I went back to the smaller bank of elevators and sent myself up to floor 18. Ah, this was more like it. Soft lighting, lush fabrics on the lobby chairs. Plants everywhere. The host right across from the elevator smiled at me as I walked in, her light brown hair piled atop her head, wearing a pale silver jumpsuit with gathered sleeves. Immediately I relaxed, comfortable back in my own kind of place. DeBlays might not be from Daltia, but he understood it.
The employees who sat in the front room had their desks arranged in a semi-circle, beneath an ornate woven-glass chandelier. One or two of them looked me over, but in a much more normal way. It reminded me that I was just one of many people DeBlays was likely to be talking to about these positions. No sense of inner competitiveness kicked in, though. All I had to do was meet with the guy, so that I could tell Arind and Dio that I'd given it a shot. I just wanted the whole thing to be over, or else to go back in time twenty minutes and hit restart.
I didn't have long to wait. Which was fortunate, because I was growing annoyed about my own attitude. A small screen lit up to the right of the host, and she glanced over and calmly said my name.
She escorted me to a room at the end of a long, thickly-carpeted hallway. Markus DeBlays rose as I walked into his office. He was a solid man, his body giving off an aura of rectangles, from his broad shoulders to his jaw, and the square tips of the fingers on the hand he extended for me to clasp. He had black hair to his cheekbones, with no grey despite middle age, and smooth-lidded, lively eyes.
"Sit, sit!" he encouraged, gesturing towards two armchairs at the side of the room. He poured glasses of water from a dented heavy silver pitcher, and offered me one. The letters "S-D" were engraved on both the pitcher and the cups.
We made the requisite small talk. "I hope you're as glad to be here as I am!" DeBlays said. "It's such beautiful weather."
I was slightly taken aback. "It's nice to hear someone say that," I replied. "Even I've had a hard time not complaining about the heat, and I'm from here."
He was nodding, as if that were exactly what he wanted to hear. "The genuine Daltian climate," he said. "I wanted to jump right in. Why put it off?"
Not a bad attitude.
"I'm sure you've done a little research on us," DeBlays went on. "Let me give you the canned speech about everything, in case you ran into some gaps."
He spent a few minutes going over the history of the company. Like many stationers, both his family and the trades they engaged in went back centuries. For all that they were traditional in the way they lived, preferring to remain among family on the stations their ancestors were born on, they were incredibly quick to take advantage of opportunities they spotted for trade innovation.
Imports to the star system were brought by older inter-system freighters. Those were impractical for transport within systems. They lacked the fine-tuned navigation to dodge hazards and commuter traffic. And the subsequent local-system ships that serviced Daltia and the outer colony moons first had to land on Roxi and transfer their goods to shuttles for any surface runs. This was both for legal and practical reasons, as the carrier starships couldn't traverse the atmosphere.
So altogether, there were at least three separate loading-and-unloading steps before imports could arrive on the ground on Daltia. Sometimes as many as eight or ten, depending on the routes and delays. Or on whether DeBlays could arrange human workers to deal with the more priceless items -- drones would never be as reliable.
"And frankly, we're losing business to the smaller, faster ships that are currently being made. No more Trium subsidies, either," he grimaced. "We have had good luck with the company that handled bulk-breaking on Roxi. Their efficiency kept the losses tolerable. But they're changing direction. It's a good time to expand into that business. They've agreed to sell us their facilities on Roxi, but I told them I didn't want their old ships."
He looked speculatively at me.
"I know you test," he went on. "You've seen what people are doing with new ships. What we've been using to move things here, it can't compete." His tone became acerbic. "Certainly not when half the importers are unregistered. Though who can blame them, with that mess back on Luna?"
I was surprised to hear him speak so openly of the black market. It was an open secret, of course. Though some people said it was holding back our legal status.
"Are the apprentices going to help with the new ships?" I asked him, looking to change the subject. The black market was quite well known to most of us pilots.
DeBlays chuckled. "Eventually. That shipyard up on Roxi will need to be modernised first. It's my hope that young flyers can bring in some new thinking on plans for the spaceport. You've all used them."
I didn't correct him about that part. "So, helping to design a shipping port."
He must have perceived my disappointment. "Ships and shipyards are an ecology," he told me. "They work together. Arguably the port is more important, if less exciting. It is the life support of the ships that use it."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," I said, mulling it over.
DeBlays sighed. "One of the reasons I came here," he said, "and brought our family -- at great expense, by the way -- is the same reason you want at the new ships. It's your passion. Murohe said as much about you. What sets this culture apart. You all value it, you encourage people to pursue it. I want that kind of passion to be part of this."
"Mostly it's not just passion to make credits, though," I said.
He looked surprised. "Surely that's not the only reputation the DeBlays company has here."
It was not, that's true. Their company had an excellent reputation, both for quality, and for using their influence to bridge cultures and worlds that otherwise had very little relation.
Still, I felt a pressure in my heart. Partly it was the bad mood I'd already been in, and another part was letdown. As an apprentice, I knew better than to hope that any interesting parts of designing a port would be left to us. I knew just how petulant I was being, but that didn't make it go away.
"What you're planning to build does sound wonderful," I said respectfully. "I'm trying to see how I might best fit in. If I had any claim to having a passion, it would be for ships -- but not just that. The navigation systems, the pilot comms and controls. Is that something useful to you?"
He stroked his jaw quietly, in thought. "I can tell you this. I'd do my best to make sure you could put that to use. It might be too early in the project to say exactly how, though."
I nodded, sensing that was the best I could hope for.
DeBlays seemed eager to get the conversation around to his overall scheme. "It takes a great deal of preparation to ground a family like ours. Fortunately, many of us are excited to get involved with this venture, and stay here. Most of my children will be joining. So there will be some stability and predictability right away. You don't need to have any concerns about success or failure. Try new things. This will be an investment for at least the first decade, and we're comfortable with that."
I swallowed hard. They were as wealthy as I'd heard, then. Businesses just did not operate with that level of security in this back corner of space.
"Why Daltia, though?" I heard myself asking. "Not that this isn't an honour."
"Well, I told you one reason," he said placidly, sipping his water. "I believe in this place. Every time I have visited, it felt like coming home. It would have been enough to simply stay in the system for a generation or two. But there will be a lot more traffic to Daltia in the coming years. We want a state of the art facility, ready to take advantage."
More traffic to Daltia? "Do you think there will be an increase in tourism?" I asked, trying to sound like I kept up with that sort of news.
DeBlays tilted his head, looking amused. "You don't know? I thought you pilots heard everything..."