by S. H. Jucha
The question Jordie was now asking himself was whether Lise knew of his profitable little side operation. Being a man who erred on the side of caution, he chose to believe that she did know. Whether Lise did or didn’t know really didn’t matter. She’d laid out her position on the matter. The streak trade was bad for dome business, and anything that was bad for dome business was subject to punishment.
Jordie made the decision to swiftly close his business. He’d give word to his security man, Stevens, who had organized the kitchen suppliers, that the business was ended. It was the same low-level security employee who made the rounds to collect the nuts. In the near future, the kitchen help would find no one coming for their supplies.
Jordie briefly lamented the loss of a good security member, but Stevens was too knowledgeable about his side operation. The individual would soon find a quiet place to rest under Pyre’s rocky soil, a good distance outside the domes.
-3-
The JOS
Captain Jessie Cinders walked down the exit ramp of the Spryte, one of his three mining ships. The Spryte was docked on a JOS terminal arm. Its gravity wheel was shut down, which meant the crew were utilizing deck shoes to adhere to the corridors’ surfaces and the terminal arm’s walkway in the absence of gravity.
Ituau Tulafono, Jessie’s first mate, and two crew members, an engineer and a tech, accompanied him. Jessie’s ships and crews had abided by the lengthy quarantine instituted by Emerson, Lise, and Captain Stamerson, following their discovery of the alien site on Triton, Pyre’s outermost moon.
Still, most stationers worked to avoid contact with Jessie’s crews. Some stationers went so far as to make it their business to brace Jessie’s spacers and shout at them to board their ships and leave, as if they had somewhere else to go.
Having suffered the stationers’ fears and wrath for days, it became standard procedure for Jessie’s crews on the Spryte, Marianne, and Unruly Pearl to maintain safety in numbers. Ituau had taken it on herself to personally accompany Jessie anywhere he went. Stationers had only to look at the heavy-boned woman of Polynesian ancestry, with the shaved head and hard expression, to decide to give Jessie a wider berth.
Jessie and his crew swept out of the gangway onto the terminal arm, walking with the telltale spacer’s gait of ensuring one foot was down before the other lifted.
“Heads-up, Captain!” Toby shouted.
Three of the Spryte’s crew glanced overhead toward the boy floating at the top of the terminal arm and hanging onto a rail. Every terminal arm was equipped with top rails, fastened along its length, for individuals who managed to lose their shoe grip on the deck’s special coating.
However, Jessie, having been forewarned by Toby, spun around. It was déjà vu. But, this time, it wasn’t sixteen-year-old Aurelia, known as Rules to Jessie’s spacers, coming at him. It was a younger, smaller girl. Her face was a study in horror, as she sped toward him. She and Toby had been playing freefall, launching themselves along the terminal arm and performing acrobatic maneuvers.
Jessie caught the young girl in his arms, as he launched off the deck in a backward somersault to lessen their impact. He grabbed an overhead rail short of Toby’s position.
“Nicely done, Captain,” Toby said, with an infectious grin, his red hair floating around his head. “Just like old times.”
“Seems like it, Toby. How’s the leg?” Jessie asked.
“Great, Captain. The BRC took. I’m going to be fine. I’d like you to meet Pena, a friend of mine.”
Jessie released one hand from the rail and offered it to the young girl.
Pena looked from Toby to Jessie and back, her mouth wide open. “You do know Captain Cinders,” she said in awe, and then belatedly shook Jessie’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Pena,” Jessie replied genially. “Yes, Toby and I are old friends,” he added and watched Toby puff up with pride, the boy’s grin widening. “You two, be careful,” Jessie said, as he pushed off to touch down on the terminal’s decking.
“Hey, Ituau,” Toby said, when the first mate passed under him.
“Toby, good to see you again,” Ituau replied. The wide-eyed stare the young girl returned Ituau told the first mate that Toby had scored major points.
