Senthil Lambda had a nose for failures. He was a seer who foretold bankruptcy. He could see other passengers’ eyes brimming with hope, their nose smelling growth opportunities, and their mouth salivating as they looked down on the barren planet from their zit of a window. He nodded despairingly, 90% of them won’t make it and end as bonded labor for the banks who had financed their trips from Earth. They would spend the rest of their lives in dreary, dangerous jobs trying to ward off ballooning interests and slicing only a bit of principal at a time.  

Yet, it was difficult to yank the glimmering tape of greed off their eyes. It was the Great Milky way rush, the age of the trillionaires, the stuff of dreams. Senthil didn’t have any such illusions, but he did dip his beak in the mad rush. At the young age of seven-and-twenty, a bulky six-footer Senthil decided to become a recovery agent. 

It wasn’t a coveted job, and people normally hated him as he squeezed them to pay their dues. 

That’s how he found himself on the small-crowded shuttle descending towards Registaan, a planet whose name meant the desert. His target was Timothy Chang, a man who seemed to have bitten more than he could chew. 

He was the first one to get out of the spaceport when they landed. He immediately hailed a cab.

As he looked out of the window, the red sun glared down on the scorched planet. There wasn’t a pukka road – just a gravel- path on which the rickety automobile lurched up and down, he bumped his head against the frame of the car. The buildings were few and far between, he hardly saw a soul. Just mounds and mounds of sand – he couldn’t imagine living here.

It came to a screeching halt outside a plush hotel. He was happy to get out.

He went inside, it was empty.

“Hello, is anyone here?” He asked the quiet room, as his voice echoed across the hall. It was like a cathedral, cavernous and covered in wonky murals on all sides. The place seemed to have aged like wine, just badly. It had few moldy chintz sofas with the sponge peeling off in some places. He had booked one of the best hotels around here, and this was what he got. 

“How may I help you, sirrrr?” The voice startled him, he looked around to see a wiry man behind the counter, with thick glasses resting on the bridge of his nose.

“I have a booking under Senthil Lambda,” he said tersely.

The guy behind the counter referred to a register, where only a single name was scrawled in the entire book – his. Nobody came here.

“Ah, yes. We have your booking sirrr. If you can sit here awhile, we would have the room ready for you in no time.”  

Senthil raised his eyebrows. 

The concierge looked apologetically at him, “We need to clean the rooms now. Don’t you worry sir, it would be done in a jiffy!”

The concierge whistled. Senthil didn’t realize it immediately, but then he heard a rustling sound like many crinkling papers, he looked at the source of the sound.

He gasped at what he saw. A giant snake was slowly coiling towards him. It had a brutal-looking face with a short snout and its mouth was open, revealing a thousand tiny teeth. His primary instinct was to run.

“Don’t be alarmed, sirrr. It’s just the help to clean your room. Besides, it is vegetarian.”

But that didn’t calm his bursting heart. The snake passed by, just inches away from him. It was easily about fifty feet long and quite thick. She must be requiring an entire farm to satiate her day’s appetite, good that she was a vegetarian, he wouldn’t like to end up as a morsel. He didn’t even want to think about how she would be cleaning his room.

The concierge seemed to have anticipated his question, “Naageshis are an indigenous species, they are homemakers by nature. They like keeping a place clean, it is integral for their survival. Because of their metabolism, they could leave quite a stink if they don’t clean up the place in which they stay. And stink attracts the microbes deadly to its life – so it’s a survival mechanism.”

“They mustn’t have heard about deodorants, then?”

“Their saliva is a natural sanitizer; the room would smell quite fresh.”

He winced; his room was getting doused by a snake’s saliva. 

It was some time before the room was ready for him, the concierge presented the key with a flourish. It was a quaint-looking door on the ground floor.

“Isn’t the snake still inside?” He asked hesitantly. 

“Naageshi, and no – she must have left through her duct in the room, she has separate plumbing.”  

