Trade Secret

by Sharon Lee

  The ship was quiet now in the unnatural way it always was when worldside on a full-pressure and full-size planet, where the sheer weight of the atmosphere and pull of the gravity made everyone—and the ship too— a smidge too heavy.

  The cheerful Franticle air control tower’d been talking about how nice a day it was, and when they were off talking to someone else, the radio brought them sucker ads and propaganda in local dialects as well as Trade and Terran, a noisy mix-up that grated on everyone, especially Iza, who merely amplified the noise to complain of it.

  Khat’s preparations had let her leave the flight deck to Iza and Cris, with Paitor as backup, the Market echoing with the piped-through sounds of the landing. They were set for one Standard Day, and in that time needed to do the official stuff and let the rest of the ship get a walk. Paitor . . . well, he’d surprised Khat . . .

  “Really, Iza, you’d think we were planning a frontal assault instead of a visit with the licensors. You’ve got you and Cris, and I have work . . .”

  “We all have work to do, and since you’re listed as a pilot on the lists, you can let that history go until we’re down,” Iza insisted. “Might as well all get with the program here, since Cris is going to be looking at oddities while I bring her in. You get to back us both up and pull in your precious trade scans at the same time!”

  In between the sucker ads and mixed in with the propaganda was a reminder that they ought not to stray off course in landing, on account of once they were under customs-zone lock deviation from course, landing outside the zones could mean complete ship strip search and all kinds of other bad things. It was a more or less common warning from planets that did it this way, but it sounded ugly. Paitor and Iza being careful on this head, and Khat too, following their example, hadn’t ever had to deal with this kind of a problem personally. The noise had to be heard . . . but once down, the speaker’d been quieted to local news . . .

  Ship sound, too, was quiet now that the door was sealed. Khat leaned into the lock’s sidewall, patting her pockets, hideaways, and wallets one last time before pushing the cycle button. Franticle was more a practical world than a safe world, so security was up to her—but then that was always the case, the way she saw it, even more so since her run-in on Banth.

  Grig, beside her, was less active, standing with his eyes closed and waiting patient and silent, for their first sight of Franticle True. Maybe he’d been here before, after all. There was a lot more to Grig than met the eye, she’d gathered from Paitor, a lot more than just a big guy older than a kid and not to full grayhead yet. He’d been on the first-out crew dozens of times for Gobelyn’s Market, that was sure, and maybe hundreds of times altogether, depending on where that age gauge of his actually settled.

  Waiting, carry check done, her hand automatically checked the ID card hung round her neck and she made sure Grig’s was on and showing, which was a waste of time since he’d hardly make that mistake. She pushed cycle to let Franticle True’s nice day in.

  * * *

  The nice day was too hot and wet and smelly for Khat’s taste, and oddly noisy too as she stepped into a barrage of screeches, caws, tweets, and flutters. Birds, upset birds even—hundreds of them or more, wheeling overhead or walking dazedly on the ground. Feathers lay scattered about, littering the bleached gray of the port’s hard apron, with some few more wafting down from the sky in arcs.

  There was more noise beyond that of the birds. An underlying rumble of powerful engines working somewhere close, with distant horns and warn-aways added to the din.

  Grig waved away a swirl of mottled green-gray with a mumbled “Damn!” and then pointed toward the side of the ship away from the lock.

  “Third landing ring, spot forty-four. They gave us a swamp and didn’t tell the owners ahead of time.”

  Khat was swatting at the air now too, grimacing at bits of fuzz that floated and fell, but the feather fall seemed mostly over so she brushed her formerly crisp and clean officer’s outfit.

  “Should have worn a hat!” She offered this to the world at large but only Grig was in range to hear, and he answered with a grunt.

  By then Khat was oriented and could see the swamp in question, barely three ship lengths behind them. A breeze blew straight at them from the swamp. In the other direction, all was flat as far as she could see, with buildings and ships that popped up onto the landscape at random intervals. Closer and not interrupting that panorama, a knee-high orange fence skirted a section of the same gray pavement they stood on, and on the other side of that a scooter-cab was arriving, striped diagonally in red and white, bearing a yellow crest on the door.

