Saltation by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee

with the pilot's leave, if you will listen to me closely rather than staring at Pilot Waitley, I'm going to tell you what was done wrong."
    Pilot Waitley . There it was again.
    The professor's hands flashed permission request pilot acknowledge so fast she almost had to assume it rather than read it.
    Well, there. If she'd done something wrong she'd better know about it so she didn't have to depend on luck next time. She answered here for learning.
    "Good, good," Professor Chibs said out loud, turning his back momentarily on the class before unleashing a large image of a Slipper to every desk top.
    "Consider this," he said at volume as he turned back to peer at them, "your ship. You are a pilot, the ship is in your care. At what point does local traffic control, or local military for that matter, get to dictate what you do with it?"
     
    Theo felt wrung out, if only from waiting for her errors to be told. Mostly, though, if she'd understood Professor Chibs correctly, the mistakes that had been made weren't exactly her mistakes. It was true that she'd failed to ask landing permission from the Mountain Commissioners, but that was arguably covered under the so-called Port In A Storm protocols.
    Still, it was unnerving hearing her name used in terms of "Waitley's liability to pay for the ship if it were damaged" and, "In space, on a job run, Waitley must, and all of you must, take tactical news reports for your flight zones. That she wasn't informed of this is unfortunate, and that mistake is partially the school's curriculum and partially the fault of the equipment or lack of it on the Slipper. Your ship is your life."
    He paused then, and an image of her Slipper, sitting on the mountain ridge, appeared. She wanted a copy of that—the Slipper looked beautiful!
    "That's it then. No one signed for the ship, no one accepted legal or fiscal responsibility. No one offered, promised, or required a written return-to-ship. No one offered or promised hazard pay or indemnity. No one apologized—well, her instructor did, but none of the authorities on the scene. The debriefing was not done in a neutral location. On-site, the pilot demanded and received, through the intercession of another, more senior, pilot, a very basic securing of the ship, which was well done." Here he fell into hand talk for emphasis: listen listen listen.
    "Do not undervalue detail, people. Do not undervalue info trails. Do not let the bureaucrats overwhelm you to the point that you, as a pilot, cannot fend for your ship. Do not forget that, on the whole, in a trouble spot, you first depend on your ship and yourself. You may listen to traffic control, but you must depend on pilot sense to survive."
    Chib paused again, looked in her direction, and did a sort of half bow.
    "Pilot Waitley, thank you."
    Then he straightened, disappearing the Slipper from the desk tops, and raised his voice.
    "Essay assignment due in ten days is entered into the log. I look forward to your analysis. Next class, back to the forms! Dismissed!"
     

Seven
     
Mail Room
Anlingdin Piloting Academy
    "Do you see that?" Asu whispered fiercely to Theo as they took their place in line. "They're still throwing packages around like they don't care down here! Why doesn't the school just pay for a package system instead of using children like that to do the work?"
    The children Theo was seeing were all bigger than her, and a couple of them were worth watching as they quietly hauled packages from the semi-pods that brought them directly out of the small transport sitting tubed to the building.
    Not only that, for all that they were moving the packages rapidly out of the semi-pods, they didn't seem to be harming anything. As Father had pointed out to her on more than one occasion, the more noise you made, the more likely it was that you were using too much force.
    The mail handlers were making a minimum of noise, their motions precise and controlled. There was no spinning, no random flinging, no