RAYTECH — OLYMPUS CAMPUS, MARS

POV: Eupprio, Malgeir (Executive)

Eupprio and Fleguipu looked at the shuttle bay external doors with anxiety as the siren light next to it flashed a menacing red. The shrill wail of an alarm pierced the air, slowly getting louder.

“What’s that—”

“Airlock,” Aida answered casually. “We’re just waiting for it to pressurize outside.”

Eupprio’s brows furrowed in confusion. “Pressurize? Isn’t this an inhabited planet?”

“Yeah, no breathable atmosphere for us outside though.”

“Will we need to put on suits?”

“Nah, Olympus is domed once we go underground. Only the launch and landing pads in the spaceport are outside,” Aida said, nodding towards the exterior cameras. They displayed the shuttle’s further descent into the landing pad, gradually unveiling an expansive underground chamber.

“Domed?”

“Yeah, like they’ve got a big artificial dome of air… You guys don’t have domed habitats?”

“We have infrastructure in space… but why go through the expense of building a colony on a non-atmospheric planet?”

“There is atmosphere here; it’s just too thin to breathe. If you go outside without a helmet, you’ll lose consciousness in thirty seconds.”

“So why build a colony here? And a whole city too!” Eupprio asked, voice tinged with bewilderment.

“You have to remember: we don’t have dozens of systems like you,” Aida explained. “We’ve got a single habitable planet in between the billions of people in our species. Everyone else gets to live with recycled air and water.”

“That sounds… dreadful,” Fleguipu sniffed, her nose wrinkling slightly.

“It’s not too bad. I lived on one station or another in the Red Zone for a few years. You get used to it. Mars, though, this is actually prime real estate.”

“Not Terra?” Eupprio questioned. “Surely that’s your most habitable planet.”

“Terra is the most habitable,” Aida conceded. “But not the richest. Think about it: it’s expensive to climb out of Mother Terra’s gravity well. So who can afford to come here? Only the wealthiest Terrans or those with the most desirable skills. And Mars just happens to be the furthest you can go without really worrying about security like you would on Ganymede, Titan, or any of the Jovian or Saturnian moons. The shipyard workers on Ceres get paid a lot too, but that’s new money; Mars is where the old money goes. For that reason, Olympus has the highest real estate prices in Sol other than a few small patches of Luna, and Olympus University is the most prestigious school in the Republic.”

“I see,” Eupprio nodded, the gesture more an acknowledgement of the unintuitive Terran logic than true comprehension. “Is that why we are meeting this Martina Wright here? She is rich?”

Aida nodded in confirmation. “Yup. Her company Raytech is, at least. Largest defense contractor in the Republic. They build everything from warships and luxury cruise liners to small arms and computer tablets.”

“That makes sense.”

“Aren’t you in that business too? Most of the alien clients we’ve shuttled so far are executives for companies building some Malgeir-Terran ship integration or brainiacs who know a lot about science stuff. No offense, but judging by your name and demeanor, you seem a lot more like the former than the latter.”

“None taken,” Eupprio said, smiling. “We were actually mostly in the finances business, but we’re making a pivot to move into defense as well recently.”

“Ah, smelling the credits from the war?” Aida matched her smile cynically. “I don’t blame you.”

“Defense is not in our company’s genetics, but we acquired a major radar manufacturer to get caught up. And we have… certain advantages.”

“Coy too, huh? Alright, keep your secrets,” Aida remarked, just as the siren lights ceased their dancing and the alarm fell silent. “Ah, looks like it’s pressurized. We are good to go. Next stop, Raytech campus. It’s beautiful. There’s this line of implanted cherry trees in front, you’ll see…”

----------------------------------------

POV: Martina Wright, Terran (Executive)

Martina’s office shimmered in the soft glow of its ambient lighting.

She smiled as the duo of aliens entered her office, mustering all her decades of experience in decorum to refrain from treating them in her head as anything— anyone other than regular new clients.

The silver furred one, the leader apparently, walked up to her, reached out her paw, and gave her a perfectly serviceable handshake: firm and brief. She spoke in fluent English through her translator, “Hello, Martina. I am Eupprio. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

Eupprio, CEO of Eupprio Tech, her implant reminded her. Age 29. Silver fur likely dyed or genetically modified. Estimated 1.45 meters, 15 Martian kilograms.

“Welcome to Mars, Eupprio and Fleguipu,” she declared. “I will be your host while you are in Sol… if there’s anything about your stay here that you are dissatisfied about, please let me know.”

Eupprio raised her snout, looking out her window at the sprawling Raytech campus beneath them. “Everything has been ideal so far. The beauty of your campus is unparalleled. I have never seen anything quite like it, especially built on a non-habitable planet.”

There are no known Malgeir colonies on non-habitable planets, so don’t get too—

“Thank you, Eupprio. Please, take a seat,” she gestured towards the twin couches in her office. “I’ve had one of these ordered, tailored to your… ergonomic specifications.”

Eupprio and Fleguipu settled onto the couches, the former letting out a low, satisfied rumble at the comfort. “Much better than a Navy shuttle jump seat, that’s for sure.”

