The Leghk Sector
The sandstorm showed no signs of letting up.
Hal Jellico dropped the case full of ancient Arla florin � four hundred thousand in platinum coins � near the blinking strobe and the five G�Nunk bodies. He took a look at the slumped forms then started trudging back through the sheets of sand.
�Made the drop. I�m on the way back,� said Hal. The response crackled in his headset.
�Got it,� said Arella. A few long minutes later, Hal was back with the group. Together, they started back for The Moor of Venice.
Folia-4
Folia System
Planetside, Folia-4
Planetside
ISS The Moor of Venice
Nickel and Dime, the small utility droids that worked for Ux, were hard at work, replenishing oxygen mask reservoirs, changing batteries and cleaning weapons. Arella and Hal watched them buzz back and forth across the cargo bay.
�That should do the trick,� said Arella. �We�ve given them a first rate shellacking and left the money. Now we just wait.�
�Right,� said Hal. �We wait for them to leave the package or we wait for them to do something completely crazy and unpredictable.�
�Strange birds,� said Arella. The main door slid open and Vern walked in, hands in his pockets. Hal chuckled.
�Speaking of,� he muttered, amused. Vern walked over.
�Mr. Rota,� said Arella. He looked sheepish.
�I didn�t mean to lose my cool like that,� said Vern. �My carbine wasn�t functioning.� Neither Arella nor Hal said anything. �Some sand must�ve jammed it up.� He looked at the ground.
�Look,� said Arella. �You�re a solid pilot and that�s what we need. We can teach you the rest.� She let him consider the thought for a moment. �But you�d better focus closely and learn what we�re teaching you.�
�Sure,� said Vern. The ship�s intercom clicked on. It was Grix on the bridge.
�We�ve got a pressure seal integrity warning,� said the Veloxi. Arella ran a hand through her hair.
�So what else is new?� she said.
�Port landing gear,� said Grix. �Repair access plate.�
�I�ll check it out,� said Vern. Arella looked at him. �I�ve been properly trained for crap jobs,� he said. She nodded and he walked aft.
�Maybe he�ll work out,� said Hal. Arella shrugged. Hal laughed and nudged her. �Well you did, after all. You remember Biggs when you first came aboard Belfast Windfall?�
�I hate you,� she said. �Let�s get up to the bridge. I want to see what our G�Nunk friends have made of the situation.
Windward Passage
Arth
Outside Restoration City
Two weeks earlier.
A warm tropical breeze floated in through the large open windows.
Biggs sat at his kitchen table, hacking away at his oversized calculator, trying to balance his books. Somehow, no matter how big he scored, he always wound up in the red. Still, this latest job stood to change that, at least for a while. It was a plum assignment.
The problem, of course, was that the word always got out. Biggs took off his stone age reading glasses and looked out across the bay. The sun was sinking into the western ocean in a smear of orange. It was almost time to go.
Any trader � or longshoreman or mechanic or stowaway � worth his salt had heard rumors of the trawler that stumbled onto a Tandelou shipwreck at the edge of the Cloud. So the story went, they salvaged the computer core and sold it to the Humna Humna for an astronomical sum.
What most traders didn�t know was the part about the map and the loo-loo lizards. The Humna Humna were keeping that tidbit as quiet as possible, making the whole situation known only to a few contractors with whom they�d worked before.
Normally, the Humna Humna would�ve kept the job in-house, but the map wasn�t enough to find the lizards� native planet. The map was a rare example of a Lowar key map: it wasn�t intended for navigation or reference, per se � it was actually a device for hiding a star system on the book-in-a-library principle. Put the key and the map together, and you�d know the exact star system where the little lizards lived. No key, no planet, no lizards, no money.
Biggs Hilsfar knew where the key was � after a fashion.
The computer core salvaged from the Tandelou wreck said the key had been stored in bin three, cargo pod five, which had been neatly detached by the G�Nunk after the ambush. So there was a G�Nunk ship flying around space with the key to the map. The retire-in-style question was, which G�Nunk ship was it?
Biggs smiled to himself and clasped his hands behind his head. Tuvakayo was the name.
Of course, it wasn�t as simple as jumping in the Belfast Windfall and driving off to meet the Tuvakayo for friendly negotiations. To begin with, if word got out that Biggs Hilsfar had flown off-world, the competition would be following him around the galaxy. And second, G�Nunk weren't known for a friendly style of negotiation.
But they did have an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic. A cryptic message about �princely payment� and the �will of G�Naen Sh�gar� was enough to get them to agree to a meeting on some dust ball world in a system called Folia in the neighborhood of nowhere.
Biggs put on a clean shirt and grabbed his wallet. It was time for his nightly decoy activity. He was still on Arth for all to see, making a point of drinking heavily at his usual haunts. The society columnists did the rest.
His favorite headline was from Around the Galaxy. It read �Bender Biggs Bar Crawl Continues.� And continue it did.
Belfast Windfall, however, was long gone.
Folia-4
Planetside
ISS The Moor of Venice
�How�d you get her past Starport without the whole world knowing?� asked Hal Jellico. �They ping every ship leaving orbit and the inbound - outbound traffic rosters are public records.�
�So is the ship registry, which Biggs doctored� said Arella, looking at the bridge readouts. �He slipped a few pennies to some bureaucrat on Arth. All of a sudden there was a twenty-year-old ship named The Moor of Venice included among ships registered to Arth.�
�What about the transponder?�
�Grix modified it,� said Arella. �When Starport picked us up on the outbound traffic lane and downloaded our transponder profile, they got the same line of garbage and signed off on The Moor of Venice leaving town. As far as anyone knows, Belfast Windfall is still parked in Biggs� back yard.�
�And you picked me up on Loman�s Moon and here we are,� said Hal. �Nice move.�
�Biggs is pretty good,� said Arella. �He wasn�t all that happy about me taking the ship out without him, but the money was too good.� She looked
�So how did he figure out the ship carrying the map key was the Tuvakayo?� Hal asked.
�Biggs wouldn�t even tell that part to me,� said Arella. �Probably some tip from the old 4620 Mafia.� Across the bridge, Grix was working his console.
�The ultimate old boys� network,� said Hal, grinning.
�Okay, here we go,� said Grix. �Just caught a spike in local atmospheric composition. Something big.� Arella and Hal came over to look at the readout. �It�s consistent with a massive shot of booster exhaust. It�s already dissipating.�
�Looks like Tuvakayo bolted,� said Hal. �I wonder if they left us a package.�
Grix keyed the intercom to the cargo bay. Ux answered.
�Let�s warm up the terrain vehicle,� said Grix.
�Got it,� said Ux.
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[Curio: Rota -- on the coast of Spain]