Alan pulled up in a Pirano cargo wagon about the time Rachel finished dragging out the second stack of pots. The little cargo wagons were small electric tractors that towed a single antigrav pallet. The company used them for moving smaller parts and bulky supplies around the village. “Mornin’, Rachel,” Alan called as he swing the wagon around so the pallet was handy. There was something in his voice that made Rachel wonder what he was up to.
“Good morning, Alan. You seem in good spirits this morning.”
He grinned. “Oh, I am. New ventures always make me cheerful.”
Rachel still thought he sounded a little too cheerful, but he bent to the task of restacking the pots onto the pallet with a will so she couldn’t complain. A small, well-sealed, bucket of bait went on the pallet as well. Even with the cover on it, there was still a definite whiffy-ness that clipped the nose a bit.
Stepping back a pace or two, Alan asked, “Anything else?”
Rachel checked the load again and shook her head. “Just lemme close the doors.”
Alan tossed a cargo harness across the load and clipped it down while Rachel closed up shop. In a tick they were humming down the lane toward the pier. Alan was humming a little himself and tapping on the steering wheel as he drove. He acted like a canary-filled-cat.
“What’s going on, Alan?” she asked.
“What?” Alan tried to play the confused innocent, but not very effectively.
“You’re way too cheerful. You’re up to something,” she accused him.
“Me? What could I be up to?” he protested.
They rounded the last corner and headed out onto the pier toward the small boat dock. Rachel was so busy watching Alan’s face, it wasn’t until she stepped off the wagon that she spared a glance for the boat that most decidedly was not the Pirano utility launch.
“How?” she asked. It was all she could get out of her mouth as her eyes dealt with the conflict between what she expected to see and what was really there.
“Jake had it flown out last night,” Alan said. “I got the word around dinner time last night and the yard gang delivered it just before sunset.”
Rachel’s eyes swept the craft from stem to stern, stuttering on the features that she’d asked for and even more on the ones that Jake had added from his own experience. The pilot’s station was perfectly placed forward and close to the rail. The bow had a non-skid decking across it and cubby spaces underneath, judging from the small doors she could see. The whole aft three quarters of the boat was open except for a wide rail on the starboard side that looked like a line of pots would sit on perfectly. There was the winch she’d asked for, and there the electronics array, cleverly tucked under the cover of a simple flying canopy roof over the pilot’s station. There was also a sorting table and clips, cleats, and tie down points everywhere.
“You gonna look at it all day or you gonna take it out?” Mary asked.
She swung around to see Mary, Jane McGill, and a couple of the other people who’d helped over the last week walking up the pier.
“Flown?” Rachel finally focused. “It flies?”
Alan laughed. “No, they’ve got a cargo lifter at the yard. Jake just had them fly it over as soon as he got it ready to go. He knows Jimmy’s serious about this.”
“Come on, lady,” Mary said as she started unclipping the cargo harness from the pallet. “You can admire it later. We got crabs to catch.” She grabbed the bait bucket and stepped lightly aboard the boat herself to direct the stowage.
Alan took Rachel through the various controls and functions at the pilot station while Mary and her crew stacked the empty pots in the stern. It took almost half a stan for them to get it sorted out and by that time Richard and Otto had joined the party on the dock. Otto’s staff clattered in the breeze that fluttered the edges of Richard’s poncho.
Looking up from the deck of the boat, Rachel grinned. “What do you think?”
Otto grinned right back, his boyish features emerging in his joy. “She’s beautiful. She’s perfect.”
“What are you going to call her?” Richard asked.
It was one of those questions that drop into a lull and draw the attention of anyone around. Rachel felt it as everybody paused to hear what she’d say.
She looked around at the faces. She looked at the boat. She looked to Otto who smiled, and she looked up into her husband’s face. “You’re the shaman, Richard. You tell me. What’s her name?”All eyes turned to Richard. All of them waiting to see what he’d say, what he’d do. He smiled back at Rachel and caught her in his eyes as his gaze focused elsewhere. Not inwardly, exactly, and not outward. Just elsewhere for one moment that might have been measured in heartbeats.
He released her from his gaze. With a mischievous grin and a twinkle in his eye that reminded Rachel so much of his father, he said, “Crabby Patty.”
There was a moment of stunned silence then Mary started giggling. “I love it.” She hugged Rachel. The rest of the crew laughed and Rachel found herself smiling back at Richard.
“Crabby Patty, it is,” she said. “We’ll get it painted on the stern later. Right now, we gotta get some pots in the water or we’ll have to name her Crabless Patty’.”
Everybody but Rachel and Mary scrambled out of the boat. Rachel looked at Mary with a question in her eye.
“Well, you don’t expect I’m gonna stay ashore on the first run do you?”
Rachel laughed. “No, of course not. Silly me.”
“We’ll be back in plenty of time to help with lunch,” Mary said. “Just get that boy aboard and we’ll get underway.”
