"No sweat, Boss. Bennington, Travers, and Ciraki are all on call."
"Good!" Westman smiled in approval. "Tell them I figure to drop in on our off-world guests tomorrow morning, but we've got a ways to go. So I want to move out within the next four or five hours."
Oscar Johansen checked his GPS display with a certain sense of satisfaction. He'd been pleased to discover that Montana at least had a comprehensive network of navigation satellites. He could have asked HMS Ericsson or Volcano -the support ships the RMN had stationed here-to provide him with the same data, but he really preferred working with the existing local infrastructure… whenever he could.
You never knew what you were going to find on a planet in the Verge. Some of them were little better than prespace Old Earth, while others were even further advanced than Grayson had been before it signed on to the Manticoran Alliance. Montana fell somewhere between the two extremes. It was too dirt-poor to afford a really solid tech base, but it had made innovative use of what it could afford. Its navigation satellites were a case in point. They were at least a couple of centuries out of date by Manticoran standards, but they did the job just fine. And they also pulled double duty as weather satellites, air traffic control radar arrays, law enforcement surveillance platforms, and traffic control points for any freighters which called here.
And there's no reason why the place has to be so poor, he thought as he tagged the GPS coordinates to the electronic map in his memo board. The beef they raise here would command top prices back home, and with the Lynx Terminus, they can ship it fresh direct to Beowulf or even Old Earth. He shook his head, thinking of the astronomical prices Montanan beef or nearbuffalo could bring on the mother world. And there are dozens of other opportunities for anyone with just a little bit of startup capital.
Which, after all, was the reason Johansen was here. The Alexander Government had made it clear that Her Majesty had no intention of allowing her new subjects in Talbott to be turfed out of the development of their own star systems by sharp Manticoran operators. The government had announced it would carry out its own surveys of the Cluster, in conjunction with local governments, to confirm all existing titles of ownership. Those titles would be fully protected, and to ensure local participation in any development projects, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had announced that, for its first ten T-years of operation, any new startup endeavor in the Cluster would enjoy a reduction in taxation equal to the percentage of ownership held by citizens of the Cluster. After ten T-years, the tax break would reduce by five percent per T-year for another ten T-years, then terminate completely in the twenty-first T-year. Given where the Star Kingdom's wartime tax rates stood, that provision alone was guaranteed to ensure the massive representation of local interests.
Johansen looked up at the sun blazing in a wash of crimson and gold coals on the western horizon. Montana's primary-also called Montana-was a bit cooler than Manticore-A. And Montana was almost one full light-minute farther from its primary than the capital planet of the Star Kingdom was from Manticore-A, too. With evening coming on rapidly, that coolness was especially noticeable, and he looked over to where the expedition was pitching its tents for the night. They were going up with the efficiency of well-organized practice, and his eyes strayed to the rippling, steel-colored sheet of water rushing over the rocks and gravel of the Schuyler River. Local trees, interspersed with Terran oak and aspen, grew right down to the riverbank, casting their shadows over the crystal-clear water, and temptation stirred. There had to be some deep pools out there, he thought, and he'd already encountered the planet's nearbass.
It's usually a good idea to maintain a certain separation between the chief and his Indians, he thought with a lurking smile, so I probably shouldn't disturb them now that they've gotten into the swing of things over there. And if I get busy fast enough, I might even hook enough fish to give us a little variety for dinner. Even if I don't, I can always claim that was what I was trying to do!
He headed for his personal air car and his tackle box.
The sun rose slowly over the eastern rampart of the Schuyler River Valley. Light frost glittered on the higher slopes to the north, and long fingers of shadow-crisp and cool in the mountain morning-reached out across the sleeping surveyors' camp.
Stephen Westman watched the sun edging higher, then checked his chrono. It was time, and he rose from his seat on the fallen tree trunk, lifted his pulse rifle from where it had leaned against the trunk beside him, and started down the slope.
Oscar Johansen rolled over and stretched luxuriantly. His wife had always been perplexed by the way his sleeping habits flip-flopped whenever he was in the field. At home, he was a night owl, staying up until all hours and sleeping as late as he could get away with. But in the field, he loved the early hours of sunrise. There was something special, almost holy, about those still, clear, crystalline minutes while sunlight flowed slowly, slowly back into a world. Every planet habitable by man had its analogues of birds, and Johansen had never yet been on a world where one of them hadn't greeted the dawn. The songs or calls might vary wildly, but there was always that first, single note in the orchestra. That moment when the first singer roused, tested its voice, and then sounded the flourish that formalized the ending of night and the beginning of yet another day.
His Manticoran-manufactured tent's smart fabric had maintained his preferred overnight temperature of twenty degrees-sixty-eight degrees on the ancient Fahrenheit scale Montana's original, -deliberately archaic settlers had brought with them-and he picked up the remote. He tapped in the command, and the eastern side of the tent obediently transformed itself into a one-way window. He lay there on the comfortable memory-plastic cot, enjoying the warmth of his bedroll, and watched the morning shadows and the misty tendrils of vapor hovering above the river, as if the water were breathing.
He was still admiring the sunrise when, suddenly, the fly of his tent flew open. He shot upright in his cot, more in surprise than anything else, then froze as he found himself staring into the business end of a pulse rifle.
"Morning, friend," the weathered-looking man behind the rifle said pleasantly. "I expect you're a mite surprised to see me."
"God damn it, Steve!"
Les Haven sounded more irritated than anything else, Johansen decided. The Land Registry Office inspector obviously knew the tall, blond-haired leader of the thirty or forty armed, masked men who'd invaded their encampment. The Manticoran wondered whether that was a good sign, or a bad one.
"Looks like you've fallen into bad company, Les," the leader replied. He jerked his head at Johansen. "You procuring for off-world pimps these days?"
"Steve Westman, if you had the sense God gave a neoturkey, you'd know this was just goddamn silliness!" Johansen decided he would have been happier if Haven had been just a bit less emphatic. But the Montanan had the bit well and truly between his teeth. "Damn it, Steve-we voted in favor of annexation by over seventy-two percent. Seventy-two percent , Steve! Are you gonna tell that many of your neighbors they're idiots?"
"Reckon I am, if they are," the blond-haired man agreed amiably enough. He and four of his men were holding the survey party at gunpoint while the rest of his followers busily took down the tents and loaded them into the surveyors' vehicles.
"And they are," Westman added. "Idiots, I mean," he explained helpfully when Haven glared at him.