Captain's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper)

by Nathan Lowell

  I looked over at her.

  She gave a little shrug. “Can’t let the girls have all the fun, Skipper. We can’t keep it up too long, but as long as we’re not stressing the systems on strength, there’s a bit of advantage to be had here.”

  “See if she’ll come another point or two into the wind, Mr. Hill.”

  “I’ve got two points more now, Skipper. I think that’s all we can get.”

  “Two points on a million kilometers is a nice savings, Mr. Hill. We’ll take it.”

  I looked over to see the chief grinning back. “That’ll help a little, Skipper. At least keep the suffering to a minimum.”

  “All gifts are gratefully received, Chief. How long can the girls keep this up?”

  “At these flux rates, probably a couple days.”

  “After that?”

  “We’ll need to pull back a bit. Depends on how much they over heat and how stable the flux. If we get much more we’re going to start running into field integrity issues and we’ll have to reef up anyway.”

  “We should have these talks more often, Chief. Mr. Wyatt can tend his pies.”

  She grinned and headed back to engineering. “Lemme just check on the girls and I’ll see you at lunch, Skipper.”

  I won’t say I wasn’t a little more hopeful. Getting a good wind this far out in the system when we were typically moving the fastest meant leverage on our arrival time. Whether it would be enough to shave twenty-six stans from the deceleration plot, only time would tell.

  The rest of the watch went by pretty normally given the circumstances. The higher than normal winds and larger sails gave Mr. Hill something more to do than he was used to. There was just enough turbulence in it to keep him on his toes and the plot showed him doing an excellent job in carving the line.

  Ms. Thomas scampered up onto the bridge at 1140 with an odd look of curiosity on her face. “The chief has a very odd smile, Captain. You know anything about that?”

  I nodded her over to the display. She saw the gauges run off the ends of the scales for sail and keel and gawked. “I’ve never seen anything like that, Skipper.”

  “Me, either, but apparently it’s one of those little hidden functions on the generators. Normally we don’t need more than we got because we’re operating in the inner system. Integrity wins over area there.” I stood up and looked out the armor glass. “Out here, we need as much area as we can get, but we need to be careful not to overstress the generators and burn one out. The governors make sense on the average run.”

  “We’re sailing a fine line then, Skipper.” Her face took on a smile as well. “Anything I need to watch?”

  “Just keep an eye on sail integrity. If it starts to climb, reef up. The overrides are off so be careful in how hard you drive her. It’s too far to get out and push if something goes wrong.”

  Mr. Schubert joined us on the bridge and we relieved the watch at 1145.

  As I headed down the ladder, I couldn’t help but notice the beatific smile plastered across Mr. Schubert’s face as he caressed the helm and the ship surged against the dark.

  Lunch was a nicely done casserole of beans and ground meat. Mr. Wyatt was still experimenting with curries and had developed a fine hand with the spice rack. I made a note to track down some of the more exotic ones when we got back to Diurnia. With his awakening skills, I thought he might find them useful.

  The lunch mess was subdued but obviously the word about the higher than normal flux rate had made its way through the crew. There were quiet, hopeful smiles around the mess as the meal progressed and polite applause as Mr. Wyatt pulled out a simple tray of brownies and a gallon of vanilla ice cream for dessert.

  About halfway through the brownies, the chief sat upright on the bench and cocked her head as if listening. I didn’t hear it at first, but then as the general hubbub died down I caught the shift in sound as well. The ship sounded different.

  She jumped from the table and raced for the engine room just as Ms. Thomas’s voice came on the ship’s announcer. “Captain to the bridge.”

  I ran. It probably wasn’t dignified and certainly did little for assuring the crew but I wasn’t really thinking of appearances at the moment. One tick and what felt like several hundred heartbeats later I was on the bridge. “What’d you have, Ms. Thomas?”

  “Flux rates are twelve points above normal and climbing, Skipper. I’ve reefed up. We’re down to sixty percent of normal, and still having trouble with integrity.”

  I looked at the strain gauges and saw they were well up into the yellow and ticking up toward red.

