Robert Asprin – Tambu

With effort, he closed his mind against the image. Ramona was right. He needed sleep, if only to steel his nerves.

He was stretching his legs, preparing to rise from his seat, when a chime sounded and a light came on the console.

Tambu smiled as he looked at the signal. Ramona was slipping. The light was red, but not blinking. Either she hadn’t issued her orders yet, or a call managed to slip past her blockade.

His eye fell on the indicator, and his smile faded abruptly. The call was from the Raven! From Whitey! I Whitey had never used a priority signal of any kind.

Without thinking, his hand went to the transmission switch.

“Tambu here,” he said even before the signal appeared on his screen. “What’s the problem, Whitey?”

Whitey’s face appeared on the screen, her features frozen in a mask of anger.

“Tambu?” she asked. “I want to know what’s going on!”

“About what?” Tambu blinked, then it all came back to him. Of course! That’s what Whitey would be calling about.

“All right,” Whitey snapped. “If you want to play games, we’ll take it from the top. I was just down on Elei making our sales pitch. They were receptive-very receptive for a planet that had never agreed with our position before. They were so receptive, in fact, they wouldn’t even let me talk. They just signed up-said they’d pay whatever we asked.”

“And you want to know why,” Tambu finished for her.

“I asked them why,” Whitey spat. “And you know what they said? They said they were paying so my ship wouldn’t burn their capital.”

Tambu ran his fingers wearily through his hair, but didn’t interrupt.