At the end of the terminal arm, Jessie tapped a plate to call for a capsule. The main engines of the JOS kept the station aloft in its near planet orbit and imparted spin to deliver gravity to its residents. But, the terminal arms were stationary. That necessitated a transfer mechanism between the two structures. A giant ring revolved around the JOS, which connected the station to the terminal arms structure. Housed within the ring were capsules or caps, as they were called, which could exit the ring to pick up passengers from either side. When passengers were loaded, the ring would snatch a cap, transfer it across its breadth, and exit it on the other side.
When the cap arrived, Jessie and his people boarded, strapped themselves in, and the cap was whisked away by the ring. To accommodate the different orientations of the station and terminal arms, the cap tilted midway through its transition. This allowed the occupants to exit the cap into their destination in the correct orientation.
Entering the JOS main corridor, which was heavy with midday traffic, the crew suddenly became their own island, and the stationers flowed around them like waves fearing to touch the shore. Within minutes, the group left the central corridor, lined with the most prestigious of shops, restaurants, cantinas, and sleepholds. Winding through corridors and taking a lift, they made their way to a quiet section of the JOS.
At a hatch-like door, Ituau smacked the heavy red button, and the hatch slid in and aside. They walked into the midday mealtime noise of a heavily crowded cantina, known as the Miner’s Pit. It had been Captain Rose’s place before he willed it to Jessie.
“Captain,” Maggie yelled over the boisterousness of her customers and greeted him with a hug. “Been waiting for you to visit,” she added.
“Had business to attend to, Maggie,” Cinders said, lifting Maggie and twirling her around once. “I wanted to tell you thanks for your efforts on the Belle’s cantina. Your idea saved my crews’ sanity at Emperion.”
“Aren’t you in a good mood,” Maggie said, laughing at Jessie’s actions, a contrast to his usually no-nonsense demeanor.
“My company and crew have coin in our accounts, Maggie. My people are happy and safe, I might add. No alien infections. What’s not to be happy about?”
“Well, Captain, I’d like to wallow in your compliment, but the cantina’s idea was Harbour’s. I think when she saw spacers relaxing here, she got the idea to have one aboard the Belle. I thought she was trying to set up some kind of competition, but Dingles set me straight, right away.”
“Hmm, and it was Harbour who gave you the credit,” Jessie mused.
“For an empath, there’s a lot to like about that woman, Captain,” Maggie replied. “Changing the subject and speaking of reprobates, how’s Dingles doing?”
“Acting like he was twenty years younger, Maggie. Harbour and other empaths cured him of his space dementia, and he’s busy chasing an empath by the name of Nadine.”
“An empath?” Maggie asked in disbelief.
“Yes, believe it or not. Dingles likes to say that spacers enjoy challenges.” Jessie eyed the crowded cantina and said, “Doesn’t look like a spare seat in the house, Maggie.”
“There will be soon enough, Captain,” Maggie said with determination and marched off toward a table with three spacers, who were done eating and lounging over drinks.
“Belly to the bar with those drinks, spacers. Captain needs a table for him and his crew,” Maggie ordered. The three retirees stood and tipped caps or touched brows toward Jessie. The table was quickly cleaned, and Maggie waved them over.
“Drinks?” Maggie asked. When everyone demurred, Maggie took their food orders on her comm unit, sent it to the kitchen, and returned to her post at the door. She was the cantina’s hostess and manager. Years ago, she ha
d sailed with Captain Corbin Rose before an accident took her arm.
Ituau leaned close to Jessie to be heard and said, “Captain, I’ve been meaning to ask you. What’s the plan?”
“At the moment, it’s downtime for the ships’ crews,” Jessie replied.
“Begging your pardon, Captain, but I don’t think our people are enjoying their downtime,” Ituau said. “The stationers are too jittery about our alien discovery. I notice that our crew members aren’t drinking or carousing much. They don’t want any trouble with station security. They’re making their visits on station brief and returning to the ship quickly after a meal or spending some time with family and friends.”
Jessie eyed the other two Spryte crew members, who nodded their agreement.
“What’s your suggestion, Ituau, if the crew doesn’t want to enjoy their downtime?”
