“The first thing you need to understand is that you’re not in charge,” Ada said.
“I don’t even know how to respond to that.” I grinned at my double entendre.
Ada ignored me and pushed forward. “Second thing is the tug merely makes suggestions. Once you get those girls moving, it’s real hard to stop or change their direction.”
“Okay, how do we get over to the barges?”
“All the controls are built into your chair. This ship is configured with twin sticks. You pop the sticks up out of the chair’s arms. We didn’t have them on Baux but there’re people who swear by ‘em. Mom used to get into arguments with other pilots all the time. I think they just wanted something to talk about.”
Ada noticed I was unsuccessfully looking for the sticks in the arms of my chair. “Just push on the panels there on the end of the arm rest,” she added.
That did it for me. A joystick swiveled out from under the arm as soon as I depressed the small panel.
“So not a coffee holder?”
“Probably not. Now, pull both joysticks back so your arms are bent and your elbows can rest on the chair again. Make sure you’re comfortable. The AI will register this as your home position.”
I pulled the sticks back so my arms were slightly bent. “Good enough?” I asked.
“No worries, you can re-register the sticks if you don’t like where you have ‘em.”
“You gonna let me sail her?”
“Only way you’re going to learn. I’ve already registered my Master’s license with the ship so I can override you if things get out of control,” Ada said.
“It’ll override my status as owner?”
“You’re such a control freak.”
“Okay, I had that coming. You’ve a Master’s license?”
“Override only works if we have a string hooked up. Been sailing since I was ten, homeschooled in space.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“Not at all. We weren’t always sailing ‘cause Mom and Dad took turns. I was home at least half the time.”
“Where’s home?”
“We have an apartment in Puskar Stellar.”
“Is that where Precast Products is located?”
“Sort of. Precast has offices in several major cities on Mars. This string’s headed for their orbital refinery over Puskar Stellar. They make parts for the big shipyards.”
“You land the tug on Puskar?”
“Nope. You can, but they’re not very good at atmospheric entry, even on Mars. We have a private slip that’s not too far away from one of the Space Elevators. Saves a bunch of fuel by not burning in and out.
“Hadn’t thought about all that.”
“You would, once you paid for the fuel to lift that tug off the planet.”
“Any harm with me flying this around a little?”
“Inertial systems?”
“Check.”
“Gravity systems?
“Check.”
Ada had a list a kilometer long but I appreciated that she had it committed to memory. She definitely had some items that Nick and I should add to Sterra's Gift’s checklist. She finally ended with, “Coffee brewing?”
“Negative.”
“We’ll have to fix that, but I can overlook it for now. Take it slow, it’s going to feel slippery compared to what you’re used to. These engines are waaay overpowered for flying around without a load.”
“Alright Captain Chen, hang onto your seat.” At some point while we were going through Ada’s checklist, she’d managed to get her own joysticks deployed.
“Slow on the helm, Mr. Hoffen.”
The Adela Chen was pointed directly at Sterra's Gift and we were only back half a kilometer. The Banny Hill was on Sterra's Gift’s port side. I had no idea what I was dealing with, so I pushed both sticks forward slowly with no tilt in any direction. As I suspected, the ship started moving forward. Much to my surprise, however, we accelerated very slowly. I pushed the sticks even further forward and we did accelerate faster, but still nothing like I was used to.
“Good,” Ada said. “Now give us a little declination and head under those ships.”
I complied and tipped the sticks forward in unison. The ship nosed over very quickly and before I knew what was happening, we had rotated nearly one-hundred forty degrees, or so much that we were almost pointing backwards.
To Ada’s credit, she didn’t say a word. I figured I was mostly there already, so I slowly pulled the sticks back until we had rotated all the way around and were now pointed down at about ten degrees.
“Incoming hail from Sterra's Gift.”
On comm.
“That what you had in mind, Liam?” Nick’s voice was half amused, half concerned.
“Only the last ten degrees.”
“Roger that. Anything we can help with?”
“Negative. Captain Chen is giving me some free rein.”
“Roger that. Let me know if you need us to move.”
Terminate comm. I wasn’t going to dignify that with a response. We passed beneath the two ships with a considerable safety margin.
“So remember, I said slippery. Try some rotation, but take it real slow,” she said.
I nodded and tipped both sticks over slightly to the port. The ship gently rotated to the port but stayed on the same line.
“Good. Straighten it out.”
I pulled it back and flew straight. I had some experience with a twin joystick system, just not something with this kind of power.
“Oh, good, you’ve got it,” Ada said, with surprise.
“I just wasn’t expecting that much power.”
“Everything changes when you hook up to a string of barges. Just run her around to about a hundred meters behind the string.”
I did a decent job of sailing up behind the set of three barges, but found I was low by twenty meters. I tipped the ship back ninety degrees and nudged it upward, but twenty meters was too fine of an adjustment for the large engines. I spun back down and tried again. I ended up thirty meters below - things weren’t getting better.
“You’re missing something.” Ada had been quiet, letting me work through things.
“Oh, thank Jupiter. What am I missing?”
