it his ships getting pirated?”

Egan shook her head. “Ballard-Daquin is planetside only.”

“I’m back to my original question,” Rigney said. “My second original question, I mean. The one about why are we meeting them.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” Egan said, very calmly, which is how Rigney knew he was close to being taken to the woodshed.

“Sorry about that,” Rigney said.

Egan nodded and pointed to Daquin. “His son Rafe is a pilot on the
Chandler,
which is a merchant ship that went missing a week ago.”

“Missing as in overtaken by pirates and late to its next destination, or
missing
missing?” Rigney asked.

“You tell me,” Egan said. “That’s actually
your
department, Abel.”

Rigney grunted and quickly accessed his BrainPal for the latest on the
Chandler
. “We sent a skip drone out when it was two days late to Erie,” he said, reading. “It’s the new policy after Earth Station went down.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” Rigney said. “It wasn’t where it should have been pre-skip, and there’s no evidence of it being destroyed. We have nothing.”

“So it’s missing missing,” Egan said.

“Looks like.”

“And now you know why Daquin is here.”

“How do you want to play this?” Rigney said.

“How I wanted to play it before this conversation,” Egan said. “I want you to talk to them about what the CDF is doing about piracy. Make it informative, sympathetic, and conversational.”

“You might be better with the sympathetic part,” Rigney said. “You’re the one who ran a media empire back on Earth.”

Egan shook her head. “I was CEO,” she said. “You don’t become CEO by being sympathetic. I had PR people for that.”

“So that’s my job here?” Rigney asked. “PR flack?”

“Yes, it is,” Egan said. “Any problems with that?”

“I guess not,” Rigney said. “And you wouldn’t care if I did.”

“I would care,” Egan said. “Later.”

“That’s comforting,” Rigney said.

Egan nodded and motioned toward the two men waiting in the room. “The way I see it is that between the two of us we can answer their questions and convince them we are on top of things, and then shuffle them off as close to happy and satisfied as we can. Which will make my boss happy. Which will make me happy. And then I will owe you a favor. Which should make
you
happy.”

“So, a never-ending circle of happiness, is what you’re saying.”

“I never said ‘never-ending,’” Egan said. “There’s no point in overpromising. Just a little happiness. Take what you can get, these days. Come on.”

Egan and Rigney entered the conference room, introduced themselves to Schmidt and Daquin, and sat down across the table from the two men.

“Minister Schmidt, I have the honor of being acquainted with your son Hart,” Egan said.

“Do you, now,” Schmidt said. “He hasn’t mentioned you, I’m afraid.”

“I’m better acquainted with his boss, Ambassador Abumwe.”

“Ah,” Schmidt said. “Late of the unpleasantness at Earth Station.”

“Yes,” Egan said. “We were pleased that her entire team, including Hart, survived the attack.”

Schmidt nodded.

Your turn,
Egan sent to Rigney, through her BrainPal.
Informative. Conversational. Sympathetic
.

“Mr. Daquin,” Rigney said. “I want you to know that prior to this meeting I accessed the latest information about the
Chandler
. I know you must be anxious—”

“One hundred sixty-five million metric revenue tonnes,” Daquin said, interrupting Rigney.

“Excuse me?” Rigney said, taken off balance by the interruption.

“My company ships one hundred sixty million metric revenue tonnes of cargo through Phoenix Home Port to Phoenix Station, and to the ships that berth here,” Daquin said. “That’s close to ninety percent of the shipping that runs through Phoenix Home Port to this space station of yours.”

“I did not know that,” Rigney said, not sure where this was leading but not wanting to ask directly.

“I understand my telling you this fact must appear random,” Daquin said. “But I need you to understand that figure because it will offer gravity to what I tell you next.”

“All right,” Rigney said, and glanced over to Egan, who was not returning his glance.

“You know about the
Chandler,
and my son,” Daquin said.

“Yes,” Rigney said. “I was just about—”

“You were just about to tell me nothing,” Daquin said, interrupting again and silencing Rigney once more. “I’m not a stupid man, Colonel Rigney, nor am I without resources, which include Minister Schmidt here. I’m well aware you currently have no idea what happened to
Chandler
or any of its crew. Please do me the courtesy of not trying to placate me with your vapidity.”

“Mr. Daquin,” Egan said, interjecting herself into the conversation, which Rigney assumed meant that he was being benched. “Perhaps it’s best if you come right out with whatever it is you came here to say.”

“What I have to say is simple. I control ninety percent of all the cargo that comes up and through Phoenix Station,” Daquin said. “Ninety percent of the food. Ninety percent of essential materials. Ninety percent of everything that makes your space station”—Daquin emphasized these two words—“habitable and the place from which the Colonial Union runs its little empire of planets. If I don’t know within a week the certain fate of the
Chandler
and its crew, shipping to Phoenix Station stops.”

This was met with silence all around. Then Egan turned to Schmidt. “This is unacceptable.”

“I agree,” Schmidt said. “And I told Jean-Michel that very thing before we came up here.”

“But you still brought him here to make this ultimatum,” Egan said.

“I did,” Schmidt said. “Which should in itself tell you the lack of options I had, as minister of trade and transport, in dealing with this.”

