Then began a program of industrial expansion and acquisition unseen on somnolent Calder since the days of settlement. Dream Enterprises was suddenly everywhere and into everything. Mining, manufacturing, raw materials. These new divisions sprouted tentacles of their own and sucked in additional businesses.
Paper and plastics, electronics, nucleonics, hydro-logics and parafoih’ng, insurance and banking, tridee stations and liquid tanking, entertainments and hydroponics and velosheeting.
Dream Enterprises became the wealthiest firm on Calder, then in the entire Stone Crescent.
The investors and Dandavid clipped their coupons
128
Dream Done Green
and kept their mouths shut, even to ignoring Cas-perdan’s odd relationship with an outsystem mal.
Eventually there came a morning when Pericles looked up from his huge lounge in the executive suite and stared across the room at Casperdan in a manner different from before.
The stallion had another line of silver in his mane. The girl had blossomed figuratively and figurewise. Otherwise the years had left them unchanged.
“I’ve booked passage for us. Put Rollins in charge. He’s a good man.”
“Where are we going?” asked Casperdan. Not why nor for how long, but where. She’d learned a great deal about the horse in the past few years.
“Quaestor.”
Sudden sparkle in beautiful green eyes. “And then will you give me back what I once had?”
The horse smiled and nodded. “If everything goes smoothly.”
In the Crescent, Dream Enterprises was powerful and respected and kowtowed to. In the Imperial sector it was different. There were companies on the capital planet that would classify it as a modest little family business. Bureaucratic trip-wires here ran not for kilometers, but for light-years.