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The city of Contractor Haven
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Clienen sat the cone-of-silence transmitter on the bar table and activated it.
“A Fuzzy Wop?” Counselor Margret asked.
“What?” replied Clienen, “They’re all the rage, everyone has them.” The device looked exactly like a Fuzzy Wop, a fuzzy little mammal from the planet Gefor that some smart marketer had copied and turned into an aural energy emanator that diffused aural energy waves at a calm ninety-two revabations: the field orientation that a Human mind found soothing. The little, battery-operated gizmo was expensive; it had a sliver of aquamarine-5 in it. Internal Security had modified a batch of the wops to also emit a complex, rotating band of audio diffractions, making eavesdropping on a conversation impossible as long as you were sitting within the five-foot cone of silence.
“What’s your poison?”
Clienen looked at the server. She was an Artival: genetically compatible with Humans if you could get past her purple skin, mono-hair, and reptilian eyes. “Purified water, please.”
She gave him a pout and looked to Margret.
“I’ll take purified water as well and an Octian Sensen. I saw it on your menu. Do you actually have it?”
The waitress waggled her breasts in her tight-fitting halter top, trolling for a reaction from either of the two Human Avarians and said, “We do, just in.”
Margret smiled past the overture and asked, “Is it in bottles?”
“It is,” the server said.
“Then bring me the whole bottle, unopened.”
The Artival wiggled her breasts again, this time at Margret, and left.
Clienen watched Margret, unfazed by the attentions of the server, tab through her multi-func. Balding, trimly fit, with an open yet serious gaze, the director could have been Margret’s father. “Between the two of us,” he said, “we probably have ten security personnel in and around this bar. You don’t need to worry about your multi-func scan results. Someone on our team would start shooting first.”
She grinned sheepishly. “I don’t normally do undercover.”
He sniffed with a smile. “We’re hardly undercover. Any commercial AI could run a facial recognition scan and find your image in the Matrincy news reports.” The implication being Margret’s stunning looks would be hard to miss. Undercover agents were bland in appearance for a purpose. “It’ll be a surprise to no one that the Matrincy has an interest in the Margel.” The bar they were in was in the center of Contractor Haven, an independent, privately held asteroid in the Margel Damansk asteroid cloud. The hollowed-out planetoid of iron and nickel that Contractor Haven occupied was a requisition and resupply base for the many contract-mining outfits that plumbed the depths of the vast Margel Damansk belt.
“We can thank Quorat for that. Do you think Jovar makes any money off this rock?” she asked, looking around the seedy lounge, the most respectable establishment in the asteroid. Jovar was the titleholder of the rock.
“He’s probably the only person making any reliable profits,” Clienen answered. “All these miners are living from boom to bust. And a lot of them are bust to bust.”
She slouched in her chair, trying to relax. “Who pays for the bust?”
Clienen glanced at the Fuzzy Wop. “Nordarken Mining, for some of them.”
“Isn’t that expensive?” This was Margret’s first counter-intelligence operation, and she was new to the contract side of the mining industry. Prior to Dianis, all her Matrincy assignments had been with the Avarian military in the war against the Turboii.
He shrugged, “Depends on the payoff. At any given time, Nordarken probably has half a dozen contracts out. Maybe one of those will hit. Maybe not. But these contract miners run pretty cheap.”
“So we’re sure Junko got his contract from here?”
Clienen nodded. “Yes. Don’t look, but the broker who issued the contract is sitting two tables over. The one getting the lap dance from the Halorite.”
Margret didn’t need to turn to look; there was a mirror on the facing wall. “You think the Dianis aquamarine will come through here?”
“Not this rock, but one close enough for Mr. Lap-Dance to do a day-shuttle. No shifting. They don’t want the potential of a field disturbance to attract attention.”
Margret used her optical implant to zoom in on the mirror, scrutinizing the person who had awarded the Dianis mining gig to Junko. “He’s butt-ugly.”
Clienen chuckled, and when he saw the counselor’s laughing eyes, he continued chuckling. Finally, “Ah, yes, fortunately for them, they don’t get paid for their looks.”
“So we have to connect the broker to Nordarken Mining, and,” she emphasized the word, “we have to follow the Dianis aquamarine all the way to a Nordarken processing plant?”
“Basically,” said Clienen.
The waitress delivered their order and finally left when neither of the Avarians gave her attention. Margret looked around the bar at the stained couches, scuffed floor, and idle lap dancers, wondering how long she’d have to be here. Her cover, as a wealthy backer for a platinum and moriaia mining operation, would work even if she was recognized as a matronen: the federation needed both metals, but she was not enthused about being on the fringe of Federation space in a back-water asteroid belt. It was generally acknowledged the Matrincy was aiding the Federation in the search for more moriaia sources. A search for moriaia contractors drew less attention than an investigation into who would raid a Class E for aquamarine.
“How many layers, or intermediaries,” she asked, “do you think there are between Mr. Lap-Dance and Nordarken?”
Clienen couldn’t help but smile at Margret’s gloomy attitude about how long this part of her mission would last. “I don’t know. Certainly more than two.” For his part, Clienen was only on Contractor’s Haven to brief Margret on the plans of Internal Security and how his scant IDB Dianis resources could help. He’d only shifted into the asteroid out of curiosity. As director of IDB Margel Damansk, the cloud was in his jurisdiction, but the sting operation was sponsored by the Matrincy and run by Internal Security, that is, until they ventured foot on Class E Dianis; there, Clienen had full authority.
“So we can follow the credits and contacts from Junko through the broker, and through the broker’s broker, and yet again through their broker.”
Clienen nodded.
“Which will take time, but we can do it?” Her tone held an edge of hope, not for her own situation but for the success of the operation.
Clienen nodded again. “It will depend on how well they’ve obscured the data trail, and credit payments can be confusing, but aquamarine is a physical asset. Eventually, it has to land in a Nordarken plant.”
“But how will we track the Dianis aquamarine to the plant? What happens if they mix it with a legal shipment?”
He shrugged. “It’s not as if there are a lot of legal shipments to mix with. But in case they should try, and we expect them to, we plan to stain the Dianis aquamarine with an aural signature that we can trace. We’ll know where the aqua came from.” He waited for her to ask how they would do that. His answer exposed the hole in their plan: they needed physical access to the aquamarine before it left the planet, and that meant finding the mining site, sneaking in, and running an irradiation protocol, ala Special Forces.
She drank from her glass of Octian Sensen.
Clienen watched her expression. “Real? Or counterfeit?”
Margret tilted the glass to the light. “Oh, it’s real. Did you see the price?”
He turned to read the holographic menu projected in the air above the bar. The prices of some of the items, the more exotic drugs, allogens, and alcohols, changed while he watched. They fluctuated in real-time with demand and supply. One of them was the sensen. “Seven hundred and twenty credits a glass?” he said out loud, wondering if he read it right. It had to be a mistake.
She gave him the Avarian head-waggle. “The Matrincy can afford it. Especially if I’m going to be stuck on this rock.”
He shook his head at the price, then tried to soothe her with a sympathetic grin.
She tapped his leg with her foot. “How long are you staying?”
He almost laughed but felt for her. She’d not been on Contractor’s Haven a day, and already she was feeling isolated. In her past Matrincy assignments, Margret had been under marriage contracts with her mission partners. There would be no cohabitation arrangements in this sting assignment. “Just the night,” he answered. “I catch a shuttle to a thorium mine in the morning. From there, a Fed corvette will pick me up and shift out.”
She leaned forward and turned the bottle of Octian Sensen so that the filigreed label faced him. “No way can I drink this whole bottle by myself. Want to help?”
