Chapter 109: A Lot Of Zuni Richer...

The iron blast portals of the Driftmark Mining Guild parted with a low pneumatic groan and breathed out a warm draft of sulfur, stale mash and hot machine oil.

When Leo stepped into the vaulted hematite hall, the whole place went quiet at once.

The thud of pewter flagons stopped, the arguments over seismic claims cut off mid-sentence, and the squawk of a dozen kinds of translator collar died across all three tiers of iron tables.

Hundreds of prospectors turned to stare at the broad-shouldered young man with long dark hair walking at the head of six human women and a grav-sled loaded with forty sealed crates of black, silver-veined ore.

’Okay... everyone’s looking,’ Leo thought, and kept his chin up anyway. ’Just walk like you belong here...’

Bouncing along at his left shoulder on light springy steps was Vexa.

She’d pulled her helmet off the second she hit station air, and her wild purple hair bounced free around her face while her violet eyes darted around the hall with delighted curiosity.

Her pink tail swished in wide lazy arcs behind her and kept flicking against the back of Leo’s trousers, and every time it did, she pretended it hadn’t.

Chloe noticed every single time.

’That’s the fourth time,’ she thought, narrowing her eyes at the tail. ’I’m going to keep counting, what a freak.’

THUD! THUD! THUD!

Four huge stone fingers drummed on basalt at the far end of the hall.

The Karkad Guild Master sat behind his slab with his four yellow eyes blinking in heavy pairs under his armored brow, and the gold gear collar on his granite chest gleamed in the lantern light.

Leo stopped two paces from the slab.

"The nest is cleared, Guild Master," he said, loud enough to carry to the farthest corner of the silent hall. "...The Obsidian Vein is open for your dredgers."

The Guild Master didn’t answer right away.

He reached out slowly with his lower left claw and tapped the interface set into the stone.

BEEP-CHIME!

A huge hololith lit up above the desk and washed the crowd in cold blue light.

It showed Sector Delta-Nine, the whole churning eighty-kilometer vortex of the Vein in crystal-clear detail, and the thousands of red swarm signatures that had choked it for twelve cycles were gone.

[Sector Delta-Nine (The Obsidian Vein)]

[Swarm Density: 0%]

[Hive Core: Destroyed]

[Platinum Vein: Open for excavation]

A low rumble of disbelieving whispers rolled through the balconies.

"Seven beings in under four hours?" someone hissed from the second tier. "Three licensed gunboats died in that field..."

The Guild Master leaned his craggy torso forward until his stone snout hung level with Leo’s chest.

"The telemetry does not lie," he rumbled, and his translator box ground the words out like granite slabs sliding on iron. "Our deep-resonance monitors recorded the death of the core entity forty-six minutes ago... The pulse field that blinded our relays for twelve cycles is gone and the ore field is restored to the Guild."

He tapped the terminal with his upper right claw.

CLANK-THUD!

A heavy drawer slid out of the base of the slab, holding a velvet-lined steel lockbox packed with neat stacks of thick triangular brass tokens stamped with the Guild’s gear-and-asteroid seal.

"The contracted bounty is twenty thousand Zuni, flat."

He reached into a second compartment beneath the stone with his lower claws.

CLINK!

He set three oversized platinum tokens on top of the brass, each one stamped with the seal of the Guild’s executive council.

"And by decree of the Council, the death of a verified Level 5 swarm matriarch carries an emergency hazard indemnity... Three thousand Zuni more, from the station’s reclamation reserve. The total payout is twenty-three thousand, and the ledger is settled."

A sharp collective breath hissed through the watching miners as Harper’s mouth fell open, and her fingers twitched against her pockets.

’Twenty-three thousand... holy crap. Holy crap.’

Then the Guild Master’s four eyes shifted and settled on Vexa.

"However," he said, in a slower and more formal rumble, "station sensors recorded an unregistered Class-S interceptor entering Delta-Nine at terminal velocity before the matriarch’s signal flatlined... Under Guild salvage arbitration, if the kill was made by a third party, the bounty must be—"

"Oh, keep your rocks, stone-face!" Vexa waved a white-gloved hand at him and rolled her huge violet eyes while her tail flicked in theatrical annoyance. "I don’t need your little brass coins! My sponsors pay me five times that just to paint their logo on my stabilizer fin... The kill belongs to Leo... I only drove through that big beetle because I wanted to meet him!"

