Page 9 of The Captain's Bounty
Rather calmly, all things considered, he asked again, “Howmuch?”
Licking the fleshy suction pad of one yellow finger, the scrapper turned the page before gulping another mouthful of air to burb, “Two thousand chits. Pay it or get out. I don’t got time for this.”
Forget breathing. It was all Bruwes could do not to grab the three-foot-tall swamp toad and yank him right over the top of his five-foot-high desk. “For ajump coil?”
Looking up at last, the diminutive scrapper-mech scowled through the film of water in its goggles before licking the dust offthe glass with twin flicks of his tongue. “Supply and demand. I supply the parts, I demand the price.”
“I could get a jump coil for fifty chits at any other salvage yard!”
“Then go there. I got tadpoles to feed.”
“Oh, you do not!” Bruwes snapped.
Olex glanced behind him, lifting a hind flipper to scratch carefully around one of the lumpy, translucent nodes protruding from his swollen back. A dark blob inside the node squirmed and burbled faintly. “Well, I will soon and if they don’t get enough to eat, they tend to eat each other. Upsets the wives. Look, friend—see? I call you friend,” he inserted in a wounded tone, spreading both fore-flippers wide in an approximation of a human shrug. “You want to check the yard? Eh? I got three hundred and six wrecks on this lot alone. You find a working jump coil in any of them and you can have it for free. You don’t, and you pay me fifty chits for taking up my time. NolaTeck coils been out of production for fifty seasons, of course they burn out. Viri coils only compatible with Viridian ships. Ku’ul coils have a playful little 2% chance of exploding mid-jump. So you do not want ‘a jump coil,’” he concluded with a stern belch. “You want a Core-III or a Phorix. Can you get one of those for fifty chits at any other salvage yard? Eh? Eh? Two thousand. Good day.”
Flipping the page again, Olex went back to his tallies, leaving Bruwes to fume in futility.
He didn’t have two thousand of anything, much less chits. He hated money. He hated everything about this backwater mining moon, covered in sand, filthy sift-miners, and scam artists. Money was king in this place. Money was king in every place, except Me’Kava, it seemed. If he’d had any idea how important something as arbitrarily worthless as chit slips were for all the rest of the known universe, he’d have tried a little harder not to get thrown off his home world.
Well, maybe not. Kidnapping people against their will had been hard enough to stomach back when he’d thought they’d eventually get a choice. From the moment he’d discovered otherwise—damn Demin and his lustful obsession with that Earthling troublemaker, Cory—the entire crew of the Me’Kava collecting ship The Raider had been doomed. They were pirates now, hunted by their own world and condemned to earning a living anyway they could in a money-hungry universe.
Growling under his breath, he shoved away from the desk before he hurt the toad man and strode back outside.
The heat of the day smacked across his shoulder like a log on fire, stinging his skin right through his white uniform shirt. His ship was docked at the far end of this squalid town, if that was even the word to use. It had been a Corporate mining camp back in the early space-faring days, when a little uranium and diamond dust was still worth mining. It was still a mining camp of sorts, populated by the sort of men who were more comfortable in the dark underground, where they had expanded the old tunnels into a deadly labyrinth of poisonous gas pockets, toxic backwash, supports rigged to collapse, and of course, the miners themselves. The surface was little better—mostly scrappers and mechshops, dotted with unsavory establishments that sold dubious drink, even more dubious food, and sex in all forms and flavors. And yes, Corporate still took their cut from every chit that passed from hand to flipper to claw, without taking the slightest interest in the health or welfare of the residents.
Bruwes stormed through the docking quadrant, past three empty stalls, two ships in various stages of repair and one currently being cut into pieces while the captain desperately protested, “I’ll pay for the repair! Just give me two more days! I’ll pay it, I swear!”
That was going to be him. Bruwes just knew it.
The Raider’s docking ramp was already down, and Aldar stood at the controls, waiting for him. His ship mechanic’s mistrust of everyone not crew was still running high, even after almost a year now of running jobs for anyone willing to pay them and it showed in the glares he cast anyone caught even looking in the Raider’s direction.
“They got the parts?” Aldar asked, drawing the ramp up the minute Bruwes was back onboard.
“Yes,” Bruwes snipped.
“How much?”
“More than we’ve got.”
“How much more?”
He exploded. “Two jobs at least! And how the hell we’re supposed to do two jobs without jumping, I don’t know.”
Scrubbing his hands through his black head quills, he forced them flat to his scalp so no one could read his aggravation. Were his eyes red? Probably. He stormed all the way to the bridge, just trying to calm his breathing and searching for the faintest hint of red in the things he saw. How close was his disease to taking him over?
Once on the bridge, he shut the door and locked it. He refused to go into Rage, never again. Not if he could help it. He was civilized. He was in charge. He was bred for far bigger and better things than the captaincy of the unlawful pirate ship that the Raider had become. His father would be so fucking proud.
Except he wasn’t, and no one on this ship knew it better than Bruwes himself.
Cold-hearted bastard.
Dropping to the ground, Bruwes took himself into firm control. Pushup after pushup, he blasted through the excess energy caused by his anger until sweat plastered his white shirt to his back and his tan pants stuck to his waist and thighs. He kept at it, pushing himself farther and faster, until his arms wereshaking. Captains didn’t have the luxury of losing control like little boys. Captains had to be calm and rational, in command at all times, with a crew that knew they could depend on his ability to make any decision at any moment, and that it would always be the right one.
Where the hell was he going to get two thousand chits?
How much did they have on the books right now? Crawling up off the floor and breathing heavily, he dropped to sit in one of the two control chairs and pulled up the logs. Forty-seven. Having just restocked their resources, that was what they had left.
Shit.
