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

by Nathan Lowell

  “We?” Chief Stevens asked.

  “Joint Committee on Security,” he said. “We don’t like it when we lose a client like that. When I got freed up, the Committee re-assigned me to the team that’s working on your little red-haired friend.” He turned to me. “We last saw him on Dree, but he dropped out of sight at the end of November. We picked up his trail on Greenfields but kept hearing that he was in Kazyanenko, and here in Martha’s Haven. It didn’t make sense so we sent teams to each place. We didn’t make the connection with your ship until it was too late. Unfortunately we got to Greenfields one day too late, but the break came with Bailey. He led us to Umbra, Umbra led us to Simpson.”

  “That still makes no sense.” I said.

  He shrugged. “I think Simpson might have been nervous about sending out his enforcer alone, so he had Bailey make the link up and ride along. By the way, his real name is David Patterson, and he’s going to be finding life very much more difficult thanks to you.”

  “How so?” Ms. Maloney asked.

  “Newsies. One of them got a nice digital of his face in the foreground of a shot of you two. They published the image, and we got the original. He’ll be showing up as a featured story on Galaxy Hunter real soon now.” He gave a feral grin. “Somebody will see him.”

  His hand went to his ear, and his eyes unfocused for a split second. I realized he wore a much more discreet communications device than he had when working for Geoff Maloney.

  “Time’s up. Must dash.” He said as he slipped back out of the booth. “Sorry, can’t stay. Have a date with the Deep Dark in about three stans, and I don’t want to be late.” He looked around at each of us. “Safe voyage. Nobody’s paying him so there’s no incentive anymore.” With a last nod, he disappeared into the crowd.

  Ms. Arellone sighed as she watched him go.

  We all looked at her.

  “Oh! sorry,” she said. “I just admire any man that big who can disappear so smoothly without anybody noticing.”

  Chief Stevens turned her head to look at where he had gone and tsked. “Kids these days.” She turned to look back at her. “When I was your age, I’d have been admirin’ how nicely he filled out that suit.”

  Ms. Arellone blushed. “Chief? He’s as old as the Captain! Why would you have even considered it?”

  “I’m wounded, you know? Stung to the quick,” I said my mouth twitching as I controlled the grin.

  She blushed again. “Sorry, Captain, I didn’t mean—”

  I held up my hand. “Yes, you did, Ms. Arellone, but it’s okay. I am old.”

  The Chief appraised me with a long look before turning to Ms. Maloney. “He wears it well, don’t you think?”

  “His age?” she asked, and turned to consider me. She smiled and there was something warm and sympathetic in it that I couldn’t remember seeing before. “Yeah. You know, when I first met him, I wasn’t so sure.” She turned back to the chief. “I think he’s beginning to grow on me.”

  “Enough! You make me sound like some kind of rash!” I said holding up my hands. “Let’s order dessert, and get on with this, leaving me and my age out of it, okay?”

  They all smirked but I got a good-natured chorus of aye-aye’s back. We finished our dinner in relative good spirits.

  Chapter Eighty

  Martha’s Haven System:

  2373-December-17

  Ms. Maloney found me on the bridge while the passengers watched the evening movie. She didn’t need to look very hard. I always spent the evenings there. Besides the morning tai chi sessions with Chief Stevens, I felt most at peace surrounded by the star-dusted blackness of the Deep Dark. Being in the cabin still hurt too much, and the guilt that, somehow, I’d caused her death by violating my own rules—a kind of karmic leveling—gnawed at me. Intellectually, I knew I probably suffered survivor’s guilt, but once the anger had burned out, I had to accept that she was gone. I often found myself sitting in the near dark of the bridge agonizing over what I should have done differently.

  “Gotta tick, Captain?” she asked, picking her way up the ladder with a mug in each hand.

  “Of course, Ms. Maloney.”

  She handed me a fresh cup of coffee, and took a seat at the engineering station beside me. “I wanted to talk about what happens next.”

