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initial engagement with the burger was successfully underway.
    “I just graduated from the academy. Diurnia Salvage and Transport offered me a berth.”
    “You came all the way from Port Newmar?”
    “Yup, not a bad trip. Came on a fast-packet.”
    We passed a pleasant stan of minor chit-chat while I ate and had a second beer. It was early in the day for me, but with nothing to do, and nowhere to go for a couple of days, it seemed a good way to pass the time.
    Eventually I thumbed the tab, adding a nice gratuity. I’d be coming back often, so I wanted to leave a good impression. Besides, she was kinda cute.

 

    C HAPTER S IX
D IURNIA O RBITAL
2358- J ULY-5
    Other than sleeping, eating, and exploring Diurnia Orbital, I didn’t have a lot to do. While I waited I reviewed all the publicly accessible information that I could find on Diurnia Salvage and Transport.
    Even before I’d accepted the offer back at the academy, I’d done some homework on them. DST was a smallish concern based on Diurnia. They started out doing salvage work and bulk transport contracts for the Confederated Planets when the CP was developing across the quadrant. The current CEO was the grandson of the founder, a man named Geoffrey Maloney. The database reported a fleet of about a dozen ships, all specializing in bulk freight. A third of them were tankers and the rest were bulk ore and grain haulers.
    I took advantage of the StationNet access to pull up the local broker reports to see what DST was hauling and where. The list wasn’t terribly long. Of course, when you’re talking about a dozen ships, and transit times are two or three months, there aren’t that many trips in a stanyer. The sailing plans were all to or from the same four systems—Dree, Breakall, Welliver, and Jett. Besides Diurnia itself, Dree was the only confederated planet in the bunch. The rest were corporate systems. The Diurnia quadrant was one of the original beads on the string that became the Western Annex. There were a lot of corporate systems out there. It was unusual to have two CP systems adjacent to each other—usually they liked to split up the influence. I dug into a few of the manifests but they were all common cargoes—grain, ores, raw metal, lumber, frozen food, and the occasional load of machine parts or farm equipment.
    The ’Net brought up a list of the actual hulls. Only two of those were the newer Unwin Bar Bell two hundred metric kiloton bulk haulers, but mostly they ran older model Damien tractors and the venerable Manchester one hundred eighty metric kilo tons tankers. While the Manchester-built ships would be relatively comfortable, the Damien tractors were built for minimum crews. They were notorious for being long on work, short on crew, and uncomfortable on long trips. The Bar Bells were relatively modern but definitely built for power and not comfort. Their big drawing card was the single pod cargo container, big enough to hold small ships inside them. They could be loaded in advance, stacked together, and even left in orbit. The containers were particularly valued for security reasons, because they were not accessible from inside the ship. The only way into a bulk container is through the cargo loading ports on either end. When mated with its ship, the ports weren’t even available. The end nacelles of the hull blocked access. Loaded, mated, and security bonded, the Unwin Bar Bells provided as secure a transport medium as possible.
    As I finished dressing for my interview with the DST people, I wondered what I’d run into. My appointment was for 09:00 in their corporate offices on the Oh-five Deck. Yes, I was nervous. I had to admit that to myself as I collected my tablet, made sure the room key was in my pocket, and snagged my service cap on the way out the door. The butterflies only got worse while I waited for the lift and reached a peak just before I entered the beige and somewhat battered office space with the oval and star logo of