He gingerly stepped inside the room; his expectations had sunk low by this time. But he was surprised when he found that it was okay. There was an anti-grav bed in the corner, the bathroom was a standard affair. There was a personalized interactive mini room for him to connect with anyone across the galaxy. His only worry was a circular door that had been etched in one side of the wall through which the dreadful Naageshi would have gone. He resolved to close it tightly when he went to sleep at night.

The room oddly smelled of lemon. 

“Have a pleasant stay here,” the concierge bowed deeply and showed himself out of the door. He dumped his bag onto the floor, flicked on the switch for the anti-grav bed, and set it to -2g, he liked a firm, bouncy bed. Slowly the mattress unfolded itself and started floating in the air. He hung his suit in the cupboard and rolled the sleeves of his shirt.

 From his suitcase, he fished out his holo-glasses and went into the interactive mini-room. From the inside, the box-like compartment was colored leafy green. A plush chair and a bare, sturdy wooden table were the only pieces of furniture. He flicked on the glasses. He connected them to the mini room via Bluetooth and immediately, the view changed around him. There was the Perp board where he had a bunch of photos of the defaulter along with known associates. There were squiggle marks that tracked his movement from the time his business loan was sanctioned and disbursed to his account. It was not an invasion of privacy as when people signed for loans that took them to outer space, to safeguard their investment, the bank regularly tracked their movements as long as they didn’t place a bug on their person – bodily intervention was legally prohibited. 

He also had a ledger on his left where Chang’s personal and business transactions were listed. The bank had also interviewed a couple of people who had been in regular touch with him before he vanished – the interview transcripts were already loaded in the cassette-player kept virtually on the desk. He had briefly gone through the material but now it was time to dive deeper. 

Till the first pilot test, Chang had used a very small portion of the fund. From the transcripts, he found out that his prey was a recluse, and had been in contact with only a few people – one of them being the balloon manufacturer.

The balloon was Chang’s design, but he seemed to have convinced the manufacturer to put in additional investment in his factory by promising consistent future orders. The manufacturer would be upset, Senthil would start working on him. 

By the time he was finished, it was late afternoon. He ordered food, freshened up & put on a similar suit to the one he had worn in. He walked out of the hotel and to the corner store that rented out cars to the travelers. He gave one look at its dreary collection of decrepit automobiles and thought there was no way he would be seen traveling in them.

The owner, a squat balding gent suggested, “You can always take the truck!”

He pointed towards the opposite side of the road, where monster wheels in various colors were parked. A childhood urge overpowered him and without thinking for a moment longer – he paid for a sleek black truck. 

A wide grin spread on his face as he rolled the truck out of the parking lot, with the manufacturer’s factory on the map. It was an exhilarating feeling, being out in the open again – the smote of dust hitting his cheeks. He had butterflies in his stomach as the truck jumped from one dune to another. 

As he rode in joyful silence, he thought of the state of the economy of the planet. How an economy dependent on oil had lost currency in this day and age – there was a time when man depended on oil for all his needs: from plastics to transportation. 

But how to transport oil in space – from an oil-rich planet to the barren ones in need? It was a challenge that had stumped many businessmen, no solution emerged. Crude came to be used by producer planets only. Renewables and nuclear fusion became the main sources of energy. So Registaan was a poor planet despite being rich in hydrocarbons. They could take care of themselves but could never think of getting rich beyond their means. 

So consumed was he by this line of thought that he didn’t notice a large swirl of dust building nearby. His heart shot out of his chest when a giant Naageshi jumped out of the sand – leaping in the air for a brief golden moment and diving back in, digging deep into the sand while its tail bobbed wildly in the air – till it vanished completely. A brief distance ahead another swirl built up, and the snake jumped out again.

It was translucent green in color, its inner organs visible in the afternoon red light of the sun. 

His feet flat on the pedal, he raced the Naageshi. 

