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

by Nathan Lowell

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t done. “You’re not like other captains. You didn’t presume on my person because you could, but you’ve been an ass about it for weeks. Moping about the ship. Leaving the room when I enter. Not even looking at me across the table in the mess, and I sit right across from you!”

  The roaring in my ears built to the point where I could only barely make out her words as each one struck home, as each burned with truth and I recognized what an idiot I’d been. The air went out of me in a rush and my head fell forward, bouncing on my neck like the bobble-head I apparently was.

  She let me stew for a tick or two before going on. “Thank you for being a decent human being, Ishmael, but next time? Before you start getting your shorts in a knot? Remember that there are two adults involved. Try talking together before you make any more sweeping, patronizing decisions about what’s proper. You can save yourself a lot of grief.” Her soft voice carried a backing of titanium.

  “Sorry, Greta.” I mumbled into my coffee as I picked up the mug to hide behind.

  She gave a sad little chuckle as she rose, leaving me to my cooling coffee and heated face. “I am, too, Captain.”

  The latch on the cabin door clicked when she closed it behind her.

  I leaned back on the couch and gazed out of the forward port. Remembering my earlier conversation with Mr. Hill, I recalled another old curse.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” I muttered.

  Chapter Two

  Diurnia System:

  2372-December-14

  Three days out of Diurnia, the universe took an unpleasant twist to the left.

  At 2340 I headed to the bridge to relieve Mr. Pall. When I got there, I found him hammering on his systems console, and Mr. Schubert staring numbly at the drop down repeater on the overhead. A series of news wire items ran in a loop and a talking head video clip played silently, the female anchor’s moving image superimposed on a stock photo of Geoff Maloney. The headlines were all variations on the same theme: “Shipping Magnate Dead!”

  “Report, Mr. Pall.”

  “I grabbed the local news wires about a stan ago, just to update the systems, Captain. I found this.”

  “What happened?”

  “Heart attack, they’re saying. Seems pretty consistent across all the sources.”

  “When?”

  He consulted a popup display and I could see the time stamp translations. “They discovered the body about five stans ago.” He jerked a thumb at the overhead. “That’s about four stans old, so it was canned right after the news broke.”

  “Any message traffic?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing yet, skipper. I keep pinging but nothing’s coming back from home office. It’s the middle of the night there now.”

  I plunked down in the vacant watchstander’s seat and pondered. “Who’s second in command at home office these days, William? Is it still Shelby Blum?”

  He hammered his keyboard a bit and gave a shrug. “According to this document, it’s a man named Ames Jarvis.” He looked at me with a curious frown. “Isn’t that the guy who came to see you on Breakall?”

  “Yes, Mr. Pall, it is. Unless there are two of them in the organization.”

  “I thought he was the Breakall station chief, Skipper.”

  “I did, too, Mr. Pall. How recent is that source you’re using for reference?”

  He slapped another window open. “Three months, Skipper. Last updated in late September.” He slapped another few keys. “Query sent. We’ll have it in...” he looked up at the chronometer at the corner of his console, “...about a stan.”

  Mr. Hill joined us on the bridge, and nudged a fresh cup of coffee onto the watch station for me before tapping Mr. Schubert to relieve the watch.

  “Watch change, Mr. Pall, I’ll relieve you if you can spare a moment?”

  He nodded almost absent-mindedly, pulled up a fresh view on his second screen and I could see the log updating on the watch station in front of me as he typed. He banged the enter key and his window closed. “It’s yours, Captain.” His fingers beat another brief tattoo on the keyboard in front of him before he turned in his chair to look at me. “Orders, Captain?”

  “Get some sleep, Mr. Pall. I suspect we won’t know much until the chain of command gets squared on the orbital and, even then, the first thing they’ll need to do is damage control with the media.”

  “Any ideas what they’ll do, Skipper?”

  I took a deep breath and blew it out before responding. “If we don’t sail, we don’t make money, so whatever it is, it probably won’t change things here.” I hoped that I was right. Diurnia Salvage and Transport was not a publicly traded company, and Maloney wasn’t just the CEO, he was also the largest stockholder. I wondered what Mrs. Maloney would do with controlling interest.

