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admission was merely frank, and not challenging; Hilton could find no cause to take offense. “Still, we need help. I can grant you that, without hesitation. Let’s go find the foreman; he said he might be in the meal-room this time of the morning. We’ll check there first.”
    It was a way of giving him a tour of the facility, maybe. Hilton looked around him with interest as Dalmoss led him through the administrative offices, across a load-in dock, past the great hulls of not one but three freighter tenders being off-loaded, and finally out into the street and down a half a block to a subsidized meal-room, where Dalmoss paused in the foyer to scan the crowded hall.
    “Look at all these people,” Dalmoss suggested. “You can see our problem. We keep on picking up freight. We’re running out of capacity to handle it.”
    Hilton followed Dalmoss’s lead in looking around him politely. It was very candid of Dalmoss to make such remarks when they both knew that the reason the Combine Yards were picking up freight was that the Okidan Yards and other yards before it had lost capacity, and the freight had to be handled somewhere. The Okidan Yards hadn’t merely lost capacity, of course. The Okidan Yards had lost its staff and its plant, and there was a lot of gossip that blamed Langsariks. Hilton knew the gossip was baseless. It was still an awkward situation to be in.
    Who was that over there by the far wall?
    Kazmer Daigule, sitting at table with some people Hilton didn’t recognize — discussing terms and conditions of hire, clearly enough, public meal-rooms being convenient meeting spaces for people without offices to call their own. Such as Sarvaw mercantile pilots.
    So Kazmer was here to run a Combine cargo.
    That would explain his refusal to come right out and say what he was doing here. Kazmer was Sarvaw. Hilton knew what Kazmer thought of the rest of the Dolgorukij Combine — or at least he knew what Kazmer had to say about other Dolgorukij.
    “I don’t see him here,” Dalmoss said. “Something you need to know about the foreman, Shires. He was at the Okidan Yards when the — when it was hit. He’s only been back at Charid for two days, still in med-assist; so it’s hard for him to get around, or he’d have met you himself. You can thank him for your job. He saw your name on the resource list and grabbed for you.”
    Dalmoss had started to move again; Hilton had to keep up. “That’s flattering. If confusing. What’s one Langsarik among others? You know what I’m saying.”
    Dalmoss grinned. Hilton was beginning to think he liked the man. “I wondered myself. Feraltz insisted. Said you had the leadership skills we were going to need in the remote warehouse. You were an officer? If you don’t mind me asking.”
    “ ‘Was’ being the pertinent word. Yes. Junior officer. But these days I’m just another unemployed Langsarik, like the rest of us.”
    That was unfair, maybe. There were plenty of jobs for Langsariks at Port Charid; that was one of the reasons the Bench had settled them there, after all, to be Port Charid’s very own captive labor pool. There were all the nasty, difficult, soul-wearying, low-paying jobs anyone could want available.
    “A cut above the rank and file, even so. We’re expanding. Fisner will tell you all about it — he said to try Receiving if he wasn’t having first-meal.”
    Fisner Feraltz.
    The name seemed familiar, somehow.
    Dalmoss moved quickly, and there was a lot of territory between the meal-room and the receiving floor. A man could clearly get his exercise, working here.
    Hilton had heard about warehouse operations, and he had an idea of their size from living near Port Charid; but he’d never been so deep inside of a major mercantile complex before. The receiving floor was the size of an asteroid warehouse, it seemed, and there were more freighter tenders there, four of them.
    Four.
    Hilton let his eyes rest on the great beasts that Port Charid used to