Suicide Run (Smuggler's Tales From the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper Book 2)

by Nathan Lowell

  “What about the yachts?” Zoya asked. “You said some of the pilots kept their yachts here.”

  “A handful. It’s more like a cheap place to store them than anything they use regularly. Jump-capable yachts aren’t that easy to park without incurring big fees. They get used infrequently and need station ties for maintenance.”

  “Yeah. Management problem,” Natalya said again. “The freighters, you know how they keep crews happy?”

  “Pay them?” Dorion asked.

  “Well, that’s part of it. You’ve got the pieces here. You’ve given us a great place to live. The food’s great. I never worry about fuel or gases for the ship. All the extrinsic rewards are spectacularly high but nobody wants to live here. Do you know why?” Natalya asked.

  “Do you?” His voice carried a bit of a snap.

  “Hey, we’re just the new kids on the block,” Zoya said. “I’m betting we’re almost the only kids on the block and that’s the problem.”

  “Crews tend to stay together, sailing for weeks, even months at a time between docking. The ship docks for a few days. Everybody plays hard. Works hard. Then they do it all again,” Natalya said.

  “And?” Dorion asked.

  “Everybody’s different, but when you’re part of a crew, you’re in it together. You’re part of something larger than yourself and your bunk and your paycheck. You’re a crew.” Natalya pointed at the model. “That’s a good design. It will work well. But you’re taking away the one thing that makes it all work.”

  “Making them single pilots?” Dorion asked.

  Natalya glanced at Zoya before looking at Dorion again. “By not giving them a chance to be part of something bigger.”

  “How can we do that?” he asked. “There’s only room for one on the ship.”

  “She’s not talking about the ship,” Zoya said.

  “Your crews don’t dock here because your crews don’t dock here,” Natalya said.

  “What?”

  “What a crew wants when they dock is companionship. Somebody to look at and talk to that’s not the people they’ve been looking at for two months,” Zoya said. “You know there’s a decent pub here?”

  “Sure. Everybody knows it,” Dorion said.

  “Do you know it’s the only entertainment venue?” Natalya asked.

  “Well, of course I know.”

  “That doesn’t strike you as problematic?” Natalya crossed her arms to keep from slapping him.

  “Why would it be?”

  “What if I don’t want to go to a pub?”

  “Then don’t go,” Dorion said.

  Natalya stared at him.

  “What if she wants to go to a movie? Or go dancing? Or just have a quiet meal with friends in a place that doesn’t serve pub food?” Zoya asked.

  “Where do you eat, Brian?”

  “At home.”

  “Always?” Natalya asked.

  “Of course not. Sometimes we go to Frosty.”

  “We who?” Zoya asked.

  “My wife and I. Who else?”

  “What does she do? She works here on the station?”

  “Yes. HR.”

  “How many people work in HR?”

  “Ten, I think. They only handle the communication station staff. Not like there are a lot of them. The station is largely automated.”

  Natalya glanced at Zoya. “Tell me. Did that department handle our contracts?”

  “Of course.”

  “Does that make us commsta staff?” Zoya asked.

  “No, you’re private contractors.”

  “Contractors you would like, ideally, to live on-station?” Zoya tilted her head to one side.

  “The company would prefer it, yes.”

  “In theory you could have five hundred crews using this station as base. Do you have room for all of them?” Natalya asked.

  “I don’t see what this has to do with the ship.” Dorion’s face had taken on a ruddy glow about the cheeks.

  “Your problem is not the ship. It’s the station,” Natalya said. “Crews won’t dock here because there’s nothing to attract a crew to stay here. They’re going somewhere else. Anywhere else. Probably everywhere else. You were so proud of not being penny wise and pound foolish and you’ve overlooked the one thing that might—conceivably—cut your turnover in half.”

  Dorion’s jaw tightened and his lips flattened into thin lines. “What might that be?”

  “You’re boring them to death.”

