TWENTY-NINE

 

 

THE FLOTILLA OF ninety-two habitats and factory floats around the Baie-Comeau was slowly crossing the terminator into night. The forward-most habitats were already in the somber starscape, like tiny, distant ships sailing on a curving reddened sea.

The Baie-Comeau had begun dropping in altitude. Although the lower winds were more turbulent, it was slightly warmer; enough that they needed less battery power to keep the greenhouses from freezing. Gaschel liked watching the habitats transition from forty-eight-hour day to forty-eight-hour night. The crops grew under lamps, the industries ran on low power, her people turned to indoor work and family time and enjoyed more sleep in what they called the long night.

The two men sat with their backs to the window.

“We did some looking, Madame la Présidente,” Labourière said. “Monsieur Tétreau found some interesting things.”

Tétreau turned a pad so she could see his display. He cleared his throat.

“It turns out that only three families regularly submit meteorological reports as deep as forty-fifth rang,” Tétreau said. “The Mignaud family, the Cyr family, and the D’Aquillon family.”

“Of course it might be Marthe D’Aquillon,” Labourière said in exasperation.

Tétreau was looking for some sign from Gaschel’s face. She didn’t give one.

“The Mignauds and D’Aquillons herd and modify their own trawlers,” Tétreau said, “just small stuff, not full bioengineering. They trade oxygen and water with other coureurs and occasionally with upper atmosphere families.”

“Black market,” Gaschel said.

“Oui, madame,” Tétreau replied.

Black markets were a necessary evil. Tétreau knew it. Labourière knew it. She knew it. She still didn’t like it.

“What about the Cyrs?” she asked.

“Trawler breeders in the lower cloud decks,” Labourière said. “They spend more time at fiftieth rang, but they also descend and have submitted met reports from lower altitudes.”

“If we wanted to, how fast could you find them?” she asked.

“This wouldn’t give us much more to go on,” Tétreau said. “They don’t submit the reports in real time, or from their central trawlers. They’ll transmit upward through a transmitter-repeater setup on the most distant trawlers in their herds.”

“But you can build up patterns over time,” she said. “Where they’ve been, they’ll go again.”

“The D’Aquillons and the Mignauds are also volcano chasers,” Tétreau said. “They’ve fitted some of their trawlers to drag nets of rosette fronds through the lower cloud deck, and especially the sub-cloud haze, where volcanic ash may be floating. They can harvest up to a dozen kilograms of metals and minerals in a good month of trawling. But this means that they’ll go wherever they think volcanoes and really low storms have conspired to lift metallic and mineral dust into the sub-cloud haze.”

Gaschel didn’t look pleased.

“I pulled in some favors,” Tétreau offered. “I have a cousin married to a coureur at fifty-fifth rang. He looked into acquiring some metals from D’Aquillon. They met up and he traded for some. He sent me up a sample.”

Gaschel’s eyebrows rose.

Tétreau produced a small plastic ziplock bag with about thirty grams of black powder.

“Very mildly radioactive,” he said, “nothing that couldn’t be explained by contamination.”

She took the bag, squeezed it. The texture was wrong.

“This isn’t volcanic ash,” she said. “It’s been processed?”

“I’ve seen processed ash,” he said. “It’s finer than this. This has been roughly ground.”

“What does that mean?”

“I used labs on the Petit Kamouraska,” he said. “These aren’t the normal elements that come out of volcanic ash. It’s heavily enriched with iridium, tungsten and platinum group metals.”

“We haven’t looked very hard for platinum metals on the surface,” she said, squeezing the bag again, considering the grains.

“We don’t think we’ll ever find any,” Labourière said. “Tungsten and platinum group metals bind strongly to iron. During the resurfacing of Venus half a billion years ago, iron sank in the molten crust.”

“We should never see these metals coming out of volcanoes,” Tétreau added. “We would expect to see them in iron-nickel asteroids. Not only that—there are fragments of clays mixed in this sample. Very few, but they’re there. Venus has no clays because it has no water.”

Her office had dimmed as they passed the terminator. Now the lights came on. She placed the bag on her desk between them.

“And how many ways are there to get asteroidal metal and fragments of clays down to the forty-fifth rang?” she asked.

Labourière made a doubtful face. “The same two ways Woodward hit you with,” he said, finally. “One of the coureurs is trading with one of the other Banks in secret, or the Bank of Pallas is trading with the coureurs in secret and isn’t telling you.”

She sat back. The darkness outside had closed in. The approaching cloud tops gave the impression of being poised to swallow the Baie-Comeau.

“Since the Bank of Pallas brought this to us, we might assume that it isn’t them,” she said, “meaning the coureurs are playing with another Bank, violating our loan contracts with the Bank of Pallas.”

“Unless the Bank of Pallas itself is setting up a false flag operation to find us in violation in advance of our next debt negotiations,” Labourière said glumly.

Gaschel ground her teeth. “What made you focus on D’Aquillon?” she asked.

“George-Étienne D’Aquillon doesn’t have any love for the government,” Tétreau said, “and this happened just after Marthe D’Aquillon started posting her arguments in the flotilla web.”

“The Mignauds don’t love us either,” she mused, “but George-Étienne’s resentment is old.”

“My talk with Marthe wasn’t very useful,” Labourière said. “I offered spots on the Forillon, but I don’t think she’ll be easy to buy off.”

“Everyone has a weakness,” Gaschel said. “Find out what theirs is.”

“The second son, Émile, isn’t rumored to be much of a friend to his father,” Tétreau said. “Bit of a drunk and drug-head.”

“Doesn’t sound like getting him on our side would do much,” Gaschel said.

“I made first contact with him. Now might be the time to try seeing what we can get from him,” Tétreau said, “while Marthe is in the depths consulting with her family.”

“I want to know where they are. Where they all are,” Gaschel said.

She gently ground the powder in the plastic bag.

“If someone is getting radioactives from another Bank, or even from our Bank, we need to know and we need to know fast,” she said. “Put planes and drones into the atmosphere. I want a real search. If we can’t figure out who’s doing it, and it puts the colonie in danger, we may need to arrest all three families and search their habitats.”