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They said their goodbyes and comm’d off.
As she mulled Selene’s advice, Harlow ground a fresh batch of kahawa beans and made a brew. She took one cup to Koro, who sat motionless in Kage’s lobby.
He took it wordlessly. She smiled, feeling somewhat victorious in her recent efforts to grind him down to accepting kahawa and occasionally a delicious plate of food.
She then wandered onto the terrace with her steaming cup. She sat on the edge of a raised herb garden and lost herself in the myriad stars and comets in the dark skies above.
If Kage indeed was this multifaceted man with a keen intuition, she thought, surely he would come round soon. She was pushing his patience envelope, but he’d promised her he was committed to their journey. So she hoped he was åOK taking the dark turns with her along their path to a potentially beautiful love.
Kage
‘Why in Eden’s hell does anything I build always get smashed within a few months of putting it up? First The Osirian, now this?’
Zane gazed in disgust at the mess of the destroyed room at 517 that had once been Harlow’s living space.
‘Lunar curse, brother,’ Xion teased.
Zane gave his brother a baleful glare while Xion threw back a wide grin.
‘So where we at?’ Kainan asked the assembled Riders. Thekhosiof the Sable Riders had personally flown in from Dunia for this meet. He was pissed off and motivated to shut down whoever had tried this nonsense.
‘Let’s start with this footage,’ Riv said.
He fired up his comm tab, and it projected a holo onto the only wall in the room that had not been ravaged in the attack.
The footage had been taken one early morning. It showed hundreds of workers filing into a warehouse on the edge of Enia city. In the distance, four squat, beige smokestacks belching clouds of black smoke. Below, a flyer landed in the parking lot. Three men exited, swaggering past lines of staffers while throwing fistfuls of schills at the desperately flailing workers.
‘What are we looking at?’
‘Footage from the drones Kage and I left at the Rinnax Holdings HQ,’ Riv said. ‘The mass of people you see are mostly illegal Allorian workers, shipped to Rhesus by the Rinnax brothers. They work in their components factory. They’re not paid well, and many of them are starving. Last I heard, the workers were meeting to decide whether to strike.’
‘The Rinnax brothers took over the components factory from their father a few years back,’ Kage added. ‘Since then, they’ve also been building interests in orhial deposits, media outlets, computer companies, and arms supplies.’
Riv took over. ‘The database we tapped revealed that the factory has signed deals to provide secret components to a group called The Klastsch, their biggest customer. At the same time, they’ve cut corners viciously. Health insurance and pensions have been slashed for their workers. Broken machines are patched up with old parts from other machines. Safety regulations are regularly flouted.’
‘Those workers are the most vulnerable casualties of complex schemes engineered on pieces of paper,’ Kage rasped, annoyance tainting his voice. ‘They’ve tried to strike, riot, and have been arrested in the hundreds. They’re so many laws the Rinnax brothers are contravening that it’s not even funny.’
Kainan paced for a few moments, thinking. ‘Here’s what I think I should do. I’ll approach the Prime Minister of Rhesia, Feldman Terion, about the matter. Give him the footage of the factory, plus evidence of their corruption and cutting of corners. I can also supply him with the evidence from Ruben’s hideaway here, plus images of his break-in here, discreetly. Knowing him and his squeaky-clean reputation, he’ll look into it as a matter of diplomatic urgency. But that’s not enough. The wheels of bureaucratic justice are notoriously slow, especially in Rhesia. So what else are we doing to nab these guys?’
Zane looked up from a destroyed Saclian antique wood coffee table he’d been studying morosely. ‘I’ve managed to get substantial shares in Rinnax Holdings. Still working on it. But if I make the right moves, we’ll own their shit in less than two months. All of it.’
Kage jerked his head. ‘Speaking of their shit. Riv and I went through a detailed manifest of the weapons cache and traced it to a pirate outfit that deals in weapon supplies. With some persuasion, I got them to reveal that Rinnax Holdings is arming itself. Bigtime. At the behest of our unknown friends in the Rhesian Royal House. Let me be clear it’s not the Rhesian government but the Royals behind this.’
‘The King?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Kainan countered. ‘My suspicions, especially after Occaro’s stunt trying to kill Auban’s son, is that someone close to the King may be working against him. He has his suspicions but can’t do anything about it without proof.’
‘Seems these Royals, whoever they are, want to take back governing power from the King and Prime Minister,’ Riv said. We stumbled on a link to a dark web forum in the database we hacked. It shows that somehow The Klastsch has been funnelling payments into the Rhesians’ Royal accounts. From what we can tell, they’re an obscure group focused on unifying a few of the planets in Pegasi against us - because they believe we’re becoming too powerful in the System. So they want to bring us down, something the King and the Rhesian Prime Minister Feldman Terion oppose.’
‘Damn,’ Kainan ground out. ‘You sure about this?’
‘I’ll send you the comms and chats. See for yourself.’
‘Who are they, these Klastsch members?’ Kainan clipped. ‘I want names, faces, identikits.’
‘Mirage and I are on it. But it’s all anonymous, with unidentified user names and accounts. So we’re scouring the data to see whether we can backtrack it to actual faces and people.’
‘This is bigger than we thought,’ Zane said quietly.
