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"You what? Never mind." Not a story he needed to hear now. Even thinking of the possibilities had begun to knock sharp edges onto the throbbing in his skull. "We're going to have to break her out, aren't we?" At the speed the Wardens worked, both he and Torin would be dead of old age before they were ready to release the Promise back into his hands. *I'll add it to the list.*
Not a big surprise to discover that Torin also had a list. Hers probably involved a lot more hitting and a lot less talking. *We need to break this off. Chance of random scans…*
"Right." *Three hours, forty-six minutes and it'll all be over. One way or another.*
Craig stared down at the place his toe had been and wished she hadn't added the qualifier. "Fukking hell, Cap, I have no idea where Doc is." Nat dropped into one of the eight chairs surrounding the big galley table and stared into a mug of coffee like she wasn't entirely certain what it was. "I'm not his fukking mother, am I?"
Cho folded his arms and leaned back against the counter. "How drunk are you?" he growled.
"Not very. I took a party pooper pill on the way back to the ship. Be sober as a C'tron any minute now."
"And while you were out there drinking, did you remember what I sent you out to do?"
"Sure." The fingertips on the hand she waved were stained with fresh blood. "Find out what Big Bill's up to without giving anything away. Shit, I couldn't do that without drinking because me being in a bar without drinking would raise suspicions you don't want raised. That last one, that was not the first party pooper pill I took and my stomach would like… oh, fuk." Nat set the mug carefully on the table, stood, walked to the sink and puked up a thin stream of colorless bile.
Barely maintaining a fingernail grip on his temper, Cho sidestepped farther from the sink as she splashed water into her mouth. "And?"
"And there's a lot more talk of that free merchant crap going on." Nat spat and straightened. "How we're going to change known space and won't they be sorry they were mean to us and boo fukking hoo." She downed a glass of water and belched. "High percentage of them talking that way. Too high to be random."
Now that was information he could extrapolate from. "The people Big Bill has lined up to buy our weapons are gathering."
"If I had to guess, I'd say, yeah."
Cho paced the length of the galley and back, trying to work out Big Bill's plans. He needed to compare the ships in dock to the ships on the list Big Bill had given him. "He's putting together a fleet…"
"Nope. From the sound of it, and given that gu
Frowning, Cho juggled the pieces. Smiled as they finally snapped into place. "Stations. Like this one was. Stations with no planetary government, so they're under the Wardens' jurisdiction. The Navy can't attack a station…"
"No way of separating the good guys from the bad guys." Nat nodded, returning to her chair and picking up her mug.
"So they have to negotiate." Cho leaned back against the counter, clutching the edge so tightly the plastic creaked. "It's exactly what I was going to do. But if Big Bill takes enough stations, he'll be negotiating from a position of power. And once he's established, he'll get rid of those ships who didn't sign with him."
"And we're not signing with him, right? But he said you'd have a place in the forefront of the revolution," Nat added before Cho could answer.
"His revolution." Cho curled his lip at the thought of being under Big Bill's command. "I don't like being told what to do."
"Okay, so we don't sign with him, but why would he turn us in?"
"Turn us in? To the law? No, he won't do that. Won't risk pissing off his captains. But if we continue to use this station-and he knows there's fuk all other stations we can use-he'll put a surcharge on ships that didn't play his game. We sign to serve under him, or we pay until he owns us anyway."
"That's…" Cho could all but see her ticking the list off in her head. "That sounds possible," she admitted at last. "But, Cap, odds are the armory's not holding the kind of weapons we can arm the ship with. In order to be of any use at all, they've got to be in someone's hands. Someone who gives us money for them. Big Bill's people'll give us the most money because that means he gets the most money. You're willing to make the hard choices, Cap, that's why we ride with you. And because of those choices the paydays have been good so far, but none of us are going to give up this kind of a payday now on the chance, however possible, that Big Bill might screw us down the line."
He should have known it would come down to the payout. He not only made the hard choices, but he was the only one who had any foresight. "If Big Bill controls the market, Big Bill controls the price."
Nat opened her mouth in the pause, then closed it again without speaking, indicating that he should go on.
"The whole concept of the free merchants…" Cho sketched quotes around the words. "… means more to Big Bill than money, so he has to get the weapons into the right hands. The weapons change everything. This is the one time Big Bill is not going for the immediate payoff." He cut Nat off with a raised hand. "Yes, he'll get his fifteen percent, the fukking universe would be imploding before he gave that up, but he'll get fifteen percent of one fuk of a lot more if his plan works. So Big Bill is screwing you out of part of your payoff because Big Bill is setting the prices."
"Okay, so…" She stared into her mug as if it might have the answers, then up at him as if it actually had. "In order to get the payoff we're entitled to, we need to set the prices."
"Yes." And because Nat had come to it herself, she'd sell it to the rest of the crew. As often as possible, Cho believed in giving orders he knew would be obeyed. Greased the way for those times the orders were less palatable.
"How?"
It all came back to the weapons. "We get the weapons off the station, out of the territory Big Bill controls-it's hard to take a stand when the person you're standing against can turn off the air-and we renegotiate based on how important we know the weapons are to Big Bill's long-term plans."
"Yeah, but if we set the prices, Big Bill can just suggest no one buys."
"He won't. The weapons change everything."
"Okay." She nodded slowly, forehead folding into well-defined lines. "I can see that. But we can't get the armory off the station with the gravity on. Big Bill controls the gravity."
"The armory doesn't matter."
Nat rolled her eyes and slapped both palms down on the table. "Damn it, Cap, I thought the armory was the whole fukking point!"
"The contents of the armory are the whole fukking point. When Nadayki gets the seal open and we have three hours Big Bill doesn't own to unload everything onto the Heart."
"So Big Bill's station, not the Heart, took the risk of Nadayki blowing the armory," Nat said slowly, "and we end up free and clear with a load of weapons."
It sounded good. Simple. Foolproof. Profitable. "And we renegotiate a better price. Our price, not Big Bill's."
"Why, Captain Cho," Nat gri
Nat made him feel good about command. Always had. She was never obsequious the way Huirre could be and she always, eventually, understood what he was doing and why. For the first time since that gu
The weapons were his, not Big Bill's.
He might sell them to Big Bill's people, he might not. His final decision would be based entirely on whether or not they could pay the price. That was what kept the system they had out here working.