As soon as Has'la sat down he could tell T'Lora was drunk.  It didn't matter, though.  She might have a bit of a hangover in the morning, but for the night there wasn't any reason not to drink once they were ready.

[b]"Take yur pick. Any o' these mules'll do."[/b]

"For hauling the stuff, sure, but none of them look like the type to brave an automated security system, especially when they find out how small of a percentage they'll get for their troubles.  Hopefully someone better will show up so that we don't have to hire one of them."

The waitress, the Bartender's granddaughter he assumed, brought his food over.  He had decided to have a decent meal for a change and had ordered the vegetable "beef" stew, some boiled peanuts (for extra protein, as he hadn't had much recently) and a bottle of soda.  He ordered a bottle of Jack when she brought his food, then started to eat.  Surprisingly, while the meat was likely dog or some wild mammal in the area, it contained real beef stock.  Animal products, at least the farmed kind, were expensive and hard to come by.  They had likely bought theirs from the farms near Dallas and had it shipped in.  Pretty expensive, but then it was for their higher-end food, so the customers were willing to pay.

Just as the waitress was leaving a man with a cybernetic eye walked up.  [b]"Hey there! You the guy looking for high-cap power cells?"[/b]

"Depends on how much you're charging." he said.  If they were new, they could go for as much as thirty Valn each.  Good rebuilds would still go for fifteen or twenty Valn each.  He looked at one and was surprised.  Most of the "high grades" you came across were actually mid-grades, low-grades that were refilled with high-grade fluid.  These were actual rebuilt high-grades, though. Which was a bit suspicious.  The only reliable sources of high-grades were factories, none of which rebuilt them, and Raiders, who kept large numbers around for their weapons.  "Nice cells," he said, "but I'm curious where they came from."  The man didn't look like an anti-raider, and raiders had been known to send their more recent members into towns to resell stuff they'd taken from their raids.  If a group was getting desperate, they might even try to sell surplus power cells.

The cells might also be stolen from a shop in the area, most likely Houston.  That would be almost as bad, though if he found out who they were stolen from he might arrange to return them for some sort of reward, maybe even a free cell or two.