Privateer Tales 3: Parley

by Jamie McFarlane

  “You think that counts?”

  “I know it does.”

  “That’s pretty cool." I couldn't believe that all of those years working Dad's claim was going to pay off for something like this. "I’m going to sign up for the coursework and see what kind of loads are available between Jeratorn and Mars. Ask Qiu if she can help us with scheduling at the dry dock.”

  “Good point. I’ll ask her. I’m out.”

  “Roger that. Over and out.”

  I was shooting for an Operator’s license in the greater-than-a-hundred tonnes class. With license in hand, AI oversight was all the Mars Port Authority would require when entering their controlled space. Docking fees would be higher too, but I didn’t have the time to finish my Master’s license. Fortunately, with Ada along, it wouldn’t matter on this trip.

  The first course was estimated to take forty hours of classroom work and was followed by a test. At least I would have something to keep me busy and if I got after it, I might be able to complete it before we got to Puskar Stellar. The course was already available on the freighter’s systems. All I had to do was transfer five hundred credits to M-Corp.

  I fired the course up on the main vid screen. The first order of business was to take a placement test. The AI would adjust to my current understanding and drill me on the information I was weak on. I scored horribly and got a forty five percent.

  To me, the questions were over the top. I didn’t see what difference it made if I understood the buoy systems, since I would have an AI plotting my route or what difference it made if I could recognize the light patterns of the different types of ships. Even so, I thought I knew most of it. My score certainly didn’t reflect my confidence. I decided to spend two hours working through the material before I switched gears to other tasks. Ugh, I thought I was done with school, it sure was going to be a long six days to Mars. I’d rather have toilet fixing duty.

  Two hours later, I was grateful to be able to close the course. I needed more coffee and could use a quick trip to the head. When I passed by the bunk room, I heard the soft sound of sobbing behind the door. A lump formed in my throat. Ada had seemed so brave through it all, I'd momentarily forgotten her loss. I considered knocking, but decided to give her some space for now.

  Several hours later I woke up in the pilot’s chair. I had hit the studying again but must have dozed off. Sleeping at the helm was just part of the job for an independent freighter captain. You had to be a light sleeper just in case something came up. At the speeds we sailed, the AI’s default actions would almost always be the preferred responses, and they would come in milliseconds. It was especially true with this amount of mass. There was no dodging with three, two-point-five-kilo tonne barges in front of us, and Jupiter help the dumb-ass who got in our way.

  I slid down the metal ladder. If you did it just right, you could place your feet on the outsides of the bars and slide. It was a harder maneuver for me since my left foot had been lost back on Colony 40. The military grade prosthetic did a lot of things well, but providing feedback about pressure on my ankle wasn’t one of them. I landed a little harder than I intended but it was okay.

  “Want some breakfast?” Ada was up and working in the small galley.

  “You find the meal bars?” I asked.

  “No, there’s quality food here. Biscuits and gravy, bacon and eggs, and pancakes and that’s just the breakfast stuff.”

  I was hungry and pancakes sounded really good. “Why not? Throw me in some pancakes.”

  “Orange Juice?” she asked.

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure enough.”

  “Absolutely.” Marny was going to be jealous. I would be sending her a picture.

  “Anything crazy going on up there?” Ada asked.

  “We’re six hours from deceleration. How hard is it to flip this bad boy over?”

  “I’d better be there, but you’ve got good hands. You could probably do it.”

  “Before I got on this tub I might have agreed with you, but I’ve got to admit, I’m a little intimidated.”

  Ada smiled. It wasn’t flashy, just a friendly, connected smile. Man, could she light up a room. “That’s a good attitude to have on a tug.” I couldn’t help myself, I felt a little proud of myself for saying something smart. I hoped I didn’t have a dopey look on my face. Her slightly raised eyebrows indicated the opposite.

  “How about you get some shut-eye. I’ll wake you up before we circumvolve.”

  “We what?”

  “Flip over.”

  “That wasn’t so hard to say, was it?”

  “No, but flip over isn’t on your test.”

