Accepting the lance, p.19
Accepting the Lance, page 19
part #22 of Liaden Universe Series
“The most probable outcome is that TerraTrade will issue a Do Not Stop.”
“That’ll kill us,” said the portmaster quietly.
Kasveini shrugged.
“Even in the bad old days, we didn’t rate a DNS.”
Kasveini sighed.
“In the bad old days, an ongoing criminal enterprise had not demanded that TerraTrade certify their pirate holding as a legitimate port.”
Portmaster Liu took a deep, careful breath. “Is that TerraTrade’s official stance?”
“TerraTrade has no official position until the survey team concludes its study and files its report. The survey team has been diligent, and we have been objective, despite the presence of…opinions within our ranks. However”—she pointed at the paper spread atop the portmaster’s desk—“the survey team cannot ignore that.”
“Even if it’s a joke?”
“Do you have evidence that it is a joke? If so, we will include both data points in our report.”
Portmaster Liu shook her head.
“I don’t have evidence that it’s a joke. What I do have evidence of is that this planet is head and shoulders better now, after the event Boss Surebleak’s styling a hostile invasion, than it’s been—well, if the stories the streeters tell are even half true—ever in its history. The Gilmour Agency didn’t care about its employees under a certain pay grade. The reason there’s any Surebleak at all is that the Agency left nonessential personnel behind when it closed its operations here. Corporate culture being what was known, everybody who had any ambition shot for to be Boss, and being Boss meant you had everything you wanted, and if what you wanted belonged to somebody else, you took it.
“Conrad turned all that around. Not only made a council of equal bosses to level up the lives of regular citizens, but got in the road boss, to make sure that the Port Road stayed open, so material can get to the port for trade, and that the benefits of trade can get out to every territory along the road.”
She leaned over.
“We’re better now, invasion or no invasion. Boss Surebleak wants to go back in time, only he’s taking an ace from Conrad’s deck and playing like one o’ the Old Bosses. All the benefit will come to Boss Surebleak and those who can pay Boss Surebleak.”
Kasveini looked at her bleakly.
“Can you prove any of that?”
Portmaster Liu took a breath, blew it out, and said slowly, “No, I can’t…but I know who can.”
• • • ✴ • • •
There had been a modest group awaiting the arrival of the Road Boss this morning. The chosen topic of all had, indeed, been the newly arrived Emissary Twelve, and her intentions for Surebleak.
Val Con had stuck to the broad outlines of Miri’s speech, though he did think it prudent to drop in a hint that there might, in future, be a team of Clutch specialists on-world, pending the Clutch and the Council of Bosses coming to a mutually advantageous agreement. There was, he emphasized, no cause for concern in regard to Emissary Twelve in particular or the Clutch in general.
Which was, he reflected, very true. If the Clutch wished to dispose of Surebleak, they might do so with a thoughtfully crafted song, and no one of those living on-planet aware of their own demise.
“Are there any questions?” he asked, having come to the end of what he considered prudent to share.
A woman in a pink sweater with a raveling sleeve stood up.
“Boss, what’s gonna happen ’bout Boss Surebleak? You and Conrad gonna retire ’im?”
Yes, of course; he should have anticipated this. The succession of Bosses was a matter of great popular concern.
“The Council of Bosses is meeting this morning to discuss their answer to Boss Surebleak’s requirements. Boss Miri is attending that meeting while I am here to answer you.”
“We’re behind you, Boss,” said a man in a bulky grey jacket, the hood pushed back to show a beaked nose and a quantity of blond curls. “Boss Surebleak’s fulla sleet.”
“Who got the streets bust up yestiday?” demanded another man. “Man’s fulla something ’sides sleet, is what I’m thinking.”
“’Slong as he can pay for it, there’s them willing to take ’is money,” said the woman in the pink sweater. “Don’t mean he’s got real backing. I got Conrad’s back—” she looked up abruptly and gave Val Con a broad smile that exposed gaps in her teeth. “You, an’ Boss Miri, too, Boss. I ain’t forgetting what you done for us—just so far! Tollbooths gone—who’d even thought it could happen?”
