'This should be interesting, My Lady. Your next appointment is with the engineer I mentioned to you.'
Honor nodded and straightened her own chair as the quiet knock on the door came-exactly on schedule.
'Enter,' she called, and an armsmen in the green-on-green colors she'd chosen for her steading opened the door to admit the engineer in question.
He was a young man, and there was something vaguely untidy about him. Not slovenly, and no one could have been more painfully clean, but he seemed uncomfortable in his formal clothing. He would, she thought, have looked far more natural in coveralls, festooned with micro-comps and the other tools of his trade, and his nervousness was palpable as he hesitated in the doorway.
'Come in, Mr. Gerrick.' She put as much reassurance into her voice as she could and stood behind her desk, extending a hand in welcome. Protocol called for her to remain seated throughout, as befitted her high office, but she couldn't—not when the youthful engineer looked so unsure of himself.
Gerrick blushed scarlet and scurried across the office, covered with all too obvious confusion, and it occurred to her that he'd probably boned up on the way things ought to go. Well, it was too late for that, and she smiled and left her hand out as he came to a halt before her desk.
He paused a moment, then reached out hesitantly, as if unsure whether to shake her hand or kiss it. She solved his quandary by grasping his firmly, and some of his uncertainty seemed to flow away. He smiled back— shyly—and returned her grip with something like assurance.
'Sit down, Mr. Gerrick.' She pointed at the chair before his desk, and he obeyed the gesture quickly, clutching his briefcase in his lap with a residue of his original nervousness. 'Lord Clinkscales tells me you're one of my senior engineers,' she went on, 'and that you have some special project you wish to discuss with me?'
Gerrick blushed again, as if he felt calling him a senior engineer might be a veiled irony, given his obvious youth, but she only waited, hands folded on her blotter. Her attentive expression must have reassured him, because he drew a deep breath and nodded.
'Yes, My Lady, I do.' He spoke quickly, but his voice was deeper than his undeniable scrawniness might have suggested.
'Then, tell me about it,' Honor invited, leaning back in her chair, and he cleared his throat.
'Well, My Lady, I've been studying applications of the new materials the Alliance has made available to us here.' He ended on a slight upward note, as if asking a question, and she nodded in understanding. 'Some of them are quite remarkable,' Gerrick went on with greater confidence. 'In fact, I've been particularly impressed by the possibilities of the new crystoplast.'
He paused, and Honor rubbed the tip of her nose. Crystoplast wasn't really all that new, though it might be to a Grayson engineer. The armorplast routinely used in spacecraft was far more advanced; in fact, it had relegated the cheaper crystoplast almost exclusively to civilian industry, where design tolerances could be traded off against cost savings, and it took her a moment to fix the differences between the two of them in her mind.
'All right, Mr. Gerrick,' she said. 'I'm with you. May I assume this project of yours employs crystoplast?'
'Yes, My Lady.' Gerrick leaned forward, the last of his nervousness fading as eagerness took over. 'We've never had anything with that much tensile strength—not on Grayson. It offers a whole new range of possibilities for enviro engineering. Why, we could dome whole towns and cities with it!'
Honor nodded in sudden understanding. Grayson's heavy metal concentrations made simple atmospheric dust an all too real danger. Provision for internal over-pressure and filtration systems were as routine in Grayson building codes as roofs were on other planets, and public structures—like Protector's Palace, or her own steadholder's mansion—were built under climate-controlled domes as a matter of course.
She rubbed her nose again, then glanced at Clinkscales. The regent was watching Gerrick with a slight smile, one that mingled approval with a hint of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she turned back to the engineer.
'I imagine you're right, Mr. Gerrick. And, under the circumstances, I suppose Harrington Steading would be a good place to start doing it. We could incorporate city domes from the ground up, as it were, couldn't we?'
'Yes, My Lady. But that's not all we could do. We could build entire farms under crystoplast!'
'Farms?' Honor asked in some surprise, and Gerrick nodded firmly.
'Yes, My Lady. Farms. I've got the cost projections here-' he started digging into his briefcase, his face alight with eagerness '—and once we take long-term operational expenses into consideration, production costs would be much lower than in the orbital habitats. We could cut transportation costs, too, and—'
'Just a moment, Adam,' Clinkscales interrupted with surprising gentleness. Gerrick looked quickly at the regent, and Clinkscales gave a slight headshake as he turned to Honor.
'I've seen Adam's—Mr. Gerrick's—figures, My Lady, and he's quite right. His domes would provide a marked decrease over the orbital farms in cost-per-yield. Unfortunately, our farmers are a bit... traditional, shall we say?' His eyes twinkled at his own choice of words, and Honor hid a smile. 'So far, Adam hasn't been able to interest anyone with the capital for it in funding his project.'
'Ah.' Honor leaned further back in understanding, and Gerrick watched her anxiously. 'Just what sort of costs are we looking at here?'
'I've designed and costed a six-thousand-hectare demonstration project, My Lady.' Gerrick swallowed, as if expecting her to protest the size, and went on quickly. 'Anything much smaller than that would be too little to prove the concept to the agri-corporations, and—'
'I understand,' Honor said gently. 'Just give me the figure.'
'Ten million austins, My Lady,' the engineer said in a small voice.
Honor nodded. Given the current exchange rate, Gerrick was talking about a seven-and-a-half-million- Manticoran-dollar price tag. That was a bit steeper than she'd thought, but—
'I realize that's high, My Lady,' Gerrick said, 'but part of it's the original soil decontamination cost, and we'd have to work out a lot of hardware for the pilot project, too. Not just the air cleaners, but water distillation, irrigation systems, contamination monitors.... That drives costs up, but once we get all of it down the first time and start mass production, the amortization over follow-on projects would—'
He reined himself in, gripping his briefcase painfully tight, as Honor raised a gentle hand and glanced at Clinkscales.
'Howard? Can we afford it?'
'No, My Lady.' There was genuine regret in the regents voice, and he smiled compassionately at Gerrick as the engineer sagged. 'I wish we could. I believe other steadings would buy into the idea if we demonstrated its practicality, and The Tester knows we could use an export industry. If we made the initial investment to produce the crystoplast and support machinery—not just for farms, but for the city domes Adam's suggested—we'd be in a position to dominate the field, at least initially. That would mean jobs and the revenues to go with them, not to mention a head start on domes of our own. Unfortunately, we're too deeply committed to other projects. It's going to be at least another year—probably two—before we could fund Adams.'
Gerrick sagged further. He made a valiant effort to hide his disappointment, and Honor shook her head.
'If we wait that long, one of the other steadings is likely to get in first, traditional opposition or not,' she pointed out. 'If that happens, we'll be in the position of buying the technology from someone else.'
'Agreed, My Lady. That's why I wish we could afford to do it now, but I simply don't see a way we can.'
'What about the Privy Purse?' Honor asked. Gerrick brightened at the sign of her interest, but Clinkscales shook his head again.
'We're already heavily committed there, My Lady, and even if you withdraw no personal income from it, it would only increase our funding resources by two or three million a year.'
'Could we underwrite loans for it?'
'We're close to our credit limits already, My Lady. A private commercial investment would work, but until we pay down some of our start-up costs, our public borrowing capacity is limited. Much as I would like to see Adam's project tried, I can't advocate further public sector borrowing. We have to maintain some reserve against emergencies.'
'I see.' Honor drew invisible circles on her blotter with her forefinger, feeling Gerrick's eyes on her while