  I sipped, and tried to wrap my head around the idea of a future. My horizon of opportunity had shrunk to cargoes for the next port, to booking passage for the next run.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked

  I found myself strangely detached. In a few days, Ms. Maloney’s stanyer in space would be at an end. Technically, when she signed The Articles, she’d made a two stanyer commitment. In reality, as Captain, I could put her ashore at any point without penalty.

  “I think I like it out here,” she said, turning to look out at the stars. “It’s peaceful.”

  I let my gaze be drawn to follow hers. “It is,” I said.

  She caught my eyes with hers. “I’d like to stay out here, Captain.”

  “What about DST?”

  “What about it?”

  “You’re going to be the majority stockholder. You’ll inherit the CEO position. How will you run the company from out here?”

  She shrugged, and her lips drew up into a half grin. “I don’t have to be CEO. I can direct the board to hire one.” She lifted her mug to her nose, and inhaled deeply before taking a sip.

  “You’d do that?”

  “Why not? Nobody really believes I know how to run a shipping company.”

  Her wry comment forced a single snort of laughter from me. “I’m not sure I know, Ms. Maloney. Even with just one ship. I can’t imagine what it must take to keep a fleet like DST’s flying.”

  That made her laugh. “Actually, I can imagine. Lots of meetings, long hours, and very little else.” Her gaze turned inwards for a few heartbeats. “I was away a lot after I reached a certain age, but the strongest memory I have of my father is coming home for visits only to have him constantly being called out for this meeting, that negotiation, or some urgent problem.” She paused and sipped again. “But truthfully, I have no idea what the job really is. It was a job he grew up with, learned as his father’s knee as it were.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I direct the board to hire Ames Jarvis as CEO. Kirsten thinks highly of him. I trust her judgment. Even if he’s been a pain in my side for this last stanyer—honestly? I don’t know that I can blame him for any of it. How much was his doing, and how much was Simpson’s manipulations from backstage?” She shrugged. “I’m going to have a talk with him, of course. Cutting me off from my own assets was a bit much. I’ve had a lawyer working on that on Diurnia since the day I found out. The stanyer will be up before that does any good, I’m afraid.” She shrugged again. “He does know his business—and DST’s too—so whatever my personal feelings about the weasel, I think he’s got to know more about keeping the company going than I do.”

  A part of me found the idea infuriating. We’d spent the better part of a stanyer trying to earn Christine Maloney her birthright. For most of that time we’d seen Ames Jarvis as the enemy, the person who stood in the way. The struggle had cost Greta her life, and now this woman was caving in. Another part of me realized that Jarvis never was the enemy. He was just the distraction to keep us from seeing the reality under the surface. The detached, distant part of me noted that I should have felt more, that the idea should have evoked some reaction other than numbness.

  After a few ticks of contemplation, I finally roused myself to ask, “So we’ll just keep going like we are?”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about, Captain.” She paused to gauge my reaction. “I’d like to direct DST to buy you out.”

  “Buy me out?”

  She nodded slowly. “We can make it worth your while, and what I’ve seen here is that there’s an untapped market in luxury travel.”

  I thought I should be more upset by the id
ea. Even if I didn’t sell out, DST’s entry into the market, with their deeper pockets and extensive infrastructure, meant that I would have serious competition. I should have felt betrayed by the idea but there was something about it that appealed to me in a perverse way.

  “Why should I sell?”

  She sighed and looked down into her cup for a few heartbeats before looking me in the face. Sympathy floated in her eyes. “Because you’re only going through the motions here. Because what started out as a wonderful adventure, a new life for you and Greta has been snatched away.” She leaned forward, and smiled. “Having spent a few days in my father’s residence after he died, I have some idea about what you must go through every time you go into engineering, every time you go into the cabin.”

  I sighed and nodded, unable to speak past the sudden lump in my throat.

