In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  “Something about a mirror.”

  “I just offered her a different perspective on reflection,” I said. “How is she?”

  “Excellent. Running a very profitable triangle trade in Ciroda these days with her new husband and first mate. Her elder daughter will be a cadet in the next class.”

  “You mean kids who weren’t born when I came here are now old enough to be cadets?”

  She snickered. “Kids who weren’t born when I made captain are now captains. Just wait. Your turn is coming.”

  We ate without talking for a bit. The beefalo tasted better than I remembered. Cookie had had nearly two decades to perfect what I thought had been perfect at the time. Perhaps it was just my memory.

  “How come you took over here?” I asked.

  “I’ve been sending my father cadets for stanyers. Seemed only right I should sit on the other side of the desk for a bit.”

  “Don’t you miss being captain?”

  She grinned at me. “Do you?”

  I poked at the beefalo with my fork a few times and thought about it. “Yes. No. Maybe,” I said after too long a pause. “I’m a bit burned out, I think.”

  She shrugged and scraped the last of her meal off the plate. “Happens. That’s why we have the facilities here.”

  I nodded and pushed my plate back, too full to finish. “I remember seeing the officers come and go. Sifu Newmar had rather a large following.”

  “She still does. I think more people come back to visit her than for any other reason.”

  “I never thought I’d be one of them.”

  “You’ve had a rough couple of stanyers.”

  “Yeah.” I scanned the other patrons and tried not to think about it.

  “Have you talked to anybody?”

  I looked back at her. “Talked?”

  “Psychiatrist? Psychologist? Counselor?”

  I shook my head. “That’s why I came back here.”

  “I can give you a referral.”

  “I’ve got a standing date with Sifu Newmar.”

  Alys smiled. “I know Margaret better than you. She’s probably already given you three impossible things to do.”

  “Three?” I knew of two but couldn’t imagine the third.

  “One, she wants you to master your form.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Impossible because it’s a form of practice. Of meditation.”

  “I expect I could reach mastery in a few more decades.”

  “Yes, but impossible because you’d need to take a teacher with you to practice and you’ve got a career to consider.”

  I had to agree. “She also wants me to prune.”

  “Prune what?”

  “Baggage, apparently. I already pruned the roses at my cottage.”

  “Your physical baggage?” She raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t see that one coming.”

  “I’ve got two trunks of stuff. It’s everything that came off my last ship.”

  “All your worldly possessions.”

  “All my physical ones, anyway.”

  Mr. Armstrong showed up to take the empty dishes. “Refills? Dessert?”

  I looked at Alys. “You probably have duties to attend to.”

  She looked at the chrono on the wall above the bar and shook her head. “Curriculum committee meeting in a stan. Nothing until then.” She turned to Mr. Armstrong. “If Cookie has some of that vanilla mousse? I’d take some and a refill on the iced tea.”

  He looked to me. “Captain?”

  “Just coffee. That meal was enough to last me for a week.”

  He grinned. “Coming right up, sars.”

  Alys brought her gaze back to me. “So. Any idea how long you’ll be here?”

  “How long can I stay?”

  She shrugged. “The academy doesn’t just exist for the molding of fresh new officers. Some really smart person recognized that command carries its own unique burdens, so they made arrangements for our students to come back whenever they need to. When they can.”

  “That’s why it’s mostly senior grades?”

  She gave a shrug. “We get some others, but yeah. Captains have more say over what they do than third mates.”

  “How long can I stay?”

  “Long as you pay for the cottage,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “But I’ll warn you that if you’re still here come fall, you’ll find yourself in front of a classroom filled with shiny new cadets all looking for words of wisdom from the famous Captain Ishmael Wang.”

  I snorted. “After the settlement from DST, I think I can afford to live here for a few centuries.” I toyed with my coffee mug for a moment. “Famous?”

  “You will be by the time I get done building you up.”

  “Whew.”

  “No, seriously. You’re not famous-famous, but people who follow the field know your name. You might not be the youngest captain on record, but you might well be the youngest owner. Certainly the youngest land-rat to make it to owner.” She smirked a little as she leaned back to let Rubin deliver her vanilla mousse. “People notice that.”

  Rubin topped up my coffee and disappeared again.

  Her words didn’t make me feel much better about things.

  “So, what do you want to do, Ishmael?” she asked around a delicate spoonful of creamy fluff.

  I took a deep breath and shook my head a little. “Practice my form. See if there’s anything I can get rid of in my baggage. Beyond that? I don’t know.”

  She nodded and took another bite of her dessert.

  “I should probably talk to somebody.”

  “I knew you were smart. I’ll send you a contact when I get back to my office. He’s expecting you.”

  I nodded and took another sip of coffee. “What would you have me teach?”

  She shook her head. “As I remember you were brilliant at systems and comms. Maybe astrogation. You could be the remedial math tutor. Doesn’t matter. You won’t be here that long.”

  “I won’t?”

  She shook her head again. “Pip’s coming.”

  I laughed at that. Really laughed for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long. The other patrons looked in our direction with smiles, reminding me that we weren’t alone. I laughed anyway.

