“And that,” she said with a thin, cold smile, “will make all of this worthwhile.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

“ASTRO Control, this is Harvest Joy, requesting inbound clearance and vector. Harvest Joy, clear.”

Josepha Zachary leaned back in her command chair and grinned hugely at Jordin Kare. The astrophysicist returned her grin with interest, then raised his right hand in the ancient thumbs-up gesture.

There was a moment of silence, and then the voice of the Astro Control approach officer sounded clearly over the survey ship’s bridge speakers.

“Welcome home, Harvest Joy! We’ve been waiting for you. Clearance granted; stand by to copy vector.”

· · • · ·

“I, for one, think this is wonderful news,” Abraham Spencer announced firmly.

The renowned financier looked around at his fellow guests. They were seated about a large conference table on an HD set, and among them they represented half a dozen of the best-known financial analysts of the entire Star Kingdom. Spencer himself was probably the most widely known and respected of them all, the long-time Chairman of the Crown Council of Financial Advisors and a confidant and advisor of many of the wealthiest individuals in the Star Kingdom, including Klaus Hauptman. He was also almost a hundred T-years old and one of those same wealthiest individuals in his own right… not to mention being handsome, silver-haired, and nearly as photogenic as he was rich.

“With all due respect, Abraham, I can’t quite share your unbridled enthusiasm… again.” Ellen DeMarco, CEO and chief analyst for the sprawling brokerage firm of DeMarco, Clancy, and Jordan, smiled. She was also a member of the CCFA and one of Spencer’s closer friends, but they often found themselves on different sides of questions. “I think you may be allowing enthusiasm to get the better of levelheaded judgment this time. The Talbott Cluster is scarcely what I would call a high return market area!”

“Of course it isn’t,” Spencer replied. “But then, neither is Silesia, when you come right down to it, Ellen. I mean, let’s face it. Silesia is riddled with pirates, graft, political corruption, human rights abuses—all of the things which make commerce risky and certainly fail to provide the kind of stable investment climate any rational person would look for. Nonetheless, the Star Kingdom shows an enormous profit in our trade with Silesia. However chaotic conditions there may be, it’s a huge market. The margin may be low, but the sheer volume of the trade compensates.”

“Perhaps it does,” DeMarco conceded. “Although,” she added with a wry smile, “you chose that particular example with malice aforethought, Abraham! You know perfectly well that I’ve been advising for years now against further exposure in Silesia.”

“I?” Spencer asked innocently. “You think that I would be guilty of choosing an example on such an ignoble basis?”

“Of course I do. But to return to the point you’ve just made, Silesia, as you so accurately say, is a huge market. It contains scores of inhabited systems, each with its own population and needs. And for all the chronic instability in the area, we have long-standing relationships with the powers that be. We have no such relationships in the case of Talbott; there are only seventeen inhabited star systems in the entire ‘cluster’; none of them have a system population in excess of three billion; and the Solarian League has very strong, direct interests in the region. As I see it, the potential economic return on expanding into that region is offset by the danger it poses to our relations with the League.”