Mentally, I shook my head. For all his angling, Bilko could be so transparent sometimes. “No, you go ahead,” I told him, keying in the autosystem and giving the status lights a final check. The dayroom, situated across the main corridor from the passenger cabin, was our off-duty spot. On the bigger long-range transports dayroom facilities were pretty extensive; all ours offered was stale snacks, marginal holotape entertainment, and legroom.
“OK,” he said, unstrapping. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Just be sure you spend that hour in the dayroom,” I added. “Not poking around Scholar Kulasawa’s luggage.”
His face fell, just a bit. Just enough to show me I’d hit the target dead center. “What makes you think—?”
The intercom beeped. “Captain Smith?” a female voice asked.
I grimaced, tapping the key. “This is Smith, Scholar Kulasawa,” I said.
“I’d like to see you,” she said. “At your earliest convenience, of course.”
A nice, polite, upper-class phrase. Completely meaningless here, of course; what she meant was now. “Certainly,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
I keyed off the intercom and looked at Bilko. “You see?” I told him. “She read your mind. The upper classes can do that.”
“I wouldn’t put it past them,” he grumbled, strapping himself back down. “I hope your bowing and cringing is up to par.”
“I guess I’ll find out,” I said, getting up. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, dream up a crisis or something, will you?”
“I thought you said she could read minds.
“I’ll risk it.”
Scholar Kulasawa was waiting when I arrived in our nine-person passenger cabin, sitting in the center seat in a stiff posture that reminded me somehow of old portraits of European royalty. “Thank you for being so prompt, Captain,” she said as I stepped inside. “Please sit down.”
“Thank you,” I said automatically, as if being allowed to sit in my own transport was something I needed her permission to do. Swiveling one of the other seats around to face her, I sat down. “What can I do for you?”
“How much is your current cargo worth?” she asked.
I blinked. “What?”
“You heard me,” she said. “I want to know the full value of your cargo. And add in all the shipping fees and any nondelivery penalties.”
What I should have done—what my first impulse was to do—was find a properly respectful way to say it was none of her business and get back to the flight deck. But the sheer unexpectedness of the question froze me to my seat. “Can you tell me why that information should be any of your business?” I asked instead.
“I want to buy out this trip,” she said calmly. “I’ll pay all associated costs, including penalties, add in your standard fee for the side trip I want to make, and throw in a little something extra as a bonus.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Scholar, “I said, “but this run is already spoken for. If you want to charter a special trip at Parex, I’m sure you’ll be able to find a transport willing to take you.”
She favored me with a smile that didn’t have a single calorie of warmth anywhere in it. “Meaning you wouldn’t take me?”
“Meaning if you wish to discuss it after we’ve offloaded at Parex I’ll be willing to listen,” I said, standing up. I had it now: her scholarhood was in psychology, and this was all part of some stupid study on bribery and ethics. “But thank you for the offer—”
“I’ll pay you three hundred thousand neumarks,” she said, the smile gone now. “Cash.”
I stared at her. The power lifters and gourmet food we were carrying were worth maybe two hundred thousand, max, with everything else adding no more than another thirty. Which left the little bonus she’d mentioned at somewhere around seventy thousand neumarks.
Seventy thousand neumarks…
“You don’t think I’m serious,” she went on into my sudden silence, reaching into her jacket and pulling out what looked like a pre-paid money card. “Go on,” she invited, holding it out toward me. “Check it.”
Carefully, suspiciously, I reached out and took the card. Pulling out my reader, I slid it in.
As the owner of a transport plying some of the admittedly less-than-plum lanes, I had long ago decided that buying cut-rate document software would ultimately cost me more than it would save. Consequently, I’d made sure that the Sergei Rock’s legal and financial authenticators were the best that money could buy.
Scholar Kulasawa’s money card was completely legitimate. And it did indeed have three hundred thousand neumarks on it.
“You must be crazy to carry this around,” I told her, pulling the card out of my reader as if it was made of thousand-year-old crystal. “Where in the worlds did you get this kind of money, anyway?”
“From my university, of course. No—keep it,” she added, waving the card back as I held it out to her. “I prefer payment in advance.”
With a sigh, I stood up and set the card down on the seat next to her. Seventy thousand neumarks… “I already told you this trip’s been contracted for,” I said. “Talk to me when we reach Par ex.” I turned to go—
“Wait.”
I turned back. For a moment she studied my face, with something that might have been grudging admiration in her expression. “I misjudged you,” she said. “My apologies. Allow me to try a different approach.”
I shook my head. “I already said—”
“Would you accept my offer,” she cut me off, “if it would also mean helping people desperately in need of our assistance?”
I shook my head. “The Patrol’s got an office on Parex,” I said. “You want help, talk to them.”
“I can’t.” Her carefully jeweled lip twisted, just slightly. “For one thing, they have no one equipped to deal with the situation. For another, if I called them in they’d take it over and shut me out completely”
“Shut you out of what?”
“The credit, of course,” she said, her lip twisting again. “That’s what drives the academic world, Captain: the politely savage competition for credit and glory and peer recognition.” She eyed me again. “It would be so much easier if you would trust me. Safer, too, from my point of view. If this should get out...” She took a deep breath, still watching me, and let it out in a rush. “But if it’s the only way to get your cooperation, then I suppose that’s what I have to do. Tell me, have you ever heard of the Freedom’s Peace?”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” I said, searching my memory. “Is it a star transport?”
She snorted gently. “You might say it was the ultimate star transport,” she said dryly. “The Freedom’s Peace was one of the five Giant Leap ark ships that headed out from the Jovian colonies 130 years ago.”
“Oh—right,” I said, feeling my face warming. Nothing like forgetting one of the biggest and most spectacular failures in the history of human exploration. The United Jovian Habitats, full of the arrogance of wealth and autonomy, had hollowed out five fairsized asteroids, stocked them with colonists, pre-assembled ecosystems, and heavy-duty ion-capture fusion drives, and sent them blazing out of the solar system as humanity’s gift to the stars.
The planetoids had stayed in contact with the home system for awhile, their transmissions growing steadily weaker as the distances increased and there was more and more interstellar dust for their transmission lasers to have to punch through. Eventually, they faded out, with the last of the five going silent barely six years after their departure. The telescopes had been able to follow them for another five years or so, but eventually their drives had faded into the general starscape background.