He halted just within the doorway and eyed Dane, Ali, and Rip with mock severity.  “You’re baaaad boys,” he told them with a shake of the head and a drawl of the adjective.  “You’ve been demoted ten files each on the list.”

Which must put him on the bottom rung once more, Dane calculated swiftly.  Or even below—­though he didn’t see how he could fall beneath the rank he held at assignment.  However, he found the news heartening instead of discouraging.  Compared to a bleak sentence at the moon mines such demotion was absolutely nothing and he knew that Van Rycke was breaking the worst news first.

“You also forfeit all pay for this voyage,” the Cargo-master was continuing.  But Jellico broke in.

“Board fine?”

At the Cargo-master’s nod, Jellico added.  “Ship pays that.”

“So I told them,” Van Rycke agreed.  “The Queen’s warned off Terra for ten solar years—­”

They could take that, too.  Other Free Traders got back to their home ports perhaps once in a quarter century.  It was so much less than they had expected that the sentence was greeted with a concentrated sigh of relief.

“No earth-side leave—­”

All right—­no leave.  They were not, after their late experiences so entranced with Terraport that they wanted to linger in its environs any longer than they had to.

“We lose the Sargol contract—­”

That did hurt.  But they had resigned themselves to it since the hour when they had realized that they could not make it back to the perfumed planet.

“To Inter-Solar?” Wilcox asked the important question.

Van Rycke was smiling broadly, as if the loss he had just announced was in some way a gain.  “No—­to Combine!”

“Combine?” the Captain echoed and his puzzlement was duplicated around the circle.  How did Inter-Solar’s principal rival come into it?

“We’ve made a deal with Combine,” Van Rycke informed them.  “I wasn’t going to let I-S cash in on our loss.  So I went to Vickers at Combine and told him the situation.  He understands that we were in solid with the Salariki and that the Eysies are not.  And a chance to point a blaster at I-S’s tail is just what he has been waiting for.  The shipment will go out to the storm priests tomorrow on a light cruiser—­it’ll make it on time.”

Yes, a light cruiser, one of the fast ships maintained by the big Companies, could make the transition to Sargol with a slight margin to spare.  Stotz nodded his approval at this practical solution.

“I’m going with it—­” That did jerk them all up short.  For Van Rycke to leave the Queen—­that was as unthinkable as if Captain Jellico had suddenly announced that he was about to retire and become a kelp farmer.  “Just for the one trip,” the Cargo-master hastened to assure them.  “I smooth their vector with the storm priests and hand over so the Eysies will be frozen out—­”

Captain Jellico interrupted at that point.  “D’you mean that Combine is buying us out—­not just taking over?  What kind of a deal—­”