“That’s what I don’t understand,” Krabbe complained. “There’s a whole crop of intelligent species now. We probably haven’t even seen them all yet! How could that happen in only fifty thousand years?”
“Fifty thousand is the lower limit, sir. It could be as much as a quarter of a million, though that’s an equally ridiculous period from our point of view. I suspect the losters had a hand in that, too. They needed servant species to help them survive. To that we can add that there must be a terrific rate of mutation. There’s an awful lot of radium down there. They even use it to power their engines.”
“Were you surprised to find a waterless biology, Spencer?” Bouche asked.
“Yes sir, I was. We picked up a couple of specimens. Seeing as how they evolved from water-based animals in the first place, the body chemistry is pretty ingenious. Their bodies do hold tiny quantities of water, but it’s held in a glycerine-like gel. They don’t perspire or excrete liquid waste. Their blood doesn’t circulate, if you can believe it. Oxygen and nutrients and all the rest migrate chemically through gelatinous blood, the molecules being passed hand to hand through the gel, so to speak. I’d swear it was impossible if I hadn’t seen it.”
Krabbe stared at the interferoscope plate, where the ‘lobster’ was disappearing inside the building which was the market overlords’ special retreat and where, presumably, they could be permanently drenched in water.
“Tenacity,” he murmured. “That’s what those old boys have got, all right. So that’s what we’ll call this planet, okay? Tenacity.”
“All right, if you want,” Bouche said sourly. “Tenacity it is.”
The food tray supported nonchalantly by the flat of one hand, Joanita Serstos walked the corridors of the gogetter ship with an easy, lank stride. She smiled on coming to the locked titanium alloy door.
Licking her lips, she fingered the lock tab.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “How goes it?”
“Hello, Jo,” a good-natured, if weary, male voice answered. “Why don’t you come in?”
A miniature oval image had appeared on the door. It showed the interior of the prison cell. Roncie Reaul Northrop lounged in an easy chair, one foot plonked on an occasional table. She tut-tutted to see how careless he still was with the furnishings, despite her admonishments. There was a big coffee stain on the carpet. The place was a mess.
He looked up from the book he was reading and smiled in greeting as she walked in, letting the door swing shut behind her. The vidset in the corner was switched on; involuntarily she glanced at the living, glowing flesh-tones it showed.
He followed her gaze and his smile became broader. It was a tape of her visit the day before. Their naked bodies were working away, her fleshy buttocks gyrating and nearly filling the screen.
She watched interestedly for a few moments, then waved her hand to turn the set off. She swept Northrop’s feet off the table to make room and laid down the tray.
“Really, Roncie.”
“Only trying to bring a blush to those maidenly features.”
“No chance.”
She lifted the cover off the tray to arrange the meal the way she knew he liked it. Knife, fork, mustard and chile sauce for the steak, chopsticks and soya sauce for the bowl of fried rice and prawns, a gold-plated spoon for the tangy lemon marsala custard. Northrop breathed deeply. The tang of the chile sauce somehow reminded him of her. Her skin was copper, almost orange, her face high-cheekboned. What he liked especially were her muscular, lithe legs and her long sexy stride.
“Tell me something. Did Krabbe & Bouche order you to keep me serviced while I’m in the brig? Or is that a bonus?”
“Shut up and eat.”
Patiently she began picking up the books that were scattered about, placing them back in the shelves. She smoothed out the bed and vacuumed the carpet. By the time he had dealt with the steak, she was cleaning off the coffee stain with a remover pad.
There was more than idle curiosity to his question. She had never consented to take a tumble with him until his incarceration. It could be out of sympathy of course, but equally it was possible his masters wanted him in a receptive frame of mind. After all, she was a Krabbe & Bouche bondwoman, one of about fifty bonded people on the gogetter ship. The entire staff, the entire ship’s complement, was bonded—Krabbe & Bouche did not recruit staff on any other basis. They wanted reliability.
“Doesn’t it bother you that K&B’s licence to operate has been revoked?” he asked. “Technically that ends your bonded status. You don’t have to do any of this.”
She snorted. “A fat lot the Stellar Commission means out here.”
He could see she was satisfied with her lot. Generally speaking Krabbe & Bouche had little to worry about as regards staff loyalty, the whole position of bonded employees being legally ambiguous. A bonded person was a semi-slave, required to obey his employers without question. That was apt to remain the case in practice—if not in law—even when the employer was in breach of his obligations.
Roncie Northrop had tried to go by the book. Learning of the revocation order the Stellar Commission had issued after Krabbe & Bouche transgressed the Non-Interference Law on Sesquielta, he had jumped ship. It was his philosophy not to back losers. And in any case he had come to dislike the rapacious partners he served.
He had reckoned without Boris Bouche’s meticulous point-twisting manipulations. At that time they had been docked in Durovia, where it was difficult to recruit trained people. Northrop had not formally applied to be released from his bond; Bouche posted him as an absconder.
On Durovia the proctors followed procedure unimaginatively. The police had found Northrop and despite his protests had brought him straight back to the ship. He had been in the brig ever since.
“You do know there’s a Pursuit Order?” he persisted.
“Oh sure, and they’ll send a ship and find us too. Anyway, so what?”
She was right. The Stellar Commission’s casual way of doing things meant it was unlikely the Enterprise would ever be tracked down.
He began raking fried rice into his mouth with quick motions. To be fair, Krabbe & Bouche probably weren’t a lot worse than most gogetters. All of them hated the Non-Interference Law; profit was all they cared about. Provided they went far enough into deep space they could flout the law for long enough to make it worthwhile.
“There, that’s better,” Joanita said after her tidying-up efforts. “You live like a pig, Roncie.”
“I’m penned up like one.”
“It’s for your own good, Roncie. Bouche could have punished you. Instead he jut put you under restriction.”
“For K & B’s good is what you mean!” Northrop protested plaintively. “Bouche had me thrown in here so I wouldn’t get a chance to renounce my bond. Not that he’d have taken a blind bit of notice if I did—that’s why I jumped ship in the first place. By the way, are we still in orbit?”
“Yes, over the little yellow planet. There’s been a geological report.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “I hear there might be work. You’ll be needed.”
Northrop frowned thoughtfully. As a nuclear engineer he was on Castaneda’s geological team. “So they have nuclear power on this planet? They want help with some geo-engineering?”
She giggled. “You could say that. Don’t worry, pretty boy. It’s all out of your hands, anyway.”
He dipped the golden spoon into the bowl of marsala. “Here, come and share this with me.”
She came closer, bending as he lifted the spoon to her. He slipped his hand up the inside of her well-tensioned thigh. Beneath her short smock she wasn’t wearing anything.