“Thank you,” said Val Con holding his hands up, palms out. “I thank you for your support, but I must ask if there are any more questions about the Clutch?”
There were none.
“In that wise, I must ask you to leave. If you have other questions, I will be pleased to see you individually in my office, only let Nelirikk have your name. On the question of Boss Surebleak’s proposal—none of us can know anything until the Bosses have met and reasoned with each other.”
They gathered themselves up and left, good-naturedly enough, with another few assurances of personal support before the door shut behind the last one.
Val Con closed his eyes briefly.
“It is good to have allies,” Nelirikk commented. “Can they be depended upon, in battle?”
“That is an answer I hope never to learn,” Val Con said. “The city is not, after all, a battlefield, nor should it be. The Council of Bosses will need to craft a new answer to an old question.”
He sighed.
“I believe I shall have a cup of tea. Will you join me?”
“No tea for me,” said Nelirikk, who preferred water. “I am pleased that none of them stayed.”
“As I am,” Val Con said, turning to his door. “As I am.”
* * *
He drank his tea while he read the Road Boss’s scant correspondence. Having finished both, he considered calling Miri to learn the outcome of the Meeting of All Bosses, when he heard the bell on the portside door jangle.
He looked to the screen in time to see Survey Leader Kasveini step over the threshold.
His thought skipped to the bolt-hole, as Miri had it, the back door that opened onto a not especially fresh-smelling alley, which eventually wound its way to the back door of the Emerald, where one with the appropriate key or palm print might enter at will.
In the screen, Team Leader Kasveini gave her name to Nelirikk calmly, seeming very nearly a rational woman. Her shoulders were drooping somewhat and her TerraTrade survey jacket was rumpled. Val Con wondered if she were well.
“I would like to speak with Val Con yos’Phelium, on the business of his clan,” she said, very calmly indeed.
Nelirikk hesitated.
Val Con leaned over and touched the intercom’s switch.
“Please send Team Leader Kasveini in, Nelirikk,” he said.
It would be his very great pleasure to send her to Pat Rin, he thought, and so vivid was his anticipation that he was smiling when she entered his office and bowed.
“I ask,” she said, “to speak to the delm of Korval.”
Val Con exhaled.
“Do please let us not play at that again,” he said irritably. “It takes a quantity of energy to bear the delm and I do not feel at all strong this morning.”
She blinked and, to her credit, inclined her head. “As you wish.”
“Thank you. Will you take a seat? May I give you some tea?”
“No tea, thank you,” she said and slipped into the chair next to his desk.
“Very well. What may I do for you, Team Leader?”
She sighed. “You have seen today’s newspaper?”
“I have, yes.”
“I have been speaking with Portmaster Liu. She is of the strong opinion that, despite Boss Surebleak’s claims of a hostile takeover, conditions on this planet have improved considerably since Clan Korval has been resident. That is social and economic improvement, in the city and on the port.”
She paused.
He waited.
After a moment, she inclined her head.
“I asked if she could prove this, and she said that the delm of Korval had tasked one of his clan to collect any existing papers and correspondence from the Gilmour Agency, and also letters, from the time of the subsequent Boss culture. Portmaster Liu feels that these documents will prove Korval’s benign effect.”
Val Con frowned. “There is such a project ongoing. An archive is being built, but as you may know, the challenge in collecting old documents is not the collection, but the collation. The team has made the decision to create broad categories of topics, each topic occupying its own volume, as it were. The last index I saw was merely a list of documents deemed to belong under the topic of Gilmour Agency employment policies. There has been no attempt, not even a rudimentary attempt, at cross-referencing.”
“Yet documents dealing with the history of Surebleak and its people, life under the Gilmour Agency and under the Boss system—the Old Boss system, as Portmaster Liu has it—are in the possession of the archivists?”