  Chapter Four

  Port Newmar:

  2374, May 28

  When Pip got off the shuttle, I recognized him immediately. His hair had gone white, his girth had expanded a bit, and he sported a trimmed goatee, but I recognized his grin as soon as he turned it on me.

  “By Athena’s nether beard! Ishmael? The one man in the Western Annex I need to find and you’re waiting for me?” He grabbed me in a bear hug and pounded my back.

  I hugged and pounded him back.

  “When Alys told me you were coming, I almost lost it,” I said.

  “You’ve caught up with her then?” He snagged his carry-on bag and nodded toward the terminal entrance. “Come on. I need to get settled in, and we need to talk.”

  “Oh, yeah. We had lunch at the O Club a couple of days ago.”

  “You’ve seen Cookie, then.”

  I nodded. “Old home week here, isn’t it?”

  He bulled through the doors and trundled toward the cottages. “Well, Bev is off somewhere with her hubby. They’re doing a nice fast-packet trade out of St. Cloud last I heard. Forget what they called it. Epiphany? Eridani? Ephemeral. That was it.”

  “I thought she was going off to work the family ship.”

  He shrugged. “Opportunities are everywhere, but berths are always in demand. Maybe she outgrew them.”

  “Heard from Bril?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ve not heard from anybody since I left here,” I said. “How do you stay in the loop?”

  He waved a hand as if swatting at a fly. “I’ve been in and out of Port Newmar a dozen times or more since we left. Gossip always comes home to roost.”

  “Any scuttlebutt on Mr. Maxwell? Mr. vo
n Ickles?”

  “Captain Maxwell retired and works for the CPJCT now. He’s the orbital manager up there.” He pointed up.

  “No.”

  “Yep.”

  “What are the odds?”

  “Well, he’s married to Alys Giggone. I’d say the odds were pretty good he wouldn’t be too far away.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know?” he asked, stopping to look at me as if I were some kind of odd flower beside the path. “Seriously?”

  “I didn’t know she was even married, let alone to him.”

  “Second hub for her, I think. She’s got a kid or two stashed out in Dunsany Roads somewhere if I remember.”

  “Do you have files on everybody?”

  “Oh, no.” He shook his head and resumed his march toward campus. “Only the important people.”

  “Von Ickles?” I asked.

  “Captain von Ickles commands one of the new Manchester Eighty-Eights for Federated Freight. He’s on the Lois’s old route over in Dunsany.”

  “He stayed?”

  “They treated him well. Moved him up as he made grade. Why wouldn’t he?” He turned into the path that led to the cottage across from mine. “They pay a nice seniority bonus, you know?”

  “What happened to the Lois?”

  “They retired her from active service about a decade back. Not sure where her hull is now. Probably melted down and recast.”

  That thought made me sad but everything has a life span. Especially ships subjected to the rigors of the Deep Dark.

  “Where’d they put you?” he asked.

  I jerked a thumb at the cottage across the way.

  “Handy.” He nodded toward his own. “Come in. They should have stocked my fridge for me. We can catch up.”

  “Stocked your fridge?”

  “Yeah. I come here often enough that I leave a standing order for supplies.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get out enough.”

  “You got stars,” he said, nodding at my collar. He looked me in the eye. “Scars, too, I’d guess.”

  That might have been the first time I’d ever seen Pip serious.

  “You got an earring,” I said. “Makes you look like a pirate.”

  He grinned and flicked the small silver hoop in his left ear with a fingertip. “Lost a bet. Best bet I ever lost.” He turned to the cottage, resettling the strap of his bag. “Come on. Let’s get out of this harmful radiation and under cover.”

  “Harmful radiation?”

  He pointed at the system’s primary hanging over the treetops to the south west. “You have any idea how much damage that thing can do?”

  I chuckled and followed him inside. The day had become warm but the clouds forming just offshore promised an evening light show when they came inland.

  Pip stashed his bag in the bedroom, tossed his coat over the back of a chair, and went face first into the small refrigeration unit in his kitchenette. He emerged with a pair of bottles and a beaming smile.

  “I keep thinking I should stock up on this stuff.” He held out a bottle to me. “You know you can only get this on Port Newmar?”

  I took the bottle with the familiar label—a square-rigged sailing ship with a bone in her teeth appeared to be sailing across the night sky. “What? Clipper Ship Lager?”

  He nodded and flipped the cap off. After a long pull from the bottle, he grinned and smacked his lips. “We lived on this stuff, but they don’t distribute off-planet.”

  I took a sip from mine and remembered only too well how much of it I’d consumed as a cadet. “Really? I thought we drank this because it was cheap.”

  He threw himself onto one end of the sofa and pointed me into the chair across from him. “That, too, but you have to admit. It’s local. Consistent product. Reasonable flavor. Not too big a kick. Not too heavy. Not too watery.” He took another pull. “It has a lot to recommend it.”

  I dropped into the chair and took a long drag from my bottle. “It’s the nostalgia factor.”

  He shrugged. “Nothing wrong with remembering the past.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. I hid my face behind my bottle as I took another drink.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” he said.