“What do you suppose would happen if you’d rotated port with your starboard stick and starboard with your port stick?”
I felt like the rookie I was. “Ahh, crap, of course.” I gently tipped the sticks away from each other. The ship lifted slowly into position.
“Nice touch.” Ada said.
“How do we link up?”
“Slide us in so we’re just twenty meters off.”
I complied. It was coming easier to me.
“Okay, we’re almost done. Stow the dead-heads. The ship will hook up the glad-hands and the tongue.”
“Glad-hands and tongue? Sounds like a bad dance.”
“Very funny, there should be a push button or rocker switch on the console between us for the dead-heads.”
Sure enough there was. In this day and age of virtual everything, there was a frakking rocker switch right there on the console. I’d probably seen ten of them in my life on very old equipment.
“What? We don’t trust the AI to handle the dead-heads?”
“Provides a good visual reminder when you’re not loaded.”
“Because the AI does such a bad job of managing this stuff?”
“Just do it,” Ada said.
I flipped the switch. It had a satisfyingly hefty feel to it and clunked audibly when I pushed it over. Three tongues extended from the end of the barge. Each tongue was three meters wide and a meter tall. They extended from the barge and toward our ship and fell well below my sightline. Ada flipped on a vid screen that showed the tongues sliding into receptacles in the ship. Three bright green lights glowed on the forward bulkhead. A few seconds later yellow bars flashed below each of those green lights.
“That a problem?” I asked.
“No, the top lights are showing the coupling status. The bottom ones are the glad-hand connections. They haven’t connected yet. You can’t fly with tongues connected if you don’t have the glad-hands hooked up.
“What’s a glad-hand?”
“Communication, power and hydraulic couplings.”
“Why not say that?”
“You sail a ship for a living and you want to know why things are named funny? When’s the last time you actually filled your sails with wind?”
“What? Oh … Very funny.”
The vid screens showed thick cables being stretched between the ship and the barge. Once they were connected, all light patches showed green.
“And, we’re ready to sail. Too bad the first mate hasn’t laid in a route for us.”
“How hard do you burn?”
“With this heavy of a load, let the AI make a recommendation. It’ll make a big difference.”
Calculate navigation plan to Precast Products. Leave 15% reserve fuel.
The AI showed a plan on the centered vid-screen.
Ada didn't like it. “Six days. Dang. Most of the time we use a Rate 4 consumption calculation. It’s what gets figured into most of our contracts. You just dropped a burn rate that’s well into the Rate 1 category. You could save a bunch if you backed off a bit.”
“But this trip we’re going to get you home fast.” I was surprised that Ada hadn’t overheard the conversation about the Navy paying for fuel. I didn’t think I needed to point it out again.
Engage navigation plan.
The ship’s massive engines spooled up. It was a much different feeling from the one we got on Sterra's Gift. I would have expected us to lurch forward, given the sound of it all. However, it didn’t seem like the ship was doing much of anything.
“Well. Let’s get that coffee rolling. We should set a watch schedule and I’ll take first,” Ada said.
“Sorry, I’m not going anywhere for a while. How about you try to get some rest?”
“I’ll start coffee, but I’m going to run the sheets through the freshener first. You should start working on your tug certifications. You will get some good hours on this trip.”
“How many hours do I need for a Master's license?”
“You don’t want to know. Six thousand in the seat.”
“Ugh.”
“Two tests and five hundred hours gets you an Operator’s license. Most of the outlying colonies are fine with that.”
“Oh, that’s not too bad.”
“Nope. AI records your hours. Believe it or not, you don’t have to be awake for half of ‘em.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Wait ‘til you start taking the tests.”
“I’ll help with the coffee.”
We pulled out of the seats. It felt weird to leave the ship to accelerate on its own, but there was virtually nothing we could do to help it along. With the heavy load in front of us, changes in direction would happen slowly. If we needed to dodge something quickly, we’d be out of luck.
I helped Ada pull the sheets off the bed. It was immaculately made with corners crisply tucked in. I folded the top bunk down and pulled its sheets off before running them all through the suit freshener, while Ada loaded up the coffee maker.
“You take the bottom bunk,” I said. “I’m a pretty light sleeper and will probably spend most of the time in the cockpit.”
“Sounds good. I guess I am pretty tired,” she admitted.
“Sleep as long as you need. I’ll be topside.” By the time we had the sheets cleaned and back on, the coffee was ready, for which I was grateful. I grabbed a cup of joe and a couple of meal bars and headed back up to the cockpit. It felt good to be underway again, if not a little strange. The heavy thrum of much larger engines would take some getting used to.
THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN
Our navigation plan showed that we would accelerate for two days and then decelerate for four. I was more than happy to use the Navy’s fuel to cut our trip time down.
Tabby, my sort of girlfriend, had been at the Mars Naval Academy for less than three weeks and I was hoping to see her when we arrived. She hadn’t communicated much since we parted ways back on Colony 40, but the contact we’d had was more than enough to let me know she wasn’t trying to dump me.
