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.