  “Official lift?” Khat asked, but then several more vehicles came, decked out in other stripe combinations, all crowding, with several of the drivers exiting the vehicles and vying for their attention with waving scarves.

  “Orderly place,” was what Grig said, picking his pace up. “The red-and-white was first, so I’m good for going with them, if there’s room for the pair of us.”

  The walk was longer than it seemed, and at the end of it there were half a dozen of the vehicles, with drivers standing near, offering hands for their bags, which instead they both tucked carefully under arms.

  “Here sir! Pilot, here!” one driver yelled, blue scarf waving like a flag, and another, with green and purple insisted, “Fastest driver, cleanest taxi,” and another, “Rebates for round trip; rebates!”

  A ruddy-faced woman, with no scarf but a jacket and helmet matching her scooter’s orange and white, cut artfully in front of the others, inching toward them with an exaggerated grin, saying in mixed Trade and Terran, “First in line, I have most honors to travel you to trade offices!”

  Complaints then, from the other drivers, led by the woman with the blue scarf—they were all women Khat saw, wondering if she should have read the planet guide to see if only women could drive—but there’d been a change of regime, according to the cross talk from other ships, so the planet guides might not have helped.

  With a flick of the wrist and a gentle twist, Grig danced a step, allowing Khat ahead and past the interloper, while the others raised their voices in a thick and indistinguishable dialect not meant for outsiders. Drivers from the back of the line closed on the orange-and-white quickly, with much waving of hands.

  The pilots took the opportunity to drop into the original red-and-white, sitting side by side on the bench seat. The driver managed a “Thank you for your care” and then turned her back on them as the near-silent machine sped away from her competitors and the noisy birds. It wasn’t the pleasantest world Khat had been on, but it beat cold mud.

  * * *

  “First come, first served,” Khat read out loud from the “Procedures of This Office” chart posted at the front of the room. It was an important room on the top floor of an important and ugly square building deep in the heart of Franticle’s important government section. Why they put it here, where the denizens and the citizens had to compete for lift space, she couldn’t divine, but that was like so much about planetary affairs to her: just how it was, might as well accept it.

  Still, for the third time in the last hour, she read the second line of the procedures out loud, the one just after “Good order will be maintained at all times.”

  They’d been there four hours before she started, and each time she read it, she was louder, and closer to the target, even if timed to go under the overloud PA announcement of the next person or group to be handed in to an examiner.

  There were two targets, actually: the clerk in front who apportioned the people in the sitting line to either of the two closed offices being the one she was most interested in expressing herself to, while the guard at the back who brought people forward was obviously under her direction, and hence forgettable.

  Barney, a local pilot working on a license upgrade, looked worried at Khat’s third iteration. He didn’t move away from her—he’d managed to post himself to her right side shortly after he’d arrived—but he
was clearly not wanting to hear a fourth time. They’d been moving, after all, and now were in the first row, about where they should have been two hours before if a series of passes, flashes of cash, and secret words hadn’t managed to drop others into spots between them and the access clerk. The cashflash was way too expensive for the Gobelyn’s Market crew to handle . . .

  “So, Revo Nine?” He’d been grilling her carefully and was amusing enough for Khat to allow it to go on. She wasn’t likely to get tumble-time anytime soon, but a good flirt was a good flirt, and practice didn’t hurt even if she had a bed warmer on ship.

  “Sure,” she allowed, “two of them. One was damn ugly rigged for asteroids and small-body work so I wouldn’t call it normal—I wouldn’t have certified it to land in atmosphere but I could have if they didn’t need it to lift again.”

  “You got to know your ship,” he allowed. “You can take a decent ship outside of them limits but you gotta know yours, too!”

  Nothing for it but to agree with this wisdom, so Khat nodded, cut a couple hands full of true course true course in hand-sign, and went on.