By the time he had reached the industrial belt, three Naageshis were diving alongside. When he brought his truck to a standstill, they all dived within the ground in glee. He hopped down and landed on his feet. He could feel pinpricks in his legs and hands, the body was tingling with action. He had a slight spring in his step as he entered Maverok Rubber Products. 

As soon as he entered, there was a distinct smell of burnt rubber. It was a cavernous shop floor, buzzing with activity. People were drawing out sheets of rubber from a giant machine at one end, while on the other, they were molding it into all kinds of articles. 

They looked at him, then quickly averted their eyes. Senthil smiled to himself, this place was teeming with immigrants, and they were still paying off their loans to the sponsoring banks. He walked towards the MD’s office – it was a plastic box overlooking the factory. He took two steps at a time, and before the secretary could stop him – he walked right in. 

The MD was irritated, but when he told him the name of the defaulter he was after – he warmed up.

“That rascal asked me to invest in a special kind of die – and you know the size of the balloons. They are massive and something that hadn’t been tried before. That put a gaping hole in my pocket, but that greasy git had assured me that the prospects were good, and we would soon be rolling in real money. THEN HE RAN AWAY!”

He nodded politely, “And you know where he went?”

The proprietor, a Mr. Salir, scratched his balls as he replied, “Beats me, I haven’t a clue. But the pilot was so successful, it was the largest article made by this factory – I was so proud of my boys and girls. It would have been a good business if he had stayed around.”

His nose pricked at that, “Why do you think that?”

“Few prospective customers also showed up at the pilot that day. They were impressed when they saw my rubber and what it was capable of – boy they were eager to get going. We were perplexed when Tim left, people generally abscond when things are bad.”

Salir opened a box of donuts which he didn’t offer to him.

“What’s so special about this rubber?” 

“Did you encounter the Naageshis while coming down here?” The owner asked with a sly smile on his face.

Senthil nodded.

“Naageshis have explosive metabolism – very high temperatures, goes up to 1800 C. Have seen nothing like it. And yet when you touch a Naageshi, it’s pleasantly warm – they have a robust heat displacement system.”

Salir got up from the desk, he was so bulky that the desk pushed ahead. He jerked his shirt once to get rid of the fallen bits of his doughnut. 

“Let me show you.”

They went back to the factory floor and entered a dark, cavernous room on the opposite end of the factory. 

He opened the lift door and held it out for him. Senthil went in, and the paunchy man followed. Salir punched a stubby finger on the dashboard and they went down. The deeper they went, more & more – it started smelling like shit. The temperature rose.

The lift jerked to a stop – hot, humid air from the bubbling pit greeted them.  It was a different world out here. 

Pitch-darkness dotted with pockets of halogen light to illuminate the path. Senthil followed Salir at a distance as he pointed his mobile torch at the cave. There were red algae everywhere, it was like rust clinging to the underbelly of rocks. 

The cave opened to a larger area. It seemed to be directly beneath the shop floor. There were rows and rows of transparent tubes filled with water. He had that weird feeling when he couldn’t determine whether it was warm or cold. 

There was a look of incomprehension on his face that the owner noticed, “We have filled these pipes with chilled water – flash cooling.”

As they walked by, harried workers in lab coats gathered around one of the pipes where a plume of orange had just burst through the water. If he hadn’t had the contextual awareness, he would have remarked it as a piece of art. He knew better. 

“So there is a Naageshi shitting on the opposite end of this tube?”

Salir didn’t reply but continued walking towards the fag end. The Naageshi was squatting on the other end of the translucent interface. 

“They enjoy the frigid coolness our potties afford. That’s why they come here to squat. Their guts are on fire, this helps them calm the roiling within and shed some temperature.”

He pointed to a studious bespectacled gentleman who was hunched over in his seat, poring over the readouts from a bunch of monitors. One of the monitors showcased a magnified image of the opening. He immediately recoiled and tried to remove that image from his mind. 

