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flopped down on the top like it was a bed. “How could this happen? What are we gonna do ?”
    I had prepared myself for a confrontation filled with shouts and recriminations and me taking the wrench to some of Vikram’s furniture. But I had no idea how to deal with a blubbering man leaking orange snot all over his paperwork. I’ve had people fall apart on me before, that wasn’t new. But I hadn’t wanted to kick their asses beforehand.
    I cleared my throat and crouched in front of the desk, keeping my head level with his. “Vikram? Are you there?”
    He held up his left hand, the crumpled paper flapping like a flag of surrender. He didn’t say anything. He just waved his arm back and forth until I plucked the paper from his grip. I held it with two fingers, careful not to touch the orange spatters on both sides. It looked like Jackson Pollack had redacted it.
    The paper was a summary of heirloom cane yields for the past month. The last time I had seen numbers this low was eighteen months ago, after we’d burned out the last of the crops infected with Vytai Bloombeck’s mutant black stripe. A quarter of the planet’s cane had to be burned to cinders, and it had set back the Co-Op for months. Everyone tied in with the cane industry (ninety-nine percent of the planet) had made sure to mention their losses whenever they talked to me. And while they never used words like, “And I blame you for bringing all this misery and strife on my head by blowing up the lifter and screwing me,” their tone and faces said plenty. I looked again and realized the yields were even lower. “Is this right?”
    Vikram poured the rum into his upturned face, turning his desk into an orange toxic waste dump. “Paper doesn’t lie. Except when it does. But this doesn’t, because I have checked.” He slid off the desktop, his butt hitting the floor, until all I could see was his head. His beard and mustache were now black with flecks of gray. He looked like an ancient head on display in a museum, the kind left over from a civilization that committed suicide. “We are fucked .”
    “Is there a new infection? Something screwing with the crops?”
    “That.” He pointed at me. “Something is indeed screwing with our crops, our cane, our livelihoods. And it starts with Wal and ends in Wa.”
    I forced my hands to relax. It was reflex to make fists when I heard the name of my former employer. “What do they have to do with us?”
    “Everything,” said Vikram, the despair in his voice boiling into white-hot rage. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it also wasn’t enough to scare me. I had twenty centimeters and ten kilos on him, alcohol-fueled fury or no. My understanding of Vikram’s personal history was that he had come to drinking after a lifetime of abstention. Whether he was a teetotaler because of his beliefs (the orange beard being a mark of a Muslim who had done the hajj to any of the approved Meccalites) or because of his time at a starship’s helm, I didn’t know. We hadn’t talked much, which was partly my fault. I thought if I shared anything personal, it might lead him or anyone else in the Co-Op to understand the truth of why owning Old Windswept was so important to me. Now, however, was not the time to start sharing.
    Vikram jabbed a finger toward the window. “Those goatfuckers in Thronehill have refused to re-certify our cane for export.”
    “What, again?”
    “Yes, again.” He turned back to his desk and leaned on it, knuckles down. “And not just the industrial muck we send up the cable. Now they’re not going to let us export our rum, even if it was bottled before the lifter blew up.”
    “That’s bullshit!” I pounded his desk, the blood pounding in my head.
    “Indeed it is!” he cried, pounding his desk, too. “Which is why you need to give us your cane.”
    The blood stopped pounding. “Excuse me?”
    He pointed at me. “Yes. You had to keep doing things the way Stella did. Making your own deals