South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  “Right. So, they have to make the planet look like a bad investment so the board is willing to sell it, but they can’t make it so bad that the board gets suspicious. Whoever buys this place has to be buying it for the food.”

  Jimmy was so deep in thought he almost walked past Barney’s. “So they’re driving the price down so the board will be forced to sell?”

  “I don’t see any other reason,” Tony said. “And we’ve been pondering this for weeks.”

  Jimmy had to agree with that, and as soon as he did, another obvious fact crashed into his head. The dawning comprehension must have showed on his face.

  Tony saw it and nodded. “It has to be. It’s the only reason to drive the price down.”

  “The bastards!” Jimmy said.

  “They’re not going to kick us off, Jimmy, but it’s going to be close.”

  Jimmy nodded. “They’re going to have to take it to the brink to get the best price.”

  Tony nodded his agreement. “It’s gonna get ugly, and how do we stop ’em?”

  Jimmy got a predatory smile on his face. “We beat them to it. Let’s get out of this cold and get something to eat.”

  Tony held the door for his boss and they found a booth amid the savory aromas of fresh ground coffee, yeasty bread, and spicy soup. The place hadn’t filled up with the lunch crowd yet. It was still early, so they had a hearty lunch, and took a couple of coffees to go. While they were eating, Jimmy sent a message to Violet. “Clambake this weekend. You and Andrew wanna come down?”

  The acceptance was almost immediate.

  Tony smirked. “And the condemned ate a hearty meal.”

  After lunch, they went back to the office and took up their conversation where it left off.

  “Maybe they’re after the manpower,” Tony said. “Do you think they want us all to go to Margary as construction workers? They’re still advertising for people like crazy over there.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Unlikely. Deep space construction is a specialized field, and we don’t have the skills. You can’t put fishermen in hard-suits and expect them to build in zero-gee vacuum. It just doesn’t make any sense. Why are they driving us out of business?”

  Tony sighed. “I don’t know, Boss. I just don’t know.”

  “We got business to attend to if we’re gonna get these boats repaired and back over the side in just eight more weeks.” Jimmy brought up a list of the required repairs and scheduled maintenance on the Aram’s Inlet fleet. “Where are we on the new construction?”

  “Jake’ll have twelve new boats ready to go when the weather breaks. Half and half, stern trawler and side.”

  “We got crews?” Jimmy scanned the report on his computer while he talked.

  Tony shrugged. “We don’t here, but these are going down the coast to Larbic and Blossom. They’ve both got enough to crew them up.”

  “Any problems with the winterization?”

  Tony shook his head. “One boat needs a whole new set of running gear, but she was due for a refit. Next year we’ll have a lot of refitting to do, but we’re in good shape for spring.”

  “Any of the ports reporting any problems?”

  “Nope, but this time of year, all the problems are people problems, not equipment.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon on the routine management of their little piece of the operation.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Callum’s Cove

  December 12, 2304

  Richard trudged back from town in time for lunch. As he came into the kitchen, Rachel smiled up from her terminal then frowned at the look on his face. “What’s the matter?”

  “Eloise Sperber. She’s missing.”

  “What happened?”

  “Brian says she’s been moping about. I went to see her this morning to see if she wanted to talk. She’s not there.”

  “How could she disappear?” Rachel asked.

  Richard shrugged. “Brian was at the diner this morning and took me aside for a chat. When he finally got around to the issue, I left him there and went around to his cottage to talk to Eloise and there was nobody home. I went back to the diner, but nobody had seen her.”

  “Where could she have gone?”

  “I hate to think.”

  “Were any of her clothes missing?”

  “Yeah. Brian says her coat was gone, but he didn’t see anything else. Alan’s checking the transportation records. Felicia McMasters was taking a shipment up to Fairfax this morning. Felicia and Eloise are friends, so she might have gone up for a day’s shopping.”

  “Without saying anything?” Rachel asked.

  “Seems unlikely, but who’s to say. People get a little–scattered–this time of year.” He shrugged out of the heavy coat.

  “It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the darkest part of the year. If she was already close to the edge because of the quota situation, who knows.” He hung his coat on a peg by the door, and settled wearily into a chair at the table. “Where’s Otto?”

  “He went out to Sandy Long about two stans ago. He should be back soon. He’ll be hungry.”

  Richard chuckled. “I couldn’t take the cold, but it’s hunger that’ll bring him back inside. Go figure.”

  “He’s a growing boy, Richard.”

  “So am I.” Richard patted his stomach. “But I’m growing out, not up.”

  They were still chuckling when Otto stamped into the kitchen. “Hi! What’s for lunch?” He looked back and forth between them when they launched into another round of laughter.

  After lunch, Richard put his coat on and headed toward the village. He didn’t say anything, but a nod to Rachel told her what she needed to know. By unspoken agreement, they hadn’t mentioned it to Otto.

  As he left, Otto looked out the window after him. “Where’s he going? Back to the village?”

  “Yeah. He has to help out the Sperber’s this afternoon,” she said. “This might be a good time for you to go practice carving. Your father will be home later. I suspect he’d like a nice warm shop to come back to.”

