Chapter 91: Haggling In Driftmark Station

The hundreds of staring alien eyes didn’t rattle Elena Sterling in the slightest.

If anything, the sudden hush settling over the Grand Bazaar put her back on solid ground.

Since she was old enough to wear heels, she’d walked into corporate galas, ballrooms and industrial bidding floors where every gaze in the room turned to follow her.

...Whether the spectators were board members in tailored silk or two-and-a-half-meter Vorn in green armor plating, an audience was an audience, and an audience on a trade floor existed for exactly one purpose.

It was there to be taken apart and relieved of its money.

The knot in her stomach dissolved.

She stepped past Leo with an effortless glide, her honey-blonde hair gleaming under the amber lanterns and her chin lifted at precisely three degrees of supreme indifference.

"Allow an expert to conduct the metallurgical negotiations, Captain," she murmured over her shoulder, in the smooth melodic voice that made the roughest frontier spacer feel underdressed. "...If one lets mechanics or soldiers price refined alloy, one invariably leaves forty percent of the margin on the table."

"Be my guest, Princess," Leo chuckled, falling in just behind her with his hands in his pockets. "Just remember we need hard Zuni, not store credit..."

Elena answered with a dismissive flick of her wrist.

She’d already picked out the best raw-metal exchange in the sector, an open-fronted depot built inside the severed reactor casing of some long-dead Tier-3 freighter.

A flickering neon glyph above the counter bore the seal of the Driftmark Smelting Syndicate, and heavy hydraulic scales and density spectrometers lined the steel behind it.

The merchant behind the counter was a Vorn.

Its squat leathery torso was covered in iron-grey hide and stood high on four trunk-like legs, and two thick upper arms ended in broad six-fingered pads. Its wide flat face held three horizontal rows of blinking amber eyes above a tusked snout that let out thin whistling jets of steam while it hammered a tally wand against an iron ledger.

Elena stopped directly in front of it.

Behind her, Harper and Jin-Ah set the heavy sealed cargo crate down on the steel inspection plate.

THUD!

The Vorn lifted all three rows of eyes, blinking in a slow rolling sequence as it took in Elena’s tailored grey uniform, her pale delicate skin and the humans gathered behind her.

A deep wet grinding rumbled out of its chest, like two granite millstones crushing wet sand, and its chest-mounted translator squawked in harsh nasal trade creole.

"Unregistered terrestrial primitives... Driftmark buys scrap by the metric ton, not by the basket. If you are peddling rusted hull plate from an orbital graveyard, the standard rate is twelve Zuni per hundred kilograms, minus a fifteen percent impurity fee... State your business or vacate my scale. My smelters do not idle for tourists."

Elena’s lips curved into a slow insulting smile.

She left the crate latch exactly where it was, crossed her arms and regarded the creature as if it were a mildly offensive stain on a ballroom rug.

"How delightfully quaint," she said, and her voice dropped into a crisp velvet purr that cut through the bazaar’s noise like a diamond blade. "A border-tier scrap peddler who mistakes refined military armor stock for unwashed orbital slag. Tell me, master smelter... can your antique spectrometer actually analyze the consolidated slate-composite, or shall I draw you a diagram in brightly colored crayon?"

The Vorn’s snout flared, and all three rows of eyes widened in indignant irritation.

"Insolent biped! The Syndicate assays fifty thousand tons of interstellar alloy every cycle! We know unrefined junk when we..."

CLICK-HISS!

Elena tapped the crate’s release stud with the polished tip of one fingernail.

The pressurized seals let go with a sharp hydraulic gasp as the lid slid back into its housing, and twenty immaculate rectangular bars lay revealed in velvet-lined foam.

The yellow lantern light struck the metal, and the whole depot was washed in a deep flawless gunmetal luster.

The Vorn stopped in mid-sentence.

Every one of its eyes locked onto the ingots, and the whistling steam from its nostrils cut off completely.

With slightly trembling pads, it reached into its vest, pulled out a multi-frequency scanner and swept the blue emitter across the top row of bars.

BEEP-CHIME! BEEP-CHIME!

The readout began flashing a frantic cascade of green.

