Free Star Wars - Kenobi by John Jackson Miller Page B

like he worked for a living.
    Well, that was fine. He could play that game.
    Gloamer’s lead assistant skittered past, carrying part of a metal airfoil. Something called a Vuvrian, the assistant was easily the most macabre thing in the garage, to Orrin’s thinking. Bipedal, but with an insect’s head—and apparently a talent for thruster control systems. Orrin didn’t have a problem with nonhumans; compared with his parochial grandfather, his opinions were cosmopolitan. Any being willing to put its back into hard work was fine with him. Diligence knew no species. And neither did sloth: there were more than enough human bums around the Anchorhead cantina to give his own kind a bad name.
    But Pappy Gault had been right on one thing. Business success was about taking the other’s measure. Between any two people, a point existed where what one wanted intersected with what the other had. That point was price, and to get the best possible one, high or low, you had to see things the other person’s way. But who knew what a Vuvrian or a Bith was really thinking?
    You can’t look a fellow in the eye when he’s all eye .
    Orrin had left Tatooine once, as a teenager. His grandfather had dispatched the hands to Rodia, to fetch a vaporator; even a secondhand device from one of the more technologically advanced planets was far better than anything most Tatooine farmers had in their fields. Left at home, Dannar had joked that Orrin would never be heard from again, once he’d seen the stars.
    But if anything, Orrin’s brief sojourn told him Tatooine was the real home of opportunity. The galaxy was full of hustlers, all scratching for a credit—and Rodia, a humid place where people clustered under domes, jammed them together in one place like the jar he used to trap sandflies in. Keep ’em in there long enough, and they’d eat one another. No, Tatooine was much better. Mos Eisley might seem like a menagerie, but you could at least drive away. Tatooine had land—and Orrin had his share.
    Thanking Gloamer, he walked along the bays and looked back at his repulsortrucks in the garage. Too many were in the shop, as usual: three more, this morning. It was due not to any fault in Gloamer’s work, but to the boneheads that operated them. Orrin’s ostensible reason for going into the fields each day was to fine-tune the vaporators for better performance. But in fact, most of that time was spent checking up on his remote teams, who confounded him daily by inventing new ways to damage his machinery, his vehicles, or themselves. They were far behind on getting the fields ready for the harvest, and expenses had soared.
    He’d hoped the next generation would take some pressure off him. But Mullen and Veeka had both somehow managed to reach their twenties without really growing up. Mullen’s talent seemed to be ticking people off, not leading them—and Veeka was … well, Veeka. Jabe Calwell, though, had some of his late father’s industry about him. Orrin saw him playing a big role in things, if his mother would let him. But Orrin would have to wear down Annileen first. Can’t have a foreman whose mama won’t let him work.
    Things had been quiet on the Tusken front in the days since the Bezzard incident; it would be a while before Plug-eye would get up the nerve, or the warriors, to try another dawn raid. But hostilities were still continuing between mother and son, Orrin heard, as he opened the door onto the sales floor of the Claim.
    “It’s not fair, Mom!” The voice was male, young, newly deep, and indignant. “It’s not fair and you know it!”
    “Fair?” Annileen replied. “What’s fair got to do with the price of water?”
    Jabe was on his knees and surrounded by multi-kilo pouches, a puzzle that in no way seemed likely to fit together on the shelves. He was not happy to be there. “Why don’t you get Kallie to do this?”
    Annileen looked sternly down the aisle from her counter. “Kallie has her own job, and you