Read Online Halfling Moon by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee - Free Book Online

companies could mine instead the broken
chunks, needing no excavation equipment to speak of, no investment
in people and governments and law --
    The company stuck with appurtenances --
excavators and law clerks and straw-bosses and crewship pilots and
-- it had contracts and plans and goals enough to get it through a
couple financial ripples, but in the end it was easiest to sell the
company to a shell corporation and merge that with another and drag
what funds there were in transit out -- and then abandon to the
tender mercies of the jackals of interstellar finance the remains.
The people stuck onworld belonged there after all -- who needed
dirt-miners in a good clean space-rock roundup?
    Grampa -- Grampa had been owed big-time when
the company was going to dust, and he'd fought for what was owed
him for the ship he'd bought, fought for his plans to retire to a
nice planet somewhere with lots of water and lots of willing ladies
. . . and filed liens and lawsuits.
    The company capitulated and in a final act
of law, after seven years, offered a settlement. They gave all the
company's current right, title, and interest to all its holdings on
Surebleak to Grampa. That included the original administrative
area, and the marshaling yards . . .
    Like so many others, he'd been swindled: the
ditch was worked clean and worth nothing, and the marshaling yard
had long been converted into farms for the portside executives.
    In the end Grampa moved to his holding,
found himself a wife and a girlfriend and some monographs on
farming, and dug in, sure that eventually, things would turn out.
It wasn't long before he was doing well enough, in the strange way
that things worked on Surebleak. His daughter, of course, was
brought up to farm, and then her sons, after she left…and now Yulie
walked to the people next door, hoping for a boon. He had good
food, what he needed was transportation and trade for it . . .
especially now, a way to replace the lighting that Rollie'd always
traded for.
    It was a trick of geography that could let
him arrive first at the market and then at the small streets and
buildings, and then go through the tollbooth, if he were so
inclined -- but really, since he wasn't much interested in anything
but the market and the farmers, he headed that way, the day warming
on him in a way that warned of incoming moisture. He walked more
slowly now, not liking to overheat if he was going to be seeing
people, the road now a sandy gravel as he approached the
market.
    Yulie could just about identify the stalls
and stall owners when the edge of his hearing was tickled by an odd
sound. It was not one of Surebleak's rare birds, but it bounced
around considerably, and it wasn't an aircraft. It was a more like
a moan, speeding up and then down, rising and decreasing in volume
. . .
    Whatever it was, it traveled the road, a
tail of dust behind it, rapidly approaching the dimly seen
tollbooth, and just as rapidly charging through, all the guards
standing aside.
    The distant market folk were as transfixed
as he, and the sound grew both closer and louder, and down slope he
could see the glint of the vehicle. It came on, shiny as dew on the
grass, scattering walkers and small carts out of the way. It rushed
at him, silver glinting from all the polished surfaces, and he
stepped into the gully, trying to push back the panic that rose in
him.
    The vehicle charged on, not pausing.
    Unless the driver was mad, there was only
one place it could be going.
    To his house.
    Yulie turned and began running, up hill,
toward home, the cabbages banging at his back.
    * * *
    The morning had been considerably hectic and much more
uncomfortable than expected. Pat Rin had never expected to
miss
the wallow of his mother's landau but the rattle-filled car
was simply not up to the paving, or lack thereof, on this section
of the road he supposedly controlled. He'd gone to the road's end
once before, at a stately pace, some twelve days before his
expedition to Liad,