[Primary Composition: Slate-Composite (Military Armor Grade)]

[Secondary Elements: Aerospace Titanium (99.8% Purity) & Superconductive Copper]

[Lattice Density: Consolidated (Zero Micro-Fractures / Zero Slag)]

[Commercial Classification: Grade-A Precision Ingot Pool]

The merchant’s upper arms twitched with naked greed.

...In a belt where combat damage never stopped and local refineries took weeks to separate ore from basalt, refined slate was a strategic commodity, and twenty flawless bars sitting on its counter were very nearly a miracle.

It cleared its gravelly throat and quickly arranged its face into bored indifference, though the rapid blinking of its middle row of eyes gave away its racing pulse.

"...A moderately acceptable batch of low-tier armor stock," it grunted, tapping the counter with a tusk. "The market is saturated with surplus from the core lanes. I can offer... three thousand Zuni for the lot. Cash transfer, no questions logged about origin."

Harper sucked in a furious breath two paces behind Elena, her knuckles whitening at her hip.

"Three thousand?! You thieving four-legged toad, that’s over a ton of pure..."

Elena raised one index finger into the air without looking back and Harper’s mouth shut so fast her teeth clicked.

’Stop being racist...’

Elena leaned slightly over the counter and rested her fingertips on the polished edge of the top slate ingot, and her icy blue eyes narrowed into two shards of glacier ice.

"Three thousand Zuni," she repeated, her voice dripping with venomous amusement. "How wonderfully insulting... Do you take me for an uneducated rock-hopper who can’t read a market index?"

She tapped the ingot twice with her fingernail.

CLINK! CLINK!

"These were consolidated under continuous electromagnetic compression strong enough to crush a deep-sea submarine," she said, sharp and clinical and completely without warmth. "Their tensile density beats standard shipyard plate by twelve percent, and they’re rated for direct plasma saturation... At today’s Driftmark spot prices, raw unsmelted slate trades at one hundred and eighty Zuni a bar while Consolidated zero-impurity armor ingots have a floor of three hundred and twenty."

She locked her gaze onto the merchant’s center row of eyes and gave up not a single millimeter of ground.

"Twenty slate-composite ingots, fifteen bars of aerospace titanium and ten bricks of superconductive copper. The raw wholesale value is seven thousand four hundred Zuni... You’ll buy the entire lot for six thousand two hundred, in physical Guild tokens, right now or I’ll close this crate, walk thirty meters down this concourse to the Iron Fang Repair Drydocks and sell it directly to the mercenary captains whose gunboats are sitting in Berth Twelve with scorched armor belts and you can explain to your Syndicate supervisor why you let six thousand Zuni of premium repair alloy walk into the hands of your chief competitor..."

The Vorn stared at her as the air in the depot went deathly still.

’H-how...?’

The merchant’s tusked snout twitched once, twice, three times, and its six fingers curled into fists as its huge brain ran the brutal arithmetic.

If she walked, the mercenaries would buy every bar inside five minutes, and the Syndicate’s smelter would miss its supply quota.

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

"...You have a tongue forged from tungsten," it grunted bitterly, and reached into a reinforced floor safe under the counter with both arms.

CLANK-THUD!

A heavy velvet-lined lockbox hit the counter, packed with rows of thick triangular brass tokens stamped with the Guild’s gear-and-asteroid crest.

"Six thousand two hundred... Exactly... Count it and take your metal off my scale."

Elena left the counting beneath her.

She nodded once to Jin-Ah, who swept the tokens with her slate’s optical sensor and confirmed the total with a crisp chime then Elena turned back to Leo, brushed an invisible speck of dust from her shoulder and let a slow radiant smirk of pride light her pale features.

"Six thousand two hundred Zuni, Captain," she said smoothly, tilting her chin with magnificent arrogance. "I trust that satisfies your liquidity requirements...?"

Leo let out a low, deeply impressed whistle and shook his head, his eyes shining.

"Remind me to use you for stuff like this more, Elena... You’re terrifying."

A delicate pleased rose flared across Elena’s cheeks, though she turned her face away at once and adjusted her bangs with a haughty sniff.

"A Sterling doesn’t negotiate, Captain... We dictate terms."