  Otto took the opportunity to shrug quickly into his coat and made a dash for the shop. Inside it was still and cold. His breath fogged in front of his face and the little puffs hung in the still air before dissipating. He crouched in front of the small stove and soon had a fire going with shavings and chips, and he slowly built it up with larger sticks. He knelt before the fire and was soon mesmerized by the flickering light inside. The warmth on his face was a welcome contrast to the icy caress of the still air in the shop.

  He closed his eyes and thought about his father’s going back to the village. Something was wrong. They had been just too careful over lunch, and obviously his mother knew what was happening.

  He opened his eyes and slipped another bit of kindling off the stack. A splinter stabbed his palm and he winced as he pulled it out. He tossed the blood stained splinter into the stove after the kindling and watched it catch and burn instantly. Again, the dancing flames caught his eye and he gazed deep into the small blaze, his mind elsewhere.

  “Do you think Brian would like me in this?” a woman’s voice asked with a throaty giggle.

  Otto started and looked around, but there was nobody in the shop. He shook himself, feeling as if he were just waking up. The episode passed, and he found himself strangely calm. He looked into the stove once more, selected a larger stick of wood from the stack and placed it in the firebox before closing the door.

  “Time to get to work,” he said to himself and slung his coat on the hook by the door, rubbing his arms in the chill, and opened the drawer where he’d been keeping his carving.

  The wood he’d found with the shark in it was in there, along with a bit he thought held a fox. There were other pieces he wasn’t sure about, but they were all bits he’d found over the winter and had brought home to add to his own collection of materials. There were also some shells and bits of bone as well.

 
He pulled the folding knife from his pocket and opened it, running it carefully across the sharpening stone to give it an edge. He pulled the curved stick with the shark in it out of the drawer. He saw the shark clearly now. He fed the stove a few middle-sized sticks to keep it happy, before settling into what he came to think of as “his” chair. It was really only a padded crate backed against the wall. It was close enough to the stove that he could feel the warming metal, but not so close that he got too hot when it had a good fire going in it.

  As he settled himself carefully in the pad, he noticed that the splinter wound had bled some and he’d smeared blood on the wood. He was alarmed, thinking he’d ruined the piece before he started, but soon realized that he’d be carving that bit off anyway. So he began scraping away the pieces of wood that weren’t the shark. His fingers soon took the task away from his mind. The practice with the knife and wood paid off. He let his mind drift a bit while he scraped. The knife made soft scratching noises that he could barely hear over the crackling of the stove, and the warmth began to build in the small space.

  His thoughts went to his mother and her work on the ’Net. He remembered the day she showed him how she patrolled the network looking for deals and news. Searching for anything that would help turn a profit or increase the probability of one. It was the same day he’d found the shark on the beach. He liked the image of his mother as a shark. He thought about her as a fisherman and giving that up to be married. He knew, without being told, that it was his father’s wish that she not fish and that only the emergency of the quotas would permit her to go back to the work that she must have loved.

  Otto’s fingers worked the wood and the knife as he thought about how that must have been. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could give up the sea, but he didn’t know how the whole marriage thing worked. He knew what men and women did, of course. And he’d read his share of what his mother called trashy romances. He had an idea of love. And he knew the effect that Susan Wasser had on his body whenever he saw her in her tight jeans and tighter shirts in mid summer. He swallowed hard, momentarily distracted from his carving by the image in his head–bright sun, warm day, lush body.

  He sighed and looked back to his work and was shocked to find that the shark was free in his hand.

  He held it up to the light, turning it this way and that. It was a rough shape, almost primitive. It had nothing in common with the smoothly finished carvings of fish, birds, and animals that his father had lined up. It looked crude but still alive, except for the bit of shell that marked its heart.

  He rummaged in his drawer until he found a bit of shell with a rich purple coloring. He used a bit of abrasive to smooth the shell the way he’d seen his father do. Working carefully, he cut a small indentation into the chest of the shark without breaking off any of the fins. He fit the shell to the hole—chipping, scraping, and cutting wood and shell until the piece fit more or less into the space he’d prepared for it. He put a dab of mastic on the back of the shell and he heard a small snap as he pressed the shell firmly down into the indent, allowing it to seat properly for the first time. At first he thought it had broken from the pressure of his thumb, but looking at it, he realized that it had merely seated itself. It wasn’t perfectly flush with the surface, the way his father’s were, but Otto found himself staring in a kind of awed satisfaction.

  He held it up to the light again, looking at the way the watery, winter sun stroked the rough edges. He admired his handiwork for a moment, before he realized that more than a couple stans had passed. The stove needed tending. He tucked the shark in his shirt pocket, folded the knife and stashed it in his pants pocket. He stoked up the stove until he had a cheery blaze going. When the wood was well caught, he slipped the dampers closed to slow the fire, shrugged into his coat, and dashed back to the house.

  His mother didn’t look right. Distracted, perhaps. Sad, certainly. She looked up as if expecting somebody, but Otto saw the look that said he wasn’t who she expected. “Father’s not back yet,” Otto said, “but look what I made you.” He reached inside the coat and pulled the shark out of his pocket. The fins tangled a bit in the fabric, but eventually it came free and he handed it to his mother.

