Page 10 of Mongrels United
The staffer had grown pale. “Put like that….”
“Good. Then I don’t expect to hear anything else about the matter,” Carpenter said dismissively.
That staffer had not lasted long. Over the eleven years Grady had been Siran’s Chief of Staff, the members of the group who worked with her at the big table had been sifted and distilled down to people who knew how to work…and also how to pace themselves. They meshed well, and got things done.
As Grady pulled up the response tracking numbers, the room grew quiet. She looked through the screen at everyone around the table. “You’ve already seen these,” she guessed.
Nods. Glum looks.
“Seventeen percent of the ship watched the announcement,” she read off, then paused. “Seventeen!The apathy is getting worse.”
“It was a positive announcement. A rise in daily calorie limits for those on basic,” Luus Cloet, her deputy, said. “Why wouldn’t they want to watch that?” Luus was sometimes depressingly naïve, but he was a superior strategist who thought in pure, complex systems, instead of linearly, the way most people did. It let him see around corners and pull up unexpected answers.
“They didn’t watch it because they didn’t know it was going to be good news,” Glennis said. Glennis was officially the administration assistant, but Grady could always count on her for the negative take on anything. Which made her useful for bull sessions.
“An extra hundred calories a day isn’t good enough news to make them stir out of their chairs and pick up a pad,” someone else added, so softly, she couldn’t see who spoke.
“The news will reach them sooner or later,” Grady said. “That isn’t the point. Engagement in public affairs is a key indicator of ship wide satisfaction. And the engagement rate is going backward.”
“It’s not the only indicator,” Luus said quickly. “All the others are still strong. Captain Carpenter still remains one of the most popular captains to ever lead the ship.”
“For how long?” Grady asked. She shook her head. “Luus, break down the numbers from last night and try to find a pattern, something that will tell us why no one watched. Everyone else, tell me what you’re working on right now.”
She went around the table, hearing their reports and assessing the priorities of their work, and sometimes moving projects up or down their list.
Everyone settled down to work and the room grew quieter. Glennis put Grady’s mug in front of her, topped up with hot tea, and returned to her seat.
Grady called up the Forum and searched for Nash Hyson. When the page formed, she saw his profile image had been updated since the last time she had seen it, which had been years and years ago. Possibly, it had gone through two five-year updates since then. No wonder she hadn’t immediately recognized him, last night.
Out of curiosity, she flipped to Hyson’s financial page, and scrolled to the bottom for the current balance…and very nearly whistled. Then, feeling like she was prying, she moved on to the affiliations page.
The page went on for much longer than any affiliation page she had ever studied—and she had studied thousands of them, to understand the political interests of anyone who wanted the captain’s time.
Grady scrolled through the long, long list of businesses and groups Hyson was associated with. They were in alphabetical order, so the expected Dreamhawks Tankball Club was about a third of the way down. Hyson was listed as owner. Not co-owner, or major shareholder. He owned the team outright, just as the gossip had claimed.
A negative revenue tool, he’d said last night.
Dozens of Aventine stalls were also on the list. He owned some of them completely and others, he was co-owner. The listed co-owners on those were possibly the stall managers themselves, for none of them appeared twice. Hyson didn’t seem to have true financial partners. Had Hyson bailed the stall managers out of trouble, or staked their start up money? The affiliations page wouldn’t tell her.
“Nash Hyson, Chief?” Luus said softly, next to her.
Grady nodded. “Kailash met with a seller last night, at a Dere Street party.”
Luus lifted his brow. “Heard about those.”
“It was my first time seeing one, too. The parties are…” She paused, frowning. “Well, they’re Hyson’s parties, to begin. Why does the richest man on the ship throw parties in the slummiest area of the ship, and give away drinks?”
“Good will?” Luus suggested.
“The good will of engineers and unemployed? There wasn’t anyone of Hyson’s type there apart from him, and he was—” She brought herself up short. There was no point in advertising that he ran illegal bare-knuckle fights. They were essentially harmless, except to the fighters themselves, and if the fighters were stupid enough to step into the ring, that was their problem, not hers. “—not there to swing his influence around,” she ended, instead.
Luus frowned. She could see the wheels turning in his brain. She’d provoked him into a train of thought by showing him an anomaly. “The parties don’t fit into any pattern we’ve ever discerned for shipboard life,” she added softly.
“No….” Luus murmured, thinking hard.
“Maybe try and figure out what purpose they serve? There were over two hundred people there last night, and we weren’t there ourselves longer than thirty minutes. There could have been more arrive later, or left before we got there.”
“On it,” Luus breathed. He reached for the controls on his desk and brought up a second screen, in front of the one he already had up. The second screen arrayed his statistical analysis algorithms.
