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manage a reputable firm that produces spaceships is certainly preferable to plowing through public transport vehicles. I shall inquire if Lord Tionel would be willing to instruct you in managerial duties.”
    Oddly enough the “managerial duties” Lord Tionel graciously told Lady Rezalla he was willing to teach her body-heir happened to include “managing” the Designer and helping him complete the freighter they had started together. That was only the first of the projects they, and Jeska Mlan, worked on together over the next few years, during which time Lord Tionel outlined for them a ruthless course of academic studies, laboratory experiments, and special use of the smaller Design Room where they could examine and improve on the myriad components of the modern spaceworthy craft. Using his influence, he arranged for them to sit the same engineering examinations that would qualify them for full employment in his, or any other, Ship Yard.
    As for his reckless body-heir, Lord Tionel sent him to the most reputable rehabilitation center available, ignoring the pleas of Lady Vescuya and not informing her in which center her darling son had been placed. Once the center was satisfied with his moral improvement and an acceptable level of responsibility for his own actions, he was to spend a year on a struggling colonial planet to learn what being a First Family scion actually meant. Lord Tionel increased the compensation to all the families of that fatal crash and took a quiet, personal interest in the education and promotion of the surviving siblings.

 
    II
     
    F IVE DAYS after Lady Nimisha reached her full majority of eighteen years, her sire was killed in a freak accident at the Rondymense Ship Yard. She and Jeska were in the office, studying Lord Tionel’s latest and revolutionary design for a spaceship capable of intergalactic distances; his private design code for this yacht was
gold plate.
Having kept a keen eye on her sire’s innovative schemes, Nimisha had already delighted him by making minor, but significant, contributions to his special private project.
    When the alarm alerted the entire yard to a major emergency, the two young women suited up and joined the search party. A space tug had gone out of control, shearing through the shell of a battle cruiser, propelling structural parts off at speed in all directions. One of them had lanced through Tionel’s pinnace as he was returning from a meeting with Admiral Narasharim, head of the Fleet design committee. On such a short, routine journey, he had not been wearing a space suit. Nor had the little ship sufficient shielding to protect its passenger from the steel beam that lanced through the single compartment.
    When Nimisha and Jeska learned the cause and the extent of the disaster, Nimisha paused long enough to calculate the trajectory of Lord Tionel’s route between the navy yard and his office. Knowing the usual velocity of his trip, the vector of the structural member that had hit his craft, and the approximate point of impact, she calculated the likely course of the pinnace after the collision. Then, after both she and Jeska donned EVA garb, Nimisha commandeered a skiff, speeding to the exact location of the collision. She then followed the calculated path until she overtook the wreckage. They found battered human remains and identified the corpse as Lord Tionel’s from his wrist com and what clothing was still attached to his body. Although the Yard personnel as well as the Fleet rescue teams would have given anything to spare the two girls such a ghastly task, they brought his remains in a body bag back to Yard headquarters while other teams were still looking for him. Nimisha and Jeska insisted on accompanying his body back to Acclarke.
    When informed first of Lord Tionel’s death and then of her daughter’s actions, Lady Rezalla fainted for the first time in her life. She had revived by the time Nimisha and Jeska returned from the mortuary. At the