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

by Lowell, Nathan

  “The weapons training?”

  He looked around for something else to stow, finding nothing he leaned against the work island and rested his palms on the edge. “In a way. Mostly it’s her outlook.”

  “Really?” His answer surprised me. “Her outlook?”

  “Well, maybe attitude,” he amended. “It’s just...” He looked up at the overhead, as if the words he struggled to find were up there. “She has not had an easy time of it, yanno?”

  “Well, I don’t know the particulars, William, but I suspect that she’s had her ups and downs.”

  He grimaced. “Yes. Mostly downs if half the stories are true.” He looked at his boots for a few heartbeats. “She made me look at myself and think.”

  I could feel my eyebrows rise a bit on my forehead. “A frightening experience for anyone, William.”

  He saw my smile and grinned back. “Yes, well. The thinking was something I’d been doing but not enough looking. Compared to her, I’m a spoiled brat, rich kid, with more advantages than brains. I figured I needed to get over myself and get on with my life.”

  His words echoed in my head and I had a very uncomfortable moment before he went on.

  He looked up at me and gave a bit of a shrug. “It’s not something she said as much as how she is. You look at her and you see one thing, and sometimes that’s really her, but sometimes it’s not. She has this intensity when she’s doing knife work, or the unarmed moves. It’s like she goes someplace else in her mind, and then she cracks a joke about my grip or my balance and tosses me on the deck.” He shook his head. “I’m not explaining this very well.”

  “I think you’re doing admirably well, William.”

  He sighed once before continuing. “So, yeah. Billy the Buccaneer seems a bit...” He groped for a word. “...sophomoric.”

  I was surprised by his use of the name that I’d assumed most people used behind his back, but it pulled a short laugh out of me. “Well, you certainly left an impression.”

  He barked a laugh in return. “No doubt, Skipper. No doubt. I can see how some people might have found that aggravating.” He shook his head. “So, this last trip I started actually thinking about it. I don’t know what, or how, or anything really, but—working with her? She’s got such amazing control of herself and I began to think that’s all we really have—control of ourselves—and it’s up to us how we deal with that.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes.

  “You’ve come a long way, William.”

  “Thank you, Skipper. I feel like I’ve still got a long way to go.”

  He got a laugh out of me with that. “Don’t we all!”

  Ms. Thomas sailed past the mess deck, looking resplendent in her dress uniform and we both gave her a little wave in passing. When we heard the lock start to close he turned back to me. “She’s going to be the new captain, isn’t she?”

  “Well, I think she’s going to pass this time, yes.”

  He gave me a hairy eyeball in return. “That’s not exactly what I asked, Skipper.”

  I could feel the corner of my mouth curling up. “Yes, I believe she is, William. Is that a problem?”

  He looked at the empty door again and thought for a moment. “No, Captain. I don’t think it is. It’s all part of the ride, isn’t it?” He seemed about ten stanyers older all at once.

  I nodded slowly. “Yes, William. I do believe it is.”

  My tablet bipped me. I pulled up the incoming message, read it quickly, and forwarded it to Chief Gerheart.

  “Looks like good news, Skipper.”

  I grinned and shrugged. “Not sure if it’s good or bad, but Kirsten Kingsley’s meeting me at the maintenance dock at 0900.”

  He grinned back as Chief Gerheart burst onto the mess deck.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  With a nod to Mr. Pall, I followed the chief out to the lock and we headed for the maintenance docks.

  As we approached, we met Kirsten coming in the opposite direction. She had a knowing smile on her face. “Liked the looks of it, Captain?”

  I shrugged. “It seems like it might fill the bill if we can come to an agreement on price and I can get the financing together.”

  She nodded sympathetically. “Financing is usually the problem.” She keyed the lock to maintenance and asked, “Did Richard Larks get to you?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  She looked over at me. “That doesn’t sound promising.”

  I shrugged. “His advice was take the money and retire to the country.”

  We were halfway along and Kirsten stopped to look at me. “He what?”

