“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.”