Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“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.”