Orbital Claims Adjuster Page 12

  The airlock equalized, and they walked inside.

  “Greetings, traders,” boomed the man in front of them. He was tall. Very tall. They were all tall, in fact, and all black haired. Perhaps a dozen people filled the foyer behind the airlock, men and women ranging in age from about twelve to…old—perhaps sixty or seventy? They all wore green skinsuits. Neat but patched.

  “I’m Carl. I’m the purser here at Cavernon Station.”

  “Third officer Vidal. This is Stewart and LaFleur.”

  “Those aren’t GG colors you’re wearing.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “I see.” Carl paused and waited, but Vidal didn’t elaborate. “What can we do for you folks?”

  “Mr. Stewart here is a trader assigned to us. He has some items that you might be interested in.”

  “Oh?” Carl sounded skeptical. “We can talk, certainly. But we don’t need much. GG keeps us well supplied. Maybe a few trinkets. But I notice you and Mr. LaFleur here have what looks like revolvers on your belts.”

  “We do,” Vidal nodded. “And they’ll stay on the belts unless there’s some sort of problem. But I don’t want any problems, because I’ll bet there’s a revolver or two on your side as well.”

  Carl smiled. “Of course, there is. We’re honest people but not stupid. And there might be a rifle trained on you from somewhere as well. Are you okay with that?”

  “We are. I think we understand each other.”

  “Good. What have you got?”

  “Mr. Stewart speaks for us. Jake?”

  Jake stepped up to the fore and began chatting with Carl. He listed the items in his standard container load. The food, clothes, wood, a few items of furniture, some solvents and cleaning chemicals they had stolen from engineering, a painting. Carl had a reasonable poker face but some of his family didn’t. Jake caught a few whiffs of interest. He ran through the list twice, once quickly listing all the items available, then a second time, much more slowly, giving more details of each of the items. Carl was a veteran negotiator, not expressing interest in anything but querying to cut down their value.

  “Food is in factory containers?” Carl asked.

  “Sealed boxes of fifty,” Jake said.

  “Standard is one hundred. What’s the size range of those clothes?”

  “Two extra-large, three large, three medium, two small.”

  “We run big here. Small is not too useful for us.”

  “You have children,” said Jake. “They are small. And you can trade them to your buddies.”

  Carl smiled and nodded. “You’re young, but you’ve done this before.”

  Jake finished up. Carl waited, too experienced to name a figure to start with.

  “All of this can be yours for 100,000 credits.”

  Carl frowned. That figure was high. Very high.

  “I thought you’d done free-trading before, Mr. Stewart. You know that’s not even a moderately reasonable starting bid.”

  Jake shrugged. “Maybe not. But that’s the charge if you want to pay credits.”

  Carl recognized an opening when he heard one. “What if we trade?”

  “What have you got to trade?” Jake asked.

  “Son, we’re obviously a mining station. We have nickel, copper, tungsten, iron, aluminum, a little gold and silver, other metals. What say we offer you…” Carl went on to name a package of metals, mostly nickel, at inflated prices. Jake waited, ignoring the amounts and values. He had something else in mind.

  “So, what do you say to that,” Carl asked.

  “You have a few things we’re looking for,” Jake said. “Here’s our counter. We’ll trade gold at one thousand credits a kilogram.” That was a decent price for gold but not great. “But we’ll trade two thousand credits a kilogram for platinum or palladium.” That was double the going rate. “Three thousand a kilogram for iridium, and five thousand for ruthenium or rhodium. In trade goods.” That was almost ten times the going rate.

  Carl blinked at that. “Well, we normally sell our rhodium at twenty thousand a kilogram.”

  The game was on.

  They came to an agreement quickly. Carl wanted to buy things from these fools before they came to their senses. He wanted a second, identical package. Jake was willing but said they had only allocated one for this station, and they bickered back and forth. Finally, Jake agreed to 7,500 credits per kilogram for rhodium and ruthenium, provided they paid for everything in those metals. Carl sent the family scurrying, and they sweated back and forth for about forty minutes, but finally he had to confess. “Mr. Stewart, that’s a fair offer but we can’t fill it all. We’ll be about 900 grams short, even including our partially refined ore.”

