Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  “It works by getting the tools and spares we need to keep the ship from blowing up the next time we try to jump.”

  His eyes widened for a moment. Natalya thought it was mostly a stretching exercise because he didn’t seem surprised. “Why jump if it’ll blow up?” he asked after several moments.

  “Well, it might not blow up. It’ll be less likely if we have the replacement emitter bus coupling that should be in the spares locker. But isn’t.”

  He heaved a huge sigh and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “You’re going to go through every possible disaster which might be caused by a missing spare part, aren’t you?”

  “If I need to.”

  “Squalid dump?” he asked.

  “Hyperbole. It’s not that bad. Certainly better than I expected.”

  “Why me?”

  “I trust you.”

  He lowered his hands and peered at her. “What could I possibly have done to you to deserve that?”

  “Well, you’re not Pritchard. You’re not part of the engineering crew at all, in fact. That means it’s not likely you had a hand in the pilferage.” She shrugged. “You’re also the only member of the crew who hasn’t been all hail and well met since Albee tried to break Captain Trask’s face on a dinner plate.”

  The beginnings of a smile seemed to tease Lyons’s lips for a moment. “I heard he got booted off the ship. I didn’t know why.”

  “You left the dinner mess just a few ticks too early.”

  “We’ve been underway a week?”

  “Yes. Jumped into Siren a couple days ago.”

  He sat, apparently lost in thought, so long Natalya began to suspect he’d fallen asleep. “You wouldn’t happen to have an analgesic on you?” he asked.

  “I know where to get one.”

  “I could use a couple.”

  “I can get them for you.”

  He sighed. “Yes, Ms. Regyri. Please.” He blinked and sat up a little straighter, then winced.

  “And maybe a nice cup of coffee to wash them down?”

  “You’re going to be like this?” he asked.

  “Just trying to be helpful.”

  “Spare me. Please. Just … let me dig myself out for a few ticks?” He turned his bleary, bloodshot eyes on her and waited.

  “I’ll just get those tabs for you.” She rose and started for the door.

  “Yes, please, Ms. Regyri. I would like a cup of coffee to wash them down. Just a splash of milk, if you would be so kind.”

  She grinned. “Be right back.”

  She slipped out of Lyons’s stateroom and almost plowed into Steve Pritchard in the passageway outside. The cloud of mouthwashy cologne nearly gagged her. His eyebrows tried to scale Mount Forehead before he got his features under control.

  “I heard you’d braved the Lyons den,” he said, clearly amused at his own cleverness. “I could scarcely believe it.”

  “Now you know,” Natalya said and sidled past him toward the ladder down to the galley.

  “May I ask?”

  She turned to find Pritchard close on her heels. “Ask what?”

  “What you’re doing in Lyons’s stateroom?”

  He seemed just a bit too busybody for her taste.

  “You can ask.”

  “What were you doing in Lyons’s stateroom?”

  “Well, we were just having a little chat about this and that. You know, how people do.”

  “Ms. Regyri.” He smiled in a way that made her want a shower. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

  “You’ve found me out. We were having wild monkey sex on his desk and rolling around in the empty bottles under his bunk.”

  Pritchard’s face turned a darling shade of pink. “Well, I never.”

  “You should try it sometime,” Natalya said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me? I’ve got an errand to run.” She waved her fingers in a stupid, flirty gesture. “Tootles.”

  She left him spluttering in the passage outside of the cabin and snickered all the way to the first aid dispensary outside the wardroom.

  Chapter 30

  Siren System: 2363, June 23

  When Natalya led Josh Lyons down the spine and through engineering she felt a little like the drum major in a very short parade. Everybody along the way stopped to gawk. To their credit, nobody commented on the cargo master’s appearance (rumpled and all but bleeding from his eyes) or his demeanor (something between grumpy and stabby).

  She also had to give Lyons credit. Once she got the analgesics into him along with most of a cup of coffee, he never balked.

