Which had left the rest of us between a very big rock and a very hard vacuum.

There were still a fair number of smaller routes and some overflow traffic that the Patth hadn't gotten around to yet, but there were too many non-Patth shipschasing too few jobs and the resulting economic chaos had been devastating. Afew of the big shipping corporations were still hanging on, but most of theindependents had been either starved out of business or reduced to intrasystemshipping, where stardrives weren't necessary.

Or had turned their ships to other, less virtuous lines of work.

One of the Patth at the table turned his head slightly, and from beneath hishood I caught a glint of the electronic implants set into that gaunt, mahogany-red face. The Patth had a good thing going, all right, and they hadno intention of losing it. Patth starships were individually keyed to theirrespective pilots, with small but crucial bits of the Talariac accesscircuitryand visual display feedback systems implanted into the pilot's body. There'dbeen some misgivings about that when the system first hit the Spiral—shippingexecs had worried that an injury to the Patth pilot en route could strandtheir valuable cargo out in the middle of nowhere, and there was a lot of nowhereout there to lose something as small as a starship in. The Patth had countered byadding one or two backup pilots to each ship, which had lowered the risk ofaccident without compromising the shroud of secrecy they were determined tokeeparound the Talariac. Without the circuitry implanted in its pilot—and with awhole raft of other safeguards built into the hardware of the driveitself—borrowing or stealing a Patth ship would gain you exactly zeroinformation.

Or so the reasoning went. The fact that no bootleg copies of the Talariac hadyet appeared anywhere on the market tended to support that theory.