"Bunch, Chris & Cole, Allan - Sten 01 - Sten" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bunch Chris)

Eventually, atop the catch-as-catch-can collection of metal The Eye was mountedЧCompany headquarters linked to the original cylinder core. The sixteen-kilometer-wide mushroom was, in Sten's time, only two hundred years old, added after the Company centralized.

Below The Eye was the cargo loading area, generally reserved for the Company's own ships. Independent traders docked offworld and were forced to accept the additional costs of cargo and passenger transfer by Company space-lighter.

Under the dock was the visitors' dome. A normal, wide-open port, except that every credit spent by a trader or one of his crew went directly into the Company's accounts.

The visitors' dome was as far South as offworlders were permitted. The Company very definitely didn't want anyone else dealing withЧor even meetingЧtheir workers.

Vague rumors floated around the galaxy about Vulcan. But there had never been an Imperial Rights Commission for Vulcan. Because the Company produced.

The enormous juggernaut delivered exactly what the Empire needed for centuries. And the Company's internal security had kept its sector very quiet.

The Eternal Emperor was grateful. So grateful that he had named Thoresen's grandfather to the nobility. And the Company ground on.

Any juggernaut will continue to roll strictly on inertia, whether it is the Persian Empire or General Motors of the ancients, or the sprawling Conglomerate of more recent history. For a while. If anyone noticed in Sten's time that the Company hadn't pioneered any manufacturing techniques in a hundred years, or that innovation or invention was discouraged by the Company's personnel department, it hadn't been brought to the Baron's attention.

Even if anyone had been brave enough or foolish enough to do so, it wasn't necessary. Baron Thoresen was haunted by the fact that what his grandfather created was slowly crumbling beneath him. He blamed it on his father, a cowering toady who had allowed bureaucrats to supplant the engineers. But even if the third Thoresen had been a man of imagination, it still would probably have been impossible to bring under control the many-headed monster the elder Thoresens had created.

The Baron had grown up with the raw courage and fascination for blood-combatЧphysical or socialЧof his grandfather, but none of the old man's innate honesty. When his father suddenly disappeared offworldЧnever to be seen againЧthere was no question that the young man would head the Company's board of directors.

Now, he was determined to revitalize what his grandfather had begun. But not by turning the Company upside down and shaking it out. Thoresen wanted much more than that. He was obsessed with the idea of a kendo masterstroke.

Bravo Project.

And now it was only a few years from fruition.

Under the Baron was his board, and the lesser Executives. Living and working entirely in The Eye, they were held to the Company not only by iron-clad contracts and high pay but that sweetest of all perksЧalmost unlimited power.

Under the Execs were the TechniciansЧhighly skilled, well-treated specialists. Their contracts ran for five to ten years.

When his contract expired, a Tech could return home a rich man, to set up his own businessЧwith the Company, of course, holding exclusive distribution rights to any new products he might have developedЧor to retire.

For the Exec or Tech, Vulcan was very close to an industrial heaven.

For the Migs, it was hell.

It's significant that the winner of the Company's Name-Our-Planet contest, a bright Migrant-Unskilled worker, had used the prize money to buy out his contract and passage out as far from Vulcan as possible.

Fellahin, oakie, wetbackЧthere will always he wandering laborers to perform scutwork. But just as the Egyptian fellah would marvel at the mechanical ingenuity of the loads, so the twentieth-century assembly-line grunt would be awed by the likes of Amos Sten.

For Amos, one world could never be enough. Doing whatever it took for a full belly, a liter of gutbuster, and a ticket offworld, he was the man to fix your omni, get your obsolete harvester to working, or hump your new bot up six flights of stairs.

And then move on.

His wife, Freed, was a backwater farm-world kid with the same lust to see what the next planetfall brought. Eventually, they guessed, they'd find a world to settle on. One where there weren't too many people, and a man and a woman wouldn't have to sweat for someone else's business. Until they found it, though, any place was better than what they'd already seen.

Until Vulcan.

The recruiter's pitch sounded ideal.