They looked at each other before Ms. Thomas responded. “No, Captain.”
“Morale officer?”
Ms. Gerheart giggled, but Ms. Thomas said, “No, Captain.”
I sipped the cold soup and digested what I’d learned a bit before speaking.
“Who’s the OD right now?”
Ms. Thomas spoke up. “I am, Captain.”
“You’re first watch?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Where are we in the rotation?”
“First is on until 1800, then second, and third section has it tomorrow morning at 0600.”
“So you’re running a straight three watch rotation?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“I assume the second mate has the second watch?”
“Yes, Captain.”
I turned to Chief Gerheart. “You were on last night. You have third watch? Is that normal?”
She looked up, rather uneasily. “Actually no, I was on because Mr. Maloney made me acting captain.” She shrugged apologetically.
“Makes sense. Thank you. I’ll take that watch tomorrow. Please concentrate on making sure the ship is ready for departure.”
“Are we getting underway, Captain?” Chief Gerheart seemed surprised by the notion.
“We don’t make any money tied up at the dock, Ms. Gerheart.”
“Well, yes, but I thought you’d need more time to get used to the ship.”
“Oh, I think I’ll have a lot of time to get used to the ship while we’re underway. What’s our next port of call, Mr. Wyatt?”
“Captain?”
“Where are we going next, Mr. Wyatt?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Captain.”
“You don’t have a cargo?”
He seemed almost bewildered by the question. “I haven’t been given one yet, no.”
“Given one?”
“Well, of course. I get cargo assignments from the office.”
“You wait for them to give you a cargo assignment?”
“How else, Captain?”
“You are aware that this is a free-trade port? Cargoes are available all the time here.”
“Oh, of course, Captain.”
“But you wait for DST to tell you which ones to take?”
“Yes, Captain. How else would I know which ones might be profitable?”
“Thank you, Mr. Wyatt. Let me get back to you on that.”
“Of course, Captain.”
I took a deep breath and pushed the remains of my lunch away. I had lost my appetite suddenly.
“Okay, people. I need to plug into the ship’s systems for a time this afternoon, then I plan to spend the evening with my wife. I’ll be back aboard in time to relieve second watch in the morning. Today’s the eighth. Plan on getting underway no later than the eleventh.”
Ms. Thomas perked up. “Where are we going, Captain?”
“I’ll get back to you on that. I need to check a few things first.”
“Can you do that, Captain?”
“Do what, Ms. Thomas?”
“Just decide to leave without knowing where?”
I considered the overhead and laid a finger on my cheek in a studied pose of consideration. “Yes. Actually I think I can. What I need from each of you, and Mr. Pall when I catch up with him, is the assurance that the ship is ready to get underway.” I didn’t want to alarm them, so I didn’t hold out for assurances that we wouldn’t all die before we arrived. I was beginning to think they doubted their mortality, collectively and individually.
They looked around at each other again, looking faintly impressed. I decided I needed to have a little chat with my new friend Philip Delman.
That would have to wait until I cracked open the ship’s systems and had a good look about in the belly of the beast.
Chapter Seventeen
Diurnia Orbital:
2372-January-09
Around 1330 I settled into the watch station on the bridge. The ship only had four stations–helm, watch, systems, and engineering. There wasn’t enough to the ship–or crew for that matter–to require more. Before I dug in, I fired off an intership message to Delman on the Tinker with an invitation to dinner at Jimmy’s up on deck eight, my treat. They had good fish, better steaks, and the freshest greens on the orbital. They also weren’t cheap, but it was petty cash compared to the value of the information I needed from Captain Delman.
The watch terminal wasn’t configured to swap divisional displays, so I pulled a page from my old skill set and patched it so I could. In reality, that only meant taking out the block that somebody else had put in. There was no good reason for that capability to be blocked on the bridge. All the displays were visible from the captain’s chair. I looked over to it and realized that the chair didn’t have any displays of its own. It made a certain sense.
I scanned the personnel records first and didn’t find anything I hadn’t expected. Only the ratings had any serious black marks and the officers were all running in the “marginal” to “average” in their performance ratings.
Engineering status reports and logs confirmed what Chief Gerheart had said over lunch. Even her assessment of tankage was right on the money. I didn’t see a single thing in that whole division that looked out of place, beyond parameter, or otherwise blemished. I wondered why she only got middling ratings.
I pulled up the ship’s stores and ran through the spare parts and comestibles. It looked okay and I was about to flip the display over to check the astrogation updates, when something odd caught my eye. We had food enough. Head count, calorie availability, and durations were all consistent. I looked again and realized it was all the same food. According to the inventory, the pantry was stocked with about six or seven variations on the same sets of canned goods. The freezer inventory held luncheon meat, and what looked like a bunker load that was almost at its expiration date.
I ran a quick cross reference against procurement and realized that the freezers were full of stuff that had never been used. All but a few dozen kilograms of goods from the original procurements were still in the freezers. While I was there, I checked to see what else the ship had purchased. Standard rates on docking fees, fuel, water, consumable supplies and replacement gasses were in order. On a quick eyeball inspection the system records looked correct. A physical inventory of the freezers and pantries was definitely in order, but if the condition of the stores was anything like the inventory indicated, we had some serious issues.