  The talking head showing in the pulldown display changed to show a different head—a distinguished looking man speaking earnestly into the pickup. The crawl under the image read, “CPJCT rep dies. Long time member dies of heart attack.”

  His seat on the Confederated Planets Joint Committee on Trade would be hard to fill. He’d been a champion of shipping companies for decades. Along the way he had done a lot of good for crews, and never seemed to have forgotten that, without crews, the ships did not sail. Some cynical voices might argue that he had done that by mistake, but I knew Maloney did nothing by accident.

  “Does that seem odd to you, Skipper?” Mr. Hill watched his helm with one eye on the monitor.

  I scanned my proximity sensors and got a good look at the ship status while I mulled the question over before answering. “In what way, Mr. Hill?”

  “Who dies of a heart attack these days, sar?”

  Mr. Pall glanced at him, and even Mr. Schubert frowned.

  “Mr. Hill?”

  “His heart just stopped beating? Probably one of the richest men in the sector? How is that even possible, sar? Unless it just blew up in his chest, or he was cut off from everybody and everything so nobody noticed, and he couldn’t call for help?” Mr. Hill shook his head. “Just doesn’t seem right to me, sar.”

  I shrugged as Mr. Pall turned his attention to me. “I know, Mr. Hill, but that’s the story, so until we get more information, we really can’t do more than speculate, and I think we have a ship to sail here...”

  He took the hint and I nodded at the repeater screen. “If you’d cut that, Mr. Pall? We’ll get on with getting home safely.”

  He nodded and, a few key taps later, the screen darkened again. “I’ve put a filter on the incoming traffic, skipper. Anything from Home Office will be flagged and routed to both of us as soon as it hits the ship.”

  We sat in stunned silence for a dozen heartbeats before Mr. Schubert stirred himself and headed down the ladder. Mr. Pall followed, but I wondered how much he’d sleep.

  Mr. Hill and I settled in to keeping the ship on course. We were only a few days out of Diurnia and whatever else happened, we’d be there soon enough. I wondered why Jarvis had been on Breakall claiming to be the section head there. I pondered Mr. Hill’s point about dying of a heart attack. With all the technology we had to keep people alive, he would have had to either been cut off from aid—or died very suddenly.

  I sat back in my chair and contemplated the darkened repeater screen on the overhead, replaying it in my head. He had died at home, not at medical. I sighed and shook my head.

  “Yeah. I know what you mean, Captain,” Mr. Hill said.

  The chrono had just clicked over to 0335 when the incoming message alert flashed on my screen. It wasn’t the normal traffic router, but the special one that flagged traffic from home office.

  I opened it and read the short message.

  “At approximately 1940 on 72-Dec-13, Mr. Geoffrey Maloney succumbed to a heart attack in his apartment on Diurnia Orbital. Security personnel found his body when he failed to attend a scheduled meeting. Medical personnel were unable to revive him. He was alone in the apartment at the time.r />
  “Operations are to proceed normally until further notice. All ships and crews are instructed to continue their voyages during this difficult time, and to maintain delivery schedules and contracts while the Board of Directors deals with this emergency.

  “Contingency plans have been activated and Mr. Ames Jarvis, recently deployed to Breakall, is the interim CEO pending Board ratification. We will keep you informed as soon as we know anything more.

  “Our sincerest condolences go out to the friends and family.”

  The message was from Kirsten Kingsley, head of operations for Diurnia. I routed it to the console on the mess deck and sent a copy to Mr. Hill at the helm.

  He grunted as if punched when he read it.

  Silently, we sailed on toward the expanding disk that was Diurnia.

  At 0430, Mr. Wyatt came up the ladder to the bridge. He brought hot coffee and a concerned look.“Skipper? Is it true?”

  I nodded.“It appears to be, Avery.” I accepted the mug from him with a nod of thanks and took a sip while he gave one to Mr. Hill and collected the empties

  He started down the ladder, but stopped at the top, turning back. “It doesn’t seem possible. Who dies of a heart attack?” he asked, unknowingly echoing Mr. Hill’s statement.

