Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

“What the—?” Knowles said jumping back from the scattering containers.

  Natalya corralled them with her feet until they rolled more or less together in a line across the deck. “Notice anything?”

  “What? They’re bottles of phenol red.”

  “Really?”

  Knowles frowned and leaned down, his head turning slowly as his gaze picked out each of the two dozen bottles spread out in the light. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”

  Natalya held up the original bottle. “This was the top one.” She nodded at the lineup. “About a third of them have a different colored bottle.”

  “That’s not unusual. Different supplier has a different batch of bottles. Those might be a different shipment. Leftover stock that didn’t get rotated. Or the new stock that got rotated to the bottom.”

  “Care to place a little wager?” she asked.

  Knowles’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the bottles on the deck again. “No, but we can check it fast enough.” He snagged one of the odd-colored bottles from the deck and set it aside. Natalya helped him reload the bin.

  They took the two bottles down to the small lab Knowles used in the environmental services department. Knowles drew one sample of water from a vat and split it between two beakers.

  “This should be relatively neutral,” Knowles said. “The reagent should show a yellowy-orange color in both.”

  He used a clear pipette to dip a measured amount from the first bottle and held it up to the light. “This looks all right. Good color and consistency.” He released it into the sample water beaker and they watched as the swirling liquid turned a delicate yellow-orange. “Looks about right. Very close to what we tested it at yesterday. High six, low seven maybe.”

  “So that’s what you’d expect to see?”

  “Well, depending on the sample either more yellow or more orange all the way up to fuchsia.”

  He pulled a clean pipette and sampled the second bottle. He held the sample up to the light. “This doesn’t look right. Color’s too pink and the consistency is too loose.” He released the pipette into the other water sample and the watched as the pink liquid swirled around in the beaker.

  Knowles stared at the two beakers and then lifted the offending bottle to look at it more closely. He sniffed it before screwing the lid back on. “Not phenol red. The opaque bottle masked the contents. I can’t tell what it is without more tests, but it’s not phenol red.”

  “Water and food coloring,” Natalya said.

  Knowles hefted the bottle as if weighing it in his hand. “Might be. Why do you say that?”

  “Cheap dross. Easy to come by. Impossible to trace.”

  Knowles grinned at that. “If that’s the case, we’ve just caught a break.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because water isn’t just water. Every station, every ship. Every source is different. It’s stupidly difficult to match waters at the molecular level.”

  “I thought it was all hydrogen dioxide.”

  “Wrong numbers of atoms. It would be dihydrogen monoxide. It’s more commonly hydrogen hydroxide because of the atomic bonding, but that’s just the basic pure chemical. What we think of as water generally contains soluble chemicals from piping, pumps, even microscopic levels of common contaminants. They’re like a fingerprint for water.”

  “You think you can find the source?”

  Knowles frowned and screwed his mouth around a little like he was tasting something interesting but wasn’t sure if it was good or bad. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Maybe?”

  “I can tell you if the water came from the ship. Or from Dark Knight. I can tell you if it came from someplace else, but without a sample from a known location, we’re left with a fingerprint with no record behind it.”

  Natalya frowned at the pink water swirling slowly in the beaker. “So, maybe five hundred credits’ worth of chemicals?”

  Knowles took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Maybe that amount.”

  “This didn’t happen overnight,” Natalya said. “And it wasn’t somebody random.”

  Knowles looked at her, frowning. “No, that took a lot of time and somebody who knew what to take and what to hide.” He paused, scratching his cheek. “How much do you think they got?”

  “Replacement cost for us will be tens of thousands if the scope is anything like I think it is.” She shook her head. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.” A sudden thought made her start.

  “What?” Knowles asked.

  “Maybe a lot more,” she said and ran up the ladder to the spares locker again. She opened the tool closet, flipped on the light, and stopped dead in her tracks.

