Acts of Conscience Read Free Page B

from Sol.
    Move on. News shows. Union bullshit. Legislative bullshit. Commercial bullshit. Corporate bullshit. A voiceover was saying, “...therefore, representatives of Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary were permitted to land their experimental spacecraft, Torus X-1 , at a private spaceport servicing the Board of Trade Regency Building in Kiev, where a special plenipotentiary hearing was called into session, expected to meet shortly with members of this so-called Kentish embassy...”
    Long shot across a half-empty plain dotted with old ruins, undemolished buildings from a few centuries back, when Earth’s population was topping out close to forty billion, buildings left standing, I suppose, because of their “historical significance.”
    Odd-looking disk-shaped spacecraft, falling out of the pale blue sky, surrounded by a nimbus of opalescent light, decelerating hard, just before it hit the ground, settling in a cloud of dust.
    Close up shot. Hatch opening in the saucer’s ventral surface, metallic ramp extruding to the ground, men and women walking down, looking around. Some of them dressed in pretty much standard solar system fashions, others wearing rather baggy, colorful outfits. Costumes I’d seen before. Similar to, though not identical with, the sort of clothing you saw in newsreels from Kent, the big, old colony on Alpha Centauri A4.
    Cold lump forming in the pit of my stomach. Once upon a time I bought a hundred-twenty shares of Berens-Vataro stock for my little portfolio, money I’ve been piddling with on and off ever since my income grew big enough that I had money to waste. The last time I’d checked, months ago, I think, the B-VEI stock was worth just shy of two hundred livres, a little more than twice what I’d paid for it.
    It’d been a very nice little spec-tech company, headquartered on Callisto, a startup venture whose prospectus discussed raising capital for the investigation of technologies leading to fully inertialess spacecraft. Included were a couple of research papers, published stuff of course, no trade secrets, detailing the work of the company’s founders, physicists Roald Berens and Ntanë Vataro.
    Hell. ERSIE has had the market in space drives sewed up for close to five hundred years. Still, I knew enough about the matter, working with the technology every day, to know they had a shot at it. A hundred livres? That’s just the size of the pay voucher ERSIE downloads into my account every month. Just about a tenth of my portfolio, these days.
    Then the announcer said, “Spokesmen for the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise state categorically that faster-than-light travel is technically impossible, violating physical laws established more than six hundred years ago. ERSIE representatives on the Board of Trade Regents have called for a full investigation of what they suggest is a ‘cruel hoax,’ possibly intended to divert investors from the failure of Berens-Vataro researchers to develop a commercially viable non-CESD space drive.”
    Not much more detail in the news. Shots of the little ship, under guard at the BTR landing field outside Kiev. The fact that the flight crew of Torus X-1 had been placed under arrest, along with the supposed embassy... Then a shot of baffled-looking members of the regular Kentish trade legation to Earth showing up at the prison, identifying the men and women in colorful, baggy costumes as actual, prominent Kentish citizens, including an infuriated man who was supposed to be the Kentish minister for interstellar trade.
    I took direct control of the monitor and hustled off to the stock trading nexus, quickly looked up my B-VEI accounts. I don’t know what the hell I was expecting. Maybe they’d be zeroed out already. Or maybe, with enough suckers falling for the hoax, which appeared to be very well planned indeed, I might be able to scoop a few thousand livres out of the mess and...
    My, my, what a busy little bee that stock-trading AI had