Skyblaze by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Skyblaze
    Solcintra , Liad
     
    It was perhaps a nonsense phrase, but around fares and administrivia
Vertu dea'San Clan Wylan, who was in fact Wylan Herself, delm of
her small clan, allowed it to amuse for most of the early shift,
finding the ease with which it shifted between Terran and Trade,
with at least some meaning attached to it, an instructive
counterpoint to the utter inability to phrase it properly in any of
the modes Liaden provided.
    Somebody ought to do
something .
    It was the ''ought'' of
course, providing the information that melant'i required an action without
indicating in which direction it flowed, nor from which necessity,
nor from which source, the ''somebody'' being a particular problem
for the Liaden sensibility.
    The phrase had become common recently, the
port being unusually beset by Terran travelers left behind or
inconvenienced by this or that ship, change of schedule or sudden
re-routing -- and had today intensified with the sudden advent of a
large vessel full of boisterous mercs with only the most modest of
language resources among them.
    Not that they -- tourists
and travelers and mercs every one -- weren't good for business,
especially at the hours when they were the only business, but they
tended to want something to be done about signs in Trade or Terran where clearly they
were on a Liaden port and should expect Liaden custom to
prevail.
    It was, Vertu acknowledged to herself, true
that the two places most likely to be accessible to non-Liaden
speakers were the elegances of High Port, and the depths within the
shadow of the Tower -- Low Port, where small businesses, some
barely above begging shops, trembled to bring in every last coin,
not disdaining Terran bits or other Terran custom.
    This insight came to her as she finished a
bowl of noodles and cheese with the last sip of wake-up tea from
the corner shop that supplied her meals whenever she had the shift
-- the insight that she too, did not disdain Terran bits.
    For that lack of disdain
she supposed she would forever be among the last and least to
receive invitations or acknowledgment from the Council, but there
-- she was Wylan, and would remain so for some time, and in that
she was secure. She did her best to keep the clan, and if it had
meant that over the relumma she'd opted to add respectable Terran
and Trade lettering to her vehicles, and to choose the larger
rather than the most elegant, and if Most
Serene Travel Experience became Wylan's Port Taxi in
translation, so be it. That the High Houses disdained her survival
was not her concern. That they expected her to bow to them out of
other than necessity was absurd.
    Well, perhaps she ought to bow, just for
practice.
    With that thought she bowed vaguely in
direction of Korval's distant Tree, it being the closest point she
could see that was not of the port and thus not of the Council, and
turned on the comm-retrieval, in case there was commerce.
    *
    The pecking order at the taxi line was
nearly immutable, with latecomers -- meaning those firms or clans
with three generations or less experience -- sitting on the second
line for manual wave-ins, while those older, the ''holding clans''
who had permanent transport licenses with no expiration date,
shared the first line in an intricate dance Vertu could call, but
whose logic was born of something other than service to the
traveling public.
    Clan Wylan ought,
perhaps, not be
be among those called latecomers, being not recent to the trade,
but to the location, but there -- that was an old battle, lost some
generations back when a racing park gave way to manufacturing in a
slyly executed move by an Olanek -- and the Balance for it would
come from someone else, for her need upon retrieving the Ring from
the insensate hand of her predecessor had been to preserve the
clan, which to this point she had done.
    The current Wylan license would grow to a
holding license in only another twelve Standards; Vertu's personal
goal was to take that first