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by Nathan Lowell

Sandy shrugged. “Now aren’t ya glad you talked to your Aunt Sandy?”

  I sighed. “I’m no closer to figuring everything out, but you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  “Hang in there, Ish. You’re in a tough place now but it gets better.” She flashed me a warm smile.

  “Thanks, Sandy.”

  I finished my lunch, bussed the tray, and headed for berthing. I set my tablet to bip me at 13:50 so I would be sure to catch up with Pip. Lucky I did, too, because it bipped me awake before I even realized I was asleep.

  Chapter Five

  Betrus System

  2352-May-15

  Pip was just putting away the swab from afternoon cleanup when I stuck my head into the galley. It seemed so familiar, like I had just stepped out of it, but it also felt like I had not been there in a year. Three months on the watch stander merry-go-round had done odd things to my time sense.

  “What’s goin’ on, Pip?” I asked to get his attention.

  He grinned and waved. “You’ve been such a stranger. I wanted to touch base about Betrus.”

  We got coffee and settled in at one of the tables. “So, what’s the latest off the beacon?” I asked.

  “Prices are good. We’ve got a bunch of mixed cargo in the empty container, and we’ve laid in extra frozen chicken and beef for stores trading. We should do all right.”

  The empty container started as a kind of challenge from Mr. Maxwell. The basic idea was to give Pip an empty container and see how good he was at picking cargos for it. So far Pip’s container had contributed about two hundred kilocreds to the ship’s profit pool. The stores trading was a way that Pip and Cookie reduced overall ship expenditures and got us higher quality ingredients to boot. The ship generally carried stores for four months while underway. Typically we were only out between forty and sixty days, which meant we carried a lot of extra stores from place to place. Pip had worked out a system of rotation and procurement where he bought extra of whatever was going cheap in one port and sold it at a good price where it was scarce. We always had our one hundred and twenty days of stores, but with the way they moved it in and out—buying, selling, and trading in each port of call—Pip and Cookie managed to take a cost center and turn it into a revenue generator. They fed the crew better than before and made creds in the process. It sounded like perpetual motion to me, but the food was great and the captain seemed pleased.

  Pip used my portable to create and run some pretty elaborate simulations. He used automated routines to update his own personal trade database from beacon feeds. He usually ran the simulations for pairs of planets along our projected course. He even had what he called, level one alternatives, which were the ports that the Lois might go to if we got diverted. Mr. Maxwell was impressed and I thought that he might be grooming Pip for something, which would be great as Pip was a good guy and deserved it.

  “—so I was thinking we could just barbecue the kids and sell the parents as slaves,” Pip said.

  “What?”

  “Welcome back.” He snorted a laugh in my direction.

  “Sorry, I’m a bit distracted.”

  “So, I see.” He sipped his coffee. “Wanna see the figures from Dunsany?”

  “Are they good?”

  “Very. We’re walking out with about five thousand one hundred creds and the co-op grabbed another five hundred. There’s a waiting list for booth managers for Betrus and I think we’ll have something like seventy five percent of the crew selling there.”

  “Wow. That’s up from what? Fifty percent on St. Cloud?”

  “Yup. Something like that. Word is spreading and even people who weren’t really interested in the past are now climbing on the cargo train.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. von Ickles got in on the act. We had a little discussion about the co-op when I tested last cycle.”

  “What’d he say?” Pip asked.

  “That we make more than he does.”

  Pip laughed at that. “Probably so. Third mates get a good share and a nice salary, but as good as we’ve been running lately, we’re probably making as much as the captain.”

  “Well, if it hadn’t been for Sarah selling all those Lucky Stones in St. Cloud, we’d have a whole lot less than we’ve got now,” I told him. “Give credit where it’s due.”

  Pip paused at that. “She’s good. Do you suppose she cast a spell or something to get all those people to buy at ten creds?” He gave one of those little back and forth looks to see if anybody heard him asking a stupid question.