“By no means all, but yes, documents detailing daily life, policy manuals and the like, are in the possession of the archive.”
“I would like to have copies of those documents, for inclusion in the survey team’s final report.”
Val Con frowned. “Why?”
“In order to demonstrate that the arrival of Clan Korval on this planet has been no disaster for the citizens of the world, nor is there evidence of criminal behavior, though there are—irregularities.”
“That is laudable,” Val Con said softly, “but—forgive me for speaking plainly. It had seemed to me that your purpose was to deny an upgrade to this port. One wonders at this new effort.”
“It was not the purpose of the survey to deny an upgrade,” she snapped. “The survey team is charged with identifying areas of potential danger for traders and impediments to trade. However, a new concern has arisen with the publication of Boss Surebleak’s assertions that Surebleak was the victim of a hostile invasion.
“If we find that to be true, TerraTrade may issue a DNS notice.”
Val Con froze.
Team Leader Kasveini nodded.
“I don’t want to be responsible for killing a world,” she said softly, “or for pushing a world into piracy in order to survive.”
“Thus the need for documents. I believe that I may be able to accommodate you. Will you wish to see the indexes and choose documents for yourself, or will you accept what an archivist chooses for you?”
“Is there someone…official on this project?”
“There are at least three Scout Archivists on the team.”
“It will serve my purpose well if one of the Scouts would choose representative documents, sign off on them, and hold herself available for follow-up questions from TerraTrade.”
“I believe that will be possible,” Val Con said. “Is there anything else I may do for you at this present?”
“No,” she said, rising slowly. “I think that will prevent—the worst case scenario.”
“Very well.”
He touched the intercom switch.
“Nelirikk, Team Leader Kasveini is leaving now. Team Leader—”
She turned.
“Yes?”
“Thank you for your care.”
Jelaza Kazone
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Pat Rin dismissed the meeting and the screen went dark.
Miri closed her eyes and sagged in the chair, concentrating on breathing. After six breaths, she felt something drop into her lap and raised her eyelids halfway. Fondi was turning in a careful circle—once, twice—then settled down, back against her belly, chin on paws.
Miri sighed, put a hand on that furry warmth, felt the beginning of a purr, deep down, and closed her eyes again.
So…Boss Surebleak. Two would get you ten that Boss Surebleak wasn’t anywhere near local. The set-up—it was too complex; there were too many threads. Your average ’bleaker: they weren’t happy with Boss Conrad or the Road Boss, they’d set it up to throw a couple retirement parties. Nice, linear, almost…well, childlike, she thought, half-smiling as she remembered Lizzie’s single-minded pursuit of anything she happened to want right now.
This thing here though…
She opened her eyes and tapped up Boss Surebleak’s demand letter.
Right.
Retire Conrad and the Road Boss. That was your ’bleaker beginning and ending, right there. But Boss Surebleak moved on from there, knife out: Strip the retired Bosses’ kin of all their property and cash, and throw ’em off-world.
Well, that wasn’t Surebleak thinking at all. What ’bleaker cared about somebody else’s kin? Sure, the retired Boss might’ve had a sister, but until she moved to make trouble for the new Boss, she wasn’t worth a pellet.
Liadens, though. Liadens cared about kin. Liadens ate, drank, slept, and breathed kin. Liadens stood together in clans; a sizable portion of their own personal melant’i was tied up in the honor of their clan and their kin.
Retiring annoying people—in a way, that was Just Business, not exactly like it was with ’bleakers, but close enough to look the same from a distance.
Busting open the clan and scattering the surviving kin, broke, their melant’i irreparably tarnished—that was straight-up Liaden Balance.
She paused, thinking it over. Balance was another thing Liadens set store by. The idea was that, left to itself, the universe was perfectly balanced. Human beings, with their pesky tendency to action and their love of change, kept the universe in a constant state of flux. It was held to be the duty of honorable persons to be balanced in their dealings. If you did somebody a wrong turn, you were morally bound to balance it out with a good turn.
