'You are seeing only one person here. Consider the other one to be his shadow.'
Denny Hill was not completely satisfied with this explanation and he continued sipping on his soup silently- the meeting was taking place at a restaurant table.
Kissur sat still. He wanted Hill to start talking first.
'Is it true that you would like to buy goods?'
'Yes.'
'How much?'
'Twelve.'
'Three million a piece.'
'One million nine hundred.'
'Two seventy five.'
'One million eight hundred.'
'Two fifty. It's manufacturing cost.'
'Nobody sells stolen goods at their manufacturing cost.'
'When these birdies fly to their destination, the counter-intelligence will be ready to cough up ten million for information about their original residency.'
'They won't fly anywhere,' Kissur said.
'Lore told me something else.'
'Who cares what Lore said? I am an Emperor's servant. Do you think that a sovereign of the Amaride Dynasty and a man of the White Falcon clan will buy your toys to bust a supermarket? Don't you know that we are a Federation ally? The Federation won't go nuts if it learns that its ally obtained these trifles.'
'Well, that's different,' Denny agreed. 'I want two million a piece and a new passport because I won't like to be here when they start figuring out who should get a medal for providing a Federation ally with military support.'
In a month, the next scheduled ship arrived at Nordwest bringing food rations in bright boxes. The ship was going to take retired scanning equipment away. Loading was completely automatic and the only person at the dock was Denny Hill. Theoretically, the regulations required the presence of two people, a civilian and a military operator that would track each other's actions. But only a quarter of the positions was currently filled at the base and the only thing that the regulations were good for was taking memory in the computer.
Denny Hill counterfeited a backup copy of the loading papers and locked it in a safe. He was not able to fake the files in the computer itself — the computer was protected too well.
Three days later Denny shoved Jack the Ripper virus into the computer, the virus overwrote all of the files' headers and Denny's boss told him to clean the computer up and to recover all the documentation from the backup copies.
Denny pulled the fake backup copy out of the safe and wrote it to the hard drive removing the last traces of his real activities.
It took three hours for the cargo ship Antei, license number 284-AP-354 registered at the planet of Agassa, to reach Lakhan spaceport. Lore Sigel was in charge of freight shipping at the spaceport. A while ago, Lore had been a very promising young man but his social-anarchy tendencies interfered with his career. He spent three days in jail for offending the public — he attempted to register a pig bought at a pig farm as a candidate on the presidential elections in Austria. He was a witness at a number of notorious terrorist trials and he had a habit of constantly moving from one place to another. All this finally brought Lore to this small provincial planet where he worked as a cargo department manager.
Lore employed as longshoremen five or six friends that nobody else would hire since the central department of security wouldn't recommend it.
Not surprisingly, the unloading of the ship with license number 284-AP-354 started very late, after the ship's yawning crew walked away to sleep in a hotel next to the port.
Lore and his friends unloaded the boxes with the retired radio scanning equipment. There were twelve more boxes in the ship than had been registered. The identification numbers on the extra boxes were removed and the boxes were packed in the new containers and sealed. The new containers were loaded on the ship Astra flying to the planet Issan. Accordingly to the documentation, the new containers housed geo-physical equipment for the company Ambeko.
The containers, however, never reached the planet Issan. Three hours after the ship's departure, the captain extracted a box out of his pocket. Out of the box, he extracted a paralyzed lightning beetle, a dweller of Lakhan deserts known for its ability to generate 370V electric sparks. The beetle was placed under the front panel cover of the control room. Having regained its senses the beetle discharged, causing minor damages to the main flight control system. The ship had to exit hyperspace and the crew began repairs. While the technicians were digging out the beetle and fixing the problems, twelve containers were dumped off the ship.
The ship soon continued its way. The reason for its deviation off route in deep space was documented and presented to the authorities in a bottle with formaldehyde. The authorities reprimanded the crew for its lack of attention that had let the malevolent representative of the local fauna infiltrate the ship and the captain didn't receive a bonus.
Meanwhile, a small ship picked up the containers; since the ship was on a charter flight, it didn't really require all the justifying paperwork. The ship's name was Laissa. The documentation accompanying the twelve containers was changed again and the containers were now marked as medical equipment. The ship was flying to the planet of Weia, to the Assalah spaceport.
On the seventeenth of the month of rains, Terence Bemish got a phone call in the evening. Shavash was on the line. They discussed a Chakhar nickel facility construction project for a while and then Shavash advised his friend to sell Inissa Logging Corporation stocks in case Terence had them.
'Oh, by the way, Shavash recalled, 'a charter ship Laissa will arrive at your spaceport tomorrow. Could you make sure that customs don't bother them too much and check that their freight could be stored in some nice storage facility.'
'All my storage space is crammed,' Bemish replied.
'Why don't you load it into 17B?'
17B storage was empty — it had been built for military equipment and its walls, covered with lead sheets, insulated all irradiation.
'What about Giles?'
'Giles won't object,' Shavash snorted.
The next day, the phone rang in Bemish's office. It was Ashinik.
'A charter flight has arrived,' Ashinik said…
'Is it Laissa?'
'Yes.'
'Send them to 17B storage.'
In half an hour Ashinik came to Bemish to get storage 'keys' — its electronic locks required an ingenious system of codes and, additionally, it had a microprocessor that could recognize the owner's retina pattern. The lock could store ten retina patterns in its memory but it currently had only two — Bemish's and Giles'. Only Bemish, however, knew the password.
The cargo delivered by Laissa was registered as medical equipment. That was not surprising. Every day, three hundred tons of medical equipment passed the spaceport. Accordingly to Bemish's calculations, every Weian peasant had by now one and a half CAT scanner.
Medical equipment was the only hardware that could be imported without tariffs and a lot of stuff entered the planet registered as such. It would be pretty hard to transport an oil drill, even disassembled, in cardboard boxes from Pepsi-Cola.
This time the cargo was too heavy to be unloaded by a forklift. Bemish watched for a while loading platforms with huge cubes, sealed and painted in green color, moving inside the classified storage area.