  “With this level of flux we shouldn’t be seeing this kind of strain, Skipper.”

  I glanced over to where the chief had left the Engineering console fired up. The keel was still extended and I slipped into the seat there just as the display showed the keel coming back in to normal levels. The chief beat me to it from engineering.

  “Did that help, Ms. Thomas?”

  She looked down at the telltales and nodded slowly. “Yes, Skipper, I think it did. Integrity’s coming back toward nominal levels.”

  “How’s she handling, Mr. Schubert?”

  He was grinning like a madman. “Thrilling, Skipper! Thrilling!”

  I snorted. “Thrilling is just a heartbeat from terror, Mr. Schubert. Try to stay on this side of the line if you please?”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  I looked at the flux rate over his shoulder. “Did this just blow up suddenly, Ms. Thomas?”

  “Yes, Skipper. We were finishing up our lunch here and the flux rate was sliding down the scale just ever so slowly. Then wham. In a matter of less than a tick it jumped from around six points above average to near twelve. It was like we hit a wall.”

  I looked at the ship’s estimated velocity and was impressed with the decrease in speed. “Ride it as long as you can, Ms. Thomas. We may see these cans delivered yet.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper. We’ll do our best.”

  “I know you will, Ms. Thomas.”

  I met the chief in the passage outside of the mess deck. She stepped off the ladder from Engineering as I came down from the bridge.

  She chuckled when she saw me. “That is why we have the governors in place, Skipper.”

  “Any damage to the ship, Chief?”

  She shook her head. “Naw. She’s rugged and we got to it right away. Did the wind come up?”

  “Yeah, we’re up about twelve points now and it came up pretty sudden.”

  The Chief’s eyes widened with surprise. “Stiff wind for these parts. Ms. Thomas did the right thing by dropping the sails like that, but it was the extra drag from the keel that caused the integrity issues. She had no way of knowing.”

  “Are the governors back in place?”

  “Yeah. I doubt we’ll need them much now.”

  “You think this is just the effect of a more laminar flow, Chief?”

  She screwed up her mouth in concentration. “Not likely, Captain. The transition would be smoother. I’d guess it’s a solar storm. We just came through the gust front.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, but I needed a reality check. Shall we finish dessert?”

  “Lovely idea, Captain.” She smiled happily as we reentered the mess deck and four anxious faces turned in our direction.

  I held up a hand. “It’s okay. Wind came up. We’re making exceptional time. We were pushing the integrity limits. Nothing to be alarmed about.”

  They looked at each other and a general rumble of relief went around the room. As for me, I was wondering how long the storm would last and whether or not we’d find another, more violent gust.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Jett System:

  2372-April-06

  The storm blew out late in the day on April third. We’d had to reef down to as little as twenty percent on the sails in order to maintain integrity, but the good news was that we had a substantial reduction in our velocity. Mr. Pall ran continuous updates on a
rrival time and after watching the date go from early in the day of April 12 to early in the day on April 11, there was some hope in the ship that we’d carve enough off to make it. Then the storm blew past and we were back on a normal model for our estimated course and speed. We only needed to dock by the end of day on April 10th to make the deadline. The current projection showed us four stans short. We’d be there, the tug would be pushing us in, but we’d miss by a hair unless we could pull a few more stans out of the course.

  It wasn’t really likely, but we had hope.

  Mr. Pall had the morning duty and managed to pick off the inner markers. We roused ourselves collectively to pay attention. We’d had the outer markers for days but the cargo list was nondescript and uninspiring after our experience on Welliver. Of course, the fact that all that excitement appeared to be a forty-five metric kiloton liability strapped to our butts contributed to the general lackluster air.

  I was tempted to hide in the cabin when not on watch. It killed me to see the crew so dejected. We were so close. If I’d only risked a little more, could we have made it? We got lucky with the storm. It let us get even that much more tantalized by the date and what we were going to miss. I fought my temptation and went to the mess deck to sit with the rest of the crew. We were all in the same boat. If we were gonna be miserable, we’d be miserable together.

  After lunch I hung around the mess deck to talk to Mr. Ricks and Mr. Wyatt about morale and what we might do once we got to Jett.