  “Apparently, anybody who doesn’t get to the autodoc soon enough, sar,” Mr. Hill offered.

  Mr. Wyatt gave a little shake of his head, as if trying to clear it. “So it would seem, Mr. Hill.” He sighed and headed down the ladder toward the galley.

  We docked at Diurnia safely and without incident in the afternoon of December 17th. The mood aboard was more worried than somber. All the crew had seen Geoff Maloney, of course, but I was the only one of them that had significant interaction with him. Even I couldn’t say I knew him personally.

  When we docked, Ms. Kingsley met us, coming aboard as soon as we’d cleared Confederation Customs. The tired looking brunette in a severely tailored suit had a slim portfolio tucked under one arm. The hollows under her eyes made me think that the suit might be the only thing holding her up.

  I met her at the lock, and escorted her to the cabin while Ms. Thomas established the portside watch and declared liberty. The crew did not immediately stream off the ship, but rather huddled on the mess deck. Waiting for news, I suspected.

  As we settled onto the sofas with a tray of coffee and cookies between us, courtesy of Avery Wyatt’s forethought, I thought she blew out a sigh. I must have looked at her oddly. “Sorry, Captain.” She accepted the coffee and gave a small tight laugh. “It’s been a very hectic few days, and I suspect it’s only going to get worse.”

  “I can only imagine.” I gave her a moment to sip her coffee, and let her push the tray of cookies away. “How can I help you, Ms. Kingsley?”

  “Kirsten, please.” She paused for another sip, or maybe to gather her thoughts before speaking. “As you might imagine, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. A power shift of this magnitude has the sharks circling.”

  I didn’t know. The situation was well outside my area of expertise, but I nodded for her to continue.

  “The company has emergency plans in place to deal with the situation, although we never thought we’d need them. I don’t suppose anybody ever does. There’s a service on the eighteenth—gods, that’s tomorrow—family only and down on the planet, although I’m not sure who all will attend. There’s not many of his family here anymore.” She took another sip of the coffee—pausing to blow on it a bit first. “The CPJCT will hold a public memorial here at Diurnia and another at Port Newmar.” Her face twisted into a grimace. “It’s not often they lose one while in service, so they’ll play it for all its worth.”

  “How’s the media? They pestering crews?”

  She shook her head. “There were a few who tried to interview crew from the Achilles—she was in port when it happened. No sobbing crewmen, no angry fist shaking, so...” she shrugged and looked up at me. “No story.”

  “What’d they expect?”

  “I don’t think they expected anything, truthfully. They were fishing. They were hoping to find some dirt to trot out. A man like Geoff doesn’t get to where he is without making a few enemies.”

  I toasted her with my coffee mug. “That’s true enough.”

  She gave me a steady look across the table. “You’re not one of them, are you?”

  “One of his enemies?”

  She nodded her head slowly.

  I shook mine in response. “I’m just a captain in his fleet. He was my boss. Nothing much beyond that.”

  For the first time since she came aboard, I saw a flash of humor in her eyes. “Uhh. Right. Sure.”

  “What? Is there something I don’t know?”

  She chuffed out a laugh. “Captain Ishmael Wang, hand-picked by the man himself from the graduating class at Port Newmar, transported to Diurnia on his private yacht. You cleaned up that festering boil that was the William Tinker, worked your butt off to make captain in record time, got assigned the worst ship in the fleet, and in less than a stanyer, you’ve turned that ship around from being the berth we threaten people with to the one we have a waiting list to get on.” She toasted me with her mug. “’Just a captain’ seems to be a bit of an understatement, even for you, Captain Wang.”

  I snorted a short laugh of my own. “I got lucky a few times.”

  “Yeah, well, luck helps, but you’ve done well and there are those that think that Geoff Maloney’s hand was behind a lot of it.”

  The silence in the cabin grew for a couple of ticks before I shrugged. “I’ve wondered that myself.”