She turned to Leo and beamed up at him, enormously pleased with herself.

"Take the money, Captain Handsome... It’s all yours."

The hall sank into an even deeper silence as Harper leaned toward Aoi with a dazed look on her face.

"She just gave away twenty-three thousand Zuni," she muttered. "Aoi, tell me I’m not dreaming... Did that crazy cat-girl just hand us a fortune like a bag of peanuts?"

"Her economic reality appears to operate on a different plane from ours," Aoi murmured, pushing her glasses up with a visibly astonished hand. "Take it, Leo, before they have time to argue about it."

Leo stepped up and laid his palm flat on the authorization plate.

"We accept the terms... The Wanderer-7 claims the contract."

BEEP-CHIME!

The transfer locked, and Jin-Ah stepped forward to sweep the tokens with her slate as she moved them into the ship’s lockbox, and for once her face was practically glowing.

As they passed the corner tables on the way out, Leo felt a pair of eyes on his back and turned his head.

The Blood-Drift captain was sitting alone at his table with a full stein in front of him that he hadn’t touched.

He met Leo’s look and held it for one long second, and then he raised the stein in a slow mocking salute.

’Yeah... keep smiling, lizard,’ Leo thought, and kept walking. ’I’ll remember your face.’

"Who’s the grumpy lizard?" Vexa whispered, skipping to catch up with him and peering back over her shoulder at the corner table. "He’s looking at you like you stole his lunch..."

"Some guy who tried to pick a fight with us the first time we came in here," Leo said. "He lost though so don’t really bother with him."

"Ooh." Vexa’s ears perked up. "Did you punch him?"

"I didn’t have to... I just told him to sit down."

"And he sat down?!" She looked up at Leo with her eyes shining like he’d just told her he’d wrestled a star. "That’s so cool... I always end up having to ram people."

Behind them, Elena let out a long-suffering sigh.

From the Guild hall, they went straight toward the Grand Bazaar, with the sled humming along behind them and Harper practically skipping beside it.

"Twenty-three thousand, Cap!" She said, and she couldn’t stop grinning even if she was still keeping a careful half-step away from him. "Twenty-three! Plus whatever the platinum goes for! That’s Torv’s coils, easy!"

’The way she has mood swings... you’d think she was pregnant.’ Leo thought, wasn’t this the same woman avoiding him earlier...?

"Coils are eighteen thousand," Jin-Ah said without looking up from her slate. "The Nexus-Prime landing tariff is fifteen thousand... Together that’s thirty-three thousand... We currently hold thirty-two thousand eight hundred, so we’re two hundred Zuni short."

Harper’s face fell.

"Wait, seriously?"

"Unless the platinum sells," Jin-Ah added calmly, "which it will, because Elena is going to sell it."

Every head turned to Elena and she didn’t even break stride.

"Naturally," she said. "Do try to keep up, Bell."

Camila tugged gently at Leo’s sleeve as they passed an apothecary stall with bundles of dried alien herbs hanging from its awning.

"Leo... once the coils are paid for, could I maybe buy a few seeds here? Just a few... I saw some peppers I’ve never seen before, and I think they’d grow in the third bed."

"Once the ship’s sorted, buy whatever you want, Camila," Leo said, smiling at her. "You’ve earned it."

Her whole face lit up, and she squeezed his arm before hurrying back to Chloe’s side.

Elena took the lead the moment they reached the metal exchange, and her boots clicked a sharp rhythm on the basalt grates.

The Vorn smelter who’d bought their slate ingots was already waiting behind his reinforced counter, and all three rows of his amber eyes were blinking rapidly at the approaching sled.

THUD!

Jin-Ah parked the sled in front of his hydraulic scales, and Elena stepped up with her arms folded.

"We’ve returned, master smelter," she purred, with a smooth icy edge that made his tusked snout flare. "And this time, we’ve brought something that even a border peddler couldn’t possibly fail to understand."

CLICK-HISS!

She tapped the release studs on the top three crates, and the lids slid back to show a forty-kilogram sample of raw crystalline void-platinum from the deepest core of the megalith.

