Komarr - Bujold Lois Mcmaster - Страница 32
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Eventually, he slept, about two hours; Ekaterin watched the time ooze by, black and slow as tar. I must know.
And after you know, then what? Will you deal with it later, too? She lay waiting for the dawn's light.
The light is broken, remember?
The routine of dealing with Nikolai's needs steadied her in the morning. Uncle Vorthys left very early, to catch his orbital flight.
"Will you be coming back down?" she asked him a little wanly, helping him on with his jacket in the vestibule.
"I hope I might, but I can't promise. This investigation has already gone on longer than I expected, and has taken some peculiar turns. I really have no idea how long it will take to finish up." He hesitated. "If it drags on beyond the end of the term at the District University, perhaps the Professora might come out to join me for a time. Would you like that?" Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded. "Good. Good." He seemed about to say more, but then just shrugged and smiled, and hugged her good-bye.
She managed to evade almost all contact with Tien and Vorkosigan by accompanying Nikki to school in the bubble-car, an escort he scorned, and taking the long route home. As she had hoped, the apartment was empty on her return. She washed down more painkillers with more coffee, then, with reluctant steps, entered Tien's office and sat before his comconsole. I wish I'd taken Lord Vorkosigan up on his offer to teach me how to do this. Her outrage at the mutie lord yesterday in the bubble-car now seemed to her all out of proportion. Misplaced. How much could her intimate knowledge of Tien make up for her lack of training in this sort of snooping? Not enough, she suspected, but she had to try. Get started. You are deliberately delaying. No. I am desperately delaying. She keyed on the comconsole.
Tien's financial accounts, on this his personal machine, were not locked under a code seal. Income matched his salary; outgo . . . when all the routine outgo was accounted for, the amount left over should have been a modest respectable savings. Tien did not indulge himself with unshared luxuries. But the account was almost empty. Several thousand marks had disappeared without trace, including the transfer she had made to him yesterday morning. No, wait—that transfer was still on the list, hastily entered, not erased or hidden yet. And it was a transfer, not an expenditure, to a file that had appeared nowhere else.
She followed its transfer marker to a hidden account. The comconsole produced a palm-lock form above the vid-plate. When she and Tien had first set up their accounts on Komarr, less than a year ago, they had taken prudent thought or one or the other parent being temporarily disabled; each had emergency access to the other's accounts. Had Tien set this up entirely separately, or as a daughter-cell of his larger financial program, letting the machine do the work for him? Maybe ImpSec covert ops doesn't have all the advantages, she thought grimly, and placed her right hand in the light box. If only you were willing to betray a trust, why, the most amazing range of possible actions opened up to you. So did the file. She took a deep breath, and started reading.
By far the largest portion of what was under the seal turned out to be a huge research clip-file much like her own on the subject of Vorzohn's Dystrophy. But Tien's new obsession, it appeared, was Komarran trade fleets.
Komarr's economy was founded, of course, on its worm-holes, and providing services to the trade ships of other worlds that passed through them. But once you had amassed all those profits, how to reinvest them? There were, after all, a physically limited number of wormholes in Komarr local space. So Komarr had gone on to develop its own trade fleets, going out into the wormhole nexus on long complicated circuits of months or even years, and returning, sometimes, with fabulous profits.
And sometimes not. Stories of all the best, most legendary returns were highlighted in Tien's files. The failures, admittedly fewer in number, were brushed aside. Tien was nothing if not an optimist, always. Every day was going to bring him his lucky break, the shot that would take him directly to the top with no intervening steps. As if he really believed that was how it was done.
Some of the fleets were closely held to the famous family corporations, Komarr's oligarchy, such as the Toscanes; others sold shares on the public market to any Komarran who cared to place his bet. Almost every Komarran did, at least in a small way; she'd heard one Barrayaran bureaucrat joke that it replaced the need for most other sorts of gambling in the Komarran state.
And when on Komarr, do as the Komarrans do? With dread in her heart, she switched to the financial portion of the file.
Where in God's name did Tien get a hundred thousand marks to buy fleet shares? His salary was barely five thousand marks a month. And then—having done so—why had he put all hundred thousand on the same fleet?
She turned her attention to the first question, which was at least potentially answerable with reference to facts of record, without requiring psychological theory. It took her some time to break the credit stream apart into its various sources. The partial answer was, he'd borrowed sixty thousand marks on short term at a disturbingly high interest rate, secured with his pension fund and forty thousand marks worth of fleet shares he'd bought with—what? With money that came from nowhere, apparently.
From Soudha? Was that what he had meant by a ghost employee?
Ekaterin read on. The fleet upon which Tien had placed his borrowed bet had departed with much hype and fanfare; shares had been trading on the secondary market at rising prices for weeks after it had departed Komarr. Tien had even made a multicolored graph to track his electronic gains. Then the fleet had encountered disaster: an entire ship, cargo, and crew lost hideously to a wormhole mishap. The fleet, now unable to complete many of its planned trade chains that had been based in the lost cargo, had rerouted and come home early, tail between its imaginary legs. Some fleets returned two for one to their investors, though the average was closer to ten percent; the Golden Voyage of Marat Galen in the previous century was famous for having returned a fabulous fortune of a hundred to one for every share its investors had purchased, founding at least two new oligarchic clans in the process.
Tien's fleet, however, had returned a loss of four for one.
With his twenty-five thousand marks of residue, Ekaterin's four thousand marks, his personal savings, and his meager pension fund, Tien had been placed to pay back only two-thirds of his loan, now due. Pressingly overdue, apparently, judging from the aggressively-worded dunning notices accumulating in the file. When he had cried to Soudha that he needed twenty thousand marks now, Tien had not been exaggerating. She could not help calculating how many years it would take to scrimp twenty thousand marks from her household budget.
What a nightmare. It was almost possible to feel sorry for the man.
Except for the little problem of the origin of that magical first forty thousand marks.
Ekaterin sat back and rubbed her numb face. She had a horrible feeling she could guess the hidden parts of this whole chain of reasoning. This apparently complex and deeply entrenched scam in the Terraforming Project had not, she thought, originated with Tien. All his previous dishonesties had been petty: wrong change not returned, a little padding here and there on expense reports, the usual minor erosion of character almost every adult suffered in weak moments, but not grand theft. Soudha had been here in his job for over five years. This was surely a home-grown Komarran crime. But Tien, newly made head of the Serifosa Sector, had perhaps stumbled upon it, and Soudha had bought his silence, So . . . had the previous Barrayaran Administrator whom Tien had replaced been on the take as well? A question for ImpSec, to be sure.
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