Earth Unaware (First Formic War) (47 page)

“I need to see some identification,” said the officer.

“I don’t have any. I’m a free miner.”

“Space born, eh? Let me guess, you don’t have any docking authorization, either.”

“I came here from the Kuiper Belt.”

The officer looked amused. “On a quickship? Sure you did.”

“You don’t believe me? Check the flight computer.”

The officer ignored this, typing notes onto his pad. “So no permits, no papers, no entry codes, nothing.”

“I need to speak with someone in charge.”

“You need to speak with a lawyer, space born.”

They carried him out to the rover and lifted him into the cargo trunk. Victor felt completely helpless—and to think this was only one-sixth of Earth gravity.

The officer drove him to a medical facility, where nurses put him on a stretcher and gave him IV fluids and ten different vaccinations. When they finished, an officer in a different colored uniform entered and wire-strapped Victor’s wrists to the stretcher. It wasn’t until the man started reciting a litany of legal rights that Victor realized he had been arrested.

CHAPTER 21

Imala

Imala Bootstamp wasn’t trying to get anyone fired at the Lunar Trade Department, but it sure felt good when she did. The culprit was one of the big uppity-ups, a senior auditor on the fifth floor who had been with the LTD for over thirty years. Imala, a mere junior assistant auditor with the agency, was so far down the totem pole that it took her a month to get anyone with authority to actually look at what she had found.

She had tried going to her immediate boss, a perverted idiot named Pendergrass, whose eyes dropped to her chest whenever she was forced to bring anything to his attention. Pendergrass had only told her, “Get off the warpath, Imala. Put down your little tomahawk and focus on your job. Stop following tracks you shouldn’t be following.”

Oh Pendergrass. You’re so, so clever. How witty of you to make reference to my Apache heritage.

She had thought the world had outgrown racial insults—she certainly had never heard any growing up in Arizona. But then she had never known anyone like Pendergrass, either, who called her cubicle her “wigwam” and who would always make a circle with his mouth and tap it with his fingers whenever she passed him in the break room. She could have gone to HR and filed a complaint a long time ago, but the HR bimbo assigned to their floor was actually sleeping with Pendergrass—a fact Imala found both repulsive and sadly pathetic. Besides, Imala didn’t want anyone fighting her battles for her. When she felt the need to “go on the warpath,” she’d be swinging her own tomahawk, thank you very much.

She couldn’t go to Pendergrass’s boss either. He was a pushover yes-man whose head was so far up his boss’s ass that he wore a kidney for a cap. All she’d get from him was a nice condescending lecture on the importance of following the chain of command. Then Kidney Cap would go to Pendergrass and give him an earful for not keeping his Apache on a short leash. And if that happened, Imala would have hell to pay with Pendergrass.

So she did the slightly unethical yet wholly necessary next best thing: She lied her way into the director’s office.

“Do you have an appointment to see Director Gardona?” asked the secretary, not looking up from her terminal.

“Yes,” said Imala. “Karen O’Hara,
Space Finance
magazine. Here for the feature interview.”

Imala felt ridiculous with her hair in a bun and dressed in such a fashionable jacket and slacks—which she had rented for the occasion—but she knew she needed to look the part. She wasn’t concerned about the secretary recognizing her. The agency employed hundreds of people, and all the grunts on the second floor where Imala worked never hobnobbed with anyone up here on the fifth. They didn’t even use the same entrances. It was like two neighboring countries whose borders were never crossed.

Imala had tried a week ago to set an appointment with the director as herself, but as soon as the secretary had learned that she was a junior assistant auditor, the secretary referred her to her superiors and hung up on her. Nor could Imala get an e-mail or a call through. All of the director’s messages were screened, and every attempt to contact him had been blocked. It was ridiculous. Who did the man think he was? This was the Lunar Trade Department, not the damn White House.

So here she was, doing the stupidest thing she had ever done in her life, all to get an audience with someone who might take her seriously.

“This way please,” said the secretary, leading Imala through two doors that required holoprint authorization. The secretary waved her hand through the boxy holo by the door, and the locks clicked open.

