Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 25, 2010 16:05:03 GMT -5
Shareholder
The vessel had a single occupant and its life support system was on the blink, literally turning off and on. Weighing in at only 1,000 tons it was much smaller than any military vessel with barely a bunk and a bathroom stuffed in behind the cockpit. Behind that was a small storage room filled with canned meats, packaged noodles and a few other essentials.
The Gaul-Moore Shipyard had manufactured the Civilian Tug Class for more than a decade without altering the basic design one centimeter. Hundreds of them had been produced although many had been lost in the Shays Pass Rebellion at Proxima Centauri. The rebels had used the small ships as long range fighters to great effect against the fleet. At least in the opening battles before the fleet changed tactics.
The remaining ships of the class were used as personal transports or executive transport vessels for corporation leaders. Gaul-Moore had even deemed them to be obsolete and focused on a new 1,200 ton design that allowed 4 passengers and slightly longer range. It called it the Civilian Family Excursion Vessel, but the military version was designated the General Executive Vessel.
Rodney Dalton sweated and panted as the life support system failed once more but his destination was in sight. The white and blue world in the distance was coming closer and soon he would be contacted by Orbital Traffic Control. They would order him into a holding pattern orbit to wait his turn to land.
Hansen’s World was a relatively large colony world boasting more than 19 million citizen-residents at the last census. The population clustered in one continent around 12 cities linked by ribbons of highways, aerial shuttles and such. It was a prosperous world with a government that was efficient and boring, the best type to have if you had to have one.
Rodney Dalton was a shareholder, one of more than 20 million to be sure, but he wanted to be there when the shareholders meetings took place. This only happened once every 5 years and made up the very base of governmental participation. For 3-4 days nothing else mattered, it was the biggest thing, even bigger than a sports championship.
Share #12-213-323 was Rodney. One vote of 20 million, or 19 million plus however many off world shareholders bothered to appear. Very few would, of course, a planet so efficient and as boring as this the meetings were routine. Rodney had a bad feeling based on some information he obtained through some unsavory channels.
The Board of Governors and the CEO needed to be warned. A small group of people with bad intents had purchased shares through unusual means and would come to make trouble. They had apparently been on-planet for months working their way through the system and gaining trust, the locals were far too trusting at that.
Mac Wilson was an old golfing buddy and they had been in on the Hansen IPO from the beginning together. One day Mac had vanished and returned looked bedraggled the following day.
Rodney was shocked to see Mac enter a bar and followed him.
Soon the man was drunk and spilled some beans.
He had once had an affair. He wife did not know and hopefully never would. Somehow some people he never before showed up and took him away. They knew everything bad he had done in the last two years, with pictures and all they wanted was his share in Hansen’s World. He hadn’t wanted to give it to them but after hours and hours of their threats he succumbed.
A similar thing happened to Randolph Scott-Jackson, an old high school chum who also had been in their IPO group. He fished now and then with Randolph when one evening he got a call and a terrorized Randolph told him everything. He had once sold a proprietary secret from his company to a competitor. It was a small thing and it was long ago forgotten until a group of men showed up at his office. They took him away for a day and forced him to sell his share.
Randolph committed suicide after ending the call.
Rodney had been visited, but he had been prepared. He managed to have friends block most of them from entering the building and then he got one of them alone.
“Mr. Rodney Dalton, I have a proposition for you. An opportunity, one could say” The man said as a way of introduction. A security camera set up before hand was using the newest facial recognition software to try and ID this guy and the others. Even linking up to off-world police databases was part of its system.
“You want my share of Hansen’s World” Rodney had responded. “You blackmailed two of my friends already, one of them committed suicide. I don’t know who are what you are working for but I don’t like it”.
The man hadn’t even changed his facial expression, he looked as calm as ever. “We know things about you Mr. Dalton and we can release those things to the public.”
Rodney smiled. He had only done a few bad things in his whole life, although people had different definitions of “bad”. “I don’t think so. My life is an open book, has been for twenty years and I doubt you’ve spied on me that long”.
