Melchior's Fire

VI: A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

They had all come.

Somehow, that had surprised An Li, although it didn’t seem to surprise Sanders at all. She had an idea that very little surprised the slimy weasel.

Just overnight, she’d discovered a lot about him. That he was, in fact, a rich producer of thrillers, and that a percentage of the net was a joke in his industry about akin to saying “when pigs fly.” With some good accounting even the most successful productions somehow never saw a profit; nobody, it seemed, ever had produced a single thing that had made one single penny. Funny about that. Buy cheap, make a fortune, and, through creative bookkeeping, keep said fortune. Show business sounded like the same sort of thing as the kind of folks who’d loaned her the money for the earlier expedition, only Sanders and his types were always legal. What a racket!

She’d also fingered his traveling associates, a young, muscular guy and a woman with a face and body to die for. She hadn’t put them together until she saw them both at Sanders’s hotel suite, setting up things for a working lunch, as it were.

All the time she’d spent sizing him up as a mark, and they were already on her tail and reporting to the boss on her movements. He dangled his bait and she’d taken it, thinking she was conning him.

The penthouse of the Stellar was sumptuous, even for Sepuchus. There probably weren’t but one or two like this on the whole planet, and they were here only for the kind of people who were outfitting a city or a fleet. Its sheer opulence was testament to what a knowledgeable designer could do even with salvaged parts.

The table was real polished wood, not synthetic, polished so perfectly that you could use it like a mirror, and the chairs were firm but plush, made of wood and natural fabrics. Sanders himself had not yet made an appearance, but they expected him to emerge from behind massive bronze doors at some point. The two assistants were now acting as host and hostess; the man, who seemed barely out of boyhood, introduced himself as “Jules, Mister Sanders’s personal assistant,” whatever that meant, and the sexy young woman with more than ample everything and a voice that was higher than An Li had ever heard before said she was Mister Sanders’s secretary, Suzy. Neither spoke or revealed very much, but they didn’t have to. The few present who hadn’t seen these types in their natural habitats still knew what they were. Randi Queson had tired of rolling her eyes, Lucky seemed amused by them, while Sark and Jerry Nagel betrayed their hormonal directions even as they pretended to be strictly business.

An Li had already briefed them on the basics, but left out the Three Kings part for the moment. She had also warned each of them that, if they had anything at all in their wallets, they should grip them tightly in Sanders’s presence.

There was a buzz at the main door, and Jules answered it. It turned out to be a small army of men and women dressed in white pushing carts full of what had to be food into the room and towards them. They proceeded to set the table and then place the food on it in containers that preserved the proper temperatures. It looked and smelled wonderful.

An Li wondered how much it cost to tip this kind of mob to do what two machines could have done just as well, but she kept quiet. Any man who could waste this kind of money just feeding his ego by showing off human service was somebody who certainly should be listened to.

Suzy went over to the bronze doors, knocked on one, then opened it just a small bit and said something to whoever was on the other side. In a moment, Norman Sanders strode out and towards them, wearing a genuine crimson silk dressing gown. It was one of the most breathtaking of all the examples of opulence they’d seen, but, An Li thought with some satisfaction, he still looked like an unmade bed.

“Good day, everyone,” he said cheerfully, if a bit sleepily, taking a seat at the head of the table. He waved his hand at the steaming items on the table. “Go ahead! Be my guest! Dig in! I never eat much for breakfast. Never feel like I’m started. Some coffee, maybe some eggs Benedict, that’s about it for now.” He suddenly realized that most of these people hadn’t seen real food in their whole lives, and the one or two who had probably had forgotten the look of it.

“Omelettes there at the end, with lots to put on them if you like, and those over there are crepes, and those are breakfast meats. All real, I’m assured, with one or two minor exceptions. There’s apparently some farming done here, in very limited amounts, just for the hotels and the bosses. Those are teas and juices, and over there are various sandwiches if you’d rather lunch than breakfast, with, I think some onion soup in the tureen. Go ahead, dig in, eat, get joyously full, and then we’ll talk.”

He was as good as his word, and the food was as rich as he promised. In fact, some of the food didn’t taste all that good to them, with one notable exception. They’d been on the artificial and reconstituted stuff so long, some forever, that they had no appreciation for the taste of real things.

The exception was Randi Queson, whose only real regret was that she hadn’t much of an appetite. She hadn’t been sleeping well, even with some help from a medical computer. She kept having nightmares about cold, alien voices dismissing the human race as irrelevant.