  She gave a sideways shrug. “You’ve helped me see my future with new eyes, Captain. The least I can do is help you on your way to yours.”

  “You don’t think my future is on the bridge?”

  “Maybe.” She looked around then back at me. “Just not this bridge.”

  That strange sense of looking in at myself through a camera outside the ship reasserted itself. While some small voice in my head screamed, the rest of me couldn’t rouse enough feeling to respond with more than a grunt. Instead, I focused on the practicalities. “Will you need a few days in port to establish your position with DST?”

  “If it would be convenient to plan for an extended stay, Captain? That will give me time to pitch the idea to the board.” She paused. “Maybe between now and our arrival, we can work out what it is that I’ll be pitching.”

  I looked at her for a few heartbeats and then turned to gaze out at the comforting cold of the stars.

  “If you don’t want to sell, I’ll still want to work on the Iris, Captain. It’s the restaurant I’ve always wanted to have. Seems funny for a rich kid to say, but the dilettante lifestyle never appealed to me.” She paused, considering me for a moment. “It really is up to you, Captain. I just wanted to let you know you have options.”

  I nodded my thanks, unable to speak.

  With a smile, she stood and slipped from the bridge, leaving me sitting in the command chair of a life I no longer recognized. The idea that I might sell off my ship so soon after getting it seemed wrong, but the thought of spending the rest of my life being reminded of my failures—of Greta—seemed worse. I sat there contemplating the Deep Dark, feeling whipsawed by indecision for a stan or more. In the end, the decision washed over me as soon as I stepped back into the cabin and it felt as right as sinking into a hot bath.

  In the end, it wasn’t the money, or the position, or the ship. It wasn’t some nebulous notion of quitting when things got tough, and the feeling that I should be tougher, or more resilient, or more determined. One might argue that I could have been smarter, but hindsight is a useless guide to the past. At best it gives us the lessons we need to take into the future. The unavoidable truth lay in the emptiness of a cabin that had once—if oh, so very briefly—been filled with such possibility.

  And the realization that I would need to seek new possibilities elsewhere.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Diurnia Orbital:

  2374-January-1

  I pulled the last shipsuit out of my grav trunk, and laid it on the pile on the bed. The two trunks yawned emptily, and the cabin looked like a flea market booth had exploded in it. I snickered a little at the mess. At the point where I should have been packing to leave the ship, I unpacked everything I owned.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place, Skipper.”

  I turned to see Ms. Arellone standing in the door, surveying the shambles. Her eyes were no longer rimmed with dark circles but she still looked haunted. After Greta’s death, she had been wracked with the guilt of failure. I was so lost in my own fog that it had fallen to Chief Stevens and Ms. Maloney to help her through it.

  I shook my head, surveying the mess. “There’s stuff in here I’d forgotten I had.”

  “Are you going to get rid of it?”

  I scanned the room, surveying the collected artifacts of two decades as a spacer. “Some of it,” I said. “There’s no need to carry around worn out shipsuits and boxers with no stretch left in the waist.”

  She nodded at the obviousness of it and her eyes skipped lightly around the room. I tried to see the piles as she might be seeing them—the few decent sets of civilian attire, three mounds of shipsuits, and four pairs of ship boots in various states of decrepitude.

  I sighed. “It’s not very impressive. All laid out like that.”

  She chuckled. A small pile of objects decorated the desk, and her eyes were drawn to the collection. I followed her gaze, and a rough bundle reminded me of a task I needed to do.

  I crossed to the desk, and unrolled the bundle of whelkies. “Come see what you think of these, Ms. Arellone.”

  Her eyes wrinkled with curiosity as she picked her way through the mess, and then widened as I pulled the first of the small figures out of its cloth-wrapped cocoon, laying it down on the desk, and unwrapping the next. When I finished with the last, I stepped back. “What do you think, Ms. Arellone?”

