Trading in Danger (8 page)

“Indeed. Some of this I can help you with, certainly. Pavrati began yearly contacts here some six years ago, and increased their service to twice yearly two years ago. The initial contact of my predecessor with the Pavrati concerned a customs dispute about interdicted psychoactives. Recently… let me just say that it would be indiscreet of me to complain that Pavrati captains have been a plague to this office for years—always demanding, never asking. So I would not say that. I would say that if Vatta brought trade and profit out of this, it could only help my office perform its duties and possibly improve relations between governments.”

Ky wondered how much “incentive” from Vatta had contributed to his attitude, or if Pavrati captains had really been stupid enough to alienate their own government’s consul repeatedly. She remembered those entries on the books, something she’d questioned back in what now felt like distant youth. We don’t bribe people, do we? she’d asked in horror, only to be glared into silence by her father and uncle. It was not a bribe, they’d explained. It was merely a courtesy, too small to do more than suggest that Vatta Transport was a friendly and cooperative entity.

As neutrally as possible, she said, “I was hoping you could inform me of local law and custom in such matters.”

“Easily. These people distrust outworld traders as they breathe air. They consider us all cast in the same mold, and blame any of us for all of us. If you were to make good on a promise Pavrati made, they would be very surprised, and probably indecently grateful. As for Pavrati’s reaction, they care not. There are no statutes requiring notification of intent.”

She thought that over for a long moment, while the consul finished his own tisane. She could commit Vatta… she could go independent. She had just made a huge blunder going independent at the Academy, but this was different. Here that boldness protected the family… she hoped.

“It’s my venture,” she said to the consul.

He nodded. “First command, I assume? Yes. You Vatta seem to run to adventures on a first voyage in command.”

Did they? No one had told her about that. “I am not looking for adventure,” Ky said firmly. “Trade and profit.”

“Oh, certainly. Only fools look for adventure. But I daresay your orders didn’t mention scooping Pavrati contracts, not that I’m asking.”

She didn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused at the twinkle in his eye. She went back to the other issue.

“The Customs Inspector mentioned an Economic Development Bureau?”

“Yes. Hidebound, stuffy, and suspicious, like all these people. If they’ve been stiffed by Pavrati, they won’t pay up front, but they’re honest enough and if you deliver the goods, they’ll pay in good credit. I’ll be glad to give you a letter of introduction—they still go in for that kind of formality—to the right office.”

“Thank you,” Ky said. “That’s most helpful.”

He shrugged, a very North-Coast shrug. “Anything to relieve the tedium. It’s normally months between ships, with nothing much to do in between but listen to their complaints. You can’t believe how tedious these people are. Imagine—for amusement, they play some idiotic game with sticks and balls on horses, of all things.”

“Polo?” Ky asked.

“Something like that.” His eyebrows went up. “You know about it? I hadn’t imagined that anywhere on Slotter Key we had anything like that—I’ve never been on a horse in my life.”

NorthCoast… Slotter Key’s industrial hub. Considered themselves superior, North Coasters did. The rest of Slotter Key, Ky suspected, felt much as her family did about North Coasters. Necessary folk, but stodgy and proud.

“I’ve heard of it,” Ky said, without mentioning where. “We’re expected to know a lot of customs from all sorts of places.”

“I suppose,” he said. “Well, if you know enough to chat about chuckles”—Ky realized he meant
chukkers
—“you’ll get along fine with them, or as fine as any of us can. But look out; they might ask you to get on a horse and play.”

“Oh, I think I can stick to trade and profit,” Ky said.

“Well, then—you’ll have dinner with me, this evening? I’ll have a letter for you by then, and I’ll call ahead as well to see when you might get an appointment. Where are you staying?”

“At the Captains’ Guild,” Ky said. “And thank you. What time?”

“Eight local. I’ll send the legation driver for you, and put a ping on your alarm.”

Outside, the moist air carried all the smells she’d imagined when, as a junior apprentice, she’d been stuck on the ship polishing the floor while the captain and senior crew were onplanet. Here was a whole world she had never seen before; it was hard to believe she was really here, that she had just been talking to a consul, captain to government representative. Her escort joined her at the gate. “Where to?” he asked.