Salir laughed at his apparent discomfort, “You get used to it. Besides, it’s a paying job – people don’t mind in this economy.” 

“What do you do with the shit?”

“This shit is fibrous. We get the crumb, mix it with curatives, and make a rubber pre-compound. It can be used in all kinds of niche applications.”

“Like sending a giant inflatable balloon in space?”

“Especially in sending a giant inflatable balloon in space. These balloons can withstand high temperatures, have great abrasion resistance, are fire-proof, thermally insulative, and electrically conductive. So when you shoot a gasoline-filled balloon in space, propelled by a railgun, it can withstand all the rigors of the atmosphere.  It’s an amazing material.”

“It also has a low-impact resistance?”

“That’s the key, isn’t it? It bursts open when it hits a surface. Amazing when you think about it.”

He agreed with Salir, it was amazing. But he wanted to get out of there, it was too hot and humid. Senthil sighed in relief when they went up.

“His aborted endeavor has indeed set me back, I won’t disagree. But it was working so well – he had created a rugged transportation system.”

“Do you know of any person who was close to Chang, who could provide an answer to that?”

Salir scratched his balls again as they came out of the factory, “Errr…, he was a bit of a recluse who didn’t have many friends – no social life at all. There was, of course, his business partner – a Mr. Aziz Kaplan, his childhood friend whom he brought along here. They started the business together.”

That was new to him. In the bank records, he hadn’t come across any Aziz that Chang was working with. That’s why he believed in footwork over armchair analysis. 

“And where can I find this Aziz Kaplan?”

“He has an office in the city. Chang even swindled his old chaddi-buddy, though he is doing quite well by himself these days – he is into telecom exchange.”

At the entrance of the factory, they shook hands.

Salir looked at the sun dipping below the horizon turning the sky crimson red, “Darkness would fall soon. You should go to your hotel, there are nasty things which come out at night.”

Senthil Lambda shook his hand once again and jumped on to his truck. He revved it to a start and waved Salir as he went by. While it was hot in the morning, the temperature had plummeted drastically now. His suit offered perfunctory protection against the chill, it was not adaptable to this climate of fluctuating heat and cold.

The sound of the wind carried the guttural growls, which raised the hair on the back of his hands. If the truck was to upend, he would be stuck out here at the mercy of the wild nature. Despite the computer assist, he traveled slowly and cautiously. He could see red eyes and large wolfish silhouettes that tracked his movement. He shuddered.  

Though his nerves were frayed, he reached the hotel in one piece.

“Thank god you are okay, sir. At night, it gets dangerous around here,” the concierge said with some concern. Senthil was tired to the bones.

 As he was having a steaming hot shower, he thought about Chang’s business partner – Aziz. Chang brought him out here, asked him to invest money, and left him behind. He knew that the exchange business was sometimes profitable but often it was very risky. 

As the people spread across the galaxy, communication became all the more crucial. Initially, communication traveled at the speed of light, so the conversation between two people across different parts of the galaxy lacked spice, there was a need to bring the spark back to the bedroom. When wormholes were discovered, some genius had the idea of shoving the cables inside them and thus nearly instantaneous communication became possible. It was a complex setup of satellites and cables and highways of information that sometimes-resembled pipelines, a thick network of coils – umbilical cords that connected man to rest of the humanity. 

For effective running of the entire enterprise, the talk-time “minutes” started trading on the bourses. It resembled the commodity trading market and insider trading was encouraged so that market moved towards instant price discovery so that the services remain affordable for the users. Aziz had to be a broadband service provider catering to the local market. The prices to the customers were capped by the authorities, the only way his business would be thriving was if he were buying the “minutes” cheaply, and that required an insider who helped him out…

After the bath, he gorged on the paneer butter masala and naan. He thought of calling one of his girlfriends, but he was quite tired. So he pushed off the robes, flicked the lights off, and within moments, fell into a deep sleep.