  Dorion’s face went slack. “What?”

  “How many permanent party here on this station?” Natalya asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s around a hundred if you count all the techs, maintenance people, and support staff like the concierges.”

  “Where do you live?” Natalya asked.

  “We have a wing on the other side of the station.”

  “What do you do for entertainment?” Zoya asked.

  “The usual things. Dinner parties. I’m a member of a book club. My wife has her gaming friends. There’s an active group of network gamers here. VR simulations. I play a little but I’m not very good. She’s amazing. Top ten on the station. We’ll take a vacation over to High Tortuga for the system finals in a few months.” Dorion smiled. “I’m very proud of her.”

  “Right,” Natalya said. “What will you do on High Tortuga?”

  He shrugged. “Well, she’ll have to play during her matches. In between we’ll probably do a little shopping. Maybe see a show. It’ll be nice to get a meal...” His voice petered out and his eyes grew wide.

  “Some of your pilots dock over at High Tortuga?” Zoya asked.

  “A few,” he said. “It’s not encouraged.”

  “So, here’s the deal, Brian,” Natalya said. “This place is a ghost town. That’s a problem if you’re going to try to cut a few pennies off by building these specialized ships and sending them out for weeks at a time only to have the pilots come back here and stare at the bulkheads until they go out again.”

  “So you’re saying the ships are all right but we need to build what? A bowling alley?” His voice carried a hint of sarcasm that Natalya ignored.

  “Bowling alley. Dance hall. Couple of different restaurants. A hotel.” She shrugged. “Give the pilots who live here one week out of the month something to look forward to docking for.”

  “Free fuel isn’t enough?”

  Zoya sighed. “If it were enough, the passageways would be packed and the docks would be full.”

  “You want me to tell the board that they can save money by opening restaurants?”

  “Just tell the board you need to diversify your revenues by leasing franchises to outside operators,” Natalya said.

  Zoya said, “Ideally, they’d be profit centers. The only expense the station would need to incur is getting enough spaces to accommodate the people who want to set up shop here.”

  “We can’t just let anybody in here,” he said. “This is a secure facility.”

  “So, vet them. Make it part of their contracts. Make them sign the nondisclosures,” Zoya said. “You’ve got five hundred crews working for you now. They’re flying all over the Western Annex. Docking who knows where. Talking to who knows whom. How secure do you think that is?”

  Dorion’s mouth opened and closed.

  “How much less secure will it be to bring in fifty or a hundred service workers to make this place a station instead of a shell?” Zoya asked.

  He took a deep breath and settled back in his chair. He looked at Zoya for several long moments before turning his gaze on Natalya. He glanced at the schematic on the display, then nodded as if to himself. “Of course. We’ll need another wing for permanent party staff. I think we already have empty bays in the central station. We can isolate the actual secure communications gear in the tower easily enough.” He looked up at Natalya and Zoya as if seeing them for the first time. “What about the ship?”

  “If the couch is comfy enough, I th
ink it’s a winner,” Natalya said.

  “Unless you’re going to give the ships to the pilots, I think you hire more pilots than ships and make the cycles shorter,” Zoya said. “Pilots take the ship out for a two- or three-day run and come back, like they’d normally do. Instead of going right out, they dock and swap pilots.”

  “Put the pilots on a rotation schedule instead of the ships?” Dorion asked.

  “I don’t know how you schedule it now, but the only real difference would be that the ships dock every time they come back to unload data. That’s more a function of time than capacity, am I right?” Natalya asked.

  “Yeah. We want the financial data updates as rapidly as possible.”

  “An Unwin Eight would have to maneuver for what? A few days?” Zoya asked.

  “To dock?” Dorion asked. “Maybe a week.”

  “The only problem with these is that jump error coming in on a twenty-BU hop could put them anywhere between here and the great beyond. They’re going to need to end a run with a short jump so they can arrive somewhere near where they need to be,” Zoya said.

