The Oilman's Daughter

by Allison M. Dickson

  He wished he’d been a bit more ambiguous.

  “Cecilie? Jefferson? What’s the meaning of this? And why do you have Frank Grant’s ring?” Phinneas didn’t know what Jonathan was talking about, but he looked at the butler’s hand and saw a pretty piece of plastic on the ring finger, and it all started to make a little more sense.

  Confusion and hurt marred Orbital’s face, but the knot of unease Phinneas felt ever since he’d spotted these two on the Ibrahim was finally dissolved. So much was clear to him now that he was buggered he hadn’t seen it all sooner. All Cecilie had ever wanted was to find the right partner for her petroleum process, no matter the cost or how many souls she had to sell along the way to get there. She’d tried to sell him on it, after all, but it looked like she’d found the best deal in the Sultan.

  “Don’t take it personally, Jonathan. We had a lovely night together, and you are awfully sweet, but this is about business. I’m sure the pirate understands how this works.”

  “Understand, lass, yes. But that makes ye no less a conniving bint.”

  “That’s enough out of you, pirate,” Jefferson said. “Cecile, you can shoot him if you want. We don’t need him.”

  “I will do no such thing, darling. He is going to see my father home, and then he’s going to wonder for the rest of his life why he didn’t take me up on my offer the first time I asked.”

  “I’d sooner do a deal with Satan himself.”

  He looked at Orbital, whose complexion had gone nearly purple from the rage he was holding in. Phinneas, still smarting over the betrayal of his First Mate, sympathized with the young man’s plight, but Jonathan had loved this woman enough to want to marry her. And the betrayal of his butler friend had to hurt almost more. The lad had been a naïve fool, but Phinneas felt sorry for him anyway. Idealists were so much like kittens, and he was starting to consider this one a friend.

  “I suppose I can understand Cecilie’s actions, even if they pain me greatly,” Orbital said. His voice was shaking, and his eyes were watery with tears he was likely struggling like hell to hold back. “But you, Jefferson? I’ve known you my whole life. You were my dearest friend.”

  Porter swallowed, but the gun didn’t waver a millimeter. “I’m sorry, sir, but my family has been sitting on that oil patch for quite some time, as you know, and now it’s actually worth something. We finally have an opportunity to make a name for ourselves and be more than servants and slaves. I’m not going to pass that up. I spoke with the Sultan after crossing paths with his people at McKinley Tower, and we came to a nice arrangement. And Cecilie just has a way with . . . words.”

  He took her hand, and the two looked at each other for a brief moment in a way that suggested more than business. Orbital winced as if he’d stuck his hand on a hot boiler, and Phinneas realized he could have shot them both dead right then and there for that, damn the consequences.

  “That is enough sentiment,” the Sultan said. “I want off this stinking teapot. It is unclean.” He barked out an order in Arabic, and a few seconds later, Phinneas heard more footsteps in the airlock. A frail man with a mop of black hair stepped through the hatch. Doctor Renault, he presumed by the resemblance.

  At the sight of him, Cecilie’s face softened a little. “Papa, these men will escort you home to Paris. I will be in touch soon with very good news.”

  The old man merely nodded and allowed Cecilie to hug him with her free arm before she sent him to stand next to Orbital. He didn’t look just tired from the ordeal of his kidnapping and being in space. He looked heartbroken. Phinneas was eager to hear what the scientist thought of his scheming daughter.

  “Just one more moment, Sultan, if you don’t mind,” Cecilie said. “I really am sorry I hurt you, Jonathan. I know how you regarded me, and you were the perfect gentleman. Perhaps we will cross paths again someday, under friendlier circumstances.”

  Orbital clenched his jaw for a moment before he spoke. “I hope to hell we do not. And so should you.”

  Phinneas grinned. Atta boy, lad.

  Cecilie turned to the Sultan. “I believe we are ready now, Sire. Come, Jefferson.” She and Porter returned their pistols into their clothing.

  “Nobody move,” whispered Phinneas to his crew. If anything happened, anything at all, the Sword of Allah would blow so many holes in the Ethershark that it wouldn’t even be worth towing to the Sargasso.