  “You’re about to become very rich, you know that, don’t you?”

  I blinked at the sudden shift in the conversation.

  She smiled at my confusion. “When the Chernyakova gets sold, you’ll be a millionaire, Captain Wang. Several times over.”

  I blew out my breath. I wasn’t sure where she’d been going with that line, and my heart seemed to have stopped for a moment. “Oh. Yes. Well. We don’t know how much it’ll go for and I’m not sure what my share of it will be.” I gave a half shrug. “I’m trying not to think about it until it happens.”

  The news about Maloney’s death had completely tossed all thoughts of the pending salvage auction out of my mind.

  “Will DST still put in a bid?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. Ames is on his way back already. He’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Under the circumstances, we’re holding up any major changes to the fleet until get the new CEO up to speed.”

  “Who’s the new CEO?”

  “The new majority stockholder, of course—Christine Maloney.”

  I frowned. That name didn’t ring any bells with me. “Is that Mrs. Maloney...?”

  She shook her head and I had the uneasy sense that she fought to contain a grin. “Mrs. Maloney left stanyers ago. Took her settlement and her masseuse off to Venitz somewhere. Christine is his daughter. Sole heir. Thirty-one. Likes her nightlife, I understand.”

  I sipped carefully before speaking. “And she’s the new CEO?”

  “Uh huh.”

  I glanced over to where Kirsten studied my face over the rim of her cup. “What does she know about running a shipping company?”

  “Not. One. Damn. Thing.”

  “Why don’t you look more worried?” I had a very bad feeling about the glance she gave me over the rim of her mug.

  “Because she’s not my problem, Captain.” She put a slight emphasis on the word “my” that set of a warning klaxon in the back of my mind.

  “Whose problem is she?”

  Kirsten picked up her mug, sipped without answering and without taking her eyes off me.

  I could feel my eyes getting round in their sockets as the implications of what she was not saying began to sink in. “She’s my problem?”

  The smirk broke free, and Ms. Kingsley gave a little nod.

  I sat very still, trying to figure out how a thirty-one year
old woman, heir the oldest shipping line in the quadrant, could suddenly become my problem. Only one, entirely ludicrous, explanation seemed possible and I blurted it even as the thought formed. “You want me to train her?”

  The smirk turned into a grin. “Right, first time, Captain.”

  “But I don’t know anything about running a shipping line!”

  The grin softened to a smile that I might have found quite charming if I hadn’t been distracted. “No, Captain, we want her to learn what it’s like on a ship.”

  “We...?” I asked.

  “The Board of Directors. And her father.”

  “Maybe you should start from the beginning?”

  She nodded and put her coffee cup carefully on the table. “Good idea.” She steepled her fingers in front of her nose and mouth, and blew out softly, brow furrowed. “Mr. Maloney has a deal for you. You’re under no obligation to accept it, but he thinks—thought—it would be something you’d be willing to take on.”

  “This is the same Mr. Maloney who’s now deceased?”

  “Yes, Captain. Mr. Maloney took some rather extraordinary steps over the last few stanyers.”

  I leaned back, laying an arm across the back of the sofa. “And I figure in those plans?”

  She gave a curt nod. “Some of them, Captain, which is why I’m here.” She pulled the tab on her portfolio, and slipped out large envelopes, placing them carefully on the table, beside her mug. “Your last performance evaluation of Ms. Thomas was quite complementary.”

  I frowned and looked at the envelopes. “She’s come a long way in a stanyer. Getting her hearing loss diagnosed and treated made all the difference.”

  “So did giving her a strong role model. We’ve had our eye on her for awhile. After her last failed Board, Geoff dug a little and pulled in a few favors. He used his position to get a copy of the confidential report from her Board.”

  I could feel my eyebrows bounce at my hairline. “I didn’t think that was even possible.”

  She snorted. “When you own the cookie store, you get your choice of cookies, Captain Wang.” She gave me a small smile before continuing. “Her last Board only failed by the smallest of margins. The crux of it was her abrasive personality and her fitness reports from Captain Delman.”