Ky just wanted to walk around, experiencing the strangeness, but that wouldn’t do, not on a company account. “There is a harbor here, yes?” Harbors meant shipping, and shipping was her business.

“This way,” the escort said, pointing. Ky called up a city map on her implant—he was leading her the right way. It seemed silly to check, but it was protocol. They started off, still on foot. Around her, the native population of Belinta went about its business, dressed very differently from the people on Slotter Key. Most wore some shade of green—gray green, greenish brown, yellowish green, bluish green—with a plaid shawl slung around the hips for the women or shoulders for the men. Their legs were bare from the knee down to sandals with turned-up toes, but they wore long-sleeved tops with snug cuffs. What was that about?

She slowed down, feeling the slight difference in the way her foot hit the ground, noticing the odd quality of the light, and the smells… What was that? A gust of wind lifted her cape and the smell grew stronger. Not unpleasant or pleasant, just enticingly different.

The street they were on curved to the right and ended at a tangle of buildings beyond which stretched an undulating surface of dirty yellow water. In the distance, she could see the dark ragged line of another shore. She called up her infovisor: it was an ocean… or rather, this was a bay, and the ocean lay off to the right somewhere. The Greater Ocean, on their maps. Ships carried cargo on that water, just as on Slotter Key; she eyed them as she walked along the street that paralleled the docks. Big ones, little ones, in a bewildering variety of designs: high at the prow with low, rounded sterns, high at both ends with a straight low section in the middle… she had no idea which design was meant for which service. Would the escort?

“What kinds of cargoes do they carry?” she asked.

“Lotof it’s wood,” he said. “Over there, it’s the mills—behind them, the forest still. Food and fiber, too, from the farmland away east of here. Riverboats come down with ores and such from the mountains.”

“What kind of local transport organization?”

“There’s the Amalgamated Transport Trust—that’s a group of shipping companies, agree on rates and that kind of thing.”

She had already looked that up and was again a little surprised at herself for checking up on the escort service.

Across the pavement on the shoreside were tall blank-fronted buildings—obvious warehouses—bearing names and logos which meant, to this world, much what Vatta Transport meant to hers. Tall doors stood open; she toyed with the idea of going in and introducing herself to a manager or two, but the ships were too interesting. She could do that tomorrow if a data search suggested it might be profitable. She came back in time to dress for dinner.

Dinner at the legation was almost as elaborate as the fanciest dinners at home. The consul had invited several government officials to dine with them; Ky was very glad she’d worn one of the formal outfits her mother had insisted on.

“You’re very young, aren’t you, to captain an interstellar ship?” asked the wife of someone in the Waterways Commission. The implant, loaded with information the consul provided, handed her the names: Cateros, Sylis and Max.

“Fairly young, yes,” Ky said.

“I wouldn’t let
my
daughter go out there, so dangerous, don’t you agree, Max?” The woman laid a hand on her husband’s sleeve; he turned abruptly.

“What? Sanna? Ridiculous.” He smiled briefly atKy.“Not at all the same, Captain Vatta. You have been trained to this life for most of yours, no doubt.” He didn’t wait for her answer before going on. “And what do you think of our homeworld, Captain? We’re still in the early stages of development, but already the waterways form a fine transportation network.”

“It’s lovely,” Ky said. “I haven’t seen much of it yet.”

“But you did see the harbor today. Quite roomy. As development proceeds, we’ll need all that space.”

“If it doesn’t silt up,” said someone down the table. Ky queried her infochip: Samfer Wellin, Minister of Agriculture.

“It won’t silt up,” Minister Cateros said. “My engineers assure me that the scour of the Big Yellow will continue to keep it cleaned out.” He glared down the table and the Minister of Agriculture subsided, then opened another topic.

“Captain Vatta, I understand you’re going to be talking to the EDs about importing some machinery for us…”

Clearly Belinta was not a world given to keeping secrets. Ky just managed not to glance at the Slotter Key consul. Had he been the source, or was it the talkative customs official? “I was told up on your station that equipment you’d ordered had not been delivered, and was urgently needed,” she said.

