Ahokas nodded. “All those dots are Toe-Holds?”
“Everything not in the sector markers is a Toe-Hold. There are more that aren’t in our database, but yes.”
The map showed a blossom of Toe-Holds all the way across the narrow portion of the map and extending well up to Tellicheri in the north and Diurnia in the south.
Bean blinked. “We’re not in the middle of nowhere. We’re in the middle of everywhere.”
Zoya nodded. “Margary over in Dunsany Roads is well out on the western side of the annex. It’s a good location for that side but not so good for trying to serve clients on the eastern side. Venitz is a small operation. I visited it before I went to the academy and it may have grown since then but it’s got many of the same problems as Margary in terms of development, and it’s a long hop from there to the big Manchester Yards in New Farnouk. The operation in New Caledonia is probably smaller and shrinking if they’ve brought in a barge from there.”
“They can’t close Margary,” Bean said. “They’re investing in it. Grinder Eight only came online last year.”
“They’re not closing it. As long as they can service Manchester there, it’s going to stay. They’ll keep paying the rent on it until the belts dry up. Probably beyond.”
“So, what’s this?” Ahokas asked.
Zoya bit her lip for a moment before answering. “This is the new corporate headquarters.”
Natalya shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Zoya looked over at her. “Say more.”
“Margary is the home office of Usoko Mining. Has been as long as there’s been a Usoko Mining. Probably before it was actually Usoko Mining.”
Zoya nodded.
“They’re a recognized CPJCT company. They need to keep that where it is. It needs to be the corporate headquarters to maintain the lease, doesn’t it?”
Zoya wrinkled her nose. “Maybe. I think there only needs to be an office there with authorization to pay the lease.”
“Granted,” Natalya said. “But none of the organized businesses there have recognized branches in the Toe-Holds. I suspect that’s on purpose.”
“Five stanyers ago, I might have argued,” Zoya said. “Keep going.”
“So they’re not moving. They’re expanding.”
“A semantic hair, but you’re making sense.” Zoya looked at the map again. “But this is going to be a massive operation. This will be the hub of all Usoko Mining operations in the Western Annex.”
Natalya felt a cold lump form in the pit of her stomach. “Yes.”
“But if the official main office is in Margary? Who’s going to run this?” Zoya asked.
Natalya looked at Zoya without speaking.
“No,” Zoya said.
“You already passed the test,” Natalya said.
“No,” Zoya said again, louder this time.
Natalya just looked at her, afraid for her and what was about to happen to her.
“They can’t make me,” Zoya said.
Ahokas looked back and forth between Zoya and Natalya. “Make you what?” she asked, her voice soft and timid sounding.
“Make her run it,” Natalya said. “Take her rightful place in the company.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Ahokas asked.
“That’s what my grandparents want. It’s what my grandmother wants,” Zoya said, her gaze boring holes in the map on the bulkhead. Her shoulders slumped. “It’s never been what I wanted.”
“But you’re here,” Ahokas said.
Zoya nodded and gave Ahokas a sad smile. “Yes. I am.”
Ahokas nodded. “Thank you,” she said, then turned and went back up the ladder to the observation deck.
Zoya took a deep breath and seemed to inflate back to her normal self. “Thank you, Mr. Bean,” she said. “You were right. I needed to see that.”
He glanced at Natalya before looking back at Zoya. “You don’t seem too pleased by it.”
She grinned at it. “No, well. Sometimes you really need to see things you’d rather not see. If you don’t face the problems, you can’t solve them.”
His eyes widened. “You think you can solve this?”
“I do, Mr. Bean.” She shrugged. “I only need to figure out what I’m willing to spend to do it, and whether the cost is worth the result.”
He looked down at his keyboard. Natalya saw him biting back the next question as he rolled his lips between his teeth.
Zoya clapped him on his shoulder. “And if it’s not, Mr. Bean, well, that’s a solution, too, isn’t it?”
He looked up at her then. “You’ll solve it,” he said.
“Thank you for the vote of confidence, Mr. Bean. Thank you very much.” She turned and headed for the boat dock. “Nats? Care to share a coffee with me on the Peregrine?”
“Love to,” Natalya said, nodded to Bean, then followed her out.
Zoya didn’t speak until they’d settled in their couches, fresh coffee in their mugs. “It wouldn’t be the worst life,” she said.
“Would you come to resent it?” Natalya asked, holding her mug close to her face and sipping.
Zoya shrugged and sighed. “I might come to enjoy it. Even love it.”
Natalya let that hang in the air for a few moments. “Do you believe that?”
“Yes, actually.” Zoya sounded a little surprised by her own words. “I do believe that it’s possible.”
Natalya sat, sipping, waiting. Listening.
“When I ran the Zvezda Moya,” Zoya said, her voice soft as if coming from far away, “in the beginning I thought it was wonderful. Being in charge. Calling the shots. I knew that I was only telling the crew to do what they would have done anyway. In the routine matters, being captain isn’t anything special. I think the most important lesson I learned from Furtner was to get out of the way when your people knew what to do.” She paused and took another swig of coffee. “I’m glad we stocked up before we went to visit them.”