Rachel looked at Richard who nodded and Otto clambered aboard, staff and all. She fired up the engines as Mary showed Otto the finer points of line handling. In a matter of a tick or two, the Crabby Patty pushed away from the pier to the cheers of the onlookers.
“Where we gonna place these, Mary?” Rachel said over the sound of the engine.
Mary came up to stand beside the podium as Otto leaned on the bows. “If it were me? I’d run this first line of ten from about there—” she pointed to a spot in the bay that was out of the way of the main channel but still close to the end of the piers “— out to about there. Put the last one right where the ledge drops down.” She pointed across the harbor to where the rocky ledge marking the outer arm of the cove angled down into the water. “About one every hundred meters or so.”
Rachel squinted, measuring the distances with her eyes. “Okay, sounds good. Let’s get the traps baited and ready.”
Mary helped Otto pry off the lid of the bait bucket and even standing upwind of it, it was a bit smelly. Mary stood well back herself and gave Otto a pair of long rubber gloves.
Otto for his part, didn’t appear to notice the smell, just slipped on the gloves and proceeded to put a chunk of fish into the bait pouch of each of the ten traps. He worked smoothly and, with Mary’s help in holding the traps open and putting the baited traps on the trap rail, he had most of them baited by the time Mary pushed the first trap into the water. The weighted cylinder of netting sank quickly, leaving the orange and blue buoy bobbing jauntily on the surface. Rachel picked her course to run outside the channel but across the widest part of the bay as much as possible. Every few ticks, Mary slid another trap off the stern. Rachel just kept the boat moving slowly forward. In less than half a stan, the first traps were in the water and neat trail of orange and blue points ran in a line across the harbor.
Rachel threw the boat into neutral as the last trap went over the side and they stood there looking back across the harbor. Rachel could make out Richard’s red poncho at the end of the dock, but only as a small point of color. “Now what?” she asked.
Mary grinned. “Now you take me back to the pier, and think about how and where you want to put out the next ten. And talk to Alan about processing the crabs you bring back.”
“Already talked to him. Rosie’s gonna take some of them and have a crab boil tonight at the diner to celebrate. I d
on’t know how many we’re gonna catch in this first run, but I’m sure we’ll be able to get rid of them.”
“Ten pots worth? One day? Probably,” Mary said. “But you should put out at least fifty pots, and scatter them across the bay to see how the different areas produce. I’m betting there’s not a lot of difference anywhere in here, but it would be good to know for sure.”
Rachel pushed the throttles forward and spun the wheel to take them back to the dock while she thought about it. “You’re right. I better talk to Alan.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Aram’s Inlet
April 20, 2305
Jimmy was ready to scream. “We got a place. We got a plan. What we don’t have is time.”
Jake sat across the table from him and shook his head. “We can build the barges for the barracks, the fuel, and the water. We can even get enough to put up a processing plant to get the fish ready to go up. What we can’t do is make enough to build a breakwater out of them. We can get every yard on the South Coast working on ’em, but by the time they get built and dragged out there, it’ll be too late to fish.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said. “What other ideas? We need to build a platform twelve hundred meters out at sea on a foundation that’s twenty-five meters underwater. It has to be strong enough to hold an orbital shuttle and all the cargo and it has to be no smaller than a hundred by a hundred meters.”
Tony threw down his stylus and leaned back in his chair. “We’ve been fighting this for days. What have we thought of?”
“Barges as building blocks,” Jake said.
“Barges as pontoons,” Jimmy said.
“Barges full of rocks,” Tony said.
“Shuttles full of rocks,” Jimmy said.
“I still say that would work,” Tony said. “If we could find enough shuttles.”
“Steel towers,” Jake said.
“Concrete towers,” Tony said.
“That will work,” Jimmy said. “But it’ll take longer than we have.”
“Grav pallets,” Jake said. “They’d be okay until we needed to recharge ’em.”
They ran out of steam and just sat there looking at each other.
“We need a different idea,” Jimmy said at last.
Everybody nodded glumly.
Jake stood up. “We’ll have the dormitory barge completed in another week. The prefab housing units only need to be bolted down. It’s an established design, so no problems. The Alluette yard is making the three fish processing barges. They’ll mount the equipment and it’ll be ready to tow in three weeks. That gives us time to build another barge here for potable water. The fuel barge, we’re just trading a new one later for one of Murch’s old ones now. He can cope with one less if we build him a new one before the summer’s over.”
Jimmy grinned. “Thanks, Jake. I’m glad you’re on the case.”
Jake shuffled out, scratching his head and mumbling.
“Where we gonna get different ideas, Jimmy?” Tony asked.
“I thought I’d call Violet and ask how she makes those grain elevators.”
Tony stood and stretched his back. “Can’t hurt. I still say, if we could figure out a way to get the concrete pylons out there, that’s the way to go.”
“Yeah, I’m with ya.”
Jimmy took a deep breath and placed the call to Violet.
“Jim,” she said with a warm smile.
He tried not to melt, but it was difficult. “Hey, Vi. How’s the season shaping up?”
