Marc then calls a friend of his, a professor of tax
law at the UoM. He asks him how a company gets that status.
He says he's come across one.
"Are you sure?" asks the professor.
Marc assures him it is true. "Why do you ask?"
"Well, in theory if a company exists only for public
service... they'd have to prove it to everybody, of course, that
they are not for profit, that nobody gets anything beyond their working
expenses. It's a completely ridiculous set of applications to file."
"OK. So let's say they filed them 200 years
ago. Who would they have filed them with?"
"That depends where they are."
"Five Sisters?"
"Hmm... The status is issued on the sector
level, and it's a formality to extend it beyond the sector level to the
Imperium. Generally a company would have to have very limited operations
in order to prove anything."
"So if you have a business established as non-profit
in one sector, then you can as a formality extend it to other sectors."
"Yes, but it's more than non-profit. It actually
has to prove public service."
The Marquis asks his friend for references about
the status.
Checking those references, he finds that it's not
a simple task. The laws are scattered around, and it looks very odd
-- there are some contradictions. Further research proves too complicated
for him.
Next he checks historical records. For 50
years before and after 200 years ago, he looks for companies granted that
status. At the time, the Spinward Marches were administered by the
Duke of Regina. At that time, the Duke did indeed grant that status
to the WDC, and that is the only company that was granted that status in
that period.
He then searches 25 years either side of that date,
and looks for anything about the company. All he finds is the company
registration, and the record of it being granted the public service status.
The Marquis decides to put his crew onto the problem.
He asks Edward "Shark" Teeth to look into anything he can find about the
WDC. Ed of course wants to know why, and on being told that they
put 2 billion credits a year into the basement of the DoHF, he goes to
his sources and asks them what black operations are being covered by the
Wonstar Development Corporation.
Then he asks Robert to find out if they make any
other donations. That is rather an intractable task, but he does
what he can. The postal records don't really exist for long enough,
and are just too big to handle. Still, for the last month he finds
that no deliveries were recorded at the box. He finds that the post
office box is paid through the year 1140; no record exists of when it was
originally paid, or by whom.
The next information the Marquis wants is anything
Robert can find out about the Naval
base in the Wonstar
system. The information he finds from Naval records here state that
the subsector is under Naval administration, and the base is mainly the
administration center. There is a small system squadron in place,
as would be expected at a base. It's a small squadron, the biggest
ship being a destroyer; mostly it's destroyer escorts and system
defense boats.
The Marquis muses aloud to that the people who are
paying his bills to search and find psionics are based in a subsector controlled
by the Navy because of the Psionic
Suppressions... The company was established in 920, about a hundred
years after the Imperium took over the subsector. So it could be
the Navy that's doing it, or it could be the perfect place to run an underground
Psionics Institute,
right under the Navy's nose.
Marquis Marc does have a valid excuse to head out
that way for research -- some rumors that he'd discounted as being implausible
-- and of course he could just be doing a survey of a system or two just
to see what's out there.
It's a good enough reason, anyway. He announces
to the crew that they will leave in two days. It's a fast turn-around,
but he promises that they can all have a two month vacation when they get
back.
Mich Saginaw scans the papers available, and there's nothing new on jump drives.
Helia Sarina plans a route to Wonstar. Mich requests that they visit Spirelle on the way, as he has some investments there he wants to check.
Shark reports back to the Marquis: the special company status has to be awarded, and his friends don't know anything about it.
Robert reiterates to Marc that he knows where the
language information is, but he can't get to it. The location of
the information is actually owned by Count Walter von Hayden. The
Marquis has never heard of him, but Robert quickly searches the Who's Who
resources. His landholdings are in Core, near Capital,
and he's a minor stockholder in Imperiallines.
There is no other information about him available. Surprisingly it's
a much shorter bio than Marquis Marc's, although maybe it's not so surprising
given his Starburst for Extreme Heroism and his status as Professor of
the University of Mora.
Marc says that they should not try to get at the
information now, but consider it during their trip. Robert gets as
much detail about the situation -- security and monitoring -- as he can,
so he can work on it later.
Marc's finances are still fine; a package containing his latest grant has appeared in return for his last report.
The Marquis continues his research, looking through his books for anything on psionics in Five Sisters or the Sword Worlds.
Ed wants to work on his gravcraft skill. Unfortunately no-one is qualified to teach him. His second choice is Sensor Ops, and the ship has an adequate training program he can use.
Mich has collected lots of data from the jump. He is pleased to notice that the actual behavior matches his model extremely well, and also that the drives were noticeably smoother. Helia noticed the smoothness too; she'd really like it if Mich could squeeze the time down to five days, though.
Helia lands the ship beside the refueling pond. They start turnaround operations right away; this is to be a quick trip.