  She reached out by reflex to take what her son offered, but when he placed the figure in her hand she almost dropped it. “A whelkie?” She looked from him to the shark and back again.

  He shrugged. “Well, I carved it. It kinda looks like a whelkie, but who knows.”

  Her thumb stroked the rough carving with one thumb, then rolled it over to see the purple shell underneath. “Nice color on the heart.”

  “It’s rough, but it’s yours.”

  She looked at him with a small frown. “Do you think I need a whelkie?”

  “I dunno. It just seems like my first one should go to you and I kind like the idea of you as a shark, swimming through the ’Net, looking for prey.”

  Her hand closed around the shark’s body even as she started to put it down. “Thank you. It means so much to me knowing you carved it.”

  She looked at Otto in a way that made him feel a little uncomfortable. Like she’d never seen him before. “Would you like a cuppa?”

  “Yes, that would be lovely.” She shook herself and smiled. “Thanks.”

  It took almost no time to brew a two of cups of tea. He snagged a pair of cookies from the jar as he slipped his coat back on. “I better go tend the stove”

  “Okay, hon,” she said. “Be careful out there.”

  There was something in her tone that made Otto stop in the door and turn back to her, one hand on the latch. “She’s okay, you know. She went shopping for something nice to wear for Brian.”

  His mother looked at him as if she’d been slapped .

  He smiled and waved as he slipped out into the cold afternoon and headed back to the little shop where the shaman did his work.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Aram’s Inlet

  February 22, 2305

  “Are we gonna put the boats back over the side or what?” Tony shouted.

  Jake Samson looked down from the cab of the crane and shook his head before killing the engine. He clambered down to where Tony stood, shivering in the wind. “Sorry, Tony. It’s just too windy. Trust me. You do not want these boats swingin’ in the breeze when you’re trying to put them in the water.”

  Tony sighed in frustration. “Sorry, Jake. Not your fault.” He clapped the burly dock manager’s shoulder. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “The wind should die down around sunset, Tony. If it does, I’ll slip a couple over the side. The front should go through tonight. We’ll be in fine shape in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Jake.” Tony headed off to brief Jimmy.

  He didn’t have far to go because as he headed back, to Quayside, he met Jimmy coming to find him. “No luck in the wind?”

  Tony shook his head. “Jake says he doesn’t dare risk it.”

  “Good. Another day isn’t gonna matter, and we can’t afford to bang up a boat trying to hurry.” He grimaced and ran a hand over his mouth. “We need to stem this tide of people leaving.”

  “It’s hardly a tide, Jimmy. Onesy-twosey. Most are company clerical people and low level service support.”

  “We’ll need those people, Tony, if we’re gonna be able to even meet last year’s landings, let alone this new target. The market’s been stable all winter, but they’re just waiting to see what we do. If we don’t have something reasonable in landings, the price is gonna free fall and the board will have no choice but to cut us loose. Some of them we can work around. The landings are what’s reported, but we need crews for these boats or we’re screwed.”

  “Yeah, I know, but so far none of the crews have left.”

  “No, but we lose many more support people and we’ll have to bring some of the crews ashore, just to keep the lights on.”

  “Why keep the lights on? Louise can answer the phone. What else is there if we’re all out fishing?”

 
Jimmy ran his hand over his skull as he thought about it. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. I just hope the media doesn’t pick up the people leaving and blow it out of proportion.”

  “Come on, let’s get in out of the wind at least. I’m freezing and we can think at Barney’s better than we can freezing our butt-cheeks off out here.” He turned and headed for Barney’s without waiting to see if his boss would follow.

  He did. There just wasn’t that much else to do until the boats got in the water.

  “How sure are we they’re not going to fire us all at the end of the season?” Jimmy asked as they walked.

  Tony shot him a startled look. “That would make no sense.”

  “What if it does make sense and we just can’t see how?”

  “Boss, you been chasing that school of fish for weeks now.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I keep coming back to it.”

  “I noticed, but what else is there? It’s a good, solid operation. Or would be if they’d stop screwing with us. We all know that.”

  “But perception is reality, Tony. You know that, too. The rate on our loans this last quarter went up a half point. That’s not because they don’t like us. We’ve always paid back the season seed money.”

  Tony sighed, and they fought the wind all the way down East Birch to get to the Beanery. “Any word from Andrew?”

  “He’s still looking, but he hasn’t been able to spot it,” Jimmy said through a jaw held rigid to keep it from chattering. “It can’t be Shyster, Shyster, and Sue Me directly. If word got out that they were selling clients down the river, they’d be out of business so fast it would make your noggin nobble.”

  Tony sighed. Until they found out who was behind the manipulation, it was all just speculation.

  “I did get one bit of interesting news.” Jimmy shouldered through the entrance to Barney’s and into the warm, aromatic interior.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Ole Man’s coming.”

  “What? When?”

  “Middle of March.”

  “He’s in system?”