“You sold them?”

“That’s what I do.”

“And gave her her share of the proceeds?”

“Yes.”

“How much did it come to?”

He spoke to the computer again, and pointed at the displayed figure. “Total, nine million solars.”

I frowned. “NewYou charges 7.5 million for their basic service. There can’t have been enough cash left over after she transferred to be worth killing her for, unless…” I peered at the images of the fossils she’d brought in, but I was hardly a great judge of quality. “You said two of the specimens were really nice.” ‘Nice’ was Gargantuan’s favorite adjective; he’d apparently never taken a creative-writing course.

He nodded.

“How nice?”

He laughed, getting my point at once. “You think she’d found the alpha?”

I lifted my shoulders a bit. “Why not? If she knew where it was, that’d be worth killing her for.”

The alpha deposit was where Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly—the two private explorers who first found fossils on Mars—had collected their original specimens. That discovery had brought all the other fortune-seekers from Earth. Weingarten and O’Reilly had died twenty mears ago—their heat shield had torn off while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere after their third trip here—and the location of the alpha died with them. All anyone knew was that it was somewhere here in the Isidis Planitia basin; whoever found it would be rich beyond even Gargantuan Gargalian’s dreams.

“I told you, one of the specimens was junk,” said Ernie. “No way it came from the alpha. The rocks of the alpha are extremely fine-grained—the preservation quality is as good as that from Earth’s Burgess Shale.”

“And the other two?” I said.

He frowned, then replied almost grudgingly, “They were good.”

“Alpha good?”

His eyes narrowed. “Maybe.”

“She could have thrown in the junk piece just to disguise where the others had come from,” I said.