Page 6 of The Captain’s Bounty (The Collectors #2)
CHAPTER TWO
“Two thousand chits,” Olex burped. His tongue flicked out to lick the dust off the aqua goggles that protected his massive eyes from the blowing sand that constantly scrubbed across the landscape of the ‘habitable’ zones of the otherwise lifeless rock that was Cutirut I.
Otherwise, he hardly looked up from his books or the mountain of receipts he was tallying.
So much for the ship being a cheap fix. For a moment, Bruwes actually stopped breathing. He couldn’t remember the last time he had two thousand chits, much less two thousand to blow on a ship repair.
Rather calmly, all things considered, he asked again, “ How much?”
Licking the fleshy suction pad of one yellow finger, the scrapper turned the page before gulping another mouthful of air to burb, “Two thousand chits. Pay it or get out. I don’t got time for this.”
Forget breathing. It was all Bruwes could do not to grab the three-foot-tall swamp toad and yank him right over the top of his five-foot-high desk. “For a jump coil ?”
Looking up at last, the diminutive scrapper-mech scowled through the film of water in its goggles before licking the dust off the glass with twin flicks of his tongue. “Supply and demand. I supply the parts, I demand the price.”
“I could get a jump coil for fifty chits at any other salvage yard!”
“Then go there. I got tadpoles to feed.”
“Oh, you do not!” Bruwes snapped.
Olex glanced behind him, lifting a hind flipper to scratch carefully around one of the lumpy, translucent nodes protruding from his swollen back.
A dark blob inside the node squirmed and burbled faintly.
“Well, I will soon and if they don’t get enough to eat, they tend to eat each other.
Upsets the wives. Look, friend—see? I call you friend,” he inserted in a wounded tone, spreading both fore-flippers wide in an approximation of a human shrug.
“You want to check the yard? Eh? I got three hundred and six wrecks on this lot alone. You find a working jump coil in any of them and you can have it for free. You don’t, and you pay me fifty chits for taking up my time.
NolaTeck coils been out of production for fifty seasons, of course they burn out.
Viri coils only compatible with Viridian ships.
Ku’ul coils have a playful little 2% chance of exploding mid-jump.
So you do not want ‘a jump coil,’” he concluded with a stern belch.
“You want a Core-III or a Phorix. Can you get one of those for fifty chits at any other salvage yard? Eh? Eh? Two thousand. Good day.”
Flipping the page again, Olex went back to his tallies, leaving Bruwes to fume in futility.
He didn’t have two thousand of anything, much less chits.
He hated money. He hated everything about this backwater mining moon, covered in sand, filthy sift-miners, and scam artists.
Money was king in this place. Money was king in every place, except Me’Kava, it seemed.
If he’d had any idea how important something as arbitrarily worthless as chit slips were for all the rest of the known universe, he’d have tried a little harder not to get thrown off his home world.
Well, maybe not. Kidnapping people against their will had been hard enough to stomach back when he’d thought they’d eventually get a choice.
From the moment he’d discovered otherwise—damn Demin and his lustful obsession with that Earthling troublemaker, Cory—the entire crew of the Me’Kava collecting ship The Raider had been doomed.
They were pirates now, hunted by their own world and condemned to earning a living anyway they could in a money-hungry universe.
Growling under his breath, he shoved away from the desk before he hurt the toad man and strode back outside.
The heat of the day smacked across his shoulder like a log on fire, stinging his skin right through his white uniform shirt.
His ship was docked at the far end of this squalid town, if that was even the word to use.
It had been a Corporate mining camp back in the early space-faring days, when a little uranium and diamond dust was still worth mining.
It was still a mining camp of sorts, populated by the sort of men who were more comfortable in the dark underground, where they had expanded the old tunnels into a deadly labyrinth of poisonous gas pockets, toxic backwash, supports rigged to collapse, and of course, the miners themselves.
The surface was little better—mostly scrappers and mechshops, dotted with unsavory establishments that sold dubious drink, even more dubious food, and sex in all forms and flavors.
And yes, Corporate still took their cut from every chit that passed from hand to flipper to claw, without taking the slightest interest in the health or welfare of the residents.
