View from Ararat Read Free Page B

course, if it wasn’t salvage, if we’d hit the mother lode and mined it ourselves, we’d be on sixty per cent, which would be . . . Well, enough for this little black duck to book a one-way ticket to a new life – with plenty left to live on.’
    He looked around the cabin. It was something they had all thought of. You could see it written in their eyes.
    And Cox wasn’t blind to the fact. He continued. ‘Come on, guys. The lo Trader ’s been missing for twenty years. The company’s written it off. They’ve already spent the insurance from the ship, and they’ve paid the blood money to the widows. So what if they do pay a bit more than they should for a shipment of really high-grade ore? It’s still a bargain. Do you think they’re ever going to lose on the deal? Anyway, who takes all the risks? Who does all the freaking slave-work? The share holders? This is our chance, people. Once in a lifetime.’
    There was a short pause. No one spoke to fill the silence, so he continued.
    â€˜Take a look at it.’ A single finger pointed towards the image of the dead ship on the view-screen, but his eyes held Mac’s. There was only one person on board he really had to convince, and Elroy Cox knew it.
    â€˜That could have been us , Mac. And you know it. You more than anyone else here.’ There was far more in the look that passed between them than I could read.
    He closed for the kill. ‘One shitty little piece of flying rock and it’s “sayonara baby”. And would they care? Not a chance. Not about us, at least. To them, the cargo’s gold. We’re expendable. We’re . . . scum.’
    I was watching Mac as he looked around at the faces in the cabin. The argument was convincing and he was weakening.
    It wasn’t hard to work out why.
    He was thirty-two next birthday – I’d checked. That meant he’d spent over thirteen years digging for ore on the moons of Jupiter. Which could, of course, make you very rich if you were one of the lucky few. But with five bad years for every good one, on average, and with the company manipulating the ore prices to suit the share price . . .
    Put it this way: you never got to see many ex-miners in the society pages on the ’net.
    Mac looked at the view-screen, then at the others. Thirteen years of breathing recycled air and drinking recycled waste, of living and working inside the metal coffin of the mining drone. Of sweating blood to fill the pockets of the faceless rich . . .
    I watched his eyes. Yes, the argument was convincing.
    But futile. At least as far as Mac was concerned.
    And it had nothing to do with some kind of misplaced loyalty to the company. The ‘boss’ might have been dedicated to his work, but he wasn’t totally insane. As usual, his objection was purely practical.
    â€˜Forget it, Cox,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re the first person ever to think up that particular scam? Why do you think they have the log? One look at the records and they’ll work out we didn’t mine that ore ourselves. After the fines and the legals, we’d be lucky not to be paying them thirty per cent. They own the game. And the umpires. Forget it.’
    But Cox just smiled and looked across the cabin to where I was sitting. And in that instant, reading the look on his face, I knew I wasn’t the only one who’d accessed the confidential personnel files.
    When he spoke again, it was to me. ‘Do you want to tell him, Cindy, or will I?’
    I just shrugged and nodded for him to continue. Either way I was ‘outed’, so why spoil his fun?
    â€˜You’re a smart man, Boss. Didn’t it ever strike you as a bit odd that your newest crew-member knew so much about communications, computers and navigation – and just about everything else – but she’d signed on as a common hand?’
    I knew it had crossed Mac’s mind. I’d