“An excellent issue,” Victor answered. “Those are antique laws. The cartel could refuse to sell us those ships of theirs. However, in that case we’d advertise what we were offering for them, how much each stockholder would get, and if they refuse to sell I would expect there would be stockholder litigation. We are not in pre-interregnum times. Stockholder litigation is an extremely blunt, but effective, instrument. They would also be subject to the taxes on inactive spaceships. One of the amusing schemes the Social Democrats had for raising money, over a century ago, was a special tax to motivate people to make use of whatever technical resources they had. The tax on an unused spaceship is enormous. Those tax bills get very large very quickly. I would anticipate that management in each of these cases, realizing that they had painted themselves into a corner, would take as much money as possible and run.”
Robert Smith waved a hand. “Tryon Interstate Trust and Securities has very large investments in manufacturing firms, most of which depend directly or indirectly on Proserpine ore for their manufacturing processes. There will be concern that some of these firms may become unstable if ore shipments are disrupted.”
“I’ve taken the precaution,” Victor said, “of sequestering the respectable amount of rare earths that we had on hand before we were sued. We can sell those. We also have in the drive and fusactor systems of our four spaceships large numbers of parts that contain pre-lawsuit purified rare earths in various forms. We can actually keep manufacturers going for a long time without violating the terms of the suit. However, we shouldn’t tell the cartel that. In addition, a reasonable financial and manufacturing forecast would appear to indicate that, well before the cartel gets into all this trouble, Bulger Spaceyards will be in full operation. That allows us to solve this problem in a way that I would prefer not to discuss further, other than to say that Elaine Bell and her supporting staff have done the needed calculations and to show that it works. Note that with the changes I have mentioned, in particular constructing more fusactors, our ability to pay off notes with reasonable rapidity will be going up. Also, while our spaceships are in poor shape, we have not yet found anything wrong with them we cannot fix. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Victor,” Rose said “you left us with this note on ‘special steps needed to maintain the engineering staff’, without saying what the steps were. Could you explain?”
“That was the expected last issue with this meeting. We could discuss buyouts of current bondholders, but those require that we get our transports back into condition where they can legally be flown. The Mighty Transporter appears likely to be ready in another week, assuming that it passes its flight tests. I’m assured by Elaine Bell that it will probably pass. ”
“And the other three ships?” Rose asked.
