Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [201]
"Credit transfer, please," Fassa requested briskly. Darnell had stiffed her on one load of supplies, reselling it and pocketing the profit himself and blandly denying that any of his drones had been anywhere near SpaceBase I. And her own excessive caution, her own refusal to leave any records behind, had given her no way to fight him. Now she demanded payment in advance before a single roll of synthosteel made it onto one of the bastard's drones.
"Your credit transfer will be. Approved. As soon as the. Loading is complete."
Fassa grinned to herself. That speech had sounded considerably more like human inflections than most dronetalk did. She wouldn't put it past Darnell to have diverted some of the new metachips for frivolous applications like improving dronetalk. He hadn't got it quite right, though. She could still tell she was talking to a machine.
And she wasn't about to let a damned droneship cheat her out of the rights to this expensive shipment!
"Credit transfer to be produced when loading is twenty-five percent complete," she said, "as by usual agreement. Or I stop loading there and you don't leave SpaceBase until the credit slip is approved."
"Agreed." The last word from the droneship had a very human sound of resignation to it. Darnell had been fooling with the Shemali metachips in his ships; Fassa was now willing to bet on it.
She still felt a vague unease about the operation, but brushed it off. She was just brooding over the Sev Bryley fiasco, that was all. No reason to suppose anything like that would happen again—not with the number of senators and bankers and inspectors Fassa now had personally dedicated to her welfare. Fassa activated the spacebase's comm link and called her hand-picked loading crew to complete the transfer.
With drone-powered lifters and other automated devices, loading the construction materials was a quick job, calling for no more than three men, all of them bound to Fassa by personal loyalty—and by the stock which they had vested in Polo Construction. Those stock options were an expense Fassa regretted, but it was necessary to ensure the absolute silence of her assistants. Once again, while the men went about their business, she cursed the underlying chauvinism of contractors who insisted on building their lifters to the specifications of a six-foot, muscular male body. There was no reason the lifters couldn't be designed so that their controls were within the reach and strength of a smallish woman; the real muscle involved here came from the machines, not from the men. But Fassa was too small to operate the machines. When she calculated what this one fact was costing her in stocks and bonuses to keep her loading crews silent, she was tempted to start her own heavy machinery factory, with lifters and forks and cranes all built so that anybody could operate them at the touch of a button.
Someday, she promised herself. When I have enough money. When I feel strong enough . . . and secure enough . . . when I am enough.
Somehow she felt that such a day would never arrive.
But the twenty-five percent mark on transfer had arrived . . . and it was time to claim her credit slip. Fassa motioned to the loading crew to stop. While they waited in position, lifters frozen in mid-arc, she walked back into the partially filled cargo bays of the droneship.
"Credit transfer," she rapped out. "Now!"
"Regret that I do not have facilities to issue credit slips in loading bay area," the droneship replied. "Request that del Parma unit transfer self to cabin area to receive payment."
The inflections were almost human, but the awkward wording was pure dronespeak. Smiling as she waved her hand before the lift-door sensors, Fassa reflected that she would have to recommend some better linguists to Darnell.
The lift-door irised open and Fassa, wrapped in her satisfied thoughts, took one step forward before she took in the glitter of silver and corycium braid against the deep-space black of a Courier Service uniform.
Startled,