Pierre D’Argent
“I’M GETTING ENOUGH MATERIAL FOR A FOLLOW-ON SERIES,” Jade said to Jim Gradowsky’s image on the wall screen of her compartment. She wasn’t actually having a dialog with her boss; the distance between Selene and the torch ship Hermes made that impossible. Instead she was giving Jumbo Jim a report on what she had come up with since the Sam Gunn bio had been aired.
Spence Johansen sat on the king-sized bed, studiously reading a manual on Hermes’s fusion propulsion system. A former astronaut, Spence had buddied up with several of the ship’s officers and was learning all he could about the massive torch ship.
Jade was telling Gradowsky about her newfound friendship with Jill Meyers when she noticed the yellow light at the bottom of the wall screen blinking. She cut her report short and called out to the screen, “Show incoming message, please.”
To her surprise, Jumbo Jim’s face filled the screen, grinning lopsidedly. “Hi, Jade. Hope everything’s okay with you on your honeymoon trip.” Before Jade could reply that she was working (not that Gradowsky would have received her reply for an hour or more), Jumbo Jim added, “Hey, Monica sends love and kisses. Says she misses you.”
Jade realized that Gradowsky didn’t send a call across the solar system just for social chitchat.
Sure enough, her boss’s face grew serious. “Uh, Jade, you know that Rockledge’s lawyers have been threatening to sue us for libel or something, ‘cause of the series. Well, Raki got our own lawyers to threaten ‘em right back, infringing freedom of the press or something like that.
“So yesterday we get a long message from Pierre D’Argent, you know, Rockledge Industries’s CEO. He’s waving an olive branch. Says he’ll drop the suit if we’ll run his story in a follow-on series. Says he can show the world what a rotten no-good crook Sam was.”
Jade felt her cheeks flaming with anger.
“Well, anyway, here’s D’Argent’s story. I’ve listened to it and it’s damned interesting, even if he hates Sam’s guts. I think we could go with it. And it would make the lawyers on both sides very happy.
“Lemme know what you think.”
Controlling her anger, Jade glanced at Spence, his nose still buried in the propulsion manual. She leaned back in the compartment’s padded little desk chair and waited for D’Argent’s story to begin.