  Before they got to the spares locker, Solomon fell in step with Natalya with a cautious glance behind her at Lyons. “Something up, boss?”

  “Spares inventory. Mr. Lyons is going to help me run an audit.”

  “You need a hand?” she asked, grabbing another glance behind her.

  “You’ve got watchstanding duties,” Natalya said. “Besides, I’d feel better getting somebody outside the department as an external auditor.”

  Solomon leaned in close and lowered her voice. “Can he see straight?”

  “No, but I can hear just fine, Ms. Solomon,” Lyons said.

  Color rose up her neck and over her ears. “Sorry. No offense.”

  “None taken, Ms. Solomon,” Lyons said.

  “We’ve got it, Ms. Solomon. You’ve got other duties.” Natalya shot a pointed look back up the ladder toward Engineering Control and the small cluster of hands peering down at them.

  “You’re the boss,” she said and went back up the ladder.

  “You handled that well. You’ve had experience working with crews?”

  Natalya shook her head. “Not so much. Mostly just me and my father on an exploration scout, but I did well at Port Newmar.”

  “Not exactly the same.”

  “No,” she agreed. “I just do my best and hope it’s enough.”

  He snorted. “Sometimes it’s not.”

  She stopped at the door to the spares locker and looked at him. “Sometimes.”

  He shrugged.

  She opened the door and flipped on the light. “Here we are. Home away from home away from home for the next couple of days.”

  Lyons’s head swiveled left to right and occasionally tracked up and down. He sighed. “I see why you wanted help. You sure Ms. Solomon wouldn’t be an asset?”

  Natalya shook her head. “Calculated assessment. Could be wrong.”

  “You think she’s involved?”

  “Let’s just say, I don’t want anybody casting aspersions on our process.”

  He peered at her through narrowed eyes. “You think Kondur’s going to be looking for a scapegoat?”

  “Depending on how much damage he takes to his bank account, he’s going to be looking for a least a few pounds of flesh.”

  “You don’t seem worried that it’ll be yours.”

  “You’re pretty observant when you want to be. Where shall we start?”

  He surveyed the room again and blew out a long, slow breath. “At the beginning, I suppose. How are they numbered?”

  “Section, shelf, bin.” She turned toward the far corner. “Alpha-one-one. Over here.”

  “Well, sooner started, sooner I can get back to wallowing in my own filth,” Lyons said.

  After a bit of bumbling, Natalya handed Lyons her tablet so he could scan the label and she could count.

  “You’re a better choice,” Lyons said. “I can’t tell scrap metal from legit parts.”

  So they began—section by section, row by row, bin by bin.

  After two stans, Natalya called a halt at Delta-four-six. “I’m getting punchy. I don’t know how you’re doing it.”

  Lyons looked a bit better than when they started. Some of the inflammation around his eyes had either gone down or was being masked by the lighting. His hands had all but stopped shaking as they worked. She saw a tiny tremor as he keyed in the last number. “Grit and ignorance,” he
said, looking up. “I could use a bit of a break before we start making errors we don’t catch.”

  “It’s almost time for dinner mess. Will you be joining us tonight?”

  He handed her tablet back and stared at the deck for a few moments. “Not tonight, no,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow.” He looked up at her and smiled. “Wouldn’t want too much shock to shipboard culture all at once.”

  “You’re not going to drink your dinner, are you?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “What if I do? My business.”

  “Until morning, when I need your help for another full day of fun and festivities.” She raised her eyebrows in question. “Am I going to have to allow time for you to sober up?”

  “No,” he said. “I am rather exhausted from a week of drunken revelry. I think I’ll just have Ms. Marah send a tray and turn in early.”

  Natalya smiled. “Probably the right choice. I know I’m going to be hitting the rack as soon as I can. It’s been a rugged couple of days.”

  “Of all the functions involved in cargo handling, I find inventories to be the absolute biggest drain.”