  The Sultan took the lead, followed by his two servants. Cecilie and Jefferson stepped into airlock together. She turned and tipped a wink at both of them. The last thing Phinneas saw before she swung the door shut were two grenades, one in each of Jefferson’s hands.

  There was no time to stand around. Whatever new treachery was afoot, Phinneas didn’t want his ship anywhere near it when it happened.

  “Uncouple from the Sword of Allah and then man your stations!” he barked. “We have to move fast, scallywags. They may yet take a few dozen potshots at us.” The remaining crew mates raced to follow orders.

  Orbital didn’t move at first. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. Phinneas touched his shoulder. “Buck up, lad. Things ain’t all they seem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ye’ll see soon enough. Buckle the old man into a harness and look to yer station. I still need a First Mate.”

  It was just a couple of grenades. The damage to such a huge vessel wouldn’t be great, but Phinneas didn’t want the ship to be in the path of any flying shrapnel. “Sebastian, bring us about and set yer headin’ for Pinnacle Station. Engine room, I want maximum power on all boilers. Give it all she’ll take and then kick her ‘till she squeals.”

  “Aye, Cappin!” called Feng from the engine room below Phinneas’ feet. The Chinaman must have been the ranking officer in the furnace. Phinneas would have to take a head count as soon as they were in the clear. Between his old crew and a few of the new mates Zeric had taken on, he wasn’t really sure who was working for him anymore.

  “Captain! Explosion on the Sword of Allah!” Jeron yelled. A few seconds later, there were a few dings on the hull of the Ethershark as a few small pieces of debris struck it.

  “Damage report!” snapped Phinneas.

  “I think we’re all right, Captain. The explosion wasn’t facing us,” said Jeron.

  Orbital pressed his face against a porthole. “There’s a stovepipe pulling away from the Sword of Allah.”

  Sebastian looked up from his helm controls. “I bet it’s them two. The French lady and the other man. They was sneaky enough to have an escape plan.”

  “Aye, as I suspected. They set up the Arabs, too.” Phinneas wondered if there was a saying about someone being wily enough to convince a Sultan to buy a bucket of sand. If so, it certainly applied to Cecilie Renault, who had likely secured a hefty sum from Abbasi before making off with her new partner.

  “We have to go after them,” Orbital said.

  “And do what? I think ye’re still stuck in cat and mouse mode, lad,” Phinneas said. “That monster’s faster than we are, for one, assumin’ Mister Porter’s grenades didn’t break anything vital. But the most important thing is we want nothin’ more to do with them. She had everyone played down to the end. You, me, the Sultan. Probably even her own daddy.”

  He glanced at Renault again and found him nodding. At least the old man was coherent.

  “I am afraid the captain is right,” he said. “My daughter . . . she is lost.”

  Orbital seemed to deflate before Phinneas’ eyes. He slumped back against the wrecked telemobiloscope set. “You’re right, of course. I just . . . I just still can’t believe it. My father isn’t going to believe what’s become of Jefferson. He’s been part of our family for years.”

  “The promise of great riches does things to a man, especially a man who never had anything of his own,” Phinneas said. “Don’t hold it against him, lad.”

  The rest of the ride was peaceful as Phinneas guided the Ethershark to Pinnacle station, where he intended to drop Orbital and
Renault off before heading back to the grotto for some minor repairs and some much needed rest. Sebastian passed around the small amount of rations they had on board. As Phinneas chewed on some strips of jerky, he found it difficult to stay awake. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so bone weary, not even when he’d awakened in the bed at the Grant farm.

  A few hours later, the Ethershark pulled into the docking station over Paris. Its grand structure contained a great many places where a man of means could find liquid refreshment, a decent meal, and even some willing female companionship, but Phinneas had no desire to see the inside of it. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little bit of a pang at his temporary First Mate disembarking. He and Jonathan had been through the thickest of the thick together, and while Phinneas was happy to be back with his ship and crew, it was going to be a long process of finding his way with them again. And what would they do? Go back to being scavengers and thieves? He didn’t think it would be so easy now. He’d seen too much and lost even more.