  Chief Gerheart and I both fetched up. Greta looked a bit amused, but I just shrugged. “He said it’s not enough money to go into business for myself so I’d be best advised to retire and collect the income on my investments.”

  She made a rude noise. “Did he offer to manage those investments for you, too?”

  “Not yet.” I smiled at her.

  She tsked and shook her head. “I thought he was better than that.” We continued toward dock three. “Did he at least ask you want you wanted to do?”

  “Oh, yes, and his advice was to buy a nice yacht so I could sail around to my heart’s content.”

  She shot me another look. “A yacht?”

  “Yeah, he seemed to think they were just like fast packets only smaller.”

  The chief snorted quietly beside me.

  “I looked at them, but they just don’t have the legs to be much use.”

  Kirsten shook her head and muttered, “I need to look at the advice he’s giving us. He’s obviously not as connected as I thought he was.”

  We stopped in front of the lock and Kirsten keyed it open. A slight over pressure in the hull gusted a green smelling miasma onto the dock and Kirsten all but retched at the smell.

  Beside me the chief said a very unladylike word that would have fit right in on any engineering deck in the universe. She looked at Kirsten. “You might wanna have an engineer look at the scrubbers.”

  Kirsten eyed the chief engineer flashes on Greta’s shipsuit. She grimaced. “Um? You wouldn’t happen to know of one that’d be willing to look at this for me?”

  The chief grinned and pulled a small flashlight out of a pocket at her thigh. “Matter of fact, I do.”

  “I’d take it as a favor, Chief...Gerheart, is it?”

  The chief looked once at me and I nodded. She took a deep breath and plunged into the funk. I followed and Kirsten brought up the rear.

  Chief Gerheart didn’t waste time looking for light switches, but her beam flashed once across the broken console as she headed into the ship. As she walked, she pulled her tablet out of its holster and I could see the schematic of a ship glowing on the panel.

  Once we were inside the ship, the funk wasn’t quite as bad. It still caught the back of my throat, but by breathing shallowly, I kept from retching. I heard Kirsten gasping as she struggled to follow. “Breathe through your mouth, it’ll help a bit,” I suggested to her.

  “Ugh.”

  I had to admire Ms. Kingsley’s ability to pile freight on a single word.

  The chief headed deep into the hold, walking past the ladder up to the first deck.

  “Hatch to engineering is up the ladder, Chief,” I called after her.

  She shot a glance over her shoulder and kept going.

  Kirsten had found a handkerchief to breathe through and had it clamped over her mouth and nose. I couldn’t imagine it helped much, but if it made her feel better, I wouldn’t deprive her of the comfort. The taste of the air caught at the back of my tongue.

  She looked at me over the top of the hanky. I just shrugged and followed the chief into the dark, the flashlight making a brilliant puddle of light as it jerked along the decking.

  I was about five steps behind by the time Chief Gerheart reached the after bulkhead. Her light scanned back and forth at waist height until it stopped on a door latch. “There we go,” she said alm
ost to herself. She grabbed the latch and pulled it up to disengage it. It didn’t budge at first so she shifted her leverage on it and got it moving. As the handle got vertical, some mechanism in the door lifted it away from the after bulkheak. She got her shoulder on the exposed edge and started shoving it sideways. I put my weight behind hers and we got the hatch open enough to slip through.

  The hatch opened into a good-sized spares locker, most of the bins empty, a couple of them broken. I had the presence of mind to register when the chief’s flashlight picked out the light switch on the bulkhead and closed my eyes as her hand reached for it. I could see the lights blaze behind my lids and opened them tentatively. Kirsten edged through the hatch behind us, her eyes blinking away the glare and the tears from the smell.

  The chief scanned the storage bins quickly and found what she was looking for. “Gimme a hand here, Skipper?” She pointed to the pile of filter cartridges. She grabbed two of them and began stacking them in my arms like firewood. She gave me five and took the sixth one herself before elbowing open the hatch on the other end of the room. It opened into the engine room, and she flicked the lights on as she passed the hatch combing. The flashlight went back into her pocket and she flicked through a few screens of schematic until she found the one she wanted. She turned the screen to orient it to the scene in front of her, then—eeling between the massive machines—disappeared into the bowels of the ship.

