Chanur’s Legacy by C.J. Cherryh

“The docker chief said he’s heard of it,” Fala said. “It’s something they say on the docks but the companies won’t investigate. Doesn’t happen until the equipment gets a little wear on it, and then it’ll happen if the play that gets into the joint works far enough to the right where the sensor bundle runs through, and that bias only happens when you get a whole lot of fifteen-year-old Daisaiji 14-canners in a row. Which you get on Urtur, they got more of them than anywhere, because they made them here. And it only happens if some driver parks short. That’s why it comes and it goes.” She couldn’t help but be interested in the purported olution to the loader glitch, if it was the answer—it sounded iffy to her; but most of all she didn’t want to hear it was Meras who had the information. She’d worked up a perfectly good, justified fit of temper, from which Meras could learn something that might keep him alive, and she didn’t want any extenuating circumstances.

“So the thing jammed,” Tarras said, “and the docker crew wanted to move the truck, and somebody’d parked a can-hoist in the way—“ “Probably why the truck parked short,” Fala said. “And the kid said it was the truck, so the chief started yelling about moving the truck,” Tarras said.

“He was pretty hot, so the kid—just got in and backed it up.”

“Without a license.”

“Captain,” Tarras said, “the length of the truck, it had to move. Isn’t a spacer working freight hasn’t stepped aboard and moved a hoist a few—“

“I haven’t. I don’t want my crew doing it. You let the dockers do their job, you don’t lay a hand on their equipment, we got a special handicap, f godssake, Chanur’s got too many enemies who’d like to sue the hide off us, you understand?”

“Understood,” Tarras said sullenly. “But,” Fala said, “it was only cosmic bad luck the tc’a was back there—“

“Luck! Methane loads come in on oxy side all the time at Urtur, and we got tc’a going back and forth on business oxy side, and it had business which is now complicated by an offspring! We can only hope we don’t get company our next trip out. Luck be damned!”

“Aye, captain.”

“Captain,”Tiar said, “begging your pardon, but he’s young. Haven’t any of us made mistakes ? “

“He can make them on Sahern ‘s deck, and welcome to him. Enthusiasm is one thing. We can’t afford his enthusiasm. Besides, his ship is here—“

“They didn’t do him any favors, cap’n. That’s their teaching? They take a kid on for an apprentice, and he’s got a little of this, a little of that? I asked him stuff on ops. He knows this board real well, doesn’t ‘t know how it relates to the main board. That’s ‘Sit here and watch the colored lights, kid,’ that’s what they gave him “

“It’s not our problem! He’s not signed with us, he signed with them.”

Silence from Tarras and Fala. Glum stares.

“Aye,”Tiar conceded from the bridge, not happy.

So no one was. She wasn’t. Meras wasn’t. But neither, one could suppose, was the tc’a.

Meanwhile Sun Ascendant was inbound, in contact with Urtur control. “To work,” she said, and, in peace, composed a polite message for merchant captain Tellun Sahern, to rest in her message file.

From toSahern’s Sun Ascendant, the hand of Hilfy Chanur, to Tellun Sahern, her attention:

We are pleased to report that—

No, scratch that. Sahern would find a way to take it wrong.

Meetpoint authorities, having dropped all charges against Hallan Meras, requested us to ferry him as far as Urtur where he might rejoin his ship. We will be glad to escort him to your dockside at your earliest convenience or to turn him over to your escort here if that is your wish.

FromSahern’s Sun Ascendant to , the hand of Tellun Sahern, to Hilfy Chanur, her attention:

We trade for a living, we don’t take secret money or run without cargo. It’s clear you had a motive in buying him free of the stsho. As you’ve surely learned by now, he has no data on our ship to give you. I doubt he could even falsify credible numbers. Chanur has made its bargains. We will not rescue you from your folly.