  “And that’s assuming that we take your assay values on the partials as correct,” Jake said, “and we had agreed to set that aside while we talked. I think it’s too high, but we’d have to do a full assay to prove it. How about this, if I take all the metals offered, including your partials, you’ll still be short about 6,350 credits or so, plus whatever I think I’m owed for the assay. I’ll take the metal plus ten thousand credits, and I’ll take GG credits.”

  “All the metal and eight thousand GG credits,” Carl countered.

  I knew those assay values were overvalued, thought Jake.

  “Done, if you’ll give us half the cash in mixed small GG coins and notes, and half in electronic certificates.”

  “Agreed,” Carl said, extending his hand.

  “Agreed,” said Jake, shaking it. “Who’s coming up with me to inspect the container?”

  “My assistant, Terry,” said Carl. “Mr. Vidal, your boy here strikes a hard bargain, but he’s fair to deal with. Will you and Mr. LaFleur be our guests for dinner?”

  “Ah, thank you very much, but we ate on the ship and we have to get moving.”

  There was a general stirring of the crowd and a number of frowns. Jake interceded. “Excuse me Carl, I have to chat with my boss for a second.” He grabbed Vidal by the arm and steered him back toward the airlock.

  “You have to stay,” Jake whispered. “You’re a hostage. When one of their people comes up to the ship, we leave one of ours down here to make sure that we don’t leave with a family member or hold them for ransom. You’ll go with him to eat and also count the money. The money stays with you down here until their guy confirms that the container has what we say it does and he watches as we push it off to them. They’ll probably send him up with a broomstick and a couple of chains and they’ll tow up a replacement container, but they won’t release you until the container they bought is broke free of us.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know,” Vidal said.

  “It’s the standard way things are done. Nothing unusual. But they won’t proceed with things unless you stay down here and count the money.”

  “How do I determine that we have the right type of ore?”

  “Can you read a spectroscope?”

  “No, but I bet you can.” Vidal turned. “A little scheduling issue, Carl, sorry. Jake and I will be staying for dinner with you.” The crowd relaxed. “Your fellow Terry will go up to our ship with Mr. LaFleur.” Vidal looked at Zeke. “It might be best if Terry drove.”

  ***

  Everything had gone as planned, and the Petrel pulled away as soon as the replacement container was secured. Carl and company had already secured their container down port, and everybody gave big cheery farewells over the radio.

  “Stewart, maybe you’ve finally found something you don’t completely suck at,” Vidal said, though Jake could hear the begrudging strain behind his words.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But Stewart, why did you ask for the credits?”

  “They’ll have lots of GG credits on account that they can’t use, and we can use the loose change—I have an idea at the next larger station we go to that might let us pick up something.”

  Suzanne and Zeke had been listening. “That was very smart, Jake. I wish we could do that. You are ver
y good at trading.” Suzanne gave him a hundred-watt smile. Jake blushed a bit.

  “Um, well, I’m good at this. I wish I was better at the shooting and stuff. That’s more important.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Vidal, rubbing his healing shoulder.

  “Yes, sir,” Jake said as Vidal stalked away.

  “Don’t believe him, Jake,” Suzanne whispered. “Lots of people can shoot guns, but without you doing this we’d be in big trouble. You got more out of this one station than we got out of six. Bassi is just jealous.”

  “Trading is easy. Anybody can do it if they try.”

  “Not me,” Zeke said. “I have no idea how you managed all that. You shouldn’t downplay your skills, Jake.”

  “It’s nothing,” muttered Jake, looking at the floor.

  Zeke and Suzanne looked at each other, shrugged, and changed the subject.