  I followed and found her pulling the latches on an upright cabinet. She had to put down the filter and tablet to free her hands, but the cover came away easily to reveal a badly sodden mass that I barely recognized as the inside of a scrubber.

  She cursed again and set the cover aside, leaning it against the bulkhead, before turning back to Kirsten. “Ms. Kingsley? This isn’t my ship but if it were, I’d strip this mess out and replace it with fresh filter cartridges as soon as possible. Now is not too soon.” She shrugged. “It’s going to make a mess, but this—” she jerked her thumb at the mess in the scrubber cabinet, “—is what’s making the smell.”

  “Would you do it for me, Chief?”

  Chief Gerheart stuck her head back in the scrubber. Clogged filters slopped onto the deck before Ms. Kingsley finished speaking.

  “Skipper? If you’d stand those spares over there?” She nodded with her head as her hands fumbled with the slippery releases. “We need to find a trash bin or something for these. And I saw a hose back in the stores locker. There should be a water fitting on the bulkhead just at the foot of the ladder over there.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the ladder.

  By the time I’d dumped my load out of the way of the dirty filters coming out of the scrubber, Kirsten had wheeled over a trash bin and was getting her nattily-tailored suit filthy by grabbing the filters off the deck. I left that task to her and went in search of the hose.

  It took us half a stan working together to get the rotting filters out of the scrubber, get it cleaned out to the chief’s satisfaction, and then re-load it with fresh cartridges. It didn’t help the smell immediately but given time, the circulation would clean it up. By then we’d become so inured to the stench, it was no longer gag-inducing.

  “Thanks for the help. Sorry about the suit,” Chief Gerheart said to Kirsten, nodding to the slime streaks down the front.

  Kirsten looked down at herself, arms held away from her body. “I didn’t like this suit anyway,” she said finally and grinned at the chief. “Thank you for this.” Her hand swept around to indicate the scrubber and clean deck around it.

  Chief Gerheart smiled and ducked her head in acknowledgment. “Glad to help. I hate seeing ships suffer.”

  “Well, you wanted to see the engineroom, Chief. What do you think?” I asked as I dried my hands on a bit of waste. I’m not sure why I bothered. My shipsuit would need to be recycled because I didn’t think cleaning would get the smell out.

  The chief cast an uneasy glance at Ms. Kingsley and hesitated.

  Kirsten grinned. “Please. This is not my area of expertise, Chief Gerheart. I’d take it as a kindness if you’d tell us both what needs to be fixed here.”

  The chief nodded at Kirsten. “Okay, then. I need to poke around a bit, but right up front, it needs a good cleaning.” She pointed to the deck around the scrubber. “You can see the difference in the deck where we cleaned. How long has the ship been here unattended?”

  “A week, maybe.”

  The chief shook her head. “Then this is old dirt. If you’re gonna sell this ship, you’ll need to get it cleaned up for starters.”

  She pulled the flashlight out again and started walking around with Kirsten hot on her tail. Every so often she’d stop, point out something with her light, and comment to Ms. Kingsley. After the second stop, Kirsten pulled out her own tablet and started making notes. I followed along behind, largely forgotten but enjoying the tour.

  After a full stan of crawling through cabinets, looking behind huge machines, and even examining the ship’s air ducts, the chief shut off her flashlight and pocketed it. Kirsten made a few final notations on her tablet and filed the documents.

  “So, you think this isn’t a bad ship, but needs some work?” Kirsten’s expression was intent on Chief Gerheart. I think she’d even forgotten she intended to sell the ship to me.

  The chief sighed once, then scanned the room once more. “It looks like she’s been used hard, and run on a shoestring for a long time. You’re going to need to put some money into it to make it really safe and spaceworthy again.”

  “These things you pointed out?” Kirsten held up the tablet.

  “The fusactors need the most attention. The ship will need to be re-certified when you sell it. Those units won’t pass. They haven’t had the required periodic maintenance so they’ll need to be decommissioned, gutted, and rebuilt.” She shrugged. “It’s not as bad as it sounds, but it’ll take time.”

