“Greene was overturned, you hack,” Bourne said, tightly.

“No,” Holloway said. “A narrow and limited exception was carved out of Greene in Mieville versus Martin. That exception doesn’t apply here.”

“The hell it doesn’t,” Bourne said.

“Well, I guess we’ll find out,” Holloway said. “It’ll probably take years to work through the courts, though, and ZaraCorp will get all sorts of bad publicity while it does. We all remember what happened the last time. Also, just so you know, I’ve been recording this little conversation of ours. Just in case you get it into your head to suggest to DeLise and his security goons that they should toss me off this ledge when they find me.”

“I resent that implication,” Bourne said.

“I’m glad to hear that, Chad,” Holloway said. “But I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

Bourne sighed. “Fine, Jack,” he said. “You win. Your contract is undeleted. Happy?”

“Not in the least,” Holloway said. “If you deleted the old contract, then I have the right to negotiate a new contract.”

“You get the standard contract just like everyone else,” Bourne said.

“You talk as if I’m not standing next to a billion-credit sunstone seam, Chad,” Holloway said. “Which I own.”

“I hate you,” Bourne said.

“Don’t blame me,” Holloway said. “You’re the one who deleted my contract. But my demands are simple. First, I don’t want to be fined for this cliff collapse. It was an accident, and I know when you sift the data you’ll see that for yourself.”

“Fine,” Bourne said. “Done.”

“And I want a one percent finder’s fee,” Holloway said.

Bourne swore. Holloway was asking for four times the standard finder’s fee. “No way,” Bourne said. “No way. They’ll fire me for even thinking about approving that.”

“It’s one lousy percent,” Holloway said.

“You want ten million credits for blowing up a cliff side,” Holloway said.

“Well, it might be more than that,” Holloway said. “I can see six more sunstones in the seam from where I’m sitting.”

“No,” Bourne said. “Don’t even think about it. The most I’m allowed to authorize myself is point four percent. Take it and we’re done. Leave it and we’re going to court. And I swear to you, Jack, if I get fired for all of this, I’m going to hunt you down and kill you myself. And steal your dog.”

“That’s just low, stealing someone’s dog,” Holloway said.

“Point four percent,” Bourne said. “Final offer.”

“Done,” Holloway said. “Write this up as a rider to the contract neither you nor I contend was ever stupidly deleted by you. If it’s a rider, I don’t have to fly into Aubreytown to approve it.”

“Already done,” Bourne said. “Transmitting now.” The MAIL icon on Holloway’s infopanel came to life. He picked up the infopanel, scanned the rider, and approved it with his security hash.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Chad,” Holloway said, setting down the infopanel.

“Please die in a fire, Jack,” Bourne said.

“Does this mean you’re not taking me for a steak at Ruby’s?” Holloway asked, but Bourne had already cut the connection.

Holloway smiled to himself and held up the sunstone in his hand, turning it in the sun. Even in its uncut, dirty state it was beautiful, and Holloway had held it long enough that his own ambient heat had worked into the heart of the stone, making its filaments glow like lightning trapped in amber.

“You’re coming with me,” Holloway said to the stone. ZaraCorp could have the rest of them, and would. But this was the stone that had just made him a very rich man. It was a lucky stone, indeed. And he had someone in mind to give it to. By way of apology.

Holloway stood up and slipped the sunstone into his pocket. He looked over at Carl, who was still lying on the ledge. Carl crooked an eyebrow at him.

“Well,” Holloway said. “We’ve done all the damage we’re going to do around here for today. Let’s go home.”

Holloway’s skimmer was roughly halfway back to his home when his infopanel alerted him that his house was being broken into; the emergency alert system’s movement alarm had been tripped.

“Crap,” Holloway said. He jabbed the AUTOPILOT function on the skimmer; the skimmer skewed momentarily as it acquired signal and pathing from Holloway’s home base. There was no traffic here—Holloway’s survey territory was deep inside a continent-wide jungle, far away from any population centers, or indeed any other humans—so the course was more or less a straight line to home over the hills and treetops. Autopilot engaged, Holloway picked up his infopanel and clicked through to the security camera.

Which showed nothing; Holloway had the camera on his work desk and generally used it as a hat stand. His view of his house—and whoever was currently inside it—was being blocked by a stained porkpie hat he’d worn for amusement’s sake during his second year of law school at Duke.

“Stupid hat,” Holloway said. He kicked up the gain on the security camera’s microphone and held the infopanel speaker against his ear, on the chance the interloper might talk.

No luck. There were no voices, and what little else he could hear was being washed out by the sound of the skimmer engines and wind rushing through the open cockpit.

Holloway clicked his infopanel back into its cradle and looked down at his skimmer instrument panel. The skimmer was moving along at a leisurely eighty kilometers an hour, a safe speed in the jungle, in which birds were liable to burst out of the trees and smash themselves into the vehicle. Home was another twenty klicks out; Holloway knew that without checking the GPS data because he could see Mount Isabel off to his right. The hill’s eastern face was chewed away and the four square klicks in front of it fenced off and stripped bare of vegetation where ZaraCorp was doing what it euphemistically called “Smart Mining”—strip-mining but with an ostensible commitment to minimizing toxic impact and to restoring the area to its pristine state when the mining operations ceased.

At the time ZaraCorp started mining Mount Isabel, Holloway had idly wondered how an area could be restored to a pristine state once ZaraCorp had mined everything of value out of it, but this was not the same thing as him exhibiting actual concern. He’d been the one who did the original survey of Mount Isabel; the small sunstone patch that first drew his attention was exhausted in a matter of weeks, but the mount was a good source of anthracite coal, and the relatively rare rockwood tree grew on the mount and down its sides toward the river. He’d gotten his quarter of a percent out of the find—a decent-enough sum—and had moved on.

Holloway’s critical eye guessed that Mount Isabel had another year or two left in her before she was mined down to a molehill, at which time ZaraCorp would airlift out its equipment and drop in a clutch of terrified summer interns, who would hurriedly strew bags of rockwood seeds on the ground—this counted as “restoring the area to a pristine state”—and who would also pray that the fence winding around the perimeter of the mining area held up while they did it.

The fences usually held. It was rare these days to lose an intern to a zararaptor. But fear was a fine motivator.

A loud crash came out of the infopanel. Whoever was in Holloway’s house just dropped something breakable. Holloway swore and pressed the button that would enclose the skimmer cockpit, and then opened the throttle. They’d be home in five minutes; the birds in the treetops would just have to take their chances.

*

As the skimmer approached his home, Holloway dropped it into CONSERVE mode, which dropped its speed significantly but also made the skimmer almost silent. He stop-hovered the craft a klick out and reached for his binoculars.