Chanur's Legacy by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page A

it. He’d only slipped up the once—
    On the docks. Which was bad. That was really bad, and the captain had a right to be mad. But he’d gotten control of himself. He’d not hit anybody else, not even when they arrested him.
    Truth was, he’d been scared, not mad. He’d been dreadfully scared. And that feeling was back with him as if it had never left.
    The translator was on the fourth from-scratch pass. The legal program was on its second. If this kept up, Hilfy thought, they were going to have to put in an order for another carton of paper. She hated the hand-slate. You took notes on it and it just got messier and spread the information you were working with further and further apart. And you couldn’t punch marks in it or turn down the corners or take notes on the back.
    Paper, she keyed to the Do List. The thick stuff. It massed more but it didn’t fold up while one was reading or note-making, And she had done a lot of reading this morning, while the loaders were clanking and thumping away under Fala’s and Chihin’s supervision. Meanwhile Tarras was tucked down with the datadump from station files, looking for information—who might take the transship cans, who had what for sale and what the futures list and the methane-folk routings looked like.
    The party initiating the contract requires of the party accepting the contract that in the event of the activation of Subclause 14 Section 2 the party accepting the contract shall perform according to the provisions of Subclause 14 Section 2, notwithstanding this shall not be construed as negating the requirements of Section 8 parts 3-15, provided that the party receiving the goods be the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1, and not a Subsequent of said person; if however the party qualified to receive the goods be the Subsequent of said person or Consequent of the Subsequent named in Subsection 3 Section 1, then the conditions set forward in Section 45 may apply.
    She had a headache, and sipped gfi and put a purple clip on the side of the paper for performance and a blue one for identity, took another sip and winced as something hung up in the Legacy’s off-loading system. A new ship had glitches in common with an old one, systems with bugs in them.
    One of the bugs was in the out-track, the very simple chain-driven system that should take one of the giant container-cans smoothly from the hydraulic lift to the hydraulic loader-arms. They had tried lasers to find a fault in the line-up, they had tried carbon-coated paper to turn up an imprecision in the teeth, they’d marked the places on the chain that jammed and the places on the wheel that jammed, and no joy. She had preferred the system because it was what The Pride used, it was old, it was tested, it was straight-forwardly mechanical, cheap to repair, but that gods-rotted chain was going to break and kill somebody someday. Every time it jammed like that she flinched.
    A small problem, the outfitter swore. Easy to fix. Just pinpoint the problem, and we’ll make it right.
    The loader started up again. So nobody was killed. Hope it wasn’t the mahen porcelain they were hauling. But the chain was intact. She heard it working.
    If the party receiving the goods be not the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1, and have valid claim as demonstrated in Subsection 36 of Section 25, then it shall be the reasonable obligation of the party accepting the contract to ascertain whether the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 shall exist in Subsequent or in Consequent or in Postconsequent, however this clause shall in no wise be deemed to invalidate the claim of the person stipulated to in Subsection 3 Section 1 or 2, or in any clause thereunto appended, except if it shall be determined by the party accepting the contract to pertain to a person or Subsequent or Consequent identified and stipulated by the provisions of Section5 ...
    However the provisions of Section 5 may be delegated by the