Then, as the others turned to follow Harper, she leaned a few centimeters closer to him and spoke very quietly without moving her lips.

"Captain... My hands are shaking."

Leo glanced down.

They were folded perfectly at the small of her back, and he could see the faint tremor running through her fingers that nobody else in the bazaar would ever notice.

"Nobody could tell," he murmured back. "You were a monster..."

"Thank you," Elena said, with enormous dignity, and kept them folded until the tremor stopped.

Harper had already grabbed Leo and Jin-Ah by the sleeves and dragged them ten paces down the concourse to an open-air munitions workshop that looked like an iron fortress.

Its owner was a scarred mercenary outfitter of some raptor-descended race.

He had a crest of iridescent blue-grey feathers, a hooked predatory beak and two sharp golden eyes that flicked between the passing crowd with permanent combat readiness.

Behind him, heavy kinetic rifles, rotary plasma repeaters and racks of artillery shells covered every centimeter of the bulkheads.

Harper skipped every bit of Elena’s theater.

She marched straight up to his counter, dropped the reinforced ammo case onto the steel mesh and popped both magnetic latches.

CLACK!

Thirty of her rail-slugs lay inside in custom foam dividers, their helical grooves catching the harsh work-lights in spirals of dark gleaming tungsten.

The feathered outfitter blinked and stepped forward with genuine professional curiosity.

He lifted one of the heavy rounds out of the foam with a three-fingered claw and weighed all forty centimeters of it on his palm.

Instead of reaching for a scanner, he pulled an ancient analog micrometer from his leather bandolier.

He clamped its hardened jaws around the nose, then around the sabot and finally along the delicate hand-cut grooves around the waist.

"Hmmm...?"

He measured it once, then a second time.

His golden eyes went perfectly round, and the feathers along the back of his crest puffed straight up.

"By the Void’s Iron Core..." he rasped in disbelief. "Two-thousandths of a millimeter variance down the entire ballistic axis and the fluting... who cut these induction channels? Was this turned on a Class-Four naval lathe?!"

Harper planted her hands on her hips and puffed her chest out, practically bristling with pride.

"Class-Four naval lathe my ass, bird-man," she said with a toothy grin. "I drew those grooves by hand on a drafting pad and cut every micron myself on a salvaged CNC bed! The vortex channels the rail plasma around the core as it clears the barrel. No friction, no bore wear and twenty-two klicks a second out of the muzzle!"

The outfitter looked from the flawless slug to Harper’s grease-smudged freckled face, and his beak hung open in reverence. In a belt full of cheap mass-stamped penetrators that jammed rails and stripped coils, this was ballistic art.

"Name your price," he rasped, clutching the slug to his chest like a holy relic. "I have a privateer crew docking at third watch who’ll pay anything for rounds that punch Tier-2 shields without cracking the sabot..."

"Sixty Zuni a slug," Harper said without blinking. "Since that’s thirty rounds... it’ll be eighteen hundred flat and not a token less."

"Done!" the outfitter squawked instantly, without even pretending to haggle.

’Why do I feel like I lost...?’

He hauled a heavy leather pouch of Guild tokens out from under the counter and slapped it onto the mesh.

THUD!

"Take it! And if your workshop ever turns another batch of these helical beauties, you bring them straight to Krax... I’ll buy every casing you can make!"

Harper snatched up the pouch and spun around to Leo with a wild victorious grin, tossing it into the air and catching it with a loud metallic clink.

"Eighteen hundred Zuni, Cap! Who’s an uncultured mechanic now, huh?!"

Leo laughed and ruffled her messy hair. "Best damn armory officer in the system, Harper... You earned every token."

Harper beamed, her freckled cheeks going bright pink under the grease, and she glanced past him, back down the concourse to where Elena stood waiting with her arms folded.

Elena raised one perfectly arched eyebrow at her across the distance while Harper raised the pouch.

For a single second they simply looked at each other, two women who couldn’t stand each other holding up eight thousand Zuni between them... and then Elena’s mouth twitched at one corner, and Harper snorted and looked away, and neither of them would ever admit it had happened.

Harper handed the pouch to Jin-Ah, who dropped it into the growing coin chest with a satisfied click then came the real miracle of Driftmark...