Bruwes stormed through the docking quadrant, past three empty stalls, two ships in various stages of repair and one currently being cut into pieces while the captain desperately protested, “I’ll pay for the repair! Just give me two more days! I’ll pay it, I swear!”
That was going to be him. Bruwes just knew it.
The Raider’s docking ramp was already down, and Aldar stood at the controls, waiting for him.
His ship mechanic’s mistrust of everyone not crew was still running high, even after almost a year now of running jobs for anyone willing to pay them and it showed in the glares he cast anyone caught even looking in the Raider’s direction.
“They got the parts?” Aldar asked, drawing the ramp up the minute Bruwes was back onboard.
“Yes,” Bruwes snipped.
“How much?”
“More than we’ve got.”
“How much more?”
He exploded. “Two jobs at least! And how the hell we’re supposed to do two jobs without jumping, I don’t know.”
Scrubbing his hands through his black head quills, he forced them flat to his scalp so no one could read his aggravation.
Were his eyes red? Probably. He stormed all the way to the bridge, just trying to calm his breathing and searching for the faintest hint of red in the things he saw.
How close was his disease to taking him over?
Once on the bridge, he shut the door and locked it.
He refused to go into Rage, never again.
Not if he could help it. He was civilized.
He was in charge. He was bred for far bigger and better things than the captaincy of the unlawful pirate ship that the Raider had become. His father would be so fucking proud.
Except he wasn’t, and no one on this ship knew it better than Bruwes himself.
Cold-hearted bastard.
Dropping to the ground, Bruwes took himself into firm control.
Pushup after pushup, he blasted through the excess energy caused by his anger until sweat plastered his white shirt to his back and his tan pants stuck to his waist and thighs.
He kept at it, pushing himself farther and faster, until his arms were shaking.
Captains didn’t have the luxury of losing control like little boys.
Captains had to be calm and rational, in command at all times, with a crew that knew they could depend on his ability to make any decision at any moment, and that it would always be the right one.
Where the hell was he going to get two thousand chits?
How much did they have on the books right now? Crawling up off the floor and breathing heavily, he dropped to sit in one of the two control chairs and pulled up the logs. Forty-seven. Having just restocked their resources, that was what they had left.
Shit.
Bruwes checked the log of their holds next.
They had a few things to sell, but nothing worth anything on a rock like this.
Six crates of medical-grade biobile scheduled to be delivered to a perfume manufacturer on Degnater in four days—impossible without a jump coil.
Two water skimmers they’d salvaged from a drift of jettisoned space debris—both of which Aldar had got working, but which were absolutely useless on this moon and the planet Cutirut wasn’t much better.
The terraformed zones were just as hot, sandy and miserable as it was anywhere else, they just had more Corporate amenities, like clean air, drinkable water and neighbors who were slightly less likely to stab you in your sleep, but only slightly.
The door chimed as someone in the hall outside sought entrance.
Switching off the log, he did not unlock it.
After a moment, the commlink crackled and Cory’s dry tone filtered through the speakers. “Can I come in yet, or are you still thinking of selling me to nearest brothel?”
Bruwes snorted. Knowing how well she obeyed anyone—Doc Demin included—he’d be lucky to get twenty chits for her, never mind two thousand.
He tapped the control panel and let her in.
She held up a finger, her blue eyes sparkling. “Before you decide to have me outfitted in skimpy black lingerie, let me show you what just came over the SATsCom.”
“We don’t have the chits to waste on mating underwear,” Bruwes said dourly.
“Which is probably for the best,” she said, breezing in to plop onto the control seat beside him. “He’d only rip them off me, anyway.”
Bruwes glared out the window, teeth gritted to keep from replying. He didn’t need to hear about her mating exploits with his ship’s doctor. It only served to remind him that he didn’t have anyone to have his own exploits with.
She thrust a tablet at him, forcing him to switch his glare from the ship directly to it. “What is this?”
“A job they posted while you were gone.” Reaching over his hand, she tapped the screen, pulling up a profile picture of a woman.
Another Earthling. Funny how he’d gone his entire life up until a year ago never having seen one, and now they were like the grains of sand on this cursed planet—on and in everything.
His shoes, his shower, the bed, even his underwear.
The sand, not the woman. That would be a completely different kind of irritant.
“Rebel archaeologist ,” he read. “How is that even a thing?”