Still, she managed some old favorites she’d neither eaten nor been able to afford in a very long time.

During the whole thing Norman Sanders said little except pleasantries and “Pass the coffee,” but they all sensed his mind going behind that dull, cherubic bearded face as he carefully watched each of them in turn.

And when they had regretfully watched the ample leftovers being cleared and taken away after none could manage any more, An Li couldn’t help but wonder where those leftovers went. Not anywhere she knew could use them, that was for sure.

Leaving only coffee and tea, the army of cooks and waiters had left with the remainder of the food, and it was again only them. Suzy took a seat on a divan across from the table and said nothing; Jules stood by the table to pour anyone’s coffee or tea but otherwise to stand impassive looking at them all. Clearly neither was going to be a central part of this forthcoming discussion.

Finally, the producer stuck a big cigar in his mouth, which Jules promptly lit. After puffing on it a bit and beginning to fill the air with thick and unpleasant smoke, Sanders began to speak. As he did, air filtration clicked on, drawing the smoke up and to his rear, out of their own nostrils. It was a nice touch.

“As Madame An has most certainly told you, I am Norman Sanders. I already know who you all are, and I’ve gone over what you accomplished and I’m impressed. I’m not much of a man of action, and I draw most of my courage from good whiskey, but that’s why I’m looking to hire people. That’s what a producer does, you know. He’s kind of an entrepreneur. He finds a project, gets control of it, then he puts it into action by hiring the best people for the job and giving them the best tools he can within a budget that will be adequate but realistic. For that, he gets a share of the payoff, sometimes the biggest share. It’s not fair, maybe, but if he does his job right he’s doing something others can’t do. I realize that this isn’t cyberspace, we’re not talking about jacking in customers in a safe and secure place to experience the thrills of whatever we dream up, but the basics are the same anyway. I didn’t come here looking for any of you, but synchronicity seems to have put me here looking for just such people at the time when those people show up here. I have a project. If it comes off, it’ll make me one of the richest people in creation and one of the most powerful. I won’t mince words on that. Your shares will be tiny for assuming the risk and doing the labor, but they’ll still be enough so that you’ll never have to work again and can do pretty much what you want forever. Interested?”

“We’re here, aren’t we?” Jerry Nagel responded.

“Let me start at the beginning. I’m a collector. Antiques, mostly, but historical stuff, and stuff that inspires or stimulates. I go to a lot of auctions, or send representatives there who know my tastes, and I wind up with a lot of stuff. Some of it is junk, some of it is truly wonderful, and some of it is blind speculation. I went to one where they were auctioning off the personal effects of Dr. Oscar McGraw. Anybody ever hear of him?”

Most had not, but Randi Queson knew the name. “He was a brilliant physicist. Said to be on a par with Einstein, Newton, that league. Is that the one you mean?”

“The very one.”

“I thought he held a research professorship on Marchellus.”

“He did, but he passed away about six months ago. It was a tragedy to science, maybe, but the guy was like almost two hundred and fifty years old and had every kind of rejuvenation process and youth serum you can name. They say he was sharp to the end. Looked like a prune, confined to a wheelchair, but he taught a class the day he died.

“Anyway,” Sanders continued, “the doctor was superfamous, had been since he was a kid. He’d lived a long time, knew or met everybody famous in our end of the universe, and had accumulated every honor and prize there was. I figured the historical stuff alone would be amazing, and it was. He’d been alone for years, after his sixth wife died, and there were no heirs this side of the Great Silence, so he willed his papers to his university and a bunch of stuff to various libraries, and the rest he said to put up on the block and use the proceeds to endow scholarships in physics and mathematics for bright kids who needed them. There was a ton of stuff to go up, and lots of interested, well-heeled bidders, but I managed to get a lot, including some trunks and such that turned up in his attic. Lots of personal stuff, so they let it go. I had people go through it and catalog it, and I began to notice some interesting names I would never have associated with him. The one that really got to me was Dr. Karl Woodward.”

“The evangelist who disappeared a ways back?” Lucky Cross asked.

He seemed surprised that the knowledge had come from this quarter. “Yes, indeed. How do you know about him?”

“Oh, my mom used to be a real regular with him. Sent him money and stuff almost all the way to the end of her days. He was her kind of preacher. Cussed like a sailor, smoked, hated most other preachers. We used to get videos from him now and then. He was a real stem-winder.”