He woke up early the next morning and turned his truck towards the city center. Despite the highway, he preferred the dunes as he got to surf alongside the Naageshis. They stopped at the periphery of the city and reluctantly – he had to climb back on the road.

The buildings in the city were tall and had bulbous structures on the top. They were gilded with gold and silver, though it seemed to have colored a bit because of pollution. It was a metropolis in a mid-life crisis, there was a buzz of activity but there was a mundanity that had settled in the place.  It was in one such building where the lifts didn’t work, Senthil found Aziz in an office that had a large board stenciled out in front, ‘Rugpick Financial solutions’.

A receptionist looked up at him as he entered, and she quickly surmised who he was from the suit. She hurriedly called her boss and within moments he came out to greet him.

He was thin and wiry and had a curly thatch of hair. He wore half-sleeved shirts, and there was a generous growth of hair on the back of his hands. After they were done dispensing formalities, he ushered him to his cabin. Unlike the reception, the office was bare and focused only on the essentials. Windows looked out into the deeper recesses of the office and through one of them, he could see dozens of men and women hunched on phones – shouting and cursing, cajoling and threatening, begging and ordering over their phones. Their faces were animated and there was an urgency in their movements. He surmised that it was a trading pit. 

 “You have got a neat little operation here,” he remarked.

“Lately, things have turned around for us,” Aziz said with his fingers steepled in a pyramid in front of him. His face was pockmarked and inscrutable. 

“But they haven’t been like that before, is that right? Your best friend brought you out here, in the middle of nowhere, took away your money, and left you stranded.”

Aziz betrayed no emotions but stared at him in stony silence. After a while, he said, “You can say so. But this place isn’t such a shithole that I once thought it was. As you can see, we have been keeping busy.”

“You trade in just the broadband minutes?”

“We do a lot more than that – oil, natural gas, internet packs, talk-time minutes, and various other commodities and derivatives. We are in the minor league, but are comfortable with what we are doing?”

“And you are also a service provider of the talk-time minutes on the planet?”

“This is the HQ. We have operations in various places around the planet – mainly the northern hemisphere. It has been a good business.”

“I don’t doubt that for a minute.” 

Though Aziz had a profitable joint, Senthil doubted whether he could make him pay on behalf of his friend. There would be a solid corporate veil that he wouldn’t be able to pierce. He decided to change his tack.

“Why do you think your friend left behind such a promising venture?”

Aziz shrugged his shoulders.

“Couldn’t you have continued the business – you had the rail gun, there was a company that supplied you with inflatable balloons, this planet is filled with oil and if I am not wrong – there is a giant rug floating in space.”

“Hasn’t the bank already taken care of all these assets?”

“It has, but it’s quite a small portion of the overall loan. It seems like your buddy took off with most of the money. The fact remains though – you could have convinced the bank and continued the operations.”

“You know our business model?”

“A bit, yes.”

Aziz got up from his chair and fired up the holo-view. 

“Then you know what problem we were trying to solve – that of transportation of crude.”

Senthil nodded.

He continued, “It is an energy source that is available in plenty. This is a unique planet; it has been inhabited by indigenous lifeforms for a long time. That’s why we have crude that is structurally similar to that of erstwhile Earth. But there are many, many planets, satellites, and comets filled with methane – available abundantly but with no means to transport.”

He realized that Aziz had gone into a venture pitch mode without even meaning to. 

“We have a constrained supply of nuclear. It would never match our desire to grow and expand, the only way humanity can fulfill its wish of unbridled expansion is if it unlocks the power of hydrocarbons.”

There was a spark in his eyes. 

“So if we wish to transport crude to different parts of the galaxy – we had to come up with a cost-effective solution. And Chang was phenomenal – he had it all figured out. It came up during one of our drinking sessions, it was quite wacky. The idea remained with us even though we were hungover the next morning. And perchance we found Registaan, it was an ideal planet for our plans – the crude and the rubber, we couldn’t have had it better. We came out here, set up a small office in this very building. We had already identified the rug material. Two months after we had settled here, the fabric company put up the massive sponge-like rug in space.”