  ***

  Captain Marchello marched around the ship for his weekly inspection. He enjoyed the opportunity to don his best uniform, and he insisted that all the crew do likewise. He had a full-time valet to shine his boots and iron his tunic and ensure that all the appropriate decorations were attached. His crew did not, but this fact do not stop him from issuing demerits and criticism for any uniform infractions he found.

  His days were full. Every morning he awoke and was served a breakfast freshly cooked by his personal cook, (officially rated as a third gunner) and perused reports from the last few shifts. His first officer attended him during breakfast but was not invited to eat. Bacon was expensive, and the captain had none to waste. The first officer wrote down the captain’s criticism’s and directives, incorporating them in the “order of the day” that the captain issued after breakfast. All officers were required to acknowledge receipt and understanding. Then he examined personal comm traffic when in range. It vexed him that they were rarely in range of any high-speed comms, and soon they would be totally out of reach. He had business interests to follow.

  After that, he had the officers’ gym cleared and half-heartedly exercised. Then a shower—with no water limit of course—and a massage from his own personal masseuse. (Like the cook, valet, aide, and a few others on the captain’s personal staff, the masseuse was listed as a member of the gunnery department. The chief gunner despaired because only he could actually aim, fire, or repair the ship’s weapons, but the captain was unmoved. When would he need to shoot at somebody?)

  In the afternoon he played chess with the doctor or the first officer for several hours. They both lost; the doctor because he didn’t care for the game at all, the first officer because it was the politic thing to do. In the evening he listened to classical music while dining on whatever his chef had prepared and then read with his evening glass of brandy until retiring. The watch officers knew better than to call the captain after dinner—all calls went automatically to the first officer. The traditional weekly meal with his officers had been suspended after the captain referred to the food served to him as a form of moose feces and spat it out. Since that was better food than the officers regularly ate, the first officer arranged to schedule mandatory drills or maneuvers during every normal invitation night since. He told the captain that the officers would be delighted to host him again but the necessities of the ship precluded it.

  The captain and first officer marched through the main cargo hold where a number of containers of high-value items had been stored. He smiled contentedly as he examined the piles of copper and tungsten ingots. His family owned 17.5% of the profit from these lucrative far trading voyages. In fact, his personal presence was the result of a complicated arrangement that allowed each allied family to supervise one voyage every few years. He was paid a premium over his regular salary to do so.

  Captain Marchello may have been a bit of a dilettante as regards ship handling, and his grasp of items affecting crew moral was poor, but he understood wealth when he saw it, or didn’t see it.

  “First, what is going on here? Why are these cages not full?”

  “As I’m sure the captain knows, we have been paid mostly in bulk metals this trip—tungsten, titanium, nickel, iron, and aluminum. It’s all in my reports, as I’m sure you read, sir.”

  The captain never read those reports. “Yes, I know that of course, but why no precious metals?”

  “We have some, sir. A little gold, some silver, but the others, particularly the platinum group, seem to be in short supply. But it doesn’t matter, sir. We are still meeting revenue goals. One ton of iron is the same value to us as 50g of gold, more value really. We have plenty of space and we get an excellent price on the iron, better than the gold. These people know they can use the gold anywhere, but we’re the only market for the bulk shipments.”

  “Yes, but the, the, portability issue?”

  “We have plenty of room, sir. We’re emptying our holds selling our goods at an excellent mark-up.”

  “Yes, but,” the captain paused. How did he explain that he had planned to raid the precious metals bin and carry off a briefcase worth of it, paying for it at the same rate they paid the outer stations at, then selling it at the vastly inflated inner system value. This sort of embezzlement was winked at as long as it was kept to a reasonable amount, say what he could fit in a suitcase. A few kilograms at most. But on a few kilograms of iron he might make a mere fifty credits. A few kilograms of platinum, however, fifty thousand. He needed those bins full so he could steal, he meant buy some of it.

  “It is unusual. Why would the numbers be down? What do you make of it, First?”

  “I’m not sure, sir, but I can inquire at the next station.”

