Free Ep.#1 - "Escalation" (The Frontiers Saga: Rogue Castes) by Ryk Brown Page B

owner, not a salesman,” Captain Tuplo said, exiting the cockpit. He descended the few steps from the cockpit to the main deck, just as Neli was coming out of the galley. “I’ll be at the cargo master’s office if anyone needs me.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Josh will help you turn the cabin around before the next boarding. I want to get underway as soon as possible,” he added as he opened the main boarding hatch. “This damn port charges by the hour.”
    “I’ll get everyone on board and ready to go as quick as I can, Cap’n,” Neli assured him.
    “And do me a favor, Neli,” the captain added as he deployed the boarding gangway. “Make sure Marcus doesn’t block access to the engineering crawl spaces. I know he’s just doing it to piss off Dalen.”
    “I’ll make sure,” Neli promised.
    Captain Tuplo stepped out of the hatch and made his way down the gangway to the tarmac. The skies were clear, and it was mid morning at the Ladila spaceport. As usual, the port was bustling with activity. Unlike Palee’s spaceport, this one was the definition of efficiency, with flights arriving and departing every few minutes. Ladila had always been a popular world, with temperate climates throughout most of the planet, and very stable and predictable weather patterns. The Paradar system was further away from the Pentaurus cluster compared to others; hence its slow development. However, since the proliferation of jump technology, many had migrated to work in the numerous resorts that had sprouted up all over the planet, and Ladila had become one of the more popular vacation destinations in the Pentaurus sector.
    Unfortunately, the owners of her spaceport were well aware of that fact, and charged more for landing at their facility than nearly anywhere else in the sector. Ship captains had little recourse, since a run to the Paradar system always meant a full load of passengers, each willing to pay a premium for the convenience of jumping to paradise in an instant. There were even plans to set up a dedicated jump shuttle service between some of the primary Pentaurus worlds and Ladila, providing hourly flights, thus allowing people within the Pentaurus cluster to simply jump over for dinner and a show, rather than booking an entire vacation.
    Of course, such a contract would not go to the likes of Connor Tuplo and the Seiiki. Those services would require dedicated passenger jump shuttles, designed for that one task. But that was fine with Captain Tuplo, as the idea of constantly jumping back and forth between the same two destinations, day in and day out, did not appeal to him. He preferred being in control of his destiny. He liked being able to pick and chose his runs as he saw fit. His dream was to someday take his ship further out into the galaxy, and provide his services to worlds that had not yet been connected by jump-capable ships. Perhaps find a group of heavily populated worlds that were just far enough apart to make interstellar commerce logistically difficult, yet still within his single jump range. He had heard rumors that there were likely hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of human-inhabited worlds out there. Considering there were at least a dozen such worlds in the Pentaurus sector alone, and they had all stemmed from a single, colonization mission that had left Earth nearly a millennium ago, it was a believable scenario indeed.
    The Ladila spaceport was a series of rings, all of which were connected to a central terminal. Each ring had its own cargo master, and each cargo master was linked to one another. It was not uncommon for ship captains to book more cargo than they could safely carry, just in case. They all operated with very slim profit margins, and no one ever wanted to lift off even a single kilogram under their gross takeoff weight. It was a game the cargo masters knew well, and they played it to their own advantage whenever possible. Captain Tuplo had gotten into the habit of understating his gross