  “Oh, it’s gonna be like that, is it?”

  “We’ll see.” She smiled again. I didn’t know what was worse, the thought that she was going to be testing me the entire trip, or that every time she smiled, my brain tried to shut down.

  As comfortable as the pilot’s chair was, the upper bunk was even more so. I set my alarm for five hours so I could shower before circumvolving. I slept like a rock and probably woke in the same position I’d gone to sleep in. I really had no idea.

  I pulled off my vac-suit and removed my prosthetic foot. I hadn’t even thought about it in the last couple of weeks. It was amazing how well the technology worked. I checked the stump under the medical cap. It was clean and looked like my leg had just grown without a foot. A little freaky, but I was starting to get used to it.

  In .6 gravity I found it easy to hop over to the shower. Before getting in, I put my suit in the suit-freshener and laid out a clean suit-liner. The hot water was wonderful. I was still taken aback by how spotless the entire ship was. Even the shower had absolutely no grime or soap buildup. Maybe the ship had a cleaning bot. It wouldn’t explain everything, but it would explain the shower.

  I pulled on a fresh suit-liner and hopped back to the bunk room. I was wiping down my prosthetic when Ada knocked and pushed the door open.

  “Oh …” Her hand flew up to her mouth like she had caught me doing something awkward. She spun out of the room and pulled the door closed.

  I mentally kicked myself for not remembering to warn her. Most people were okay with my missing foot, but it took them off guard when they saw me holding the prosthetic. I hopped up and pulled the door open.

  She was standing there, right outside the door, staring at me, her mouth agape. I could tell she wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  “It’s a prosthetic. Pirates blew off my real one back home. Don’t feel bad, takes most people a bit to adjust. I should have warned you. Believe it or not, you feel so much like all the rest of my friends, I kinda forgot you didn’t know.”

  “Oh...” Her eyes glistened like she was ready to cry. “That’s about the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time.” She pulled me in for a hug. Unfortunately, I wasn’t particularly well balanced when she did. She wasn’t expecting to carry my weight and as a result, we both fell over.

  “Oh frak,” she said and her hand flew up to her mouth again. “Sorry.”

  I looked up at her. I’d had the good sense to twist us around so neither of us hit anything hard. I was real glad no one else was there to see it, however. It was the very definition of a compromising situation. We both started laughing.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think about that.”

  “Payback’s a bitch,” I said.

  She slugged me in the arm. “No cussing.”

  “Okay, okay. How about I get dressed and I’ll see you topside in a couple.”

  “I just wanted coffee.” She was still a little embarrassed.

  I reattached my prosthetic and pulled on my vac-suit. She sure smelled good. Frak, I really needed to get those thoughts out of my head.

  I met her in the cockpit. Whatever embarrassment she had felt was gone by the time I got up there.

  “The AI could do this for you, but you might as well get the experience. It’s generally considered best practice to stop the burn, detach,
fly to the other end, reattach and then start the deceleration. It introduces fewer non-linear stresses on the string. That said, we don’t have that option since the pirates destroyed the coupling on the other barge. Any idea how you might accomplish circumvolving?”

  “Seems like the most obvious way would be to use the joysticks in a way which would cause us to lift.”

  “You’re a quick one. That’s it, exactly. The AI will warn you if you start to twist, but generally if you’re close, it will just make up the difference.”

  “Ready?” We had already dropped out of the burn and the AI was waiting for us to flip over one hundred eighty degrees to start our deceleration.

  “Make it so.”

  I shook my head and tipped the joysticks in. We slowly flipped over. Fortunately, the vid screen showed me the horizontal line I was aiming for and I slid down into position. At this point anyone who had grown up on a planet would be in real trouble because we were now technically pointed downward. But as spacers this wasn’t much of a problem for us.

  “Good job,” Ada said.

  “Thanks. So how do you guys set up your trade routes? TradeNet?”

  “If we can’t line up something better, we use TradeNet. Recently, we’d been hauling for Precast. It was good money. They supplied the string and we ran out to the small mom-and-pop claims and hauled ore for ‘em.”