“He was indeed. He was also a doctor of astrophysics, and had been a classmate and university research partner with McGraw until something caused a big change in Woodward and he dropped out of science and got religion. Not sure of the story there, and McGraw never understood it, but they stayed friends, or so it appears from the notes. I have a ton of voice diary reminiscences by McGraw of old Doc Woodward, but it was their last meeting that suddenly got me to sit up and take notice. Woodward, it seems, had come across a stuck pirate band and a derelict old ship that pointed him directly to the Three Kings. How to get there, that is. Woodward wanted McGraw to run the physics and get it exact as possible. McGraw wanted to talk Woodward out of it. He didn’t; he did the figures and gave ’em to Woodward, who promptly took off in his tent-meeting spaceship and vanished, apparently forever. I have McGraw’s calculations. Everything else is still there, and it checks out. I’ve had it looked at. We even think we know why Woodward’s ship couldn’t have survived the trip, at least two ways. I think the problem’s solvable, and so do the brains I hired to look at it. I want you to go there and stake it out for me.”

There was absolutely no apparent reaction from any of the others there, unless you counted the unsuppressed belch Lucky Cross gave. Finally, Jerry Nagel said, “You have the figures from the smartest guy who’s ever lived in our lifetime, the stuff used by Woodward? And it didn’t work for Woodward? And you think that, decades later, those same figures that this smart guy with his supercomputers and whole university brain machine got not quite right can be made right by lesser brains? Who are you kidding? Things are getting worse every year, breaking down more and more. We’re on the skids, not the way up. You’re offering us a one-way trip to a sure death.”

Sanders shrugged. “I’m offering you a way out, a chance to make a bundle, get free of all debts and clear your reputations, and no strings. I’ve got money and position, but you can’t have too much, and I’ve always dreamed of owning my own studio, top to bottom, without regard to cost. Risk? Sure. Lots of it. A hundred times more than the usual salvage-type job, but you know that going in, something you didn’t last time. Right? Blank check on equipment, whatever you need. And nobody’s gonna follow you and try and collect one way or the other, I can guarantee that.”

An Li looked at her companions and sensed that they weren’t nearly as dead set against this as they were making out. You couldn’t tell about the Doc, particularly after what she’d been through, but maybe, just maybe, there was real interest there.

“Let me talk to my former crew in private for a few minutes,” she suggested to the producer. “Let me see if things can be worked out.”

Sanders shrugged. “Take some time. But my time is valuable, and there are a lot of other crews here that can be put together. My offer won’t be on the table indefinitely.”

“We’re just gonna step outside for a bit and talk,” An Li told him, ignoring the implied threat. “Then we’ll give you an answer.”

He nodded, and dismissed them with a near-regal nod, getting up from his chair and, with his two too-good-to-be-true companions, vanishing back into that bedroom or whatever it was.

“Li—” Queson began, but she waved her hand and shook her head to indicate that there was to be no talking here. They all got the message, and, as a group, trooped out and went down to the lobby area.

An Li led them to a particularly noisy part of the reception area and then said, “We were almost certainly bugged in there, probably still are, but between the ambient noise here and the small leaky communicator I have in my pocket we should be reasonably secure. If not, it’s better than nothing.” She looked at each one of them in turn, then asked, “So? What’re your thoughts?”

Cross shrugged. “No different than most other jobs, except the getting there. I also don’t like this split. Standard in this business is fifty-fifty, financing and crew, after expenses. He thinks he’s got us ’cause there’s nobody else gonna hire us right now, but that’s bullshit. We all know that. There’s nobody else better to do this kind of job, and if he plunks down a few million on a throwaway crew he’s throwin’ money down a hole. We’re the best chance he’s got and he knows it.”

Sark and Nagel nodded. Only Randi Queson seemed a bit hesitant. “You really think we can do this?” she asked them all. “I mean, nobody’s ever come back that went looking with a chance of finding it. Not one. That tells me that either you die on the way there or there’s no way back once you get there.”

An Li looked at all of them carefully. “Honest opinion? I think we can do it, yes, but there’s more to it than meets the eye here. I looked into that damned gem that’s supposed to be from the Three Kings and something or somebody looked back.”

“Huh? What?” They were all interested now.

“You can see things in it. Strange things. Some of it’s out of your mind, some of it is no place you’ve ever been, but I don’t think those things are natural. I think they’re set up to collect information on us, or maybe anyone or anything. Like alien-type ferrets. Only we take them around. We wear them like jewelry, and the public and the rich and famous actually stare into them.”

“More than ferrets,” Queson said, thinking things over. “Baited hooks. I’d love to actually see one of those.”