  “On your energy?” she asked.

  “On my will to live,” Lyons said.

  “Sorry, this is probably not your favorite thing to do.”

  He shook his head. “Actually feel better tonight than I have all trip. I’m rather surprised.”

  She slapped the light switch, closing and locking the door. “Any idea why?”

  “It’s either the coffee or the meds,” he said, not looking at her.

  “Uh huh.” She said. “That’s your story?’

  “That’s my story.”

  “Works for me.” She nodded her head at the ladder. “Come on. You’re welcome to wallow in your filth, but after crawling through those bins all afternoon, I want a shower.”

  Lyons fell into step and they climbed the ladder. “I can understand that.” He lifted his left arm and gave himself a quick sniff. “Sorry, I seem to be a bit whiffy. In that closed space, too.” He grimaced. “Sorry.”

  She shook her head and turned down the spine. “No apologies necessary. I’m the one who shanghaied you into the job. Least I can do is put up with a little whiffiness.”

  Chapter 31

  Siren System: 2363, June 26

  Natalya slammed the bin marked O-27-56 closed. “That’s the one we’ve been looking for all week.”

  Lyons stood up from the utility cart he’d been perched on and shook out his shoulders. “Last one?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’s it look?”

  Natalya winced.

  “That bad?”

  “You’re the one who’s been putting in all the zeroes. What do you think?”

  He shook his head. “To be honest, I stopped paying attention to what had numbers and what didn’t about half past day two.”

  “I’ll be able to get a solid read on it now,” Natalya said. “I’ve been looking at the total spares value every evening and the number keeps going down and down and down. I’ll have the exact figure when I run the replenishment order against the Siren databases, but it’s going to be ugly. Into the six figures. Maybe as much as half a mill.”

  Lyons’s eyes fairly bulged at the number. “Merciful Maude. That’s a lot of parts.”

  “Literally. It’s metric tons. Maybe as much as a hundred.”

  “How can anybody steal that much from a ship?”

  “That’s the question. How did they get that much off the ship? How did they know what to take? There are some really expensive items here, but we’d have noticed right away if they’d been missing.”

  “Without an engineer?” Lyons asked.

  Natalya started to nod, but stopped. “Maybe. I’ll have to look more closely. Some of the oxygen filtration media. It gets used a lot but it also has a shelf life of only a few months. It has to be ordered fresh regularly.”

  Lyons nodded. “So, while it’s expensive, somebody would have noticed.”

  “It would also be hard to move with only a partial shelf life. If I were looking to make the most profit with the least risk, that’s the stuff I’d leave.”

  “I don’t envy you the task of sorting it all out,” Lyons said.

  “Thanks.” Natalya paused for a moment. “And thanks for helping me out.”

  Lyons handed her tablet back and shrugged. He ran a hand across the back of his neck and looked at his boots. “I should probably thank you for dragging me out.”

  “You’re welcome?”

  He snorted and held out his hands. They trembled like a badly tuned fan. “Not as bad as yesterday. Having something to do helped.”

  “You didn’t dive back into the bottle when you left here?”

  Lyons sighed. “That first night? I had a couple shots but it was the end of the bottle.”

  “Last one?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’ve still got half a case.”

  Natalya felt her eyebrows rise. “How much did you bring aboard?”

  His mouth twisted into a grimace. “Just the one case.”

  Natalya did the math in her head. “Yikes.”

  “It’s not that much taken across the whole week. A fifth a day.” He lowered his gaze to his boots again. “Really long days.”

  “I’m not judging,” Natalya said.

  He looked up at her with a half-smile on his face. “Yeah.”

  “Can I ask …?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. I’m working hard not to remember it. Any more than I have to.”

  “How’s that working out?” She gave him a smile and a wink.

  He laughed. “About as well as you might expect.”

  “I asked Blanchard.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said to ask you. It’s not his story.”