  “And start with a short one. Peregrine could jump a couple of stans after undocking.” Natalya nodded at the display. “That ship could probably make a quick hop out within a stan.”

  Dorion stood and held out a hand. “Thank you. Both of you. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  Natalya shook his hand. “Sorry we didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear.”

  He shook his head. “You told me what I needed to know.” He held out his hand to Zoya. “Both of you.”

  Zoya shook it. “I wish you luck with the board.”

  He grinned. “They can be a bit stubborn when they get an idea.”

  Natalya crossed to the door and stopped. “So make it seem like it’s their idea.”

  “Suggestions?” he asked.

  “You have a chief of operations?” Natalya asked.

  “We do.”

  “Catch him in the passageway and tell him you’ve thought about his idea of setting up some service franchises on the station to attract the pilots you’ll need for the new ships,” Zoya said. “Tell him you like the idea and that you’re impressed with the creative way he’s approaching the problem. Then walk away.”

  Natalya laughed.

  “But that’s your idea, not his.”

  “He doesn’t need to know that. By the time he gets back to his office, he’ll think it’s his idea and will claim it when he presents it to the board,” Zoya said.

  “Naw. He’s not that kind of guy.”

  “Bet?” Zoya asked.

  “Bet what?” Dorion asked.

  “Loser buys dinner at the first new restaurant,” Zoya said.

  “Bet,” Dorion said and held out his hand again.

  Zoya shook it and they both grinned. “I hope it’s someplace expensive,” she said.

  “So do I,” Dorion said. “By the way. Report to Dispatch. You’re off on your first circuit tomorrow.”

  “Excellent,” Natalya said. “It’s time to test out the new toys your people installed.”

  “Haven’t you tested them yet?” Dorion asked, frowning.

  “Just in-system here. Not in field conditions,” Natalya said.

  “Well, it’s all pretty easy. Jump in. Grab the data. Jump out to the next system on the route. Rinse. Repeat,” he said.

  “You forgot the ‘don’t get spotted’ part,” Natalya said. “You really think somebody would jump us? We’re just a courier.”

  Dorion shrugged. “It’s not common, but we’ve lost ships before.”

  “Enemy action or just bad luck?” Zoya asked.

  “We believe bad luck. Law of averages. Our ships jump more times in a day than almost everybody else in the Western Annex does in a month. But we don’t rule out somebody grabbing one of our ships to try to get the financial data.”

  “How can they?” Natalya asked. “We can’t even access it.”

  Dorion shook his head. “They don’t know that. We just don’t take chances that we don’t need to.”

  Natalya and Zoya traded glances and shrugs.

  “We’ll do our best to sneak in and out, then,” Natalya said.

  “Safe voyage,” Dorion said.

  Chapter 9:

  CommSta Bowie

  2366, April 8

  NATALYA STRAPPED DOWN while the coffee brewed. She grinned at Zoya. “You like the new nav?”

  Zoya grinned back. “Did you check this itinerary they gave us?”

  “Not in any detail but that’s a lot of stations over three weeks. How many? Eighty something in almost twenty days?”

  “Yeah. Eighty-four.”

  “How many can you plot at once?” Natalya asked. “Set for least time.”

  “I’ve plotted the first six. We have to come back here eight times, counting the last one. That’s going to add a few stans to the run.”

  “How’s it look?”

  “Odd. I’d expect we need to hit them within a couple of days of the last data pickup or the whole scheme falls down.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’d expect.”

  “This list is in alphabetical order. That can’t be right unless they always run in alphabetical order. We’d be jumping back and forth around the Western Annex rather than a least-time route between here and there.”

  Natalya paused. “Good point.” She unbuckled and climbed out of her couch. “Come on. Bring the list.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Scheduling. I’d rather get it cleared up before we leave than try to iron it out after we’ve jumped away.”

