In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  She looked to me before looking back at Pip. “Chat about what?”

  “We’ve got a bit of an exclusive story for you, but we’d like to discuss it first before we fire up the presses.”

  At the word exclusive, the red tattletale on the camera went out and the cam dropped into her outstretched hand. She tucked it into a pouch at her side and smiled. “I’m listening.”

  “Step into my office, would you?” Pip extended a hand toward the lock in invitation.

  She picked her way up the ramp as if it might fold underneath her at any moment. Pip and I followed and I slapped the close key. She gave a little start when the lock began moving.

  “So, here’s the deal,” Pip said. “We’ve got a problem and we think you can help us. In return for that help, we’ll give you a story that nobody else can get.”

  “Details?” she said, eyes sharp and skeptical.

  “OMO says no tours,” Pip said.

  Her eyes went wide. “They’re gonna go nuts.”

  “You see our problem?”

  She nodded. “What do you need?”

  “David S. Powers. You know him?”

  “Davy Docket? Sure. Everybody knows him.”

  “Can you record him saying we can’t give the tour because we don’t have a permit? That if we do, we lose the ship?”

  “That’s easy. He’s a one-button interview.”

  “One button? On your cam?” Pip asked.

  She shot him an impatient glance. “On my blouse.” She looked back and forth between us for a heartbeat or two. “What else?”

  “News isn’t an exhibition, Ms. Marsport. It’s the public’s right to know. We have the man who led the salvage team that returned the ship and its unfortunate—late—crew to Breakall Orbital. He can walk you through the tragedy. Show you the stains on the deck. We give your holo cam a tour of the ship and you publish it for everybody to see. ”

  I coughed.

  “All right. Maybe not the stains on the deck,” Pip said.

  Her eyes had gone round and her jaw hinged open. “Mother of dragons,” she said, her voice barely audible over the sound of the blowers. “Who?”

  I held up a hand. “Uh. Me.”

  Her expression was one of those comical takes you see on holos that you know can’t possibly be real. Hers was.

  “You can check the records, Ms. Marsport,” I said. “I was only first mate then, but it was me.”

  “How soon do you want Powers?” she asked.

  “You’ll do it?” Pip asked.

  “Do it? Are you kidding me?” She shook her head. “How many of my clothes do I need to take off? I’d record naked for this story.” She reached for her blouse.

  “No, no! Please. No,” I said.

  Pip’s face fell and I chuckled.

  “That won’t be necessary, Ms. Marsport,” I said. “We just want to avoid a riot, if we can.”

  “All right. Let me go get Davy Docket on cam. I’ll be right back.” She took a couple steps toward the lock but stopped. “You’re not going to stiff me on this, are you?”

  “Don’t put out the Powers piece until you have the tour,” Pip said. “The two pieces will have more punch together. A real one-two.” He made little punching motions with his fists.

  “Good enough.” She looked at the lock. “What do I do? Say ‘open sesame seed’ or something?”

  I punched the lock key and the machinery levered open.

  “When you’re ready, just ring the bell. We’ll come get you,” Pip said.

  She scampered down the ramp like her skirt was on fire and disappeared around the side of the ship in the direction of the lift.

  I closed the lock again. “Think she’ll do it?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’ll do it.” Pip bit his lip.

  “But what?”

  “But will it be enough?”

  “We need a Plan B,” I said.

  “We need some crew to do things like run errands and mind the lock,” he said. “In the meantime, your coffee’s getting cold.”

  “It’s been cold for the last three ticks but it’s coffee.” We headed back to the mess deck. “A real one-two?”

  “It worked.”

  “She probably doesn’t even know what that means.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” he said. “You’d be surprised what goes on as sport here.”

  I paused to look at him.

  He shrugged. “What? You want to bet? Against me?”

  I laughed. “Not this time.” I continued up the ladder to the mess deck. “I prefer to have a little better chance.”