The computer flat screen in on his desk changed and it seemed the facial recognition had worked its charm.
“We can tell your wife about your robot girlfriend”
“She’s the one who gave it to me, as a gag gift for my fortieth birthday. If that is the best you can do Timothy Geithner, you can turn around and leave now. Do you still run drugs to Terra Delta after doing time there? Does your old gang know you are out, because I understand the Red Hats do not let members quit”
Rodney also had them trailed after they left and tried to trace the associations of this Geithner character. He had quite the thug history but his present employer was as yet unknown, but he had been on Hansen’s World recently. That was interesting.
Ten of the dozen members in his original IPO group had been pressured to sell to this shadowy gang. He went farther and contacted the Hansen Shareholders Services Office where he had contacts. Normally they would refuse to disclose certain information but his friend there soon sent him a message.
New Hansen Holdings had acquired 900 shares in the past year but what was more there were dozens of similarly unknown groups also buying up shares. While they were still a small percentage of total shares it concerned the few people who knew about them. The vast majority of these holding funds were based on Isis. Isis was once a industrial competitor to Hansen’s World but it was now a backwater, nobody went there and it didn’t even have a link on the Info-Network.
That is what compelled Rodney Dalton to take the old ship to Isis. What he found there had been surprising, the world was in a deep depression. No news of this had gotten to the outside, the local media outlets seemed to be on a short leash. He saw empty apartment towers, condemned office buildings.
“Is there any industry left?” he asked the taxi driver, who was human.
“There is the Maxwell-Johnson Corporation” the man had responded casually “They produce all kinds of goods we need here locally. We don’t get much imported because of the economic slump but MJC is taking care of us pretty good.”
Economic slump, who was he kidding? Probably himself, it seems everyone on Isis was in denial that their command economy was a disaster. It was a slump but the media was always reporting that it was a “slow recovery”.
The Isis City Inn was apparently the only hotel and it offered few amenities, Rodney might have been the only visitor, he saw no-one else. The President of the Maxwell-Johnson Corporation was Javier Santos, he appeared on the news a lot it looked like.
Apparently the MJC controlled all of the local media.
Santos was shown cutting the ribbon to inaugurate a health clinic in some destitute city to the north of Isis City. Then it showed him visiting a shelter for women and children and passing out food and teddy bears. Santos was a figurehead Rodney realized, the real power here was not the guy everyone was looking at on the news.
“I would like to make an appointment to meet with the Vice President for Operations, a Mr. Douglas Hume. I am an investor from the Planet Richmond and I am interested in doing some business on your world” he told the secretary the exact same thing he told the front desk and the door guard and the gate guard.
“Mr. Hume is a very busy man Mr. Dalton” the secretary replied.
“Too busy to cut ribbons and hand out teddy bears I presume. It seems obvious to me that I am trying to reach the go-to guy here.”
The secretary smiled ruefully as if she knew that Mr. Dalton had figured out more than the sheep had realized in a decade. “I will inform Mr. Hume and he will decide when and if to meet with you, I can reach you at the hotel?”
“Probably, I assume Isis City doesn’t have much of a night life?” Rodney joked.
“Goodbye Mr. Dalton” the secretary said more forcefully, not smiling.
Rodney climbed back into the taxi and asked to go to the space port. On arrival he noted a man was milling about his ship.
“What are you doing?”
“Security, did you know this ship has some damage?”
“It must have missed that, it probably happened in transit. Does it look bad?” Rodney asked following the man to the other side.
“I’m only a security guard but you might want to have a mech or a tech look at it. I doubt they have a lot of back-up systems on a ship this small.”
The outer hull of one of the blisters was holed. The instruments inside didn’t look damaged to any extent but the hole was a concern. There was no back-up, true. Rodney was no expert either but this looked like part of the life support system. It also occurred to Rodney that he had no provisions left in the storage compartment.
