Sean-Michael Argo - Carrion Duty

The Bottom Line must be attended, he repeated to himself, the actuarial mantra helping him clear his mind for the task at hand.

There was an arrangement between House Indron and Augur Corporation that the Actuary had not only allowed, but overseen. Lord Soren Aiken was easily the most capable Grotto elite that the Actuary had encountered, having proven himself to be in possession of both a sound military mind and a keen understanding of the delicate socio-economic balance in the universe.

Grotto Corporation needed more elites like him, thought the Actuary, if they were to prosper in the coming decades.

The universe was changing, and had been doing so from the first moment humanity encountered the ancient machine race that had come to be known in common parlance as the Gedra. The Actuary was convinced by that first encounter that he was bearing witness to the event horizon of a quantum entanglement that would re-make civilization itself.

There was so much they had yet to understand about the enigmatic machines and whatever holocaust wiped out their creators. This arrangement between Augur and Grotto, clandestine and technically illegal as it might be, was the only way forward. It was a dangerous alliance to be sure, and had yet to bear significant fruit, but the Actuary was as patient a man as he was methodical.

As one part of his mind worked furiously at pouring over the data coming from Kratos 12, a portion of his energy and attention delved into the information in the seventh cluster. His hands worked with blinding speed, providing a physical component to the cogitation so that his brain would be able to maintain the connection and keep pace with the data as is moved through his awareness. In one breath, he adjusted the core interest rate, giving it a minuscule increase that would go relatively unnoticed by individual citizens and yet provide a much-needed infusion of liquidity for the infrastructure ministry.

In another breath, the Actuary poured over an after-action report from a Reaper tug out of Baen 6, in which the Reapers purged a Red List community by the name of Fiat Lux.

The Actuary temporarily lifted a pollutant restriction in several industrial districts in the capital city of Kratos 12, and set the restriction to re-activate a week later. The brief reprieve from the restrictions would allow the refineries there to maximize their output for that time period, and that excess productivity would compensate for the degraded growth that would occur next month due to several difficulties in shipping on the far side of the sector. He estimated that there would be a ten percent increase in health complications amongst the population in the immediate area, in addition to those who worked in the refineries, though the human cost threshold was within acceptable limits relative to the Bottom Line.

As he proofread the restriction reprieve and authorized a slight cost increase of basic services in the affected districts, the Actuary continued to analyze the data from the Reaper tug.

There it was, after years lost in space the Tasca ship had been secured. The cargo appeared to have been jettisoned or otherwise removed from the ship, though the nav-computer had been recovered.

The Actuary carefully crafted a macro routine that compared life bond outputs of the present day with life bond outputs of pre-unionized Kratos 12 and let it run.

While that macro occupied the system, he diverted his entire attention to the next task. The contents of the nav-computer had been moved into a clean room and synced with the system so that the Actuary could interact with it. As he investigated, the Actuary saw that someone had attempted to scrub the nav-computer with a series of manual commands. Functionally, the computer had been blanked, though data could never actually be completely eliminated from the hardware, the trick was just accessing it.

Carefully, the Actuary reached out through the system and discovered the identity of the company that manufactured that model of nav-computer. Upon finding the company, Metis Ordo, the Actuary took note that Grotto Corporation was in possession of nearly thirty percent of the small company’s stocks. He authorized a full purge of all interests held in the company, which happened in seconds, and then he waited.

Within five standard minutes the market had reacted, and other shareholders, fearing a catastrophic loss or incident within Ordo Metis, dumped their shares. No sooner did the shares hit the exchange than the Actuary used his tremendous resources to purchase every available share. By the time he was finished, Grotto Corporation was in control of ninety percent of Metis Ordo.

As his macros continued to run the Actuary worked to cover his tracks. In the matter of a few minutes he had successfully engaged in a hostile takeover of Metis Ordo, and while that was perfectly legal, it had taken a titanic amount of resources to accomplish.

In order to mask his true purpose, the Actuary initiated contracts with the freshly seized company to outfit the entirety of Kratos 12’s domestic fleet with the Metis nav-computer. Given that Grotto now owned the controlling interest in the company, the end costs of the retro-fit would be far less than if they had been purchased directly and most of the funds allocated would return to Grotto coffers anyway. It was a bold move, and he would likely be required to explain the minutiae of his logic during his next peer review, but that could wait.

A high-level request for universal access protocols went from the Actuary to the tech masters of Metis Ordo, and while he waited for their response the Actuary continued his official work with Kratos 12.

The Reaper tug out of Kratos 12 had seen hard duty in the Ellisian trade war, and as yet the command elements had not participated in any overt military actions since returning from the front. The Actuary drafted an anti-piracy mandate for the Kratos system and established a variable range of hazard bonuses, having compared the payouts to cost of engagements and determined that the loss of life and equipment would balance against the estimated salvage and human spoils.

By the time he was finished with that, he saw that Metis had dutifully responded with the access protocols. The Actuary set up another macro that compared the aptitude and performance ratings for pending student graduates with the labor needs of Kratos 12, and gently adjusted the scores of graduates who were borderline between one job assignment or the other. As his macro molded the lives of millions, the Actuary used his system to connect with the nav-computer.

Now that he had the universal access protocols he was able to interact with the data still on the hardware of the nav-computer. He pulled up the transit logs of the ship, and was reminded that he was looking into the records of a Tasca cartel slave ship. While Grotto Corporation sometimes did business with the cartel, it was all clandestine and wreathed in several layers of plausible deniability. He was aware that Lord Indron had authorized a joint mission to be conducted with a clutch of Tasca operatives and members of the Merchants Militant known as the Dire Swords.

The joint mission had resulted in the capture of a Gedra entity unlike any other previously encountered. The surface of the planet in question had also been covered in a series of ring structures that were thought to be part of a mighty energy weapon.

The Dire Swords were re-assigned upon completion of the mission, leaving the Tasca ship to transport the entity to a remote Augur research station. The cartel ship was supposed to take a lengthy journey across the frontier instead of going directly to the station, in order to give the appearance of simply being a slave ship on the prowl. The ship had disappeared without any communication or hint of its last location.