  I grinned at him. “I’m still a little off balance. I can’t believe you’re here. And giving a keynote address?”

  “Why not? I started this conference. It’s grown from a half dozen modeling geeks from the academy. Third annual and we’re expecting to get a couple dozen people from the various shipping lines along with some data mongers from around the Western Annex. Saltzman’s sending somebody this year. We’ll have a couple from Federated.”

  “This is the same stuff you were doing back on the Lois, right?”

  He nodded. “Humble beginnings on the mess deck with your mother’s old computer. Yup. It’s a lot bigger now.”

  “You learned more math?”

  He laughed, a low chuckle in his chest. “Yeah. Well, that, too.”

  “Do you have to prep or anything for the keynote?” I asked after a few moments.

  He shook his head. “It’s nothing to write home about. Mostly thanking them for coming. I’ve got a little song and dance about the latest work on applying structural equations to profitability on extended multi-cargo runs. It’s a lot more than we used to do by guess and good instincts in the old days. Single-cargo ships have an interesting problem. They can’t diversify risks across multiple cargoes. It’s one of the reasons Eighty-Eights are climbing so fast in the ranks of ships.”

  “I was on a Barbell. It worked pretty well for bulk hauling.”

  “I know.” He looked at me over the top of his bottle. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “About bulk hauling?”

  He shook his head and leaned forward, anchoring his elbows on his knees. “About Barbells.”

  “Not much to tell. Unwin-built. Single-can design. Rated at two hundred metric kilotons. Lock the can in place and off you go. Without a can they’re two bricks on a soda straw.”

  Pip nibbled on the inside of his lower lip as he looked at me. “You were on the William Tinker for a lot of stanyers. Started there when you graduated and stayed there until you made captain.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You have a file on me?”

  He grinned. “I said. Only the important people.”

  “What else do you know?”

  He pursed his lips and squinted at me like he was reading something in his head. “Married, divorced. Made captain a couple stanyers ago. Moved to the Agamemnon, a fifteen-metric-kiloton tractor, also with DST. Flew her for about a stanyer before Maloney died, and then started your own company. Sold that a few months ago to the new CEO of Diurnia, one Christine Maloney who just happened to be your cook on the Iris.” He saluted me with his nearly empty bottle. “Did I miss anything?”

  I thought of the sapphire eyes and the bubbling laugh. I shook my head. “Those are the high points.”

  “There were some low points, too,” he said.

  I nodded. “A few. We all have them, don’t we?”

  He nodded and drained his beer. “Too true.”

  “So enough about me. What have you been up to? Cargo first?”

  He shrugged. “Not much to tell. One of the cousins is the skipper for the Prodigal Son. We’ve managed to stay solvent and I’ve worked up through the ranks. Cargo first is all we can justify in that small a ship. I took the exam and hold the rating, but there was never any reason to claim the rank. It’s not like I’m going to get paid more or passed over. Besides, I’m getting the owner’s share less a franchise fee to the old man. Shares have been better than I ever imagined. Which is why this modeling symposium started. People took notice of how well we were doing.”

  “Your father had nothing to do with that, did he?” I asked.

  He smirked. “He fought it at first. Made it clear that I had to keep the profit coming and cover the costs of my own ship. H
e held the note, but I paid the bills with interest.”

  “How long did it take you to pay it off?”

  “Well, it was a twenty-stanyer note.”

  I smiled. “So, you paid it off in ten?”

  He grinned. “You know me so well.”

  I raised my bottle in a toast to him. “Congrats. That got his attention, did it?”

  “It did. Of course, he kept up on our trading the whole time. We’re part of the family fleet after all and he’s still the chairman of the board.” He went to the fridge and pulled out another beer. “You want one?”

  I shook my head. “One’s my limit for the afternoon.”

  “Lightweight.” He came back and sat down again.

  “Married?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Never found the right person. Really wasn’t time to get involved.”

  “So you brought the Son here?”

  “Sure. We picked up a hot priority over in Dunsany and made a tidy profit on the run.”

  “Just cooling your heels for a few days?”

  “Roland is doing some maintenance on the engines and upgrading the sail generators.”

  “Roland?”

  “Captain Roland Marx. Second cousin on my mother’s side. He’s the captain of record and has the engineering certification for that power plant.”

  “But can he cook?”

  Pip shook his head and laughed. “Gods, no. He keeps us moving. I keep us fed and keep the profits rolling in.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “For now. He’s planning on trading me out soon for a better-looking model.”

  “He’s leaving? What’ll you do for a captain?”

  “Well, yes, and no. He’s actually planning on staying with the Son. I’m planning on leaving.”

  “You’re leaving your own ship?” I could feel my jaw stretching open.

  “Buying a new one, I hope.”

  “You must be doing well.”

  He looked down at his hands. “Yeah. Well. That’s what I wanted to talk with you about.”

  “So you weren’t kidding about looking for me?”

  “I knew where to find you. I expected to be flying to Diurnia to do it when the conference is over.” He didn’t look up, just kept worrying the corner of the label on his bottle with a thumbnail.

  “So? What did you want to talk about?”