Hostile Takeover - Hardcover

Shwartz, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765304619 ISBN 13: 9780765304612

Publisher: Tor Books, 2004

Synopsis

Caroline Cassandra Williams is on the fast track and determined to stay there. A financial analyst in one of the mega-global corporates she's stayed one step ahead of her enemies to keep from losing her place as a valued salaryman -- and two steps in front of those colleagues who would grind her down in a nanosecond to reach the next rung of economic freedom. Even though she's clawed her way out of the insulae, where working poor are warehoused, she keeps herself grimly focused with nightmares of losing her job. Or being frozen into a shipsicle and shipped to the Outer Rim as an expendable drudge. Or -- worst case --going bankrupt and dying slowly as the authorities harvest her limbs and other body parts.

When the multiplanetary company she works for sends CC to audit Vesta Colony to learn why assets keep hemorrhaging away, she knows this is her big chance to make the Ultimate Career Move. Assuming she gets the facts and pins the crooked trades and any other crimes she finds on someone or a bunch of someones she can turn in with a clear conscience, she can go home first class, collect her fiancé and a fat bonus, then march down the aisle in a perfectly event-planned wedding into a prosperous-ever-after twin career track. She's already even planned vacations with their children-to-come at the theme parks on Easter Island, the cofferdams surrounding Disney World, and the Gobi Dinosaur Pavilions. If CC succeeds, she's set for the rest of her life.

But Vesta turns out to be unlike anything CC has ever seen, and the deeper she delves, the more twisted things get until her life -- not to mention her career -- hangs in the balance. As plots expose more plots, CC finds herself confronting not just possible insider trading and fraud, but attempted murder. Who's at fault? She's got a colony of suspects, including old friends, old rivals and a dashing EarthServ pilot who knows a whole lot more about CC and her worlds than he's letting on and shows signs of being able to shake them -- and her will-power -- any time he wants.

Someone among the analysts, traders, EarthServ, and retired diplomats CC meets is hatching a deadly merger with the potential not just to crash the Solar System's economy, but wipe out humankind. Will CC find out in time -- or will the takeover she fears turn not just hostile, but deadly?

About this title

About the Author

Susan Shwartz has been nominated for the Nebula, the Hugo and the World Fantasy Awards and is the author of several novels, includuing Second Chances, Heritage of Flight, and The Grail of Hearts, as well as the very well received Star Trek novels, Vulcan's Forge and Vulcan's Heart. She resides in New York City and is a veteran of the financial-services industry.

Reviews

Heavy on finance and light on action, Shwartz's new stand-alone hard SF novel makes the excitement of space flight and colonization secondary to corporate kowtowing. Alpha Consultants LLC sends Caroline Cater "CC" Williams to Vesta Colony in deep space to audit an illicit money trail. While crawling up the corporate ladder, CC plans to keep a low profile. However, as she digs deeper into unethical trades, several "accidents" threaten her life. During a routine training flight with the handsome Marc Davidoff, CC spots an unidentified spaceship that may be carrying hostile aliens. Shwartz (Second Chances) sets up the plot so that CC and her associates gauge whether aliens are good or bad by the way they handle their trades. The not particularly heroic CC mostly gets praised for her good computer skills and her ability to remember and implement basic space training. Predictably, when she has to leap, whether to financial assumptions about aliens or into Marc's arms, it's only too clear that, regardless of logic, she'll always land on her feet.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In a future of multiplanetary corporations and mining colonies in the asteroid belt, CC Williams is a high-octane financial analyst whose bosses have sent her to investigate a mining operation on the asteroid Vesta, where profits are mysteriously hemorrhaging away because of bad trades. A veteran of climbing the corporate ladder from the lower classes while constantly fending off rivals, CC is eager to prove her mettle and smooth the way for an upcoming marriage and extravagant honeymoon. Yet awaiting her on Vesta is a maze of political maneuvering, hints of insider trading, and an attempted murder that also yields the horrifying implication that someone is plotting a deadly merger with the potential to decimate the solar system's financial markets and even threaten humankind. Shwartz has several previous award-nominated works under her belt, as well as two rousing Star Trek novels, and her experience shows here in tautly paced action and a vivid depiction of Wall Street's interplanetary dominion a few centuries hence. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hostile Takeover

/ 1

Three months out from Earth on the asteroid run and heading toward Vesta Colony, Rimrunner ceased its latest engine burn, and CC Williams began running for her life again.