“Perhaps it was not advisable to let one company handle the vast majority of shipping to Phoenix Station,” Egan said.

Schmidt smiled thinly at this. “I would agree, Colonel Egan,” he said. “But if you’re looking to blame the Phoenix government, you’re going to need to look at the Colonial Union contracts first. You’re the ones who have given Ballard-Daquin control of your shipping, not us.”

“We can’t guarantee that we will have any information,” Rigney said, to Daquin. “We’re not being lazy about this, Mr. Daquin. But if a ship or its wreckage”—Rigney regretted the phrasing almost immediately, but there was nothing to be done for it at the moment—“is not found immediately, the task of finding it becomes exponentially more difficult.”

“This is your problem,” Daquin said.

“Yes, it is,” Rigney said. “But if you are going to put us on the hook for this problem, you need to understand its scope. What you are asking may well be impossible in the timeframe you’re asking for.”

“Mr. Daquin,” Egan said. Daquin turned his attention to her. “Allow me to be entirely frank with you.”

“All right,” Daquin said.

“I sympathize with your concern for the
Chandler
and her crew, and your son,” Egan said. Rigney noted wryly that it was Egan, after all, who ended up deploying the
sympathy
card. “But you are mistaken if you think that attempting to hold Phoenix Station’s shipping hostage is going to work. For one thing, the shipping we get from Phoenix can be replaced by other colonies. For another, the damage you’ll cause Phoenix’s export economy will be immense.” Egan pointed to Schmidt. “Whether Minister Schmidt here wants to tell this to you or not, he and his government will be quickly obliged to nationalize your company. And no matter what, you’d find yourself in court for violating your contracts with the Colonial Union. It’s also entirely possible, because Phoenix Station is the seat of the Colonial Union government, that your attempt to starve it out of existence will be looked on as treason. I don’t think I need to tell you that the Colonial Union is not notably forgiving of that.”

Daquin smiled. “Thank you, Colonel Egan,” he said. “I know a little of your history. I know you were a CEO on Earth. It’s clear we speak the same language. So allow me to offer you the compliment of being equally blunt with you. Your threat of replacing Phoenix shipping with shipping from other colonies is empty. The Colonial Union is
weak,
Colonel Egan. You’ve lost the Earth and you’re not getting it back. You’re running out of soldiers and the colonies know that when that happens you’re going to start preying on them to fill the Colonial Defense Force ranks. That makes them all nervous, makes them all finally question whether the Colonial Union has come to the end of its usefulness.

“You start ordering shipping from other colonies for Phoenix Station, they’re going to want to know why. And when they find out that it’s because Phoenix is starving you from below, some of them are going to realize how weak you are right now and decide it’s better to break away now than wait until you’ve bled them all a little more. You know that. I know that. You don’t dare show all the other colonies how weak you truly are.”

“A pretty speech that conveniently forgets that your company will be nationalized before that can happen,” Egan said.

“Schmidt,” Daquin said.

“The Phoenix government won’t nationalize Ballard-Daquin,” he said, to Egan. “Right now we’re a coalition government. That coalition is both unpopular and unstable. As bad as Daquin shutting down exports would be, attempting to nationalize the company would be worse. It would fracture the government. The current government would rather be unpopular and in power than unpopular and out of it.”

“The issue could be forced,” Egan said.

“The Colonial Union could force the issue,” Schmidt agreed. “But that is a solution that is worse than the problem, Colonel Egan, Colonel Rigney.” He motioned to Daquin with a slight nod of his head. “Right now you just have one citizen of Phoenix irrationally angry with you. If you force the issue, you’ll have a billion quite rationally angry with you. And that anger will be certain to spread. Jean-Michel is right: The Colonial Union is weak at the moment. You don’t want to advertise the fact.”

“You have a week,” Daquin said.

“Even if we could accept your demands, a week is not nearly enough time,” Rigney said.

“I don’t care what you think is nearly enough time,” Daquin said.

“It’s not about what I
think,
” Rigney said, more testily than he intended. That, at least, seemed to cut Daquin off. “It’s about the limitations of travel and communication. We don’t live in a science fictional universe, Mr. Daquin. We can’t just zap messages instantaneously from one part of space to another. We have to use skip drones and ships that have to travel to where space is flat before they can leave a star system. Even if we were to start an intensive search and investigation
today,
the fact of how travel works means we have almost no chance of getting you information in a week. Hell, we are
already
searching for the
Chandler
. We
still
would be lucky to get you information in a week.”

“I’m not moved,” Daquin said.

“I understand that,” Rigney said. “But this, at least, isn’t something that can be negotiated. If you are only giving us a week, you might as well make your power play now, because we
will
fail you. But if this is actually about your son, Mr. Daquin, then you’re going to give us the time to do our job. And our job is what you want us to do: find the
Chandler
.”

“How much time,” Daquin said.

“Four weeks.”

“Two weeks.”

“No, Mr. Daquin,” Rigney said. “Four weeks. You know shipping and you know what you can do with your company. I know our ships and what they can do. I’m not bargaining with you. I’m telling you the time we need to do this. Take it or don’t.”