Counterweight by A. G. Claymore

backed in with
a tray in his hands. He slowly walked to the desk and set out the three drinks
that Cal had ordered. He looked across to G’Mal, who looked pointedly down at
the drinks before directing an incredulous look at him. The poor fellow
shrugged helplessly, nodded at the two invaders and then scuttled out, closing
the door quietly.
    “The investment, sonny!” Cal exclaimed in perfect Oaxian.
Though Dheema had been the official language on Oaxes and their colony, Tauhento,
for over a thousand years, the smugglers of both worlds still used the old
language to help obscure their activities.
    “Investment?” he inquired in Oaxian.
    “I’ll just take another look at the stockpile.” Cal headed
for the side door, hoping it wasn’t just a closet or washroom.
    The young man jumped out of his seat in alarm. “Wait, you
can’t just walk in there! You might be dealing with my father but I have no
clue who you are.” He caught Cal by the arm just as he reached the door.
    He was so focused on Cal that he failed to notice ‘McFreely’
slipping behind his desk. The ‘sticky’ was a short-range data chip with a
cloning program. If you could get close enough to your target’s data node, you
could make a copy of everything he had.
    If you could get close enough.
    The Ufangian was leaning right up against it. The closer you
got, the faster the data transferred.
    “Hey!” G’Mal turned Cal from the door. “McFreely, what are
you doing?”
    “Nice picture,” Cal’s accomplice muttered, pretending to
stare at the details of the image on the wall behind the desk. “Not the first Foxlight, is it?”
    “Yes, it is the first,” he waved the Ufangian back
out to the middle of the office. “Look, gentlemen, if you have a deal, it’s
with my father. I don’t know anything about it so we’re not going to accomplish
anything here today. Why don’t you come back in a few days when the old man
returns?” He held out his hand, offering the old Imperial version of a
handshake.
    Cal was impressed with the young Tauhentan. He didn’t hide
behind polite phrasing; he came right to the point, once he managed to regain
his footing. ‘Ro’j’ looked at ‘McFreely’ who gave a barely perceptible nod.
“Fair enough, lad.” He waved his hand over G’Mal’s. “We’ll be seeing you.”
    Outside, Cal took the sticky and they split up. Cal headed
for one of the connectors that linked the two sides of the city, tossing his
hat over the railing as he activated his implant. There were literally
thousands of convenient locations where he could view the files on the sticky
but all of them were watched by a bank of quantum-core computers that sat
brooding over all intra-city messages and data access.
    His implant, however, was completely independent of the city
systems and it was shielded from scans. Using it for short-range links, such as
the sticky, was more-or-less safe, but a long-range message could be picked up
by the random scanners.
    He powered up the Hothmoen discriminator, developed by the
Yo’Thage brothers on Weirfall a century and a half ago. The discriminator
allowed perception at the quantum level. Linking it to a Midgaard implant
allowed faster-than-light communication by tunneling a path through countless
micro-wormholes.
    Cal focused his attention on the device in his tunic pocket,
picking up the ready signal almost immediately. He came to a stop at a
semicircular rest area that jutted out into the main atrium of the city.
    Leaning on the damp railing, he began to work his way
through the files. The manifests for the Foxlight II were particularly
illuminating. Each voyage resulted in a cargo transfer straight through the
orbital counterweight platform and onto another freighter. There was always a
sub-note indicating a large quantity of water coming down on the elevator each
time the ship visited orbit.
    It made sense. If G’Maj had found a new source of spicewood,
he’d want to bring enough down here to