“You put an excise tax on the corporations and they’ll just pass it on to us by raising their prices.”
Nodding, Amanda admitted, “Yes, that’s true. But it will be a very small rise. A tax of one percent would bring in ten thousand international dollars for every million dollars in sales.”
Without waiting for the next questioner, Amanda continued, “HSS alone cleared forty-seven million dollars in sales last week. That’s nearly two and a half a billion dollars per year, which means a tax of one percent would bring us more than twenty-four million in tax revenue from HSS sales alone.”
“Could we finish the habitat on that kind of income?” asked the next caller.
Amanda replied, “Yes. With that kind of assured income, we could get loans from the banks back on Earth to finish the habitat, just the same as any government secures loans to finance its programs.”
The meeting dragged on until well past one A.M., but when it was finished, Amanda thought tiredly that she had accomplished her objective. The people of Ceres were ready to vote to form some kind of a government.
As long as Martin Humphries doesn’t move to stop us, she reminded herself.
CHAPTER 44
Lars Fuchs stood spraddle-legged behind the pilot’s chair on the bridge of Nautilus, carefully studying the screen’s display of what looked like an HSS freighter.
According to the communications messages to and from the ship, she was the W. Wilson Humphries, the pride of Humphries Space Systems’ growing fleet of ore carriers, named after Martin Humphries’s late father. She was apparently loaded with ores from several asteroids, heading out of the Belt toward the Earth/Moon system.
Yet Fuchs felt uneasy about approaching her. Fourteen months of hiding in the Belt, of taking his supplies and fuel from ships he captured, of sneaking quick visits aboard friendly independent ships now and then, had taught him wariness and cunning. He was leaner now, still built like a miniature bull but without a trace of fat on him. Even his face was harder, his square jaw more solid, his thin slash of a mouth set into a downturned scowl that seemed permanent.
He turned to Nodon, who was handling the communications console on the bridge.
“What’s the traffic to and from her?” he asked, jabbing a thumb toward the visual display.
“Normal telemetry,” Nodon replied. “Nothing more at present.”
To the burly young woman in the pilot’s chair Fuchs said, “Show me the plot of her course over the past six weeks.” He spoke in her own Mongol dialect now; haltingly, but he was learning his crew’s language. He did not want them to be able to keep secrets from him.
One of the auxiliary screens lit up with thin, looping curves of yellow set against a sprinkling of green dots.
Fuchs studied the display. If it was to be believed, that yellow line represented the course that the Humphries ship had followed over the past six weeks, picking up loads of ore at five separate asteroids. Fuchs did not believe it.
“It’s a fake,” he said aloud. “If she’d really followed that plot she’d be out of propellant by now and heading for a rendezvous with a tanker.”
Nodon said, “According to their flight plan, they will increase acceleration in two hours and head inward to the Earth/Moon system.”
“Not unless they’ve refueled in the past few days,” Fuchs said.
“There is no record of that. No tankers in the vicinity. No other ships at all.”
Fuchs received brief snippets of intelligence information from the friendly ships he occasionally visited. Through those independent prospectors he arranged a precarious line of communications back to Ceres by asking them to tell Amanda what frequency he would use to make his next call to her. His calls were months apart, quick spurts of ultracompressed data that told her little more than the fact that he was alive and missed her. She sent similar messages back by tight laser beam to predesignated asteroids. Fuchs was never there to receive them; he left a receiving set on each asteroid ahead of time that relayed the message to him later. He had no intention of letting Humphries’s people trap him.