  “How about movies?” Mr. Wyatt was leaning against the deep sink and looking at the big repeater screen over my head.

  Mr. Ricks perked up. “Can we get the equipment, sar?” He was looking back and forth between Mr. Wyatt and me.

  Mr. Wyatt nodded at the repeater behind me. “We’ve got the screen. Just need a cube player.”

  Chief Gerheart came onto the mess deck in time to hear that. “Already got it, Mr. Wyatt.” She crossed to the unit on the bulkhead and pointed to a spot on the lower left edge. “Socket’s there. This is really just an entertainment screen that’s got the interface to be used as console repeater built into it. Plug in a cube and it’ll play it.”

  I spun in my seat and leaned back against the table to consider it. “When I first made the run out from Port Newmar to Diurnia, the packet had movie nights after mess. As a passenger, I found it to be a rather pleasant way to spend an evening.”

  Mr. Wyatt piped up. “I can lay in some popcorn when we get to Jett.”

  “Where do we get the movies?” Mr. Ricks asked. “I mean I have some loaded in my personal player.” He colored slightly. “I doubt that they’d be of general interest.”

  I looked around at them. “Any cinema fans in the crew?”

  I got shrugs back.

  “Well, let’s take it under advisement. Some opportunity will present itself, I’m sure.”

  My tablet bipped and I looked down to see a message from Ms. Thomas on the bridge.

  “This is a good idea. Do we have a chess set? Bridge deck? Any pinochle players? That’s a nice table. Can we play games on it?” I let that sit for a heartbeat to distract them a bit. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to check on something.”

  I left the mess deck in good order. After abandoning all decorum and bolting before, I’d vowed to never scare the crew that badly again so I forced myself to a sedate jog up the ladders and onto the bridge.

  “Whadda ya got, Ms. Thomas?”

  She turned as I popped up onto the bridge and pointed to her screen where I could see a red flashing blob and I got a sinking feeling.

  “Mayday, Skipper. We got a problem.”

  I sighed. “Never rains but it pours.”

  Mayday is the distress call for ships in trouble. It was an old, old signal that followed mankind off old Earth and into the stars. My mother used to celebrate May Day as a kind of holiday of a more fecund nature, but this was apparently a corruption of a French phrase meaning “Help Me.”

  “The Sarcastic Voice out of Fischer has an environmental issue. Her scrubbers are all off line with bad cartridges and twenty-eight people aboard. It’s a fast packet. Looks like another Damien hull.”

  I frowned. “That was sloppy. No spares?”

  She shrugged. “Report says all the spares are contaminated. CO2 is building up and they can’t get rid of it.”

  “And we’re the only ship in range?”

  Ms. Thomas shrugged. “We’re the closest, but can we help them?”

  “Let’s find out. Call the chief, would you, Ms. Thomas?”

  “I’m right behind you, Skipper.” I turned and saw she’d followed me up to the bridge. She shrugged a little apologetically. “I had a feeling when you bailed on the movie discussion.”

  “You heard, Chief?”

  She shrugged. “Enough. Damien’s have good scrubbers. We use cartridge based scrubbers, too, but our cartridges aren’t interchangeable.” She turned to Ms. Thomas. “Did you say twenty-eight people aboard?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what’s in the Mayday message, Chief.”

  “No wonder they have scrubber problems. I thought they were only rated for a crew of four and sixteen passengers.”

  “Can we help them, Chief?”

  “If we get there before they all suffocate, probably we could do something. We got more than enough environmental capacity to handle them all, although where we’d stack them, that’s another question.”

  I turned back to Ms. Thomas. “Are we nearest responder?”

  “We’d need Mr. Pall to tell us that, Skipper. We’re on parallel tracks but I don’t know if anybody else is on a closing course with us. They might be able to reach her sooner. No other ship has responded yet.”

  “Page Mr. Pall to the bridge, please, Ms. Thomas.”

  She rang his stateroom directly. “Sorry, Mr. Pall, but could you come up to the bridge? We need your help here.”