“I say we get back to work, Captain. We made some good coin on the Emperion slush. That made everyone happy, and we know we can do it again and again.”
“We did have a good time aboard the Belle, Captain, whether we were working on the colony ship or on downtime,” the engineer added.
“The colony ship was great,” the tech enthused. “Fresh food, a cantina, people to meet …”
“And empaths,” Jessie finished for the tech.
“Yeah,” the tech agreed with a sigh, which brought chuckles from Ituau and the engineer.
It was a sign of the amazing transformation that a single, sixteen-year-old runaway from a murder charge had wrought on Jessie’s crews. His people would always think of Aurelia Garmenti as Rules, a name her young sister, Sasha, had given her.
Prior to meeting Rules, spacers knew little about empaths and their capabilities to read and influence emotions. But, their fears about them were enough to want to keep the empaths at arm’s length. In truth, spacers couldn’t afford the coin for an empath’s therapeutic time.
Jessie’s ships were stranded at Triton, Pyre’s third, outermost moon, away from resupply from the JOS by the commandant’s extraordinary six-month quarantine. It was the powerful empath leader, Harbour, who managed to pull together some spacers and engineers and break the aging colony ship out of orbit over Pyre and sail it to Triton to save them.
Aboard the colony ship, Jessie’s crews regularly mixed with the empaths, who were grateful for the presence of the spacers, many of whom worked on the ship’s much-needed maintenance. Working with the spacers at Emperion, slinging slush, a primary resource for YIPS manufacturing, enabled the Belle to earn some much-needed coin to see to long-awaited capital expenditures.
“Even Sasha?” Jessie asked innocently. That brought his crew’s heads sharply up. Sasha was a young empath, one of the strongest ever discovered. Having spent her entire life imprisoned in the governor’s house with her mother, Helena, and her sister, Aurelia, Sasha was completely untrained. She tended to have two power positions for her abilities — on and off. There was little middle ground.
“Sometimes you have to take the strange with the wonderful, Captain,” Ituau replied with a grin. “I know Sasha means well by her attempts to perk us up, but she could send you loopy for a half hour. Sometimes, after she sent to me, I couldn’t remember what it was I was headed to do.”
“But you felt good about whatever it was,” the engineer said, adding his own grin.
“Okay, I’ll talk to Captains Erring and Hastings,” Jessie said. “If they concur with your opinions, we’ll pack it up, head for Emperion, and make some more coin.”
The crew’s hearty agreement was cut short, when the food arrived. Expectations of an early launch drove their appetites, and they dove into their dishes.
Jessie had no sooner finished his meal than his comm unit signaled.
Ituau heard the soft, pleasant tones, and she smirked. In all the time she’d been Jessie’s first mate, he’d never programmed his comm unit to respond based on who called him. It had been the default chime for everyone. That was until lately.
“Private call,” Jessie said, standing, and waving his comm unit.
“Sure, Captain,” Ituau said. She pointed toward the manager’s office to prevent Jessie from stepping outside the cantina to be alone.
While Jessie made for the office, Ituau and the other Spryte crew members shared smiles. Their captain had never married and never had a girlfriend longer than the length of a downtime. He still didn’t have a liaison with a woman, unless you considered a business relationship as qualifying. Of all the women who could have captured Jessie Cinders’ fancy, it happened to be Harbour, leader of the empaths and captain of the Honora Belle.
“Hello, Harbour,” Jessie said, when he closed the door to the office.
“Hello, Jessie. Enjoying your downtime?” Harbour asked.
“Yes and no,” Jessie replied. “The YIPS notified me that the Belle’s slush transfer is complete.”
Jessie was using the spacer’s generic term for frozen gases. Despite the lengthy quarantine, Harbour and he had reversed his company’s impending economic disaster, changing it into an abundance of coin. Rather than sit out their enforced time at Triton, where the alien site was discovered, Jessie’s three ships and the Belle had sailed for Emperion.
This moon was covered with a deep layer of frozen gases. It was tidally locked in the planet’s shadow never receiving the warmth of starlight. The spacers made use of the numerous and voluminous, empty water and gas tanks of the Belle to transport the slush.