“Ask him. I think he loves showing off all the things he has and you don’t. It’s part of the fun of being rich and powerful,” An Li responded. “Still, you won’t sleep good when He shows up in your mind.”

“ ‘He’?”

Quickly she told him of the sensation.

Queson now had her anthropologist’s hat on. “Makes me wonder. We’re being baited and hooked by these empty ships with just enough treasure to make sure we’ll keep coming. You seem to think we’re being scouted, but it sounds more to me like we’re being studied, in small and manageable groups. Hey, rats! Here’s some great cheese! Come to our maze! Let’s see how clever you are!”

“If that’s true, then there’s no bankable treasure over there,” Jerry Nagel pointed out. “Just bait and a trap. That really lowers the odds.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We just outsmarted a creature that had the collective knowledge and wisdom of an entire human colony,” An Li reminded him. “And we’re no colony or group of Holy Joes. We’re salvagers.”

“I don’t like it,” Nagel said firmly. “If they’re that technologically ahead, and we’re in their own den or trap or maze or whatever it is, then we haven’t got a chance in hell of getting out of there.”

Randi Queson was deep in thought. Finally she almost breathed, “I wonder…”

“Huh? Wonder what?”

“How many ships are on record as having returned from the Three Kings with bait but no people? What kind of ships were they? If they weren’t cyberships, then we may have an edge they didn’t.”

“That first scout who reported the place was a cybership,” Cross noted.

“Yeah, that’s right. Only I wonder if they got any more reports from it on other discoveries after they got the Three Kings report. An, give me a little time this afternoon to research this stuff and see what I can come up with. Set up a late dinner, on Mr. Megabucks, with all of us to settle things once and for all. The later the better. By then I hope I’ll know just what kind of chance we might have, however slim, of pulling this thing off.”

“Fair enough,” An Li replied, and she saw the rest of them nodding. “Tell you what. We’ll meet in the courtyard outside the hostel at, oh, twenty-one hundred hours. That give you enough time, Doc?”

“Better than nothing.”

“Okay. I’ll try and set up dinner for an hour or so later. The one other question is, do we need to replace Achmed if we agree it’s a go?”

They looked at one another and shrugged. “I don’t think so,” Sark replied. “We’re still a team, accustomed to each other’s signals and timing. Adding somebody on something like this and breaking them in isn’t gonna be easy to do. We’re not taking apart a colony here. It’s almost like prospecting or exploring. I think we can handle it. Anybody think I’m wrong?”

“Well, if we can replace him with that actress pet of his, Suzy what’s-her-name, I wouldn’t mind,” Nagel commented wryly.

“Funny, I thought Jules the Sweet would be more your style. Seriously, replace him or not?”

She looked around and saw nobody contradicting the big man.

“All right, then,” she said. “Doc, you go do your research. Jerry, I want a workup and laundry list of just about everything and anything you think you’d need if we do this. The rest of you, well, whatever you can think of. Let’s be ready when we go back there tonight!”

Norman Sanders almost choked on his claret. “Half? Half!”

“It’s reasonable considering the odds,” An Li pointed out. “You get an expert crew and the only front money required is the list of necessary equipment and supplies and the ship’s lease itself. We know pretty much what you’re worth, Mr. Sanders, and what this all costs. It will take you almost six months to make back the up-front cost of this expedition on interest alone. We agree on your bills up front, before we leave. We add that to your half. Other than that, it’s a split.”

“It’s outrageous! You’re nothing without my information!”

“And once we have it you become irrelevant,” she noted.

“This is blackmail! You’re all a dime a dozen! I can go out and hire a crew for next to nothing on this asshole of a world!”

“Then why don’t you and stop wasting all our time?” Randi Queson came back. “It’s because half of something is quite a bit, but half of nothing is nothing. You’re not buying bodies here, or you wouldn’t still be bothering with us at all. You’re hiring expertise that nobody else has, and you’re hiring the best. The best usually get a premium, but we’re offering this to you at standard rates because the profit potential is so high.”

“You don’t take this, what will you do? You’ll all be scrambling for garbage in the backwaters of this hole!”

“Not at all,” the doctor responded. “I’ll go back to teaching until something else comes up, and Jerry will stop figuring out how to disassemble things and go back to making things work with what’s at hand. Lucky will go back to tugs or some other commercial piloting job, Li may need a bit of help but she’ll wind up the same, and Sark, there, well, there’s always work for someone like him. A real jack of all trades.”