  She hung up and less than a tick later, Mr. Pall belted up the ladder, shipsuit half zipped, and with a serious case of ‘I just woke up’ on his face.

  Ms. Thomas filled him in on the situation and he sat down to plot, while I brought up the long range scanner.

  “Six stans plus or minus, Skipper. Less if they can speed up a little to match us.”

  I found the ship on long range. There didn’t seem to be anybody else in the immediate vicinity.

  “Can you raise them on a voice channel, Mr. Pall? I think we’d like to chat them up.”

  “I can try, Skipper.” He burrowed into his console. A few ticks later, he looked up at me. “I have Captain Allison, Skipper.”

  “On the speaker, if you please, Mr. Pall.”

  “Circuit is live, now, Skipper.” He snapped a key down.

  “Captain Allison? Captain Ishmael Wang of the Agamemnon here. How can we help?”

  A woman’s voice came from the overhead speakers. “Thank you, Captain Wang. We’ve got a right mess here with too many lungs and not enough scrubbers. Anything you can do to help with one or the other, or both, would be greatly appreciated.”

  “We’re at least six stans behind you, Captain. Can you last that long?”

  “We’re good for maybe ten more stans.” She coughed a little and when her voice returned I could hear the stress in it. “We’re getting people into suits now to try to relieve the load on the scrubbers. It might buy us some time.”

  “Is your engineering officer available, Captain? Chief Gerheart is with me on the bridge. It might be useful if they could chat a moment.”

  “One tick, Captain. I’ll get him.” The circuit went quiet for a moment.

  Then a man’s voice came on. “Chief Green, here.” If the captain’s voice carried a bit of stress, then Chief Green’s stress was packed in a can and mounted on his back.

  I nodded at Chief Gerheart and the two engineers talked technical for a bit, while I conversed with Mr. Pall over matching course and speed.

  They came to a break point and she nodded to me that she was done.


  “Captain Allison? I’ve been talking to our astrogator and we can match velocities much quicker if you can add a little velocity to facilitate matching course. We can probably be there in a couple of stans.”

  “Of course, Captain Wang. We’ll open a telemetry channel now and coordinate the rendezvous.” There was a catch in her voice. “Thank you, Captain.”

  “Don’t thank me, yet, Skipper, but I’ll take a rain check when we all get to the orbital.”

  “Done and done, Captain. Sarcastic Voice, out.”

  “Agamemnon, out.”

  “Circuit is closed, Captain.” Mr. Pall turned to me, his eyes glittering with excitement. “So you think they’re pirates, Skipper?”

  “Pirates, Mr. Pall?”

  “Yes, Captain. Running the bad scrubbers trick to get us to dock with them, then they hijack us, kill the men, rape the women, and steal the cargo?”

  I looked to Chief Gerheart who shrugged in return.

  “It’s a fair question, Skipper,” she said.

  “You think they’d hijack a cargo of kitty litter, Mr. Pall?”

  “The ship would be worth something, even if it’s just for parts, Captain,” he said.

  “I’m not sure we live in the same universe, Mr. Pall. What do you think, Chief? Were they good enough actors to make you believe they were really in trouble?”

  She ran both hands up over her head and scratched her fingers along the scalp. “Well, the chief talked a good story. It made sense and hung together, but then, it would if it were fake. He sounded worried enough and so did that captain. They did put out a public Mayday and anybody could answer, including a patrol craft. They’re on an inbound track so it’s not like they’ve been lurking in here in wait, unless they’ve been really clever. Which I suppose they might be.” She was thinking out loud for Mr. Pall’s benefit as much as mine, I think. “It’s a dangerous universe, Captain. He could be right. They might be pirates.”

  “Do you think so, Chief?”

  “No, but I could be wrong, too, Captain.”

  “Okay, then I think I know how to handle it.” I turned to Mr. Pall. “Please make a least time rendezvous with the Sarcastic Voice. We’ll use the emergency collar and link up nose to nose. We can use the locks to keep the bad air out of our ship and let a few people at a time through. First few should tell the tale. Does that meet with your approval, Mr. Pall?”