Chapter 271 --271
The main cabin was adequate. The working surface was a folded crate lid that Roen had improved with a piece of planking, which was functional if not elegant.
She had learned, over a year, to work in whatever space existed.
The working list traveled with her. Thirty-eight items. Eleven completed. Twenty-seven open, in various states of progress, organized by dependency — things that required other things to be done first, things that could run in parallel, things that were waiting on information that didn’t exist yet.
Item thirty-eight sat at the top.
’Return.’
Underneath it, in the margin, she had written in small precise script the seven sub-items that ’return’ actually contained. The contract review was one. The collar charter submission was two. The provincial bloodline review handoff was three. Items four through seven were contingencies — things she would need depending on what the capital looked like when they arrived.
She worked through the contingency planning while the river moved.
The system sat on the crate lid beside her documents and occasionally said things.
---
The delegation was five people.
She had considered larger and decided against it. Large delegations announced themselves. Five people representing a trading company attending a contract review was unremarkable. Five people who happened to also carry a year’s worth of carefully prepared documentation for a set of administrative submissions was just five people with a full bag.
Herself. Mira, because Mira handled the financial documentation and also because Mira was the most composed person in the household under sustained pressure. Caius, for reasons they had discussed at the Varen window. Petra, because formal correspondence was going to be required and Petra’s ability to produce exactly the right document in exactly the right register in minimal time was not something she was willing to operate without.