As the captain's "safe to release" signal broke into programs on every screen, lights flashed and the "all clear" blared from speakers in every corridor of the ship. Except, of course, Freeze. No one there was conscious, so no one had a need to know. But the high net worth and corporate passengers, the only ones able to fill Rimrunner's staterooms, thanked God and top management for key-man insurance and personnel who knew their jobs, and drew deep breaths to mask their apprehension.

It wasn't as if her life were in any immediate danger. Except for one alleged pirate sighting that turned out to be a Solar Sailor way off course, Rimrunner hadn't had a single incident since it boosted away from EOS--Earth Orbital Station--three months ago. Nothing succeeded like success: the last safety drill, three months ago, had been conspicuous only for the excellence of the hot hors d'oeuvres served afterward in the First Class lounge.

Just because the ship was secure, however, didn't mean its passengerscould let their fitness lapse. At the beginning of the trip, Rimrunner's MedCenter had sent workout schedules to every stateroom. Meaning that CC--better known by the string of numbers on her Alpha Consultants LLC debit card than by the antiquated names Caroline and Cassandra, which she hadn't used since she'd fled her low-rent origins--knew this was part of her job, too: to report to ship's gym like a good little shoshaman, or salaryman, sweat alongside all the other passengers, or pay the penalty fee for missing workouts. Miss too many workouts, and it would probably show up on her next evaluation. Alpha had invested a lot of money in her training, her passage, and her life insurance: it had a right to make certain that when she landed on Vesta, she'd be able to function in what amounted to little more than zero g.

So CC ran for her life, running harder than she'd ever run back when she was struggling to escape gangs and a chronic lack of future. She had an hour to go now on her workout, and she'd be damned if she was leaving before it ended. Never mind that she was expecting a transmission from her employer, a consulting firm so powerful that it terrified other consulting firms and justified its name: Alpha. She could supply password, retinal scan, and timestamp an hour from now, too. The message would wait. So would her curiosity. While confidential instructions might be best practices in an audit, that level of secrecy wasn't. In fact, she'd been ordered to conceal these transmissions.

CC might have escaped a life of make-work, public support, or enforced immigration in deep Freeze; but she balanced on a scalpel's edge. Just one mistake, and she knew she'd be tossed right back into the underclass. Nightmares about landing in the discard heap still woke her at 4:00 A.M. most sleepshifts. She feared they always would, but so far, she'd managed to hide them. Exercise wasn't just mandated by ship's regs, it helped.

So, now that the ship's engines had ended their burn, CC started hers. The pun made her smile. She thought of passing it on, then paused to second-guess herself. The person next to her might considerit strange, a sign of her past as the descendant of the overeducated, underemployed tutor demographic: better not.

She glanced up over the treadmills, mini-centrifuges, and weight systems to the bulkheads. Flashing across the ceiling of the lavish gym that occupied one whole ship's bay was a narrow black zipper. Stock symbols and quotes danced across one segment; below it ran the water futures index, prices tracked against the orbiting ice chunks throughout the solar system and against challenges like the current sunspot alert.

Below the zipper, screens glowed with business news transmitted from all Earth's major exchanges and relayed by the Bloomberg Boosting Units orbiting throughout the solar system to pick up. Picked up, decrypted, cleansed of static, readjusted for Doppler shifts, recollimated, encrypted again, and sent on their way, the data gleamed gold and green. The graphics for the financial news were, appropriately, the colors of old-fashioned money.

The only flickers of red that showed up on the map lit places that most of the Non-Governmental Organizations had written off anyhow.

Next story! Chile had merged with three others to form the Republic of New Patagonia. Now that that nation had, essentially, ceased to exist, the sunset provisions of the sovereign bonds it had issued for terraforming on Mars--short term at a century--were being called. Big as New Pat was, it was still an emerging market. Compared with some NGOs, whose revenues exceed those of Africa and the Eurasiazone and were closing fast on the North American gross continental product, this new nation was a nonstarter. Still, its bonds were deeply discounted. Remained to be seen if bondos would regard that as a plus or a sign of a credit preparing to take a dive.

