Chapter 5 · Chapter 5 - The Firm

There were three names on the wall: Veyr, Antilles & Sorn.

That was slightly misleading.

There had been other partners over the years, of course. Some had retired, some had left for the judiciary, and one had accepted a government appointment only to discover that public service was considerably less entertaining when one could no longer bill by the hour. Associates came and went. Junior attorneys became senior attorneys, occasionally became partners, and on rarer occasions became cautionary anecdotes told over drinks.

But the firm was Veyr, Antilles & Sorn.

Two of those names belonged to its founders.

The third belonged to the son of one, which had turned out to be remarkably convenient from a branding perspective. When Alden eventually joined the partnership, nobody had to change the sign.

For most practical purposes, the firm meant three people.

All three were, to varying degrees, married to their work.

They simply managed the marriage differently.

Talia Veyr

Talia Veyr was fifty-seven years old and had no patience for anything that could have been expressed in half the time.

This applied to legal arguments, committee meetings, client explanations, restaurant menus and, according to Caro Antilles, at least two of her marriages.

She had been married three times.

She did not consider this especially interesting.

There were two children, a son from her first marriage and a daughter from her third, both now adults and old enough to have developed the useful habit of calling before arriving. Talia loved them deeply and discussed them rarely, partly because she regarded affection as a private matter and partly because the personal lives of senior attorneys had an irritating tendency to become office mythology if allowed sufficient oxygen.

She was currently separated, which, combined with two grown children, left her with a degree of personal independence she found entirely satisfactory.

Much of it was spent at work.

Not because she had nowhere else to be. Talia simply failed to see why an unfinished argument should become less important because somebody had decided that eight in the evening was an appropriate time to stop thinking.

She had met Caro while studying law at university, and the two of them had later founded the firm with Kaelen Sorn, who had been somewhat older and considerably more established than either of them. Of the three founders, Talia had probably been the least sentimental about the entire enterprise.

The firm existed to practice law.

Preferably well.

Everything else was administration.

She was intelligent, fast and extremely difficult to distract. Her sarcasm was usually delivered without any visible effort, which made it considerably more effective. She did not raise her voice when annoyed. She simply began removing unnecessary words from her sentences until the recipient understood that continued discussion was shortening their own life expectancy.

Clients sometimes mistook this for coldness.

They generally stopped doing so when she won.

Talia had a particular talent for identifying the actual problem underneath the problem somebody had brought into her office. She was very good at deciding which battles mattered, which merely felt satisfying, and which should be handed to Caro because he was already angry about them and might as well put the energy to professional use.

She disliked wasting time.

She disliked incompetence more.

And she had built a substantial portion of her career on the principle that neither should ever be rewarded.

Caro Antilles

Caro Antilles was also fifty-seven, although he maintained that Talia had been fifty-seven considerably longer.

They had met at university.

This was a fact Talia occasionally regretted allowing him to remember.

Caro was the easiest of the three to underestimate because he made such an obvious effort to enjoy himself.

He talked with his hands. He talked with his eyebrows. On particularly good days he appeared capable of conducting an entire secondary argument with his shoulders while his mouth remained occupied with the first one.

His jackets rarely survived intact until midday. At some point one sleeve would be pushed up, then the other, but never quite to the same height. Nobody knew why.

Caro himself claimed not to notice.

Talia noticed.

Talia noticed everything.

University had also introduced him to Selah, although she had wisely chosen microbiology rather than law. They married shortly after graduating and, several decades later, remained happily married.

There were five daughters.

Tallie. Rhea. Kaelen. Lina. Jessa.

After Jessa, Talia had asked whether Caro had finally accepted that the universe had no intention of giving him a son. Caro had informed her that he possessed five perfectly functional children already and saw no obvious reason to exchange any of them. Whether that had been his original position was a matter on which Selah might have offered a different account.

His family had long since accepted another fact about him: Caro worked ridiculous hours.

Not reluctantly. Not because the firm demanded it. But because he liked it.

A case could get inside his head and remain there for days. He could leave the office, go home, eat dinner with his family and still be visibly rearranging an argument somewhere behind his eyes. He had been known to disappear halfway through an evening because something had occurred to him, only to return twenty minutes later with a datapad, one sleeve already pushed above the elbow and an expression Selah had learned to recognize years ago.

The work made him happy.

It also periodically drove him completely mad.

His wife and daughters had accepted both conditions as permanent.

Among friends, Caro was warm, talkative and relentlessly sociable. He liked stories, good food, terrible jokes and arguments that could be safely continued over another drink. Humor was not something he deployed merely to disguise discomfort. He genuinely found a great deal of the galaxy funny, particularly institutions convinced of their own dignity.

This did occasionally cause problems.