Natalya chuckled. “I am, too.”
Zoya took another swig before speaking again. “Sometime in those stanyers between taking the captain’s chair and when I left for the academy, it all changed.” She paused. Looking somewhere else. Her focus lost in her memory. “It became less about telling people what do to and more about taking care of the people who trusted me.”
“Was that when you had to punish those guys for fighting?” Natalya asked.
She shook her head. “No, but that might have been the beginning of it. Somewhere in my brain, I stopped thinking about how to punish them and started thinking about what I owed the rest of the crew. I could punish them. I could let them go. I hope Furtner would have stopped me if I’d tried to toss them out a lock, but that wouldn’t have helped.”
Natalya nodded but didn’t speak. She just took a swig of coffee and waited.
“I needed to find something that would be less a deterrent and more a lesson. Not just for them but for the rest of the crew. I needed to take care of them all, not just the two who’d caused the problems. Not just protect the rest of the crew, but something that did all of it.”
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen? Fourteen? Honestly, I don’t really know. That time just sort of blended all together. It was before Furtner died.” She paused. “That’s how I think of it. Before Furtner. After Furtner.” She shook her head. “I know that I’d changed after Furtner had gone. It was all different without him. With him? That’s a little less certain.”
“You wanted to be a captain,” Natalya said.
Zoya nodded, slowly, deliberately, over her mug. “Sitting on the bridge, watching the clippers come and go. Seeing them made me want to leave the humdrum back and forth from belt to smelter and back again. It helped that Pop-pop didn’t discourage me. Gram never really got on board.”
“So you went,” Natalya said.
Zoya pulled in a deep breath and pushed it out through her nose in a rush. She looked across the console at Natalya, a tight smile
on her lips. “I got a great education. Met you. We’ve done way more than I ever imagined in our time together.”
“But?” Natalya asked.
“But I still want to be a solar clipper captain. I want to have a crew and a job and deal with the humdrum of it all. To have those kinds of adventures and take care of my crew in the coldest, most unfriendly, inhospitable environment humans have ever tried to live in.”
“You can do that here,” Natalya said.
Zoya settled back and looked into the distance again. “Not really. I can take care of the people who take care of the people. There’s probably a couple more layers in there. It probably sounds weird but it feels too remote, too distant. Yeah, indirectly you’re right, but I’d be an administrator in an office. I’d be directing, not doing.” She looked at Natalya. “Does that make sense?”
Natalya held her cup over toward Zoya’s and clinked them together. “Perfect sense,” she said.
Chapter 53
Smelter Seventeen:
2368, March 29
Ally Wishes jumped back in just before noon. “How long before they dock?” Zoya asked.
Ahokas checked the scan again. “Probably a week.”
Zoya nodded. “When they check in, do me a favor and ask them to forward the invoice?”
“For the cans they filled for us?”
“Yeah. I need to make sure I have the funds to cover it.”
Ahokas looked at Zoya with both eyebrows climbing her forehead.
“I can loan you some if you need it,” Natalya said.
“You two are footing this out of your own accounts?” Ahokas asked.
“We don’t have company funds to draw on,” Zoya said.
“How are you going to buy three cans of supplies from them?”
“Well, I hope we’ll be able to cover it in cash, but failing that we’ll give them cans of ore,” Zoya said.
Ahokas looked at her with narrowed eyes and a frown on her face.
“What?” Zoya asked.
“That would have to be a lot of cans,” Ahokas said.
Zoya nodded. “We should probably try to find someplace to unload the last cans they brought us. It’s not material we can use right away but the Higbee people say they’ll have the first pieces installed in a couple of weeks. That should give us some room.”
“If you can find me those people who shifted the cans for us, I can unload the goods and reload the empties with the ore stored below. We’ll just be trading mass for mass but it’s better than spacing it.”
Zoya nodded and looked at Natalya. “Can you get Madigan and Fries on that?”
Natalya nodded and headed for the Peregrine to use the radio there. On the way by the banking terminal she stopped and pulled up her balance. She blinked a couple of times to make sure she read the totals correctly and then scrolled through the account activity. The last entry was a substantial deposit from Carstairs Ltd. The note read “Services Rendered.”
She popped back up the ladder. “Uh, Zee? You might wanna check your credit balance.”
Zoya frowned. “Is there a problem?”
“Not exactly. I seem to have been paid by Carstairs.”
“I didn’t know they owed you,” Zoya said.
“I didn’t know either.
Zoya ducked down the ladder with Natalya at her side. “How much did they pay you?”
Natalya leaned closer to Zoya and lowered her voice. “A million credits.”
Zoya froze and looked at her. “Seriously?”
Natalya nodded. “I had to look twice and then scroll up to see the deposit. Six zeros.”
Zoya stepped up to the terminal and keyed her access code. “Well. Huh.”
“You, too?” Natalya asked.
Zoya nodded. “Bounty, do you suppose?”
“For turning in the hijackers?” Natalya asked.
