Free Shadow of Victory - eARC by David Weber Page A

been unable to produce it locally, thanks to Ismail Reichart’s raiders.
    Reichart had seen his opportunity in the midst of Chotěboř’s preoccupation with the komáři , not that Kumang Astro Control would have been much of an obstacle to him at the best of times, and his fleet of renegade mercenaries had hit the star system like a hammer. They’d left Chotěboř itself relatively unscathed—they’d had no desire to encounter the komár on its own ground—but they’d looted and stripped every bit of the system’s painfully built up industrial infrastructure. They’d taken even the planetary power sats, driving Chotěboř back onto surface-generated power, with all the crippling limitations that had implied, until it could somehow cobble up replacements…once Reichart finally deigned to depart with his loot.
    Leaving Chotěboř totally unable to implement the solution to its desperate health crisis out of its own resources.
    And that was why President Hruška, at the instigation of newly elected Vice President Cabrnoch, had taken the only option he’d seen and petitioned the Solarian League’s Office of Frontier Security for aid. Which OFS had provided…under its customary terms.
    Which was how Chotěboř had effectively completely lost control of the resources of its own star system.
    Under pressure from Frontier Security to “maximize income generation potential” for the system’s people, Hruška had issued yet another decree, setting aside the constitutional prohibitions designed to prevent outside exploitation of the system. He’d had no constitutional authority to do anything of the sort, but the Nejvyšší soud, Chotěboř’s supreme court, had flatly refused to take up the single lawsuit challenging his actions. Šiml had known every man and woman who’d joined to file that suit, although he hadn’t been formally associated with it. He’d wanted to be, but he’d been in too much public disfavor at the moment, scapegoated with responsibility for failing to solve the crisis himself by Cabrnoch and Žďárská. At the same time, he had to acknowledge Vilušínský’s point. However people might feel about it now, at the time Hruška's actions had been supported by a huge majority of Chotěbořians.
    Of course, quite a few of them—and their children—were suffering a severe case of buyer’s remorse these days.
    In return for a sizable down payment—and it had been sizable, by Chotěbořian standards, Šiml conceded—in a deal brokered by the “disinterested” facilitators of OFS, Frogmore-Wellington Aeronautics and Iwahara Interstellar had received two hundred-T-year leases, with an option to renew, on virtually all of Kumang’s deep-space resources. That infusion of cash, coupled with OFS technical assistance, had permitted the final design and fabrication of the anti-komár nanotech which had reduced the threat from the status of a deadly plague to a simply serious health threat which could be controlled, if not eradicated, by the prophylactic measures already in place.
    And all it had cost was debt peonage for the entire star system.
    As part of the articles of agreement Hruška had signed, OFS had undertaken the “reclamation” of the infrastructure ravaged by Reichart’s attack. It had been rebuilt to something approximating its pre-raid level, and as part of the reclamation, OFS had assumed administrative responsibility for it. As soon as Chotěboř managed to pay off the loans the League had extended to it through OFS, ownership of that infrastructure would, naturally, revert to Chotěboř. In the meantime, though, OFS would be required to charge a “reasonable fee” to defray its operational costs in Kumang. The last time Šiml had seen an accounting of the debt, interest, those “reasonable fees,” and penalties for chronically late payments on it had increased the original amount by approximately two hundred and ten percent.
    And the payments were always late, since there