  “What about the sail generators? You said they need work?”

  “New coils. They flex over time. The metal gets fatigued and they need to be replaced. They’re standard parts and any competent re-fitter should be able to deal with them. It’s just one of those things that you’ll want to.”

  “Thanks for this,” Kirsten said. “I’ve had ships inspected before but this is the first time I’ve gone along to see.”

  The chief chuckled. “I’ll send you my bill.”

  “Please do.” Kirsten smiled. “We owe you for this. While we’re at it, do you want to look over the galley and the bridge?”

  “I’d love to. I’ve heard about these Higbee’s but this is the first one I’ve been on.”

  The two of them wandered off toward the ladder and left me standing in engineering. I wondered how far they’d go before they realized I wasn’t with them. They disappeared through the hatch on the first deck, still chattering away. Kirsten had her tablet out, taking more notes.

  I chuckled to myself and wandered back through the stores locker and onto the cargo deck. The ship almost thrummed from the sound of blowers cranked up on high to facilitate the change of air. The main deck was one of the largest open spaces I’d ever seen in a ship. I figured the space to be ten meters wide, perhaps as much as thirty meters long, and close to four meters from deck to overhead. That seemed like a lot of volume to me. I considered the general criticism on the design that said it was difficult to get a full nine and a half metric kilotons aboard. Filing that observation away, I wandered forward and up the ladder to the first deck to look for the others.

  I found them on bridge with Chief Gerheart on her hands and knees, her head stuck inside a console. I could see the flashes from her light shining out through the cracks.

  Her voice echoed in the metal cabinetry. “No, these are okay. I’d leave it up to the next owner to replace them or not.” She sneezed. “Needs cleaning, though.”

  Kirsten actually giggled. “I’m not surprised at this point.” She saw me climb up the ladder. “Hi, Captain.”

  “Hello, Kirsten.
Is Chief Gerheart giving you the lowdown?”

  “Oh, yeah. Greta’s been very helpful.”

  I didn’t react to the use of her first name, but things seemed to have progressed a bit. I found that intriguing given the chief’s past.

  The chief backed out of the cabinet, and stood. She started to dust down the front of her shipsuit and realized that the slime on it wasn’t quite dry, and that she really didn’t want it on her hands again.

  “Okay, you two,” Kirsten said after a heartbeat. “Recommendations?”

  I nodded for the chief to go first. “Well, I gave you the list in engineering for that space. There’s the one problematic chiller in the galley. You’ll want to have all those galley fittings gone over.” She paused and looked around the small bridge. “The electronics here are a bit dated, but adequate. The fiber-optics look sound, and the linkages seem okay. You’d need a good systems person to check out the internals there.” She shrugged. “That’s about it.”

  Kirsten looked at me. “Captain?”

  I thought about it for a few heartbeats. “You’ve got a lot of routine work that needs doing. Stuff that a crew should have done as a matter of course, but I’m guessing morale may have been a problem.”

  Chief Gerheart nodded agreement, her mouth pinched together in a rueful-looking grimace.

  “From my perspective, you have a couple of choices. Leave it for the new owner to deal with, and discount the price. Or you can fix it up and try for the best deal possible.”

  She looked at me with a frown. “The way you say that makes me think you’re not interested in buying it yourself.”

  The chief and I shared a glance. Kirsten saw it but before she worked out enough to ask, I said, “I might be, but after meeting with Larks, and doing a little homework of my own, I really can’t afford this ship.” I looked out the aft ports at the cold darkness beyond. “Or any other.”

  Kirsten frowned. “What are you saying, Captain?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “According to everything I’ve been able to learn, I just don’t have enough capital to go indie. Even after the most optimistic estimate on the Chernyakova, I can’t afford any of the smaller vessels currently listed here. My share isn’t even enough for a down payment.” I spread my hands to take in the Jezebel. “This is an interesting vessel, and I think it would be a good ship, but the bottom line is that I just can’t swing the bottom line.”