Read Online Investments by Walter Jon Williams - Free Book Online

room. “I’m trying to think who I could ask.”
    “Your father,” Martinez pointed out. “He’s on the Fleet Control Board, he should have the authority to get the information.”
    Terza shook her head. “He couldn’t do it discreetly. An inquiry from the Control Board is like firing an antimatter missile from orbit.” She smiled. “Or like a command from a Lord Inspector. People would notice.” She gazed up into the corner again for a long moment. “Bernardo, then,” she decided. “He’s got access and is reasonably discreet. But I’ll owe him a big favor.”
    “Ten days for the query to get to Zanshaa,” Martinez said. “Another ten days for the answer to return.”
    The communication would leap from system to system at the speed of light, but Martinez still felt a burning impatience at the delay.
    A smile quirked its way across Terza’s face. “I’ve never seen you work before. Half the time you’re frantic with impatience, and the rest of the time you’re marching around giving orders like a little king. It’s actually sort of fascinating.”
    Martinez raised his eyebrows at this description of himself, but said, “I hope you can manage to sustain the fascination a little longer.”
    “I think I’ll manage.”
    Martinez reached across the corner of the table to take her hand. Terza leaned toward him to kiss his cheek. Her voice came low to his ear. “My doctor once told me that a woman’s at her most fertile in the month following the removal of her implant. I think we’ve proved him right. For the second time.”
    He felt his skin prickle with sudden heat as delight flared along his nerves. “Are you sure?” he asked.
    “Well no,” Terza said, “I’m not. But I feel the same way I felt last time, and I think experience counts in these things.”
    “It definitely should,” Martinez said.
    Fecundity, he thought. What more could a man want?
    *
    “The harbor looks a little bare,” Martinez said. He sat, awaiting breakfast, beneath an umbrella on the terrace of the Chee Fishing Club, where he had been given an honorary membership, and where he and Terza were staying. No Fleet accommodation on the ground had been judged worthy of a Lord Inspector, and the only deluxe lodging on the planet were at the club— conveniently owned by Martinez’ father, part of a sport-fishing scheme.
    “The commercial fishing boats are out, and the shuttles aren’t coming in any longer,” the manager said. He was a Terran, with a beard dyed purple and twined in two thin braids. He wore a jacket with padded shoulders and of many different fabrics, all in bright tropical colors, stitched together in a clashing melee of brilliant pigment. Martinez hadn’t seen anyone else similarly dressed, and he suspected the manager’s style was peculiar to him alone.
    Steam rose as the manager freshened Martinez’ coffee. “Without the shuttles we’ve only a small fishing fleet and a few sport boats,” he said, “though more will come in time. We can build up an enormous fishery here— though we may have to export most of the catch, since everyone here ate nothing but fish for the first year and a half and they’re all sick of it.”
    Martinez gazed down a lawn-green slope at three bobbing boats dwarfed by the huge grey concrete quay against which they were moored. Two flew Fishing Club ensigns, and another a private flag, probably that of an official in the Meridian or Chee companies. Across the harbor was the town of Port Vipsania, named after one of Martinez’ sisters, and beyond that, stretching up into the sky, was the cable that ran to geosynchronous orbit and Chee Station.
    Port Vipsania, like all the early settlements, was built on the sea, because before the skyhook had gone into operation the previous year, workers and their gear had been brought to the planet in shuttles powered by chemical rockets, shuttles that had landed on the open water and then taxied to a mooring. Supplies, too, had been