"Well, pickings have been pretty slim, lately," Potter continued. Which was something of an understatement. There'd been a lucky run of High Desirability planets discovered and placed on the A list in the last few years, and Survey Teams were assigned by seniority. The Explorers had been getting rich on discovery bonuses, the senior Survey Teams had been getting richer on all the "Priority:Rush/Habitation Study" orders, and the Companies had been getting richer still on their increased stock values for acquisition of high investment value worlds.

The only people who hadn't been getting rich were, as usual, the commander and crew of the Fast Eddie.

The Edward V was her name on the roster, but her first master had been a Canuck drunkard who insisted on calling her Edouard Vee; somebody heard the "vee" in a Montreal accent, thought it was "vite," which meant "quickly" in French, the joke made the rounds and the name had stuck like a leftover curse, far outlasting the short and undistinguished career of the ship's first, now dead, master.

Fast Eddie had a crew of eight: The master, Thomas Farrow, the flight crew, consisting of Captain Potter, First Officer Connolly, and Navigator Owens, Chief Engineer William Liu and a black gang comprised of two engineers of indiscriminate but more or less Latin ancestry named Icaorius and Mi'huelo Costanza. Icaorius and Mi'huelo being something of a mouthful, they were instead known variously as "Ike and Mike," "the Cisco Kids," or more commonly, "those Christless Spaniards." They might actually have been Spaniards for all that the officers could decipher of their bizarre dialect, but in fact, they were Basques, and every reference to them as Spaniards by the rest of the crew was followed by mysterious failures in cabin humidity, air conditioning, and most frequently, the mean temperature of shower water. Consequently or not, as time passed there were fewer and fewer such references.