Riches Like Dust
by Scot Noel

 Her ship might as well be scrap now, an empty, airless hulk picked to the bone by her competitors, for, soon and certainly, it would no longer be hers.   If only she had help.  She had stretched herself too thin this time, perhaps into bankruptcy.

“Would Madam like her coffee warmed?” a voice asked from the darkness behind her.
 
“Yes, Bryce, please.”  Without breaking the quiet mood in the lab, a robot moved forward, the silver carafe in its hand reflecting computer displays as it poured and then backed away.  Robot Bryce had been with Syreeta the longest, one of three “skeletals” aboard ship, and, like the ship itself, an inheritance from Syreeta’s mother.
 
“Madam appears disturbed,” Bryce said.  “Will there by anything further?”
 
“Yes, Bryce.  The trade value of ten point six metric tons of Galidnium, one skeletal, one inoperative lander, and one slightly damaged tractor?” Syreeta asked.
 
Without so much as a heartbeat between her question an his first syllable, Bryce replied: “Five thousand adjusted dollars, Madam.  Why do you ask?”
 
“Because, my dear Bryce, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place.  I’m going to have to sell off some things to keep from going bankrupt.  Robot Hooke comes first to mind.”
 
“Plus one lander and one tractor,” Bryce said.  If he had emotions, his voice did not betray them.  “Where, however, does Madam plan on finding ten point six metric tones of Galidnium?”
 
“We’re sitting on top of it,” Syreeta answered.  “Ship’s computer made a mistake.  There’s no alien wreck here for us to salvage, just an old probe, or a satellite maybe.  Whatever it is, it’s been down here less than a week.  Probably spiraled in after being trapped in orbit.”  She sighed a deep sigh and hoped it was not wasted on the machine behind her.  If only her mother were still alive…  “You have to have some intuition when you look at these readings.  You can’t just match salvage profiles, no matter how good…”
 
Syreeta let her words trail off.  There was no use being angry at machines for being machines.  She needed decision makers, intuitors, people with good common sense.  She couldn’t do it all.  Unfortunately, people and Syreeta did not mix.
 
Something had been bothering her, a minor annoyance, a whisper of sound, a flash of static on the screens.  Nothing her sleep-starved thoughts had been able to put the whole of together until now. 
 
“If I may be so bold,” Bryce started to say.
 
“Shut up,” Syreeta ordered.  “What the hell is that noise?”
 
“Sandstorm,” Madam, Bryce replied.
 
“Sandstorm!”  Syreeta said.  She glanced to her screens.  “With my antennas and lenses still recording?”  She was up and past Bryce in a flash, finding her way through the darkness almost as well as he.  “I’ll feed Hooke to the metal mites,” were the last words Bryce heard as Syreeta’s footsteps pounded off toward the bridge.
 
At forty three, Syreeta’s speed from the lab to the bridge had decreased only slightly since her schooling days.  In that long gone time she had raced from the mastery of her lessons to the bridge, eager for that applause best bestowed by approving parents.  Yet a measure of disappointment often tainted that joy, approval not so easy a thing wrest from her father’s grasp.
 
“Ah well,” Syreeta thought as she rounded the corner onto the bridge, “now I count the pennies and keep the ship alive.”
 
Before her in low light, a deck of consoles and screens led to a pair of seated figures, the command robots Hooke and Dawkins.  Like Bryce, they took on human form, but thin and skeletal, their black metal skins a characteristic of servants all over Manned space.  Unlike Bryce, who wore a scribe’s white cloak, these two sat dressed in costumes of Syreeta’s own fancy: red coats and white belts as seen in the Imperial British Army, circa 1880.  Two white helmets lay polished at their feet.
 
“Admit it, Hooke,” Syreeta said at the top of her best blustering voice, “you’ve been programmed by one of my competitors to ruin me!”  At the sound of her voice, Robot Hooke spun around from the command station, his helmet sent flying by an unintended kick.  “The sensors, Hooke, the antennas!  They’re out there in a raging gale of sand.”
 
“Well within specifications, Madam,” Hooke said instantly.  There might almost have been a touch of indignation in his ancient, well-crafted English.  “We have wind at no more than force two, particle density at—“
 
“Look at this!” Syreeta stabbed an angry finger at two gauges.  “You’re cutting their useful life in half, letting them out there like that.  I know they can survive it, man; that’s not the point.  Do you know how much it costs to recoat those lenses?”
 
In the silence that followed, Robot Dawkins ventured a reply. “Madam had impressed upon us the need for urgency.”
 
“Fifty two point nine adjusted dollars,” Hooke said, finally.
 
“Read my lips, Hooke,” Syreeta said.  Then slowly, “Rotate the lenses into shield position and bring those antennas down!”  With an angry swirl, she turned to stomp off the deck, but within a stride the futility of it hit her.
 
“I’m replacing you all with one of those new poly-droids next trip,” she said without turning.  As she left the bridge a small red light alerted her to another listener.  “That goes for you too, computer.”
 
Syreeta reached her bed and fell into it fully clothed.  She was asleep in seconds, the winds of a nameless world continuing to pound her ship with sand.

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