Gregory St. Croix slumped deeply into the overstuffed leather chair, facing the picture window of his 32nd floor office. The chair back pitched viciously against a black marble desktop, levered by his legs, which he held jammed against the window's pewter sill. Big, calloused fingers roped together behind his neck, pulling his head down against a heavy, well tailored chest.

His coal black eyes took in the low lying coke plants and tall furnace stacks of St. Croix Mining, stretching out almost to the limit of view. Gregory's features pulled together into a hard slash-lipped set that, for him, passed as contentment.

Two hundred and forty thousand tons of pure elemental Titanium had been processed through St. Croix today. Tomorrow, the first oh so carefully and quietly released shipment of jet black collapsed oxy solid, two metric tons of it, would be transshipped to Bremman's Veldt Cryonics Institute for an enormous price; worth more, reflected Gregory, than today's production of Titanium.

His eyes fell to the desk's cold surface, and the agent reports neatly ordered there. Clawing up the stack that dealt with the church, he scanned again the briefs dealing with the inquiries it had been making into his mining affairs in the Draco sector. His face reddened, and a guttural snarl escaped through clenched teeth. He shredded the papers, hurling them at the black serpentine wastebasket nearby. A few managed to enter it, most did not.

Gregory swung back to face the marble desktop, dropping both feet to the floor and straightening his tall blocky form; an act which caused the chair to wheeze.

On his desk lay the keys to the universe, in the form of a small control box no larger than a cigarette pack. Gregory slid one thick arm over the cold stone and grasped it; slowly pulling the controller to him. Plucking it up, he pointed it toward the left office wall some six meters distant, and mashed an inset green button on the controller.

Silently a panel rose divulging the distorted sheen of a plasma cage field. Heavily baffled behind a full inch of polarized and leaded glass, it's coruscated brilliance was still visible, in spite of the muting barrier. An ephemeral, pulsing light beat deep within the cage.

"Well Princess,"said Gregory, "I guess it's time to move you on to safer Quarters."

Refining site six, as the corporation lovingly named it, was a good size piece of real estate to abandon, but not the most important piece of the vast holdings of St Croix Ltd.

Gregory St. Croix was not the sole owner of St. Croix Ltd. Total ownership had ceased three generations ago when his great grandfather staked a claim so phenomenal that incorporating became necessary to raise development capital. A great wandering core of some exploded planet had drifted into a long capture orbit about a small Double star. It completed swinging through that system about once every thousand years or so. Heavy with pure elements, it provided a rich living for two generations of the St.Croix family and the leeching horde of co-investors, but the windfall had run spare.

Gregory owned, through inheritance, over 31% of St. Croix - a controlling interest, enough to tramp steel-booted through the Board of Directors. But St. Croix was not the gold mine it was in his ancestor's day. Now, the remains were mostly Iron. There was only the enormous personal wealth of the family estate.

Oh yes, Gregory was wealthy enough to buy and sell nations. However, the glory and status as holder of the largest mining find of the age, was gone. No cultured rich man's son for all of that, Gregory had pushed, clawed and parlayed to keep the mammoth St. Croix alive and in one piece. Hard as stone, brilliant, and unscrupulous, he raped his way across the stars looking, always seeking, for something big enough to assure the care and feeding of the giant, ever hungry, St. Croix Ltd.

Gregory sat back and contemplated the result of that effort. A mining ship had discovered it while prospecting in the Draco constellation. The lazy captain had sent the ship's expensive solar sail drone into a thin asteroid field to snoop out a few promising rocks, and got the snooper's sails holed badly enough to strand it.

The captain had engaged the snooper's weak one shot jump generator, attempting to hop it out of the rock field where it could be retrieved. While the riddled sail collector built the necessary charge to go FTL, the probe had inadvertently recorded some footage of the life-form. The man didn't report it, and was caught trying to alter the recordings from the probe, to cover up his costly mishandling.

Quality control had reviewed the recordings and brought some curious data to his attention. While the flickering, transparent images appeared to sport about the ragged remains of the solar sails, the probe's metal density scanners had recorded declining mass readings in the surrounding area. The quality people were worried that they had discovered some sort of blight-causing agent, some eater of metal, and therefore profits. Gregory saw a possible advantage. Perhaps, he had thought, it was something he could inflict on competitors to provide an edge. He fired the Captain, bonused the quality lab, and sent out his best geophysics people to investigate.

Based on these reports, other specialists were sought out; some came for the money, others for different reasons. Gregory applied pressure where necessary to get what he wanted. The rest was history.

The things were attracted to the graviton network often built into the currently popular sail/collector/antenna units common to many of the compound-technology spacecraft. It made the creatures somewhat more visible in space, and provided the low attractive mass environment they bred in. While they did consume small quantities of mass by converting it into radiations, which they absorbed, mostly they removed mass from around themselves, leaching it away, somehow translating it elsewhere by manipulations at the quantum level of the universe. Any kind of mass, located at any distance. Selectively.

His quick mind realized that here in his hands lay the seeds for a new technology of transportation and other breakthroughs. Prominently and more importantly, in his view, here was the Magic Lamp, the cornucopia of mining. The Big One he had spent his life searching to replace. It was his and his alone to exploit. Unlimited access to all the pure, perfectly refined metal he could envision, for as long as he wanted. All he had to do was learn how to rub the lamp. So he did.

Half of all his immense personal wealth had been funneled into the project. Not to advance knowledge or explore the breadth of scientific opportunity exposed, but to get the whip hand on the beings, to control them. Direct them. Own them. He found that not only could they extract and transport elemental substances, but could be directed to concentrate them, reassemble them into masses as collapsed as the matter of a white dwarf, if desired.

