“Good night, my fellow Arcadians, and thank you for listening.”
Politics, Purchase, And Personnel
Karl Huenemann sat staring out the windows of his living room, eyes unfocused, for a long time after the prime minister’s speech ended.
Gerard Laporte couldn’t protect him from this. Milbank had not made it about Huenemann, he had made it about budgets and priorities. And there, Milbank had his caucus solidly behind him.
Milbank had gotten the funding for the project by a bare majority, with some help from the other side of the aisle. His vision of a hyperspace-enabled future was compelling, and the House and even the Chamber gave the first-term prime minister the funding and authority he needed to push the project forward.
Now, the seasoned second-term prime minister had called it quits – at least for now – and he would have both the House and Chamber behind him. If the project’s biggest booster had decided it was probably too soon, he would pull a bunch of the people who had supported the project as well as everyone who had been against it.
That would be a flood even Laporte could not hold back.
Karl Huenemann believed in the project and thought it was very important to the future of Arcadia. Its cancellation was gut-wrenching.
Gerard Laporte was disappointed, too, but for different reasons. Milbank had considered the project very important. Laporte didn’t, but he was willing to go along. To horse trade with Milbank over it. If Milbank wanted this project, he would have to give Laporte the things Laporte wanted. He was more than willing to play that game.
But if Milbank cancelled the project, that took away a big bargaining chip.
Laporte started considering how this would change the lay of the land for getting his other legislation through, given he couldn’t threaten the hyperspace project to get Milbank’s support.
Huenemann’s situation didn’t even begin to figure into Laporte’s calculations.
“I think Rob did a nice job there,” Jessica Chen-Jasic said.
“So do I,” Chen MinChao said.
“Should we make an inquiry?”
“What? Can we buy your project?”
“No,” Jessica said. “Ask can we buy the property. The project site is forty acres adjacent to the shuttleport, and right next to the forty acres where our shuttleport freight-handling operation is. Most natural thing in the world is to ask, since he’s canceled the project, is that property available? We could use the room for future expansion.”
“It’s the adjacent property?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then yes, I think we should ask about it,” MinChao said. “Give Rob the idea, if he hasn’t had it already.”
“I will drop him a note. Ask him about buying the property. He need not expend funds to clear the site. We’ll take it as-is.”
MinChao chuckled.
“Yes. Yes, that would work.”
JieMin and ChaoLi had watched the speech on their heads-up displays and now sat together talking about it in their living room. The boys were down for the night, and the girls were in their room, so they had the living room to themselves.
“Is he really canceling the project, do you think, or is he opening the door to selling it to the Chen as scrap?” JieMin asked.
After several meetings with Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu, ChaoLi knew more about what was really going on than JieMin did at this point. But that was family deep secrets, so she had to be careful.
“Could be either, really, but you know Milbank really thinks the hyperspace drive is important.”
JieMin nodded.
“I think so, too. I hope so, anyway. It would be good to see it succeed.”
“Oh, I think we will, JieMin. I think we will see it succeed.”
Rob Milbank looked at Jessica’s note. Now there was an idea. It solved a lot of other problems, too.
Normally for the government to sell something, it had to go out on auction. Sort of like purchases being put out for bids, but the other way around.
However, in the specific case of selling government-owned land for development purposes, the prime minister could sell land without putting it out on auction, as long as there were comparables and he got the fair-market price.
Selling the forty acres the project was on at the spaceport, then, he could do without going out to auction. He could do it without approvals from the legislature, too, for that matter.
Those forty-acre parcels had one-hundred-foot frontages and were four hundred forty feet deep, which meant there were almost four hundred of them around the two-mile-square expanse of the shuttleport. Most of those had not yet been sold. There was only so much demand at this point, but the government had known the future would eventually gobble up those spaces as the colony grew.
Right now, though, the land was cheap. He could even discount it because the Chen would take the land in ‘as-is’ condition, without him spending money to clear it off.
Probably best to charge the going rate, though, if Chen Zufu was comfortable with it. That avoided embarrassing questions. Selling it to the Chen, though, who owned the plot next door, was a no-brainer. That was in the prime minister’s purview, as well, to sell it to the party that could make the best use of it.
He sent a one-word answer back to Jessica: ‘Perfect.’
It all happened very quickly. On Wednesday morning, Milbank instructed the government personnel office to lay off everyone on the project. No exceptions.
Anyone working on the site was sent home and the facility locked up.
Milbank also asked his legal office to draw up the sale of the property to the Chen family, which was organized as a corporation under colony law, at the currently listed price for the open parcels.
The property was already fenced, to keep people from wandering into a rocket-engine test or the like, so there was nothing that had to be done there. There was already a guard
