Surebleak Port
Portmaster’s Office
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Portmaster Liu had a headache.
In fact, she had earned her headache. Angry star captains, suddenly legal Complex Logics offering to do orbital cleanup as a way to redeem their good name, a not-quite hostile survey team bent on tripping her up, and now—the dubious pleasure of having a Clutch ship approach the planet in her care for the second time in her tenure as portmaster.
It had been…tense, when the Big Rock had come into Surebleak space for the purpose of off-loading the Road Boss’s house and effects. It had been tense, despite she’d had plenty of warning, and a plan, and an approach that the Big Rock had scrupulously followed.
Still…the Big Rock had been—big. If something had gone wrong…but nothing had gone wrong, and it turned out that she had wasted a lot of perfectly good anxiety on that mission.
It had taken the arrival of the Little Rock coming in, so far as the instruments were concerned, straight from Galaxy Nowhere, blazing a trail across all lanes of traffic and by some fool’s luck managing not to collide with anything or punch a hole in the planet, but settling down, light and sweet as you please, in the Road Boss’s driveway.
It was a truth among the Guild that the Clutch were a law unto themselves. Clutch ships rarely put into Terran ports; that was the good news. Of those very, very few that did, some actually made an attempt to obey port direction. Witness the Big Rock. The limitations of their drive made this a nontrivial exercise however, and most just followed their own inclinations and the port worked around them.
Still, it would’ve been…better if the Clutch had put off any visits to their ally, the Road Boss, until after the survey team had finished up their business and left planet.
In fact, it would’ve been…neighborly of the Road Boss to give Port Admin a tiny hint that such a visitation was about to occur.
That brought her up. Say what you would about the Road Boss and most of Conrad’s people, in matters of port safety, they were stringent. If the Road Boss had known they had company coming, they’d’ve called. That would’ve been most like them. Still, it had to be checked.
She was reaching for the comm to put the question directly to the Road Boss, but it beeped first, interoffice, and Carla, on reception, was saying that Survey Team Leader Kasveini would like a word.
Of course she would. The survey team would need to know if Clutch traffic was a usual thing and, if so, what protocols the port was putting into place to deal with the disruption in normal traffic flow.
The survey team would probably also want to know why this particular Clutch ship wasn’t landing at the port at all, but making straight for a landing at the Road Boss’s house. Which they’d be obliged to see as suspicious, in keeping with their theme of Tree-and-Dragon was bad for Surebleak and the rest of the universe, too.
The portmaster ran her hand through her hair.
“Portmaster?” asked Carla, sounding worried.
Right.
Portmaster Liu sat up straight behind her desk, smoothed her hair, and settled her face in lines of calm authority.
“Thank you, Carla,” she said calmly. “Please show Team Leader Kasveini in.”