“We finished the offload, yesterday, Jessie. I received the YIPS payment this morning, and I’ll need your account information to transfer your share of the coin.”
“Are you intent on giving me your share of the payment, Harbour?” Jessie asked innocently. He could imagine Harbour’s shock when she reviewed the enormous amount of funds deposited by YIPS accounting into the colony ship’s general account. The Belle had limped along for generations on the meager earnings of artisans and, lately, the more generous client payments to the empaths.
“You have your share?” Harbour asked in disbelief.
Jessie laughed quietly. “Here’s what I want you to focus on, Harbour. That’s only our first haul, unless you want to quit this partnership,” Jessie suggested in a casual manner.
“Hmm … let me think about that,” Harbour replied. She waited until she heard Jessie struggle to retract his suggestion that they dissolve their agreement. Then she burst out laughing.
“Don’t do that,” Jessie declared. “I nearly fell over, thinking you might be taking my facetious suggestion seriously. I started wondering if another captain had approached you with a better deal.”
“In time, Captain Cinders, you’ll find I’m extremely loyal to the right people,” Harbour replied seriously. “But, back on the subject at hand, how did we make so much coin?”
Jessie was still digesting Harbour’s comment about loyalty. He’d walked away from more than one lucrative deal in his life because he didn’t trust the other individual. He thanked his stars that the personal trait was important to Harbour too.
“Sorry, Harbour, musing there for a second. Uh, prior to negotiating the contract with the YIPS, I did some checking with my sources about the state of business at the JOS and the domes, the backlog of slush at the YIPS, and what the miner captains might be hauling in from the inner belt. I found out the JOS and the domes are intending to expand, the YIPS was already short for slush, and the miners were primarily hauling ore. This told me the YIPS would be desperate for slush.”
“Over how much time have you accumulated these sources?” Harbour asked.
“Some of these contacts belonged to Captain Rose,” Jessie replied. “Many of them were generated by me and my crew. Every captain needs sources to stay ahead of the competition and to make the best deals.”
“How do I go about procuring contacts or sources?” Harbour asked. Her role as captain was new, and she had no formal training as a spacer. Nonetheless, the residents of the Belle, some slightly fewer than 3,000
individuals, had elected her to the position, especially when they discovered Harbour intended to rescue Jessie’s ships at Triton.
“That’s the good news for you, Harbour; you don’t have to go looking for them. They’ll come to you. You and your ship are valuable assets, and you can choose your associations.”
“By that definition, I have one associate. How am I doing?” Harbour asked, her humor slipping out.
Harbour waited for Jessie to respond. As was his custom, silence was his response to her teasing. She patiently waited him out. One of these days, you’re going to go too far, Harbour thought. Then, he’ll run away. She despised comm calls as opposed to sitting beside Jessie. For an empath, who could detect a person’s emotions, the calls denied her sensitivities — they were tasteless.
Part of Jessie pleaded for him to relent. He was more than a little tired of the isolating role of company owner and ship’s captain. “I’ve heard the man has some rough edges, but he plays it straight. You might have made a good choice, rescuing his sorry butt.”
“I thought I did,” Harbour said. Her laughter was soft. Having gotten Jessie to emotionally connect with her, she returned to the problems that her people had encountered.
“Jessie, some issues have come up for this ship. We’re having difficulties obtaining supplies. With Emerson’s most recent decree, none of my people, including Danny and the shuttle, can make the JOS, without the Belle going through a decontamination blowout.”
“Only the authorities have no idea how to blowout a colony ship,” Jessie finished for Harbour.
“Exactly. It’s not like a colony ship was designed to do that sort of thing,” Harbour said, exasperated with the commandant and his edicts. Both Harbour and Jessie knew that it wasn’t just Emerson. Major Finian of JOS security had taken Harbour into his confidence and informed her of the machinations between the commandant and the governor. Subsequently, Harbour had shared the news with Jessie.
“Not to worry, Harbour,” Jessie said. “I’ll take care of your needs with Maggie.”