“I’m thinking of taking an offer as a contract enforcer with the entertainment guilds,” Sark said with a kind of eerie combination of smile and growl.

“You see, Mr. Sanders, we have lives, both real and future,” Randi told him, sounding quite confident. “You want the best, you need to pay for the best.”

Norman Sanders looked for a moment like he was going to have a stroke, then he calmed down enough so that at least his face no longer appeared to be bright red. He reached out, took the rest of the wineglass, and downed it.

“Thirty percent,” he managed.

“Fifty, Mr. Sanders. We’re not negotiating here. We’re setting a price. If you want to make it negotiations, though, then our share is seventy percent.”

“Seventy percent! But you said fifty!”

“That was before you said thirty. Now, we can go back and forth and wind up at fifty or we can just settle at fifty. Or, we can thank you for a good meal and a bad offer, leave, and get on with what we were doing before we met you. Your choice.”

Sanders was breathing hard, but the others noted that neither of his attractive assistants seemed the least concerned, so they weren’t, either.

“All right, all right. Fifty percent of the net.”

“Only if the maximum costs are set as part of our contract,” An Li came in. “And no overruns. Anything not listed and priced in the contract is your tough luck.”

Sanders sighed. Finally he said, “All right, all right. Let’s do it.”

“Look on the bright side, sweetie,” Lucky Cross put in. “Odds are we’re all gonna die over there anyway, so why be such a penny pincher?”

“I guess we all are betting on long shots here,” he admitted.

“Yeah, but you’re not one of the targets,” Sark replied.

Still, it was done.

Afterward, well away from their new patron and long into the night, they discussed, hashed, and rehashed both the deal and what was to come.

“He caved too easy. I don’t trust him,” Randi asserted.

“Nobody trusts him,” An Li agreed. “I doubt if his own mother would trust him with her laundry, assuming, that is, that he has a mother and that he didn’t sell her to finance one of his early deals. Still, he’s risking pocket change for a massive payoff. I’m not sure he’d risk real money, from his point of view, on something like this, but I wasn’t kidding. He really is that rich, and our job is to make him richer.”

“Our job is to get as much valuables as we can and somehow get them and us back alive,” Jerry pointed out. “Anybody really feel comfortable that we can do it?”

“Comfortable, no,” Randi said, “but possible, yes. There are eight known ships, three in good condition, the other five derelicts, to have somehow made it back from the Three Kings. All had Three Kings-type stuff like that creepy gem or other equally weird things. Some had bodies, some didn’t. At least two, though, had a number of bodies who died from the effects of riding a wild hole back to our space after having been damaged getting there in the first place. In other words, they did manage to get out, to escape. Their hardware just wasn’t up to the stress of the job. Jerry?”

“Doc’s right,” he agreed. “No matter if this thing is a trap or not, the fact is that people did manage to escape, and the only reason they didn’t get all the way was that their ships couldn’t hack it.”

“None of them were cyberships, which is important,” Randi put in. “The one cybership, the original discovery scout, that did make it there in fact sent back other reports, two others, after its incomplete Three Kings report, so either it was let go or it just went right through the system. Whatever happened to it after that was probably, almost certainly, unrelated to the Three Kings. Only the scout’s report was garbled, in several strategic places, so that everybody in creation couldn’t get there because they didn’t know where. The scout probably never knew his full report didn’t get through. And that first ship, intact but crewless, with all the bait aboard, that didn’t find the Three Kings because of the scout’s report, or at least not because of that report alone. But it did have a highly sophisticated homing logic that triggered only if it was either told to return by crew codes or if it had been abandoned for more than two years in place. While not as sophisticated as a cybership, the system had many things in common with cybership systems makeup. No, it’s possible. We can do this. I’m certain of it.”

“My problem is Sanders,” Lucky Cross put in. “No matter what, I just can’t trust the son of a bitch. He’s got some way to cheat us, I’m sure of it.”

“Well, we’ve let the Guild lawyers do the contract, so that part is solid,” An Li assured her. “And we’re gonna have the valuables under our control, so we’ll have possession. I agree, he’s slimy and he’ll try to pull stuff, but, frankly, considering what we’re about to agree to do, handling him is gonna be the least of our problems, and something I’ll happily worry about when we’re back.”

“Agreed,” Sark said, nodding. “If all else fails, I’ll gladly just shoot the son of a bitch and take my chances. Out here, your word and your contract are the sacred things. Who the hell’s gonna convict me for popping a crooked producer?”

“That’s important,” Queson pointed out.

“What? That I could kill him and get a medal out here?”

