HAURAAN INDUSTRIAL CITY<br/>GRAM II - MOON I<br/>GRAM SYSTEM<br/>SWORD WORLDS CONFEDERATION<br/><br/>36 DAYS AGO<br/><br/><br/>The old man stood motionless before the massive viewport.  It formed one wall of a room which served a purpose somewhere between a conference room and a lounge.  The room was plushly appointed, as befitted the wealth of its master.  The recessed lights barely illuminated the chamber.   The high intensity lights of the spaceport below blazed into the darkness, red and blue signal lights blinked on communications arrays, and soft yellow rectangles of light shone from the dark shapes of the habitat towers, but all were dwarfed by the great orange globe of the Gram II gas giant which filled the sky of its satellite.<br/><br/>The glow of the gas giant silhouetted the old man.  Yngvar could see only faint details besides his outline.  His sparse gray hair appeared almost translucent.  He wore a kind of uniform, the charcoal gray of most businessmen in the Gram System.  The shoulders of the uniform's tunic were wide and held rigid by stiff epaulets, but the old man needed no help from a expert tailor.  He was fit despite his advanced age.  The sash about his waist was small and conservative, unlike the broad embroidered sashes worn by executives who didn't work in sealed habitats.  His pants were loose at the thigh but tapered so they would fit easily into his high polished boots.<br/><br/>He made a slight gesture with the half empty glass he held.<br/><br/>"I missed her twelfth birthday because I was opening this tower," he said.  "Some said it was a demotion, that I was being cast off into the void to labor under the baleful glow of this orange giant.  But it wasn't.  The board of directors entrusted me with this.  It was a sacred trust.  They knew I could make these mines turn a profit, and they knew I could do it with nothing more than the men I would bring with me.  They spent a fortune to buy the rights to mine this moon.  They went into debt to buy me the best equipment, the best fusion cutters, the best powersuits.  They bought me everything though I needed nothing, and I repaid them every credit of it.  I kept that sacred trust.  This moon is the jewel in the crown of Hauraan Corporation, and it was I who cut and shaped it.  Even war did not take it from me."  He paused and downed the contents of his glass.  "But the war took from the me the jewel of my heart."<br/><br/>The old man fell silent again.  He had spent the last hour explaining to Yngvar the nature of the task at hand.<br/><br/>"I will pay you handsomely," he had said, "If you go to Biter and find my granddaughter.  You must discover if she is alive or dead.  If she is alive, bring her back.  If she is dead, bring her back.  She must come home.  I have lived a long time, and I have borne many things, but I cannot bear the thought of her left there in some frozen airless tunnel.  I am not without friends and resources.  You will have a berth on a ship, the identification you need to pass through the Empire's blockade, and whatever weapons the devious mind of Captain Bello can conceal aboard his vessel. "<br/><br/>Among the items he had earlier shown Yngvar was a picture of an athletic young woman who appeared to be in her early twenties.  Her name was Dagny Egilsdottir.  She wore the uniform of a student at Gram University of Technical Sciences, tan shorts, a white blouse, and a sky blue neckerchief held by a small silver clip bearing the school's crest.  It was her graduation day, and she proudly held the medallion she had been awarded for her completion of the university's demanding curriculum.  A year after graduation she had gone to Biter as a mining engineer, against the wishes of her grandfather.  He had explained the fates of her parents; her father had been a drifter of dubious charm, and her mother, never having shown any common sense, soon found herself with an infant, no husband, and without the necessary social esteem to ever get one.  Her grandfather had petitioned the courts to award him custody of the girl child, and they had readily agreed.  She went from being the consequence of her mother's flighty passion to the being the treasured protege of her grandfather Egil Olfinsson, Executive Director of Hauraan Industrial City.<br/><br/>The data stick Olfinsson had given Yngvar held his granddaughter's biometric data as well as all the information he had been able to gather about the situation on Biter.  The fleets of the Sword Worlds had fought bravely, but when the Zhodan front failed and their alien allies had deserted, there had been no choice but to accept the armistice the Empire offered.  The occupation of Biter had been brutal and swift, and only reports to reach Gram in a year had been fragmented and inconclusive.  The settlements had gone silent and Caladbolg's soldiers held the spaceport.  Freighters still came to Biter, large haulers bringing reinforcements and supplies for the occupation force and smaller merchant ships selling whatever they could to the those same soldiers.  Of interest to Director Olfinsson was that freighters large and small left Biter with holds full of ore and metals, which meant mines were operating.  If the mines had survived, then perhaps so had a mining engineer.<br/><br/>He had made clear the dangers of undertaking the task.  Biter was a hostile world, made all the more hostile by the arrogant malevolence of Caladbolg's soldiery.  An implacable courage ran thick in their veins, but their armies had suffered in three years of war.  Many thousands of them lay dead on Sting, the first of the Sword Worlds' fortress star systems, and thousands more had left only radiation flash shadows to mark their passing at the great invasion of Beater, crossroads of the Sword Worlds and the center of their fortress systems.  Biter's dangers were considerable now, and because of them he had retained the services of a mercenary he had become aware of through the channels he had cultivated.  She was not of the Sword Worlds.  Her name was Ren Moltinova, and she was an Earthwoman, a common enough breed on the Empire's Spinward frontier.  She would not arouse suspicion.  His sources said she had worked for the Confederation before, and that she had performed admirably.  She would guard Yngvar on his mission.<br/><br/>Their identification documents showed them to be residents of the Empire's frontier provinces.  Captain Bello had agreed to take them on as unskilled crewmembers who were working for their passage until they learned the skills of their trade.   He had received his own reward for his part, which was to get Yngwar and Ren to Biter and to provide them a means to return.