Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [75]
‘How do I get to meet them?’
Layly Landerchild, by family title a firstmaster in his own right, would have been the sixth member of his family to hold the title of Firstmaster Chairholder of the Company Board. It was the most senior position in the Company and so, more or less by definition, it was the most senior position on Kaldor.
The civilian administration, called for historical reasons the Minor Faction, was devised originally to make group representations to the Company on behalf of the minority of people who were not part of it. This organisation had gradually developed in strength and influence as the relative numbers of such outsiders increased, but it was still nothing like as powerful as the Company itself. It could no longer be totally ignored, however, and it was the angry hostility of the Minor Faction which led to Layly Landerchild being denied the only prize he ever wanted.
To his fury, well-concealed as languid and slightly amused disdain, Landerchild had been passed over for Chairholder in favour of Diss Pitter, a man from one of the minor families whose links to the twenty were so tenuous as to barely count.
‘Firstmaster Pitter must appeal to the Minor Faction for some reason,’ he had remarked in one of his few unguarded moments.
‘Background perhaps. Like calls to like after all.’
There had been Landerchilds on the Company Board for as long as anyone could remember, just as there had always been Roatsons, Mechmans and Farlocks. The thirty man Board was more or less exclusively made up of senior members of the twenty founding families until the Minor Faction began to agitate for what it termed ‘non-blood merit’. After that it was felt politic to encourage an occasional conspicuously non-family candidate to reach for a place at the top table. They seldom proved successful but it was a small enough concession. It was so small in fact that it could hardly be called a compromise, and if it satisfied Minor Faction opinion it was regarded as a worthwhile sacrifice to make. It could even be seen as a useful exercise in Company man-motivation.
It was probably complacency, they decided afterwards, but almost before any of them noticed the senior families had lost their traditional hold on the Company Board and thus on the Company itself. Layly Landerchild’s defeat for Chairholder was only one of the more recent manifestations of a horrifying erosion of the standards which had made Kaldor what it was.
And the situation was getting markedly worse. The latest vacant place on the Board was being contested by two men, neither of whom belonged to a senior family. One of them indeed was a former storm mine captain with no family connections of any kind.
Clearly something drastic needed to be done to redress the balance before the order and civilisation on which everyone depended collapsed and disappeared for ever. The Company, the twenty, the minor families, the Minor Faction, everyone would benefit from a return to the founders’ core values.
Out of the fear of change would come the desire for the stability of the past, a stability that could be restored only by senior members of the senior families. But first there must be the fear.
Once the plan was under way, patience was the essential order of the day. With everything in place it was important that no one in the know stirred the wind and drew too much attention to what was really happening. There would be a time for that. Meanwhile it must be business as usual. But of course this was business as usual. No one on the Board would have expected anything less. The upstart Uvanov should be held to account for his inadequacies.
‘My understanding was that the ARF lacked resources and direction,’ Landerchild remarked. He leaned back in his chair. He was a tall man, no longer young but slim and vigorous, with the relaxed confidence that only psychopaths and those born to unquestioned privilege normally possess. He used the monotone speech affectation