The Ramal Extraction by Steve Perry

laws. And more than a few times, that had been tested to the limits. It had been rescinded once, and they’d had to shoot their way out of the port. Bad for business, when you had to square off with your clients. People got pissy about the littlest things, too. On that operation, they’d probably taken out thirty people on the field, wounded a couple dozen more. What the locals wanted to hang them for? It had to do with being out and about on a local religious holiday. Hey, you can pile the bodies anywhere you want, but don’t show your heathen faces on the Sacred Anniversary of Zanu’s Holy Ascension!
    “Fan out and find out,” Jo said. “Time is money. Quicker we clear this, the bigger our bonuses.”
    After the room had emptied, save for herself and Cutter, Jo said, “You think Rama is going to be part of the solution or part of the problem?”
    He shrugged. “Can’t say. The Rajah seems to think more hindrance than help, if I read him right, and the kid seems to have a major hard-on for the Thakore next door.”
    “I’m on that,” she said. “I’ll have a file for you to look at in a few minutes.”
    “Good. I think I might tool on over to the range and shoot a target or three; the rust is starting to thicken on my trigger finger.”
    “Hell getting old,” she said.
    “Yeah. Come back and see me when you’re my age.”
    “If you are still around.”
    He smiled. “There’s that.”

    Gramps knew all about money, credit, banking, and the shades of marketing: white, gray, and black. Somebody was always looking to get a bigger slice of whatever pie was available and always looking for easier ways to do it. It didn’t take him an hour playing on the local nets to figure out where the serious players were in the money games on Ananda. Legal, quasi-legal, criminal, these tended to blend together most places. A step this way, and you were aboveboard and clean as a new needle. A step the other way, and you were into the gray, where some things were fine as long as you didn’t look too closely, and others might get you lock-time if you got caught doing them.
    Another step or so, it was shoot-first-and-don’t-bother-to-ask-the-corpse-questions.
    Dealing with the mostly honest and clean shoes was usually the safest way to start poking around. If you couldn’t find out what you wanted to know there, you could always head for the crap-boot slums.
    Thus he found himself in the foyer of the Anandan version of the Orders of Patrons of Agriculture, the local growers association. It was a new building, high-tech, cold, and sterile, with art and architecture that showcased how much everything had cost. New money liked to flaunt itself; old money tended to be a little lower key.
    Fifteen stories tall, a lot of glass plate and exposed stressplast girders, the headquarters, and paid for by, the exportation of Heavenspice, nearly all of which grown here was controlled by the association who owned this building.
    “Captain Demonde?”
    Gramps smiled at the sweet young man who had come to fetch him.
    “If you’ll follow me, Director Sergal will see you now.”
    Sergal was a tall, fit woman, probably forty or so, with carefully upswept and statically held jet-colored hair thatmade her look as if she were standing over an air grate. She wore silk cling in a shimmery silver and had a smile that would cut emeralds.
    Fine-looking woman, she was.
    She stood behind a desk carved from what looked to be a single piece of granite. There was a window behind her that offered a view of the city. The perks of power.
    “Captain Demonde. How nice to meet you. Please, sit. How may I be of assistance?”
    Gramps sat on the angular and ugly couch, which was every bit as uncomfortable as it looked. Sergal seated herself in her custom form-chair, which would be infinitely more pleasant an experience. He had to look up, since the couch was at least fifteen centimeters shorter than her chair.
    There were a number of ways he could go about