Man-Kzin Wars IX, Larry Niven [leveled readers TXT] 📗

"It doesn't." I paused, decided to trust her. The smugglers already knew we were on to them anyway. "Miranda Holtzman's internal organs were found in a shipping container on Wunderland, along with a cache of stolen UN weapons. The container's point of origin was 19J2, but when I tried to punch up the data on it the system drew a blank."

"You did a shipping trace to get that data, right?"

"Yah."

She nodded. "When you do a trace, the net uses the billing system data because normally you're interested in who owns the shipment and who's paying for it. This bay isn't in the billing system because no customers are registered to it so it would never show up. But the routing software knows about every node around Alpha Centauri and that's the data set that gets used when a shipment is set up and verified."

The picture became clearer. "Is there any way someone could swap the source and destination addresses without a Port Authority ident, or at least without logging it in the computer?"

"Too easy." She laughed and tapped a few keys on a board at the base of the container racks. Its display came up with a duplicate of the inspection container's shipping panel. Another press brought up SRC and DST. She hit a final key and the readout flashed REJECTED for a moment and then, magically, TMU19J234C and TMUCA147A switched places from origin to destination. "You just refuse delivery."

"What?"

"You refuse delivery. If you accept the shipment, you need a PA ident to accept the COD, clear customs control, verify the manifest and all that. If you refuse delivery, the tranship box just gets bounced back to point of origin still sealed so none of that matters, so you don't need the ident. The shipper's delivery bond is forfeited to pay for shipping the container back and the transaction is cleared out of the net. It's a user function."

"A user function?" I couldn't believe my ears. "What happens if a refused shipment gets re-refused by the shipper?"

"Why would anyone do that?"

"What would happen?" I tried to keep my voice level.

She shrugged. "I don't know . . ." She paused, thinking. "Grounded at the originating port, I suppose. At worst it would go back to the recipient again. It couldn't get lost or redirected, only a PA ident can change the source or destination. Nobody could claim it unless they signed off with us." She paused again. "Unless . . ."

"Unless it got shipped here."

She nodded, understanding the problem. The tranship system had a couple of assumptions built into it — that the Port Authority was physically present at all the system endpoints, and that no shipper would refuse its own refused container. With dynamic encryption and multilayered security measures, the system was considered fail-safe. But a couple of reasonable assumptions made a security hole big enough to shove a twenty-meter container box through that wasn't defined as a failure. There were no hackers, no high-level corruption. The system just worked the way it was designed to. It was a brilliant setup, a sort of digital jujitsu. The smugglers were only caught because of human error. I wondered if they considered their system fail-safe too.

It would be a while before the crime scene team arrived. Merral scrambled up the container rack to call in her findings to her team. I took the opportunity to look into the cargo box on the loading ramp. I got a shock. The white crates were all clearly labelled. They contained high-tech drugs, each molecule assembled atom by atom in zero gravity. I recognized some of the names—Polyhalazone, Quadrol and Ricaline. Every case here was worth fifty thousand crowns at a minimum, at least treble that on the black market, and there were hundreds of cases. There was more in the container, stacked parcels of brown quickwrap a half meter on a side. I ripped one open. Brand new fifty krona wafers spilled onto the floor. I couldn't begin to guess how much was in the package. The next package yielded twenties. I ripped open a third. Hundreds. I picked one up and looked it over carefully. It gave away nothing to the naked eye although I knew it had to be counterfeit. I would have heard of a theft this big—the whole system would have. I was willing to bet it was a very good counterfeit. The Isolationists never did anything with half measures.

The scale wasn't half-measured either. I counted packages and did some quick mental arithmetic, then did it again because I didn't believe the results the first time. This container held a billion crowns at a conservative estimate. The krona isn't the rock solid currency it used to be. Its value has been steadily eroded since the start of the occupation and the slide has only accelerated since the liberation. Even so, a billion crowns was a staggering sum. A fraction of a percent of counterfeits in the cash supply will upset a currency's stability. With the Provo Government's grip already shaky, there was enough here to undermine the entire system's economy. If this container got through to Wunderland, Alpha Centauri would be in chaos within a month.

It wouldn't, though, because we'd gotten here first. I felt suddenly shaky. This was a major haul. I was well aware of what the Provos knew and did not know about the Isolationists. The scale of their smuggling system, their expansion into medical facilities and organlegging and their counterfeiting operation were all new pieces of information. We were going to get positive DNA idents from this site, and the Goldskin interrogators would get the names we didn't have from the ones we caught. This investigation was going to break the back of the Isolationists in the Swarm before they even got going and shut down a huge smuggling ring as well. The information we gained would let the Provopolizei put a major crimp in their operations on Wunderland too.

It was a good feeling—it was