Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network by E. Foner (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📗

“Why do I have to read it when you just told me the whole thing?”

“The real question is how this is going to affect the election,” Phil said slowly. “It won’t have much impact on the older Guild members, but if the majority of young traders with mortgages have been experimenting with the new platform, they’re going to be angry.”

“But they won’t be angry at Larry,” Georgia protested.

“They might feel that he represents the establishment that let them down. We’ll have to see what the opposition candidates do today—whether they try to connect Advantage with the Conference of Sovereign Human Communities. Even a rumor that humans on a CoSHC world were behind the fraud could be enough to sink us.”

“But what would the motive be?” Georgia demanded. “Independent traders are a lifeline for human communities living in space or on alien worlds.”

“I think that—” Phil’s words were cut off by a ‘whomp’ sound from somewhere off to the right, and everybody turned in time to see a column of fire ascending to the sky.

Larry knocked over his own coffee jumping up from the breakfast table. “Stay here, Georgia. I’ll find out what it is and come back as soon as I can.”

“Working press,” she retorted, brandishing her credentials at him as she scrambled to get her legs out from under the picnic table. “I’m going with you.”

 “That was no propane grill going up,” Phil called after them. “More likely a fuel pack implosion or an incendiary device.”

Before Larry and Georgia reached the site of the explosion, a Vergallian emergency response floater was already overhead, spraying some kind of foam on the remains of a small ship. Larry spotted John standing with Semmi at the edge of the campsite and changed course to meet him. John pointed at his ear to let them know he was talking over his implant, and then a look of relief flooded his face.

“She wasn’t on the ship,” he said, lowering his hand.

“Who?” Larry asked.

“Ellen. She’s still on Flower.”

“This was her ship?” Georgia gaped at the foam-covered wreck. “That’s horrible. I met her on Flower and we’re working together on a follow-up story to her Advantage report. I can message her through my tab to tell her what happened, though I don’t know how soon she’ll receive it.”

“That won’t be necessary,” John said. “I just spoke to her.”

“Your implant can reach into orbit?”

“It only has to reach my ship over there,” he explained, pointing off to the side. “I have an emergency Stryxnet relay, one of the perks of my job with EarthCent Intelligence. Ellen took the news in stride, but she said something about just getting out of surgery, so she’s probably loaded with painkillers.”

“Does this sort of thing often happen at Rendezvous?” Georgia asked.

“First time in my life,” Larry told her. “Somebody must not have been happy with that Advantage article, though it’s hard to see what they gain from fire-bombing Ellen’s ship.”

“It tells me that they’re afraid of something that hasn’t been published yet,” John said, running his eyes over the remains of the two-man trader. “This was a professional job. Burning out a Sharf ship on the ground without even scorching its neighbors means a plasma incendiary device with active containment, if not something even more advanced than that.”

“Do you mean it wasn’t humans?” Georgia asked.

“The technology definitely wasn’t human, but the operator could have been. I’m going to talk to the surrounding ship owners and see if any of them had exterior cameras recording, but I doubt I’ll learn anything. Whoever did this was professional enough not to get caught.”

“I’m going to write a dispatch for the paper,” Georgia said. “I’ll start interviewing the people here to ask if there are any witnesses. Can you help, Larry?”

“Sure. If I find somebody who saw anything, I’ll point them your way.”

By the time Georgia and John finished interviewing everybody who was willing to talk, it was almost time for lunch. The job of keeping Semmi amused had fallen to Larry, who discovered that the gryphon was perfectly happy playing fetch, as long as the human did the fetching. As they left the area of the burned-out ship, they found that barriers had been set up to channel everybody to a single exit point. A polite Vergallian soldier asked if they were together and then escorted them into a temporary privacy booth. A uniformed officer sat behind a table next to an impossibly beautiful female who was obviously from the Vergallian upper caste.

“Names?” the officer demanded.

“Larry, no last name.”

“Georgia Hunt. Galactic Free Press.”

“John, and I’m with EarthCent Intelligence. You can check my programmable cred.”

The Vergallian looked at the gryphon expectantly.

“That’s Semmi, she’s with me,” John added. “A Huktra friend left her in my care.”

The gryphon snorted at this characterization of the situation, and the upper caste Vergallian who was there to serve as a truthsayer smiled.

“I’ll make this as brief as possible,” the officer said. “You aren’t suspects, but many of the people we’ve interviewed describe being questioned by a Human intelligence officer or a Galactic Free Press reporter. Did you learn anything that will help us with our investigation?”

“Nobody saw or heard anything of significance,” John said. “There must be a connection with the article Ellen just published, but you already know that.”

“Somebody who was outside with their kids when the ship went up told me that they didn’t even feel the heat, just a sudden change in the air pressure,” Georgia contributed. “I’ve already dictated the story for my paper, though I doubt I’ll get more than a couple of lines below the images I took with my implant. Can I get your names for the story?”

The Vergallians exchanged looks, and the officer said, “Not at this time. Did you have a relation to the owner of