Over the course of the day, it gets more unbalanced
-- one is falling off dramatically, while one of the others is pushing
to keep up. Now that's odd, thinks Mich, all the others should be
pushing to keep up, not just one. He switches out the failing one,
and switches in a brand new unit.
Fire alarms and the air pressure alarms for engineering
go off. On the bridge, Helia asks Mich if he's OK down there, but
he replies that it's all under control.
Mich tumbles across engineering and into his vaccsuit.
Fortunately at this point the bright light is being filtered through the
faceshield... the unit that was supplying extra power is glowing, and the
one next to it -- the one switched out -- seems to be gathering some frost.
Mich quickly switches the whole array out and engages
the zuchai crystals
to take over. It's fortunate that he had them already powered up
as a precaution in case he needed to switch in jump. The transfer
is smooth and successful.
The glowing unit is now brighter, and the ball of
frost on the other one is getting larger. Clearly one is dumping
energy into the other, which in turn is absorbing energy. Both units
are totally disconnected now, but they're still continuing to misbehave.
Mich decides what he needs is a heat pipe to connect
the two, to get the heat from one unit to the other. He runs to the
engineering shop and hurriedly finds what he needs, and returns to the
problem area. He finds that the hot unit is now glowing white.
This is nothing like anything Mich has experienced
before. He gets closer to the units, so he can set up the heat pipe
between them. His suit tells him it's a little too hot to get that
close.
The air pressure in engineering is still dropping. Marquis Marc is quite concerned and calls Mich, but he replies that things are under control. Marc suggests that everyone on board should get into vaccsuits just in case the problem spreads beyond engineering.
Mich grabs a big wrench and lowers the heat pipe
into place. One end melts away while he holds it in place.
He contemplates what do to -- there's no fuel going to either unit, and
there are no connections to them at all.
He drops the heat pipe and sets up an electrical
connection between the two units. It blows out immediately from the
massive current.
Suddenly Mich is flung backwards and hits the ground.
Where the hot unit was is now a point source glowing with the unmistakable
aura of cherenkov radiation.
He stands up, a bit the worse for wear, and examines
the situation. He has a glowing point source about a meter off the
floor, and alongside it the atmosphere is condensing on the cold unit.
The difference between ambient temperature and the heat source is much
higher than the difference between ambient and the cold unit.
The temperature is starting to drop off from the
hot unit -- but with a corresponding increase in hard radiation.
The remaining atmosphere is condensing on the cold unit.
The fire alarm stops. Helia asks Mich if that
means things are better.
"Yeah, they're a little better," he says.
He assures the bridge crew that he has everything under control.
The hard radiation is Mich's biggest concern.
He quickly works on shielding to protect the rest of the ship. This
is a "standard" emergency procedure for engineering, and he has it rigged
up in about ten minutes. He encloses the radiation source in shielding,
and despite taking a fairly heavy dose himself, the ship and the rest of
the crew is now safe.
Mich feels quite sick. He now addresses the
problem of the atmosphere, condensing on the cold unit which is essentially
at absolute zero. He builds an airtight container around that unit,
double walled to insulate it, and strong enough to contain the pressure
if the frozen atmosphere decided to become gas again.
After an hour, Mich is done. All the other
units are off and normal. He repressurizes the engineering section.
Everything seems to be OK. He reports back to the bridge.
"We had some problem with the power systems," he
says, "That overheated and supercooled. It supercooled freezing the
atmosphere out, and overheated to..."
"I've never heard of zuchai crystals doing that,"
the Marquis interrupts.
"I didn't say zuchai crystals, I said the power
system."
"What power systems were we using?"
"Fusion reactor, zuchai crystals, and matter-antimatter
generators."
"They warned me... they told me not to do this,"
mutters Marc.
Mich continues, "But all of the matter-antimatter
generators are off-line, so we're OK now." He assures the Marquis
that his ship is just fine. He says he'll keep the units off-line
until he figures out what happened.
Marc asks if he can inspect the damage. He
asks if Mich is hurt, and the engineer replies that he wants to talk to
the doctor. Marc calls the doctor, Grand Admiral Baron Bridgehead,
to meet him in engineering.
The doctor is quite concerned about Mich. He's suffering from both thermal and radiation burns, and extensive bruising. He escorts him to sick bay immediately and puts him under treatment.
Marquis Marc observes two new boxes in engineering.
Mich explains that one is all radiation shielding, because the failure
of that unit started emitting radiation in the thermal band, and then progressed
to harder radiation. The other one cooled and removed the air.
So they have one box that is emitting energy and radiation, and another
that's absorbing energy. The air froze on the cold one. The
rest of engineering is undamaged.
Helia says she'll watch engineering from the bridge
while Mich is in the sick bay. She has no intention of getting near
the new boxes, despite being assured that radiation levels are normal there.
The crew settles down to wait for the Third Eye
to come out of jump...