“No, no. That he has to come here to settle, or at least we settle here. The contract’s signed and sealed here, we’re hired for the round trip from here, so this is where it ends. We don’t play in his yard.”

“Agreed. Okay, folks, there’s nothing more to do but to do it,” An Li told them.

Maybe, Randi Queson thought, but Norman Sanders isn’t the only slimy crook around here. This time you don’t get to sit high and dry up in orbit while we put our necks in a noose. This time, your neck’s on equal footing with mine. You’re not the boss anymore.

Sanders was all smiles, which made the crew collectively uneasy, but he assured them that he would sign the agreement and that their own attorneys would verify it before they left. He did choke a little at the list of equipment the various members came up with, but he still agreed that he’d provide it all, or at least the closest equivalent he could find on this junkyard planet.

“I’ve transferred the Stanley’s lease to my production company,” he told them, “and a crew is already up there making modifications and repairs to outfit it for the trip. Just out of curiosity—any of you ever ridden through a wild hole before?”

“Not too many people have,” Cross told him. “At least, not too many have and lived to tell the tale. None of us are looking forward to it, but we’re ready to give it a try.”

“Yes, well, that’s not really your job, is it? Your job starts when you arrive. I’ve placed the navigational information in encrypted form in the captain’s navigational computer, by the way. The captain will have access to it, but nobody else, and even she won’t be able to get to it until she needs it, and only during that period. You’ve been making snide remarks about my honesty, so this is my way of insuring yours.”

“That’s not fair!” Cross almost shouted at him. “What if something goes wrong? We won’t have any data at all to be able to use manually!”

He shrugged. “I suggest that if something that bad goes wrong then manual control will be the least of your problems. Manual control brought back mangled ships and dead bodies. The captain’s signed off on this. The rest makes no difference. Oh, and one other thing.”

“Yes?” An Li responded, not liking this a bit.

“You’re going to take along a robotic camera unit. It’s quite intelligent, almost to having a personality of sorts, but it consumes nothing and its sole function is to record this entire expedition. If you get back, this footage alone will be a sensation.”

“I don’t like it,” Sark grumbled. “I don’t like to shower in public.”

“It’s smart enough to know what’s appropriate, and to take criticism and suggestions. It absolutely will not get in the way. That’s not its job. But refuse to take it, and it’s a deal breaker. That’s the one and only condition I place. At the very least, I want to see where my money’s going.”

And whether or not we’re trying to put something over on you, An Li thought. Still, it wasn’t worth arguing over.

“If it’s smart and doesn’t interfere and if it can even help if need be, then we’ll take it. One problem or funny move, though, and it’s history. You understand that?”

“I think we understand each other perfectly.”

“When will the supplies be aboard and the ship refitted? In other words, how soon can we go?” An Li asked him.

“Two more days. Some of the weaponry you wanted isn’t exactly legal, you know, and many of the sensors and such are also pretty tough to find in good condition. Still, most of it is repairing the damage to the Stanley. Oh—the shipfitter wants to know if you want to take the smelter. Even if you did use it to good effect last trip, it seems rather excessive here, and the object is to streamline the outer hull as much as is possible in a salvage ship.”

“We can send that one back,” Jerry Nagel told him. “It didn’t really do a whole hell of a lot of good for us, and even less for poor Achmed, and I can’t think of anything we’d use it for on this kind of trip. What few of its functions might be useful we can get from the weapons array. A lot of what we asked for isn’t for shooting, it’s alternative tools, you might say. I suspect if we face off against an alien race that’s been running this kind of experiment or scam or whatever all these years, they can probably outgun us anyway. My feeling is they’ll keep hidden, let us hang ourselves, as it were. I’m not itching to fight somebody who actually might be able to use stuff that’s brand new.”

“Fair enough. I’ll stick around long enough to see you off, but then I have to get back home. I’ve put off work far too long now,” Sanders said.

“But we meet here to settle up,” An Li reminded him.

He smiled sweetly. “Of course! You couldn’t keep me away. So, that’s it now.”

“Well, one more thing,” An Li told him.

“Oh?”

“Petty cash. We’re going to need to pick up some personal things here, and we’re gonna have a nice little going-away party as well.”

Norman Sanders sighed. “Oh, very well. How much?”

“Two thousand apiece.”

“What!”

An Li shrugged. “Don’t worry, Normie, Baby. It comes out of our share…”

He wasn’t mollified. “What the hell are you going to do with money like that?”

She smiled sweetly. “That’s none of your damned business.”