  “I don’t know. She is a South Coast shaman, after all. She stayed up all night stringing the stones with leather thongs and blessing them. Maybe she worked some kind of compulsion into them at the same time.” I suggested with a little shrug.

  He looked at me with a shocked expression, “You don’t think…” he started to say until he saw my grin.

  “Gotcha!” I said.

  We both laughed at that. As many times as he’d gotten me in the past, it was good to have the shoe on the other foot, and I realized once more just how much I missed him. We had had such fun in those months when we worked hip-to-hip in the galley.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked.

  “She’s getting better. Works with Cookie every day on bread and they’ve starting changing the soup stocks too. One word: yum. They get together and it’s—I hate to use the word but—magical. She cuts him no slack at all and he seems to enjoy that, too.” He stopped there and gave a little shrug. “It’s like a father-daughter thing almost.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know much about fathers.” Mine was somewhere out in the Diurnia quadrant but I didn’t know where. He and my mom broke up when I was four and for all I knew he could be on the ship. Well, except that I’d see his name on the roster. All mom ever said when I asked was, “He’s a good man, Ishmael. We just can’t stand each other.”

  “Well, there’s good and bad there,” Pip said focusing on the coffee in his mug. Pip’s father owned two ships but Pip enlisted his aunt’s help to get aboard a freighter instead of working for him.

  “What is the story with your family, Pip?” I asked.

  “Dad casts a long shadow. I already told you that.”

  “Yeah, but what does that mean?” I pressed.

  “It means that if I stayed on his ship—ships, now—I would have to do things his way. I want to do something else.”

  “That’s no answer. What did he want?”

  “Look, all I ever wanted to do was trading projections. Buying and selling is like—well, I suppose it must be what gamblers get addicted to. I started working on my earliest simulations when I was ten. They were terrible but they got better. My mom was the cargo picker on our ship. She knew what she wanted to move and she had a gift for finding good deals. Nobody can out haggle her,” he said with a little faraway look.

  “So? Wouldn’t they let you pick cargo?”

  “Some, but they were always second guessing my decisions. Once in a while they’d let me pick some, and my projections beat theirs by a factor of two.” He scowled. “But even so they just wouldn’t listen to me.”

  I sipped my coffee. “You need to clean this urn.”

  “What?”

  I held up my cup and said, “Number two is beginning to pick up some scum inside. Rinse it down with vinegar and hot water when you cycle it next time.” My mouth was on autopilot but I was thinking about what he’d said. It sounded like every father-son cliché in the book, but then I remembered Diane telling me that clichés only got that way because they happened enough to prove true.

  “So, what broke it for you?” I got back on subject. “What pushed you over the edge?”

  “About the time I was getting ready to get my secondary ed certifications, they started pressing me about going on to school.”

  I snorted. “Ha. You should live with a professor.”

  He chuckled at that. “Good point.”

  “So? Why didn’t you go? I agreed just to get my
mom off my back.” There was a bitter-sweet overlay on that one. I’d agreed but she had died. Now that I couldn’t afford to go, I thought I might just want to. Ironic.

  “They wanted me to follow in their footsteps. Go to their school. They were getting quite adamant. Even filled out the applications and were lining up their classmates to provide recommendations. Dad was more interested in me carrying on his reputation than in what I wanted. They’d done everything but buy the tickets to Port Newmar.”

  “Port Newmar?” I asked with a little prickle of disbelief. “Don’t tell me. They wanted to send you to the academy?”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Pip said with no small amount of exasperation.

  “Sorry, I’m a little slow today. Just woke up from a nap. Why didn’t you want to go to the academy?” I asked in what I’d hoped was a neutral tone.

  “Four years of course work?” he asked. “Just so I can take the test to be able to do what I was already doing?”

  “Well, if you put it that way,” I said.

  “Besides, I can sit for the exam anytime. I don’t need to go to the academy first.”

