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would be very interested in this cat thing. Strange cat things were right up her alley.
    Holloway saved and closed the video file, and smiled. Yes, she would be very happy to see this video.
    The only real question was whether she’d be happy to see him .

 
    Chapter Five        
    At any one time, there were perhaps 100,000 people on Zara XXIII. More accurately, 100,000 humans; there might be an occasional Urai or Negad, brought in by ZaraCorp in a minor, mid-level management capacity to show that the company was committed to sapient diversity in its hiring and staffing practices. But they rarely stayed long, and neither ZaraCorp nor its human employees did much to convince them to stay. Zara XXIII was a “man shop” all the way through.
    Sixty thousand of the people on Zara XXIII worked directly at the few hundred E & E camps, in crews ranging in number from fifteen to two thousand, depending on the size and complexity of the exploit site. The majority of these people were laborers—the men and some women who operated the mining or harvesting machinery, hauled the product off of mountains or out of mines or up from wells—and a few managers and supervisors. But each site also had its support roles, including cooks, IT, janitorial, medical teams, and “happy staff” of both sexes.
    These E & E camps dotted the planet from equator to poles; they sent raw materials to Aubreytown, the planet’s sole city, located on a high equatorial plateau to save the cost of a few miles of beanstalk construction. Aubreytown sent back supplies, relief crews, and coffins for some of those whom the relief crews were relieving. One could spend an entire life working at ZaraCorp E & E camps, and some did.
    Twenty thousand of the people on Zara XXIII worked the beanstalk in Aubreytown, taking the raw materials shipped in from the E & E camps and preparing them for transport, first up the beanstalk and then to the ships docked at the ’stalk shipping terminal, at geostationary distance from the planet. The ships represented the massive and inequitable transfer of raw material wealth from Zara XXIII to Earth—or would, if there were any native sapient species on the planet to recognize the inequity. There weren’t, so it was all good from the point of view of ZaraCorp and the Colonial Authority.
    Fifteen thousand people on Zara XXIII were contracted prospectors/surveyors, like Holloway. These contractors paid an annual franchise fee of several thousand credits to ZaraCorp and were given a territory to survey for the company. If they found anything exploitable, and ZaraCorp landed an E & E camp to exploit it, the contractor shared the wealth to the tune of one quarter of 1 percent of the gross market value of the materials extracted.
    If your territory included rich seams of sunstones, you could get wealthy, as Holloway was about to. If it included ores or rare woods, you could make a comfortable amount. If like most surveyors you worked a territory that included no raw materials in a high enough concentration for ZaraCorp to bother extracting, you’d go broke, fast. Most survey contractors lasted a year or two before they shipped earthside, flat busted. ZaraCorp required every contractor to prepay the return trip. Independent surveyors were not tolerated planetside.
    The remaining five thousand people were miscellaneous: construction and maintenance crews for Aubreytown buildings and structures. ZaraCorp executives and white collar staff stationed planetside to keep track of materials and profits, and support staff for said execs. A Colonial Authority Judge and her two clerks. A well-armed if not hugely well-trained security detail, whose primary job was to break up the fights in the Aubreytown bars (that is, when they were not the ones starting the fights themselves). The owners and staffs of Aubreytown’s sixteen bars, three restaurants, and one combination general store/brothel. The medical staff at Aubreytown’s twelve-bed