You should ask her what’s wrong with our SC-30 shuttle seat—

Martina chuckled, easing herself into her chair with a practiced grace. “Actually, we make those shuttle seats too. The discomfort is a… compromise for other features the Navy requires, though we are now experimenting with Malgeir variants that may be slightly more comfortable for someone with your physique. Anyway, please, tell me… how was your trip here? Any trouble on the way?”

“Oh, not much,” Eupprio replied with a dismissive flick of her ear. “Just a mild piracy scare near the Saturn Red Zone.”

“Ah, yes, we get a few of those. I’ll make sure your shuttle takes a detour far away from it on your way out, even if it—” Martina closely observed the aliens’ faces with her limited knowledge of Malgeir body language.

Eupprio shook her ears dismissively. “No, that’s fine. We enjoyed the view, and I’m confident in your people’s skills.”

Martina nodded, in a gesture of mutual respect. “As we are confident in yours.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“We did see something on our way up to your office though,” Eupprio commented, fishing for information. “There was a large hole in the ground in your campus. It seemed like an active excavation—”

“Ah yes. That’s a new underground building site for Project Panoptes… Actually, it is tangentially related to your sensor upgrade project.”

“Panoptes? I’m unfamiliar with the word…”

“It’s an ancient Terran word, meaning all-seeing eyes,” Martina replied with casual pride. “How much do you know about our ships’ situational awareness systems?”

“Not much, just that it’s more advanced than ours.”

Martina nodded. “Every warship, Terran or Malgeir, carries a combination of sensors: proximity, visual, infrared, thermal, radar, gravidar, et cetera. Each of them gets fed into the ship’s computers, which fuses the information it gets from each of them into a singular picture available for its commanders. For detecting most ships, this sensor fusion task is trivial. But against ships designed for low observability, it becomes a much more complex problem. There is way more ambiguity and you need to combine data from multiple sources for better detection: a smudge on a long-distance telescope, a radar ping from a patrol boat, slightly elevated telemetry from a listening satellite, all of it comes together to give us a better picture of the battlefield of the future.”

Eupprio’s expression tightened. “But stealth ships… our enemies don’t have those kinds of ships… do they?”

“Not yet. But they might eventually start building them. And increasingly, some of the pirates in our own system are getting their hands on such systems. We expect stealth proliferation in the Red Zone to be a big problem in the next couple decades.”

“I see.”

“Panoptes allows us to read information off the millions of sensors we have in Sol and beyond, from the nose of our most advanced reconnaissance ships to century-old orbital telescopes in Terra orbit. Every single pixel of camera footage, every radar bounce is read and processed, compared against recorded orbital data, accounting for light-time delay and even jamming. Errors and data imperfections are then deconflicted and resolved using the largest series of super-intelligence chips ever built for a single purpose. If a bee-sized rock is out of place anywhere in Sol… Panoptes sees all and knows all…”

“Bee?”

“Small Terran animal… about your claw’s size.”

Eupprio’s tongue hung out in astonishment. “That’s… impressive. I assume these facilities house those computers then.”

“Exactly right. Buildings and buildings brimming with advanced neuromorphic computers. They’re not just here on Mars,” Martina gestured vaguely skyward. “They’re mostly on Terra, Luna, and Europa. A few on our ships and stations. That much data takes a lot of computing power to sift through.”

“And when it’s built—”

“When it’s finished and switched on, nothing in Sol will be beyond our reach. Piracy and the Resistance will finally become a problem of the past. People have said for decades that you can’t chase a technological solution to this social problem, but…” Martina offered a nonchalant shrug, her eyes twinkling. “Those people also haven’t seen a quettaFLOPS computing network in action either.”

Eupprio looked dazed, her snout open and tongue hanging out.

Next to her, Fleguipu must have sensed that something was significant about the Terrans’ achievements in scaled computing from her friend’s reaction, but she didn’t quite understand: usually, Eupprio handled the technical side of the business. She brought the conversation back to the ground. “That’s um… very impressive. Is the timeline for our project related to the completion of Project Panoptes?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Martina replied. “The Fifth Fleet sensor upgrade package is ready to be delivered to Malgeiru. Is your team ready to integrate?”

Eupprio came back to Mars and nodded with fervor. “Ah, ahead of schedule. That’s what I like about you Terrans.”

“You haven’t met half of us,” Martina chuckled. “And we still have a lot to go over on the administrative side. Our researchers did some digging into your company, and we noticed that there hasn’t been a lot of mention of your activities in the defense industry before recently—”

“That is correct,” Eupprio replied, unphased. “We are relatively new to the sector. But your research may or may not have covered our recent acquisition of Ciolnoenc Instruments. They are a company specializing in defense electronics and long range optical—”

We have evaluated their acquisition history. Not the most optimal but far from the worst option.

Martina let Eupprio’s monologue wash over her.

“— and as a young, agile company, we are more than ready to listen to the experience of our experts from Ciolnoenc in such a project,” she finished.

