Home Run (Smuggler's Tales From the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper Book 3)

by Nathan Lowell

  Natalya felt the sting of tears trying to form. “I don’t know.”

  Ahokas stepped up behind Zoya. “Give him a chance. He might surprise you.”

  Her words caught Natalya’s attention. “What do you mean?”

  Ahokas crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re afraid he’s not going to be proud of you because you think you should have accomplished something more than what you have.” She raised an eyebrow. “Right? Doesn’t matter what it is but you haven’t seen him in a decade and you’re Daddy’s girl. You want him to be proud of you.”

  “I’m not Daddy’s girl,” Natalya said, her back stiffening against the implication.

  Ahokas smiled at her. “Hon, takes one to know one. You’re an engineer because of him. You went to the academy because of him. He’s so much a part of you, you can’t even see that you’re not the same person.”

  “My mother’s an engineer, too.” The words sounded weak even to herself.

  “All right. Tell me, smart girl. Think back. What was in the top drawer of your father’s tool box?”

  Natalya shrugged. “Sockets for his socket wrench set.”

  “And your mother’s?”

  Natalya shook her head. “I never saw it. She kept it with her when she was working.”

  “When you were learning about thrusters, who did you hand the tools to?”

  “My father, of course. Mom worked on a commercial freighter. No way I could have been with her.”

  Ahokas tilted her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. “Need more?”

  “More what?” Natalya asked.

  “Who took you into the Deep Dark? Who showed you how to fly the Peregrine? Who warned you about boys?” Ahokas asked.

  Natalya sat back and sighed. She looked at Zoya who shrugged in return.

  “I only knew my father second-hand,” Zoya said. “I learned command from my grandfather and Furtner.”

  “And ruthlessness from your grandmother?” Natalya asked with a smile.

  Zoya laughed. “Probably.”

  Natalya looked at Ahokas again. “What’s your point?”

  “My point, love, is that dads are always proud of their children.”

  Zoya looked up at Ahokas.

  “All right. Most dads,” Ahokas said. She patted Zoya on the shoulder. “They love their kids. They want their kids to be happy.”

  “You seem to know a lot about fathers,” Natalya said.

  “I had some problems with mine. Took me too long to resolve them,” Ahokas said, her gaze focused somewhere in the past. “I was almost too late but I learned a few lessons when he passed on.” She refocused on Natalya. “Trust him. From what little I’ve seen of you, he’ll be proud.”

  Ahokas’s words seemed to calm whatever devil had been jumping on Natalya’s heart and spiking her adrenaline levels.

  Natalya looked up at Ahokas. “Thanks.”

  She shrugged. “Welcome.”

  Zoya stood, hauling Natalya up by the arm. “Come on, Daddy’s girl. We got work to do.”

  Almost against her will, a small laugh fought its way out of Natalya. “All right. I’ll go see Madigan about some cargo handlers and get the stores list from Kremer.”

  “Let Fries pilot the shuttle. I need to talk to the Higbee people about the new station,” Zoya said. “They’re close enough now.”

  Chapter 48

  Smelter Seventeen:

  2368, March 20

  Natalya found Madigan on the mess deck. “You spend all your time here?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “Coffee’s good and it beats hanging out in berthing.”

  “We need some people to run the cargo rigs. Know anybody?”

  “How many? Three? Four?” he asked

  “Something like that. We need to unload that tractor and reload it with ore.”

  He nodded. “They bring anything good?”

  “Stuff we’ll need eventually. It’s mostly stuff for the old station. Zoya’s putting together a list now of goods we want them to bring back.”

  “She’s something.”

  “Oh, yeah. She’s at least that.” Natalya grinned.

  “I’ve sailed with a lot of skippers but that woman’s got more command presence than all of them put together.”

  “She started young.” Natalya rose and headed for the galley. “Cargo handlers?”

  Madigan nodded. “You heading right back?”

  “Soon as I can get a list from Kremer.”

  “We’ll be on the boat deck.”

  Natalya knocked on the door jamb.

  Kremer—a small, older man with a white fringe of hair around an expansive bald spot and shockingly blue eyes—looked up from his tablet. “Hello. Can I help you? Ms. Regyri, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and thanks. How are the food stocks holding up?”

  He held out a hand, palm down and teeter-tottered it a couple of times. “I’m up to my armpits in meats. I could use some fresh vegetables. Even some canned ones. Fruit’s always in short supply. Coffee?” He paused and his face exploded in wrinkles as he frowned. “We could use some more, but we got enough for a few days. Maybe a few weeks.”

  “Can you send me a list of what you need and another of what you’d like to have?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. When do you need it?”

  “We’re sending that tractor out for a grocery run. I want to make the best use of it.”

  “Half a stan? I’ll send it to your tablet?”

  “Perfect, thank you so much.” She paused at the door. “And thanks for doing all this.” She waved a hand around the galley. “Not everybody would.”

  Kremer ducked his head and might have actually blushed. “I always cook on the barge. This is just bigger. I love to do it and I don’t have to work the mining heads.”

  “That sounds like you found the right place for you to be.”

  He nodded. “I think so, too.”

