"So. Everything's goin't tickety-tickety, like a wee sewin't machine. Worries me, ‘cause we're noo i' a sewin't machine.
"An‘ noo Ah'm off? D' either ae y‘ wish't' kiss me ‘bye? Ah brusht m' fangs nae more'nt two epochs gone."
Instead, Sten bought him a farewell drink. Or two. Cind found time for one herself.
He loudly mourned, over the stregg, that he had now discovered the problems of being a figurehead. He never got to have any fun.
Cind patted his cheek.
"It's Uke the old song goes," she said. " ‘You just stand there looking cute/And when something moves you shoot."
Just stand there, Sten thought.
Like hell I will.
Ida, too, was disobeying Proper High Level Leadership Rule Three, SubParagraph D: Keep a Lotta Grunts Between You And Where The Bullet Goes Bang. Sten had determined to keep the Rom in the background as long as possible, and use them as deep-cover recon and for surreptitious transport of small attack forces. Eventually they would be blown—but Sten hoped to get the maximum utilization from the traders before they were exposed as the Emperor's enemies.
That, of course, meant that Ida herself shouldn't even consider going operational.
Ida had come up with a Grand Scheme, one that Sten had heartily approved of. She hadn't bored him with details such as who was the field agent who would plant this "bomb."
Ida planned to plant the Fiendish Thingie herself. Romantics, or those who had never spent any time around Kaldersash, might have thought she was providing a noble example by leading from the front or, possibly, indulging in some homesickness over the old glory days of Mantis.
Of course, the reality was that Ida had seen vast opportunities for the initiating agent to make Noble Profit, a reality Jon Wild also sensed instantly.
And so a grossly overweight and overbearing woman, accompanied by her mousy husband, arrived on the trading world of Giro. It appeared that he had the money, but she had the clout. But since they arrived with several millions in hard credits, E-transmitted one day after their arrival, no one cared about their personal arrangements.
Civilizations, human or otherwise, tend to accept certain fictions. One of the most convenient is that securities—stocks, bonds, and the like—actually have some relationship to the actual prosperity of the government/corporation they're issued by. The Bourse, Wall Street, Al-Manamah, the Drks'l System, all have worked about the same over the centuries.
Ida had figured out a long time before that the two best rules of security trading are: (1) Avoid the perceived wisdom, and (2) The stock is not the company. Her non-Aristotelian approach to the market as pari-mutuel system had made her several squillion credits.
One of the many odd facts she had collected in her periodic economic looting/maiming expeditions was that Giro was one of the worlds specializing in securities/finance where the entire system's main computers were housed.
Ostensibly, however, Ida's—and oh, yes, her husband's— reason for being on Giro, instead of using one of the brokerage houses on her—unnamed—home world to trade was that she liked to be in the center of things. That also wasn't particularly interesting to anyone.
She and Wild made their grand entrance one morning, when the trading firm of Chinmil, Bosky, Trout & Grossfreund opened. Ida had chosen the firm carefully, not for its massive size and far-scattered branch offices, but because CBT&G were known for their "liberal" interpretations of the Empire's security laws. Ida knew that a white-collar crook is one of the easiest to hoodwink. He's not only convinced he's the first to come up with whatever scam he's running, but is convinced that everyone else, from the coppers to the marks, are utter fools.
Ida and Wild announced their intent of increasing and broadening their holdings beyond their home system, and mentioned the huge amount they were prepared to play with, and were rapidly passed through the hands of a receptionist to a junior trader to a senior trader to a partner, Sr. Bosky himself.
Ida pretended to listen to his advice, accessed a central terminal, and began buying. And selling.
Talking in a steady stream as she did:
"Sr. Bosky, now, if I do as you advise, and go long on TransMig, keep what I have in Cibinium, consider this new issue of Trelawny... Jonathan, stop fidgeting, we know what we're doing... ah, getting out of Soward five percent municipals... see that quote... I could have told them... good advice, Sr. Bosky, as I was saying that I consider Trelawny, although the prospectus hardly seemed to be complete—-"
She had completely lost Bosky in one-half an E-day.
Ida sneered inwardly—she figured anyone as crooked as Chinmil et al. were, most especially a partner, would have to be able to see which walnut Ida's pea was under for a day or so. But she continued her prattle as money went here, there, and everywhere.
Bosky was tempted to tell this annoying woman to go away—but he noticed that within two trading days, Ida had doubled her investment.
He started listening. Hard. And spending his own, and the firm's, money, chasing Ida's investments.
Of course, what Ida was really doing with her capital was very different than what Bosky thought, but it would take at least one cycle for the confusion to subside and Bosky to figure out just how many megacredits he had lost.
He also failed to notice that Wild, in the chatter, had been unobtrusively feeding a program into the firm's main computer. Stage One. It took one E-week to get the program exactly positioned.
That night, Stage Two was mounted. Ida and Wild, well after midnight, sbd out of their hotel suite to a completely clean and anonymous gravsled Wild had procured and lifted into the night.
The next day, Ida got the obligatory terrible message from home. A cheap, hack, dumb device that'd get her busted out of Basic Extraction Tactics 101 at any spy academy. But businesspeople, in spite of loud boastings that they study history/ espionage/military strategy, in fact do nothing more than memo-rize enough catchphrases to convince their fellow drinkers they're Tigers.
Ida promised Bosky they would return shortly.
And they departed on a great luxury liner, a liner they immediately left at the first planetfall, where they picked up one of Wild's ships that had been prepositioned for them. Then they disappeared completely. Even the ship they had used for their escape was completely wiped and given new registry, from engines to nav equipment to hull numbers. That was but one of the cultural specialties of the Rom.
Even before they had gotten off the liner, Stage Three, a completely automatic program previously fed into one of CBT&G's smallest branch offices half a galaxy away, activated.
All of Ida's investments were liquidated immediately into hard currency, and the credits E-moved. Later investigators managed to follow the money through three laundries before the trail vanished.
Both Ida and Wild, already rich enough to consider hiring Croesus as a flunky, had trebled their personal fortunes. They had made so much, in fact, that Ida had felt almost guilty, and made Sten and Kilgour an additional bundle, just for recreational purposes. "How clottin‘ nice it is," Ida observed, "to be able to do well by doing good, or whichever way the grammarians say I should put it."
Stage Two went off, predawn, just as the market opened for the next trading "day."