  “Yeah, I prefer to stack the deck myself.”

  I gasped. “You cheat? I’m shocked to my core.”

  “Only when it matters.”

  I stepped onto the mess deck and tossed the rest of my cold coffee down my throat before throwing the cup away. I could see Sharps had made some significant progress. Little things like liners in the trash cans. Somebody had scraped down the two coffee urns. I wasn’t sure how fit they’d be, but at least they were cleaner. I ran my hand down the chromed side of one. “I was probably the last person to clean this urn before today.”

  “Really?” Pip asked. “Over a thousand days and you think nobody else cleaned it?”

  “Caretakers have very little vested interest in that kind of thing.”

  “True. Bring your own. Do your shift. Leave. As long as the ship doesn’t catch fire or drift away on you, it’s good.”

  “You want to get your beer?” I asked.

  “What? Now?”

  I shrugged. “I figure it’ll take maybe a stan for me to walk Ms. Marsport through the ship. That should give you enough time to move it in.”

  “Past the crowd?”

  “Put a tarp on it. We’ll be getting replenishments from the chandlery all day, I hope. It shouldn’t raise much attention.” I shrugged. “If they ask, tell ’em it’s beer.”

  He laughed. “Won’t they mug me for it?”

  “They won’t believe you.”

  The call bell rang. “That was fast,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Let’s go see.”

  Sure enough, Madeline Marsport, Breakall News Forty-Two, stood at the lock. I cracked it open to let her in and Pip out.

  “Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked as he walked by her off the ship.

  “I’ve got an errand. I’ll be back before you’re done.” He gave a jaunty wave and headed for the lift.

  “Did you get it?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Easy. He loves it when people pay attention. You wanna see it?”

  “I believe you.”

  She laughed. “You shouldn’t be so trusting, Captain.”

  “So I’ve been told. How do you want to frame this?” I asked.

  “How about you just talk to the camera? Pretend it’s a friend who’s come to see the ship and point out the places of interest as we go. I’ll ask a question if I have any or point if there’s something I think you should talk about.”

  “What if you point and it’s nothing I can talk about?”

  “Pull your earlobe. Like this.” She reached up and gave a little tug to her left earlobe.

  I followed her example.

  “Even less. Just a little touch, like you had a scratch for a moment.”

  “Very well, Ms. Marsport. How would you like to begin?”

  “I’ll start out there. You open the lock and welcome me aboard?”

  “Like just ‘Welcome aboard. I’m Captain Wang, your tour guide this morning?’”

  “Sounds perfect. Remember. Just be yourself. You’re talking to a friend. You can pretend you’re talking to me instead of the camera if that helps. Relax and go with it. I’ve seen you with the crowd. This should be really easy compared to that.” She paused to give me a little nod of encouragement. “Ready?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  She scampered back off the ramp and stood at the entrance. She pulled the hover-cam out of its pouch
and launched it with a toss. It stopped just a few centimeters over her head and I noticed a small control wand in her left hand. She nodded to me and I closed the lock. It had barely closed before she rang the call bell and I kicked the key to open it again. As the ramp extended I stepped down onto it and looked at the camera. “Hello. Welcome to the Solar Clipper Chernyakova. I’m Captain Ishmael Wang. Come aboard and I’ll show you a little bit of what it’s like to live and work between the stars ...”

  I walked back into the ship with Marsport a few steps behind. Inside I keyed the lock closed and faced the camera again. “Crewmen coming aboard or leaving the ship use that door. It’s an airlock and can be used in an emergency to dock two ships in space as well as keep us snugged up against the side of the orbitals when in port. Come with me and I’ll show you where the crew eats.”

  I didn’t get far down the passageway before I ran into Al coming the other way.

  “Oh, Captain. I heard the lock call—” She stopped when she saw I wasn’t alone.

  I turned to give the hover-cam a good look at Al. “I’m giving a bit of a tour to our friends here,” I said. “Everybody? This is First Mate Alberta Ross. Ms. Ross? Everybody.”