“We didn’t really do anything else.” Zoya frowned then and looked back at her terminal. She keyed something on the screen and took half a step back. “Well, that answers that question,” she said.
“What question?”
“How are we going to pay Ally Wishes?”
“And?”
“I’ve got a Usoko Mining drawing account on my personal profile. I wonder how long that’s been there.”
“When was the last time you checked your balance?”
“Margary, I think. So it could have been any time since we’ve been here.”
Natalya nodded. “We could have paid off Ally Wishes without it.”
Zoya cleared the screen. “If I hadn’t thought so, I wouldn’t have hired him to fetch for us. Of course we haven’t seen his bill yet.”
“What was on the final manifest?” Natalya asked.
“The biggest item was fuel and water for the barges. That’ll probably come in steel bottles like your father brought us. There were some odds and ends for the galley on the Mindanao and a couple of hardsuits for us.”
“Hardsuits?”
Zoya nodded. “I want to be able to visit the work site whenever I need to find out how it’s going.”
“You certified on a hardsuit? That’s not part of the deck program.”
“No, but my grandfather made me get certified before I left for the academy.” She grinned. “Never take them at face value when you can show up and see for yourself.”
“Your grandfather is a hoot.”
“You’re certified, aren’t you?”
Natalya nodded. “Requirement for graduation in engineering.”
“I thought it was,” Zoya said. “Speaking of hardsuits, I haven’t gotten an invoice from your father yet.”
“He won’t send one,” Natalya said. “You’ll have to pin him down when he gets back from Mel’s.”
Zoya said. She glanced toward the boat docks. “Madigan? Fries?”
“Sorry. I got sidetracked by being a millionaire.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Zoya said, grinning. “Now I better go tell Ahokas we’re not paying for this out of our own pockets.”
“Probably a good idea before your grandmother hears you’ve been nominated for sainthood.”
Zoya laughed and trotted up the ladder while Natalya headed for the Peregrine and the radio.
Ahokas keyed the mic. “Ally Wishes, USM17. Over.”
“USM17, Ally Wishes. Go ahead. Over.”
“Ally Wishes, USM17. We’ve cleared the docking ring for you. Hold at ten meters and we’ll get somebody down there to latch you on. Over.”
“Thank you, USM17. Ally Wishes out.”
“How are we doing on the cans?” Zoya asked.
Ahokas shrugged. “Piece of cake. Got a little crowded with everything in there, but we had enough room if we took it slowly and reloaded one can before we tried to open the next. The goods we brought in took up fewer cubes than their weight suggested.” She shrugged again. “We’ve got three cans of rocks on standby under the station.”
“Perfect,” Zoya said. “What else do we need?”
“I think we’re doing pretty well. Things are coming together fast now,” Ahokas said. “We’re going to need more crews—captains in particular but some engineers as well.”
“You have a handle on how many?” Zoya asked.
“Not really,” she said. “Depends on how many come back from Mel’s.”
“Think they’ll take their credits and bail out on us?”
“Some will. Can’t blame them. Credits in the bank and no responsibilities beyond feeding themselves.”
Ahokas’s words jabbed Zoya’s guilt button. Was she doing that? More credits in her personal account than she imagined possible. Was she being selfish by not wanting to pick up the mantle of responsibility for this station? She had to admit it was shaping up to be one the key stations in the Toe-Holds, especially once Manchester showed up.
“What do you want to do, Kim?” The words were out of Zoya’s mouth before she even knew they were in there.
Ahokas turned her head to
look at Zoya, her brow furrowed and her head cocked sideways. “What?”
“What do you want to do? If you could do anything, what would it be?”
“Why do you want to know?” Ahokas’s voice carried more curiosity than caution. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”
“Just curiosity. Sometimes I feel a little self-centered and need to step out of my own head.”
Ahokas laughed. “Dearie, you may be the least self-centered person I ever met.”
Zoya laughed with her. “I guess it’s true. We are all our own worst critics.”
Ahokas shook her head. “Not everybody. Some people aren’t aware enough to realize they should be.”
“I can’t argue that, but you didn’t answer my question.”
Ahokas looked back out at the approaching ship.
“Is it something shameful? You want to be a pirate? What?”
Ahokas glanced at her out of the corner of her eyes. “You’ll laugh.”
“Maybe. Will that matter?”
“I want to do what you do,” she said staring out, her shoulders stiff and her chin high.
“What? Bum around the annex in somebody else’s ship?”
“No,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I want to run a station.”
“Why don’t you?” Zoya asked.
She shook her head. “Not qualified. I know enough to know that. I’m pretty good with the marshaling yard but I have no idea about what else running a station requires.”
“What do you think you’d need to become qualified?” Zoya asked, the kernel of an idea in her heart.
Ahokas looked at Zoya, her eyes widening. “I have no idea. Probably work with somebody who knew what they were doing for a while. See how they handled things. See what mattered.”
“What about education?” Zoya asked. “Ever think of taking an advanced degree in station management?”
Home Run (Smuggler's Tales From the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper Book 3) Page 30