“Forget that,” Darcy said. “I’ll have some firewood delivered this afternoon, enough to get us there in one go; we can store it in the forward hold instead of a cargo. And I’ll spell you at night, I don’t need much sleep. How long travelling like that?”
“A week, maybe,” Len Buchannan said. He didn’t seem terribly happy with the idea.
“That’s fine. We’ll start this afternoon.”
“We’ll take half of the money now, as a deposit,” Gail said. A Jovian Bank disk appeared from nowhere in her hand.
“You’ll get a thousand now as a deposit, plus five hundred to buy enough food and water for three weeks,” Lori said. “I’ll pay another two thousand once we leave the harbour this afternoon, two more when we get to Schuster, and the sum when we get back here.”
Gail Buchannan made a lot of indignant noise, but the sight of actual cash piling up in her disk silenced her.
“Make sure it’s decent food,” Lori told her. “Freeze dried, I’m sure you know where to get stocks of that from.”
They left the Buchannans bickering and went on to a lumber-yard to arrange for the logs to be delivered. It took an hour longer than it should have done to get their order sorted out; the only reason they got it at all was because they were regular customers. The yard was frantically busy with an order for a thousand tonnes of mayope. The laughing foreman told them a lunatic starship captain was planning to carry it to another star.
They were going to make Joshua Calvert’s deadline. Marie Skibbow couldn’t keep the thought out of her mind. It was mid-afternoon, and she was sitting up at the bar in the nearly deserted Crashed Dumper having a celebratory drink. What she really felt like doing was singing and dancing, it was a wonderful experience. All the contacts she’d meticulously built up over the last few months had finally paid off. The deals she put together had clicked into place all the way down the line, smoothing the way for the wood to get from the lumber-yard into orbit with minimum fuss and maximum speed. In fact it had turned out they were being limited by how fast Ashly Hanson could load the foam-covered bundles into the Lady Macbeth ’s cargo holds. The starship only carried one MSV, which imposed a two hundred and fifty tonne per day restriction. The pilot simply couldn’t work any faster; and not even Marie could obtain a MSV from Kenyon, which was the only other place they were in use within the Lalonde star system. But even so, they should have the last bundle loaded tomorrow, a day before the deadline.
Her Jovian Bank disk was burning like a small thermal-induction field in her sawn-off jeans pocket. Joshua had paid her on the nose, every McBoeing flight that lifted off the spaceport’s metal grid runway saw another batch of fuseodollars added to her account. And he’d given her a bonus for arranging the lorries. The drivers were taking colonists’ farmsteading gear from the spaceport down to the harbour and returning half-empty; it didn’t take much organization or money to fix it so they brought the mayope with them when they came back. That way Joshua saved money on an official contract with the haulage company that owned them.
Her first major-league deal. She sipped her iced brightlime, enjoying the bitter taste as it went down her throat. Was this how millionaires felt every day? The total satisfaction which came from tangible accomplishment. And all the famous merchant names in history must have started with a first deal like this, even Richard Saldana, who founded Kulu. Now there was a thought.
But there weren’t many opportunities for deals this big on Lalonde. She simply had to leave, that goal had never changed. The money from the deal would be a hefty slice towards the eighteen thousand fuseodollars she needed for a basic set of neural nanonics. Joshua would probably pay her an overall bonus as well. He was honest enough.
Which brought her to the real question of the day: whether or not she was going to go to bed with him. He had certainly asked her often enough over the last four days. He was handsome, if a trifle gaunt, with a good-looking body; and he must be talented after all the girls he’d been with. An owner-captain under twenty-five years old, it would surely run into hundreds. Especially with that grin. He must practise it; so sexy. She rather liked the notion of what they’d be capable of doing to each other if they flung off every inhibition. There had been rumours back at the arcology about the prowess of people geneered for spaceflight, something to do with enhanced flexibility.
And if she did—which she probably would—he might just take her with him when he left. It really wasn’t a possibility she could afford to ignore. After Norfolk he said he was planning on returning to Tranquillity. That habitat was premier real estate, superior even to Earth and Kulu. I’ve already whored my way down the river; whoring to Tranquillity would hardly be a hardship after that.
The Crashed Dumper’s door creaked open. A young man in a blue and red checked shirt and long khaki shorts walked in, and sat down at the other end of the bar. He never even glanced at Marie, which was odd. She was wearing her sawn-off jeans and a dark-orange singlet, long limbs on show. His face looked familiar, early twenties, ruggedly attractive with a neatly trimmed beard. His clothes were new, and clean, made locally. Was he one of Durringham’s new generation of merchants? She’d met a lot of them since she got the job at the embassy, and they were always keen to talk while they waited for Ralph Hiltch, her boss.
She pouted slightly. There, if she had neural nanonics she’d have no trouble placing the name.
“Beer, please,” he told the barkeeper.
The voice fixed him, it just took a moment for her incredulity to die down. No wonder she hadn’t recognized him to start with. She went over to him.
“Quinn Dexter, what the bloody hell are you doing here?” He turned slowly, blinking at her uncertainly in the pub’s filtered light. She held back on a laugh, because it was obvious he didn’t recognize her either.
His fingers clicked, and he smiled. “Marie Skibbow. Glad to see you made it to the big city. Everybody wondered if you would. They didn’t stop talking about you for a month.”
“Yeah, well . . .” She sat on the stool next to him as he paid for his beer from a thick wad of Lalonde francs. That wasn’t right, Ivets didn’t have hard cash. She waited until the barkeeper went away then dropped her voice. “Quinn, don’t tell people who you are. They’re killing Ivets in this town right now. It’s pretty nasty.”
“No problem. I’m not an Ivet any more. I bought myself out of my work time contract.”
“Bought yourself out?” Marie had never known you could do that.
“Sure,” he winked. “Everything on this planet is financially orientated.”
“Ah, right. How did you buy it? Don’t tell me dear old Aberdale started being successful.”
“No, not a chance, it never changed. I found some gold in the river.”
“Gold?”
“Yes, a nugget you wouldn’t believe.” He held up his hand, making a fist. “This big, Marie, and that’s the honest truth. So I kept going back, there was nothing ever as big as that first one, but I built up quite a little hoard. They thought it must have washed down from the mountains on the other side of the savannah, remember them?”
“God, don’t remind me. I don’t want to remember anything about that village.”
“Can’t say I blame you. First thing I did was get out. Sailed straight down the Juliffe on a trader boat; took me a week and I got ripped off by the captain, but here I am. Arrived today.”
“Yeah, I got ripped off too.” Marie studied her glass of brightlime. “So what’s happening upriver, Quinn? Have the Ivets really taken over the Quallheim Counties?”
“It was all news to me when we docked this morning. There was nothing like that in the offing when I left. Maybe they’re fighting over the gold. Whoever owns the motherlode is going to be seriously rich.”