  Knowles bumped into her and braced himself on the door frame to lean into the closet. “That seems kind of sparse,” he said.

  Natalya sighed. “If you didn’t know what was supposed to be in here, it would look fine.” She pointed to a shelf just above eye level. “That’s where I’d look to find the coil alignment meter and tools.” She pointed to the space beside it. “Burleson bus coupling balancing tools.” She pointed to a lower shelf near the middle. “Fusactor test equipment.”

  Knowles frowned. “Well, that’s where you’d look but you’re used to fleet ships. Maybe they’re all just stowed someplace else.”

  Natalya slumped against the bulkhead. “That might be worse, in a way.”

  “How so?”

  “Somebody with enough engineering knowledge to know what those tools do moved them from the place where they’d need to be for somebody who needed them to find them. Does anybody aboard have that kind of knowledge?”

  “Besides you?” Knowles asked.

  She chuckled. “Yeah. Besides me.”

  “Solomon, maybe. She trained with an old engineer.”

  Natalya considered that, letting her gaze scan the nearly empty closet. “Solomon’s propulsion. Some of the missing tools, sure. Burleson drives. Even some fuel mix adjustment tools for the kickers.” She shook her head. “Then who took the power tools? That fusactor test equipment would only be useful for somebody who knew how to use it and when.” She looked at Knowles. “You brought your own tools with you, I bet.”

  “Of course. And my own crew.”

  “I’ve got my own tools, too, but they’re just a basic set. Nothing like the specialist tools that should be stored here and belong to the ship.”

  “How much is missing?”

  Natalya shook her head and sighed. “Hundreds of thousands.”

  Knowles gave a low whistle. “That’ll eat into shares.”

  Natalya looked at him and started to laugh. “Yeah. It will indeed.”

  “What’ll you do now?”

  “First, notify the captain. Second, get a valid inventory of the spares locker so we can replenish what’s been stolen when we get to Siren.”

  “Third?”

  “Pray nothing happens between now and then that needs a part or a tool that’s missing,” she said.

  Knowles looked around the tool closet and then the row upon row of bins and storage cabinets in the spares locker. “I’d put that prayer first,” he said.

  Chapter 29

  Siren System: 2363, June 23

  The spares locker seemed too small a space for the enormity Natalya and the captain considered. “Who’d do this?” Trask asked.

  “Who could do it?” Natalya asked. “Somebody who knows enough about the ship and what it’s doing. Somebody with enough knowledge of the engineering division to pull it off.”

  “How long do you think it’s been like that?”

  “Without being spotted?” Natalya shuddered. “No way to know. The only reason I twigged was because of the emitter bus coupling. I went to get the replacement and found all this.”

  “How long must it have taken?” Trask asked.

  “I’ve been asking myself that same question. It’s going to take us days, maybe weeks to get a final and accurate inventory in here. Even allowing for some rudimentary
inventory filtering to take only things that were worth taking, it must have taken months.”

  “That long?”

  “They stole parts and replaced them with similar masses of scrap. They probably worried that somebody might be able to tell if the ship was missing a few tons of mass.”

  “Tons?” Trask said, his gaze sweeping the rows of storage.

  “Probably. Crew mass allotments are calculated pretty carefully in CPJCT space.”

  Trask snorted.

  “Yeah, I know. It gets lost in the rounding errors on tankage alone to say nothing of the food stores.”

  Trask’s eyes widened at that. “You don’t suppose?”

  Natalya bit her lip. “Aren’t food stocks supposed to be rotated?”

  “They’re supposed to be but I’m going to sleep better if Marah can prove that they have been,” Trask said. He cast a final scan around the room. “What do you need to get this straightened out?”

  Natalya considered for a moment. “Somebody we can trust to help with the inventory. Once I know what’s missing, generating a replenishment order when we dock at Siren should be easy, if expensive.”

  “You’re not going to be able to keep this under wraps, you know?”

