Trade Secret (eARC) (5 page)

But that ship style was not
this
ship's style. Not
his
ship style. He was among Liadens who frankly expected all to go well and frankly expected to be comfortable in ways his ship family could have barely imagined. This ship's lead cooks were chefs, and there were three of them. The ship's protocol master was an attorney as near as Jethri could tell--not Paitor with a half-out-of-date manual!--and he, he--he was no longer just a crew member. He was, by necessity, not just acting like a trader, he
was
a trader. He was not just
acting like
a member of Clan Ixin, he was the son of Ixin's Master Trader.

It was not quite like being a captain, but it was
quite
like having a say and exerting himself and--and it meant hosting Festival parties. Whatever that meant . . .

And that meant he had to learn more, quickly. And put himself forward, soon.

He stretched his way from the table, and glanced toward the food display. Leftovers were rare on the
Market
, but here, if they weren't used, they would likely just get recycled . . .

Well, duty called. Study called. He'd promised Norn ven'Deelin that he would do his best to be a proper son to the house, that he had.

The single dish of
chernubia
remaining he took away with him to study with, and a cup of tea, wondering the while if he had left a dish or two sitting lonely after all.

Clan Ixin's Tradeship
Elthoria
, in Jump

Born and raised on a spaceship, rarely did the feeling of being pent up fall so heavily upon Jethri as it did now. He strode to his small suite,
chernubia
in hand, his mind full of the promising and confusing vision offered by Gaenor, and perhaps by proxy, by Vil Tor.

It wasn't certainly, that he was
against
the idea of such a personal time with them--either or both--other than the idea that they might not understand exactly what it was they were getting into. Yet he urgently wanted not to disappoint them--either or both--for aside the passing attention he'd been able to pay to Freza DeNobli back on, umm, on . . . not Vincza, but the other one in that system--must have been Chustling--he hadn't had that much experience. There'd been some casual bundling he'd been part of back in that year or so he'd been seen to be closing in on adult size, but that had been pretty tentative all around.

And Freza, on Chustling! By then he'd been dreaming pretty often about her, because they'd been on parallel course there for a while, the
Market
and
Balrog,
and they'd been pretty comfortable with each other, comfortable enough to talk as well as touch. That's where he was still frustrated because not only had they
liked
each other, but they'd agreed that it would be a good time to wander off together while the older folks were drinking and doing their shivaree setups and they'd be able to be out of the wild rudeness some of the older folks clamored for and just have their own time, figuring it
was
time.

Shaking his head, he remembered Dyk rounding the corner where they were standing nose to nose, holding hands, and Dyk saying, "You have to be quicker to disappear than that, Jeth! Captain said if I didn't find you for hatch duty, why, I'd be doing it myself by shift-start. I can see it ain't convenient, maybe, but I found you. Best meet me at the dock for turnover in seven minutes. Seeli's already been calling for her get-out-now."

And Freza had made sounds something very like, "Mud and stinks," and not too quietly, either, before she said, "Six minutes!" and kissed him, hard, like they'd both been thinking about, too, while Dyk ducked his head and said, "Hi, there, Miz Freza . . . sorry!"

Seeli'd seen him come in all grunch-faced, said, "Some ports are like that!" and left him to stare at the boarding screens, Dyk not having bothered to even step aboard.

Freza . . . They hadn't matched shifts again, and ship-to-ship wasn't hardly the same, even when they could at least smile at each other. Not nearly the same when it could be four years before they were on the same route again. Then, of course, he'd shipped with
Elthoria
and it was likely Mac Gold or one of his brothers was all she'd been left with the next portside, and hollow comfort that was!

He sighed, gustily.

*

First things first, he enabled the mail run, and found three other things he ought to have seen earlier, too,
and
the first Festival message from Gaenor, plus a lilting and seductive voice reminder for him to check his mail from Gaenor, that hint from Vil Tor! He shook his head, grim-faced against the missed offer to see the pair of them in their suggested Festival rags . . .