The lantern light struck the crystal, and the whole depot filled with a prismatic glow as the thick veins of liquid silver threaded through its black facets pulsed with a faint light of their own.

The Vorn went perfectly still.

All three rows of his eyes dilated into huge black spheres, and his tally wand clattered onto the counter.

"Void-platinum," he wheezed, and his six-fingered pads trembled as they reached toward the crate. "Crystalline lattice... zero volcanic impurity... this is Grade-A core stock from an untouched pocket..."

He caught himself, pulled his hands back and cleared his gravelly throat with a wet rattle.

"...a respectable sample of deep-drift crystal," he grunted, trying very hard to sound bored while both thick arms twitched with greed. "But the platinum market is volatile, the cutting needs harmonic lasers and the Guild takes eight percent on unaligned ore... I can offer you four thousand Zuni, immediate transfer."

Harper leaned over to Leo and whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

"Four thousand? Cap, he’s robbing us blind... I can see his hands shaking from here... That guy wants it bad."

"Wait for it," Leo whispered back. "Look at Elena’s face."

Harper looked, and slowly started to grin. Elena’s lips curled into a slow and deeply insulting smile.

"Four thousand," she repeated softly. "How wonderfully pathetic... Do you imagine that because we’re human, we can’t read the smelting indices of the Core? Again...?"

She tapped the crystal with one fingernail.

CLINK!

"This isn’t asteroid platinum, you four-legged drudge... It’s bio-resonant void-platinum, harvested from the breeding bed of an apex nest where it’s been soaking up cosmic radiation for seven centuries... Its lattice is naturally superconductive, with a dissipation threshold four times higher than aerospace iridium, It’s the raw material for Tier-3 warship shielding and high-output jump manifolds."

She leaned in a centimeter closer and pinned all three rows of his eyes to the counter.

"There are one thousand two hundred and forty kilograms of certified Grade-A ore in front of you... Raw platinum trades at four Zuni a kilogram today, and bio-resonant crystal has a floor of six and a half... That puts the wholesale value at exactly eight thousand and sixty Zuni."

She lifted her chin.

"You’ll buy all forty crates for six thousand four hundred, in physical Guild tokens, right now... Or I’ll turn this sled around, walk sixty meters down the concourse to the trade representative in Berth Twelve and sell it to the syndicates, and you can explain to your smelting director why you let it walk out of your depot."

Her voice dropped to a whisper.

"...Decide."

’Isn’t this like what happened last time... again?’ Aoi thought, was this Vorn just that dumb or...?

Beside her, Vexa leaned toward Leo and sighed, she was completely delighted.

"Is she always like this?"

"Always..." Leo whispered back.

"I love her," Vexa breathed. "She’s terrifying."

The Vorn stared at Elena while his snout twitched once and his thick hands clenched into trembling fists.

A long defeated wheeze of steam hissed out of his nostrils.

"...You’re a demon in a flight suit, woman," he grunted bitterly, and reached into his floor safe with both arms.

CLANK-THUD!

A steel chest of gleaming brass tokens slammed onto the counter.

"Six thousand four hundred, exactly... Take it and get your cursed rocks out of my sight."

Elena didn’t even glance at the money.

She turned to Jin-Ah, who swept the chest with her slate and confirmed the count with a crisp chime, and then she turned back to Leo and brushed an invisible speck of dust off her lapel with an immensely satisfied smirk.

"Six thousand four hundred, Captain... Precisely as calculated."

Leo laughed under his breath and shook his head.

"You’re a terror, Elena... once again, I’m really glad you’re on our side."

"Naturally," Elena said, and her smile sharpened into pure pride. "A Sterling doesn’t let border peddlers insult a balance sheet, Captain. It’s a matter of basic hygiene..."

In a quiet alcove behind the exchange, Jin-Ah knelt beside the sled and linked the ship’s accounts while her slate hummed.

BEEP-CHIME!

[Guild Extermination Contract: +20,000 Zuni!]

[Matriarch Hazard Bonus: +3,000 Zuni!]

[Void-Platinum Sale: +6,400 Zuni!]

[Treasury: 9,800 ? 39,200 Zuni!]

Jin-Ah looked up from the screen at all of them crowded around the sled, and her voice was very quiet and steady even though the slate was trembling slightly in her hands.

"Thirty-nine thousand two hundred Zuni!"