  She sighed. “Probably not, but I’d like to keep the interference to a minimum.”

  He laughed. “Can’t blame you there. What about Pritchard?”

  “Pritchard?” Natalya shook her head. “Uh. No.”

  “He’s not doing anything else at the moment.”

  “Let me just say, the thought of being cheek by jowl with him for days at a time leaves me less than enthusiastic.” She shook her head. “I’d rather Josh Lyons.”

  Trask opened his mouth as if to speak but closed it again before anything came out. He looked at her with a slight tilt to his head. “Really?”

  She shrugged. “He’s actually a cargo master?”

  “Yeah. I think he was with Sullivan over in Halpern before he came out to Dark Knight.” Trask frowned. “He’s rather disagreeable.”

  “I think he’s probably just carrying too much baggage and can’t seem to drink it away.”

  “You want me to ask him?” Trask asked.

  “You two have a history, I take it?”

  Trask shrugged. “Not as such. I keep putting him on the mission rosters and he keeps coming. More than half his mass allotment is liquid.”

  “He’s probably going to run a little low by the time we reach—where was it? Joe’s?”

  “Moe’s. Moe’s Mining.”

  Natalya raised an eyebrow. “Seriously.”

  “Yeah. Not terribly catchy but she flies under the CPJCT radar.” Trask grinned. “If she didn’t have us making the runs in with cheap ore, she’d probably go belly up.”

  “So Kondur uses her to feed goods into the system.”

  “And siphon off cargoes that we need but don’t want to account for.” Trask shrugged. “Honestly, it’s a shell game and I think TIC does it on purpose to justify their existence.” He paused for a few heartbeats. “So you want me to talk to Lyons?”

  Natalya shook her head. “Lemme try him.”

  “Suit yourself,” Trask said. “You got a fallback position?”

  “I’ll get one of the wipers.”

  “How do you know they’re not in on it?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t know you’re not in on it, but you’re the captain so I’m pretty screwed if you are in any case.”

  He laughed. “I like you, Regyri. Remind me of your father.”

  “I come by it honestly.”

  “That you do, lass.” He sighed. “I better go talk to Marah and see what’s in her pantries.” He shambled toward the locker’s door and stopped at the jamb to look back. “Good work on this.” He waved a hand around the room.

  “Thanks, Skipper. We’ll get it straightened out soon.”

  Trask nodded, pursing his lips but not speaking. When he left, the spares locker seemed a lot larger for not having him in it.

  Natalya pulled out her tablet and sent a bip to Lyons via ShipNet. She didn’t think he’d answer, but at least she’d give him warning that she was coming.

  Natalya knocked on the door. A polite two raps with a single knuckle. When nobody answered, she said, “Chief Lyons?”

  “Go away,” he said. It sounded like he was just on the other side of the panel.

  “Chief, I need your help.”

  “Yeah, right. Go. Away.”

  “Chief? Could we at least talk about it face to face instead of face to door?”

  Lyons snatched open the door and thrust his pallid, sweaty face out of the darkness on the other side. “Here’s my face saying ‘Go away.’ Is that better?”

  Natalya planted her feet and stared into the man’s red-rimmed eyes. “Not really, no.”

  He closed his eyes and his lips pressed into a thin line. “I outrank you. Go away.”

  “I know that, Chief. I need your help.”

  He reached for the door jamb with his free hand and almost missed it. “I’m not in any condition to help you.”

  “You enunciate pretty clearly when you want to, Chief. I do need your help.”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “You’re not going to leave me alone. What is it?”

  “I’ve got an inventory problem.”

  He blinked at her as if trying to process whatever it was she’d just said. “You’re engineering.”

  “I’ve still got an inventory problem. I need your help.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “It’s still true and you keep telling me you can’t help me but you don’t even know what the problem is.”

  He fell against the edge of the frame, propping himself on a shoulder. “All right, Ms. Whoever You Are. Tell me so I can tell you I can’t help you.”