Tabby, Nick, and I had known each other for virtually our entire lives. We’d grown up going to school together, played on the same pod-ball team, and palled around for the last seventeen years. It wasn’t until Tabby was about to ship off to the Naval Academy that she’d finally let me know I’d been an idiot to not have pursued a relationship with her more seriously.
Compose video to Tabby, center on my face.
“I hope your start at the academy has been okay. You’ll never believe it but Nick has fallen hard for that new crewmate, Marny. But, that’s not really the big news. We ran into another problem. It seems like trouble finds us. Anyway, it’s really a bad deal; a pilot and her daughter got attacked by pirates, even though they weren’t very far out from Mars. The daughter, Ada, made it okay but the pilot, her mom, ended up dying. It was terrible. We did, however, make a prize claim on the freighter we captured. Anyway, we are expecting to be on Mars in six days. If you can break free from school for a day or two, I’d love to see you. We’ll do something awesome. I’d really like you to meet Marny. Oh, you’ll notice I’m flying in a different ship. This is the tug we captured. Ada’s been teaching me how to fly it, and I’m going to work on my license. Anyway, let me know about getting together. I really miss you, Tabby.”
I felt like an idiot. My thoughts, when talking to Tabby, were jumbled and I seemed to just ramble. I hoped she’d be able to make something out of what I said.
Incoming hail from Sterra's Gift.
“Liam here,” Ada wasn’t in the cockpit with me so I played the audio over the speakers.
“Qiu’s on board and squared away. She wants to know when we’ll leave Mars for Jeratorn.” Nick said. He struggled to pronounce her first name.
“Think T.S.O. - nothing like it’s spelled. The time frame will depend on when repairs are complete, but I’ll get to work on lining up a load. We’ve been hitting it pretty hard lately and I’m going to try to meet up with Tabby.”
“Cool, I’d like to see her too if that works out,” Nick said.
“I left her a message, we’ll see what she comes back with. We should plan to pull some pay out for both of us so we can live it up. You set the amount. We also need to square with Marny.”
“Yup. Already on it. Marny’s been paid out and I dropped five thousand creds in our personal accounts. Marny said she was going to introduce me to hot springs. I can’t wait.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear this. By the way, have you looked into the TradeNet subscription?”
“Yup, done. So after everything, we’re running at ninety thousand m-creds without being paid for the load of pirate loot.”
“I was thinking, wasn’t there some artwork in those crates we liberated from the pirates on Baru Manush? Isn’t it likely stolen?” I asked.
“Yup. We’ll have to find a dealer who can do a provenance search. It’d probably be easier to find an auctioneer who deals in this stuff. The navy will validate our video evidence of how we procured the art, although some of it might get tied up. All in, just be better to let the pros deal with it.”
“How much will they take off the top?” I asked.
“I’m showing the big boys take fifteen to twenty percent.”
“Sounds like it’d be worth it.”
“I’ll set it up,” he said.
“I was wondering, have you gotten any security updates from the pirate base?” We’d captured a Red Houzi base about a month ago and we hadn’t come up with a plan to do anything with it. There was at least ten times as much loot left at the base as we’d been able to take with us.
“It’s all quiet. Not even a flyby as far as I can tell. We’ve got to get back there,” Nick said.
“Any thoughts on how we should go about that?”
“We have a tug now, we should just rent a barge and get Jack to help. Do you think your dad would be willing?”
“Why not? We could cut ‘em both in on the haul.” I hadn’t said anything to Nick yet, but I wanted to set up our own base somewhere using buildings and guns we scavenged from the Red Houzi base.
“I’m in. How is Ada doing? She had a pretty rough day,” Nick said.
“Hanging in there. She’s sacked out right now. Can you find us? I sent you our navigation plan.”
“Check your sensors. We’re right on top of you.”
The displays weren’t set up like I was used to, something I would soon resolve. Sure enough, Sterra's Gift was fifteen kilometers above us.
“Would have bit me …” I muttered.
“Hey Liam, you did the right thing back there. Ada’d be dead if you’d turned away. I don’t give a crap what Veras and Marny said about the other thing.”
“Thanks bud, it means a lot coming from you. But, don’t let Marny hear you say it, I think she can take you.”
“Nah, she knows. I get where she’s coming from. When she was in the Navy, she had to clean up a lot of messes those pirates made. It was hard for her not to take ‘em out when she had the chance.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I’m not sure we’re dealing with the same class of pirates.”
“What do you mean?”
“This ship is immaculate - like Navy immaculate. There isn’t a single thing out of place.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Not sure. I guess it’s just different. Also, we’re six days from Mars. That’s striking pretty close to home.”
“Yeah, I suppose, but it was just dumb luck that we were close by.”
“No. I know. I’m not sure what I’m saying. We’re missing something. Anyway, I have a class to start working on.”
“A what?”
“Oh, Ada’s got me all fired up to get my Operator’s license. I need two tests and five hundred hours on the tug.”
“You have the hours.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need five hundred hours sailing under load. What do you think you’ve been doing with all that ore from your claim to the refinery?”
Privateer Tales 3: Parley Page 5