  Natalya walked back through the empty mess deck and wondered if she’d ever find the one for herself. The thought startled her when she remembered that she’d always believed the helm of the Peregrine was the place.

  She’d worked herself into a funk by the time she got aft to the boat deck.

  Madigan and Fries stood beside the shuttle with five other people.

  “Cargo handlers,” Madigan said by way of greeting.

  “How many do we need to unload a tractor?” she asked.

  “Two per can,” said an older guy with a pot belly. “Minimum. Three max. Barbell takes four.”

  “How many of you have worked cargo before?”

  Every hand except Fries’s went up.

  Natalya pulled Madigan out of the lineup. “I need you to stay here and run the lock.” She looked over the rest.

  “All right, then,” Natalya said. “Ms. Fries, you’ll need to make two runs.”

  When Natalya got back to the observation deck at the yard, Zoya and Bean had their heads together over Bean’s display. Bean stared intently at something on the screen, while Zoya looked over his shoulder.

  “What’s going on?” Natalya asked. “Last time I saw that look on your face was when you first stepped off the ship at Dark Knight and saw what people were wearing.”

  Zoya snickered. “Come see. This is what we’ve got coming in.”

  Natalya stepped around to look over Bean’s shoulder.

  An animation ran on a loop. An odd-looking pile of materials unfolded to form part of a station. The next piece unfolded beside it while third and fourth pieces joined them. The perspective changed as the viewpoint rotated around the collected parts, showing them sliding together to form one large unit. Once it was formed, another piece unfolded to the side and joined the base while a funnel-shaped object blossomed off the top.

  “A grinder,” Bean said. “We’re getting the grinder first. This is what it’ll look like going together.” He tapped a key and the animation froze. “This last piece is the power and life support. It’s massive. Easily twice t
he size of Grinder Eight, where you found me.”

  “Is it what you spec’ed out for us?” Zoya asked.

  He shook his head. “No. The capacity on this matches what I’d estimate we’d need for an operation about half again bigger than I see here.”

  “Where’d you get this?” Natalya asked.

  “We talked to the Higbee project manager. He sent a lot of documentation ahead,” Zoya said. “We’re just unpacking it now.”

  “So, your grandfather must have upgraded the request,” Natalya said.

  “Looks like.” Zoya tapped Bean on the shoulder. “Show her the final.”

  Bean flipped through windows too fast for Natalya to follow and stopped on an artist’s rendering of a space station. “This is what we bought, apparently.”

  Natalya found the grinder unit tucked into one corner of the extended platform. “What scale am I looking at here? That’s the grinder there?” She pointed to it on the screen.

  “Yup,” Bean said. “That’s the grinder. This stuff here next to it is power generation and one of the environmental hubs. The next unit out is the smeltery, which pours right into raw metal forming. It looks like a high-speed ingot processor.”

  “Whatever metal comes out gets formed into ingots?” Natalya asked.

  Bean nodded. “That’s what it looks like. Here and here are the plate and rail formers. In zero-gee this is all easy. I think this piece is a wire puller. It takes rails and stretches them into wires to the correct gage.”

  Natalya pointed to an odd collection of spires and tubes. “What’s that?”

  Bean shook his head. “I think that’s the alloy tower. I’ve only seen pictures of stand-alones before. This is integrated into the whole platform. See? The metal forming area abuts it. There’s not enough detail in this view but I suspect there’s a 3D rendering of it where we can actually walk through it.” He shrugged. “I haven’t found it yet, but I’m sure it’s there.”

  “And the scale?” Zoya asked. “That looks like it’s huge.”

  “It is huge,” Bean said. “I’m thinking maybe as long as two kilometers. A klick and a half wide. This one hell of a station. In volume, it has to be as big as the Manchester yard in Margary.”

  Zoya’s face went blank and she stiffened. “Of course it is. I’m so dumb.”

  Bean turned in his chair to look up at her. “What?”

  “Everywhere there’s a Usoko operation, there’s a shipyard nearby.”

  Bean nodded. “Yeah. That’s my understanding. No need to haul metal when you build the yard next to the smelters.”

  “Where’s the yard here?” Zoya asked.

  Bean shook his head but Natalya caught her drift right away.

  Bean looked back and forth between them. “There isn’t one here.”

  Natalya said, “Yet.”

  Bean’s eyes went so wide he looked like he was wearing goggles. “Holy molybdenum. The station here was just a prototype?”

  Zoya gazed at the rendering on the screen but her focus was somewhere else. “Proof of concept. They wanted to see how much metal was here. Initial assays must have been off the charts. They ran up the smelter to see what the actual yields were. This thing must have been in the planning stages and only needed Gram to pull the trigger on it.”

  “That’s how it got here so fast,” Natalya said.

  Zoya nodded. “And why Higbee is pulling out all the stops on this pre-fab. This project is worth trillions.”

  Natalya felt a little weak in the knees and dropped into the nearest chair. The implication of it washed over her like a bucket of ice water and she stared at Zoya.

  Zoya stood straight up. Her shoulders settled back. She might have been on the parade ground at Port Newmar except her eyes weren’t fixed looking straight ahead. They kept moving around in their sockets like she was looking at different ideas inside her own head. Her lips grew tighter and tighter until white lines appeared all around her mouth. Zoya must have seen it too.

