"Charles Stross - SEAQ And Destroy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

News is coming in of a bloody attack on Wall Street. As trading opened in New York
at 13:00 G.M.T. the ailing infotech giant IBM (US) launched a hostile take-over bid for
Mercury Telecom PLC in London. Fund transfers to Europe so far total over ten billion dollars,
believed to be close to IBM's entire liquid assets. Mercury is the main PSTN and ISDN
operator for the London Stock Exchange and handles the Stock Exchange Automated
Quotation system, SEAQ. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission have been notified, but
no immediate action is possible because inspectors are working at saturation levels
elsewhere in the City.
It appears that IBM has been controlled in large measure by shell corporations
registered in Columbia and Peru for the past three months. CEO Debbie Beagle has refused
to comment on allegations that her corporation is cooperating with the Soviet offensive in an
attempt to dismember Western Europe's high-technology industries.
Closer to home, EuroBank has launched a counter-offensive before the close of
trading in Moscow, with a bid for shares in the state airline Aeroflot and a back-up investment
of ECU 500m in BSF. Amstrad and News International's Sky Channel have announced a
consortium bid for BSB in an attempt to consolidate the satellite TV market under one
umbrella. Glaxo, Ciba-Geigy, and the NHS Pharmatech division are reported to be entering
the fray with a bid for several small Russian pharmaceutical manufacturing units; and the
smell of money may drag British Power and even NHS(PLC) into the trade war.
The government remains silent on the issue so far, but a spokesman for Number Ten
Downing Street has re-affirmed the Prime Ministers' commitment to the free market. "The
share issue for British Monarchy PLC will not be jeopardized," he emphasized. "There is no
alternative!"
The Queen was unavailable for comment.
In Europe there has generally been a measured response to the carnage. Fiat,
Dassault-Renault, and Airbus Industrie are conducting intensive merger negotiations in
conjunction with BMW, Porsche-SEAT and Arianespace, apparently in an attempt to inflate
their group capital beyond any credible takeover attempt. The fact that this would
automatically be viewed as monopolistic is irrelevant because the move is purely intended as
a short-term defensive measure тАУ safety in numbers, and the more zeros on the balance
sheet the better.

NewsBurst:15:45 G.M.T.
In a move that has shocked industry bystanders, IBM (US) has dismissed the entire
board of Mercury Telecom and moved a special Emergency Task Group into the boardroom.
MT apparently held out for a full twenty-seven minutes under the intensive IBM bidding which
raised the price of shares from 198 to 323 in less than half an hour. The price of shares has
suddenly slumped into the red, with a post-takeover quotation of 121 delivered five minutes
ago by human messenger. The SEAQ service appears to have been overloaded by the
rapidity of events, with priority going to financial transactions; many smaller desks are
apparently 'flying blind' on expert systems alone and praying that their software has no
hidden bugs in it.
Judith Richmond, a broker with Copperhouse-Gerbil, had this to say:
"Things are just going crazy today. It's not a classic melt down because some shares
are going through the roof in real time, but it's like a shooting war's broken out. Nothing is
stable any more, and all we small brokers can do is keep our heads down when the big
countercurrent exchange laundries go into action. We're spilling a million ECU's a second
right now, draining into the Soviet economy; it's sheer havoc. I'm not going to predict what's
going to happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow I expect to see a lot of dealers
throwing themselves under BMW's ... or Lada's."