“You are probably correct. I will ask the computer to run a diagnostic and then I will know what to have them fix. I also need to find a place to buy provisions, food and stuff.”
“Well” the guard said slowly “There ain’t a lot of food around these parts, you know. I can probably find some stuff for you, but it’ll only be the very basics. Do you have any bearer credits?”
Of course, it was the only inter-stellar currency that made any sense. The guard looked as if he hadn’t seen a bearer credit in ages. In the state of this economy, maybe he hadn’t.
The taxi took him back to the hotel. Getting the ship repaired and provisioned was going to be his top priority because he might have to get away very quickly. Mr. Douglas Hume was probably not the kind of guy to mess with and Rodney was definitely going to mess with him.
He entered the hotel cafeteria and it was completely empty of people except for the guy who was probably the cook, waiter and janitor. He seemed overjoyed to have a customer and vigorously shook Rodney’s hand and gave him the “best” table.
“What do you have anyway?” Rodney asked when told there was no menu.
“We have noodles, of course” the answer came “I have some canned meats, crackers and I just got in a load of green onions.”
Rodney sighed. “The economy is still in a rut, huh?”
The man nodded and said quietly “They said it was recovering but they have been saying that for years. Not to sound unpatriotic or anything”.
“Canned meat and noodles sound good to me right about now” Rodney said and slipped a bearer credit out of his pocket. “I hope there is something worth drinking”.
“The government heavily subsidizes liquor production” the man said with a grin.
Of course they do. Let them get drunk and not try to topple the rulers. It was an old style strategy of dictators and tyrants. Soon Rodney was back in his room with a bottle of, well, something clear and unpleasant-tasting. It worked though and that was the important thing.
The phone rang and he got it on the third ring.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Hume will see you tomorrow morning at 9:00 local time, Mr. Dalton” the voice of the secretary informed him and then hung up. Then that would probably make it a bad idea to finish the bottle. This was much more important than the rotgut in the bottle after all.
Rodney curled up under the thin blanket on the ratty mattress and got to sleep rather quickly, thinking about what the morning would bring.
The vessel had a single occupant and its life support system was on the blink, literally turning off and on. Weighing in at only 1,000 tons it was much smaller than any military vessel with barely a bunk and a bathroom stuffed in behind the cockpit. Behind that was a small storage room filled with canned meats, packaged noodles and a few other essentials.
The Gaul-Moore Shipyard had manufactured the Civilian Tug Class for more than a decade without altering the basic design one centimeter. Hundreds of them had been produced although many had been lost in the Shays Pass Rebellion at Proxima Centauri. The rebels had used the small ships as long range fighters to great effect against the fleet. At least in the opening battles before the fleet changed tactics.
The remaining ships of the class were used as personal transports or executive transport vessels for corporation leaders. Gaul-Moore had even deemed them to be obsolete and focused on a new 1,200 ton design that allowed 4 passengers and slightly longer range. It called it the Civilian Family Excursion Vessel, but the military version was designated the General Executive Vessel.
Rodney Dalton sweated and panted as the life support system failed once more but his destination was in sight. The white and blue world in the distance was coming closer and soon he would be contacted by Orbital Traffic Control. They would order him into a holding pattern orbit to wait his turn to land.
Hansen’s World was a relatively large colony world boasting more than 19 million citizen-residents at the last census. The population clustered in one continent around 12 cities linked by ribbons of highways, aerial shuttles and such. It was a prosperous world with a government that was efficient and boring, the best type to have if you had to have one.
Rodney Dalton was a shareholder, one of more than 20 million to be sure, but he wanted to be there when the shareholders meetings took place. This only happened once every 5 years and made up the very base of governmental participation. For 3-4 days nothing else mattered, it was the biggest thing, even bigger than a sports championship.
Share #12-213-323 was Rodney. One vote of 20 million, or 19 million plus however many off world shareholders bothered to appear. Very few would, of course, a planet so efficient and as boring as this the meetings were routine. Rodney had a bad feeling based on some information he obtained through some unsavory channels.
