Pelquin's Comet Read Online Free Page B

personal touches – 3D image cube with a sequentially changing series of family photos, and a pot plant whose small verdant leaves spilled out to tumble down the pot and dangle over the shelf supporting it like an eruption of green yeast. It was enough to suggest that the interviewer might be human after all, to lightly smooth the edges of what could otherwise have come across as a wholly unsympathetic environment. Enough, perhaps, to throw the unwary off-balance, to tempt them to relax just a fraction; but Pelquin wasn’t about to fall for that. The room’s only occupant, however, was a different matter. At least he’d been spot on regarding the age. As for everything else…
    “Captain Pelquin, I presume,” said the tall, rod-slender woman who stepped forward to clasp his hand in a vice-like handshake. The eyes that assessed him from behind the perfunctory smile were as keen and bright as a console alarm. “I’m Terry Reese, Senior Loan Assessor for First Solar Bank. Do take a seat.”

T HREE
    Prior to Pelquin’s arrival, Terry Reese had taken the trouble to skim through the file containing all the information First Solar had on the man, which proved to be a surprising amount. She gazed with jaundiced eye at the fields of text that scrolled across the air before her, while reflecting on a thoroughly unproductive morning. This was to be her third and final appointment of the day. The previous two had been a waste of time and she didn’t suppose number three was going to prove much better.
    This was an age of expansion, of hot heads and burning ambition, of genuinely heroic deeds sprinkled among the far more numerous foolish and ill-conceived ones. Mankind was stretching out to claim the stars, his reach greatly boosted by caches of ancient technology left behind by the Elders – an advanced civilisation which seemed to have abandoned this sector of the galaxy centuries ago. Not for her to speculate as to why they’d abandoned so much intriguing and useful tech, she left such matters to wiser heads with different priorities. Not that every cache held significant finds, of course; some proved to contain no more than baubles and trinkets, but even these were highly valued. The lack of an apparent pattern was frustrating to say the least – her job would have been so much easier if each haul was identical – but any cache was worth retrieving.
    Then, of course, there were the guardian entities: programmed intelligences left behind by the Elders to protect the caches; or, at least, to protect some of them. Again, no one had yet figured out a way to predict whether a guardian was likely to be in situ or not; and that was a decidedly telling variable, since the guardians had proved to be tenacious, ingenious, and often deadly.
    There was no doubting, though, that this was a good time to be a banker. Cache hunting had ignited the imagination of a generation, inspiring men and women to gamble on finding that elusive pot of gold at the end of a xenological rainbow. The pursuit of their dreams, successful or otherwise, required many things: dedication, faith, self-belief, courage, knowledge, resourcefulness, a dollop or two of good fortune and, above all… money. Which, of course, was where she came in.
    Terry Reese saw her position as one of great privilege and responsibility. She and those like her were retained by the banks to separate the diamonds from the rubble, to decide which proposals merited support and which were black holes waiting to suck in funds without any prospect of a return. The substantial salary she received was merely a reflection of her success in making the right choices and the privileged lifestyle she enjoyed no more than just reward.
    Of course, some cases were easier to assess than others.
    The first person who had come to see her that morning with begging bowl in hand, for example, had required a judgement that was simplicity itself. A naïve rich kid with stars in his eyes and little more