  Her eyes grew wide with surprise. “When you said you had a whelkie, Captain, I thought you meant a whelkie. As in one. You didn’t tell me you had a whole pile.” She never looked up from the desk. Her gaze darted from figure to figure to figure. She focused on one, and she started to reach for it, but stopped and looked over at me. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  She picked up the figure, and held it up to see the purple shell at its heart. The figure was a badger resting on its haunches, sitting almost upright with its head turned to look to the left as if it had just heard a sound.

  “It’s lovely, Captain.” She smiled, really smiled, not the half-formed rictus approximating a smile I had seen on her face for weeks. “What is it?”

  I grinned at her. “It’s a badger. Ornery little beasts from old Earth. They’re tough enough to survive in a variety of climates and conditions, so they make excellent niche-dwellers in terraforming operations.”

  “He’s kinda cute,” she said.

  “He’s yours,” I told her.

  She at me in shock. “Oh, no, Captain! I couldn’t possibly—”

  I handed her the bit of soft cloth he’d been wrapped in all that time, and the length of red string he’d been tied with. “It’s already done, Ms. Arellone.”

  For the first time in our acquaintance, I saw Ms. Arellone speechless. Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and she looked from me to the badger and back to me again before she was able to get her jaw under control. “Are you sure, Skipper? I was just admiring it!” She started to put it back down on the desk where she’d found it.

  “Do you know the story of the whelkies, Ms. Arellone?” My question stopped her.

  “Not really, Skipper. Just that they’re really rare, and are some kind of good luck charm.”

  “They’re carved on a planet called St. Cloud over in the Dunsany Roads quadrant. The shamen who live on the south coast collect driftwood, and carve the figures. There’s an indigenous snail—a whelk—that lives in the tide pools, and the shells have a purple color. Some are dark purple. Some have just a bare wash of color. The story has it that the darker the hue, the more powerful the whelkie.”

  She held the badger up to see the bit of shell embedded on the badger’s chest as a heart. “Is that what this is?”

  “Yes, Ms. Arellone.”

  “This one’s really purple. How purple do they get, sar?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s on the upper end of the scale.”

  She looked over at me again. “But what do they do? Power for what?”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “The story is that the whelkie finds its owner, the person it’s supposed to go to. Usually it’s given out by the village shaman to somebody who needs strength or guidance.”


  She arched an eyebrow skeptically in my direction.

  I snorted a laugh. “Yes, well, that’s just a story.”

  “Do people believe it?”

  I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as I considered. “Some do. Some don’t. Mostly the skeptics dismiss it as religious mumbo-jumbo.”

  “What do you think, Skipper?”

  “I think that I’ve carried my dolphin for stanyers. There’s something soothing about holding the wood. I don’t feel like I’m influenced by some supernatural influence or anything, but perhaps it serves as a kind of centering device. A physical manifestation of focus.”

  She thought about that for a few heartbeats, and then looked down at the collection on the desk again. “You must have needed a lot of guidance, Skipper.”

  I laughed, and felt something cold and brittle snap inside me. “Yes, well, these aren’t my guides. They weren’t given to me.”

  “Where’d you get them then?”

  “Stanyers ago, on a trip through St. Cloud on the Lois McKendrick—back before I went to the academy. I found a guy in the flea market there who sold them to me.”

  “I thought you said they had to be given?”

  “Yes, well, that was before I knew what they were, and I bought ten of them for private trading goods. I just have never been able to sell one.”

  “Some trader you are, Skipper!” she twitted me even as she held her badger up close to her face.

  I chuckled.

  “So? How long have you been lugging these around?”

  I tried to add up the stanyers and couldn’t. “Since before the Academy. Maybe twenty stanyers.”

  She blinked in astonishment. “That long?” She looked closely at the shell turning it so the light gleamed on it. “Do you suppose it’s still got power?”

  I shrugged and grinned. “As much as it ever did, probably.”

  She gave me one of her exasperated glances, and then nodded at the collection on the desk. “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”