“That’s true. Was supposed to come last year and didn’t. We need it badly; we’re points below projections on production because of it—”

“That’s not your department, Wellin. Your job is getting the most out of what we’ve already got.” Minister Cateros seemed to puff up like a bullfrog. Ky looked down at her plate. She didn’t need a teaching tape to know that the men were rivals, and that Cateros thought he outranked Wellin.

“I can’t plow fields with polo ponies,” Wellin said. He stabbed a slice of roast as if it were Cateros. “If we’d imported heavy stock as originally ordered—”

“They’d be stuck in the muck up there,” Cateros said. “You just have to get the job done, Wellin…”

“Do you play polo?” Cateros’ wife asked Ky with a desperate smile.

The men stopped and stared at her.

Ky shook her head. “No. I do ride, but I’ve never played polo. Not formally anyway.”

“Not formally? What does that mean?” Cateros sounded grumpy still.

“Oh, my brothers and I had read about the game, so we sneaked some brooms out of the pantry, and tried it.”

“You grew up on a planet?” asked Wellin’s wife. “There was room for horses?”

“Oh yes,” Ky said. She wondered if the woman thought all spacer crews grew up on ships. “Slotter Key has plenty of room… where I live, many people ride.” Always be ready to talk about any neutral topic, her father had said. You never know what it might be, but be ready.

“You should come to a match while you’re here,” Cateros said. “You can use our box.”

“Thank you,” Ky said. “I don’t know how much time I’ll have.”

“There’s a match day after tomorrow on the City grounds. If you don’t have an appointment.”

“Thank you,” Ky said again.

“I’ll see you have my number,” Cateros said. He looked at the ornate timepiece on the wall. “Good heavens, it’s late. We’re due at Erol’s wedding rehearsal, Sylis. We must go—you will excuse us,” he said to the consul. They both stood, as did Sylis, looking confused. The others all stood, until Cateros and his wife had left. Then, in a straggle, the other Belintans excused themselves, leaving Ky facing the consul across a cluttered table.

“That went well,” the consul said.

“Really?” Ky said. “They seemed angry to me.”

“They hate each other, but I got them to come and sit through most of a meal together. Captain Vatta, if you can possibly stand it, please go watch that polo match. I’m sorry to say that I simply can’t make head or tail of it, but you have a clue. Perhaps that will loosen Cateros up a little, and be a chink in their armor.”

“I can try,” Ky said. She could, she supposed, watch a polo game and make polite conversation.

“Good. I have transmitted a letter for you to the Economic Development Bureau, and here’s a hard copy for you to take tomorrow. Your appointment with the Assistant Minister for Procurement is at eight local time: that’s midmorning to these people. He’s supposedly going to arrange additional appointments for you. Let me know if he doesn’t.”

Garsin Renfro, the Assistant Minister for Procurement, was a tall, thin man with the long face Ky had begun to think of as Belinta-normal. “Can you really get us that machinery?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Ky said. “But very likely.”

“How long would it take?”

“Where had you found it before?”

This led to a long explanation of the process, starting with bid requests sent out to a dozen manufacturers and proceeding at glacial pace through every detail of what had happened. Ky kept wanting to interrupt, but made herself listen. Her father had always said no one could tell which detail would make trade and profit… but she was fairly sure none of these would.

“So… you were happy with the quality of the bid samples from FarmPower and Pioneer Agriculture Supply, and FarmPower had a closer outlet?”

“That’s right. Actually five suppliers met the quality standards. But FarmPower gave us the best overall deal, and they charged shipping only from Sabine. We ordered shipping by fastest scheduled carrier, and that was Pavrati; they come in every sixty days.” He looked at her as if she might object; Ky smiled.

“That’s understandable, if you had an urgent need.”

“We did—we do.” He shifted in his chair. “I won’t—I can’t—burden you with all that’s involved, but this delay has cost us…”

“Of course,” Ky murmured. “Now—your government’s contract with Pavrati. Was it exclusive?”

“No. The Board isn’t authorized to make such deals. But they were the next, on the schedule. I spoke to the Pavrati captain myself; he assured me they could pick up the machinery on their way outbound, from Sabine, and just store it until they came back. We’d hoped to have it sooner—that another ship could pick it up on the way in—but he said no, they stop at Sabine after Belinta, not before. But he would be back in about one hundred twenty days, he said, and that was well within our parameters.”