I pulled up the ship net and sent a message to Wyatt’s tablet. “Please join me on the bridge at your earliest convenience.”
While I waited, I decided to check the ship’s manifest record as well. I wasn’t sure what I’d find, but since I was going to have the cargo chief for a little face time, it seemed a logical thing to do. The record was highly underwhelming with the median port stay being six days, and the average just over seven. The manifests all ran toward the commonest cargoes, nothing very high value and no priorities. A tractor like the Agamemnon could make half again as much on a voyage by taking a high priority, high value cargo like pharmaceuticals or electronics spares. As such, those cargoes were very popular and much in demand. It took a sharp cargo man to grab them up because everybody watched for them. The Agamemnon carried low value, low priority cargo that probably should have gone in a mixed freight container on a larger ship.
My tablet bipped and I opened the inbox to find that Philip Delman had accepted my dinner offer. The time stamp made me look at the chronometer on the screen and realize that my cargo chief had not yet reported to the bridge.
I sighed. “It’s no wonder the ratings are always in trouble.” I muttered it under my breath and I hoped nobody was there to hear it.
I found Wyatt in the galley pushing a broom around.
“Mr. Wyatt, did you receive my message?”
“Message, Captain?”
“Apparently not. Is your tablet malfunctioning?”
He looked surprised
. “I don’t think so, Captain. Why?”
I was beginning to understand a great deal more about why the Agamemnon was the worst ship in the fleet, and it had nothing to do with the ratings.
“Because I sent you a message, Mr. Wyatt. That message should have resulted in your tablet alerting you so you would have known that a message had been delivered to you.”
He smiled. “Oh, in that case, let me check.” He stowed the broom and headed out of the galley.
Intrigued. I followed him out, up to officers country and into his stateroom where he opened his grav trunk and took out the tablet, still bipping for attention. He held it up for me to see. “No, Captain. Not malfunctioning.”
“Can you tell me why your tablet is stowed in your grav trunk, Mr. Wyatt?”
“Safe keeping of course. I’m terribly clumsy, Captain. I’ve dropped a couple and broken them already. I keep this one here in my grav trunk to keep it safe.”
“I see.”
He started to put the tablet, still bipping, back into the grav trunk.
“Mr. Wyatt, you have a message. Don’t you think you should read it?”
“I assumed you’d tell me since you were already here, Captain.” He said it so reasonably.
“What if mine was not the only message, Mr. Wyatt?”
He shrugged in acknowledgment. “Excellent point, Captain.” He lifted it up and tapped the key to bring up the display. “Oh, I see. Do you still want me to join you on the bridge, Captain?” He started to put the tablet back in the trunk.
“You did go to the academy, didn’t you, Mr. Wyatt?”
“Of course, Captain.”
“Where were you before you came here as chief?”
“I did most of my time with Saltzman Shipping. Worked on almost every one of their Leviathans at one point or another. Finally worked up to chief, but they had no openings. So, I wound up here.”
“How long have you been with DST, Mr. Wyatt?”
“Two stanyers next April.”
“Your last performance review wasn’t great. Did Captain Delman talk to you about that?”
“Oh, yes, Captain. We had a nice discussion about initiative and entrepreneurial spirit.”
“I can see that conversation had a large effect on your outlooks and attitudes, Mr. Wyatt.”
“It did, Captain. I’m always on the look out for new opportunities. I haven’t found any yet, but I’m always looking.”
“Mr. Wyatt. Please keep your tablet near you at all times. You don’t need to have it in the holster, but when I send you a message, I really need to know that you’re likely to read it.”
He frowned. “Captain Delman used to just page me on the announcer.”
“Somewhat inconsiderate of watch standers isn’t it, Mr. Wyatt?”
“I suppose so, Captain. I never really thought of it.”
“Think of it, Mr. Wyatt.”
“Now, Captain?”
“Mr. Wyatt, please forgive this question. Are you on drugs? Intoxicated? Anything like that?”
He didn’t seem offended by the question, although he did appear surprised. “Why, no, Captain, why do you ask?”
“What was your graduation rank at the academy, Mr. Wyatt?”
“Well, you know the old joke, Captain? What do they call the officer who graduates last in his class?”
I supplied the answer with growing dread. “Sar.”
He beamed. “So you’ve heard it.”
“Were you always planning to be Cargo?”
“No, I was originally Deck.”
“What happened, Mr. Wyatt?”
“My second year advisor told me that if I wanted to stay in the Academy I needed to change to Cargo.”
“Was any reason given?”
“My grades were low and the evaluations were marginal.”
“Any idea what that might have been, Mr. Wyatt?”
“Well, the work was rather boring and the instructors thought I was simple in the head.”
“Are you?”
“Simple in the head? I don’t think so, Captain, but I probably wouldn’t know because I have no benchmarks for comparison.”
“Do you know the freezers are full of food that’s about to expire?”
