“… we trust some accommodation might be arrived at before we are forced to—” Fat Guy was saying.

“Before your heavies come calling?” she interrupted.

Tall Guy smoothly came in with, “We do hope such methods are not necessary, and had not even considered them.”

These were all clichés, straight from business school. And this pair had probably never gotten the true skinny on how the wormhole got so tangled up in Luna-Earthside disputes. The Library was an antagonist in the many clashes over ownership, management, risk, and investment.

“Look, it wasn’t my fault that damn comet nucleus came unglued on its ride down the grav well and smacked mass into the worm’s Mouth. Pure accident, it was. Pilot training and operations like mine keep the Mouth in line, right?”

Tall Guy nodded and with some effort got a diplomatic expression onto his face. “I know you feel that accountants and lawyers are annoying, but—”

“Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.”

“My colleague and I don’t question why you failed—”

“I wasn’t in charge of screening the comet ices against that solar flare. We used standard reflecting coating to keep the ice from subliming, routine methods. But that big solar flare blew off the shadow coating. Not my department! That storm made the whole damn iceberg start boiling off. It developed expansion fractures inside an hour, killed two women who—”

“We are well aware of that,” Tall Guy’s voice came sliding in like a snake. He had probably laid this conversation out in advance, getting his pitch in shape. To prove his point, he waved a hand and punched a few buttons on his belt. An air display of her account ledgers hung in the air between them, shimmering like a waterfall, the numbers all color-coded so that her debt glared forth in scarlet. A gaudy avalanche of debt. Claire had her share, but Rachel had paid nearly all of hers off by writing an autobiography. Now corps were making a 3-D from it. She scowled.

Tall Guy said languidly, “But there… may… be a way out for you.”

She smiled prettily, arched an eyebrow, said nothing. She had learned that if you let people talk, their love of their own voices could lead them into overplaying their hands. They would babble on, and, immersed in telling whatever story or moral lesson they meant to impart, reveal useful things.

The Library Prefects had indirectly taught her that—in detail—but the idea had originally come from her famously laconic grandfather. Granddad had squinted at her while she went on at a grand family dinner, spinning out a tale that ended in no particular point. Everybody smiled politely and general talk resumed, but a few moments later he had leaned over and whispered in his round burr, “Never pass by a chance to shut up.” She had blinked and thought furiously about that, and learned a lesson that became quite useful.

Tall Guy said with a thin smile, “We can either talk of possibilities or we can seize your ship. Yours and Claire’s.”