Windswept Read Free

maybe it would be worth squeezing that cash out of you, just because I’d have an excuse to kick your ass from one side of the island to the other. It’s like when the Big Three decides they need to make a show and send out Ghost Squads to sabotage each other. Or when they get their goons to crack down on Indentures so they don’t get ideas about Breaching. You ever see a goon work somebody over with a riot club, Bloomie?”
    Bloombeck shook his head, his jowls shivering.
    “I have,” I said. “I had to take a lot of classes in hostile negotiation in business school, and I did really, really well. You want to see what I learned?”
    He shook his head again.
    “Then get lost.”
    Bloombeck’s eyes opened wide, and he tumbled over himself and a couple of seats on his way out.
    I took a deep breath and sat back, blinking up a link to the Public and loading up the traffic queue from the top of the lifter. All the ships coming and going from Santee Anchorage lay there, listed in neat little rows, a spreadsheet that could tell all kinds of stories if you knew how to read it. Ten years ago, that story would have been one of scrapes with goons and derring-do on the high seas, of fishing Breaches out of the ocean like pickles from a barrel. Now there were only half a dozen supercarriers swinging by to grab a few billion barrels of industrial molasses, and those beasts barely needed to refuel from our ocean.
    There were four colony seeders en route for refueling, but there was no way to tell if any of them were the ship Bloombeck had talked about. I scrolled them away until I saw the ships I knew were the real deal. I’d dug their names out of news reports, stolen Big Three financials, and all the gossipy whispering that traveled around Occupied Space faster than light. I smiled as I saw them: fifteen LiaoCon Xinzang-Class ore processors coming in from Nanqu. Fifteen claustrophobic nightmares filled with choking gases and horrible rations and enough people who would want to jump ship even if there weren’t a sprawling city at the bottom of the anchor. I had been making payments to people who ran orbital traffic control, enough for them to run broadcasts on my behalf and keep quiet. There was always a chance they could screw me over at the last minute, but that was a risk worth taking. Besides, the messages they’d broadblasted into space made a point of telling people to ask for me by name, all but ensuring I’d get the credit for them joining the Union.
    I watched the queue for a few more minutes. The LiaoCon ships were still four hours away – a little tight for my timing, but I’d be able to take care of business before the miners started their descent.
    Business. Gah. I blinked up the time: quarter past four. Damn Tonggow for ditching me at the last minute. How a woman that scatterbrained could make a rum as good as Old Windswept was a mystery. How she managed to keep her distillery running was an even bigger mystery. She’d been doing something right, though, for her to keep producing as well as she did, and, as long as she kept it together long enough for me to buy the place off her, I could make sure there was always a steady supply of Old Windswept...
    My scalp tingled at the thought of the still running dry. I sipped my tea, but it was too late. My fingers grew cold, and my eyeballs watered, and that voice scraped across the back of my brain, dry as bagasse and sharp as nails: You really think they’re going to make it? You pushed away a good thing with Bloombeck, like you push away everything good, and now Tonggow’s not here, and you’ll never make it to six o’clock…
    The breeze blew through the seaward windows again, carrying the cool green from the ricewheat paddies and the cane fields way out in the kampong, the bite from cane diesel engine exhaust, the heavy tones of coral carbon being spun into lifter cable. The first Breaches had called it getting windswept, back when they came down the cable and