SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 885: Recovery

The summons came the next morning, and it was the first door anybody in Meraval had opened for him since he arrived.

A clerk brought it up to his rooms with the seal of Ithanne's office on it. Recovery planning session, ninth hour, works committee room on the administrative floor. Observers of the Great Houses entitled to attend and record.

Trafalgar read it twice.

He had been refused the sealed chambers. He had been refused the succession council. He had been refused a rope line around a dead clerk in a drained channel.

Now they were inviting him into the one room where it would be decided who got to touch the wreckage.

He went, sat where they put him, and wrote nothing down.

The committee room held about forty people and none of the grandeur of the great chamber. Long table, working lamps, charts of the second ring pinned along one wall with the sealed sector shaded in.

Ithanne at the head. The harbour authority in a block on the left with folders open. Maela Sorrel and three Canal House heads on the right. Corvyn near the middle with Kesh beside him.

Behind them sat the plain, older administrators Trafalgar had watched file past him since his first week, and whose names he still did not know.

Kesh presented.

He did it standing, without notes, and it took him forty minutes.

"The sector cannot be pumped in one operation," he said. "I want that understood before anything else. Those bulkheads are holding a pressure differential against open ocean. Drain the inside faster than the structure settles and we lose the seals, and after that the tramway above and the fourth ring floor."

Nobody argued. Two of the harbour engineers were nodding before he finished.

He laid out the phases. Controlled reduction in stages, with structural readings between each one.

Bodies first, as they became reachable, because the families were already filing and because the water would not improve them. Structural survey second. Buildings last, once the engineers could certify that entering one wouldn't bring the rest down.

"Six weeks," he said. "I would rather tell this room eight and be early than tell it four and be wrong."

Maela Sorrel put her pen down.

"Four of those buildings are ours. Two warehouses, a counting house and the leased frontage on the eastern run. My houses will want their own people there when they're opened."

"Canal House inspectors on the recovery of Canal House property, with sight of the survey record for those four. I'd have proposed it myself if you hadn't. Send me names and I'll have them cleared."

Maela sat back.

Trafalgar watched her do it and understood exactly what had happened. She came in with one lever, she used it, and the man handed her what she wanted before she finished asking. Now she had no reason to obstruct anything.

'That is the second time I have watched him do that. He gives people the thing they came for.'

Ithanne moved down the agenda. Manning. The displaced port schedule. Compensation claims from the families, which took nearly an hour and which nobody treated as urgent.

Trafalgar waited until the end, because the end was the only place his question fitted.

"One request from the observers," he said.

The room turned.

"When the buildings in that sector are opened, I'd like an observer present. Not handling anything and not directing any part of the work. Standing there when the doors come off, and countersigning whatever record is taken."

Ithanne answered before anybody else could, which he suspected was a mercy.

"No."

"May I hear why?"

"You may hear three reasons." She folded her hands. "An observer has no standing in a port operation. None of you do. That isn't personal and it isn't new, it's the same rule that keeps a Zar'khael or a Vaelion from putting a hand on Myrrhvale property."

"Understood."

"Second. The finding on the cause of this breach names nobody, and that includes you. Any evidence taken out of that sector in your presence gets argued over for a year."

"Also understood."

"Third, and I'd ask you to consider this one properly." She looked at him steadily. "A clean record out of that sector is worth more to you than to anyone else in this room. If you stand next to it, it stops being clean."

There was no answer to that. She was right about all three.

Kesh cleared his throat.

"If it helps," he said, to Ithanne rather than to Trafalgar, "the fleet has no objection to the observers being kept informed. Anything of significance out of that sector goes to your office, and your office circulates it as you see fit. It costs us nothing and it saves four people asking me the same question every week."

"That's acceptable," Ithanne said, and wrote it down.

Somebody further along the table thanked him for it.

Trafalgar sat with his hands flat on his knees and began to think.

A recovery run, lawfully and with everyone's blessing, by the organisation whose commander had laid four charges along that ring to put the building underwater in the first place.

Paper would be pulp. Anything in a crate would pass through a Tide inspector's hands before it reached a table. Whatever came out at the end would be true, complete and useless.

And he could not say one word of it.

He had a signature on a two-year-old shipping authorisation, and that was all he owned. If he put it on this table now, in front of forty people, it would be a foreign observer accusing a Myrrhvale admiral of murder on one line of a passenger register.

It would be dismissed inside the hour, and then it would be spent, and he would never get to use it again.

The session closed a little after the thirteenth hour. And there wasn't much he could do about what had happened; they had to wait for Rhosyn to be able to do something.