All the security made Imala nervous, and she was beginning to wonder if this was a good idea. What if the director didn’t think her information important enough to overlook her unorthodox way of getting his attention? Or what if she was wrong about the data? No, she was sure about that. The last door opened, and the secretary ushered her inside. Imala stepped through, and the secretary disappeared the way she had come.

Director Gardona was standing at his workstation moving his stylus through his holospace, zipping through documents so fast, Imala couldn’t imagine how he could possibly be reading anything. She put him in his early sixties, white haired, fit, handsome. The suit he was wearing was probably worth more than three months of Imala’s salary.

“Come in, Ms. Bootstamp,” he said. “I’m most interested to meet you.”

So he knew who she was. Imala wasn’t yet sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

He pocketed his stylus and faced her, smiling. “But tell me first, is Karen O’Hara a real journalist for
Space Finance
or did you pull that name from a hat?”

“Real, sir. In case you checked her on the nets.”

“As if I have time for such things,” he waved her to a cocoon chair, which resembled an empty sphere with the front quarter sliced off. They were great for minimal gravity, and Imala climbed inside. Gardona took the chair opposite her.

“Why did you agree to meet me, sir, if you knew who I was?”

Gardona spread his hands in an innocent gesture. “Why wouldn’t I want to meet any of my employees? And such a good one, too, I’m told.”

He was either lying or there were people watching her she didn’t know about. Pendergrass and Kidney Cap would rather yank out their fingernails than give her a positive review.

“I apologize for the silly deception, sir, but reaching you by traditional means wasn’t working.”

“I’m a busy man, Imala. My secretary protects my time.”

So he knew
how
she had tried to reach him as well. Or maybe he was simply assuming she’d gone to the secretary.

He laughed. “Disguising yourself as a journalist. That’s takes guts, Imala. Guts or stupidity, I’m not sure which.”

“Perhaps a bit of both, sir.”

“And under the guise of doing a feature interview, too.” He shook a finger at her. “Appealing to my narcissism, I see.”

“It seemed the most believable story, sir.”

“Well I’m flattered you would think me important enough to warrant a feature interview in such a reputable magazine.” He crossed his legs. “Well, you have my attention, Imala. I’m all ears.”

She got right to it. “I have evidence, sir, that Gregory Seabright, one of our senior auditors, has been ignoring and in many cases concealing false financial records from Juke Limited for the better part of twelve years.”

“I know Greg, Imala. I’ve known him since grad school. That’s a very serious accusation.”

“There’s more, sir. I also have evidence of financial payments to Mr. Seabright from a small subsidiary of Juke Limited in excess of four million credits.”

Gardona was silent a moment. He was still smiling, but there was no longer any life behind it. “If such an allegation were true, Imala, which I doubt, I can’t imagine Greg would be dumb enough to keep such payments on file or make them easily detectable. He’s one of our top auditors. He would cover his tracks.”

“Oh, he covered his tracks, sir. He covered them with so many layers it’s taken me two months to piece it together. I had to snoop and dig in places not normally accessible to me. It’s a very lengthy thread that I had to follow to connect Mr. Seabright with the payments, but if prosecutors are patient enough, I can connect the dots for them.”

“Prosecutors?”

“Obviously. Juke Limited ships have been exceeding weight limits for transshipments to Earth year after year without paying the required fees and fines. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of credits here. Juke has been paying him off to turn a blind eye and foster illegal tax and tariff practices.”

“And you can prove all this?”

She held up a data cube. “Over three thousands documents.”

“I see. And when did you research and compile all this?”

“After hours. I only stumbled on it because I was studying old files, trying to familiarize myself with some of our larger accounts.”

“This is troubling, Imala. Who else knows about this?”

“Just my immediate boss, Richard Pendergrass.”

“I see. Well I will have to look into this immediately. If this proves true, it would be devastating to the reputation of this agency. I would ask that you keep this quiet until we can conduct an internal investigation.”

He started to get up.

