Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network, E. Foner [the unexpected everything txt] 📗

showing provenance and everything, but when I arrived here at Aarden, I saw that Flower was in orbit. There’s a Frunge blacksmith working at Colonial Jeevesburg on Flower who I’ve traded with before, so I decided to bring him a few weapons for evaluation.”

“Everything was fake,” Daryl interjected.

“The blacksmith was very nice about it,” Kobby choked out, brushing away a tear with the back of her hand. “He said the replicas were actually very good and offered to take them on consignment to sell to the human gaming fanatics who can’t afford real antiques, but they’re worth at best a quarter of what I spent on them. I don’t know how I’m going to keep up with the new loan payments.”

“You’ll take me as an apprentice and we’ll work on it together,” Daryl said.

“Have you reported the fraud to anybody yet?” Georgia asked.

“I showed the paperwork to an expatriate Earth lawyer Flower recommended who lives in the independent living cooperative. Brenda only needed a few minutes to find the small print where everything was identified as museum-quality replicas, including in the provenance documentation. I guess it’s something they used to do in small museums on Earth that couldn’t afford the real thing. The curator sold them as authentic medieval pieces, but I didn’t record my meetings with her, so I don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“When I file my story, I’ll ask the editor to hand-carry it to EarthCent Intelligence since their offices are next door,” Georgia said. “I’d like to capture images of the paperwork you received if that’s all right with you. Did you have anything else to add?”

“Tell her about the finance manager,” Daryl urged.

“That could just be my imagination,” Kobby protested. “You know what it’s like when you start playing back a conversation in your head.”

“But it brings the whole story together.”

The woman sighed, and then looked Georgia straight in the eye. “The way I remember it, the finance manager at MORE didn’t care what I wanted the money for, she cut me off before I could even explain. She said that my account was in good standing and they’d do a cash-out refi and give me the money to gamble in a casino if that’s what I wanted. But when it was all done and I told her I was off to make the biggest purchase of my life, she said, ‘Stop worrying. Armor is always a good investment.’ It didn’t hit me until I got to Aarden and found out I’d been cheated that I never told her I was buying armor.”

Eighteen

“I think we’re in trouble, Dad,” Larry said. “Everywhere I went last night there were people with playing cards in their hatbands buying drinks for the crowd.”

“It’s my fault, the council’s fault, for not seeing this coming,” Phil told his son. “We should have realized that as soon as a seat on the council meant more than a lot of drudge work planning the next Rendezvous, candidates with vested interests would get involved. The ironic thing is it will be up to the new council to make any rule changes, and somehow I doubt they’ll be shooting the horse they rode in on.”

“The two of you sound like a couple of boys whose kite string broke,” Rachel scolded them. “Are you just going to give up? You tell them, Georgia.”

The freelancer looked up from her tab and then thrust the device at Larry. “Read this,” she instructed him, and then proceeded to make it unnecessary by filling everybody in on the contents of the Galactic Free Press article. “The paper ran Ellen’s story on the front page. They even hired a Verlock mathematician to provide a forensic statistical analysis of all the Advantage recommendations she documented. He proved beyond a doubt that the platform was designed to create losses.”

“You’re talking about the new system so many young traders are using?” Phil asked.

“They called it ‘Advantage’ because it was supposed to give users an advantage over the competition by providing real-time data about market demand. There’s a note from the managing editor that while he would have preferred to delay publication until they could identify the responsible parties behind the fraud, the Galactic Free Press believes it to be in the public interest to inform the community now before more traders go broke.”

“The reps from the finance outfit that bought my mortgage from the Sharf tried to push some new platform on me right before Joe introduced you back on Union Station,” Larry told Georgia. “I didn’t hear them out because I wasn’t interested.”

“Was it MORE?” Georgia asked. “Ellen told me that most of the traders she interviewed first heard about Advantage through MORE financial services, and the name kept coming up with the traders I talked to yesterday.”

“Yeah, that’s them. I wonder why it’s not in the article?”

“Because it would be tantamount to accusing the main servicer of ship mortgages held by humans of trying to drive their borrowers into bankruptcy. We need proof.”

“It’s possible that the finance company is as much a victim as the traders in this case,” Rachel pointed out. “It’s doubtful they would know anything about galactic trading conditions, so they’re probably just paying the real owners of this Advantage platform to be able to offer clients a benefit.”

“It’s possible, but it doesn’t feel that way to me,” Georgia said. “Reporters have a nose for this sort of thing.”

“Like you knew Colony One was a scam?” Larry teased her.

“That was different, and Ellen told me that investigative journalists always strike out on their first story. Anyway, read the sidebar by Bob Steelforth, Union Station’s chief correspondent. He did an interview with Clive Oxford, the director of EarthCent Intelligence, who said they’ve launched an investigation into Advantage with the cooperation of Earth authorities and ISPOA, the Inter Species Police Operation Agency.”