Orson Card - Earth unavare

The man beamed. “Thank you, Mr. Jukes.”

The man looked like he was going to speak further, but Lem didn’t give him the chance. He turned and flew away, heading back to the push tube. The Board would be surprised all right. And when Lem told them that their files had been compromised and that the schematics for the glaser were likely in the hands of free miners, or that the same free miners likely had incriminating video of a Juke vessel killing someone, video that would almost assuredly result in a public-relations nightmare of a lawsuit, they’d be much more than surprised.

Lem could see the Board of Directors now. Fine mission, Lem. Well done. Too bad you killed a man and lost us billions of credits in R amp;D and the very future of this company. Too bad you made a jackass of yourself. Other than that little snafu we’d say the mission was a smashing success. We were warming up this seat here at the board table for you, but you see, we have a strict policy against idiots. We’ll have to give it to this spineless Ivy League bastard instead. So sorry. I’m sure you understand.

Lem climbed into the tube and spoke the order for the helm, shooting away.

These people have stained me, he told himself. These damn free miners have stained me. Thank you, Concepcion Querales. Thank you for taking the last two years of my life and flushing them down the crapper. No, not just the last two years, but my whole life, everything I’ve worked for. This will cancel out all of my previous achievements. My reputation will be ruined. And not only that-now that he thought about it-but his fortune as well. The company wouldn’t just sue him, they’d take him for everything he was worth, which was no small sum. They’d tag the whole ordeal as gross negligence and roast him alive. And Father wouldn’t do anything to stop it. He’d turn a blind eye. He’d chalk it up as another of Lem’s “life lessons.” You got yourself into this mess, Lem. You can get yourself out.

No, he was going to correct this. The Board would never know. By the time they reached Luna, all would be resolved. The free miners might be beyond their reach at the moment, but he was certain there was a solution, even if he had no idea at the moment what it might be.

He reached the helm and pulled Chubs aside into one the conference rooms. Chubs floated near the entrance, but Lem felt like walking. He turned on his greaves and vambraces and paced back and forth in front of the window, beyond which was the murky dust cloud and the dotted black of space.

“We have a situation,” said Lem. “One that I would prefer to keep very quiet.”

“All right,” said Chubs.

“When we bumped the free miners, there were three men on the hull. One of them was struck with one of the sensors we cut away.”

“I remember,” said Chubs. “It looked ugly.”

“Yes, well, ugly is putting it mildly. The man is dead. We killed him.” Lem put a little emphasis on the word “we,” hoping to spread the blame around.

Chubs furrowed his brow. “How can you possibly know that?”

Lem told him about the message from Concepcion.

Chubs whistled. “Podolski know about this?”

“I called him to my room, and he checked the system. You ready for the fun part? They downloaded us. Not only did they hack us and leave us a lovely little message, but they also took our files. Everything.”

Chubs swore under his breath. “Are we sure about this? Podolski confirmed?”

“They used a snifferstick. They poked their little noses in here without us knowing it and they copied us clean. Podolski showed me on the records. They duped us.”

Chubs swore again. “Not good, Lem.”

“No, not good. Schematics of the glaser. All of our research. The engineers’ journals. And my favorite part: all the video of the bump.”

Chubs stopped rubbing his eyes and looked up at Lem.

“Yes,” said Lem. “They have video of us killing one of their crew. Do you know what the press would do with that? What the courts would do with that?”

“It was an accident,” said Chubs. “We weren’t aiming for the guy. We didn’t even know he was out there.”

“Prosecutors won’t care,” said Lem. “Besides, it doesn’t look that way in the video. I reviewed it myself. In slow motion. It looks like we were gunning for him. They’ll call it incontestable. And when they do, corporate will cut us off at the knees. They’ll sue us as well. If we don’t do something about this, you and me and everyone on this ship is malja. Toast. Game over.”

“They stole from us,” said Chubs. “That has to account for something. They stole corporate secrets.”

“That will win us no sympathy. You think people will shed tears for the largest, wealthiest corporation in the world? Oh boo-hoo. Poor Juke Limited. Those fat, greedy corporate executives will only get a hundred billion credits on their yearly bonus this year instead of a hundred and twenty. What a shame. No. No one will care. The media would have a field day with this. The poor and middle class will dance in the streets. They eat this stuff up. They can’t be happy until everyone else is brought down to their level.”

“We can fix this,” said Chubs.

“How? We can’t track them. I already asked the navigator. They’re long gone. We could go looking for them, but there’s no guarantee we’d find them. We probably wouldn’t.”

“We don’t have to find them,” said Chubs. “We just have to know where they’re going and be there first, waiting for them when they arrive.”

“We don’t know where they’re going,” said Lem. “I told you. They didn’t exactly leave a forwarding address.”

“But we do know where they’ll go eventually,” said Chubs. “Weigh Station Four is the only outpost this far out. All the families and clans go there for supplies. El Cavador headed out into the Deep, so they obviously don’t yet know what’s in our files. As soon as they figure out what they have, they’ll rush to Weigh Station Four and try to sell the schematics on the black market. That’s the only place even remotely close to here where they can do that.”

“They could head back into the inner system,” said Lem. “Maybe they won’t go to Weigh Station Four. Maybe they’ll think they’ll get a better price closer to home.”

Chubs shook his head. “Not families. You have to know how these people think. They don’t take risks like that. Most of them came out to the Deep to get away from trouble. When they try to sell, they’ll use a reliable source, someone they trust, someone they use often. That’s more important to them than getting a better price. They wouldn’t fly down to Mars or the Asteroid Belt. A, it’s too far, and B, they’d want to stay as far away from corporates as possible. They took something of ours, and they know we’ll want it back. Believe me, they’ll play it safe. Weigh Station Four is where they’ll go.”

“Fine. But how will we recover the data?”

“The same way they took it from us. We’ll hack their ship and steal it back. And maybe erase their servers in the process, just to be certain.”

“They could have moved the data onto a mobile device, a portable drive or something.”

Chubs shook his head. “Families use handhelds. Old models. If they want to port the information, they’d use those. But the handhelds are rooted to the ship’s main servers. When we wipe the servers, we wipe the handhelds, too.”

“It’s not flawless,” said Lem. “They still could have the data stored somewhere else.”

“Maybe,” said Chubs, “but I doubt it. We’ll never be one hundred percent sure. Hitting their servers is as close as we can get.”

Lem considered this a moment then realized a snag. “It won’t work,” he said. “If we go to Weigh Station Four, they’ll see us. They’ll see the ship. It’s not a very big outpost. They’ll know we’re waiting for them. They’ll turn tail and run.”