“Not just environmental. They need full closed-system ecology specialists to manage a station’s ecosystem. Ship stuff is a lot simpler.”
The light dawned on me then. “Because the ship can dock, but the dock has to be there.”
He put the tip of his finger on the end of his nose. “CPJCT has specialists to do that. Remember Brill?”
The name took me back stanyers but summoned up an image of the amazing woman who’d helped me before I went to the academy. “Of course.”
“Her master’s degree?”
“Closed-System Environmental Science or something like that?”
He grinned. “Something like that. I know it was a master of science degree in some flavor of station environmental management. You know where she is now?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t heard from her since she graduated.”
“Me either.”
“What good does that do?” I asked.
He shrugged and struck off down the dock toward the ship. “Maybe nothing, but it’s a lead.”
“You think you can find her?”
He shot me another grin. “Finding her should be easy. The larger question is whether or not she’s plugged into the wider world of station environmentals.”
I matched him stride-for-stride as we closed in on our lock. “That would seem to be a logical assumption.” I shrugged. “We’re talking about Brilliantine Smith here.”
“Precisely,” he said and punched the access code for the lock. “Let’s go get paid for this can of rocks while I do some digging through my files.”
Chapter 27
Ice Rock: 2375, June 20
After the sprawling expanse of Mel’s with its blinking signs and the almost brooding aggregation of containers at Dark Knight, Ice Rock looked rather simple and plain. Their docking gallery had only half a dozen docking rings and the whole station looked smaller than the average CPJCT orbital. What they lacked in visual appeal, they made up for in efficiency. We docked just before the watch change at the end of the mid-watch and their cargo handlers had the can off almost before we cleared security.
“That’ll keep us from leaving until we have a new cargo,” Pip said as we watched the station security saunter away down the dock.
“You don’t have one lined up already?” I asked.
He gave a half-hearted shrug. “Maybe. Not sure how much I want it.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Carbon dioxide,” he said.
“Isn’t that a gas?”
“Raw ice,” he said. “Low margin. Barely covers operating expenses and we’d have to take it into Siren.”
“Smuggling?” I asked.
He shot me a sideways grin. “I think of it as alternative sourcing.”
“What else is there?” I asked. “Besides the ice? Isn’t that their specialty here?”
He nodded but screwed up his mouth. “Mostly, but they also ship out a lot of refined gases and smelted metals. A can of refined iron would pay better.”
“How do you find cargoes here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s a cargo listing at CPJCT orbitals. Don’t they do that here?”
“Some,” he said. “Every station is different. Ice Rock has a single broker that’s run by the Dilland company. They control all the cargo leaving the system.”
“And the next can out is CO2 ice?”
“Yeah. There’s another Barbell due in here in about four days.”
“I saw them on approach. Bristol Maru?”
“Yeah. If we wait them out, they’ll get the ice and we’d get the next cargo in line.”
“Is it a better can?”
He shrugged again. “No idea. They won’t tell me what it is.” He grimaced and shook his head. “Thing is, we don’t know if the Bristol will take the can of ice or wait. Nobody else is inbound at the moment, so we can’t know what the luck of the draw will be.”
“That seems screwy to me,” I said.
“Me, too, but that’s how they work it. Probably because they ship a lot of low-priority, low-margin cargo out of here.” He glanced up and down the dock and shook his head again. “If they didn’t insist that the low-margin stuff ship, everybody would line up for better cans and leave the ice sitting in parking orbit.”
“Seems like an opportunity to me,” I said.
He looked up at me with a frown. “How so?”
“Low-cost, low-margin ice? What can you do with that?”
“They process most of it for various commodity goods. Oxygen gas. Carbon nanotubes. Stuff like that.”
“Zero-gee factories?”
“Yeah. They’ve got several scattered out around the system. Do everything from cracking the gas to processing volatiles and growing nanotubes.”
“Logically, this can is surplus raw material? Stuff they can’t process here?”
“Logically,” he said.
“But they have excess smeltery capacity to deal with the raw ore?”
“Yeah. Major investment in belt mining early on. Probably a quarter of all the metals used in the first wave of orbitals came from here. A lot of the belts are playing out, but the smelters still work.”
“So we need to find someplace that can turn the ice into carbon nanotubes, because a can of those would be worth a lot more than a can of raw ice.”
He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You have any idea how to do that?”
“Make nanotubes?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope, but somebody does. Where’s this can going?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Manifest lists a mining outfit in Siren. Moe’s Mining.”
“What’ll they do with it?”
He shrugged. “Tag it as being produced in Siren and sell it into CPJCT somewhere.”
“Think on that,” I said. “And take the can. Two hundred metric kilotons of carbon dioxide ice will get us back up to CPJCT space and I’ll get to see how this operation will work.”