But that had to wait, after all, because if business was on deck, there was a complicated missive and even more complex set of files from Tan Sim, being the record of a dozen or more trades, side financing, short leases, storage and shipping contracts, all executed on the fly between the opening of the jointly bought pod that had begun their partnership and the departure of the Scouts, much of it real catch-as-can of hurry. The worrying part was that a few pieces of this and that had gone missing in the hurry . . .

Literally on the fly this had all happened, as Delm Rinork had created and sold Tan Sim's trader contract and exiled him to a long-route tradeship with little hope of success. Tan Sim parted out the pieces using a contractor and there'd been some assumptions that needed to be tested and worked out, seeing that it might be the partner contract between them wasn't as straight as it ought to be if they were both going to be able to hold their partnership responsible--not that Tan Sim hadn't done them proud, considering the whole of the problems they'd faced.

Then another note, this from Scout ter'Astin, very formal and very curious, and very short, especially compared to whatever it was Tan Sim was on about, admitting that ter'Astin would be happy to make an appointment to see Jethri Gobelyn soonest when
Elthoria
made next port, and that in fact he was applying to the Master Trader as well as Pen Rel for assistance in such a meeting and looking forward to an open discussion . . .

That bothered mightily, for ter'Astin of all people knew the change in Jethri's circumstance from acrobatic Terran apprentice to acknowledged son of the clan. Even the digital wrapper showed the Scout had purposefully aimed it to him as a Gobelyn, which meant . . .

It meant something, and he was darned if he could figure out what. He supposed a careful question to tel'Ondor might give him a clue--a reason to visit Vil Tor!--or perhaps a deep-search of the Liaden Code of Proper Conduct might show an answer.

Was he in trouble? Was Tan Sim? Or had Miandra's training gone wrong--a concern of
his
since he'd been the intermediary in defending her from the overzealous "healing" of a Healer more concerned with order than with people gone awry, with her now loose in space. With her apparent power and known affinity for trouble . . .

That thought had more interest for him than he'd expected, but surely he wouldn't be the first refuge Miandra might seek if --but there, she'd sought him on Irikwae, after all, when friends and family were all about her.

"Clear the board of reds before you move to the first yellow," he said, recounting out loud an ancient dictum Paitor swore was handed down from the days the Gobelyns had first risen into space from a rumored seafaring past.

So, he had to consider Gaenor and Vil Tor's offer and confusion, as recent as it was, to be down in the yellow side of the problems. Without knowing exactly what it was about, he'd have to figure that ter'Astin's necessity was a flashing yellow, and so not quite red. That was a problem he hadn't thought about too hard before--he was double or triple or worse tangled in the Scout by now, between the weather machine and Miandra, and the save against the ugly Scout and the loan of his childhood "logbook" with cryptic notations from his father and, truth told, who knew what else might have been snuck under those covers? It was clear that he'd missed some kind of training his father was to give, and he wondered if the book held keys to more of that birthright that he'd considered before. A heavier tangle: ter'Astin had seen his father's shattered body--which was more than Jethri had--and recalled him for a brave man, stoutly facing chaos with thoughts for the injured and endangered, a worthy man across any of the races of men.

For all of the tangle, ter'Astin was coming to him. The Scout hadn't said where, but given that
he'd
just got the news from Thringar, and Boltston was up in a bare six-day meant that it was likely they'd be looking at Caverna or even Grammit before he saw the Scout.

So if his board had red lights on it, Tan Sim was wearing them: contract issues, missing objects which tied to money they were owed or expecting, possible conflicts with -

His protocol mentor would be proud of him, he reckoned, if he could see the resolve with which he closed the files and the most pressing thing was Tan Sim, and that was all
his
stuff, not things that ought to tie into his duties with the ship. The stuff with Gaenor and Vil Tor, that was personal stuff, and that could take time from the ship. And whatever ter'Astin was about, if it was for anyone named Gobelyn, that too, wasn't properly ship stuff, but his.

Study screen up, it was time to follow some of the sidetracks he'd come across earlier, looking at definitions. He'd looked at delivery pretty close, but now he'd need to study possession, its relationship to ownership, and legal ramifications of failure to perfect rights of ownership before transfer of possession. And those writs and legal stuff . . . The Master Trader said she was planning to lean on him for better Terran trade results.

