John Ringo: Honor of the Clan

In the hall, she watched him walk away, O’Reilly’s deputy at his elbow, until they turned and were out of sight.

The first thing Michelle noticed when she entered her construction bay an hour before Adenast’s nominal start time was the unaccustomed emptiness of the bay. A lone employee sat at the far end of the bay, headset engaged, holding the existing products static. She recognized him as one of the Sohon masters. Below adept level, the masters were the middle managers whose coordination skills, paired with their technical competence, glued each project together by mutual communication and ensuring everybody knew his or her assigned tasks. Everything from starships to the enormous building control machines grew whole in a single tank, a massive endeavor regarding years of effort by a single family — “family” for Indowy could encompass generations of an older breeding group — and it all had to be coordinated by the masters. Mental visions of the project had to remain in tune, and across multiple work shifts. Apprentices had to feed the great tanks with needed raw materials on a precise schedule and at precise input loci to support local control of the necessary reactions. In the rare but inevitable case when one of the experts found an engineering issue in the design, it was the masters who coordinated with the adepts to design a fix and communicate the revised design image to every member of the production team.

In the current case, the Indowy Iltai Halaani sat on a stool at one end of the bay, headset connected to all the tanks with an absurd spaghetti tangle of wiring, holding all the tanks in a stable state. Work had stopped. Michelle walked to the center of the bay and turned full circle, absorbing the sight. She had expected the response, once word got back to Adenast that she had at last been compelled by circumstance to see her clan head. With that meeting ended the polite fiction that the estrangement of the human Clan O’Neal from the rest of the Indowy species did not reach to Adenast. Clan Aelool and Clan Beilil had remained aligned with O’Neal in the Bane Sidhe split of 2047. Aelool was minuscule, and had a paltry three breeding groups on Adenast, and those refugees lived completely on the other side of the world. Beilil was also quite small, one of the smaller groups reoccupying the most habitable portions of Dulain.

Despite growing up there, Michelle O’Neal had no pressing reason to live and work on Adenast rather than relocating to Dulain — no reason except for the contracted projects in the middle of construction in this very bay. Once again, she faced a life or death situation. If she could not complete her projects on time, within specified variations of delivery, theoretically she could be hauled into contract court and her debts called in. With the troubles the Darhel Epetar Group was having from their recently foiled plot to do just that, she doubted another group would court similar disaster. Also, one of her projects had been contracted by the Epetar Group. In the likely event of its default, she would have to write a new contract with a new buyer. A building main control system wouldn’t lack for demand, and she could write its contract for delivery as late as she had to, effectively keeping the project in abeyance for years.

Her mind busily calculated the options. What was that saying? I expected this, but not so soon. Her problem was that she would have to exquisitely coordinate schedules and new project deadlines to move her operations, picking up lower-return short-term work as the long-term projects completed. It would cost a great deal of FedCreds, and further her debt. It was possible but only if she had the workers to get those coordinated projects to completion. The Aelools had contracts. She might be able to find a couple of Beilil families who were between contracts and could help her wind up her operation in the interim, but her work was large. There was low probability that their help would be enough, and the scheduling delays while they traveled from Dulain to Adenast were going to be prohibitive.

It wouldn’t be enough.

Her mind turned the problem over like a game of aethal laid out on the board. It was a losing board, but her highly skilled gamesmanship refused to stop gnawing away at the problem.

The Aelools were not blacklisted. It was possible she could get the Adenast families to swap out other-clan replacements for their current projects. If she could persuade them, she could have the Adenast Aelools relocated and working in any time between one and ten days. Three breeding groups could take on one eighth of her current projects, and she could make all but one of her immediate deadlines for the Group most likely to be hard cases about her “issues.”

The problem there was that Beilil, while remaining friendly with O’Neal, did not owe much of a favor balance to the clan. She’d have to get the word to Dulain, get groups with the right skill mix re-tasked, get those groups to Adenast for even on the most temporary of jobs. She calculated best and worst case estimates. It was an impossible task.

If grandfather’s diplomatic mission to Barwhon was a complete success, he might succeed in mending relations with at least one of the major clans on Adenast. The Koolanai Clan who raised her were, on the whole, quite fond of her. They, reasonably, felt that her high achievement reflected well on them and brought their own clan honor. Or, they had. If Clan O’Neal’s reputation was restored, they stood to gain as much as anyone. They were also one fourth of her work force.

Clan Roolnai was her real problem. They had staked a lot of personal reputation on the collaboration with humans, albeit covertly through the Bane Sidhe, and were furious at the embarrassment caused by the now near-universal public opinion verdict of humanity’s irredeemable mass insanity.

Since 2047 she’d held her Roolnai workers through force of personality, sheer will, and a very liberal hand with favors to the breeding groups contracted for her project. That same liberality with favors had prevented her from replacing Roolnai families with Koolanai families as several projects had completed and been replaced with new work.

The bottom line was that without some kind of give from the Indowy Roolnai, she was toast. Maybe not dead, but in so unenviable a debt position that her carefully nurtured ability to pick and choose her projects would be gone for life. She’d have to take whatever projects would give her the best short-term profit, like crumbs from the Darhel tables.

However, if Grandfather agreed it was useful to the Clan, trickling in the credits she’d won for the O’Neals by “fencing” the level nine code keys would gradually pull her back up, but slowly, so slowly as to stretch even a mentat’s long-term view.

First, try the obvious, she thought, resisting the temptation to smack herself on the forehead. She walked the length of the bay, using the transit belts to cover the vast distance, until she stood beside Iltai Halaani. “I will take over this task. Please convey my regards to the Indowy Roolnai and pass on to him my humble request that he agree to see me on a matter of importance to his clan.”

“Indowy Roolnai, I see you,” she said, rising effortlessly to her feet.

She had been honestly worried he wouldn’t come. If he hadn’t, it would have spelled ruin.

Iltai Haalani had accompanied the clan head back to the bay and, as they had come in at the end where she’d been keeping vigil over her work, he was able to immediately resume control of the tanks, freeing her for discourse with the clan head.

“Human Michelle O’Neal, I see you,” Roolnai replied politely, his green-furred face blank of all expression.

“I appreciate your great kindness in coming to meet me personally,” she said.