Chapter Seventy-Four - Who Are You and What Do You Want?

"'Ello!" the man on the other side of the door said.

He was wearing a suit pulled off of a discount rack and a smile that was almost genuine. His hair was combed with his fingers and he wasn't standing level to the door, which only made sense, this didn't seem like someone competent enough to care about being level.

The man next to the speaker was two heads taller, making him one of the few people that Ivil would have to look up to speak to. He had limbs that were longer than they ought to be, but Ivil couldn't sense any cores in him, hidden or otherwise. This was just a man that grew long.

"Hello," Ivil said. "Who are you and what do you want?"

"Ah, well, we're here for the after-party. We noticed that delegate Sterlingworth didn't pop out of her room, so we thought we'd do the neighbourly thing and come on over!"

"Delegate Green," Aurora said as she walked up behind Ivil. "A pleasure to meet you again."

The man—Delegate Green, Ivil supposed— nodded and tried a bow which made him shift in the air a little before he grabbed onto his zero-g travel drone. "Nice to see you as well. I was wondering if you were going to pop over to any of the after-meetings?"

"After-meetings?" Aurora asked.

"You know, big meetings like today's are good and all, but all of the actual work gets done right after!"

Aurora didn't look like she knew that. Whatever she was going to say was interrupted as a second delegate flew over. An elderly woman accompanied by a stone-faced guards man in a suit that was somehow crisper than Delegate Green's. "Ah, you've found her, Green," she said.

"Delegate Galatea," Aurora said with a slight bow.

"Mhm. Well, you going to invite us in?" the woman asked.

"Ah..." Aurora glanced at Ivil, then shrugged faintly and stepped back from the doorway. Ivil did likewise, letting the group in. She sighed and extended her gravity generation to the lot of them. It would raise fewer questions than if she kept it limited to Aurora and herself.

"Whoa, that's properly nice," Green said as he collected himself then bounced on the spot a couple of times.

"Indeed," Aurora said while she gave Ivil a slight side-eye. "So, can I assist you with anything?"

"You can get drinks out," Galatea said. She stomped over to the couch and sat down onto it. Her guard took up position next to the door while scanning the room. He had a gun in that jacket, and at least one core linked to his eye, but Ivil dismissed him as a non-threat.

"Give me just a moment, then," Aurora said. "I'll set some water to boil. There are softdrinks in the fridge there, if anyone wants any."

"Don't mind if I do!" Green said as he wandered over. "I make a point of grabbin' every drink in these mini-fridges. Oh, and all of the towels and such too."

'Which moon do you represent, exactly?" Ivil asked.

"Saturn!" he said. "No one moon in particular, really. But if you have to ask, Hyperion."

There was a slight shuffle, and Twenty-Six poked her head into the living room. She was wrapped up in a blanket still, as if she didn't dare un-tuck herself. "Oh! I thought I heard a familiar accent," she said.

Green blinked, then a wide smile appeared. "Ey! Delegate Sterlingworth, you didn't mention you had a Saturnian babe in your gang."

"You mean in my delegation team?" Aurora asked.

"Yee," he said. "Where're you from, babe?" he asked.

Ivil might have, under slightly different circumstances, detached Green's head and his body from each other, but Twenty-Six just smiled prettily, and she sensed that it wasn't an insult to call her babe. "I'm from layer four section four," Twenty-Six said. "The ol' four-four, yee?"

Ivil blinked. Twenty-Six's accent had changed. Not too much, she usually spoke with a 'spacer standard' accent that had just a slight bit of a twang to it, but now it had changed a little more, become more easy-going and informal.

"Yee, that's fantastic stuff. I'm from ol' Hyperion myself, but my brother here is from... what're you from?" he asked the tall man.

"Layer three, section two," he replies with a surprisingly high-pitched voice.

Aurora returned with some tea just then, or at least a warm kettle. "Forgive my ignorance, but layers? Sections?"