“That’s good to hear,” Martina said. “But to be blunt, we didn’t sponsor your company’s entry into the Oathkeeper program because of your new acquisitions. Rather, it is your expertise in other areas that attracts us.”

Eupprio thought quickly on her paws and pivoted like an experienced dancer. “You may think of our main business as financiers. It serves as a base of capital for our purchases, and lubricant for navigating our bureaucracy.”

“Precisely. While some Malgeir manufacturing firms are more technically prepared for a project like this than others, the nature of the… differential in our technology makes that hard to quantify positively. For example, are you familiar with the general principle behind our gravidars?”

Eupprio shook her head honestly. “No, I am only aware it is several generations upgraded from our radar. I assume it operates on some gravitic principle?”

“Actually, it does not, but that was what we wanted people to think. As some of our people have guessed, what it relies on is not gravitational waves, which travel at light speed, but rather FTL principles. Which is why gravidar systems are deeply integrated into our blink drives. This is relevant because your drives are mostly compatible with ours, except they take up a large volume of your ships because your ships are bigger: bigger ships, more mass, bigger blink drive.”

“I see. Are you implying we should have bought a drive company instead of a sensor company?” Eupprio asked.

“No. We are saying there was no way you could have known, and none of the other Malgeir firms that are bidding on Republic contracts know what they are doing either. Your other advantage, however, your capital — your capabilities in navigating Malgeir government and society — those are enduring, and we intend to leverage those.”

Eupprio nodded, a newfound comprehension dawning in her eyes.

Martina continued, “We will… go over how we can best synergize those in more detail in the coming week. But for now, we have an additional request of a somewhat… time-sensitive nature.”

“Go ahead.”

Martina hesitated, her gaze oscillating between the pair of aliens. “It uh… it might be best if we spoke with you alone on this matter?”

“I trust Fleguipu,” Eupprio declared firmly. “There is nothing about my business she is not also aware of.”

“Very well. I’ll be straightforward. We know you have access to a large number of Malgeir Navy incident reports.”

Eupprio’s eyes momentarily betrayed her surprise before regaining composure. “Is that so? There are many rumors surrounding our company; not all of them are true.”

We are 99.8% certain. We have TRO surveillance from her office and—

“We need a copy of them, and we are willing to pay.”

“Can’t you request of copy from the Defense Ministry given your collaboration with—”

Martina answered, “We can, but it will take time.”

Eupprio nodded thoughtfully. “I see. But if I had them, I would not hand them out for free. How would you price this?”

We are not paying for the value of the reports, but the expediency and avoidance of potential omission. Value calculated… negotiation should end below: 18.3 million Terran credits. Start negotiations with at least 12 million.

“We’ll offer you 18 million Terran credits for the whole cache,” Martina offered unflinchingly. “Final price.”

Eupprio ran through the numbers in her head, factoring in the exchange rate.

“Done,” she said, retrieving her tablet and initiating the file transfer to— “How do I hand these over—”

Martina gestured towards Fleguipu. “Just transfer the files to your friend’s datapad, unencrypted preferably. The sensors in my office will intercept it.”

Eupprio shot her a sharp look, then shrugged and complied. “And how will you deliver payment?” she asked as the file transfer began.

“We can add that as a line item to your sensors upgrade contract: technical support,” Martina suggested. “My assistant will optimize its categorization and depreciation for taxation purposes—”

Eupprio shook her ears in disapproval. “That will not do. Our company is already at the cap of our hundred billion source-sole contracts limit imposed by your Republic’s procurement regulations.”

“Ah.” Martina’s brow furrowed briefly in thought. “There are ways around that too, but we can also deliver equivalent value goods or technology in—”

Eupprio shook her ears again, this time more sharply in refusal. “I want hard credits.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Terran credits,” Eupprio specified. “I want it in the local currency here. Either in a discreet account or physical denominations.”

She does not care about money. She is making a backup plan for if the war goes poorly for the Malgeir, or she wants to deal with Republic entities in less-than-legal situations. Possibly even bribes for acquiring tech samples.

Martina mulled over this for a moment and nodded. “That’s acceptable. I’ll have my assistant get you an account at Sol Bank under a legal pseudonym and credited with the amount. You will have to pay a local income tax on the amount, since it cannot be deducted as a business expense.”

Eupprio’s snout flared slightly. “There is no way around that? Would they even know about…”

“Not easily. And word of advice, you don’t want to mess with the Republic Revenue Service. But we can optimize it: we have a subsidiary office on Titan, which allows remote residence for tax purposes, and if we pay you out at that location, we can optimize your effective rate down to—”

1.95%.

“—about two percent with various tax incentives.”

Eupprio waved her paw casually. “Fine, that’s acceptable.”

Martina nodded as her implant got to work.

Creating account… Crediting… Preparing paperwork… Sending the details to her tablet… Done.

“It’s done.”

“That was quick,” Eupprio commented, a hint of astonishment flickering in her eyes as she saw the alert on her datapad.

“Our computers work fast.”

Wanna see me do it again?