Far from the Spaceports

Part 1 - Arrival (fourth section)

Back in the Finsbury Circus office, I had chosen a chilli chai, waited for it to froth up in the mug, and joined Elias in the pod. It was very nearly soundproof already, but he carefully opaqued the door, and activated the noise canceller. It would take Slate and I about quarter of an hour to infiltrate it, if we were determined and in a hurry. Twice that time if we wanted not to set off all kinds of alarms. Plenty long enough for Elias to brief me, even if the bad guys knew to start right away.

There was a timepiece on the wall with two sets of digits, one showing actual London time, and the other a countdown until the risk level of being hacked was too high. Elias flicked a finger at it to set the digits moving.

"Nice holiday?"

I sipped at the chai.

"Bit short."

"Sorry about that."

He wasn't, not really, but the time in lieu would be deducted from his out-of-budget allowance, so I suppose there was at least a little regret there. He sniffed at the mu tea without drinking, and looked deeply satisfied.

"Well, you see this is an EA. They've already flagged three OITs. We can't ignore that, and I need a Dust coder who also knows about high volatility exchange derivatives."

I hazarded a guess.

"Someone's scamming with another Cross Volga Swoption? But we already know how to handle those."

"It's not a Cross Volga, not this time. We don't know what it is, not exactly. But it's starting to hit several of the outstations in the asteroid belt. A number of the exchange houses in those locations are reporting irregularities, nearly every week. But not consistently, and we can't see the pattern. Whoever it is, they're not in the least bothered about mixing the game up. And there's collateral fallout on private business as well. Some big losses among them. Normally we'd not be so worried about that, but it's the SMEs which are most closely tied into the SIG infrastructure which are worst affected."

He paused for dramatic effect, sniffed his tea again, looked pointedly at the timepiece showing how long we'd had so far, and waited. I thought about it some more.

"Is there a pattern to the shorts?"

"Yes, there is."

He swirled credentials onto the wall screen. It dissolved away the ECRB logo to show instead a top-down view of the asteroid belt, unevenly coloured. There was a deep red area to the left, fading quickly through orange to yellow and green. There were a couple of other red patches, but nothing so striking as the first one. I looked at it for a few seconds. It seemed perfectly graduated at first glance, but as you studied it, little irregularities appeared here and there, anomalies in the superficial smoothness. I looked at him.

"This is hooked up live to the Pyramid?"

When he nodded, I tapped my lapel.

"Hello Khufu. Please overlay the current position of the various planets, and any significant asteroid settlements."

Little white blobs appeared roughly where you might expect them. Ceres was well away from the centre of the red area, about a radian anticlockwise. Mars was almost opposite Ceres, as well as a long way in-system. Jupiter and a whole shoal of moons were almost directly out into the cold from that red epicentre.

"Khufu, what's the shorting pattern for the Jovians?"

Nothing happened. I looked at Elias.

"It's alright, Khufu, show him on my authority. Two minutes only, no external resync."

"Your default permission override has been logged, Elias."

Rather improbably, Khufu had a deep and melodious female voice. She sounded just how I imagined Nefertiti would have spoken, and quite unlike a fourth dynasty male pharaoh.