The man stepped through the airlock doors and strode across the arrivals lounge. Tall, dark, and handsome, with a body like a Greek god barely contained within a immaculate, crisp suit. This drew a raised eyebrow from you; this man looked more preened than the women, and half of them had been fashion models back on Earth. Scowling, he tapped away at a leather-bound computer pad, upon which you spied graphs, stocks, shares, spreadsheets, tallies of credits gained and credits lost...
No, no, no. This would not do. If there was one thing your employer hated the presence of on his planet more than men, it was spreadsheets. Maxwell came here to relax, and the mere sight of a graph would drive him into a fury.
With a command into your own computer pad, the gravity generators directly beneath the man's feet shut off, surrounding him in a bubble of negligible gravity. His purposeful, powerful stride propelled him into the air; the generators tracked him as his momentum carried him, tumbling, across the space dock lounge.
"What the hell is going on he- OW!" he roared, rebounding off the far wall. "Who is doing this? I am Daniel Stern, and nobody treats this way. Get me down!"
You took your time, allowing him to drift a little closer before standing. Noticing you, he squirmed like a fish dangling from a line, trying to twist himself in the air to fix you with his piercing eyes. "Who the hell are you!"
"Mister Powell's transitionary and assistant. And you must be a Daniel Stern, son of interstellar shipping magnate Alexander Stern."
"That's right, you recognize me," Daniel sneered, voicing it as a threat. "Now. Get. Me. Down. I have a very important business meeting scheduled with your boss."
With a few taps of your finger onto the pad, you loaded up Mr Powell's schedule for the day. "The only meeting booked in for Mister Powell is with the Tigrean beach volleyball team. It would appear you're on the wrong shuttle craft. This is Rila Prime. It is a pleasure planet. There are no meetings here. There is no business here. There are no men here. These rules are made perfectly clear to anyone attempting to travel here." But then you doubted that the Stern's were that big on rules; judging by their business practices, they certainly didn't have a care for laws. The Sterns effectively ruled the major trading lanes, their freighters traveling unchallenged while their rivals suffered attack after attack from suspiciously coordinated, well-funded pirates.
Daniel hit you with the look of a sullen child that on his home planet would have sent men running. "This is what is going to happen. You're going to get me on that planet. Then you're going to get me a meeting with Maxwell, and you are going to do it right now."
You suspect he might have stamped his foot had the floor not been several feet below him. The Daniels were young, augmented clones of their father that been decanted only four years prior and, though they held in their heads the memories, sharp business acumen, and ruthless cunning of Alexander Stern, they were still very much like petulant infants. You glanced over at your bag of transitioning equipment tucked beneath the lounge seat, thinking of all the fun devices inside that you'd not had the opportunity to use yet. You could get him to the planet, as he requested, and you could even do it without breaking Maxwell's rules. You smile.
"Very well, Mister Stern," you say, reaching up to shake his hand. "We have a deal."
No men, the rules clearly stated. But they didn't say anything about...
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