Right. Paitor had warned him that trade would look different from the big-ship side, and being a lawyer or word splitter hadn't exactly been what he'd been thinking of. Maybe Jethri
should have
thought that--after all his father had been a trader and had somehow found his way with words and his understanding of what Paitor called trick angles so valuable to traders that he'd been pushed up to commissioner.

Details. He'd have to study the details.

Clan Ixin's Tradeship
Elthoria
, in Jump

The breeze blew in his face, shifting angles from time to time, and the sound of surf crunching into hissing waves and foam near his feet. The hills of the early part of this path gave way to the spot he always chose for the runout--the beach. He'd been looking forward to this since before he sought his bed the night before, this exact concentrated effort, this relief in movement.

He accelerated slowly, his muscles stretching for this familiar challenge automatically, eyes taking in the birds, the people, the boats, his mind dropping away from the recent and problematical protocol lesson he'd had the shift before, a lesson showing him again that casual agreements between partners were among the most dangerous.

His shirt was the last he still wore from the
Market
, all the others having been replaced in the face of grimaces, hints, and outright cajolery. Once outsized, now the shirt pleased him with the way it fit, though it did make him stand out, the large alternate bright red and yellow diagonal stripes proclaiming, in a fancy Terran-style script,
Trundee's Tool and Tow
on the red and
Satisfaction Guaranteed
on the yellow of the black shirt, front and back.

Most of his shipmates wore what they called
gym-sets
; a kind of tabbardly wick-shirt over shorts, with wick-socks and light exercise slippers. He'd been advised, early on, to run and work out in a heavier grade of shoe, to promote getting into basic shape for planetary sojourns; he'd also worn weighted wristbands and sometimes a belt. The belt he'd long since put aside as unwieldy for him, but the other items he'd kept with, and the shirt's schedule rotated, after all, sometimes giving way to a shirt he'd gotten on Irikwae, handed down from a cache of vine-working clothes when he'd had that duty.

His investment in the shirt he wore now had been from returning a defective circulating microsteamer for Dyk--Dyk got a refund and a new pot, while Jethri'd been able to keep the shirt since neither Dyk's careful off-ship wardrobe or his calm on-ship duds had room for something quite so commercially assertive.

He could run the water scene for hours: it reminded him of the calendar he'd been gifted not all that long ago, where lightly clad and even unclad people walked at ease. This was better than the calendar, for if the scene looped, which it must eventually, he'd never consciously caught the repeat, and he'd looked for it.

And, he admitted to himself, it wasn't simply the view of the tanned bodies in the world-sim, though that was good, but the whole experience of moving into the wind and of feeling his new strength.

Iza hadn't been so firm about exercise as perhaps she should have been: maybe he'd not have been so afraid of the open when first he'd met the twins if he'd only been used to moving, or at least used to thinking about moving, in open spaces. And it wasn't only the twins he'd embarrassed himself in front of--there'd been the times he'd flinched at something as ominous as open spaceport roofs and random breezes.

Funny thing was that once he'd survived a wind-twist, many of his fears had been put aside. And it was the cat, of all things, he'd been most concerned about.

The quiet swirl of the breeze changed tune as he picked up pace, and now the ceiling mounts moved to give him a more chaotic mixture as the surf he watched also picked up. The illusion was all the more compelling because of his lack of experience at a real seaside.

He marched on, knowing that much of his new confidence had come from the moment he'd grabbed the cat and made a dash for safety, ignoring the slashing claws for the necessity of shelter for a friend. He'd been out of breath getting to the safe-celllar, but he'd never doubted that he could. And that was because his mother the trader, unlike his mother the captain, had a vision of his success.

Success. Yes, always the goal. Success as a trader was a goal and his own Master Trader's ring the ultimate expression of it. To help him pursue that goal he'd become fit--both as a project that took no obvious study time and to be a hedge against mere local
weather
as he'd experienced when faced with rain and heat and twisted wind. Grig might have faced such, but he doubted that Iza had, for surely she'd have complained . . . and been more exacting in the regime she expected of her shipmates.

