The request would have to be phrased carefully. He settled more comfortably into his chair to watch again and analyze his best selling points. The Tir Dol Ron was, as the humans would put it, a tough customer.
The bounce tubes had been an annoyance when Michelle had first outgrown her old clothes and started wearing robes. In pants, they had been fine. She had walked around with her hair braided and tolerated the flyaway bits the breakneck fall to the bottom of the tube shaft caused. Until she had learned to hold them down by main force of will, her robes had tended to end up around her ears. With that kind of affront to her dignity as incentive, she had learned fast. The thousand little tricks of technology she had would have appeared to the uninitiated as magic. In fact, one of the first things she’d done was taken advantage of some differences in human versus Indowy physiology to have her Sohon headset surgically implanted. The second thing she’d done was learn to work efficiently enough to have some nannites to spare. She walked around with a layer of them at all times. Hidden, never enough in one place to be a visible aggregate, but completely controlled. That was one of her small technological magics. Easily mastered, for her. Later, other and progressively more esoteric applications and technologies had followed, leading to abilities that the adults on Earth before the war, even the ones at the cutting edge of physics in the most secret of the secret research labs, would have considered flatly impossible. Then again, she understood a whole lot more physics than they did. The difference was of the same magnitude as that between Aristotle and Heisenberg — and as shocking to the common man as the difference between a clay pot of Greek Fire and a cobalt bomb.
It would have been shocking, that is, if the Michon Mentats hadn’t been every bit as tight-lipped and disciplined about their knowledge and abilities as the Tchpth or the legendary Aldenata themselves. Any of the mentats from any race of sophonts could have created vats of nannites the size of a small star with no input from the Tchpth. The ability was a requirement of the rank. They were also wise enough to understand why they shouldn’t. There were things that were worse than the current Galactic sociopolitical order, suboptimal as it was. Far worse. An unjust galaxy was better than no galaxy at all — and inevitable besides. The nature of life prior to enlightenment was necessarily and irreparably a morass of injustice — the rule was as solidly inflexible as Tlschp’s Law of the Balance of Entropy.
Which was why she was on the way to her meeting today, serenely dropping down the bounce tube to the Galactic conference sector of her building. She would meet with the Darhel supervisor Pahpon, and treat him as a superior, even though he was little advanced from the ancient human soldier throwing a clay pot of incendiary. Ancient was, in the scheme of things, not all that long ago. In any case, she would meet with him. Her true superior was neither Pahpon nor the entire Epetar Group that employed him. Her true superior was the self-discipline and foresight she had necessarily had to develop to be able to hold some very advanced physics and skills in her own head. Desire for the good opinion of her colleagues was her shield against hubris. She could see the consequences of saving her own life as clearly as if she was reading a history book after the fact. Her life was not worth that. Except for the one way out she had already arranged. If it worked.
Her steps were sedate, measured, as she entered the conference room reserved for Darhel. “Good morning, Supervisor Pahpon,” she said.
“Human Michon Mentat O’Neal. Our group is terribly displeased with your negligence in allowing the Aerfon Djigahr to be removed from your facilities. I am here to present you with a letter of demand for your debts to our organization. You will see in the file that, as per the rules to avoid their unnecessary losses, we have purchased your debts from the various other groups to which you owe various obligations. AID, send—”
“I would not do that,” she said icily.
The Darhel froze, fur puffing up in a vestigial reflex his prehistoric ancestors had used when alarmed. “You are surely not such a human barbarian as to take everyone else down in flames for your own error?” She could see the pulse beating at his throat in stark terror, and smell the fear pheremones that were not at all like the scent of a Darhel whose system was releasing the suicidally intoxicating Tal. Darhel could feel fear without dying of it. In fact, they could feel some rather extreme fear. As Pahpon was now.
“Of course if I fail to retrieve the Aerfon Djigahr in a timely fashion, or ensure its destruction, as per our contract that I would not let it be transferred out of Epetar’s hands in any nondestroyed condition, functional, restorable, or reverse-engineerable — if I do not do that, then I will be in breach of my contract with Epetar. However, within our contract, my responsibility does not terminate until one half cycle and twenty-four more Adenast days. I merely begin incurring late fees after Renthenel twenty-one. I am not yet in breach.”
He glared at her. “You know very well that destruction clause was intended to cover any necessary loss of functionality during the research process.”
“Nevertheless, it is in the contract that if I make a good faith effort to avoid destruction, I fulfill my contract by providing you with whatever I learn about the device. The contract does not say the device may not be in other hands at some point or points during the research period. It says I must either return it to Epetar Group at the end of the contract or ensure that it has been irretrievably destroyed during the research period.”
“Research is not being conducted on the device, the task for which your services were contracted. You are in breach,” he insisted.
“Research is most certainly being conducted. The contract gives me supervisory discretion to arrange that research in whatever way seems practical to me at the moment. At this moment, the only practical research option is for the persons that have it to research the device where it is.” Her speech was calm, her manner preternaturally still.
“Research for another group!” he growled, the renowned melodious voice marred with a harsh burr.
“Preliminary research data where the technical results are, as a matter of universal practice, stored in a single, closely protected site and not in that group’s internal storage, as a matter of security. The thieving group’s central facilities do not have technical analyses and results. The most they have is some cubes of pretty footage. Galactic standards do not consider a group in possession of data until it reaches one of their authorized ships, authorized central facilities, or a Darhel member competent to understand the information. I have constant external monitoring that will demonstrate to the satisfaction of a contract court, in the absence of contrary evidence, that the technical research results that would put me in breach have never left for a ship, nor to one of their central facilities, nor a Darhel of the group, whichever it may be, who is technically competent to understand the information. I am not in breach. I suspect Adenar, by the way.”
“That’s a flimsy technicality and you know it.” He waved away her conjecture with one hand. The Darhel was breathing very carefully and deliberately now.
“As your ancestors told the ancestors of the Indowy so many generations ago, in contracts, technicalities are everything,” she said.
“This is not the performance level we have come to expect from Michon Mentats.”
“This is rather precisely the sort of performance we have come to expect from Darhel Groups.” Impassively, she noted the ultrafaint scent of Tal entering his system.
“Fine. Live until the end of your contract. But your wages are in abeyance until you demonstrate the ability to fulfill your obligation,” he sneered. “Make your peace with the Aldenata or whatever you human barbarians do because the day your contract expires unfulfilled, is the last day you eat. You are dismissed!” he said.