So now new products were rolling out the bays of St. Croix: solid gases, super collapsed liquids, compressed iron. But the strange new introductions were being made slowly, so as not to raise undue alarm in the marketplace. Meanwhile stockpiles of standard fare now grew. Unfortunately, some of the best products, like the solid collapsed oxy, were harder to obtain a source for. Most high concentrations were on planets already occupied or were expensive to retrieve and process.

There was elemental oxygen everywhere, of course, locked up in compounds and scattered freely through out the universe. But leaching such sources was slow. Certain mineral salts and rare earths were also problematic, requiring star lifting and segregation, or creation in collider rings, since the direction of the entities in their collections was risky and crudely controlled.

The space leaches mostly concentrated on heavy metals by nature. Moving them away from breeding sites to gain relief from the magnetic and gravitational fields they contributed to.

That of course was one of the keys to their control. It wasn't very hard to develop a gravity whip to torment them. Make fields to contain them. Create devices to emulate the creature's natural communications to direct them.

Gregory, had enough of trying to coax compliance out of the leaches. He had taken on hundreds of new clients, based on his now expanded means of "mining". Pressure to service and satisfy these orders had increased exponentially. The oxygen order, "extracted" from Earth, was just one of many ambitious new sales contracts he was pressured to fulfill. Possibly, he ruminated, I should have looked further to fill that deal, but I was so damn mad, and I had the beacon right there on the CORIANDER....

Research was being completed on a device to replace his dependence on the leaches. Very soon,Gregory would sit at a keyboard of a machine that could extract any amount or type of matter a mass spectroscope could define and deposit it in any way he wished, anywhere he wanted. No more trying to explain what he needed in the broad strokes his hold over the leaches required. Or the parsimonious board, for that matter. The process would be computer driven and operate on exactly defined templates responsive only to Gregory. The military applications of the new technology were impressive, and he had plans in place to leverage that to his advantage, even market some of it. Safe enough to do, he felt, as long as the Giant St. Croix Corporation controlled the tech.

His staff had watched, recorded, analyzed and emulated in the laboratory what the leaches did. His theoreticians and practical scientists had broken through to unveil the core processes. All he required now was time. Gregory mulled over the message sent by the CORIANDER this morning, turning his mind back over his agent's hurried reports.

So. The church is poking its nose into my business. Gregory took this as no small threat. The church could be a force to be reckoned with.

They will make a connection between certain of my "mining" operations in the Draco, on Earth, and with the CORIANDER, and there will be customer difficulties, he mused.

Haviland was a good man, and wouldn't squeal, but eventually the church would trace the registry of the ship to the phony holding company and then to St. Croix. Gregory decided he wouldn't be here when they did. Neither would any trace of the Leaches, or his project staff. By the time he was tracked down, he would hold a winning hand. This was his discovery, his game, and it would play out by his rules.

The attention bothered him. The fact that the church had discovered his "pets" and was researching the species bothered him more. They were encroaching on his property and profits. That would have to stop.

First, he had to get to the project facility on Vega with his staff and his key, the queen bee of the leaches. Later perhaps there should be a little "mining" done on New Vatica. Alcomer contained nothing really valuable. There was oxygen of course, carbon, perhaps. He could have the leaches concentrate it into industrial diamonds. Some value, he smiled to himself, might come of religion after all.

Before he left, he made two calls. The first one was to the facility security chief. No one was to land without a fight. That should buy him some extra time, and he didn't need much. The second was to his pet. The queen was made to understand she needed more room in the Draco for breeding. A lot more room... Heavy radioactive elements should be moved "away". The Vega research facility would be a good place to move them...

Gregory punched up the number to one of his suites. Time, he thought, to check up on his"ward".

Gold hair sprayed out from the girl's turning head as the video cut in. Gregory eyed thetwenty three year old visage in the monitor.

"Sienna, we will be leaving shortly for Vega III. Your father will be joining us there. I'm afraid he won't be traveling with us but," he smiled, "you can't have everything."

Sienna's lip twitched in the visor display.

"I thought my debt would be paid up in three months. Why can't you just leave us alone?"

Gregory pressed his hands down firmly to the cold marble and widened his smile.

"Your father's work is on Vega now. Surely you want to be near him? It would be unkind to release him three months from now on the other side of the Universe from you. The two of you might never meet again. I hope you can learn a lesson from all this. You shouldn't gamble, bad habit; especially when it affects your loved ones."

Gregory evaluated the girl. She had fire in her, he'd give her that much. It had cost good money to hire the agents that had set up Sienna's misadventure. Havilland had to buy off her dilettante, so called friends, bribe casino workers, her legal council, all just to gain leverage over her father. Even now, he was still paying; paying in patience with the man's simpering, directionless daughter. Still, it was a cost he would endure for the future prosperity of his corporation, and his planned domination of the economic and political universe. He need only to continue doing what he was best at, using the laws men made to lever his own advantage, pander to the greed of others, and put his own interests first.

He briefly wondered what that would sound like in Latin. It would make a good family motto; words to live by.

"We have gone over this again and again, Sienna. Anyway, you have no complaint against me. The court made you my ward until your father pays off your debt. Three months. You could appeal, next time you get back to Aldera II."

The girl's eyes narrowed to slits. "I can't go there when I'm with you, can I? My father would never work for you if you didn't hold me over his head. I hate this place, and I hate you!"

Gregory frowned. "I need your father's talents, and you are not going to stay here. "Gregory's smile returned. "You've got an hour."

I will have to keep her out of the factory compound, he thought, too much of a chance she will see things she shouldn't. As it is she knows nothing, and can say nothing.

The screen switched off. Gregory completed the rest of his calls, stood and stretched. He jammed the controller in his pocket, crossed to the office door and left.