Next! CC listened to the latest pronouncements on last year's loss of a Zumwalt-class liner, a joint venture between Cunard and EarthServ, like Rimrunner itself, in an explosion just outside Jupiter's orbit. The talking head on-screen opined the cause had been an undiscovered satellite on a course so eccentric that ship sensors hadn't spotted it until too late. In any event, the explosion was driving down the defense electronics sector and had caused the resignation of at least three CEOsso far. A blue-ribbon team had been assembled back on Earth to investigate.

CC stepped up her pace: by the time that team made it out to the Asteroid Belt, the real investigation would be half over.

Someone hit the remote.

The screen blanked. Then, it brightened, this time with "lite" news. Probably, after that downer story EarthNet thought that people needed a pick-me-up--hence, this tongue-in-cheek discussion of the eleven-year Sunspot Index. Like the hemline and lipstick indices, sunspots were always good for a polite smirk, unless, of course, you were caught unshielded on the sunside of a ship. Or if you'd bet against the index and lost money.

They were in a period of maximum sunspot activity now, and the markets were reacting. So, fortunately, were Rimrunner's excellent shields. Meanwhile, everyone wore badges, and kept one eye on the newsfeeds for sunspot alerts.

"State-of-the-art health and business facilities" were among Rimrunner's most popular amenities, the advertorials proclaimed in living holo on all the highest-demographic nets. From bar to fresh-water showers, Rimrunner proved that the remaining Zumwalt-class ships weren't just civilian luxury liners, but safe. "Safe as houses." After all, the only people who could afford them lived in houses, or condos at the very least, even if they were subsidized by their employers.

Another reason to hang on to her job like grim death.

What's more, as the latest advertorials trumpeted every five minutes, travel on board Rimrunner wasn't just luxurious, it was safe. The ads had succeeded in their claims. Now, no self-respecting corporation would send executives out on anything less, especially since EarthServ was still trying to flush the last few pirates preying on the O&M, or oil and mining consortia, that had replaced Earth's "oil and natural gas bidniz" as the latest profitable frontier.

On the one long bulkhead that wasn't occupied by mirrors or Bloomberg transmissions was another of Rimrunner's amenities: VR screens that displayed spectacular views of space to the passengerswho cycled or ran in place, or grunted as any one of a number of high-tech racks equipped with gleaming, queeping monitors and attentive, personable trainers (available for private sessions at an additional fee, facilities and tips not included) built up their strength.

Wiping her forehead before a trainer could intervene, CC glanced at one of the VR screens. She thought she could get addicted to starlight; she'd never forget that first half-ecstatic, half-panicked moment when she first saw the stars from space. Awe, due diligence, and sheer delight danced a jig in her belly. For a moment, she thought her hollowness inside was a reaction to zero g--and she had so not wanted to be spacesick. Then, she'd shivered in pure joy as she realized the stars were another part of that heritage she hoped to reclaim--assuming she played her cards shrewdly, she wasn't fired, and she completed her audit without getting killed. Ships might be safe, but space travel on business still put you in a bad place on the actuarial tables. Now, she fought not to betray just how much she loved watching the stars.

On each exercise machine's heads-up display gleamed shipwide announcements: solar activity levels--high, not yet critical, potassium iodide available from your steward; casino night; hourly ship's tours; EVA training.

Deck-to-ceiling mirror panels showed the panting, sweating passengers. Even the retirees took time from their own modified workouts, carefully supervised by MedCenter techs in white shipsuits, that they'd had to agree to--and sign releases for--before they were allowed on board. And they too were fined for missing workouts, fined for letting their weight rise or their good cholesterol and calcium drop: disincentives to shirking that both their corporations and their insurers insisted on.

CC got a glimpse of herself, treadmilling away in sleek exercise clothing. Certainly, she was no beauty, but beauty was a disadvantage for anyone trying to climb the corporate ladder unless you played it very carefully indeed. Of middle height, she was fit and slender; medical coverage was cheaper if she kept her weight down. She'd weigh even less once she got to Vesta, whose gravity was about ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765304619
• ISBN 13: 9780765304612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352