The Board of Governors and the CEO needed to be warned. A small group of people with bad intents had purchased shares through unusual means and would come to make trouble. They had apparently been on-planet for months working their way through the system and gaining trust, the locals were far too trusting at that.
Mac Wilson was an old golfing buddy and they had been in on the Hansen IPO from the beginning together. One day Mac had vanished and returned looked bedraggled the following day.
Rodney was shocked to see Mac enter a bar and followed him.
Soon the man was drunk and spilled some beans.
He had once had an affair. He wife did not know and hopefully never would. Somehow some people he never before showed up and took him away. They knew everything bad he had done in the last two years, with pictures and all they wanted was his share in Hansen’s World. He hadn’t wanted to give it to them but after hours and hours of their threats he succumbed.
A similar thing happened to Randolph Scott-Jackson, an old high school chum who also had been in their IPO group. He fished now and then with Randolph when one evening he got a call and a terrorized Randolph told him everything. He had once sold a proprietary secret from his company to a competitor. It was a small thing and it was long ago forgotten until a group of men showed up at his office. They took him away for a day and forced him to sell his share.
Randolph committed suicide after ending the call.
Rodney had been visited, but he had been prepared. He managed to have friends block most of them from entering the building and then he got one of them alone.
“Mr. Rodney Dalton, I have a proposition for you. An opportunity, one could say” The man said as a way of introduction. A security camera set up before hand was using the newest facial recognition software to try and ID this guy and the others. Even linking up to off-world police databases was part of its system.
“You want my share of Hansen’s World” Rodney had responded. “You blackmailed two of my friends already, one of them committed suicide. I don’t know who are what you are working for but I don’t like it”.
The man hadn’t even changed his facial expression, he looked as calm as ever. “We know things about you Mr. Dalton and we can release those things to the public.”
Rodney smiled. He had only done a few bad things in his whole life, although people had different definitions of “bad”. “I don’t think so. My life is an open book, has been for twenty years and I doubt you’ve spied on me that long”.
The computer flat screen in on his desk changed and it seemed the facial recognition had worked its charm.
“We can tell your wife about your robot girlfriend”
“She’s the one who gave it to me, as a gag gift for my fortieth birthday. If that is the best you can do Timothy Geithner, you can turn around and leave now. Do you still run drugs to Terra Delta after doing time there? Does your old gang know you are out, because I understand the Red Hats do not let members quit”
Rodney also had them trailed after they left and tried to trace the associations of this Geithner character. He had quite the thug history but his present employer was as yet unknown, but he had been on Hansen’s World recently. That was interesting.
Ten of the dozen members in his original IPO group had been pressured to sell to this shadowy gang. He went farther and contacted the Hansen Shareholders Services Office where he had contacts. Normally they would refuse to disclose certain information but his friend there soon sent him a message.
New Hansen Holdings had acquired 900 shares in the past year but what was more there were dozens of similarly unknown groups also buying up shares. While they were still a small percentage of total shares it concerned the few people who knew about them. The vast majority of these holding funds were based on Isis. Isis was once a industrial competitor to Hansen’s World but it was now a backwater, nobody went there and it didn’t even have a link on the Info-Network.
That is what compelled Rodney Dalton to take the old ship to Isis. What he found there had been surprising, the world was in a deep depression. No news of this had gotten to the outside, the local media outlets seemed to be on a short leash. He saw empty apartment towers, condemned office buildings.
“Is there any industry left?” he asked the taxi driver, who was human.
“There is the Maxwell-Johnson Corporation” the man had responded casually “They produce all kinds of goods we need here locally. We don’t get much imported because of the economic slump but MJC is taking care of us pretty good.”
Economic slump, who was he kidding? Probably himself, it seems everyone on Isis was in denial that their command economy was a disaster. It was a slump but the media was always reporting that it was a “slow recovery”.