  “The other one was a sweet little thing,” she reminisced, ignoring the guy’s previous mention that a Revo Nine was a middling big ship to handle, “and I had the same one three trips, not back to back. As pure on the last trip as the first. I had a good second each time—different second each time, you know! If I had a good second I could fly one of them all year and not feel I was wasting my time. Damnedest thing was that I had the junk buggy in between. So I went from a Ver 3B to a 1-C Alter back to my Ver 3B.” Khat poured the sad on, and his face got sad, too.

  “Get your hands mushed up if you have to do that too often,”he said and she nodded.

  He’d already handed a card to the patient Grig, who was working on pilot catnaps as they waited, and two to Khat—one “with my direct lines, you see,” and he was leaning a bit in her direction when there was yet another multibody stir at the back of the room. Khat sighed, but he stiffened where he sat, turning to glare at the newcomers, who were speaking a little loud, like they didn’t trust people could hear them.

  “Therinfel! Tradeship Therinfel, here’s your call.”

  The ship’s name was said as if Therinfel’s folks had been sitting in line the whole time, Khat saw, and wondered if they’d somehow inserted that ship’s name ahead of others in the sign-in record. She’d closed her eyes briefly when she’d heard the name. Knowing the ship was in-system was not the same as being in close proximity to crew members.

  * * *

  “Liadens!” Barney said it quietly, but loud enough that several others in their row and the row behind heard, and the sounds they made, low though they were, were not pleasant.

  Grig, Khat saw, was no longer catnapping, but like her he was not turning to glare. After the others turned and grumbled, Khat permitted herself a glance and allowed her elbow to touch Grig’s, her fingers forming a quick prior pilot sighting and then slower, spelled out, Banth.

  He nodded as the rustle of cloth and boots moved toward the front of the room, turning slightly with bored eyes and a yawn.

  Three Liadens, it was, Khat’s witness fight third one getting to Grig and maybe to Barney, too, before she turned her face toward the local, saying, “But you know a Revo Nine just does not have the go-on of a Kavin. Any of them.”

  The third one in line was a pilot—she’d seen him in the bar at Banth—who took her measure when she’d come up armed after flooring the chel’Gaiban, and seen him tactfully not go for his gun or hideaway. She didn’t know how to read the Liaden insignia, didn’t know if he was just a pilot, or if he was head pilot. Didn’t much matter; if he got a good look at her, he’d remember.

  “You’ve flown a Kavin? We don’t get too many out this way—I think I’ve only seen one.”

  For his side, Grig twisted in his seat so that Khat’s back was against his and her face turned away from the new arrivals.

  “They’re great. Not a real high-volume yard. Someone told me they’re a knockoff of a Liaden design, but all I have to say is that everything on them is sweet. Never saw a ship where everything was balanced quite so nice. I’ve flown two and I can tell you I’d have taken it anywhere they wanted me to go with either of them. The one was practically a courier—five minipods was all!—and the other was a double rack with two internal minipods.”

  Khat extolled the Kavins until Grig touched her elbow; when she dared look two locals were coming out of the second examination room all in smiles while the clerk escorted the Liadens into the same room with a flourish, ducking in behind them and pulling the door to. The inmates of the waiting area mumbled among themselves, Khat not the only one to shake her head.

  “So you don’t like Liadens either?”

  Khat sighed slightly, studied her nails, looked across the small distance to Barney’s hopeful face. “Can’t say that—haven’t met all that many of them myself.”

  “You’ve met some? They actually talked with you?” His face showed he doubted this very much.

  “They’re people, that’s all. Grew up different. But yeah, met a couple, and I know a trader—loop born he is—who got himself a trader’s spot on a Liaden ship called Elthoria.”

  Barney’s lips unsneered, went bland, tried a smile.

  He looked away. “Never did meet any. Passed a couple up to Franticle Orbital, had more rings on than my grandmother and just stopped where they were like they had no idea how traffic works on a deck.” He paused, and his face hardened, showing more lines on it than Khat would have guessed he could muster. “It was more like there wasn’t anyone else around who was worth thinking about!”

