Ephialtes (Ephialtes Trilogy Book 1) (43 page)

The deadline
passed.  The monies were transferred.  It was the final bow tying up
Martian independence.  The USAN’s financial authorities working in tandem
with National Cybersecurity had tried to freeze Martian assets.  Kostovich
was ahead of them every step of the way, not least because he knew exactly what
they were doing.  Through his backdoor he had daily briefings on exactly
what they were trying to do and how they were trying to do it.  Even
without that information Kostovich was always going to beat them.

He
circumvented the USAN’s measures in the middle of the night.  Shareholders
of Venkdt Corporation woke up to find themselves not just divested of a
proportional amount of their shares but appropriately compensated with cash in
their bank accounts.  Literally overnight, without a shot being fired or a
brick being thrown, in fact with no physical clash whatsoever, Venkdt Mars Corp
had wrested itself free from the parent company.  Now Mars was truly
independent.

All the
companies that recently formed on Mars were Martian.  Venkdt Mars Corp was
now fully Martian. 
Hjälp
Teknik
remained a public company traded on stock exchanges of Earth, but accounted for
only a small portion of the Martian economy.  Charles Venkdt had often
said he welcomed foreign investment in the new Mars and there it was already.

In a matter
of months Mars had gone from being a colonial outpost with a ramshackle
garrison, half-heartedly enforcing laws from a hundred and forty million
miles away, to a new nation, a new planet, with its own fully independent
economy and military.  It had its own locally elected government and a
president with a huge mandate from the Martian people.  Charles Venkdt,
like many of his fellow countrymen, believed there was a golden future ahead of
them.  They were sitting on huge resources which they could extract and
sell to their solar neighbour.  Not only that but they were right next
door to the asteroid belt.  The asteroid belt was immensely rich with
resources which the Martians could exploit for themselves and trade with
others.  They were right at the frontier of human experience, forging
ahead into the solar system, a few short years from conquering the asteroid
belt.  Who knew where they could go from there?  With a big enough
population on Mars and with the wealth they could extract from the natural
resources around them maybe even terraforming would become a possibility. 
The great dry oceans of Mars might once again heave with water.  Maybe one
day Martian children would play in the open air.  It seemed the
possibilities were endless.  The Martian future was bright indeed.

Charles
Venkdt liked to read.  He had read many books about the founding of the
USAN.  About how people had crossed oceans, spending long months in
relatively unsophisticated craft then landing in a hostile environment. 
How they had overcome many trials and false starts in order to gain a foothold
in an unforgiving new world.  Those first settlers would hardly believe
what the world they were founding would go on to become.  Venkdt saw the
early Martians in the same light.  Similarly, they had travelled immense
distances in barely suitable craft and had faced extreme difficulties in
surviving in a hostile and unfamiliar world.  They too had
triumphed.  They had adapted, using their technological knowledge and
sheer will to prevail over the environment.  He expected that they in
their turn were building a future unimaginable to them.  Technologies
would develop allowing further and faster travel.  Mankind would expand
beyond the solar system, again facing challenges of distance and environment. 
Through enduring hardship and by adapting and overcoming all challenges it
would prevail once more.

So the cycle
would repeat.

Where might
it end?  Maybe never.  Maybe the only limit was the edge of the
universe itself.

Elspeth had
planned a special stream celebrating the final plank of Martian independence
being laid in place.  She had expected to be covering parties, like those
for the election.  Maybe she would do some
vox
pops and some pieces to camera with madly celebrating Martians behind
her.  But the transfer of the monies passed largely unremarked.  To
the bulk of Martians independence had already arrived.  They had voted for
it and they had received it.  They had voted for their president, Charles
Venkdt.  Martian independence was old news.  Some money got moved
around in some bank accounts somewhere.  So what?

Elspeth still
did her piece.  Ratings were better now, following the interviews with
Bobby Karjalainen and President Venkdt.  But there was not much she could
do to make a change in balance sheets seem exciting.  Elections,
competitions such as they were, with winners and losers and all the rest of it,
made for good entertainment.  Numbers moving around?  Less so.

She tried to
jazz up the story with some graphics.  She depicted great streams of money
shooting through space from Mars to Earth, with the little flag flying over
Mars in her graphic changing colour.  It was pretty tame stuff, and was
not popular.

Elspeth
wondered what she might cover next.  The election and Martian independence
had been exciting but it was pretty much all over now.  She knew the story
of the money transfers was dull but she was still surprised at how low her
stream had rated on the aggregators.  A few months earlier Martian independence
seemed radical and exciting.  Now it was just a fact of life, no more
remarkable than the sun rising in the morning.

She had
always wanted to be a correspondent covering political and business stories and
she knew those were not the most glamorous or popular, but after the heady days
of her two big interviews she had come to like the idea of being
prominent.  She had an ‘in’ with the president now; that might be
useful.  She knew that the Martian economy would undergo many changes in
the coming years.  It was exciting to her.  Her challenge was to make
it exciting to the audience, and she was already discovering how difficult it
was to enthuse them.

Venkdt had
just stepped out of the shower.  He decided to log into his aggregator to
catch the news as he dressed.  Since the interview he had added Elspeth as
one of his favourites, and he noticed her report on the transfer of monies to
Earth.  He selected it and screened it on the wall of his bedroom. 
Visually the report was not particularly interesting but Venkdt listened as he
selected clothes from his wardrobe and rubbed himself down with a towel.

