Talk of tariffs and taxes, two subjects JR had never found particularly engaging until he saw the looks on the faces around him, senior captains of ships larger than Belize looking as if they’d swallowed something sour.
Belize , a small, old ship, incapable of doing much but Mariner to Pell, Pell to Viking and back again, saw its economics affected if the agreement of Mariner and Pell pulled Viking into line with that agreement. Viking’s charges, JR was learning, were a matter of complaint among Alliance merchanters—while Union willingly paid the higher fees, for reasons Alliance merchanters saw as simply a pressure against them, encouraging the stations to excess.
A junior supplying water and running courier, as he’d been asked to do, he and Bucklin, could learn a great deal of tensions he’d known existed, but which he’d never mapped—the narrow gap between a station’s charges for supplying a port and a ship’s costs of operation, a slim gap in which profit existed for the smaller carriers.
But there were the windfall items: the few ships that had the power to make the runs to Earth, in particular, had enormous opportunity… and to his stunned surprise, the Old Man put that extreme profit up for trade as well.
A cartel, skimming off that profit, would assure the survival of the marginal ships, the old, the outmoded. An entire system of trade, giving critical breaks to the smaller ships.
“It won’t work,” Bucklin had said in the rest break after they’d first heard it. “We’ll take less for our goods?”
“If the little ships fail,” he’d said to Bucklin, the argument he’d heard from the Old Man, himself, “Union’s going to move in.”
Bucklin thought about that in long silence.
When that argument was advanced to them, the other captains had much the same reaction—and came to much the same conclusion.
Then it seemed the major obstacle would be Union.
But, JR reasoned for himself, and saw it borne out in arguments he was hearing, Union, growing among stars they had only vague reports of, responded to the pirate threat with a fear out of all proportion to the size of the Mazianni Fleet.
Probably it had to do with the fact that Union had been consistently outpiloted, outgunned, and outflanked.
Possibly it even had to do with fear of a third human establishment in space, an admittedly unhappy situation they’d all talked about aboard, but only in the small hours of the watches and not in public. Union set great importance on planning the human future, and a third human power arising from a base somewhere outside their knowledge might not be a comfortable thought for them.
“What we have,” the Old Man said now in his argument to the gathering of captains and Mariner Station administration, “is a shadow route and a shadow trade that’s running clear from Earth, dealing in exotics like whiskey, woods, that sort of thing, biologicals funneled on the short routes out of Sol… one ship we did catch, Flare , a Sol-based merchanter doing short-haul trade—not necessarily with Mazian, but for Mazian.”
“Mazian’s getting the profit, you mean.” That was Walt Frazier of Lily Maid , a small hauler, an old acquaintance of Madison’s and the Old Man, by what JR guessed.
“There’s a well-developed shadow trade at Earth,” the Old Man said. “As you may know. Mars is a rich market. Luxury goods get off Earth, they go toward Mars. A certain amount doesn’t get there… written up as breakage during lift, just plain left off the manifests. And the mini-network leaks a certain amount via short-haul suppliers right on the docks of Sol One… but there’s a fairly brazen trade—or there’s been a fairly brazen trade—siphoning off goods to ships the like of Flare and several others we’ve been watching. They’ve been short-hopping their illicits out just to the edge of the system where others are picking it up and trading it on. We think certain interests in the Earth Company are supporting Mazian by running cargo for him, and that there’s a link between thefts and smuggling in Sol One district—not war materieclass="underline" luxury goods. Paintings. Foodstuffs. It’s high money. Money does buy Mazian what he wants.”
Among the captains, among four, there were a few exchanged glances and slow nods, sharp interest from the others.
“And Flare is no longer operating,” Joshua asked.
“Not Flare , but a ship named Jubal is. Was when we left Sol. Operating under Mallory’s close curiosity. We want to know where the goods are coming from, but we also have an interest in tracing the route through the black market, and figuring how it translates into supplies. We find it ironical that the primary market for illicit luxuries is Cyteen. And the second-largest is Pell. Every credit spent in the black market has a good chance of coming back as ammunition and supply for the Fleet. It’s picked up, run through the Hinder Stars, comes into this reach not necessarily at Mariner: more likely at Voyager, where security is less exacting, and then it travels on to Esperance, where it connects to Cyteen. But those are the heavy items. Big-time smuggling. In the same way, and adding up, money out of the whole shadow market is drifting into Mazian’s hands through the honest merchanters. People just like you and me. It’s a situation that can collapse stations. Collapse our markets. And have Mazian and Union going at it hammer and tongs again across Alliance routes. All of us will be fighting, if that happens, either that, or we’ll be hauling for Union trying to beat Mazian, and hoping to hell we don’t get hit by raiders the first voyage and the second and the third… That’s the situation we came from, and if we don’t get fairness out of the stations regarding our needs, and if we don’t get compliance out of our own brothers and sisters of the merchant Alliance to stop the trade that’s feeding Mazian, we’ll see the bad days back again and hell staring us in the face. You remember the feeling. You’ve been out in the dark, at some jump-point with a hostile on the scan and with no support in ten lightyears. Don’t leave Mallory in that condition. We’re decent people. Let’s stick to principles, here. Let’s realize how much the shadow-market does amount to, and who’s profiting.”
God, the Old Man could rivet the rest of them. And he could use words like principles , because he had them and acted by them. Nobody moved. JR thought, This is how it was all those years ago. This is how he got them to unite in the action that started the War.
“So what percentage are we talking about?” Lily Maid asked, to the point.
The Mariner stationmaster thought he was going to answer. The Old Man said:
“Pell’s talking ten.”
There was a slow intake of breath.
“No higher,” Lily Maid said, and Genevieve agreed.
“Are we talking about ten across the board?” the station-master wanted to know. “The luxury goods—”
“The point is,” the Old Man said, “voluntary compliance. We voluntarily confess the true manifest. If we install incentives to hedge the truth, if we need a rulebook to tell what’s right and wrong, there won’t be universal compliance. Flat ten.”
There were long sighs, frowns, shiftings of position, literal and maybe figurative. A junior witness to a major turn in human history didn’t dare take so much as a deep breath.