Sebastaen-Januarias nodded slowly. “You were offering half the union scale, plus an eighth of any bonuses?”
It was not precisely a question, but Heikki answered anyway. “That’s right.”
“Then I’ll accept—assuming the contract doesn’t have any surprises, of course.”
“I’ll flip it to you in the morning,” Heikki said. “If you can give me a number.”
Sebasten-Januarias fumbled in the pockets of his enormous coat, and finally produced a crumpled slip of paper. “This’ll reach me. It’s at the field.”
“Good enough,” Heikki said. She reached across to switch off the minisec, saying as she did so, “If it meets with your approval, I’d like to talk to you about our search plans. Can you come by tomorrow at one?”
“I’ll be there.” The young man nodded.
“Good,” Heikki said, and pocketed the minisec. The service robot trundled forward as she did so, and she waved it away. Only when the dinner was over and Sebasten-Januarias had left in an ancient fastcat did she wonder why the young man had not bothered to get himself a computer linkup of his own. Probably doesn’t want to pay Lo-Moth any more than he has to for power, she decided. Everything in FirstTown runs off the company grid. You don’t even know if he does live in FirstTown, a small voice whispered, at the back of her mind. She pushed it aside, and reached into her belt for the card that controlled the lift. The lobby was very empty, most of the corporate functionaries having left long before; even so, she lowered her voice a little as she ran the card across the sensor face.
“What did you think of him?”
“I like him,” Nkosi said immediately. “I can work with him, that is quite certain. I think this will be fun.”
Oh, wonderful, Heikki thought. She had been on other jobs when Nkosi had had fun with his work. “Sten?”
“He seems to have more sense than most,” Djuro said. “He’ll do.” He saw Heikki’s grin and added, “All right, he’ll more than do. I’m pleased.”
“Good enough,” Heikki said. “Then we’ll settle with Alexieva in the morning, and see if we can’t schedule a first overflight for—say, the day after tomorrow?”
Djuro nodded. “We can do that.”
“Right, then,” Heikki said, and punched open the door of the suite. She was more tired than she had expected, she realized belatedly, and had all she could do to stifle a jaw-cracking yawn. A light was flashing on the monitor cube. She glared at it, then manipulated the controls to transcribe the message to a storage disk unheard. “I’ll deal with it in the morning,” she said, when Djuro raised an eyebrow. “It’s bound to be Alexieva’s bid.” She closed her bedroom door behind her without waiting for an answer.
When she ran the disk the next morning, however, the message proved to be from FitzGilbert instead. Heikki leaned back behind her workboard, a cup of the hostel’s excellent coffee in her hands, and stared at the face projected on the media wall. She ran the message again, then a third time, and then sat staring at her empty screen.
“I take it that wasn’t Alexieva’s bid?”
Heikki turned, to find Djuro standing in the doorway, a cup of tea in one hand and a fresh message block in the other. “No,” she said, and triggered the message again. “Somebody from Tremoth Astrando’s on planet, and I’m summoned to a meeting.”
“With a strong suggestion that you’d better have a team put together for this person,” Djuro agreed. He held up the message block. “This is Alexieva’s bid. It’s good for us, on the low side, but not unreasonably so. Somebody really wants her on the team, Heikki.”
“You noticed that,” Heikki said, rather sourly. She took the message block from Djuro, plugged it into the workboard’s socket, but let the data reel by without really looking at it. “What do you think, Sten?”
“I don’t like it,” Djuro said bluntly. “I don’t think you should hire her if she were the last guide on planet.”
“That’s really reassuring,” Heikki muttered. She glanced again at the figures, and said, more loudly, “But if not her, who? The other names I’ve unearthed are strangely uninterested, or at best don’t answer my call. Lo- Moth wants me to have a full crew picked out and hired—and I can see why, it gives Tremoth less chance to interfere in what’s Lo-Moth’s affair. And, of course, I don’t want to take the chance of anybody interfering with me.”
“You’re going to hire her, aren’t you?” Djuro asked. His tone was unreadable, and Heikki glanced warily at him.
“I don’t see that I have any other good choices. Alexieva is at least supposed to be the best.”
“That’s true enough.” Djuro did not sound convinced.
“If I offer a provisional contract,” Heikki said slowly, her fingers moving with sudden decision across her workboard, “and she accepts it, then I can say to FitzGilbert, and to this person from Tremoth, yes, I’ve got my team picked out, thank you very much, and I don’t need any help from you. And I can still dump her if it doesn’t work out.”
“It could work,” Djuro said, and sighed. “I think you’re being a little paranoid about Tremoth, Heikki. Why should they interfere?”
Heikki looked at him and said nothing. The little man sighed again.
“All right. You’re the boss, Heikki.”
Heikki nodded. “I won’t be able to be here to meet Jan. Can you and Jock handle that? Where is Jock, anyway?”
“Asleep.”
“Oh.” Heikki glanced at her workboard, already displaying the bones of a provisional contract, and ran her hand across the shadowboard beside it to throw a set of program menus onto the media wall. “All right. We should be getting some weather and course simulations that I asked FitzGilbert to run. I’m also getting Ciceron to run the same set, just to see how they compare. When those arrive, you and Jock go over them. I’ve made some preliminary notes, which are in the files, but I’d appreciate anything you two can come up with. Talk to Jan, too, see if he can add anything. I’m going to work on this contract.”
“Whatever you say, boss,” Djuro answered, and disappeared.
Heikki grimaced at her screen, and settled herself in for a long morning’s work. She finished preparing a provisional contract and flipped it to Alexieva’s mailcode, then copied her earlier simulations into another transfer file and dispatched that to Ciceron. The meteorologist came on line himself an hour or so later to discuss fees; they haggled for almost half an hour before settling on the usual rate for his sort of work. Nkosi appeared briefly, left the disk of rental contracts on the desk, and vanished again. The simulations results arrived from Lo-Moth—the corporate technicians confirmed her general conclusions, Heikki saw with some satisfaction, but had made some minor changes. She logged those, then tied her console into Lo-Moth’s main library. As she’d expected, there was a set of survey-satellite photos of the most likely area of the massif—raw data, mostly, only a few frames processed around the time of the crash in a vain search for the wreck. She pulled up a program of her own, and set it searching through the accumulated material, looking for changes in the forest cover that might signal a crash clearing. The program produced nearly three dozen possibilities, but after several hours’ work with her own battery of programs, she was able to narrow the possibilities to six. She skimmed through her final compilation once, then left the disk for Djuro, and headed for the workbay and her fastcat.
The trip to Lo-Moth’s main headquarters took her back out through town, outside the Limit on the spaceport side. This was crysticulture country on a grand scale, the scrubland fading into glittering sand as it approached the distant bay. Sifters moved across the shifting ground, following courses marked by brightly colored flags. Their massive scoops grabbed up the first ten centimeters of topsoil, funneling it into electrostatic screens where the usable minerals were separated from the surface impurities, which were vented from chutes at the sides of the machines. The land in the wake of the sifters looked darker, almost tarnished. Heikki shook away the image almost angrily: the next good blow— and there would be one, at least one within each planetary year; that was a certainty, given Iadara’s weather— would stir the darkness back into the sand, drive the sea up onto the land until it reached the edge of the scrub and even beyond, churning the loose soil until it was fit to be harvested again.
The road curved north a few kilometers further on, leaving the sands behind. The land showed scrub growth again, low-growing, fleshy-leaved plants that gave way quickly to the lusher growth of the plains. There