He saw the hologram of a craft traveling in space and launching a missile. It exploded at a certain point in space above the planet, expanding into a massive rug.

“We had also met the rubber guy – he was interested in the project. The local crude-extractors were also interested as it would boost their crude sales. We even got them to install the rail guns.”

Senthil raised his eyebrows. 

“Yes, we were quite persuasive or so we thought,” Aziz smiled wryly. “So here it goes – we would pump the crude in the inflatable balloons of rubber made by Maverok rubber products. This rubber is electrically conductive, we dosed it with fillers to make it more so.”

There was a schematic hologram appearing in front of him as the balloon was being held in a metal car mounted on an electromagnetic rail gun. The rails started sizzling with magnetism, and the car pushed forward – building speed. Then it was thrust into the air. 

“The rail gun pushes the car into space. Once it reaches a particular distance, the balloon separates from the car which falls to the ground, further momentum pushes the balloon towards the destination. The rug is a stiff, plastic material – held together in space by gyro-crafts kept at the two wider edges of the rug. That builds in tremendous downward thrust as the balloon impacts – the net is the cancellation of the two forces as the balloon splatters open and deposits its content in the spongy mass of the rug. The crude which had been warming because of the atmospheric resistance impacts the rug and flash-freezes inside the rug because of the minus temperatures in space. Multiple bombardments of balloons can deposit a tremendous amount of crude in the rug. Then the same gyro-craft propels it forward, connecting it to a warp-drive enabled craft which can tug it across larger distance.”

“It can then be taken to the space refineries?”

“Yes, where the rug would be melted – it’s cheap plastic which gets separated in the fractional distillation.”

“But what about the wastage – won’t a sizeable chunk be lost when the balloon makes an impact and during transport through a worm-hole?”

“It would be less than 20%,” Aziz emphasized through gritted teeth. He seemed to have touched a nerve.

“So why did he leave all this behind, Aziz?”

“Because the fucking fishes live in that oil reservoir.”

Ah, that changed everything. There was a strict galactical law on industrial activity around indigenous lifeforms. If they couldn’t pump out the crude, there was no transport. There was no money. 

“You didn’t know that when you were investing the money?” There was a look of sympathy on his face.

Aziz’s face was ashen as he nodded. It was a rookie mistake, they had built the pipeline, only to know that nothing would trickle through it. But then the secrecy around this knowledge would be tremendous, there were oil companies that had sunk in tremendous money in the land – money not their own.

Senthil discreetly clicked the photographs of the office as well as the holodeck, few letterheads on Aziz’s desk of Rugpick Financial solutions which had an off-planet address.  

“You do know that I would need documentary proof of your financial holdings, P&L statements, technical feasibility studies, business model, and the test results of the first pilot. Photographic and video evidence would be much appreciated.”

“Of course, I would extend all support possible to help out the bank,” Aziz was brisk, business-like again. “But please note that Rugpick Financial solutions is a different holding company than Rugpick Logistics, and I had never taken a loan from the bank.”

“Ya of course. You have built a strong moat of legalese around this company,” his hands swept across the office. “We won’t try to breach the corporate veil.” He gave him a wry smile.

He collected all the pertinent documents and left. He had one last stop to make before he scooted off the planet.

It took him some time to get an entry. The oil-field owners didn’t want to entertain a recovery agent, not while they were trying to contain an explosive piece of information that would have a damaging impact on their interests. But then, an old heiress took pity on him and allowed him to putter around her oil field. 

It was dry, dreary land with hard bare Earth. But the old lady told him, it was a gusher. It was so hot that the land itself seemed to be melting. Thankfully, he had left the suit behind – he didn’t mean to linger around, he just came there to verify the claim. 

