The pumps were already sluicing the lines again in start-up mode, testing the system for leaks which had opened during the hours of darkness. Their hoosh announced Slade as he entered the crew area, then closed the door behind him.
"Hey, it's Soldier," called Chesson as Leaf was saying, "Via! Look how he's togged out!" Slade wore a Steward's tunic, blue-green with silver piping. It fit him no worse than the garment he had worn to the House.
"Fried potatoes with your breakfast?" asked Pretorius. He shook the skillet.
"Via, yes," Slade said as he sat down beside the fourth chair at the table. He took the plate the foreman handed him. Raw fries, nothing processed about them, gleamed beside a filet of shallotte or some similar fish. "You guys teaching potatoes to swim, then?" the tanker asked. There was certainly no garden plot at the station, swept as it was by tides on an average of once a month.
"My wife grows them," said Chesson as he took another mouthful. "Well, we both do every other month when I'm off, but I can't take much credit."
"No trouble at the House, then?" Leaf asked.
"Yeah, what did the Mistress say?" Chesson added as he recollected the circumstances in which the big man had ridden off in the truck.
"Let the man eat his breakfast," said Pretorius. He took his own place at the table. Even in the foreman's eyes, however, were questions dancing to be answered.
"There was a bit of trouble," Slade said. Instead of eating, he eased his chair back and looked across the other three men. "Nothing that couldn't be handled. What happens this afternoon, though, that's going to be harder. They're going to give Bev Dyson guardianship of the Slade Estate."
Unexpectedly Leaf said, "I wasn't but a boy, not so much as Chessie's age." Chesson, who was a good thirty years old, bridled but did not interrupt. "The storm of 161 it was, the Great Storm. You remember that, Piet?"
Pretorius shrugged. "Before my time," he said.
Leaf nodded as if to pump up his memory. "There was never anything to match it," the old man said. "Fifteen days of wind and waves. There wasn't a let-up till the end. The eye missed Main Island altogether, just curled through us like the blade of a circle saw. But you know, lads—it did pass. Master Teddy is of age in two years?"
Chesson and the foreman were nodding slowly in agreement. Slade said, "If Bev Dyson takes over—" he raised his left hand, palm up and fingers extended— "in six months, Teddy will be in a fish's belly." The hand clenched with the suddenness of jaws snapping.
The three other men looked at Slade, at the fist and at the face set as hard as that fist. "This planet's been run a certain way since the Settlement," the tanker said. "Some mightn't like it, but it seemed to suit most pretty well. If Dyson takes over, the system isn't going to change, not really . . . but the way it's applied won't ever be the same. The Council Islands'll toe the line set from the Main, from Slade House or Paraclete, whichever Bev decides should be his capital."
Slade's voice was getting louder, but he did not move from his chair. "Councilors won't decide anything but who they screw on a given night. And all right, that doesn't bother you or me either. But the rock-hoppers, the independants, they'll all be pulled in and settled if they'll come—or hunted down if they won't, you know Bev Dyson. And when there's nowhere to run, he'll start squeezing every laborer on Tethys . . . and he'll squeeze you the worst, my friends, because he hates every soul and thing that ever wore Slade Blue."
The clenched fist opened again as if it bore the future on a platter.
Pretorius shook his head with a look of sad wonder. "I can't leave, Holt," he said. "Maybe you can go back as a mercenary, but they wouldn't have me at my age. And I wouldn't have them! This is the life I want, right here. And if that means Dyson and all the things that Dyson means, then it'll have to be that way.
"It's not what Mistress Slade wants," said the tanker softly.
"It's not what we want," Chesson burst out, "but what bloody difference does that make?"
"A good question," said Slade. He grinned as the pieces came together, working his fingers closed again without haste. "You know, I used to wonder why the Old Man put us so heavy into food production. There's ten stations just about like this one, right?"
"Sure, but that's business," said Leaf, watching Slade with puzzlement.
The tanker nodded. "Business, sure," he agreed. "The Slades feed most of the planet from these stations. But there's a lot more profit to cost of plant and maintenance in mining operations, which is why we've pretty well got food stations to ourselves. Right?"
The crewmen gaped or frowned. The economics of the situation had never consciously affected them. They were Slade retainers, and they did the jobs their forebears had done before them.
"Right," said Slade gently. "So what's the difference between mining and food extraction? Besides what you're trying to bring out of the sea?"
Pretorius saw where the conversation was directed. He said, "No."
The others looked at him. The foreman nodded to the weapons racked beside the doorway. "The mining rigs have guards, too. Any time you work men near the sea, you need sensors and guards."
"Right again," said Slade. It was good to be sure he could trust the men he was with. Trust them to think as well as act. "But a manganese dredge doesn't bring them halfway around the planet the way the juice does from your rig, does it? How many critters—how many monsters, they'd call them back at the House—have you put down, Piet?" He gestured. "Leaf? Chessie?"
Chesson snorted. "I remember my first, though not real well," he said. "It was when Pops was on this rig, so I must have been maybe five. He let me pull the trigger when a networm surfaced right under the platform."
"All right, friends," said the tanker as he rose to his feet. He stood, arms akimbo, facing the crewmen. "This isn't your job or that of the crews off-duty and at the other stations. But if it isn't done by you, it won't be done at all. For yourselves, and for the Mistress—and for Master Teddy, who can just maybe set things straight again, like they were when I was a kid. If he just gets a chance and a little help. Are you up to it?"
The pumps gentled the silence with their background of hoosh, hoosh. At last Pretorius spoke. "It's us you'll want to call the others, I suppose, Soldier?"