Caro could be impulsive. A case presented badly enough could move him several steps ahead of strategy before strategy had finished putting on its shoes. He had taken cases because somebody infuriated him, antagonized officials who might have been useful later and once begun dictating part of a filing before anybody had formally decided they were filing anything.

But impulsive was not the same as careless.

The important difference was that Caro could correct. Once the initial flare of outrage passed, he was perfectly capable of looking at his own position, deciding it was untenable and changing it without wasting another hour defending his pride.

Talia valued that more than she ever said aloud.

He was also an excellent lawyer.

The jokes sometimes made people forget.

Usually only once.

Alden Sorn

Alden Sorn was thirty-eight.

He was the only one whose name had not originally belonged on the wall.

The first Sorn had been his father.

Kaelen Sorn had been somewhat older than Talia and Caro when the three of them founded the firm, and for years the name had meant him. Kaelen had supplied experience, contacts, considerable capital and, when necessary, the calm certainty of a man who had already watched several supposedly catastrophic legal emergencies become footnotes.

Twelve years earlier, an aircar accident had killed him. Alden had lost his wife, Veda, and their young son, Velen, in the same crash. The three of them had been traveling together to an awards dinner at which Kaelen was to be honored when their aircar went down.

The accident itself had been one of those ugly Coruscant disasters that became political only afterward. A commercial cargo hauler suffered a catastrophic repulsorlift failure in an upper traffic lane and dropped through several levels of traffic before striking a cluster of smaller vehicles below. The maintenance contractor had already been under quiet scrutiny over falsified inspection records and a series of preferential Imperial procurement renewals. There had been questions in the Senate, then an internal Transport Ministry investigation, then considerably fewer questions once the relevant offices decided the matter had received enough attention. The official finding never changed. Mechanical failure. A terrible accident. Twelve people dead, Alden’s family among them.

In the aftermath, stricter upper-lane transit regulations had been introduced, along with mandatory redundant repulsorlift systems for commercial haulers operating over densely populated sectors. Inspection requirements had been tightened, maintenance records centralized, and several procurement contracts quietly terminated. The reforms had been presented publicly as evidence that the system had worked. None of them altered what had already happened.

Alden had been twenty-six.

There were events after which a person's life divided itself so cleanly that everyone else instinctively understood not to ask what the boundary meant.

He had never remarried.

He almost never spoke about why.

People who met him years later generally encountered the finished version: controlled, courteous, elegant to a degree that never quite became conspicuous. He moved slowly without ever seeming slow, listened without fidgeting and had an unnerving ability to remember names mentioned once several months earlier.

He liked expensive things. That was obvious only if one knew enough about expensive things to recognize them. There were no dramatic labels, no fashionable excess, nothing purchased merely so that somebody else could identify its price. Alden wore fabrics intended to last decades, owned furniture expected to outlive him and regarded genuine craftsmanship as an entirely reasonable justification for spending sums of money that made younger associates briefly reconsider their career choices.

He had inherited wealth. More importantly, he had inherited the complete absence of any need to demonstrate it. Old money did not glitter. It fitted perfectly.

Alden spoke less than Caro and considerably more gently than Talia, but silence should not be confused with passivity. He simply preferred to know where a conversation was going before deciding how much force to apply to it.

Of the three, he was probably the one who maintained the healthiest relationship with work.

Which was not the same thing as working less.

Alden travelled more than either of them. He had fewer reasons to insist that clients come to Coruscant and very little objection to crossing several systems when a matter was better handled in person. His absence from the office for days, occasionally weeks, was sufficiently common that nobody regarded an offworld transmission from him as noteworthy.

But once the work was finished, Alden possessed a skill neither of his partners had ever properly acquired.

He stopped.

He could spend three days in negotiations, close the matter late in the afternoon and then have an excellent dinner without bringing the case with him. If there was an exhibition nearby worth seeing, he saw it. If the hotel was particularly good, he might remain another morning. If the city had something interesting to offer, he did not regard enjoying it as time stolen from his profession.

Caro would have continued thinking about the case over dessert. Talia would probably have brought the case to dessert.

There was something faintly ironic in that.

Caro had Selah and five daughters at home and was the man most likely to lose track of the hour entirely. Talia had two grown children, a separation and almost complete control over her own schedule, and generally used that freedom to work for as long as she pleased. Alden had no family waiting for him at home at all.

He was the one who had made the greatest effort to ensure that he still had a life to go home to.

His father had been one of the founders. Alden was not. He had never pretended otherwise. By the time he became a partner, however, the distinction mattered considerably more to him than it did to anyone else.

And, conveniently, the lettering outside the offices required no alteration whatsoever.

VEYR, ANTILLES & SORN

The same three names. Not quite the same three people. And somehow, still the same firm.

