Being hani.
No question then where they were going—and since they had missed that wretch Atli-lyen-tlas twice due to gtst damnable haste in going wherever gtst was going (one suspected now, away from them) speed might be of the essence. Which meant no delay in loading cargo, no great mass to what they could take, and no time to fuss about the niceties of what they took.
“Got a few possibilities, captain,” Tarras said. ‘’Kshshti not being an unusual destination out of here.” Meaning that they couldn’t be too picky on that account either.
Hilfy read the list. It was a matter of figuring what they could load quickly, and one of the best answers was something light and valuable and easily disposed of in a port that bordered kif territory (she shuddered to think, and refused to carry small edible animals) and likewise lay on the receiving end of two lanes coming out of mahen territory, and one port away from stsho space and tc’a.
Methane load, maybe, which she hated almost as much as the small edible animals.
Or pharmaceuticals. She read the latest market reports from a ship inbound from Kshshti, ran it through the computer program that could spot the relative bad deals and bargains compared to markets elsewhere, factored with points of origin for the goods in question, plus a set of keywords like shortage and various diseases and rise and fall of prices in the business news. It advised, at least, it read news faster than a mortal eye could scan it, and it liked the pharmaceuticals possibility, the radioactives (another load she was not fond of, since one was at the mercy of the company in question’s packaging practices, inspection was not easy, and some of them were appallingly naive about what a loader did to cans.) But Kita was an importer of such materials, while Kefk, one step further on from Kshshti, was a moderate exporter of said materials and reasonably would be shipping them to Kshshti… figuring trade possibilities was a headache on a border, because you couldn’t ‘t get thoroughly accurate information across said border: traders lied, governments lied, and the black market flourished, but a well-known ship was ill-advised to play that game.
You wanted something … something that you knew about that the rest of the universe didn’t. And the only thing they knew about that the rest of the universe didn’t was the exact nature of the Preciousness, and (at least as regarded the average trader) that they carried some sort of stsho psychological …
… event.
She punched in data with sudden energy and factored in political uncertainty and instability: stsho … and even, thinking about Tahaisimandi Ana-kehnandian and his meddling personage … instability: mahendo ‘sat.
The computer silently worked and worked, and came up with a whole new set of projections. Under those conditions, a person wanted essentials in store and a government or a station wanted information and strategic necessities in greater abundance than ordinary. And it projected price rises and scarcities in different patterns.
The only difficulty with that scenario, the glaringly clear difficulty, was that inside information didn’t do you a bit of good if the people making the decisions to buy weren’t also privy to it. It was good for playing the futures game. But perfectly smart investments could bankrupt you if the secret stayed secret. As, contractually, it was supposed to.
Strategic metals, strategic materials, and out of a place like Kita, which was a quasi-star of so new a generation it hadn’t heavy elements and wouldn’t exist except that it provided services and repairs, and that those services and repairs had employed people who wanted first food and then luxuries to ameliorate their barren lives, and then employees who served up the luxuries, and then food to feed the purveyors of the unnecessary, an ecosystem of elegant simplicity beginning to run to the baroqueries common to civilization.
All of which told you, as every trader knew, that Kita was a place that imported as much for its own use as it could afford to have, and exported surplus luxuries, which it might well have; surplus necessities, which it was more reluctant to release; surplus people, who wanted out of Kita Point; and finally the final layers on the developing economy of a new station, Kita served penultimately as a cheap warehouse for speculators to store what could be imported from its neighbors and unloaded at a more advantageous time, at a higher price; and most baroque of all, it manufactured things out of the pieces, parts, and materials which the speculators warehoused; and employed workers who in turn began to want luxuries, and so on, and so on…