  “Really? I don’t mean to bring up a bad memory, but do you remember your Cargoman exam?”

  “Of course, it was horrible.”

  Phillip Carstairs, cargo genius, couldn’t take tests to save his life. He knew the material backward and forward but he couldn’t pass a written test. I’d arranged with the education officer to get him an oral exam and he passed not just his Cargo Handler exam but he jumped up to Cargoman.

  I just looked at him for a few heartbeats until he lost the belligerent expression and looked back down into his coffee.

  “I probably couldn’t pass it even with the four years of course work,” he said into his mug.

  “Why, Phillip Carstairs, do you mean to sit there and tell me that after having completed four years of extensive, intensive, and specialized training specifically established to teach you what you need to know in order to pass that test, you think you might actually fail it?” I asked him with a grin.

  From behind me I heard Mr. von Ickles chuckle. “Very good question, Mr. Wang. I couldn’t have said it better myself.” He took his refilled coffee cup and sauntered off the mess deck.

  “Damn, this ship seems small sometimes,” I said. I could feel myself turning red.

  Pip looked at me with his head cocked. “Why do I get the feeling that I’m missing something?”

  “Probably because it’s the Lois,” I said. “There’s always something more than meets the eye.”

  “Don’t make me come over there and hurt you,” he said. “You know I can and would. What was that all about?”

  “Mr. von Ickles told me the same thing. He wants me to consider going to the academy. Everybody’s been on me about what I’m going to do with my life since we left Dunsany.”

  “Well, after that performance, they probably figure you need some direction.”

  I chuckled while Pip drained his coffee then and said, “Come on, it’s gym time. I need to get in a work out before we start dinner, and you look like you could use a run.”

  Chapter Six

  Betrus System

  2352-June-04

  Perhaps it’s some kind of universal law that just when you think everything is fine, bang you get hit in the head. We were two days out of Betrus and it had seemed like a long haul from Dunsany Roads. Part of the problem was due, in no small part, to my inability to let go of the images of that night with Alicia Alvarez. Every time I opened my locker, I caught her scent on my jacket. I should get it cleaned, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  The other issue, was the continue nagging about my place in the universe. This quest for identity was not foreign to me. When your mother is an ancient lit professor, you come to grips with the existential early on. Who am I? Why am I here? Nobody had any really good answers in the old books. It seemed to me that it was not the kind of thing you could answer except in hindsight. The problem I was up against at the moment was that, at eighteen, I didn’t have a whole lot of hind to sight and I just wished people would leave me alone to deal with it.

  I was just getting ready to relieve Francis for the afternoon watch when Brill stormed into environmental by slamming the hatch open so hard it bounced off its stops. This was the first time I’d seen her angry since we met and she was making up for lost time.

  I looked at Francis who shrugged in return.

  Brill grabbed the hatch, slammed it closed with both hands, and threw the dogging lever with a wrench that I thought might twist it out of its socket. She stood there with her back turned for a tick, and when she turned around she was under control. If I hadn’t seen the performance with the hatch, I wouldn’t have known she was upset. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Mr. Wang, when you’ve relieved the watch, would you join me in my office?” she asked very officially.

  “Of course, Chief,” I said to her back as she passed us and entered her office.

  Francis and I finished the formalities. He shrugged and gave me a hopeful smile before heading for the hatch. It opened easily enough although it wouldn’t have surprised me to find it stuck from the slamming. I did a quick scan of the displays, slaved my tablet, and followed Brill into her office. We were the only ones in the section, but I think she needed the comfort of her own space. Whatever was bothering her, it was not going to be fun for either of us.

  When I entered, she was standing in the middle of her office with her whelkie in hand. The whelkie was a small wood carving of a heron that I had given her when I joined the section. They were made by South Coast Shamans and were suppose to have magical properties. She was stroking it absently with her fingers, and I couldn’t be sure she was even aware of the action.

  “You’re not going to get the promotion to spec three, Ish,” she said with a catch in her voice.

