First of the insert scenes. Right after Maico's visit to Ben. (Re-ordering the travel plans). Courtesy of Mal...
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Quote:The Supers had been a bust.________________________________
It wasn’t that they wouldn’t tell her anything, it was that they didn’t tell her anything she didn’t know already. Maico found a quiet bench in Schuster Creek park to rifle through it all, not far from Korolev. The water in the creek babbled suggestions at her, but they weren’t anything she could use.
“Well. I was chancing my arm anyway while waiting for the shuttle,” she told herself. It was either that or sit around doing nothing but wait.
The bench creaked as someone sat beside her. She felt a shadow fall across her. She started to speak, but her guest held up their hand,This was someone who, for the time being, preferred to be an anonymous source. She made certain the video feed from her camera was off. Audio, kept recording.
"So, I hear you're chasing hardsuits?" The question was light, but there was an edge behind it that made Maico's skin crawl. She'd drawn attention to herself, never a good thing when chasing ghosts.
"Yes," she confirmed. "Know anything about them?" It was a joke, technically. Still, she was hoping for an answer.
"A little," Tina said. "Most of which I can't exactly tell a reporter, mind." Maico's heart sank at the revelation of another dead end, and almost missed is as the Soviet went on. "But I can tell you a little about their target-du-jour."
"The UBA?" This was something, maybe. "What about them?"
"They're crooked, for one thing."
Maico gave her companion a skeptical glance. "That's a pretty big thing to just say flat out."
"Oh, they didn't start out crooked, and most of the rank and file don't know anything about it. But they're crooked, starting from Jimmy Mason and going all the way down through the board of directors into the upper management. The problem is," she added with a frustrated huff, "we *know* they're crooked, but we can't *prove* they're crooked. So far they've been too good at covering their tracks."
"Maybe you should start from the beginning."
"Right, okay. UBA started as a mining co-op, right after the end of the war. By that point Greenwood pretty much owned all the trade between Earth and the Belt. Most of the indies were looking at either slowly going broke or throwing in with Greenwood. UBA offered a third option."
"Join together and combine their efforts?"
"Exactly. So they started the co-op, and united they stood. It was a bulwark against Marsden's monopoly, and it had a lot of support from other small groups. The first couple of years went well enough. They were run by a board of directors with representatives from each mine, with the mines themselves being run by worker's councils-"
Maico smiled wryly. "Something about that sounds familiar," she noted.
"I couldn't possibly comment," Tina replied loftily. "In any case, as UBA grew and prospered it started to draw professional management talent, a lot of it from Earth. The board nominated one of these new managers, guy by the name of Jakob Eisen, as the official chief operating officer. He did a pretty good job of it by all accounts. Something happened next, none of our sources know what exactly, but about six months after Eisen took over as COO there was a huge shakeup on the board. The old council structure was gone and replaced with a more corporate chain of command. A lot of UBA mines protested, and Eisen was supposedly planning on going back to the status quo when his shuttlecraft got shot down by pirates on a routine trip."
"Suspicious."
"Very. The board elected one James Mason to replace Eisen as COO. And that's when all the shit started."
"You think Mason arranged for Eisen's shuttle to be shot down?"
"I didn't say that."
"But of course. So. What sort of person is Mason?"
"You ever see 'Wall Street?' Jimmy Mason's an alpha sociopath of the highest order; all he cares about is amassing as much money and power as he possibly can. And he's smart, really smart. We're a hundred percent sure that Mason or one of his hench-lizards has been hiring mercenaries to attack independent settlements in order to scare them into the UBA, but he's managed to cover his tracks so well that we couldn't take it to a tribunal."
"Sounds nasty."
"He is. Unofficially, nobody on SMOFcon would bat an eyelid if he were to, ah, vanish." Tina stressed that last word just a little, riding a smirking chuckle. It sounded like a joke.
"Vanish?" Maico repeated, her mind working through each and every connotation of that word.
Tina smiled at her. "In iocis veritas. Thing is, no matter how satisfying it'd be to geek Mason, he's just part of the problem. There's enough people like Mason infesting UBA now that even if we took him out there'd be another one to take the reins and we'd be back at square one. They can't be stopped without starting a dangerous ball rolling, so we need a different way to deal with the issue."
"And that other way would be the Knight Sabers?"
"I couldn't say." And that was confirmation of something. Maico just wished she knew what it was.
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