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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.
 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 that rich, and
our job is to make him richer.
is
 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
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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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]