SATISFIED, COMMANDER OF AGENTS closed the field report.
Korval's strengths—that it husbanded—one might say, hoarded—ships; that it valued the skills and reactions of pilots above any other skill a clanmember might possess; that they deliberately bred for pilots, thus propelling themselves to a pinnacle of the type . . .
Those strengths had hidden a notable weakness.
Pat Rin yos'Phelium, heir to Kareen, elder cousin to Val Con, who should by all right of blood and kinship, now stand as Korval Himself—excepting only that he was not a pilot.
Crippled, in Korval's eye, he had been cast aside, dismissed to a wastrel life of spoilt self-indulgence.
The Department of the Interior, however, knew just how to value Pat Rin yos'Phelium, and his place within the Plan.
Commander of Agents smiled slightly and lay his hand on the closed folder.
Despite that the Department found it necessary to its own success to remove Korval from the board, yet it was true that the world, in some measure, required Korval. Lose a clan which held controlling interest in a triple-dozen industries on-planet, which controlled the pilots guild, funded the Scouts, which owned outright fifteen trading vessels and unnumbered smaller craft, not to speak of the yards which serviced them? The planetary economy trembled at the whisper of such calamity. Why, Korval owned the very dies from which cantra pieces were struck, only leasing them to the Moneyers Guild in twelve-year renewals stretching back to the time of the first Val Con yos'Phelium, Cantra's heir.
In any wise, it was no part of the Department's Plan that Liad should be made bankrupt. It was all to the Department's good that Liaden economy flourish and expand.
Thus, if the economy demanded a Korval, then a Korval there would be.