Katarina set the communication stone back in its cradle and sat there for a minute, tapping her finger on the desk.
[Doctrine-certification. A four-hundred-year-old assessor with a Court mandate and a personal connection to my best inscriber. That's quite the problem.]
On Earth, she'd watched this exact thing happen twice. A scrappy company builds the standard, proves the market exists, and then some massive corporation with government backing steps in and announces it'll be handling things from now on, for the good of everyone. Both times, the scrappy company got bought or buried.
[Neither of those is happening to me. But I'm not solving it tonight.]
She banked the desk lamp's array, stood, stretched until her spine popped, and headed down the hall to her room.
