“No.” Miriam took another deep breath. “We’re a design bureau. We design brakes—better brakes than anyone else in New Britain, because we’ve got a forty- to fifty-year lead in materials science thanks to our presence in the United States—and sell licenses to manufacture our designs. So. Did it occur to you that it might just be a bad idea to fire our senior materials scientist?”
Morgan shook his head minutely, but his eyes narrowed. “That was a scientist?”
I’m going to strangle him, Miriam thought faintly, so help me I am. “Yes, Morgan, Roger is a real live scientist. They don’t wear white coats here, you see, nor do they live in drafty castles in Bavaria and carry around racks of smoking test tubes. Nor do they wear placards round their necks that say SCIENTIST. They actually work for a living. Unlike some people I could mention. I spent five months getting Roger up to speed on some of the new materials we were introducing—I was going to get him started on productizing cyanoacrylate adhesives, next!—and you went and, and sacked him—”
She stopped. She was, she realized, breathing too fast. Morgan was leaning backward again, trying to get away from her. “I didn’t know!” he protested. “I was just doing what Angbard told me. Angbard said no, don’t buy the new works, and this artisan told me I was a fool to my face! What was I meant to do?”
Miriam came back down to earth. “You’ve got a point about Angbard,” she admitted. “Leave him to me, I’ll deal with him when I can get through to him.” Morgan nodded rapidly. “Did he tell you to shut down the business? Or just put the expansion on hold?”
“The latter,” Morgan admitted. “I don’t think he’s paying much attention to what goes on here. He’s fighting fires constantly at present.”
“Well, he could have avoided adding to them right here if he’d left me in charge; the one thing you can’t afford to do with a business like this is ignore it. How many points are you on?”
Morgan hesitated for a moment. “Five.” Five thousandths of the gross take, in mob-speak.
Ten, or I’m a monkey’s aunt. “Okay, it’s like this. Angbard wants a quiet life. Angbard doesn’t need to hear bad news. But if you let this company drift it will be an ex-company very fast—it’s a start-up, do you know what that means? It’s got just one major product and one major customer, and if Sir Alfred realizes we’re drifting he’ll cut us loose. He can afford to tie us up in court until we go bust or until Angbard has to bail us out, and he’ll do that if we don’t show signs of delivering new products he can use. I think you can see that going bust would be bad, wouldn’t it? Especially for your points.”
“Yes.” Morgan was watching her with ill-concealed fear now. “So what do you think I should do?”
“Well—” Miriam hesitated for a moment, then pressed on. What the hell can he do? It’s my way or the highway! “I suggest you listen to me and run things my way. No need to tell Angbard, not yet. When he sends you instructions you just say ‘yes sir,’ then forward them to me, and I’ll tell you how to implement them, what else needs doing, and so on. If Angbard doesn’t want me expanding fast, fine: I can work around that. In the short term, though, we’ve got to position the company so that it’s less vulnerable—and so that when we’re ready to expand we can just pump money in and do it. In the long term, I work on Angbard. I haven’t been able to get in to see him for months, but the crisis won’t last forever—you leave him to me. I can’t be around as much as I want—I’ve got this week to myself, but they keep dragging me back to the capital and sooner or later I’m liable to be stuck there for a while—so you’re going to be my general manager here. If you want the job, and if you follow orders until you’ve learned enough about the way things work not to sack our most important employee because you’ve mistaken him for the janitor.”
“Hah.” He looked sour. “What’s in it for me?”
Miriam shrugged. “You’ve got five points. Do you want that to be five points of nothing, or five points on an outfit that’s going to be turning over the equivalent of a hundred million dollars a year?”
“Ah. Okay.” Morgan nodded, slowly this time. Miriam put on her best poker face. She wasn’t happy; Morgan was barely up to the job and was a long way from her first choice for a general manager, but on the other hand he was here. And willing to be bribed, which made everything possible. If there was one thing the Clan had taught Miriam, it was the importance of being able to hammer out a quick compromise when one was needed, to build coalitions on the fly—and to recognize when a palm crossed with gold would trump weeks of negotiations. Normally she was bad at it, as events in Niejwein had demonstrated, but here was an opportunity to do it right. “I’ll take it,” he said, with barely concealed ill-grace. “You didn’t leave me a choice, did you?”
“Oh, you had a choice.” She smiled, humorlessly. “You could have decided to wreck the company I created and screw yourself out of a fortune at the same time. Not much of a choice, is it?”
“Okay, my lady capitalist. So what do you suggest I do? Now that I’m running this business under your advice?” He crossed his arms.
Miriam walked around the desk. “You start by giving me back my chair,” she said. “And then we go look round the shop and come up with an action plan. But I can tell you this much, the first item on it will be to track down Roger and offer him his old job back. Along with all the back pay he lost when you sacked him. Now”—she gestured at the door—“shall we go and assess the damage?”
Five days of hard work, stressful and unpleasant, passed her by like a bad dream. At the end of the first day, Miriam went home to her house on the outskirts of Cambridgetown, to find it shuttered, dark, and cold, the servants nowhere to be found. On the second day, she met with her company lawyer, Bates; on the third day, Morgan reported finding the misplaced Roger; and on the fourth day, she actually began to feel as if she was getting somewhere. The agency Bates recommended had sent her a cook, a gardener, and a maid, and the house was actually inhabitable again. (In the meantime, she’d spent two nights in the Brighton Hotel, rather than repeat the first night’s fitful shivering on a dust-sheeted sofa.) A visit to Roger, cap in hand, had begun to convince him that it was all an unfortunate mistake, but she was getting very tired of telling everybody that she’d been hospitalized with a fever during a business trip to Derry City and had taken a month to convalesce afterward. Whether they believed the story . . . well, why hadn’t she written? Never mind. Her earlier reputation for mystery and eccentricity, formerly a social handicap of the worst kind, suddenly came in handy.
On the fifth day, while Morgan was away performing his corvée duty for the Clan, a parcel arrived.
Miriam was in the office that morning, going over the accounts carefully—Morgan had left that side of things almost completely to Bates’s clerk, and Miriam wanted to double-check him—when the bell outside the window rang. She stood up and slid the window back. “Yes?” she asked.
“Delivery.” An eyebrow rose. “Hah! Fancy seeing you here. Sign, please.” It was Sharp Suit Number Two from the verminous hole of a post office near Chicago, wearing a fetching magenta tailcoat over the oddly flared breeches that seemed to be the coming fashion for gentlemen this year.
“Thanks.” Miriam signed off on his pad. “Want to come in? Or . . . ?”