"But it's a whole planet," Lawrence insisted. "It must be profitable."
"It is, but only within its own star system. Suppose they produce a memory chip with a density equal to anything on Earth: they still have to ship it across fifteen light-years to sell it. While any Earth factory producing the same kind of chip has only got a couple of thousand kilometers to reach its consumer population, and that's by train or bulk cargo ship. Which transport method is always going to be more expensive?"
"Okay, so Kinabica should produce something unique. That's how real trade works, an exchange of goods between supplier and consumer on both sides."
"That's the theory, sure. But what can Kinabica produce that Earth can't? Even if they got lucky and designed a neurotronic pearl way ahead of anything on Earth, it would only take a couple of months for any of our companies to retro-engineer it. At our current level of manufacturing technology, the only production that makes sense is local production. Starflight is just so goddamn expensive."
"Then why are we doing this?"
"Because asset realization is the one thing that can justify interstellar flight. On Earth, the concept is plain digital accounting, swapping figures around in spreadsheets. There's very little actual money involved. Z-B accepted Kaba's negative equity loading to help with its own starship operation funding problem; the two complement each other perfectly, provided you have the balls to see it through. That's why we're out here in a tin can flying faster than a speeding photon, to turn all that nice corporate financial theory into dirty physical practice. Z-B was in almost the same boat as Kaba was when it came to financing our starflight division; they'd laid out a trillion-dollar expenditure over the last couple of centuries and have precious little on the balance sheet to show for it, except for fifty multibillion-dollar starships with nowhere to go. Except now we have Kinabica's debt on our books, we can legitimately employ our own starships to collect some equity. As we've essentially written off the planet's founding investment debt, all we need is the products from their factories to sell on Earth. That way, the production costs are simply cut out of the equation, so now all the money realized by the sales of Kinabica's high-tech goodies goes directly into maintaining Z-B's starships, the strategic security division, and servicing the equity debt. If the accountants do their sums right, we also come out with a profit."
"Sounds like piracy to me," Lawrence said.
Ntoko laughed at the youth's surprise. "You got it, my man."
Platoon 435NK9 was scheduled to land on Floyd, a large moon orbiting Kinabica. While the rest of the Third Fleet platoons would be trying to keep a lid on Kinabica's resentful and resourceful population, they would be intimidating the three thousand inhabitants of Manhattan City.
Floyd was just large enough to hold on to an atmosphere, a thin argon-methane envelope that occasionally snowed ammonia crystals during midnight on the darkside when the temperature became seriously chilly. There were no seas or even lakes; its surface was covered with a spongy dull rouge vegetation, like a lichen with dendrite fronds. The claggy stuff covered every square centimeter of the moon, from the top of its few sagging mountain ranges to the bottom of crater basins. Not even boulders or cliffs remained free: its grip was pervasive and total. The locals called it Wellsweed, after the avaricious Martian weed in The War of the Worlds.
From the platoon's landing vehicle it looked as if they were gliding over an ocean of thick liquid, with strange crumpled wave patterns suspended in time, casting long, low shadows. They were having to use heavily modified Terran lunar cargo landers to get down to the ground. The vehicles were normally a simple cylindrical pressurized cabin, with rocket engines, tanks, sensor wands, thermal panels and cargo pods clustered around it in an almost random pattern, while three metal spider legs were flung wide underneath to absorb the impact of touchdown. Now the whole clumsy edifice had been encased in a lenticular composite fuselage designed to protect the vulnerable bulky core from the meager atmosphere during descent and deceleration. It was the closest the human race had ever come to building a flying saucer, though it certainly lacked the smooth elegance normally associated with the concept.
The sun had just risen above the low hills behind Manhattan City, beginning its seventy-five-hour traverse of the sky, when they wobbled in over the spaceport. Various strobe lights and guidance instruments ringed the patch of blasted rock that served the city (all currently dark and inactive). Noxious yellow flame belched out of dark holes in the vehicle's fuselage. Legs unfolded with labored jerky motions, allowing them to settle to the ground with alarming creaking sounds and the muted roar of the rocket jets drumming against the badly stained fuselage.
A second, then a third vehicle from the Third Fleet swooped in gracelessly and touched down beside them. Nothing marked them out as interlopers more than the local ground-to-orbit shuttle craft that were parked along the far side of the spaceport, silver-white spire rocketships standing vertically on curving scimitar fins, their pedigree taken direct from the dreams of the 1950s.
The platoon disembarked, edging clumsily down an aluminum ladder welded to one of the landing legs. On the ground, Lawrence's muscle skeleton AS struggled to compensate for the low gravity, restraining every movement. They jostled, bounced and slithered their way toward the main airlock of Manhattan City. Bulky impact armor worn over the muscle skeleton made it look as if they'd sealed themselves in puffball spacesuits to cover the short distance.
The smaller one-person airlocks only just allowed them to pass through.
It was the combination of Floyd's minerals and the odd biochemistry that Wellsweed employed that had justified the construction of Manhattan City. Essentially it was nothing more than a dormitory town for the refineries and processing plants that produced complex organic molecules that were used by Kinabica's medical and chemical industries—high-value, low-mass products, perfect for Z-B to reclaim and transport back to Earth.
Once the platoons were inside Manhattan, the mission proceeded along more standard lines. The commanding officer delivered his polite ultimatum to the city's administrator, who immediately agreed to all the demands. Technical support teams came in and started going through the inventory and refinery specifications.
There were plenty of suitable products that could be shipped back up to the starship orbiting Floyd. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of anything stored at Manhattan; batches were usually delivered straight down to Kinabica. For some inexplicable reason all Manhattan City's industrial facilities had been shut down five hours after the Third Fleet had emerged from compression.
Platoons were dispatched with Z-B technicians to "assist" city personnel in restarting the production lines with minimum delay.