  “Son of a bitch,” Zoya said, the words spitting from between clenched teeth. “‘Do whatever you think necessary’ my ass.”

  “It was a test, Zee,” Natalya said.

  Zoya nodded and seemed to pull into herself, gathering herself. Her expression went from a tightly closed scowl to an almost relaxed consideration. Her head turned slightly, angling so she contemplated the rendering out of the corner of her eyes. As Natalya watched, her lips changed from a tight line to a subtle smile. “It was,” she said. “One I may have passed.”

  “Is that a good thing?” Bean asked looking up at Zoya, faint lines on his forehead as if he couldn’t decide whether to run or hide.

  “Maybe,” Zoya said. “Maybe.”

  Natalya felt the laugh coming before it broke loose. It was a big laugh, one that filled the observation deck and spilled down the ladder. So big it swept Zoya up in it and brought Bean along for the ride.

  Chapter 49

  Smelter Seventeen:

  2368, March 22

  Natalya and Zoya stood by the lock and watched as Ally Wishes pulled back under her own power. “Think they realized there’d be a problem getting out of here without a tug?” Zoya asked.

  Natalya shrugged and peered out of the port, watching the flickering attitude jets as the egg-shaped hull fell silently away. “I suspect tractor pilots get used to not having a kicker.” She turned back to Zoya. “The larger question is will he come back.”

  Zoya shook her head. “I don’t know. We signed a contract. He’ll make out well if he brings the goods back. It’s enough that his crew will get a nice bump in their shares for a relatively short run. If he doesn’t, we’re only out a few cans of ore. It’s not like we don’t have a lot of ore laying around.”

  “That won’t matter for too much longer, will it?” Natalya asked.

  “No,” Zoya said. “Once that grinder comes online, we’ll be able to process all the raw ore into more refined product and the smelter will take it all without burping.”

  “Did Higbee give us an estimate?”

  “The contract calls for six weeks after initial deployment. The clock starts ticking when they unpack the first module.”

  “You going to put it back in the same place?”

  “More or less. It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s in the right orbit. I think I’ll keep the twenty-kilometer buffering zone for this place. It’ll be more important when there are more ships operating here.”

  “What are you going to do?” Natalya asked.

  “With the station?”

  Natalya nodded. “You know damn well your grandmother set this up.”

  Zoya frowned at the deck. “I don’t think she blew it up. I think we’d have been shanghaied some other way to get us out here. Maybe not this stanyer. Maybe not next. But eventually.”

  “What if we hadn’t gone to visit?”

  “Oh, that’s just icing on the cake. Gram doesn’t leave much to chance. We just happened to visit when some assholes tried to hijack the operation. I’d bet my boots we’d have wound up here no matter where we were at the time.”

  “What if they hadn’t blown it up?”

  “Hijacking and extortion are pretty high on the scale of problems. We’d have been guilted into coming out here to solve whatever problem we found.” Zoya shook her head. “No, she’s not behind the loss of the station. Even she’s not that cold.”

  Natalya sighed. “But she took advantage of it to put this plan into motion.”

  “Exactly,” Zoya said.

  “So, what do we do from here?”

  Zoya frowned and looked at the closed lock. “Now that we know the plan, we can begin to counter it.”

  “We know the plan?” Natalya asked.

  Zoya nodded. “Not in detail, but it rough terms. She wants me to take over Usoko Mining. She needs me to give up on this flying-around nonsense and settle into the family business. She’s already got me here on site, dealing with an unthinkable disaster. I think she pulled t
he trigger a little sooner than might have been wise, because she’s tipped her hand.”

  “How so?”

  “I assumed she wanted me to come out and take over the station. Even before the disaster. I don’t know who was in charge before but I’d bet whoever it was was in line for a big promotion and Grandmama had nobody else who knew Toe-Hold space to take over.”

  “Granted. How has she tipped her hand?”

  “She’s shown me what she has planned for this system. She’s counting on my being willing to step up to taking it over as the heir apparent to the business.”

  “Are you?” Natalya asked.

  Zoya smiled. “We’ll see.”

  “What do you want, Zee?”

  Zoya looked at Natalya. “I want my captain’s stars. Maybe someday, my own ship.”

  Natalya nodded. “You know, we have a ship.”

  “We need something bigger than the Peregrine.”

  “I’m not talking about the Peregrine.”

  Zoya frowned. “The Mindanao can’t jump.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Natalya said.

  Zoya’s gaze drilled into Natalya. “You got my full attention.”

  “Something Madigan said about knowing what the problem is.”

  “The problem is that it can’t jump with half the bow missing,” Zoya said. “Isn’t it?”

  Natalya shook her head. “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “What is the problem then?”

  “We can’t fix it here.”

  Zoya snorted. “Yeah, and?”

  “We need a shipyard,” Natalya said.

  Zoya’s eyes widened. “We need a shipyard,” she said.

  “The question we need to answer is whether or not we’re willing to wait for a few stanyers to get the shipyard built.”

  Zoya frowned again. “You’ve got something else in mind.”