“Yes, Captain. We’ve never used any of it, and Captain Delman never gave me any instructions on disposal. According to regulations we are required to have all that food in the freezer, but I’m not sure why since we’ve never used any of it in the time I’ve been aboard.”
“You’ve been handling the mess chores the whole time you’ve been aboard?”
“No, Captain. It’s only been since my last performance review really. Up to then, meals were rather catch as catch can. After the talk about initiative and entrepreneurial spirit, I determined that I would do that to demonstrate. Now I handle stores and fix meals.”
“The pantry is full of canned goods, the freezers are full of food you don’t use. Are all the meals about like what I saw at lunch today?”
“Oh, no, Captain. That was just in-port lunch.”
“And underway it’s different?”
“Of course.”
I almost relaxed.
Then he added, “Underway, I’d open two cans of soup.”
“I should have seen that coming,” I said and scrubbed my face with my hands. “Are the inventories correct, Mr. Wyatt? The systems and the lockers actually match?”
“Oh, yes, Captain. I inventory them every trip. There’s not much else for a cargo chief to do. Between you and me it seems rather a waste, but the regulations say I need to be here.”
I was beginning to get a suspicion about Mr. Wyatt. It was unsettling, but less unnerving than surface appearance. “Tell me, Mr. Wyatt. How exactly do you get cargoes for the ship?”
“Well, after we’ve been in port a couple of days, I call the local DST affiliate and ask for dispatch. I tell them who I am and they give me a manifest. We get the cargo and go where it needs to be delivered.”
“Avery–May I call you Avery?”
“Sure, Captain. That’s my name.”
“Avery, I’m gonna suggest something. Are you doing anything this afternoon?”
“Sweeping the galley, Captain.”
“I want you to plan menus.”
“What kind of menus, Captain?”
“Our menus. Sit down with a calendar, and for every day, put down everything you’d serve for every meal. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack.”
“That sounds easy enough, Captain.”
“Well, I’m going to make it a little more difficult. You can’t have the same meal in any two week period.”
He blinked owlishly. “Two weeks? How many days worth of menu do you want me to do?”
“Well, how long does it take the Agamemnon to go from there to, say, Welliver?”
“I have no idea, Captain. Weeks. Maybe eight weeks.”
I took a deep breath and tried to stay focused in the face of diffusion. “Okay, I want you to do menus for sixty days. Every day. Three meals plus the midnight snack and you can’t serve the same meal twice in a fourteen day period.” He nodded as if he really understood what I was saying. I needed to add one more caveat. “You can’t serve the same meal more than three times in the 60 days.”
“What do you mean by ‘midnight snack,’ Captain?”
“That can be just something that the midwatch can grab when they wake up to go on watch. It doesn’t have to be a sit down meal. It could be just some fruit, or a sandwich, or even soup that could be heated quickly in the microwave.”
“Any other restrictions on the meals?”
“Try to keep caloric distribution even across the three meals. I want to see traditional breakfast foods in the morning, I’d like to see a full, three course meal at noon and evening–that means soup or salad, a main entree with two side dishes, and dessert.”
“I know what a three course meal is, Captain.”
“Sorry. I’m just thinking
out loud here, Avery. I wasn’t sure what I meant myself, so I was just saying it to see if I knew.”
“Okay. How soon do you want these? And do the meals need to be something I can cook? Or just anything that sounds good?”
“Let’s start with anything that sounds good, and I’d like the whole list by morning.”
“Tomorrow morning, Captain?”
“Yes, Avery. I’d like to review the menu list when I take over the watch at 0600.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Do you think you can to that?”
“By morning, Captain? Of course. I could probably have it done in a stan.”
“Really?”
His look of confidence started fading. “I don’t know, Captain, but yes, I think so.”
“Well, Avery, if you think you can run up a sixty day menu in a stan, then I believe you and if you’d send that to my tablet when you’re done, I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure thing, Captain.”
“I’ll let you get on with it then, Mr. Wyatt. I look forward to seeing your solution.”
I left Mr. Wyatt slipping his tablet into the holster and headed for the lock. I needed to see somebody in “Cargo Dispatch” about a cargo.
DST’s fleet admin office was on the oh-five deck and it didn’t take me more than five ticks to go from the lock to the door. The counter clerk looked up when I opened the door and stepped in.
“Captain? How can I help you?’
“I’m Ishmael Wang off Agamemnon and I’d like to talk to somebody in Cargo Dispatch.”
The clerk looked confused. “Cargo Dispatch, Captain? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I was talking to my cargo chief about a cargo for us. He said he gets his cargoes by calling the local office and asking for ‘Cargo Dispatch.’”
“Oh, Agamemnon! Of course. Mr. Wyatt. A lovely man but he sometimes needs a bit of assistance, Captain.”
“What assistance, exactly, do you render?”
“Oh, he calls once in a while and I just pull up the pending freight queue for him and give him the first three on the list that Agamemnon can carry.”
“It’s just luck of the draw? Whatever might be on the free-trade list at the time?”
“Pretty much, Captain.”
“Is there any reason why he couldn’t do that himself?”
Captain's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper) Page 11