All the usual. Not mine, no money, no harm, no foul.

****

Henry Exline was minding his own business, harvesting his beans, when he heard the engine. He straightened and looked for the sound. Not a sound he heard very often, maybe once a year when the supply ship came around. He listened carefully and noted the direction the sound was coming from. Then he saw it, a little shuttle, that’s all it was, and that meant there was a bigger ship somewhere reasonably close. Not having anything close was why Exline lived on this nearly-empty moon, and he didn’t really like the idea that there was somebody there he didn’t know about.

He stood considering for several minutes before turning towards the tiny house. He went in, picked up a pack and started packing. In five minutes he was ready to go. He put on his old brown coat, walked out the door and started at a good pace in the direction the shuttle had come from.

***

Atherton Wing walked into the seedy bar down near the Eavesdown docks. It was not his regular watering hole but it was a good place for the business at hand. He nodded to the barkeep and stepped through the door at the back of the bar and into a small, smoky, not-very-clean room.

“Everything go as planned, Bothney?”

“Yessir. The boy got on the boat, the boat left and now we just wait. It’ll take them about two weeks or so to make it out to Halcion, cause them cargo boats don’t move so fast, and we’ll be waiting for ‘em when they get there.” The speaker was a non-descript man in his late twenties.

“How soon before they start getting sick?” Wing knew what he had been told, but he wanted to hear Bothney’s version.

“The fella said they’d start getting sick in a week or so, coughing, you know, mebbe the runs on account of the water, if the boy got the stuff into the water. He might not have been able to find the central water valve, but that wasn’t really important anyway. He’ll have been able to find the ductwork, no problem. A week, they start getting sick and by the time they h