The Isis City Inn was apparently the only hotel and it offered few amenities, Rodney might have been the only visitor, he saw no-one else. The President of the Maxwell-Johnson Corporation was Javier Santos, he appeared on the news a lot it looked like.
Apparently the MJC controlled all of the local media.
Santos was shown cutting the ribbon to inaugurate a health clinic in some destitute city to the north of Isis City. Then it showed him visiting a shelter for women and children and passing out food and teddy bears. Santos was a figurehead Rodney realized, the real power here was not the guy everyone was looking at on the news.
“I would like to make an appointment to meet with the Vice President for Operations, a Mr. Douglas Hume. I am an investor from the Planet Richmond and I am interested in doing some business on your world” he told the secretary the exact same thing he told the front desk and the door guard and the gate guard.
“Mr. Hume is a very busy man Mr. Dalton” the secretary replied.
“Too busy to cut ribbons and hand out teddy bears I presume. It seems obvious to me that I am trying to reach the go-to guy here.”
The secretary smiled ruefully as if she knew that Mr. Dalton had figured out more than the sheep had realized in a decade. “I will inform Mr. Hume and he will decide when and if to meet with you, I can reach you at the hotel?”
“Probably, I assume Isis City doesn’t have much of a night life?” Rodney joked.
“Goodbye Mr. Dalton” the secretary said more forcefully, not smiling.
Rodney climbed back into the taxi and asked to go to the space port. On arrival he noted a man was milling about his ship.
“What are you doing?”
“Security, did you know this ship has some damage?”
“It must have missed that, it probably happened in transit. Does it look bad?” Rodney asked following the man to the other side.
“I’m only a security guard but you might want to have a mech or a tech look at it. I doubt they have a lot of back-up systems on a ship this small.”
The outer hull of one of the blisters was holed. The instruments inside didn’t look damaged to any extent but the hole was a concern. There was no back-up, true. Rodney was no expert either but this looked like part of the life support system. It also occurred to Rodney that he had no provisions left in the storage compartment.
“You are probably correct. I will ask the computer to run a diagnostic and then I will know what to have them fix. I also need to find a place to buy provisions, food and stuff.”
“Well” the guard said slowly “There ain’t a lot of food around these parts, you know. I can probably find some stuff for you, but it’ll only be the very basics. Do you have any bearer credits?”
Of course, it was the only inter-stellar currency that made any sense. The guard looked as if he hadn’t seen a bearer credit in ages. In the state of this economy, maybe he hadn’t.
The taxi took him back to the hotel. Getting the ship repaired and provisioned was going to be his top priority because he might have to get away very quickly. Mr. Douglas Hume was probably not the kind of guy to mess with and Rodney was definitely going to mess with him.
He entered the hotel cafeteria and it was completely empty of people except for the guy who was probably the cook, waiter and janitor. He seemed overjoyed to have a customer and vigorously shook Rodney’s hand and gave him the “best” table.
“What do you have anyway?” Rodney asked when told there was no menu.
“We have noodles, of course” the answer came “I have some canned meats, crackers and I just got in a load of green onions.”
Rodney sighed. “The economy is still in a rut, huh?”
The man nodded and said quietly “They said it was recovering but they have been saying that for years. Not to sound unpatriotic or anything”.
“Canned meat and noodles sound good to me right about now” Rodney said and slipped a bearer credit out of his pocket. “I hope there is something worth drinking”.
“The government heavily subsidizes liquor production” the man said with a grin.
Of course they do. Let them get drunk and not try to topple the rulers. It was an old style strategy of dictators and tyrants. Soon Rodney was back in his room with a bottle of, well, something clear and unpleasant-tasting. It worked though and that was the important thing.
The phone rang and he got it on the third ring.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Hume will see you tomorrow morning at 9:00 local time, Mr. Dalton” the voice of the secretary informed him and then hung up. Then that would probably make it a bad idea to finish the bottle. This was much more important than the rotgut in the bottle after all.
Rodney curled up under the thin blanket on the ratty mattress and got to sleep rather quickly, thinking about what the morning would bring.