  The two men stood at the airlock for a few moments, unsure who should say what first, while Dr. Renault hovered in the background, waiting patiently to leave the ship. Finally, Phinneas reached out his hand.

  “You’re a hell of a First Mate, Orbital. If ye ever want a job as a spacefarer, ye know who to call.”

  Jonathan grinned. “I’m not sure my father would be too pleased with that, but we did have a hell of a time, didn’t we?”

  “Aye. Never a dull moment.”

  “I’ll be in touch soon. I want to discuss a proposition with you, after I get all this mess sorted out with my father, that is. And sleep for about a week.”

  “Looking forward to it. Take care of yourself, lad. And the professor here.” He shook hands with the old man and watched the two of them depart down the narrow passageway.

  A few minutes later, they undocked from Pinnacle Station and Phinneas pointed the ‘Shark toward the grotto. He felt like he hadn’t seen the place in twenty years, so his memories of it were foggy. But there would be food for his aching stomach, and a very big and comfortable bed.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jonathan accompanied Doctor Renault down the elevator into Paris. Renault had a scientist’s fascination with the journey home, which had been so different from his trip up. The Sultan’s men had abducted him from his apartment in the middle of the night and shoved in the trunk of a carriage. After that, they shoved him into a vacuum suit and took him to the edge of space not on an elevator, but on a middleman and then lifted through several hundred feet into the hold of a Fulton that might even have been the Ibrahim. From there, he’d been transferred into the Sword of Allah where the Sultan had given him an ultimatum: relinquish the petroleum refining process or Cecilie would be killed.

  “What choice did I have? She must have then made her own deal with them,” said Renault as he sipped at a bulb of chardonnay in one of the many Pinnacle lounges, where Renault wanted to stop for a drink. Jonathan thought the scientist might have wanted the company, and Jonathan was happy to provide it. He was also happy to suck down some fine French vintage to nurse his own wounds. “For years, she’s been all I had left. Her, and my science. And now I’ve lost her.”

  “She’s not dead,” said Jonathan. “She was in that stovepipe. It arrived at Roosevelt three hours ahead of us. They were already on their way back down.”

  Renault set his bulb in the air beside him, poked it with a finger, and regarded its spin in the microgravity. “Zat does not mean I haven’t lost her, Monsieur Orbital. Cecilie has always seen the world as something to conquer. It frustrated her that I did not share this view.”

  Jonathan nodded in sympathy.

  “It is a beautiful miracle, our world,” said the scientist. “I must admit, I never thought of it in such a broad perspective before. You and your family have truly created a wonder with your railroad. You have made the world a smaller place.”

  “I’m not the only one,” said Jonathan. “Doctor, your technology has the potential to not only power the world, but to completely change the way it works. I met a man in Kansas who was able to develop a new form of light-weight, man-made plastic that would revolutionize industry as we know it. Before he died, he was just waiting for the opportunity for it to go full-scale. All he needed was a reliable source of methane, which you can provide with your process.” Jonathan sipped at his bulb of Kentucky bourbon. “We’re on the cusp of another Renaissance, Doctor. You’re going to be famous for it.”

  Doctor Renault shrugged. “It was never my intent. Now that you’ve seen what atrocities people are willing to commit for this technology, imagine what they will do for the oil itself. I am afraid the future is doomed.”

  Jonathan sighed. Perhaps the scientist was right, but he didn’t want to hear it right now. Not after everything he’d just been through. “Tell you what. Come to Houston with me. You don’t need Paris anymore. We have state-of-the-art laboratories, assistants, funding. The Orbitals have spent decades working for the betterment of mankind, and you can help us continue to fulfill that charge.”

  Renault thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “I suppose there is nothing left for me here now. I have always wanted to see America.”

  They went back to Renault’s apartment one last time to pay off his outstanding rent and to collect the notebooks the doctor had hidden beneath a loose floorboard in the kitchen. They were a bit musty, but filled with notes, formulae, diagrams, and detailing the doctor’s experiments in refining. It was his life’s work.

