Trouble was, I needed to become the worm, not the other way around, she reflected bitterly.
Canyer’s Guild Hostel looked like the kind of place that put up working stiffs between jobs on a junkyard planet. Cobbled together from every conceivable kind of old building site, it seemed less a large building than an assemblage of junk that had somehow come alive from the weight of salvage all around and under it. It could have been described as ball-shaped, triangular, oblong, rectangular, starlike, and flowing adobe and been pretty well depicted correctly. The only assurance was that, because it had been put together by the same sort of people who might need to stay in it for a while, it was pretty damned stable. No two rooms were remotely alike.
Getting the crew set up wasn’t a problem; the guilds owned the place, and if you had a valid card they couldn’t refuse you, even if you couldn’t afford to stay there. Salvagers, like other skilled workers in guild or union organizations, took care of their own because, God knew, nobody else would.
There weren’t many different guild facilities on a dump of a world like this. Salvagers’, engineers’, longshoremen’s, and entertainment were about it. “Entertainment,” of course, was always there except on the Holy Joe-type worlds, and, buried deep, even on a couple of those. The folks who lived in the entertainment hostels didn’t exactly do Shakespeare. They were more like a service industry.
The odd thing was, she was a card-carrying member with some experience in three out of four. Engineers required more than on-the-job training; when you were dealing with the complex cybernetic spaceships and robotic design and reprogramming, well, you needed an education for that.
But she’d run tugs to and from orbital freighters, she’d been on and then led salvage teams, and she’d begun, actually had been born, in one of those entertainment guild hostels, so she had the other three. She might have had the fourth one, too, if she’d ever had the time to learn to read and write. That was a luxury in an automated age, even one that was falling apart. She’d never felt the need nor figured out the sense of knowing those skills.
She set up the crew and signaled them to pack up and come on down, and suddenly felt empty, almost drained. It took her a moment to realize why.
For the first time in a very long time, she was absolutely on her own. She’d done the last thing she had to do. Oh, a few added debriefings, and some soft soap and maybe fancy moves when the leasing company digested the fact that the Stanley’s rent hadn’t been paid, but, otherwise, she was done.
She had a week or two, she knew, before things began to get ugly. Word didn’t exactly travel instantaneously around the known galaxy anymore; it took time for these things to get back to the leasing people, for somebody to figure out the score, and maybe for some enforcers to be sent out to see what could be done, if not to collect, perhaps to make examples for the future.
Avoiding those types wasn’t a real challenge, either, for the same reason as it took for word to get around. The distances involved in this kind of life were vast. The real challenge was the DNA sample they had of her, but even that could be fudged, if it came to that.
What was required was what she didn’t have: money.
She wasn’t worried about the others. They were a guild crew and had been properly hired; she was the one with her ass on the line, putting her neck on the chopping block thanks to a talkative young marine who’d seen this whole deserted colony while on his last patrol and who wanted to show off just where he’d been.
She knew now that she should have left it to the marines, but the money potential had been so huge that it had been worth the risk. She still would take such a risk again for such a possible prize. Those who didn’t take those kinds of risks remained insects, grunts on the ground or in the brothels doing the same monotonous and degrading shit until they either died or killed themselves leaving no permanent marks on the landscape of history.
It was time to find her own room here, take a shower, dress for optimism, and go on over to a bar.
She didn’t want a place close to the guild billets; it would do her no good to run into everybody she knew or try and pick up another broke guildsman. Hocking what little she had left, she got herself more than presentable and took a taxi over to the Hotel Center where the buyers and sellers of all sorts of junk congregated.
Most of the time she always hated being so small. A hundred and forty-five centimeters put you well below most, and even if your body was very well proportioned, forty plus kilos didn’t make for an imposing figure. You had to do that on look, on bearing, on how you moved. Her entertainer background was always the most useful to her when not in space, although much of it came as naturally to her as her height or weight. She hadn’t been designed as an entertainer in some genetics lab, but the odds were her mother, or maybe her whole lineage, had been.
That’s why she’d liked space so much, though, other than that you were on your own or the equal or boss of the rest of your fellow workers. If you were in a weightless area you could move a ton of ore just as easily as someone twice your size, and even if you were piloting a tug, the tug became an extension of you and made you just as powerful as anybody else in one.
Now it was back-to-basics time until she had enough to break away again and guarantee a disappearance into another more equalizing position.
The dumb-clever name of the Prefabricated Inn showed up between two of the five central hotels in the business district. It looked like the right kind of place, although she didn’t remember it from the past.
She paid the taxi with her card and then got out and looked around the place as the little vehicle, itself rescued and rehabbed from the junk pile, buzzed off.
It hadn’t been too long ago that she’d been a guest in one of these, after she’d taken the prospectus and proofs to the agency reps and gotten financing for the salvage trip. It had been, in many ways, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream: Here not because you were doing escort duty, plying business information, or giving other forms of personal service, but because you were a guest, a paying guest who belonged here. Being called “Miss” and “Ma’am,” having the service types try and solicit you, walking into places like this bar like you were about to sign a billion-dollar deal.
Well, she was dressed pretty much the same now, and had the same look, so maybe she’d be remembered. If so, nobody would be looking for her as just another escort on the make. She just hoped she could find a mark quickly and easily in this place.
She couldn’t afford to be sitting around one very long otherwise, and it was a long, long trip back to the hostel if she didn’t score.
Young, old, male, female, it didn’t really matter so long as they had some money. Even information wouldn’t be all that valuable now. Not until she could clear the decks and her obligations and take chances again.
The place wasn’t a dump like the world it was on, but it was a prefab model that some designer had tried to disguise as something interesting while only making it something more plastic. It probably was something from the salvage yard—even the fancy hotels in this area were assembled from true surplus projects—but, for a bar with some limited food service, it looked and smelled pretty clean.