Free Poisoned Pawn by Jaleta Clegg

assignment somewhere. It’s important.” It was important, to me.
    “What is his name?”
    “Malcolm Tayvis.”
    His fingers clicked over keys. “Rank?”
    “Sector Commander.”
    He stopped moving his hands and glared.
    “Maybe not. Can you just search for his name?”
    He hit a button, the click sounded final in the vast stone lobby. “There is no one by that name.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Quite.” He looked away, at a screen. His hands moved over the controls again. I was dismissed.
    “Thanks anyway,” I said.
    I felt his eyes on me the whole way across the lobby.
    I walked out into a morning that didn’t seem as bright. I could send a message to Grant Lowell, I knew that one would go through, but then Lowell would want something in return. He wanted me, in the Patrol, under his command. That was the last thing I wanted to do.
    I had one more option to find Tayvis. I could find bars where off-duty Patrol hung out and ask them if they knew Tayvis. And maybe in a hundred years I’d get lucky and find one. Tayvis was in the Enforcers, who didn’t hang out in bars, at least not ones I could get into. I could search public directories for him, but I had no idea where his home planet was. There was no way the directories could list every citizen of the Empire. I might get lucky, but I doubted it.
    I headed across town to my lunch appointment with the ceramics dealer.
    Lunch was disappointing. The restaurant we met at was one of the cheaper ones. The flowers on the table were plastic. The food may as well have been plastic. The dealer, Juntis Shoot, was a thin man, wearing old fashioned glasses, and a huge chip on his shoulder. The last ship he’d contracted with, he told me in a loud voice, had stolen the last shipment he’d sent with them. It was never delivered.
    I asked him if maybe the ship had been lost, it did still happen. He glared and kept right on telling me how untrustworthy spacers were, especially the independent traders. I shifted in my seat so he could see the patch on my shoulder, the one that said Independent Traders Guild in big red letters. He didn’t even pause.
    “Why don’t you use a contract shipping service?” I finally broke in to ask. “Since you don’t trust traders.”
    That launched him off on a new stream of complaints, this time about the prices charged by the big shipping companies for even small cargoes.
    I ate my bland food and waited for him to slow down.
    “Hom Shoot,” I said, raising my hand to interrupt him and using the local form of address, “Do you want to sign a contract with me or not? I am an independent trader, bonded by the Guild, which guarantees your cargo, even if something happens and I can’t deliver it.”
    “How much?” he said abruptly.
    “For one run?”
    “No, no,” he said and waved his hands. “How much for you to contract to deliver all of them? One shipment a week. One week off every four months.”
    “I’m not sure I want to sign a permanent contract, Hom Shoot. How about a trial run for both of us? I’ll take your cargo to Kimmel and send a message back if I decide not to continue shipping for you. Otherwise I’ll be back for another—”
    “Won’t do,” he said and frowned, shoving his glasses up his nose with one bony finger. “I have shipments for Ytirus, Cygnus, and Kimmel taking up storage space. I’m paying for them to sit there and collect dust. And I’ll have another shipment ready in four days. You’ll have to take all of them.”
    “And what if I don’t?”
    “You can’t do that,” he said primly. “Guild rules.”
    “Hom Shoot, I haven’t signed anything. I can walk out without breaking any rules.”
    He blinked rapidly several times. He looked like a fish, one that wasn’t in water at the moment. He dove into a thick case he’d brought with him and pulled out a fistful of papers.
    “Sign here,” he said stabbing at the paper.
    I picked it up and started reading it.
    “You don’t need to do