Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

transparent. The man couldn’t act to save his life. He had no sense of his own face, no awareness of how to conceal emotion. It made him seem enormously stupid. For an instant Lem tried imagining the man doing King Lear or Prospero, and the idea was more than a little revolting. Falstaff is more to your liking, chubby, except sapped of all wit and humor.
    “I think someone in the company may be trying to usurp my father by discrediting him to investors,” said Lem.
    Ramdakan laughed. “They’ll have a hard time of that. Your father is loved by investors. They all care about one thing, Lem. Coin. And your father gives them plenty of that.”
    “Yes, but Father could quickly fall out of favor. Everything could turn in an instant. You no doubt know about this business with taxes and tariffs, for example.”
    “I know we pay taxes and tariffs,” Ramdakan said cautiously.
    Oh you stupid little man, thought Lem. Is that the best you can do? Is that the face you make when you’re pretending to be innocent? Has that ever once worked with anyone?
    Lem’s face of course revealed nothing. Instead, he showed concern. “You haven’t heard then? I thought for sure that you, of all people, with such control of the finances, would know.” He gave Ramdakan the holopad with Imala’s findings already pulled up on the screen. “The LTD recently found billions in unpaid taxes and tariffs,” said Lem. “And worse still, there were people both inside the LTD and in Juke Limited who not only knew about the discrepancies, they also took steps to cover it up.”
    It was absurd to call the illegal accounting of billions of credits mere “discrepancies,” but Lem knew that was exactly the term Ramdakan himself had used when the Board was scrambling to keep the news silent. The evidence hadn’t implicated Ramdakan directly—he was too smart for that—yet Lem could see the man’s dirty fingers all over it. Ramdakan had likely done all the up-front work himself. And if not him then at least his weasely finance teams who had taken his explicit direction.
    But regardless of who had gotten the ball rolling, it was obviously a vast undertaking that involved far more people than Imala even knew about, with Ramdakan and Father likely right up at the top.
    “Ah yes,” said Ramdakan. “I had heard something about this.”
    Lem wanted to laugh. Ramdakan was acting as if illegal activity with that much money was mere office chitchat or casual gossip. “That’s a lot of money, Norja,” said Lem. “It takes whole departments of people and no small amount of money to conceal something like this.”
    Ramdakan shoved the holopad back into Lem’s arms suddenly angry. “Is this why you called me into a freezer, Lem? To show me what the idiots at the LTD do with their spare time?”
    Not in their spare time, moron, Lem wanted to shout. They’re a government agency. This is what they’re supposed to do all the time. That is, when they’re not taking bribes from you and doing whatever dance we tell them to.
    But he said none of this. Instead he kept his expression calm. “I called you here, Norja, because I’m worried. Father would never have agreed to this. And yet, the evidence insinuates that Father was complicit in this. Some may even conclude that Father orchestrated the whole thing.”
    “Not true.”
    “Of course not. But if the press were to ever hear about this…”
    “They won’t,” Ramdakan said. “We have people on this right now, Lem. They’re making it go away. And if the press ever did catch wind of it, the PR folks would handle it and make sure it didn’t go to the nets. That’s their job, and they do it very well. This is old news, Lem. We’ve got it under control.”
    “Good. I’m glad to hear it. So how much of it have we paid?”
    Ramdakan blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”
    “The back taxes, the unpaid tariffs. How much of it have we paid thus far? Surely we’ve begun the process of meeting the required debt.”
    “It’s complicated, Lem. We’re talking about massive amounts of money. It’s not like buying a pair of shoes.”
    Or a bigger belt, Lem thought.
    “There are lawyers involved,” said Ramdakan. “There are thousands of pages of documentation to sift through. These things take time, Lem. Our people will handle it. That’s their job. It’s not your concern.”
    “But it is my concern,” said Lem. “People in this company are threatening to taint my father’s