“But the margin is really low.”
I took a couple of ticks to think about that while I admired the docking gallery. Warm, moist air filled the space. Containers with some lush green planting ran along at waist height opposite the locks. “How long have we been out here?” I asked.
“We left Jett in April,” he said. “Almost two months, I think.”
“How much have we earned in two months?”
“Half a billion credits total. Less net of shares and expenses.”
I let those numbers hang in the air for a few moments while I considered. “This ship would be just finishing its first round trip in CPJCT space,” I said. “We left Dree at the end of January and didn’t dock in Jett until early April. Two months and a bit.”
Pip’s smile eased across his face like a sunrise. “I told you it was profitable out here.”
I nodded. “You did. And I’m seeing it for myself. The incremental expense of operation out here isn’t that much compared to the value of the cargoes and the reduction in expenses from running twice as many cans in the same amount of time.”
“So you’re saying ‘Take the can of ice?’”
“I’m saying ‘Don’t be greedy.’ It’ll cover expenses and give us a chance to check in with the board.”
“We’ve been filing board reports every month,” Pip said. “Have been since we formed the company.”
“From here?”
Pip shrugged. “I told you. It’s not what you think.”
“Have we had any communications back?”
“The CEO is pleased with the results so far,” he said.
I gave him a look.
He smirked. “Alys has acknowledged the receipts but nothing more.”
“What about Brill?”
He frowned and bit his lower lip. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Not even a receipt. It’s like the query went into a black hole.”
“Is that normal?”
&n
bsp; He shook his head. “No. It’s been a month. If the address was wrong, I’d have gotten a bounce back. I’ll send another with a tracer.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Last I knew she was in the environmental section of Siren Orbital.”
“Isn’t that where this can is going?”
“Well, Siren, yeah.”
“Maybe we’ll have better luck in person,” I said.
He shook his head. “She’s not there.”
“Can you be sure? Maybe she’s just not checking messages.”
He bit his lip again and screwed up his face for a moment. “Possible. Not probable.”
I had to agree with him. “Where could she be?”
Pip grinned. “The timing is right and she would have been looking for a job.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you were going to start up a new station in Toe-Hold space, who would you tap to run environmental?”
“I’d tap Brill but she’s the only one I know.”
“So would I, but the community is rather small. It’s a specialized field,” Pip said.
“You think she’s working at the mystery base?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Could be Siren holds some answers after all.”
Chapter 28
Siren System: 2375, July 8
We jumped into Siren just after lunch mess. We weren’t carrying as much velocity as we normally would if we’d come from one of the neighboring CPJCT systems, but we’d done a couple of corrective jumps along the path across the Western Annex. Staring out into the Deep Dark always made me appreciate how insignificant we were. Even with the longer legs on the Chernyakova, that trip made me appreciate just how much nothing existed in the Western Annex.
“We’re on course to Moe’s, Captain,” Al said, rousing me from my musings.
“Thank you, Al. Good job, Tom. Secure from navigation stations and establish normal watch throughout the ship.”
“Secure from navigation stations and set normal watch, aye, aye, sar,” Al said and started slapping keys.
I sat there for a few more heartbeats, looking at the pale white pinpoint that was Siren’s primary.
“Something wrong, Skipper?” Al asked, her voice low.
I shook my head. “Just pondering. I almost wound up here when my mother died.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I grew up on Neris. That’s only a couple of jumps from here. She died in a flitter accident and the Neris Company was going to deport me to Siren if I didn’t leave the planet.”
“You got on the Lois instead?” she asked.
“Yeah. Just struck me funny. After working so hard all these stanyers to avoid it, I end up in Siren anyway.”
She looked forward and grinned. “I can see that.”
“At least this way, I’m not in debt, unskilled, or stranded.”
“You’re also not a kid anymore,” she said.
The stanyers slipped through my mind in flashes like beads through my fingers. I grunted and levered up out of the captain’s chair. “Fair trade, I think.”
“What? Your age for the money?”
I shrugged. “That doesn’t hurt, but I was thinking about the experience.” I looked her in the eye. “I used to be worried that I’d be stuck ashore somewhere. Now?” I shook my head. “I’m not going to tempt fate and say it’s not possible, but it’s much less likely than it was when I was eighteen, broke, and the only skill I had was making coffee.”
Her chuckle carried as much bitterness as humor.
Starting down the ladder, I wondered if she had been as stuck on Breakall as I first thought. I glanced back up toward the bridge and suspected I had underestimated the situation.