  “Huh.” He held out his right hand and watched it shake for a while.

  “What will you do tomorrow?”

  “Probably sweat a lot. Try to sleep.”

  “What do you do when you’re not aboard ship?” Natalya asked. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  “I run logistics for Dark Knight Mining and Manufacturing.”

  “Challenging job?”

  “Can be. When one of the mining fleets gets hit, that’s the worst.”

  “Gets hit by what?”

  “Belt rats. Iron Mountain thugs figure it’s easier and more fun to take the ore than mine their own.”

  “Happen often?”

  “No, thank Maude.” He sighed. “Once a stanyer maybe. Everybody going out figures it’ll be somebody else. Or not this trip. Or whatever rationale you tell yourself.” He shrugged. “Most of the time, they’re right.”

  “How many fleets does Kondur run?”

  Lyons bit his lips together and shook his head. “That’s probably information that you’re not in the loop for.”

  “A lot?”

  “A lot. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Natalya thought about it for a long tick. “That’s why it’s so hard to defend. Targets are too spread out. Strikes are too spread out.”

  “In a nutshell,” Lyons said. “I don’t know if they do it so randomly to throw us off or if it’s all they can manage. For that matter, even why they do it.”

  “Well, there’s the value of the ore,” Natalya said.

  “Which is not inconsiderable, but that’s a long way to haul ore.”

  “All the way back to Iron Mountain?”

  “Yeah. It’s a long haul for a bulk hauler to get all the way up there from a belt in Dark Knight.”

  “A bulk hauler like this one?”

  Lyons nodded. “Two hundred metric tons, even with as long legs as she has, it would take a while. You can’t just skip across the pond in a straight line like we did to Albert.” He paused. “We did go to Albert first, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there’s a messy bit of dark out there between Dark Knight and Iron Mountain. Lo
ts of random rocks. Lots of gas. Proto-stars lighting off at weird moments. You can’t fly through it, even ballistic. You never know if you’re going to jump into a rock that wasn’t there before. Or into a gravity well you can’t jump out of. Assuming you survive jumping in to begin with.”

  “What if they’re not going to Iron Mountain?” Natalya asked. “My father always claimed that Iron Mountain got blamed for a lot of stuff they didn’t do. Made it easy for people to make the odd smash-and-grab knowing Iron Mountain would take the heat.”

  Lyons shrugged. “That would change things, but doesn’t change the frequency of hits.”

  “Yet.”

  Lyons raised an eyebrow.

  “If they’re just setting up the operation? Maybe they haven’t been in a position to hit more than once a year until now.”

  “Possible,” he said. “The last hit was just a couple months back. They shouldn’t hit again until this time next stanyer. Plus or minus a few weeks.”

  “So if they strike in less than a stanyer?”

  “Depends. How much less? A few weeks, even a couple of months, aren’t significant.”

  Natalya gave a little sideways nod of the head. “Granted.” She raised her eyebrows. “So what are you going to do tomorrow?”

  “Read any good books lately?”

  “I have a couple I can loan you, if that’s the question.”

  His gaze seemed to focus somewhere on the far bulkhead. “I used to like to read. Used to read a lot.”

  “What happened?”

  He bit his lip and shrugged. “I stopped.”

  Chapter 32

  Siren System: 2363, June 26

  The captain reviewed the report on his console and sighed. “How in the name of all that’s holy did somebody do this?”

  “Physically, you mean?” Natalya asked.

  “Yeah. Greed and desperation make common cause, but this must have been a huge amount of work to pull off.”

  “It’s tons of parts. It either took a lot of time or it wasn’t one person.”

  “Could one person have done it?” Trask asked. “Whoever masterminded this had to know a lot about the ship and how she flies. Does any single person have that kind of knowledge?”

  Natalya shrugged. “I don’t, but I’m the new kid. I passed my environmental classes so I know what has to be done, but Knowles is operating on a completely different level down there.”