Page 26 of Spark Transform

“Me, either.” Hujuru chuckled. “I wouldn’t take your job if they gave me the gross profits from an entire frontier planet.”

Jane laughed. “It’ll get better once the project is complete.” She pushed her chair back and stood. Hujuru took the hint and stood as well.

After Hujuru left, Jane sealed the room and walked toward her private lift. So many chaotic threads to pull together for her plan to work. Her head throbbed like an untuned flux engine.

As she entered the capsule, a sudden epiphany struck her. Media companies would be the perfect hiding place for the Ayorinn cancer.

On the surface, they competed for scoops and subscribers, but what if Mabingion’s oldest companies were part of a secret conspiracy? CGC foundation law and later regulations gave all media companies permanent protected status. An inordinate number of them claimed Ridderth as home.

Plus, media companies knew better than anyone how to get the public’s attention. They could seed the galactic net with the destructive memes, then pretend to get new releases after everyone else did.

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Media company revenue peaked when new quatrains appeared. Even more so when new riots followed. Ridderth was a prime example of that. Galactic-scale riots would mean galactic-scale profits.

Jane’s previously disjointed conjectures finally coalesced into a stunning conclusion. Hujuru was wrong about the Legacy being a scam, but she was right that someone was making money on it.

She paced back and forth in the lift cage, fired up by the ripple effect through her plans. Tomorrow, she’d look for what could go wrong. Tonight, she’d think about success.

As the lift doors irised open to reveal her dark, quiet office, she sent an order to the coordinated raid planners to get her a list of names, locations, and employees of the top media companies on Mabingion that were more than twenty years old, and any media company that was in Ridderth for the original Legacy riots.

She massaged the screaming muscles at the base of her skull. If it turned out the media companies weren’t the source of the Ayorinn cancer, it would still be a net win. They were certainly guilty of keeping it alive and profiting from the trouble they stirred up by broadcasting the quatrains far and wide.

Either way, she’d be doing the city a public service. Ridderth had suffered enough from would-be messiahs, charlatans, and self-aggrandizing crusaders.

Just like the CPS High Marshal said, the CPS had no higher calling than ensuring the long-term galactic peace.

Chapter 11

Planet: Mabingion • GDAT 3242.194

Arco raised her voice to be heard over the rented flitter’s engine. “We’re confirmed and expected.” The flitter’s windows showed a graceful cityscape all around them.

She tapped her new earwire to quiet it, then folded her tablet and maneuvered it through the seat’s safety web into the inner chest pocket of her coat. Brenner’s newest equipment request had been better earwires with state-of-the-art security features.

Arco had introduced him to the new team members as her personal security chief. He hadn’t blinked an eye, but she later realized she should have asked him first. After that, she’d increased his contract pay, which she now realized she hadn’t told him about, either. She tanked at being a boss.

He’d appointed himself pilot for the flight. Now he used the flitter’s console to query the Arazak traffic control system. They would be on time if the system’s estimate for their arrival was accurate.

N’Dwama, one of her three new security guards, rotated the realtime holodisplay of traffic and obstacles. Her skin was darker and cooler-toned than Brenner’s, and colorful gemstone threading kept her silvery hair close to her scalp. She had no family, and said she’d moved to Ridderth a year ago for personal reasons. Arco sensed some heartache there.

According to her records, she was a low-level telekinetic and mid-level sifter with twenty years of corporate security experience for a private company on Mabingion’s smaller continent to the northeast. For fun, she flew in planetary races. “Scans are reporting swarms of uncontrolled traffic. Too slow for speeders, too erratic for autofreight. Students on airsleds, probably.”

Brenner nodded. Arco found herself watching him for clues as to what he was thinking. Each time he initiated a private conversation with her, she expected him to resign. He hadn’t done it yet, but it had only been four days since his unasked-for promotion.

She was afraid to ask if he was staying on the job, in case he took it the wrong way. She valued him immensely.

Maybe she was warped — probably was, in fact — but her trust in him had grown each time she’d visited him at the rehab center. Davidro’s journals said he killed easily and with pleasure, but Davidro lied a lot, especially about himself. Brenner could have destroyed her or any of the medics with a flick of talent. That he hadn’t, even when the pain was unbearable, spoke volumes to her.

Tōn Ko sat to her left, angled so he could stretch out his long legs. He was a young, blazingly quick ramper and shielder. Green was his favorite color, reflected in the gold-green tint of his skin and his leaf-colored and styled hair. He also favored tight clothes that accentuated his trim and toned physique, suggesting he liked the attention. His accent hinted at Mandarin as his first language. He’d said he grew up in a wealthy canton of Nyar Solla, a huge equatorial megacity on the other side of the planet. Arco gathered his conservative family had cut him off entirely when he refused to renounce his minder talents. She cynically wondered if they’d also asked him to renounce being left-handed or mechanically inclined.

Arco’s third new guard had taken an earlier commercial flight. She was already at their CPS Institute neighborhood destination, scouting ahead. Tōn Ko stayed in live contact with her.

Arco was thrilled to finally have enough security staff so she could safely leave the city of Ridderth. Her finder sense had been nagging her about a story idea the entire time she’d been grounded. It had been sparked by a tip from one of her fans about newly uncovered CPS medical data.

Anonymously-sourced, leaked data was highly suspect, especially if it involved profit or served an agenda. The minder health data definitely fit the latter category. In the beginning, the CPS had believably repudiated it all as a criminal counterfeit designed to impede Minder Corps effectiveness.

That changed when dogged journalists and data divers throughout the galaxy had begun tracking down obscure but publicly available government medical statistics and CPS reports that corroborated the leaked data, at least in broad trends. The CPS couldn’t very well claim that data was counterfeit, too, unless they’d been faking their own internal and official reports for the last half century.

Lately, the CPS’s responses to requests for comments ranged from rehearsed sidesteps to threats to charge the questioner with galactic sedition.