  Zoya followed Natalya out of the ship and back onto the dock. It took them only a couple of ticks to get to the scheduling office. The clerk looked up from his terminal. “Peregrine, right?”

  “Right,” Natalya said. “We were prepping for departure and discovered that we didn’t know what order this list is supposed to be in.”

  Zoya held up the drive.

  He held out a hand and Zoya dropped the small device into it. He slotted it into his console and opened the file. Natalya could see the light reflected on his face as he scrolled down through it. “This is in alphabetical order,” he said. “That can’t be right. Where’d you get it?”

  “Guy at Dispatch handed it to me this morning,” Zoya said. “It needs to be in schedule order, doesn’t it? So the data on the buoy isn’t more than a day or two old?”

  The clerk nodded. “Yeah, it should.”

  “Do you have the data for when the last pickup was on each of these?” Natalya asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Can you generate the new query with that data appended to each station?” Natalya asked.

  “Sure. One tick. Do you have the new Mark Twenties?” he asked.

  “No. Sixteens,” Natalya said. “Upgraded last week. Best we could do without ripping out the network and running new fiber.”

  He nodded again. “Your ship profile hasn’t been updated. It’s still showing Mark Tens.”

  “I don’t think she’s had Mark Tens since the ’50s,” Natalya said.

  “It’s a default template. That should have been updated. When you get back from this route, come see me and we’ll reconcile the systems.” He pulled the drive and handed it to Zoya. “You should be able to import that directly so the system will plot your course in order. You can choose best time or least cost and make adjustments for intermediate way points as you go.”

  “So all we need to do is fire it up and hold on?” Zoya asked.

  He grinned. “Basically. The navigation system should be linked to your engineering systems so it knows how much leg you’ve got and when the capacitor should be charged. Most skippers just do a little manual fiddling to get the best approach.”

  “Thanks,” Zoya said and nodded to Natalya.

  “That was painless,” Natalya said as they left.

  “I’m glad you asked. This will save me a lot of time.”
/>   “I’m glad, too. That might have been embarrassing for the company if we’d failed to grab the data in time.”

  “Might have been embarrassing for us to botch our first route,” Zoya said. “Makes me wonder if we’ve been initiated to the tribe.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What if they gave us the file in the wrong order on purpose?”

  “To see if we knew the difference?” Natalya asked.

  Zoya nodded and then jerked her chin toward the Peregrine’s lock. A group in station livery stood clustered around and grinned as they approached. Dorion stepped out of the group with a smile on his face and a package in his hands.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve passed with flying colors.” He handed the package to Natalya. “I heard you like good coffee. Enjoy this on your first route.”

  “You were going let us get underway for the wrong place?” Zoya asked, her jaw clenched.

  He shook his head. “Not at all. Traffic control wouldn’t have approved your departure until we’d confirmed your itinerary and sent you the corrected one.” He looked back and forth between them. “Whose idea was it to go to the source?”

  Zoya looked at Natalya.

  “I might have known,” Dorion said.

  “Well, she spotted the problem while we were trying to manually load the first jumps,” Natalya said. “I just figured the best place to get what we needed was scheduling rather than dispatch.”

  “Good job. Both of you,” he said. “Welcome to the team.”

  After everybody had shaken hands all around, Natalya and Zoya got back to work.

  “That was nice of him,” Zoya said.

  “Giving us a bad routing list?” Natalya said.

  Zoya shrugged. “I was talking about the coffee. He knows how much you like it. Not everybody has your fetish about it.”

  “Still feels like hazing,” Natalya said.

  “How many windows in Hutchins Gym?” Zoya asked with a sideways grin.

  “Twenty-seven to the outside, six ticket, and twelve boxes for real people, not cadets.” Natalya grinned back. “All right. Point made.”

  “Besides,” Zoya said. “We apparently passed.”

  “Apparently.” Natalya finished her pre-flight check and made sure her seat belt was latched. “I’m reserving judgment until I see what kind of coffee he gave us.”