gorda

Aside from all that, she was carrying about a million tons of titanium ore to the heavy industries on Gorda. All told, that would take care of their traveling arrangements for the next year or so, pretty much.

The last week hadn__ been any better, come to think of it. On Monday they arrived at Gorda, just to find that the cargo of electronics he was to ship to Beowulf had been taken by another freighter for a lower fee. It took him until Wednesday before he found another cargo _ which had to reach Earth by Saturday. The last straw was when his crew mutinied a day out of the Hermes system and demanded a pay increase. The union tended to call that sort of thing __ollective bargaining_, not actually mutiny, but hey _ the results are the same. He tended to favor the term __iracy_, but this wasn__ the high seas and out here, there were real pirates to worry about. His former crew had also wanted more time off and a better cook _ at least one who knew how which end of a frying pan to hold. He was unable to comply, and so was forced to stop at Beowulf anyway. That was the last time he saw them. Fortunately for him, Weaver, Fuller and Jang opted to stay with him. Whether it was out of loyalty, or perhaps just convenience, he never knew.

It did occur to him that perhaps he__ gone to the wrong Academy _ the guys in the Space Fleet always had more interesting stories to tell at the spaceport bars. You know, tales about the dude who got vaporized in a plasma accident in the engineering section, or the fella who got turned into a blob of weird space jelly by some alien virus _ or the time someone flew a starship into an astor-field at warp four by mistake (they were still trying to find the black box on that one). The Imperial Space Fleet__ recruiting office sure didn__ go around advertising __oin up, see the universe, meet interesting aliens and die screaming_, but it was known there were risks involved. It was part of the job after all, and yet somehow, they still got recruits signing up in droves. Yes, indeedy _ the stories were far more interesting than his _ took a load of ore to Gorda, took a load of mining equipment back to Tordrazil. Took a load of Florpavian Flame-birds to a zoo on Deanna, took a load of machinery to Salus. Picked up and dropped off a few passengers on the way. Still, Florpavian Flame-birds were a risky cargo_ and damned tricky to transport _ which is probably the only reason he__ had any entertainment at all on the last trip.