Arriving back in the Aki system, the team decided to proceed directly to the ground in order to sell their cargo of produce. As they dropped through the atmosphere, Dliiavrnt scoured the trade press for the latest market prices, finally deciding on Fourth City as the best place to try and sell up.
Lasnus then whipped up some spurious news items, purporting to depict senior Sorel Combine managers emphatically refuting rumours of a catastrophic crop failure on Sorel; the idea being to create a price hike for the type of produce the team were selling, in such a way that a denial from Sorel would only increase speculation of a disaster being hushed up.
Meanwhile, Captain Nose was placing a call. He contacted Sterling Hughes, and requested a meeting. By chance, the antiterrorist officer was free that afternoon, so he gave Nose directions to his office in Third City and hung up. Nose took the Baranduin's gig across to the spaceport at Third City and rode the monorail into the police offices.
Although the office block Hughes occupied appeared pretty normal, Nose's experienced eyes picked out little features here and there, adding up to the fact that below the aspidistras and "you don't have to be crazy..." office paraphernalia, there was a premises that he would have had to think twice about assaulting with even a reasonably large platoon... Hughes ushered him in to his office, however, and settled down to negotiate.
There followed some fairly spirited haggling, with Hughes defending his budget while trying to secure the team's assistance. Finally, a deal was struck at Cr15,000 per man for a five-man team, with the five cases of five Trane gauss rifles and a laser pistol (for Dliiavrnt) thrown in, plus a free run at first interrogation of any prisoners (though survival of said prisoners was a precondition), and indemnity from any "collateral damage". This settled, they got down to practicalites and constructed a suitably black police record for each of the team, enough to make them look like exactly the sort of desperadoes that would sell guns to terrorists.
Back at the dealing hall, the Zho Bros were ready for another attempt. This time, they chose a woman factor, and queued up in her line. Dliiavrnt brushed her mind - and hit pay dirt. The woman was running a rather sophisticated scam; her datapad had a cunningly designed "malfunction", disguised as a rounding error, that would siphon off 0.9% of each sale into a series of elaborate shell accounts from which she could later retrieve it. When they came to negotiate with her, Dliiavrnt dropped several subtle comments about "retirement funds" and "discretion". Ten minutes later, the pair were heading back to the ship with a transaction chit allowing them to collect Cr4,000/dton - Cr308,000 - for their cargo of veggies.
Hughes had provided some good starting places for the team to try and make contact with Red Action, and that night they went to check on the first one. Andromeda was a seedy bar in a very seedy district; an almost derelict zone of the city, right under the south-east corner of the Race Pit. Notwithstanding Aki's very high Law rating, this zone was a pretty rough spot, and as Nose, Lasnus and the Zho Bros moved down the streets, they saw many other people armed. Entering Andromeda, they ordered their usual drinks, noticing as they did that Lasnus and Stpierb' seemed to be "clocked" by the locals. The reputations were spreading...
Walking up to the "dish of the day" chalkboard, Dliiavrnt cleared it, then chalked "Gauss Rifles for sale" in bold letters. And returned to his table. After a while, a shifty little man slid into their booth, and enquired if they did indeed have "some ov dose oidenences" for sale? Calling himself "Joe", he refused to name his "cloients", but did place a call to set up a meeting. While he did this, Dliiavrnt skimmed his mind, finding a veritable sewer of scurrying, furtive, nasty little thoughts - exactly what the average Zhodani expects from an Imperial, he remembered. He also found a suspicion - not a certainty, because "Joe" was also exaggerating the closeness of his relaitionship with his clients - that the people he was dealing with were the Red Action rebel group.
When the clients were apparently skeptical of the existence of the weapons, Lasnus radioed back to Gvn on board the ship, and the Vargr set up a beautifully arranged holopic of the crates of guns, which made them look far better than they probably were, and transmitted it over in real time.
"Joe" eventually negotiated a meeting in an abandoned factory, not too far from the Andromeda, for midnight the following night. The team were to bring one rifle and five clips of ammo; the "clients" would bring 30% of the purchase price (Cr5,000 was the starting offer, but Nose, ever one to push the price, was in favour of holding out for Cr10,000 or more). If the results were favourable, a further meet to swap the balance of the goods would be arranged.
The team left the bar, and immediately started work on the rest of the plan. Lasnus wanted to try skewing the magnetic fields of the rifles so that they would announce their presence with a distinctive signature when fired, but this was discarded on the grounds that a) a really competent armourer would spot the changes and b) the terrorists would already have killed someone by the time their presence was detected. Instead, tiny neutrino sources were built, and secreted in the butt stocks of the rifles.
The next day, around midafternoon, Lasnus, Nose, Stpierb' and Dliiavrnt went back to the bar to see if they could pick up any more leads. As they sat in the bar, they were aware of three seperate groups of people watching them. While the other three sat at the front of the booth chatting, Dliiavrnt reached cautiously out with his psionics to see what they were about.
- The first group turned out to be a low-ranking cell of the Red Action, there to watch the team for signs that they were a police plant - which of course they were.
- Next, he found two undercover cops. From their surface thoughts, these appeared entirely unaware of anything to do with Red Action or the team. They were tracking a band of local lads who'd been doing a line in housebreaking in more affluent areas.
- As he touched the brain of the first member of the last group, he was instantly aware of two things; the man he was scanning was an ISS operative, and the man sitting next to him was both that and a psionic himself. The brief contact was enough to discern that the man had not had his training in the Consulate, meaning he was probably Institute trained. Instantly, Dliiavrnt disengaged his probe and retreated - as far as he could tell, without alerting the psionic Agent...
Nose decided he'd like to go and have another look at the meeting place, so the others decided to stage a distraction. Dliiavrnt, heading for the bar, leant close to the undercover cop on the way past and - pointing out the Psi - whispering, "He's got a gun, you know". The man stared at him for a moment, and then responded, "Of course he's got a gun. So has everyone else in the bar. Are you some kind of simpleton?"
