Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 71

Arata nodded.

“But,” Solveig continued. “Four years ago, when we resumed operations, you were also our only customer. And you got to set the market rate for Alon. Because you were the market for us. Now that you are no longer our only buyer, the market rate has gone up. And you have been able to buy at the favored rate while everyone else has driven up the value of the commodity.”

Arata turned his palms up. “We abided by the terms of the contract, no more and no less. And we would love to continue our mutually beneficial relationship on similar good terms in the future.”

Solveig looked at the compad on the table in front of her, where the main data points of the old agreement were listed in neat bullet format.

“That is also Ragnar Corporation’s wish. To maintain the excellent relationship between our companies.”

She looked up at Arata again, whose expression had changed subtly. She could tell he knew she was about to make her main pitch, but that he didn’t know what to expect, how to translate her polite deflections into a prediction.

“But we cannot afford to continue to sell a considerable percentage of our most valuable product’s annual yield at what are now far-below-market prices. Not if we want to remain in business. Especially not considering the rate we have to pay for Hanzo graphene composites.”

“Ah.” Arata folded his hands on the table in front of him. His little smile had returned to his face. “Now we come to the heart of the matter. In the typically direct Gretian fashion.”

If we go about this in the Acheroni fashion, I’ll be here for three more weeks, Solveig thought. She wouldn’t mind the extended time away from home, but the thought of sitting here for days on end and bouncing inoffensive and evasive statements off each other with the Hanzo people had no appeal to her.

A message popped up silently on the comtab in front of her. It was color coded with the data link from her secondary personal comtab, the one whose node number she replaced every few weeks. Only a few people had the address for that node.

Hey, shorty, it read. Having stationary downtime for the next two weeks. Can we meet in the Syne?

Aden.

Solveig suppressed a smile. She looked at the words for a moment and quickly flicked them off the screen before Gisbert could see the message. A glance to the right told her that she was too cautious in this case. He looked like he was about five seconds away from drifting off into a midday nap.

“Forgive the interruption, but I must retire briefly to attend to myself,” she said in Acheroni, using the standard phrase she had learned for excusing a visit to the sanitary facilities.

“Of course,” her counterpart answered in the same language. He had seen her glance at her comtab, and she knew that he suspected she needed a break to confer with her seniors.

If he wants to think that, so much the better, she thought. Let him think they just yanked on my leash.

Arata waved a hand and nodded toward the door, and Kee appeared in the room.

“If you would follow me,” Kee said to Solveig with a polite nod. “I will show you the way.”

Solveig got up and returned the nod. Kee walked off, and she followed, leaving her corporate compad with the contract details on the table. Another assistant walked in and commenced serving beverages.

“He does not know what to make of you,” Kee said to her as they were walking down the skyway in front of the conference room.

“Who, Arata?”

Kee nodded. “He is not used to negotiating with someone as young as you. It throws him off. He does not want to be disrespectful, and yet he does not want to concede or defer too much. You are messing with his . . . what is the word? Calibration.”

“His social calibration,” Solveig said with a smile. “I get it.”

She glanced at Kee, who was wearing a little smile of his own.

“Are you sure you want to be telling me that I make your bosses confused? You should be trying to get information out of me. Not feed it my way.”

“It amuses me a bit,” Kee said. “Even if my parents were directors here, I would not be sitting at a negotiating table yet. One must pay their dues in the lower ranks first. Nobody your age has power here. Not the kind of power to say yes or no to someone like Director Arata. They will hear what you say because of your family name. But they will not believe that the decision was yours.”

“As long as they sign whatever we agree on,” Solveig said.

If there’s anything I know how to handle, it’s people who assume I have no agency of my own, she thought.

The sanitary suite was more spacious than her living quarters at the university had been, and far more expensively appointed. Solveig did a quick scan of the room with the security sensors of her corporate comtab, which was equipped with the most advanced spy detection algorithms available on the market. When she was satisfied that there were no obvious data sniffers in the room, she took out her personal comtab and opened the message from Aden to reply. Even though the corporate anti-snooping hardware hadn’t detected anything overt, she did not allow herself the delusion of thinking her comms to be fully private. They were in Hanzo’s corporate headquarters, after all, and she was sure that just like Ragnar, they kept tabs on every data stream in their building. She’d have to change the hardware and the node address of her anonymous device again, and Hanzo would still be able to get through the encryption in a few hours or days. But she wasn’t concerned with Hanzo’s ability to read her private mail eventually. Personal comms were of little interest to their business, her burner tab would be long gone by then, and