  “Do so.”

  ***

  Nadine punched the altitude jets and cursed as the ship rocked. It had taken two tries to mate with the airlock.

  “You okay?” asked Jen. Jen was the other person on the bridge. The two of them were pilot, navigator, engineer, and gunner if necessary.

  “Yes, just tired.”

  “You and me both. We can’t keep up this up with just the two of us.”

  “We’ll keep up. We have to.”

  “Too true,” said Jen. “I can barely imagine us getting what we are promised.”

  “I have an excellent imagination. I have no problem imagining it,” said Nadine. Her thoughts turned to orange juice. “Where do oranges come from?”

  “What?” Jen asked. “Old earth, I think.”

  “But how do we get them on Delta?”

  “They don’t grow on Delta. It’s too cold. They’re made in those, what do you call them, greenhouses, where they heat the air to keep it warm all the time. They’re really expensive. It costs a fortune to heat those places, and they need special radiation shielding and special lights, something to do with the spectrum. Why do you ask?”

  “Never mind. Let’s get the show together. Meet you at the airlock.”

  She suited up in five minutes and they collected together in front of their side of the lock. They were met by a hulking man in a reinforced hard suit carrying a shotgun. He looked like a medieval knight from the old vids. His name tag read “Demetrios.”

  Nadine tilted her head up and gave him her best smile.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Good. What did I tell you?”

  “Stand still and look scary. Don’t talk. Don’t attack anybody unless you say. Don’t kill anybody. Hit them before I shoot them.”

  “Good, what else did I say?”

  “That if I mess up you’ll kill me in my sleep.”

  “Good, good. We understand each other.”

  Jen was carrying a metal attaché. It had reinforced hinges and clasps and a thumbprint lock, and it was connected to a harness on her body by a short chain. The same harness had two revolvers in quick draw holsters. She hefted the case up. “All set. Ready to do my thing.”

  “Showtime, people.” Nadine stepped into the lock, and her crew followed her. Nadine didn’t carry any weapons.

  At least,
not any visible ones.

  She carefully closed and locked the ship behind her, then spun the inner wheel. It opened wide into the station to show a tall man with black hair. Two equally tall men with shotguns stood behind him.

  “I’m Nadine. We spoke on the comm.”

  “I’m Carl.”

  “We’re in a bit of a hurry, so we’d like to move right along here.”

  “Fine with me. We’d like to inspect the goods.

  Jen applied her thumb to the lock on the case. There was an audible click as it opened and she flipped it forward for Carl’s inspection.

  Carl leaned forward and reached into the case. Inside were six revolvers anchored by clips. He unclipped one and removed it, opened the cylinder and spun it a few times, then closed the cylinder, cocked the hammer, and dry fired it. The action worked easily, and the hammer dropped with an audible click.

  Nadine cleared her throat. “Six revolvers, 500 rounds of ammunition, 400 frangible, 100 solid shot.”

  Carl nodded. “As discussed.”

  Nadine smiled. “Now, Carl, as regards payment, we have some definite preferences.”

  Chapter 11

  The next few stations went as smoothly as the first, and Jake got to demonstrate why they needed the GG credits. They had just finished trading at one of the larger stations. More formal, it had a truss, its own refinery mirror, and a station office. Their discussion in the office went well and their usual overpayment for platinum group metals (PGMs) went through, but Jake had been reviewing a number of the reports before arriving. He spoke to Vidal on the way out.

  “They should have more.”

  “More what,” Vidal asked.

  “More PGMs. You sent me the, uh, reports you were given, and there were some production reports and same assay reports. Given what they’re refining here, there should be more. More metals.”

  “They said that was all they had.”

  “Yes, well. I think it’s a ploy. Suzanne?”

  “Yes, Jake?” Suzanne said. Either Zeke or Suzanne accompanied Jake and Vidal on these buying trips. Jake could probably have done it by himself, but Vidal still had a few issues with Jake being alone.