  Natalya lowered her voice. “It’s Regyri, Chief. Natalya Regyri. I’m engineering third and apparently the only real engineer on the ship.”

  “All right. That’s who you are, but why is your inventory my problem.”

  “Because unless we get it straightened out soon, we all might die.”

  Lyons scoffed and shook his head. One shake and he winced before holding very still. “We’re all going to die, Ms. Regyri. Some sooner than others.”

  “I’m aware of that, Chief, but I’d like mine to be later rather than sooner if that’s all the same to you.”

  He sighed and blinked up at the overhead light. “Come in. Keep your voice down, please. I’m planning on having a hangover.”

  “You’re not having one now?”

  He shrugged. “That might be why the light’s so bright out here.” He turned and shuffled back into his stateroom.

  Natalya stepped into the dimness and held her breath for a moment, almost afraid of what she’d inhale. She realized she wouldn’t be able to talk without breathing and took a tentative sniff. Other than a bit of stuffiness and some rather ripe clothing, it wasn’t as bad as she feared.

  Lyons lowered himself onto his bunk and waved at the chair. “Spill. I’ve got a date in a few ticks and don’t wanna be late.”

  “Somebody’s stripped the spares locker of everything of value.”

  One ruddy eye pried itself open and peered out at her. “Engineering spares?”

  “Yes, Chief. They replaced it with useless crap that massed about the same as the missing parts.”

  The eye closed. “That’s inane.”

  “Insane?” she asked.

  “No, Ms. Regyri. In. Ane. As in incredibly silly. Stupid. Might even be puerile, now that I think of it and depending on what they replaced the parts with.”

  “Scrap metal and colored water as nearly as I’ve been able to tell, Chief.”

  “Oh, for the love of all that’s holy in your world, stop calling me chief.” He leaned forward on his elbows and grabbed his temples with his hands. “Mr. Lyons will do but if that’s too formal for you, Josh. Better yet, just tell me what you want
from me.”

  “You’re the cargo master. You know inventory management. I’ve got to take an inventory of the whole damn locker and you’re the resident expert on how to do that effectively.”

  He scrubbed his face with his hands and blew out a breath. “Start on one end. Go through it all, bin by bin. Count what’s there. Mark it on your tablet. It’s not brain science.”

  “I like this plan, Mr. Lyons. Would it work better with a couple of people? One to look and count and the other to mark?”

  He moaned a little. “Just scan the bin label with your tablet. It’ll pull up the record and tell you what’s supposed to be there. Correct it and scan the next.”

  “So you’ll help me, then?”

  Lyons lifted his head up and stared at her. “At what point did I even suggest that might be an option?”

  “You’re clearly the expert at this, Mr. Lyons. I never would have thought to scan the label with my tablet.”

  “Were you raised under a rock?”

  “In one, mostly.”

  “In a rock.”

  “Asteroid station in Valar up in Tellicheri.”

  He closed his eyes and lowered his face into his hands again. After several moments he asked, “Are you still here?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you really want?” he asked, speaking into his hands.

  “Somebody to verify that the counts are valid. I could cheat them myself without an auditor.”

  He sighed. “You’ve never scanned a bin label but you know about inventory audits.” He lifted his head again, looking for all the world like it weighed twenty kilos. “Who are you?”

  “Engineering third officer.”

  “Barbells aren’t rated for engineering thirds.”

  “Depends on who’s doing the rating. We’re not in the High Line anymore.”

  He blinked each eye individually and then together. “I thought we’d jumped to Siren.”

  She smiled. “Now you know why I need an unimpeachable auditor to oversee this.” She gave him a few heartbeats to ponder. “So. Are you going to sit here in this squalid dump feeling sorry for yourself, Mr. Lyons? Or will you come help me save the ship?”

  Her question poked a laugh out of him. “You’re going to save the ship with a spares inventory? How does that work?”