  “Okay,” I said with a shrug. “No big deal.”

  She looked at me then, chewing her lower lip. “You’re being replaced by a spec three that’s waiting for us in Betrus,” she said.

  I waited.

  “Home office finally processed Gregor’s transfer and did so with a replacement from there. We picked up the orders from the orbital beacon last night. I’ve just come from a meeting with the captain and Mr. Kelley.” She struggled for control. “I tried to argue for you and the captain is very angry at the home office right now. She assures me that she’ll do everything in her power for you, but she has no choice but to bring on this new guy as soon as we dock.”

  “I see,” I said. “What will happen then?”

  “I don’t know. She had all the senior staff there when I left. They’re fighting for you.”

  I heard the unspoken but in her voice. The ASIC popped up and I cleared it on my tablet without leaving the office. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but no slot, no job?”

  “True. But the officers can be creative with slots,” she pointed out. “Look at what they did for Pip.”

  “Good point,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Well, I’m crew for a couple more days, so I’ve got a watch to stand.” I started to leave.

  She nodded and said, “I tried, Ish. I really did try.”

  I turned back to her and wrinkled my nose. “Do you slam hatches like that for everybody?” I asked with a grin.

  She colored a bit at that and chuckled. “Um. Not exactly professional decorum, huh?”

  I shrugged.

  She got a wicked look on her face. “You shoulda seen the captain!”

  I stepped out of the office, took a deep breath, and said, “Trust Lois.”

  After that it was hard to focus on my duties, so I made an extra effort. It would have been too easy to overlook something and I concentrated like it was a test. In a lot of ways, I suppose it was, just not the kind I was used to. There didn’t appear to be anything in the logs and there was no maintenance scheduled so the only thing I had to look forward to was my VS
I walk through.

  That wasn’t the longest watch I ever stood. It’s hard to find a longer watch than the twelve hour overnight port-duty watches. But it was close. My mind kept trying to tell me it would be okay, but my gut kept reminding me of what it was like on a company planet with no job, no resources, and no friends.

  Brill stayed in her office all afternoon. I didn’t dare get too close. Not that I was afraid of her. I was more afraid of myself. I didn’t know what I’d do, and I didn’t want to break down into pitiful sobs. It occurred to me that she might be feeling the same way. More than once during that afternoon I found my own whelkie—a dolphin—in my hands with my thumb stroking the smooth, oiled wood.

  What worried me most was that I hadn’t heard from the captain. I liked and respected her a lot. On the one hand, she knew I was on watch and would be unlikely to summon me in the middle of it. On the other, I doubted she had answers for me yet. All I could do was trust Lois and pay attention to my current duties.

  My watch eventually ended. Francis showed up a few minutes early, a very unusual thing for him to do. “It’s all over the ship,” he said. “Raw deal, Ish.”

  “It’s just one hand and the game isn’t over yet,” I told him with what I hoped was more assurance than I really felt.

  “She still in there?” he asked, nodding at the office.

  “Been there all afternoon. Unless she slipped out while I was on VSI.”

  He sighed and I think I did too.

  When he took the watch I headed out to get cleaned up for dinner. I didn’t even make it out of the hatch before the captain’s summons hit my tablet. I stopped for a tick in berthing to splash some water on my face and wash the cruft off my hands. I straightened my shipsuit and wished that I had gotten my lucky stone back from Brill in Dunsany. I let out a small laugh and went to see what the captain had to say.

  When I entered the cabin, the senior officers were with her—Mr. Maxwell, the First Mate; Mr. Cotton, the Cargo Chief; and Mr. Kelley, the Engineering First Officer. They looked calm, cool, and collected, which I didn’t take as a good sign. These people were pros had dealt with crew changes for longer than I had been alive. I couldn’t imagine I was the first junior crewman to get bumped off a ship. Just the thought put a lump in my gut, but I stood braced at attention as best as I could.