“Did I miss something?”
The interruption came from the middle-aged black woman who had started to enter the cabin, only to stop short at the laughter within.
“No, not really, Roz.” Eisner assured her. “Did Dobbs get off okay?”
“No trouble at all.” Rosalyn sank into a chair. “He seemed a lot politer on the way out than on the way in.”
“We had a talk. I explained a few facts of life to him, and he pulled in his horns a bit.”
“That’s nice,” Roz grimaced. “Since you’re in an explaining mood, maybe you wouldn’t mind explaining a few things to me-like what do we do next?”
“We already know that,” Nikki protested. “Now that we’re pirates, we do whatever pirates do.”
“Technically, we’re mutineers,” Eisner corrected. “We aren’t pirates until we actually attack another ship. But Roz is right; we still have several options open to us at this point.”
“We’ve been through those already,” Nikki grumbled.
“If you don’t mind, Nikki,” Roz interrupted, “I’d like to go over them again. I’m not too wild about the choice we’ve made so far.”
Eisner began hastily, before a fight could start. “First of all, we could continue business as normal. We could return to our home port, report that the captain died of natural causes in space, and run the freight business ourselves. Of course, that would mean we’d have to give the money we’ve collected to the proper people.”
Nikki snorted derisively, but Roz silenced him with a glare.
“Second,” Eisner continued, “we could sell the ship, divide the money among us, and either go our separate ways or set up another business. The main problem with that being that you need ownership papers to sell a ship, and as soon as we touched down planetside, someone’s bound to get very curious about where we got our money.”