Now, between Gaenor's long language lessons, shared striding about
Elthoria
's public and private passages, and his time working out here, he was probably the fittest member of the Gobelyn family in the last twenty years.

Well . . . he nudged the control up, planning on "catching" the couple running ahead of him on the screen when he heard a cough. Pen Rel's cough. It took a moment, and came again. Or was the second cough actually the third?

He glanced aside, where the arms master's face came into the view field.

"Your workout is impressive, I grant, but I'm asked to accompany you, Jethri, immediately, to the Master Trader's office for a meeting."

Stomach tightening, Jethri reflexively flashed his fingers over the controls to bring his lope to quick halt. Surely if ven'Deelin said immediate, it meant now . . . but--

But this, this was exercise wear, seen only by himself and those of his shipmates by happenstance on the same schedule as he; if there was a place the public dress code was most relaxed, this was it, surely. He doubted it was respectful to be seen above crew quarters in it--

"Immediately I shower and--"

Pen Rel bowed an intricate rebuttal. "Your time is not currently your own, Jethri, for it is both your Master Trader and your mother who have called. I walk with you that you not be delayed, and also that we may continue on to other destinations after, if required."

*

"Sit, sit, sit, son of my name."

He started an explanation, a concern that he might stain . . .

"If the fabric of this place is not up to honest sweat, I long ago failed at my mission as a trader. And you, too! Sit, my friend! We'll have enough fidgets from Jethri not to deal with yours as well."

Named first by ven'Deelin, Jethri took the seat he preferred, a soft scroll-leather arm seat with firm support; it was the higher of the available seats, and gave him a superior angle to Pen Rel in the conversational triangle established by Norn. If he could find a twin of it he'd have one for his own rooms.

Pen Rel took no time at all getting settled, but it was Norn ven'Deelin who fidgeted at her desk momentarily, answering a half-motion by Pen Rel with a semi-bow and a half-exasperated sigh as well as a wave of her hand that flashed her Master Trader's ring.

"I have called for a nuncheon; let us allow it to be brought before we dive headlong into the unknown. You'll both forgive the press of necessity, I'm sure."

Indeed, the trader calling "necessity" was sufficient to move the ship and crew at her whim, that she knew.

"In the meanwhile, I shall tell you both that we are none of us going to be doing exactly what we expected, come Boltston. To begin, none of us was expecting a Scout to meet us there, but my discussion with the chief navigator tells me that a Scout ship in a hurry--as my missive from ter'Astin indicates his will be--should make the envisioned trip without difficulty within the time frame of our own visit. We must assume he will be there.

"Thus, Jethri, you will wish to shift schedules one shift, starting this evening shift; it will be a double. I have sent already the notes to your files; please read them as you may. I believe you will see some items delivered to you as well; you will pick them up at your service locker on your way back to your rooms."

"I don't understand, ma'am. Must I be on ter'Astin's schedule?"

"No, you must be on Boltston's, for ter'Astin will be, I have no doubt."

She turned with a flutter of hands, which could be read as saying
next topic
, giving her attention fully to the arms master.

"You, Pen Rel, will take the time while we wait to discuss in a more than general way where we stand in Jethri's general preparations. You may include anything you've learned of tel'Ondor in the last days."

Jethri's ears perked up--he wondered if there'd be a change of his direct oversight after all; or if it was simply that trading preparation for Boltston occupied her.

Pen Rel settled, glancing at Jethri speculatively. "I would not send Jethri off to Solcintra proper on a solo mission at this moment, if I may be so bold; yet if it fell to him he would--with the application of common sense--possibly survive it, as long as he was not brought to discuss the matter of main line Balance nor the fitness of Terrans to be on the homeworld.

"For generalities, he is now far more aware of posture, threats, hidden arms, and counters than he was when he first boarded. Perhaps against tel'Ondor's original expectations, he has also continued with reading his bows and is able to read far more than he may perform accurately. He is also picking up more of the hand-talk than I would have expected given how little we on
Elthoria
use it: I gather he has an interest."

A glance at him: Jethri bowed little more than a nod, admitting that last. His heart was racing, which he worked to calm with some of the exercises he'd learned from tel'Ondor for fitting himself to relax for social moments.