She gave a little sideways head nod, and a shrug. “We’re gonna be ahead on grains and produce, but behind on mutton and lamb. I don’t really know how that will affect the contract, but I suppose it will depend on how you do with the fish. If you go long on the protein, we’ll be able to substitute here.”
“True. I saw that in the contracts the Ole Man sent down, too.”
“How’s it going?” she asked. “I’ve been watching the landings as they come into the PlanetNet.” Her forehead furrowed.
“Yeah. Well, I know where to get the fish. The problem is getting to them.”
“Tell me. Maybe I can help.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He fought back the memories of the old days when they’d first been married and how much pleasure they’d taken from solving the unsolvable together. “The fish are twelve hundred kilometers out.”
“Yeah, Sonya said you’d found a new fishing bank. She also said you found a sea mount to work off.”
“Sounds so simple till you try to do something out there. It’s three days by boat each way. Ten draggers out there will pull in over a megaton a day. We need to find a way to get all that fish ashore before it goes bad, or find a way to process it out there and move about a megaton a day of processed fish.”
“How do you normally move that cargo?”
“Cargo lifters take it to the marshaling yards where the shuttles pick it up and boost it up to orbit,” he said.
“Well?”
“They have a range of five hundred kilometers. They’re built for muscle, not duration.”
“Hm. I see.”
“We need to have a base out there that can support ten draggers, twenty crews, a small processing plant, and a shuttle pad.”
Violet didn’t even flinch at the mention of the shuttle pad.
“So? What’s the problem?”
“It’s twelve hundred kilometers out. We’re trying to think of some reasonably stable engineering project that will get us through this season so we can plan for next. Building it would be child’s play with a couple of years to work on it. We only have a couple of months before we begin running out of time.”
“Barges?” she asked.
“Can’t get enough of them fast enough.”
“How many you need?” she asked incredulously.
“Almost a hundred.”
She whistled in appreciation.
“By the time we get enough yards working to complete the task, we can’t get them out there in time.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“There’s only a dozen yards within a five hundred kilometer radius of us here. Even if we send them directly out rather than coming here first, that means we all need to get moving in about six weeks. That’s less than forty barges.”
“What’s the cargo capacity of the barges?” she asked.
“About two megatons. It’ll take them almost a week to get out there.”
“Okay, break it down for a simple farmer, Jim?”
“If I can.”
“How are you going to get the supplies out there to the crews?”
“The shuttles will drop off supplies and pick up fish,” he said.
“You’re planning on a megaton a day of processed fish?”
“Right.”
“Okay, the problem is you can’t figure out how to build a platform at sea that’ll let a shuttle land?”
“Oh, no. I know how to do that. It just takes more time than we have.”
“How’d your sister do it on Umber?”
“They went in with special gear. We could do it the same way, but it’ll take ten weeks to get the gear from Dunsany and at least four months to build the platforms.”
“You’re making it too complicated, Jim.”
“Okay, break it down for a simple fisherman,” he said with a grin.
“You’re over-engineering it. The sea mount lets you have some anchorage and you said yourself you can have forty barges in time.”
“Yeah. Okay, so far.”
“So it takes a week to get a barge out from the Inlet?”
“About that, yeah.”
Violet said, “It’ll take the boats a couple days to fill a barge. Will the product keep aboard the barge once it’s processed?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s not the issue.”
Violet shrugged. “So? Send a barge every two days. Load the outgoing ones with supplies and fill the incoming ones with fish.”
“But that would take
—” Jimmy froze.
“Yes?”
“Only seven barges,” he finished.
“Seems like it would be cheaper to get the fish in by barge than try to arrange special shuttle pickups and all the rest that goes with that. If it works out, you can spend the time working on the seamount. Load up some of the barges with rock or blocks or something. The boats won’t use a megaton of supplies a day and a new barge will be hitting their location every other day. Over the course of the summer, you can probably build that seamount up quite a bit, just a barge load at a time, if that’s what you want to do.”
He sighed and would have laughed if he hadn’t felt so stupid. “Thanks, and to think I called to ask you how you build those grain elevators.”
“They’re poured in place with a plasti-crete mix on a form.”
“How tall are they?”
“Forty meters, mostly.”
“I wonder what it would take to have four of them poured on the seamount.”
“I can have my guy call you, if you want.”
“Later, Vi. I think you’ve just given me the answer I need. You’re right. I’m thinking way too permanent for an exploratory effort.”
“Just let me know, Jim.”
“Thanks, Vi. I will. I better go talk to Jake about getting those yards making barges.”
“Stay in touch, Jim,” she said and cut the connection.
He sat there for a tick, shaking his head. “We thought of everything but barges as barges,” he muttered then got Jake on the line and started giving orders.
Chapter Forty-Three
Callum’s Cove
April 20, 2305
For their first trial, Mary had convinced Rachel to leave the pots out just a few stans. In part because she wanted to see what the catch would be like and partly because she wanted them to get practiced in putting the traps in and pulling them up before they got full of crabs. Nobody really knew how it would work out.
South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) Page 26
