“First, thank you all for assembling,” Victor said. “I realize that bringing us all together required some time, but as the Audit Committee hopefully explained there was a need for review, but the situation was not an emergency. As you are all here physically, after we meet, a tour of the facilities has been arranged. On one hand, our three competitors have sued to oblige us not to sell any of the rare earths we recover, except of course to the Space Guard, whose finances are limited, and the Elizavetsians, who have no use for them except as trade goods. Legal staff advises they have a very strong case. Tactics indicated that they were in the process of cutting their own throats, though they hadn’t figured out yet.
“On the bright side, we were able to bring up all three fusactors. They are running cleanly at standard maximum power, selling large amounts of electricity to the Pacific West. That’s actually a significant income stream, as outlined in my report. On the dim side, all four of our freight haulers have now landed. None of them is safe to fly. We have undertaken the needed repairs, starting with the Mighty Transporter, which seems to be in the best condition, but it will take some time to bring all four of them back into operation. The former crews have all been arrested and are being tried for various crimes. Since the stolen materials were always deposited by them directly on the surface of the moon, they were able to beat the space piracy charge, because their crime was not committed in space. Still, they will almost certainly be guests in Club Portland for some considerable time to come. Income from the fusactors is adequate to keep us in operation and do the necessary repairs to our spaceships.”
“Victor,” Benjamin Goldsmith asked, “why didn’t we try to contest the claims of the cartel that they owned the monopoly on importing rare earths? Letting them bar our sales that way seems to put a significant limitation on what we can do with the material.” He shook his silver-white hair.
“On one hand,” Victor said, “as Tara Broadbent explained to the Audit Committee, our chances of winning the case were extremely poor. The cartel agreement was a very solid standard contract, one whose style has been contested repeatedly before without success. We could spend large amounts of money on expert attorneys, but private inquiries to several law firms confirmed that there was almost no point to contesting the case. On the other hand, our competitors are now in a bit of a pickle. They have been expelled from the China Yards, so they have to do their own maintenance. If they are taking good care of their ships, and we suspect that they aren’t, a reasonably-qualified ship’s crew can do the needed maintenance over the short term. Eventually they run into a problem they cannot fix, for example replacing drive spines. Previously, their foreign part-owners dealt with this.
“Except for one minor detail.