He had already downloaded the notice from the zonal wildlife authority and the court ruling in the favor of the environmentalists. It seemed like Chang had an earlier intimation of this, so he left before the heat picked up. The creature was called the skimmer and you would find it around dead carcasses. 

As he drove around – it was hard to miss the carcasses. They belonged to bovine creatures with three horns, the skin had been completely picked out so that only the bones remained. A thick viscous liquid seemed to be oozing out of the cattle, but he knew better – it was not leeching out of the cattle, the skimmer was preying on it. It skimmed the skin off dead animals, leaving behind bare-bones as it grew in size.

Once it was fattened and viscous, it would plunge into the oil and promptly split in two. He clicked a few snaps and filed it in the thick dossier he maintained on his target via his holo-glass. 

Officially, he was done and could take the consulting fee from the bank. But he would now travel halfway around the world on a hunch, on a voucher he was sure the bank wouldn’t reimburse unless he delivered results. 

He went back to the hotel and checked out. As he was leaving, he saw the Naageshi enter his room. By now he had gotten used to its enormous girth. He almost felt like patting it when he saw it puking all over the room a slimy, lemony yellow disinfectant from its mouth and rubbing its tongue on the walls and floors – licking it back in.

It was a weird planet, and he was glad to be off.

#

Koche was a casino planet. Glamor, glitz, and the greed of money. It attracted the gambling addicts from all around the zone: rich and poor, the desperate and the desirable. But the cardinal rule never changed: in the long run, the house always won.

The financial district came as an afterthought. The gambling corporates earned so much money, that they needed professionals to manage it. The stock market and the commodities exchange, the bond, and the derivatives market: all cropped up almost overnight to multiply the manifold income of the gambling dens. 

The bank was surprised when Senthil called and asked them to organize a raid on a planet where they had one of the largest branches. 

He reached the location along with the bank team – the address taken from the off-planet letterhead of Rugpick Financial solutions. They found Chang almost immediately. He was flustered to be cornered so, his face almost a question.

“I checked the employee records for Rugpick on Koche, didn’t find you. But had a gut feeling that you must be out here.”

“How?” Chang was a well-groomed professional with the easy charm of a salesman. “I am just a contract employee for this organization. You cannot –”

Senthil’s boys worked swiftly and scoured every computer and holo-glass in the office. Senthil had to admit that the boys were professional. 

“Can’t claim the due amount through Rugpick Financial Solutions? Ya, we know. Your friend Aziz was worried about the same. Do you know why I thought you would be here? Because of an inherent rule in commodities trading – the market appreciated people with inside information and encouraged them to act on it to unlock the real value and give the right price to the consumers. I could understand your friend trading in oil & gas futures because he was tapped into a source of knowledge – the output data of the whole of the planet of Registaan, it is one of the last few planets dealing in crude. But how he was so profitable dealing in ‘telecom minutes’? Who gave him the inside information on the communication packages? Registaan is backwaters – he had no way of churning a profit by sitting there. It had to be his chaddi-buddy who helped him in getting out of the hole he has landed his friend because of the Oil logistics business.”

“Sir, we found it!” One of the boys shouted from the other end of the office.

There was a look of thorough disappointment on Chang’s face.

Senthil gave a wide grin, “You do know what he is talking about, right? Your personal wealth – stocks, bonds, cash, and ownership records. Koche is also a tax-free haven, your money had to be deposited here.”

“How do you sleep at night?” The charm and suavity were gone, replaced by a rankled hostility.

“Like a baby. Okay boys,” he clapped his hands. “Tell the bank we found the money. Mr. Chang, just so you know – the bank won’t just claim the principal and the interest, it would also charge you for the cost to track you down. Let me tell you this, it’s going to be a bomb.”

At this point, his targets normally told him that they would fight it out in the court of law and got colorful in their abuses. Laughing, Senthil walked out of the office.