K'pok, having spent almost all of her available currency on repairs to her primary fusion plant, was able to stretch her remaining resources by living on her ship. Although the auxiliary power plant was inadequate for hyperspace travel, the ship was otherwise operational and more or less spaceworthy; the reactionless drives having been unaffected by the collision. All that now remained was to obtain sufficient deuterium to refuel the primary power plant, and for that she needed money — about 12,000 credits.
The other three got themselves settled at the Grand Regent hotel in Cordwainer City — an impressive name for a fairly mediocre hotel, but at least it provided the neccessities of life. The datanet terminal immediately came in for heavy use, as each of the three set about job-hunting in an effort to raise enough money to get off this frozen godforsaken rock.
Prominent in the news feeds was a tense situation arising from a dispute between an off-world mining company, Panderjack Industries, and a consortium of native Cordwainer miners. The trouble revolved around mining rights for deposits of the mineral plauttite, a rare earth used extensively in the Terran cosmetics industry to counteract the carcinogenic effects of a wide range of many of the Empire's most popular beauty treatments. Plauttite is primarily mined in an area of geological excrescences, about 250km from Cordwainer City, called the Brainlands for the supposed resemblance of the formations to the creased folds of brains.
According to the native miners, the dastardly Terran interloper Panderjack had snuck in and by devious lawyers tricks stolen away their rights to their deposits from under their very noses, ruining their livelihoods and destroying their very way of life at a single stroke. Needless to say, Panderjack's version of the situation was quite different; his position was that the mining claims were unassigned and they bought them both legally and fairly. Veejay Panderjack, the owner and operator of Panderjack Industries, stated publicly that he was more than willing to give native miners reasonable precedence for employment in his plauttite extraction operations; the representatives of the miners accused him in reply of trying to reduce them from proud independence to menial servitude, and accused him further of trying to soften them up for annexation by the Terran Empire. Panderjack's reply was intemperate (and heavily censored by the local news media), and the matter continued to escalate with bad feeling on both sides, culminating in an attack on a Panderjack mining crew by a group of native hotheads in which they took 22 office staff and miners hostage. The extremists demanded that Panderjack allow the native miners to continue as they have traditionally done, and to buy their ore at rates to be set by the Plauttite Miners Syndicate, or else risk some unspecified and unpleasant fate for the unfortunate hostages.
There was considerable grass-roots sympathy in Cordwainer City for the case of the miners, though almost everybody agreed that taking people hostage and no doubt jostling them unpleasantly was impolite to say the least, and that no good could come of such rash and aggressive actions. Regardless of their sympathies for the native miners, almost everybody also agreed that Veejay Panderjack was within his rights, and that his claims were legally valid, and even that he'd been fairly reasonable (for a wosker). There was much collective tut-tutting and shaking of heads, and the general opinion expressed was that there would be tears before bedtime.
The news that a famous Vulcan mediator had landed and was at hand came as an enormous relief to the embattled Panderjack; well recognizing his limitations when it came to temperate negotiations with the suspicious natives, he leaped at the chance to hire a professional to do the job for him. He immediately invited K'pol to visit him at his office. K'pol, as it happened, was not available, being dead, but K'pok kept the appointment and though she made it clear to Mr Panderjack that she was not qualified for the task as her mother had been, in Veejay's eyes a Vulcan was a Vulcan, and any Vulcan was better than none. A deal was struck between them; K'pok to mediate the dispute to the best of her ability, and Panderjack to finance the refueling of her newly-repaired fusion plant.
Not being one to leave anything to chance, Panderjack also made inquiries after hiring a group of quite a different sort of "mediators", just in case the Vulcan variety failed to get his people released.
Our other heroes saw in the discreet advertisement an opportunity to make enough money to get off Cordwainer and back into Imperial space, and answered the call along with a varied group of local roughnecks and troublemakers. For some reason known only to himself, Kappo decided to adopt the persona of a retired lawman called Jack Alexander (why? It probably seemed like a good idea at the time). After a reasonably thorough series of tests and interviews, they were chosen as the three candidates for the job who were least likely to leave a trail of corpses behind them, if worst came to worst and the hostages had to be rescued. Panderjack offered them 1,000 credits a day and made it very clear to them that although he wanted his own people released safe and sound, he was equally concerned that casualties among the native miners be kept to an absolute minimum — preferably zero. To sweeten the deal, he offered a 12,000 credit bonus if the job could be done without anyone being killed.
K'pok, Kappo (Jack), Weptish and Jek finally met, and together they went on board K'pok's ship to make their plans for the release, and if need be rescue, of the hostages.
