“Well?”

The silver-haired woman behind the immense desk was perfectly groomed, and her face was the product of the sort of biosculpt available only to people for whom money truly was no object. Unlike the nondescript, somehow subliminally seedy man in the uniform of a Sternenwelt Lines purser, she was perfectly suited to the elegant office, yet there was a coldness in her eyes, and her smile held a honed duralloy edge that beaded the purser’s forehead with sweat.

“I’m sorry, Madam Osterwelt,” he said, “but they won’t sell.” The woman said nothing, only gazed at him, and he swallowed. “I upped the offer to the maximum authorized amount,” he said quickly, “but only three or four of them were even interested.”

“You assured us that your local knowledge of the sector suited you for the job. That we could rely upon your good offices to attain success.” The woman’s mild tone was conversational, and he swallowed again, harder.

“I was certain they’d sell, ma’am. We were offering them ten years of income for a successful melon grower!”

“An attractive offer,” the woman conceded. “Yet you say they refused it. Why?”

“I-I’m not certain, ma’am,” the purser said unhappily.

“They must have given some indication,” she pointed out, and he nodded.

“As near as I could figure it out, they simply didn’t want the money, ma’am. I talked to old Esteban, the yokel who runs the field, and he just said his wife, his father, and his grandfather were all buried in the plot behind his house. That… that was fairly typical of what all of them said, ma’am.”

“Parochialism,” the woman said distastefully. She shook her head, and her tongue made a clicking sound against her teeth. “Regretfully typical of these untutored frontier people. I suppose I ought to have expected it-and you should have anticipated it as well, Mister Bergren.” She cocked her head. “I fear you’ve served us less than satisfactorily in this matter.”

“I did my best, Madam Osterwelt!”

“I’m sure you did. That’s the problem.” The purser wilted before the chill dispassion of her voice, and she made a weary shooing motion with one hand. “We’ll be in touch, Mister Bergren.”

The purser withdrew with obvious relief, and the woman pressed a stud on her desk panel. A discreetly hidden door opened silently within twenty seconds, and an athletic young man walked in.

“Yes, Mother?”

“You were right about Bergren, Gerald. The man’s an utter incompetent.”

“Is he?”

“Utterly,” she sighed. “How fortunate that no one knows he was acting for us. In fact, I think it would be a very good idea to take steps to ensure that no one ever does know he was representing our interests.”

“I’ll see to it,” Gerald said, and she smiled at him.

“A good son is a mother’s greatest treasure.” She sat back in her chair and folded her hands atop the desk while she gazed across the office at the subtly shifting patterns of a light sculpture. “Still, incompetent as he may be, he has put his finger on the nub of the problem, dear. Farmers can be the most stubborn people in the galaxy, and frontier people cherish such boringly predictable attachments to their land. I’m afraid that if they refused the price we authorized him to offer, it’s unlikely they’ll sell to anyone.”

“We’ve had that problem before, Mother.”

“I realize we have, dear, but alternative methods can be so… messy.” She pouted at the light sculpture, then sighed again. “Do you know, the most provoking thing of all is that they don’t even have any idea why we want their little dirt ball.”

“No one does yet, Mother. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. But I really think I might not mind as much if I were up against an opposition that understood the rules of the game-and the stakes, of course.”

“Mother,” the young man said patiently, “their system is the only logical place to become the primary transfer node for the jump points serving three entire sectors. You know it, I know it, and whenever Survey gets around to releasing its new astrography report, every major shipping line will know it. Does it really matter whether they know it or not?”

“Don’t forget who taught you everything you know, dear,” his mother replied with an edge of tartness. “It’s really very unbecoming for a son to lecture his mother.”

“Was I lecturing?” He smiled and shook his head. “I didn’t mean to. Why don’t we think of it as a case of demonstrating I’ve done my homework?”

“You got that from my genes, not your father’s,” she said with a laugh, then shook her own head. “Still, you’re quite right. All that matters is making certain GalCorp owns the only habitable real estate in the system when the time comes. All of it.” She brooded at the light sculpture for a moment longer before she shrugged. “Well, if we have to be messy, I suppose that’s all there is to say about it. Who do you think we should put in charge of it?”

“Why not me?”

“But you’ve never done any, um, field work, dear.”

“Which doesn’t mean I can’t handle it. Besides, we ought to keep the command loop on this one as secure as possible, and every young man should start at the bottom. It helps him appreciate the big picture when he finally winds up at the top. Not-” he smiled again “-that I have any desire to wind up at the top for many more years, Mother.”

“Wisdom beyond your years,” she murmured. “Very well, it’s your project. But before you take any steps, be sure you research the situation thoroughly. This sort of thing is seldom as simple as it looks at first glance, and I don’t want my only son to suffer any unpleasant surprises.”

“Of course not, Mother. I’ll just pop out to Ursula and spend a few weeks nosing around Sector Central. I’m sure I can find some generous soul with the access to provide the information we need. Who knows? I may even find the ideal people for that messy little job we discussed.”

One week after his arrival on Santa Cruz, Paul Merrit sat back in the comfortable crash couch and rubbed his chin with something very like awe. The screen before him glowed with a complicated schematic any Bolo tech would have given ten years of his life to study, and its design was over fifty years old. Fifty years! Incredible. Working all by herself, with only the resources of a single automated maintenance depot-admittedly a superbly equipped one, but still only a single depot-Marina Stavrakas had developed Nike’s brain box design into one that made the newest Mark XXV’s look clumsy and slow.

He tilted the couch back and crossed his legs. More screens and displays glowed around him, filling Nike’s fighting compartment with a dim, shifting luminescence. There were more of them than there would have been in a more modern-well, recent-Bolo. Nike was a modified Mark XXIII, after all; humans needed broader band data interfaces than any Bolo did, and Nike’s basic technology was eighty years old, without more recent updates in human-machine information management systems. But for all that, the compartment was surprisingly spacious. Not only had Nike been the first fully autonomous Bolo, whether anyone knew it or not, but she’d also been the first to incorporate molycirc psychotronics. It was very early generation stuff, considerably bulkier than its more modern equivalents, but Stavrakas had used it in some amazingly innovative ways. What she might have accomplished with the current technologies scarcely bore thinking on.

He turned his couch and keyed another screen to life. A forty-nine-year-old time and date display glowed in one corner, and the white-haired woman who appeared on it sat in the same crash couch Merrit now occupied. She was far frailer and older than the single, poor-quality flatpic of Major Stavrakas he’d found in Central’s surviving records, but her olive-dark eyes were still sharp and alert. He’d already played the recording three times, yet he felt a fresh sense of respect, coupled with a regret that he’d never known her, as she began to speak.