Chapter 29
Moe’s Mining: 2375, August 15
Docking at Moe’s reminded me more of Mel’s Place than a CPJCT orbital. The station itself girdled a big asteroid in the belt. One end had a massive airlock with a line of ore barges waiting outside. CPJCT officials met us at the dock for a perfunctory inspection but offered no comment on either the ship’s logs or the provenance of our can of ice. Pip thumbed their log certifying that the can had come from Blanchard in the Venitz sector.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” I asked as the CPJCT inspectors walked away up the dock. “Falsifying logs?”
He shrugged. “They know it’s bogus.”
“Why the charade?”
He sighed. “I don’t really know. I mean, the CPJCT knows they can’t survive out here without the Toe-Holds filling in the gaps in their production. They also know they need Toe-Hold space to bleed off the nonconformists and iconoclasts.”
“They just don’t want to make it too easy?”
“I think it’s more about recognizing the rebels’ need to actually rebel. I look at it as a rite of passage. Once you know it’s out there, it’s not that hard to pass back and forth. Until you know? It’s Dunning-Kruger.”
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“How long have you known?” I asked.
He glanced up at me and opened his mouth.
“No lies. How long?”
He closed his mouth and shrugged. “My whole life. I was born there.”
“So the academy is what?”
“A good education. What else?” he asked.
“Running away from your father?”
“Oh, that was real enough. I really don’t want the whole command deck, engineering thing. Never did. Just want to play the trading game.”
“But you didn’t need to take the deck program at the academy. Why fight it?”
He gave me a glance and a snort. “How many cargo classes did you take?”
“Three. Same as you.”
He didn’t say anything, just stood there looking at me with an eyebrow raised.
“So, I could have graduated as a Cargo Third?” I asked.
“Yeah. You checked off a box when you started, same as me. Everybody got the same basic program, right?”
I nodded. “Sure. Never know when you’re going to be left as the captain or chief engineer in an emergency.”
He snorted again. “Like anybody would remember those classes.”
“Granted.”
“Engineering gets a different specialist course load because of the physics and chemistry. Stewards get food handling and diet. The entire cargo course structure is the same as for a deck officer. I took a couple of extra finance and accounting classes while you were playing astrogation games, as I remember.”
“Yeah. You hated the CAP/M math.”
“It was stupid,” he said. “To be fair, I’ve actually used it myself, so that counts for something, I suppose.” He shook his head as if to dislodge that train of thought. “Point is, other than a couple of electives, I had to take the same deck training program you did.”
“Huh.” I had to ponder that for a few heartbeats. “What would you change?”
“Most junior officers don’t get much experience in actual trading. I’d fix that.”
“How?”
“Make a trading simulation for them to participate in. When they join the academy, they’re given a starting line of credit. The one with the most credits at the end graduates first.”
I frowned. “That hardly seems fair.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re competing against all the upperclassmen in the beginning. People who know the ropes and have assets accumulated.”
“How is that different from what we were up against when we started?”
“Well, to begin with, we were working with established entities who had the relationships and assets in place.”
“Maybe you were,” he said.
“You had a ship given to you,” I said.
“I had to make it work,” he said. “Same difference. Yeah, I had some help with starting capital, but I had to turn a profit or my father would have taken the ship back.”
&nb
sp; “I’ll grant you that.”
We stood there outside the lock for a few heartbeats. I considered what he’d told me. “Why’d you agree to go, then?” I asked.
“What? To the academy?”
“Yeah. You didn’t need to go. You could have stayed in Toe-Hold space and nobody would have said anything.”
He nodded. “I could have. That’s what I wanted to do.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He scuffed a boot on the deck plates. “I was going to. In the beginning, I just went through the motions, killing time until I could get back home. That’s what got me into trouble back on the Duchamp.”
“What changed?”
He sighed and looked away from me, staring down the length of the docking gallery for a few long moments before looking back at me. “I found a friend.”
His words surprised me. “I thought I was the one who had no friends.”
He grinned. “I had family. Lots of family.” He shrugged. “It’s not the same.”
We stood and watched the stationers going by for a tick or so. Cargo totes, security types. The occasional cluster of people who might have been spacers. A few CPJCT types in one official livery or another.
“Now what?” I asked.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Now we get on with finding Brill.”
“Still no messages from her?”
He shook his head. “They’ll have our can swapped by tonight. We can move to the orbital after that.”
“Will that help?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. It was her last known address. Perhaps she still has people there.”
“You sure?”
“No, but it’s the best lead we have.”
“And we need a cargo heading back out,” I said.
“That part’s easy. I’ve already got a couple earmarked.”
I snorted.
He laughed. “That’s what you pay me for.”
He had me there. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s tell the crew we’re moving on tonight.”
“Just as well. There’s nothing for visiting crews to do out here except get into trouble.”
“I’m sure they can do that once we dock at Siren.” A stray thought flittered through my brain. “They got into surprising little trouble out in Toe-Hold space.”
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