"Oh, uh," Twenty-Six said. "Layers are the depth in the ring. The lower the layer, the closer to Saturn. Sections are quadrants around the planet. But there are ten of them, so it's not really quadrant."

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"Ah, so it's a way to identify where you're from in relation to Saturn."

"Yee," Twenty-Six said with a nod. "There's a bit of, uh, casual racism that goes with it too, unfortunately. The outermost layers had it best, and the inner layers, one and two, have to deal with a lot more radiation and such so they tend to be a bit weirder."

"We've been getting better 'bout it," Green said. "Saturn's got this weird rep problem. Everyone knows we're the best engineers in the system, and yet they insist on thinking we're all backwards hicks."

"They're not mutually exclusive," Galatea said. She nodded her thanks to Aurora, then prepared her tea. "Ah, it's nice to work with gravity. You'll have to tell me how you got your hands on a localised generator like that."

"I... know some people," Aurora replied without looking Ivil's way. "You mentioned earlier how after-meetings were common?"

"Oh, of course. No one will air out their private grievances in an official meeting. Nor will actual deals be struck there. It's too open, too public," the old lady replied as she clinked a spoon in her cup. "Now's the real time for deals to be made."

"I see. And what kind of deals are you trying to make?" Aurora asked.

The old woman huffed. "Isn't it obvious?"

"If it was, I'm certain Aurora wouldn't have to ask," Ivil said.

The woman huffed some more. "We're here to deal, Lady Sterlingworth. The main thrust of today's meeting was dispensing each moon's share of the cores. These two Saturnains already made it clear enough that they don't care much for their share."

"That's not entirely true," Green said. "It's valuable, we just can't make best use of them ourselves."

"Hmm, exactly. Galatea has little interest as well. Our moon has a sword of Damocles above it. We're just waiting out the centuries until we slip past the Roche limit and break up. Not so different from the position your Phobos was in before that Empress knocked you back into place."

"I see," Aurora said. "So you're not interested in your share of the cores either?"

"Oh! Don't think that for a moment. We'd make good use of those. Our family, and extended family, has become quite rich acting like the last pit-stop to the ass-end of the solar system, but we'll never be a major influence. We keep our heads down and are happy with just being rich and apart from all the rest."

Ivil nodded. She wasn't too well versed in Neptunian politics, but the Galatea family of Neptune was somewhat known to her. They ran the failing moon as well as a few dozen stations in Neptune's rings. They collected resources and acted as a waystation for deep-system exploration. They weren't too dissimilar to Saturn in some ways. Plenty of natural resources, but nothing that others couldn't grab closer to home, and nothing to do with those resources themselves.

They were relatively rich, all things considered. Not individually, but as a 'family.' Their nation was strictly socialist. Almost violently so. All gains were shared equally, and all hardship born the same way. The average Neptunian was actually far more wealthy, dollar-for-dollar, than just about anyone else in the solar system.

But they were also stuck in their little corner unable to leave without losing everything. It was the living embodiment of a sunk-cost world.

More cores wouldn't help them. The wealth and favours earned from those cores, however....

"I think we could work something out," Aurora said. "Phobos is... not the wealthiest, but this kind of investment would mean a lot to us."

"Money is nice, favours are nicer," Galatea said.

"Oh? We'd settle for money," Green replied. "But there are richer fish to drop this bait in front of. Just auctioning off all of the cores one at a time would bring us a small fortune."

"Not as much of a fortune as we could bring," Aurora said. "Not unless you intend to sell to Mars or Earth or one of their proxies?"

"That would burn our bridges with the League," Green said. "But selling to individuals and corps? That's a little easier to swallow."

Aurora shook her head. "What kind of favours would you trade for cores, then?"

"Experts, medical facilities and supplies, some help putting pressure on the corps that are preventing us from forming a proper government," Green listed off casually. He might have been a hick, but the man wasn't stupid, Ivil realised.

***