“One more thing, Mr. Gardona. Juke Limited is our largest account. To conceal something this big for this long is too much for one person. I can’t prove it beyond the legal definition of doubt, but I have six other names on this cube whom I suspect are aware of and participating in this practice.”

He took the cube. “I hope you’re wrong, Imala. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

She left his office, and by late afternoon of the following day word was spreading that Gregory Seabright had been terminated. Not suspended. Not given leave. Terminated.

Imala stood at her cubicle—which was smaller than most refrigerators and sometimes just as cold since it was directly below one of the AC vents—and felt better than she had in a long time. She had beaten the Man. She had taken on the giant and slung her rock and hit him dead center in the forehead. Gregory Seabright, dirty money-grubber, was down. And not just Seabright but Ukko Jukes as well, the wealthiest man in the solar system. Or, as Imala knew all too well, one of the most crooked men alive. Yes sir, not even old Ukko Jukes was safe from her justice.

She slapped her desk with the palm of her hand. Now this was auditing. If only her father could see her now. “Auditing?” he had said, when she had told him about her plans for grad school. “Auditing?” He said the word like it left a sour taste in his mouth. “That’s worse than accounting, Imala. You’re not even counting beans. You’re checking to make sure someone else counted beans. That’s the most pointless, fruitless, meaningless career anyone could possibly choose. You’re smarter than that. You can do anything. Don’t waste your life being a bean-counter checker.”

But oh how wrong Father was. Auditing was what made everything work. Without auditing, we’d live in financial barbarism. Markets would collapse. Banks would break. The whole system would crash.

But you couldn’t explain that to Father. He’d throw up his hands at talk like that. But taking a crook, putting a bad guy in prison, that Father could grasp, that was something he could wrap his head around.

Once she saved up enough to send a holo to Earth and once Lunar prosecutors got involved and the media caught wind, she could contact home and say, “See, Father? Your little girl taking on Ukko Jukes. That big enough for you?”

Pendergrass poked his head over the wall of the cubicle. “You heard about Seabright?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“You have anything to do with that?”

She shrugged.

“Come on, Imala. You told me he was duping. I didn’t think it was possible. I thought you were witch-hunting. You know, fresh out of school and ready to take on the world. All that idealistic crap. We get people like that sometimes.”

Imala said nothing.

“Guess I was wrong,” said Pendergrass. “I should’ve listened to you. My mistake.”

Imala raised an eyebrow. “Are you actually admitting you were wrong?”

“Hey, there’s a first for everything.”

He smiled, and for once he didn’t look at her chest.

“As a peace offering,” said Pendergrass, “I want to buy you lunch.”

Ah, thought Imala. So that’s where this was going.

He must have sensed what she was thinking. “It’s not a date, Imala. Hanixa is meeting us at the restaurant. It would be the three of us.”

Nothing could be less appetizing than to share a table with Pendergrass and his little HR hussy, but Imala wasn’t about to reject an offered olive branch. That would only make things worse. So she grabbed her coat and followed him outside.

The black car waiting at the curb was the first red flag. Pendergrass opened the back passenger door, still as friendly as ever, and Imala was climbing inside even though warning bells were going off in her head.

When the car door closed without Pendergrass joining her, Imala realized what a mistake she had made. A man was sitting across from her, his face hidden in shadow. Imala didn’t need to see his features to know who he was.

“Hello, Imala. My name is Ukko Jukes.”

The car pulled away from the curb and onto the track. Wherever they were going, Ukko had already programmed the destination into the system. Imala considered trying for the door handle and taking her chances jumping from the car. But they accelerated suddenly, and she figured he would probably have the doors locked anyway.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

He surprised her by laughing, a big belly laugh that filled the car. “You don’t mince words, do you, Imala. Rest easy, my dear. I’m not the villain you think I am.”

“Then who’s the villain? Gregory Seabright?”

Ukko frowned. “Director Gardona contacted me this morning and informed me of the investigation. I was as disappointed and shocked as he was. Furious, really. If this proves true, it means there are people in my company who think they can steal from me.”