Boss Surebleak’s business proposition, now, it was—it was dressed up like Balance, but at core it wasn’t more’n plain and fancy revenge.
…which fit right in with the Department of the Interior’s policy manual. Miri sighed. The DOI might’ve started out being an ultra-secret group to ensure that Liad and Liadens were always at the top of the heap, but they’d strayed off that path long ago and into the bog of ensuring that the Department of the Interior was the greatest power in the universe with a clandestine army of enforcers, the elite members—like Val Con’d been—brainwashed to carry out the Department’s goals without question or complaint.
The Department’s goals having lately shrunk to the annihilation of Clan Korval, the various deaths of prominent clan members was an understandable goal.
The ruination of Surebleak, though—that didn’t fit their mandate.
Or did it?
“They don’t need TerraTrade to certify the port here,” she said to Fondi, or to the empty air. “They take over, use known methods to recruit the population, and they’ve got a new base, and a new mission.”
Without Korval—with its resources, its uncanny allies and its unsettling relationship with luck—to stand against them.
A vision rose before her inner eye: fire; a tower of orange and blue flame roaring into the nighttime sky. The Tree—burning.
Smoke stung her eyes and she coughed, gasping for air…
In her mind’s eye, pods began to fall—to explode—from the burning Tree, and wherever they struck, green shoots burst forth.
“Not optimum,” she rasped, and took a deep breath as a cool, sweet breeze eddied around her.
“Not optimum,” she repeated, and had the sense that the Tree agreed with her, even as the vision left her, with a last flash of what might have been black wings against a soot-dark sky.
“Miri,” Jeeves said from near the ceiling. “Emissary Twelve wonders if you might come to the east patio. She has several topics to discuss with you.”
She took another breath of cool air and opened her eyes. Fondi was still curled on her lap, but his head was up, ears pricked and alert.
“I saw it, too, kid,” she said. “We’re gonna do our best not to let it get that way.”
Carefully, she urged the cat from her lap to the desktop and stood. Her muscles were quivering like she’d just done a hard march, which was—well, how did she know how much energy visions used?
“Jeeves, please tell Emissary Twelve that I’m on my way to see her. I apologize for the delay.”
“She can scarcely notice so small a delay,” Jeeves said. “But I will tell her that you will be with her very soon.”
* * *
The outside day was cloudy, and not exactly warm. Miri had stopped in the hall to snatch a jacket off a peg before she stepped through the tall window and onto the patio.
Emissary Twelve was sitting on the stone ledge that bordered the stone-floored space, and she was wearing a…garment.
It was, thought Miri, stopping short and considering it, more like a tent than any real garment, cut out right off the bolt of all-weather cloth down in the basement. It enveloped the Clutch Turtle from shoulder to foot, and there was, she saw as she came closer, a hood, presently folded back.
Val Con had told her that the House would be providing their visitor with a custom garment to keep out the cold, but she’d only managed to imagine something sort of jacketlike, built out, maybe, to accommodate the shell. This…
Well, who but Jeeves, who had apparently volunteered to design and create the thing, could have imagined this?
“Good morning,” she said in Liaden, moving to Emissary Twelve’s side. “I hope your cloak is adequate to your needs.”
“It serves my needs admirably,” the Clutch said, turning luminous eyes on her. “It is, you understand, the prototype, but I am encouraged that it will be possible, once we have studied its performance at length, to be usefully adapted for the technicians. I feel, for instance, that it might be less voluminous, as the technicians will be required in the course of their duties to enter smaller rooms and corridors.
“But that is for later. For today, I will be removing to the base given for my use on the land of Yulie Shaper. I have requests to make of you before I go.”
Miri blinked. Emissary Twelve was much hastier even than Edger, who was counted downright speedy by most Clutch. And she was growing hastier still, as if she were taking on the mode of madcap humans. Miri hoped she didn’t hurt herself, remembering that she and Val Con had pushed so many exertions onto Edger that he had grown his next shell years before it was time.