  Khat thought about that even as she nodded. “Could feel that way—I think that’s the melant’i stuff. If they don’t know where they stand with you they have got to assume they’re the big jets and you’re not.” She smiled across, expanded the thought train—

  “Figure it like walking into a bar at the end of a route. If you’re in the big room, you grab a seat, look around, see if you know anyone, or if you want to know someone. Mostly everything’s even.”

  He shrugged, nodded.

  “But if you walk into that same bar and walk right on into that back room, the select lounge, the premium zone—whatever they call it there—then, you walk right in, you’d better know someone or they better know you, ’cause else everyone needs proof you belong there.”

  He nodded, agreeable.

  “That’s how Liadens live mostly, like they’re all in a premium room all the time, always ready to come out and be biggest jet or sitting back counting how far they gotta go to get there, or how careful they’ve got to be of who. Always on the pose for ‘I’m more dangerous than you are’ I guess. Where they come from, one mistake, one snub to the wrong clan, and you could be in for a decaying orbit!”

  “Sounds like too much trouble to me,” the local replied with a sniff.

  “Not easy, is my guess.”

  “But hey, tell me who you know on a Liaden ship? A trader even, that’s got to be a first. Talk about not easy!”

  They nodded together over the ease, ignoring the sound of someone well behind them in the queue giving up and walking out. As if on cue, Grig reached to a leg pouch and offered Khat and Barney each a pilot’s fruit bar, pulling them back in a seamless motion when the clerk finally emerged from the meeting room she’d taken Therinfel’s representatives to.

  Khat felt Grig do as she did—look away from the room, toward Barney. Barney did not look away, instead moving his head to peer around Khat with avid interest, as did half the room. The clerk closed the door quickly, avoiding looking into the meeting room or at the larger assembly, finding a path to her desk by dead reckoning or habit, whichever was stronger.

  Grig handed out the rations again, taking his thanks from Barney, who was quiet while he ate, giving Khat a break. They’d barely finished when the other room opened and in short order the people in front of them rose, only to have the
clerk wave them aside with a curt, “No confirmation on that bond your agent was to post. You can wait, but I have a crowd and must call the next.”

  “Gobelyn’s Market? Tradeship Gobelyn’s Market.”

  Khat winced at the volume of the announcement, and perhaps misreading that expression, Barney patted her on the knee before she rose, whispering, “Good luck, Pilots!” as they rose to enter enter the inner sanctum.

  * * *

  “Gobelyn’s Market? Is Gobelyn’s Market crew here?” The words came in an awkward Trade, as if they’d learned from someone who barely knew Trade.

  It was unexpected, and Khat already at the ragged edge of polite after what Route Administrator Clowfar had called an “expedited” hearing on the ability of the Market to operate within Franticle’s space as need be. They’d all the ship’s public technical details with them, and an abbreviated discussion of the piloting depth on the ship, and of course the go-ahead sign from officials on the station. She’d thought herself exhausted—and this was not what she needed.

  Grig’s sign was subtle but Khat caught it, taking the right side, so she could cross-draw if need be. The express lift was half full, with two Liadens unknown to Khat focusing their attention on her as they dropped fifty-seven floors at a pace unsettling to the seven or eight citizens if not to the pilots. She’d seen them too late, but really, they’d been good about using the taller and bulkier locals as cover, and stepped in just as the doors slid shut.

  “Gobelyn’s Market?” inquired the tall one again, he a good hand shorter than Khat and a head and half or more shorter than Grig. He bowed with a flourish to her corner, taking in Grig’s presence a half a heartbeat after he’d started his bow and trying to include all who might qualify.

  They were posing Liaden: both competent-looking, both with hands close enough to pull points that they might be trouble if that was their goal.

  Grig bowed to both of them, a bow that meant something more to them than to Khat because they both stiffened and gave him more attention. Khat used their discomfiture to adjust herself.