Selra Tann

Selra Tann was born on Coruscant.

This occasionally disappointed people who, upon meeting a Mirialan, apparently expected a childhood involving Mirial, ancient traditions, dramatic journeys across the galaxy and at least one formative spiritual revelation.

Selra had grown up three transit stops from school.

Her parents were civil servants. Not impoverished civil servants desperately saving every credit so that their exceptionally gifted daughter might one day escape the circumstances of her birth. Just civil servants.

Her father worked for the Coruscant Civic Infrastructure Authority. Her mother worked in the Office of Civil Records and Residency. Both had respectable careers, stable salaries, good benefits and the particular kind of professional patience acquired by people who had spent decades watching governments reorganize departments without materially changing what those departments actually did.

Administrations changed. Logos changed. Forms changed. But someone still had to make sure the water reached level 2,314 and that six billion residency records did not accidentally disappear.

The Tanns were comfortably middle class by Coruscant standards, which was a category elastic enough to mean almost anything depending on altitude. They had never been wealthy, but neither had Selra grown up thinking about whether there would be enough money for school supplies, transport or dinner.

Her parents had expected both of their children to study. They had not required either of them to become lawyers, doctors, engineers or anything else suitable for boasting about at family gatherings.

Their son, Selra's older brother, had apparently absorbed the family tradition more thoroughly and entered the civil service himself.

Selra chose law.

Nobody was particularly surprised.

She had always liked rules.

More precisely, she liked understanding what rules actually said, which was not necessarily the same thing as what the person quoting them claimed they said.

Her academic record was good enough to put her in contention for an internship at Veyr, Antilles & Sorn.

She got it.

Then she stayed. That sounded simpler than it had been.

Internships at firms like Veyr, Antilles & Sorn were not charitable enterprises. Nobody there considered potential a substitute for competence for very long. Selra had arrived knowing perfectly well that a strong academic record had earned her the opportunity to walk through the door and absolutely nothing beyond it.

So she worked.

She researched what she was given. She learned which partners wanted concise summaries and which wanted the supporting material immediately available. She learned that Caro Antilles could ask an apparently irrelevant question halfway through a conversation and return to it forty minutes later with alarming purpose. She learned that Talia Veyr could detect an unsupported assertion at distances normally requiring optical equipment. She learned that Alden Sorn remembered mistakes without necessarily mentioning them. Which was somehow worse.

And eventually she stopped being the intern. Then she stopped being the newest junior attorney. Now Selra had cases of her own.

Not glamorous ones, for the most part. Junior attorneys rarely built careers on matters that generated headlines. There were contracts to review, procedural disputes, regulatory questions, clients whose problems mattered enormously to them and to almost nobody else.

They still had to be done properly. That had become particularly inconvenient lately.

Because Selra Tann had also been given access to the most consequential case the firm had touched in years.

Possibly decades.

She understood exactly what that meant. Selra was ambitious. She saw no particular virtue in pretending otherwise. She wanted better assignments. She wanted greater responsibility. She wanted one of the offices with an actual exterior window eventually, rather than one technically capable of seeing daylight if the building opposite happened to adjust its advertising display correctly.

She wanted people to know her name.

And she was perfectly aware that the Thrawn matter could accelerate that process enormously.

Cases like this could alter careers. Being noticed by the partners on a case like this could alter them even faster. Selra intended to be noticed. What she did not intend to do was become the sort of attorney who confused ambition with permission.

There were lines she would not cross.

She would compete for work. She would volunteer first. She would stay late, arrive prepared and make very certain that when an opportunity appeared, nobody could reasonably argue that someone else deserved it more.

But she would not sabotage another junior attorney to create that opportunity. She would not conceal information because sharing it might allow someone else to shine. She would not manufacture another person's failure and call the result merit.

Selra had a sense of honor about these things. Not an especially poetic one. She simply wanted whatever career she built to actually belong to her.

If she eventually became senior counsel, she wanted it because she had earned it. If she ever made partner, she wanted to be able to look around the table and know that nobody sitting there had to pretend not to remember how she had arrived.

The problem, at present, was considerably more mundane.

Thrawn might be the most important client the firm had represented in years. He was still not Selra's only client.

There remained messages to answer, research to finish, filings with deadlines that did not care that half the New Republic appeared to have developed a professional interest in one particular Chiss Grand Admiral.

Her other cases continued existing. This was, Selra had discovered, extremely inconsiderate of them.

So she did what junior attorneys at prestigious firms had always done when presented simultaneously with the opportunity of a lifetime and the ordinary workload required to retain their employment.

She worked more.

For now, it was manageable. Probably. And if it was not, Selra Tann had absolutely no intention of being the first person in the office to admit it.