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university physics and chemistry programs: Defense had kept some things sequestered — FTL was only one example of it. The University hadn't taught him or his predecessors what it didn't have access to, and, wondrous to say, the people in Defense who'd understood the data had died, and their successors had just guarded the file drawers without knowing what they were sitting on… until the downloads from the ship in a matter of seconds had obsolesced the secrets the Defense Department was keeping.
    So now the executive branch of the Mospheiran government had no cards to play. Atevi, holding the principle continent, held most of the developed mineral resources. Humans, on the large, mountain-centered island, had to trade fish for aluminum and copper. And human orders for those supplies hadn't yet increased, possibly because the human legislature hadn't moved to authorize the trade; but the aiji had with one pen stroke authorized atevi mines to produce what this ship needed.
    Ceramics and plastics as well as aircraft were all mainland items that Mospheira imported.
Oil
was an import from the mainland. There was oil to the north of the island, offshore, but that had lain right near the highest priced real estate on the island and that development had stalled because the oil supply from the mainland had never been threatened since that discovery.
    The atevi head of state was no fool. The atevi head of state had sold aircraft and oil to the island at very good prices — just as his father before him had done. Aviation guided by the paidhi's reports and the human desire for trade had run out of domestic market and diverted its ambitions toward satellites. It needed a launch vehicle which it planned to build on the island, but to achieve that it had to bring atevi industry up to such a capability itself in order to supply the components. So even before the arrival of the ship was a suspicion in the skies, rockets of Mospheiran design were on the negotiating table, and Patinandi Aeronautics on the mainland had become Patinandi Aerospace.
    The ship arrived: the heavy lift rockets Mospheira envisioned were a dead issue. Plans for a reusable spaceplane arrived from the heavens and in one
day
after accepting the concept as viable the aiji in Shejidan had ordered Patinandi to shift its production of parts sufficient for the commercial air fleet to a somewhat older but still viable facility during the building of an auxiliary aircraft plant.
    Consequent to that pen stroke in Shejidan, and literally before another sun set, Patinandi in Sarini Province had begun packing up the dies and essential equipment for that production for freighting to a province other than Geigi's, a province which was about to profit handsomely.
    And with no one being cast out of a job, the aiji instantaneously and by decree converted the largest aircraft manufacturing and assembly plant in the world to a round-the-clock effort to build a spacecraft, no debates, no committees, no dithering.
Amazing
how fast the whole atevi system could move now, considering that the space program had once been hung up on a committee debate on the design of chemical rocket slosh baffles for three months.
    Half a year ago none of this had existed.
    And depending on the technical accuracy of the paidhi's trans-species interpretation and translation of what were in effect historical documents, that ship down there was going to fly sooner than he was supposed to admit even to Jase. The frame design was by no means innovative; the dual engines, the zero-g systems, the heat shield, and the interactive computers were the revolutionary items.
    And as to
why
atevi accepted this design without the usual debate on the numbers that had previously absorbed atevi attention and slowed projects down to a crawl, why, the numbers of this craft were clearly felicitous and beyond debate, even its engines and computers. Down to the tires it landed on, it was an historical replica of an actual