TGoaW-5

<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
==Chapter 5 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
----
The Duke's brother isn't going to...
----
...inherit, not if Duke Dinh Ngo manages to get released, anyway. Truk Tan Ngo's ascension would be a disaster. It's not that he's a poor administrator, it's that unlike his older brother, he's guaranteed not going to live to forty.
The fortunes of the Family's firm, Ngo Enterprises, are proof of administrative talent-Truk Tan is a superb salesman and an able accountant. He isn't the engineer his brother Dinh is...and this is a problem when your main business is engineering support services for other industries-especially when your rockstar engineer is currently in detention for unwise critiques of the Archon.
well, at least, that's the public story.
Shit is almost universally more complicated than that. The Archon wants what's in Dinh's head. Not his amazing talent for solving technology problems..no, it's because Dinh Ngo knows where Arthur Luvon and Katrina Steiner have got off to.
And he's not telling.
The Ngo family aren't actually affiliated with Heimdall. They're more or less 'adjacent' to that organization. Similar friends, similar views, similar enough that company assets were made available as a cut-out to facilitate Katrina and Arthur's escape from Loki.
Truk would tell, if he thought for a moment it would get his brother out of Blackgate, but there's that whole 'trust' thing. Dinh's the future of his homeworld, after all, Dinh, and Dinh's young son David.
Truk's just holding it together while the lawyers and corporate security work on finding the right hands to bribe to get his brother released.
In the meantime, he's got the duties.
"I would ask if you were high, because I am." Truk commented, looking at the imagery. 'You found a ****** Warship?"
"Yes, Sir." Grant Sithers-Deen said. "It's not just any warship."
"I can almost see that...and you want to park it where??"
"Boojum or Snark's orbitals, near the service yards."
"And you want me to do what? tell you it's fine?" Truk asked, "because it looks like something you should be turning over to LCAF's brass for a brass ring and an attaboy."
"So...no?"
"I didn't say 'no'." Truk commented. "I'm asking you what the ****** you think you're doing. Dinh's being held as a suspected insurgent, there's Loki crawling all up our asses on Kowloon proper looking for...rebels, and you want to bring a a bloody Warship into the system??"
"We can keep it low-key." Grant said.
"You'd better." Truk said, "We're on a damned tightrope down here, Grant, I'm not going to be gentle about it-the Archon's got my Brother in a place people don't come out of except in pieces, and he wants something, you turn up with an asset like that, and he'll want TWO somethings-it might actually make it worth the expense to drop a Regiment on us to get them...we might not be able to keep hiding the production lines if LIC gets genuinely curious, and you KNOW where that lands."
"But you aren't saying 'no', sir?" Grant pressured him.
"I am not saying 'no'...I'm saying Keep it subtle. We're dealing with too many intelligence types crawling around here, plus whatever the Terrans over in the HPG compound are really up to. Keep it quiet, use the Snark repair site, and I'll need to work out some good lies to tell them when, not if, they catch on that we're hiding something of this magnitude."
"How's your health??" Grant asked.
"I'm still dying on schedule. Has there been any word on Mai?" Truk asked.
"Not recently. Free Traders sometimes don't check in."
"Yeah, but Mai's not sick, and if they don't let Dinh go. She's our best bet for keeping what little autonomy we've got left, so I'd appreciate it if you tell my cousin I need her to come home...in the meantime. I've got to be out-system for a few months. Coventry's looking for equipment to get their fourth line back in action, and it's worth as much as the tax revenues from two continents to get that contract."
"Understood."
"Keep your find quiet!!" Truk reiterated.
----
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
5