  She blinked a couple of times then shrugged. “Hello, everybody. Welcome aboard the Chernyakova.”

  “We’re on our way to the mess deck,” I said. “Would you care to join us?”

  “I need to go see Mr. Carstairs for a moment, Captain. Do you know where he is?”

  “Check the lock. He’ll be along shortly.”

  Al grinned. “Aye, aye, Captain.” She mugged for the camera a bit, which almost made me giggle at the thought of what a bald, pierced Amazon would look like grinning and waving on the video. “Enjoy the tour, everybody.”

  She flattened against the passage and I led Ms. Marsport past her and on into the mess deck.

  The rest of the tour went fairly well, I thought. After surprising Sharps and Franklin on their hands and knees scrubbing out a cooler, we went down the spine to visit with Chief Stevens. After a couple of wide-eyed moments she gathered herself and gave us the three-credit tour of the ship’s engineering spaces, including power and environmental, before waving us away with “Now go look at something more interesting. I’ve got work to do.”

  As we made our way back along the spine, my gaze went to the darker patch on the deck. I wondered if I’d ever be able to walk the spine without seeing the messenger’s bloated body sprawled there in my mind. I took about four steps before I realized that Ms. Marsport wasn’t with me. I turned around to see her pointing at the deck.

  I touched my earlobe but she pointed again and gave me a firm nod. Her lips formed the word “Please.”

  I touched my earlobe again but she pointed again and lifted her right hand to the top button of her blouse.

  I took a deep breath and looked down at the stain. “When we first came aboard back in ’71,” I said. “We found the crew where they’d fallen. One of them was there. We think he was the messenger sent down from the bridge to find out what was wrong.” I had to stop to clear my throat. “Needless to say, he didn’t make it.” I turned away from the camera and started walking. “When we get to the end of this long passageway, I’ll show you up to the bridge.”

  The bridge wasn’t much to look at in the glare of the orbital’s lights but I gave her a few moments to walk the cam about and get a feel for the space before leading her back down the ladder. I took her through the captain’s cabin and let her peek into a couple of the officers’ staterooms before going down the ladder to crew berthing.

  We stepped into the bay and I flipped on the overheads. “Finally, this is where the crew sleeps while we’re underway. We call it a berthing area, and their bunks are berths.” I walked down the length of it, giving her a chance to check out a couple of the sections. “Each quad has room for four crew members, two up and two down. As you can see, a crewman has just about enough room to crawl into a bunk and would have to leave the quad to change his mind. Through there is a sanitation station, what the crew calls the head or the san. What others would call the bathroom. Around the corner and down the passage there’s an identical berthing area for the other half of the crew.”

  “How many people aboard a ship like this?” Ms. Marsport asked.

  “Four people per quad. Six quads per berthing area. Two areas. Forty-eight plus a minimum of five officers.”

  I led her back out and up to the lock where I thought we’d end our tour. “And that’s about all I can show you about life aboard the Chernyakova,” I said. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit.”

  I expected the light to go out but it stayed lit and I looked at Ms. Marsport.

  “I have a couple of questions, if I may?”

  I nodded.

  “Why are there no mattresses in any of the beds, Captain?”

  I ran a hand back over my scalp and took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself. I couldn’t look into the camera for this so I stared at the bulkhead. “When tragedy struck the ship, two-thirds of the crew were off duty. Half of those were probably asleep and the other half lounging about in the berthing area.”

  “In their bunks,” she said.

  I shrugged. “There’s not much room there.”

  She nodded and motioned me to continue.

  “We had to dispose of all the bedding on the ship. We haven’t had a chance to replace it.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  I pressed the key to open the lock and she walked off the ship. I watched the cam fall into her hand as she turned and looked back at me. “We good?” I asked.

  “We’re better than good. When do you want this released?”

