Trade Secret (eARC) by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

Jethri had--and recalled him for a brave man, stoutly facing chaos with thoughts for the injured and endangered, a worthy man across any of the races of men.
    For all of the tangle, ter'Astin was coming to him. The Scout hadn't said where, but given that he'd just got the news from Thringar, and Boltston was up in a bare six-day meant that it was likely they'd be looking at Caverna or even Grammit before he saw the Scout.
    So if his board had red lights on it, Tan Sim was wearing them: contract issues, missing objects which tied to money they were owed or expecting, possible conflicts with -
    His protocol mentor would be proud of him, he reckoned, if he could see the resolve with which he closed the files and the most pressing thing was Tan Sim, and that was all his stuff, not things that ought to tie into his duties with the ship. The stuff with Gaenor and Vil Tor, that was personal stuff, and that could take time from the ship. And whatever ter'Astin was about, if it was for anyone named Gobelyn, that too, wasn't properly ship stuff, but his.
    Study screen up, it was time to follow some of the sidetracks he'd come across earlier, looking at definitions. He'd looked at delivery pretty close, but now he'd need to study possession, its relationship to ownership, and legal ramifications of failure to perfect rights of ownership before transfer of possession. And those writs and legal stuff . . . The Master Trader said she was planning to lean on him for better Terran trade results.
    Right. Paitor had warned him that trade would look different from the big-ship side, and being a lawyer or word splitter hadn't exactly been what he'd been thinking of. Maybe Jethri should have thought that--after all his father had been a trader and had somehow found his way with words and his understanding of what Paitor called trick angles so valuable to traders that he'd been pushed up to commissioner.
    Details. He'd have to study the details.

Chapter Four

    Clan Ixin's Tradeship Elthoria , in Jump

    The breeze blew in his face, shifting angles from time to time, and the sound of surf crunching into hissing waves and foam near his feet. The hills of the early part of this path gave way to the spot he always chose for the runout--the beach. He'd been looking forward to this since before he sought his bed the night before, this exact concentrated effort, this relief in movement.
    He accelerated slowly, his muscles stretching for this familiar challenge automatically, eyes taking in the birds, the people, the boats, his mind dropping away from the recent and problematical protocol lesson he'd had the shift before, a lesson showing him again that casual agreements between partners were among the most dangerous.
    His shirt was the last he still wore from the Market , all the others having been replaced in the face of grimaces, hints, and outright cajolery. Once outsized, now the shirt pleased him with the way it fit, though it did make him stand out, the large alternate bright red and yellow diagonal stripes proclaiming, in a fancy Terran-style script, Trundee's Tool and Tow on the red and Satisfaction Guaranteed on the yellow of the black shirt, front and back.
    Most of his shipmates wore what they called gym-sets ; a kind of tabbardly wick-shirt over shorts, with wick-socks and light exercise slippers. He'd been advised, early on, to run and work out in a heavier grade of shoe, to promote getting into basic shape for planetary sojourns; he'd also worn weighted wristbands and sometimes a belt. The belt he'd long since put aside as unwieldy for him, but the other items he'd kept with, and the shirt's schedule rotated, after all, sometimes giving way to a shirt he'd gotten on Irikwae, handed down from a cache of vine-working clothes when he'd had that duty.
    His investment in the shirt he wore now had been from returning a defective circulating microsteamer for Dyk--Dyk got a refund and a new pot, while Jethri'd been able to keep the shirt since