In a way he
was glad that there hadn’t been much excitement about the news.  It was
right because this was just a formal detail and something that people didn’t
really need to trouble themselves with.  He knew that when people got
excited they were volatile.  The time for that had passed.

Once he was
dressed Venkdt moved to his breakfast room.  A drone bought him coffee,
toast and jam.  As he spread jam on the toast he wondered about what the
day might hold for him.  He had meetings with the senate - they
were still thrashing out amendments to the constitution.  He wanted to
catch up with Kostovich at some point to thank him for all his help with the
money transfers and the armaments.  When he finished breakfast he decided
to call Christina.

“Hi, Dad,”
she said.

“Hey, kid,”
said Venkdt, “did you catch any of the bulletins this morning?”

“I didn’t. 
Is something up?”

“No, no,
they’re just talking about the money.  It all went through, Kostovich got
them all paid off.”

“That’s good,
Dad.”

“I think so,”
said Venkdt.  “So that’s it now, all done.  Venkdt no longer owns
Venkdt Mars and the constitution - which is pretty good anyway,
thanks for that - is shaping up nicely, too.  We’re
kicking a few more things around later on.  So it’s all done now, the
major stuff.  We are an independent, self-determining economy.”

“Congratulations,
Dad, I’m glad it all worked out for you.”

“Not just for
me, for us.  All of us Martians.  This is just the very beginning,
for all of us.”

“Okay, Dad,”
said Christina, with the slightest hint of weariness in her voice. 
“Listen, I’m going to be late for work, I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

“Sure, kid,”
said Venkdt, and Christina was gone.

The younger
generation, he thought, just took all this for granted.  They didn’t
appreciate that everything they had, everything their world was built upon, had
been put there by hard work by those who had gone before.  The systems
that maintained their world were not part of natural law, but were governed by
the laws of man.  Without the supremacy of law, with all held equally
before it, the system would come crashing down and the world would revert to a
feudal state.

Before he
arranged for his car to pick him up he called his PA and asked her to set a
meeting with Kostovich for later that afternoon.

It was never
good to be called urgently to the president’s office.  Farrell felt an odd
sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he tried to rack his brains for any
lapses or failures his department may have made.  He knew that Mars was a
top priority at the moment and he also knew that
Venkdt’s
deadline for the transfers had passed overnight.  Immediately after taking
the call he contacted his most trusted deputies and got them to prepare reports
on what had happened.  Not only did he need paperwork that covered his
ass, he needed it to look like it hadn’t been quickly created for that specific
purpose.

National
Cybersecurity had been tasked with freezing Martian assets.  Obviously,
they had failed.  Farrell kept running through his mind how and when had
they been asked to do that.  How specifically had the task been
framed?  How often had the department of foreign affairs requested reports
to be made to them?  And wasn’t defence supposed to be involved too? 
Maybe some of the blame should be on them.  He had an underling looking
into all these questions but they were against the clock.  It would only
take him minutes to get to the New White House.  The reports could be sent
through to his comdev so they had to be concise, and he had to be able to
internalise them before he met with the president.

There was a
second task he needed to tackle too; what to do next?  He had another
hastily assembled team on this.  The horse had already bolted but maybe he
could distract attention from that by concentrating on what their options
were.  It seemed to him that they were quite limited.  The Martians
now owned most of the infrastructure on Mars and seemed to be doing well
politically, too.  Maybe he could play the legality card?  What about
collecting all the money that had been transferred and depositing it in a
central place?  Was there
maybe
some way to declare
it illegal and confiscate it?  It seemed unlikely.  While it wasn’t
legal to buy something without the would-be vendor’s consent, it equally
was not illegal to give someone money for nothing.  From a very strict
legal point of view the shareholders still held valid shares and had merely
been given an amount more than equal to those shares by someone with whom they
had not agreed to do business.  Maybe there was some way to just let them
keep the money
and
the shares as a big screw you to Charles Venkdt?

At the New
White House he made his way through security and up to the president’s
office.  On entering he found that Senator Peter Brennan and Audrey
Andrews were already there.  Farrell made his way to the sofas.  “I’m
sorry I’m late,” he said.

“As far as
I’m concerned, these people just got free money.  It doesn’t change a
thing, legally,” said Brennan.

“Not the
point,” said Cortes.  “Think about how it looks.  He would make us
look like the bad guys, taking money for nothing, and him getting nothing in
return.”

Brennan shook
his head.  “If some crank was to give away free money that’s down to
him.  Nothing we can do about it.  I say we hold firm.  Nothing
has changed.”

Cortes was
clearly annoyed.  “What has changed is this; we look like fools, incompetent,
impotent fools.  We said we were going to freeze their assets.  What
happened to that?”

Farrell
thought that getting in early and controlling the conversation would be a good
strategy, rather than hiding from the wrath of the president.  “If I could
just cut in here, sir,” he said.  “Cybersecurity is looking into that
right now.  It appears the Martians used some extremely sophisticated and
hitherto unseen techniques to get those monies transferred across.  It
really is quite remarkable.”

“Quite remarkable,”
echoed Cortes.  “We’re the most powerful nation to have ever
existed.  Don’t we have software engineers capable of doing remarkable
things?”

“Of course,
Mr President.  Perhaps I didn’t convey the extreme level sophistry that
was required for this operation.  It’s something quite unprecedented.”