  “The sooner the better. We need to let these people know what’s going on.”

  “Will do, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Marsport.”

  “Thank you, Captain. See you in a few stans.”

  I really didn’t know why I felt gut punched. Walking through the ship shouldn’t have been that harrowing. Her focusing on the stain in the spine had pegged my meter. I’d had a hard time breathing after that.

  I found Al and Pip on the mess deck with three coffees on the table between them.

  “One of those mine?” I asked and slipped into the seat.

  Pip slid one of the cups over to me.

  I took a sip and nodded. “Not bad. Where’d you get it?”

  “Guy selling to the line.”

  “Your beer aboard?”

  “It’s chilling now.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Nope. Just rolled it in.”

  Chief Stevens came onto the mess deck and sat with us. “We have coffee?”

  “Not yet. You want one? I’ll fly,” Pip said.

  “Naw. We getting some lunch?”

  I looked at the chronometer and probably would have been surprised that it was already a couple ticks past noon if I hadn’t felt like it was already half past midnight.

  “Probably should,” I said. “How’re Sharps and Franklin doing?”

  “I sent them to find themselves some food at 1130,” Al said. “Asked them to be back by 1230 and we’d watch the lock for deliveries while they’re gone.”

  “Good.” I sipped the coffee and let the sound of the ship wash over me.

  “What’re we going to do if this viddie thing doesn’t work?” Pip asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve done about everything we can.”

  “Any thoughts on getting the berthing areas cleaned up?” Al asked. “If we get food prep going for tomorrow and the crew can move aboard, that’ll take a load off us in terms of security.”

  “Having a brow watch and messengers would be a big step forward,” I said. “How long it would take them to clean out deck berthing? It’s a big space.”

  “We’ve got what? Twenty new crew coming tomorrow?” Al asked. “Start them on the berthing areas and branch out into the passages.”

  “I’ll need some
help in engineering,” the chief said. “I’m picking up the loose crap but what I need is about forty people with a gallon of elbow grease and the odd sponge to get that place cleaned up. I don’t know what some of that crud on the decks is, and I don’t think I want to know.”

  “You don’t,” I said. “What do we have left to do to get underway?”

  “Besides food and crew?” Al asked.

  “Well, and basic supplies. The usual things,” I said. “Chief? Any idea yet?”

  She shrugged. “I think she’s actually spaceworthy now. The volatiles seem to have vented, leaving the tank empty, but the gauge was stuck. I got that cleared this morning. I’ll order tankage from the chandlery this afternoon and see if what we get matches what we’re missing.” She took a deep breath and blew it out her nose. “I’d like to take a day and run diagnostics on the fusactors. Another for the sail and keel generators. They always take a bit of fiddling.”

  “Burleson drives?” I asked.

  “They’re running low-level validations now. I’ll know this evening whether or not they’re what they say they are.”

  “What do they say they are?”

  “A lot better than I expected,” she said. “Barbells don’t have that kind of leg as a standard fitting.”

  “What are we talking about?” I asked.

  “Class T Origami. If they’re up to spec, we’re good for six Burleson units. Loaded.”

  I felt my eyeballs bulging.

  Al grinned and nodded as if the news wasn’t exactly news to her.

  “We had Class O’s on the Tinker,” I said. “We could do three with a tailwind.”

  “We got a really good deal on a used ship,” Pip said, smiling into his cup.

  “Don’t calibrate your jumps till the diagnostics are done,” the chief said. “I’ll let ya know when to celebrate.”

  “Old engineer’s saying?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Got it in a fortune cookie somewhere in Ciroda.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Breakall Orbital:

  2374, August 9

  The call bell interrupted our little kaffeeklatsch. Al volunteered to see who was at the door and returned with some tote-wielding chandlery workers with a delivery for Ms. Sharps. Pip and I ran the manifest and had the workers stack the goods in the galley. I signed the delivery receipt and sent them on their way.