A pause them, with ven'Deelin's hands giving permission to continue.

"As much progress as we have, I would not send Jethri to Liad on his own, I would not send him on a mission of assassination, nor set him to rear guard, nor assign him to set security perimeters for this ship, nor in fact to take over my position."

Jethri glanced suspiciously at him--where was the cause for humor, he wondered . . .

The Master Trader laughed lightly and added a bow that even his current level of understanding could not fully unwind--perhaps appreciation, acknowledgment of a hit, an acceptance of the word of an expert . . .

"Yes, yes, no one may replace you properly, this I well know. But if it fell to him to replace
me
? If the situation dictates bold moves, if we discover at our next port that I must be flitting about to elsewhere while
Elthoria
travels its course . . ."

Jethri was so taken aback by this question that he sat, traderlike, without reaction, almost as if he'd been expecting the tack, which he'd of course not been. His hands gave away no tension, nor his expression.

Pen Rel's face briefly showed something like surprise, or even dismay, to Jethri's eye; the man shifted in the seat, leaning forward and then going to a neutral while his shoulders grew guarded, and his tone, when he finally did speak, was more guarded than even his shoulders.

His glance toward Jethri was quick and measuring, as if gauging Jethri's reaction--but then, the pause became pronounced, and finally the arms master sat back, a slight, wry smile on his face. Jethri silently his mind racing, an eerie blandness filling him with a vision of Trader Jethri ordering the ship about.

"Of all the concerns I had anticipated," Pen Rel allowed, " this was not one. Can you not see the levels of difficulty? Has ever --"

"And I have not," she said quickly, "asked you if this might be
easy
. I have asked you if you thought it might be done, if I feel necessity exists."

"Mother," Jethri managed, "but how could I, with ports that deny my license?"

She lifted a hand in his direction, silencing him, as Pen Rel gathered his countenance once more and spoke, this time with more surety.

"If you are of that measure, then yes, it might be done. The pilots know their business as does the ship; so often does the ship run a route that your interventions are no more than having a preference for an evening departure, or a request for a careful inbound or outbound route to permit the planet counters their games. The trade side, that issue is one I cannot answer. If you have no question that Jethri can handle the trade, how might I?"

"How might you indeed,"said ven'Deelin, "if I were to say this we would do."

She raised a hand slowly to face, touching her chin as if in worry, then uaing the same hand, she tapped the ring she wore and turned to Jethri.

"Had we your trade partner to hand, with his license, then I might craft a letter of trust permitting you to direct the ship's trades with his signature holding them on worlds too backward to admit a Terran as a trader. We are not yet so fortunate, I think. But," she said, turning to Pen Rel, "we might at Boltston conjure a trader out of a clan we trade with, one needing the time on point . . ."

She moved her hands, as if lightly throwing something, to Pen Rel. "The question is, will ship and crew take to such a thing, if need be?"

Pen Rel's hands made a motion as if weighing things in each palm, or perhaps of throwing something unseen back and forth between them. Then he closed his hands and dropped the invisible ball or bag, and smiled more fully.

"Yes, Master Trader, it is in my mind that the ship stands well with Jethri. He is seen as young, and perhaps distant, and perhaps odd--but surely he is accepted and there'd be no challenge to his right to direct the trade should it come to that. He is resourceful and asks for assistance; in the case of your absence he need not fear for mutiny nor resistance, unless he becomes arrogant, which I do not expect. It could be better if he were a bit more of the crew--but time is what that takes, and social experience."

For his part Jethri took in the discussion with some amazement--to consider that ven'Deelin would entrust him with the whole of a port's work scared him; that she might entrust much of a trade route's work to him was overwhelming--

"But why, why should you need to leave? Does the scout bring bad news? Does--"

Jethri's questions were cut short when the door chimed low and melodic then and the Master Trader smiled and stood.

"By your leave, I will let the nuncheon arrive, and after, we may continue this."

Perforce Jethri bowed polite agreement with his host, and began setting questions aside for later as the door opened and an elegant cart was rolled in by a smiling crewman, preceded by a very tempting waft of aromatic breeze.