  “I’m glad it was undisturbed,” said Jonathan, who had worried that Cecilie might have somehow beaten them to Paris and stolen the notebooks ahead of time. The thought of her arriving hours or days after he and Dr. Renault departed and finding nothing but a few spiders under the floorboards brought a smile to his face.

  The two men returned to Houston via the Circumferential Rail. Jonathan spent a good bit of the journey drafting a letter. After he was finished, he addressed it to Phinneas Greaves, Captain of the Ethershark. In the hours between the train’s arrival at Roosevelt and the elevator’s departure for McKinley Tower below, he descended into the bowels of the station and paid a lot of money to the man who ran Roosevelt’s docks, charging him with the delivery of said parcel by whatever means possible.

  The man’s eyes widened at the amount of currency Jonathan handed him, and solemnly agreed to do everything in his power to see that the package reached its intended recipient. Satisfied, Jonathan rejoined Doctor Renault as they waited for the elevator. Despite the sadness at losing Cecilie, there was a spring in his step and if he hadn’t been wearing magnetic boots, he might even have danced a bit of a jig.

  * * *

  Time passed.

  Doctor Renault’s techniques didn’t stay secret for long. Oil became a watchword on every prospector’s lips as the Saudis rolled out their new high-efficiency fuel called gasoline. Not to be outdone, the newly-formed Texas Oil Company—under the visionary leadership of the brothers Jefferson and Lincoln Porter and their third partner, Mademoiselle Cecilie Renault—developed a new internal combustion engine. Carriage manufacturer Henry Ford announced that at least half of his 1908 carriages would use Texas Oil motors instead of the steam-piston drive which they’d used for nearly a decade.

  Jonathan kept checking for a message from orbit with Phinneas’ name on it, but none arrived. Then he made a point of being in the lobby every time the elevator berthed, watching for the dark-skinned man with the shaved head and gold earrings. And still, Phinneas didn’t come.

  After a month, Jonathan stopped checking. The pressures of chasing down investors for the next leg of the Circumferential Rail were taking the bulk of his time, and the remainder was spent with a dark-haired girl from the secretarial pool named Myrtle. She was laid-back, sensible, and didn’t have a devious bone in her body from what he could tell. It was a safe relationship, a comfortable one. Jonathan knew better than to wish for more. The problem wi
th adventure and excitement, he decided, was that it tended to bring out things in him he neither expected nor desire. And yet, he still wished to see the inside of a Fulton again from time to time.

  It was an evening in late November that found Jonathan up to his neck in paperwork, his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows as he sorted through cost analyses in between generous sips of his favorite bourbon.

  “Well would ye look at this,” said a sardonic voice from the office doorway. “Suit and a tie? And here I thought ye’d gotten yer space legs.”

  Jonathan was surprised, but he couldn’t be angry at Phinneas’ sudden arrival after months of silence. He smiled at the pirate, who cut a dashing figure in black leather boots and a matching fringed vest over a cream-colored homespun shirt. A red scarf was knotted around his neck.

  “Good to see you, Captain. You’re looking wealthy.”

  Phinneas shrugged. “Been some good scores up in the Black. More and more teakettles puffing around up there. It’s such busy work for an honest pirate like meself that I’m thinkin’ about hirin’ a second ship.”

  Jonathan laughed. “Come here and have a drink with me, you old bastard.” He poured Phinneas a large tumbler of bourbon, dropped in a couple of ice cubes, and handed it to his friend.

  “Thank ye, lad.”

  “I should thank you. I notice that you haven’t hit any of the Orbital Fultons, or the railway again.”

  “Call it a professional courtesy.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. Did you receive my letter?”

  “Aye, lad. That’s why I came.” He took a lengthy drink of bourbon and licked his lips afterward. “Private security, eh?”

  “Look, the Space Guard is all well and good at trying to keep the peace, but you and I both know that there’s a lot of space out there and not that many cutters to keep watch, especially with the CR expanding its lines. There are more Fultons than ever, and as you said, a lot of easy pickings. Just because you haven’t raided any Orbital ships doesn’t mean we haven’t suffered losses.”