  “I’m trying to figure out if I should use TradeNet as my primary or as a backup.”

  “Out of the box, you’ll need to use them,” she said. “You won’t be able to make the contacts otherwise.”

  “Perfect, thanks.”

  I started punching in details about the trip we wanted to take and spent the next two hours setting up a few different scenarios. Most of the work I had to do was just inserting our two ships into the TradeNet system. I set an alert on cargo headed to Jeratorn as well as an alert for barge strings coming from there.

  Ada seemed to enjoy helping me with the Operator’s license studying. She knew most of it, but there were a few things she’d forgotten. It wasn’t really a terrible way to pass the time.

  With only two days left to Mars, I received a communication from Tabby.

  “Heya, Liam, that’s so exciting that you’re coming here. We get Saturday afternoon and Sunday off. I just have to be back before 2200 on Sunday. Is Nick coming? I’m super busy, but I’ll make sure I have my weekend clear. I gotta run to class. See ya this weekend.”

  I breathed a deep sigh of happy relief. I wasn’t sure I’d survive if I didn’t get a chance to see her. I knew in my heart she was the one for me, but I’ll be darned if gorgeous women weren’t always showing up in my life and causing unwanted distractions.

  By the time we were a day out, I’d studied about as much as I was going to. I was scoring in the high nineties on the practice tests, but Ada informed me that the actual test was harder. I only needed a seventy percent to pass and even then the score wasn’t recorded, only the pass or fail.

  “If you blow this you can’t take it again for forty-five days and it’s another two hundred fifty m-creds.” Ada said. I could hear my mom’s school teacher voice sometimes when she spoke.

  “Yup. I’m doing it.” An hour and a half later I finished the test and passed. They didn’t tell me how I scored but I didn’t really care.

  “Now you just need to finish your hours,” she said.

  “Let’s see how many I have.” I punched it up so it would display on the screen.

  “What? That doesn’t look right.” Ada looked at me curiously.

  The display read thirty-five hundred, twenty-four hours.

  “You’ve got a year and a half in the chair already?”

  “Ore haulers. Life of an asteroid miner.”

  “That’s fantastic. Pay for your license then.”

  I did as she suggested. It was rather anti-climactic.

  “You’re licensed to bring us in to dock now. With me on board, you won’t even have to get AI oversight.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?” I asked.

  “Why not. I’ve done it hundreds of times. You have to learn sometime. Anyway, Precast’s dock isn’t near anyone really. It’ll be easy.”

  “Are you dropping off the barges with Precast? I thought you’d filed a claim of salvage,” I said.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Because of your deal, they waived the penalty on our original contract.”

  “Nice. So what’ll you do after all this?” I asked.

  “Know anyone looking for a freighter captain?”

  “What about you and your dad’s business?”

  “He’s done. He wants to retire. He’s giving me part of the insurance payout from the loss of Baux, but I’m out of a job.”

  “I don’t think you want to get involved in our next gig. We’re headed into pirate territory.”

  “So, what? You don’t want me along?” Man, she could go from happy to grumpy in a hurry.

  “No, I’m not saying that. It’s going to be really dangerous.”

  “And I can’t handle it?”

  “No, you’re plenty tough. It’s not that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I like you Ada. I don’t want to see you get hurt.” It didn’t come out the way I wanted it to.

  “Liam, I understand the risk, but I want to do something that matters. And I don’t think about you that way.”

  Oh crap, I’d really messed this up. “No, I didn’t mean that.”

  “What, so you don’t like me?”

  “No. I mean yes. But not that way.”

  “So do you or don’t you?”

  “What? Like you?” I felt like a fighter who’d taken one too many punches in a fight.

  “No, need a captain for the freighter?”

  “Yes, of course we do.”

  “Good then, it’s settled. Wake me up when we’re a thousand kilos from the dock.” She pulled herself out of the chair and slid down the ladder.

  TIME TO GET BUSY

  “Look Captain, we need to get this resolved. I feel like you’re stonewalling me,” Qiu Loo said.

  “Have you spent much time on a mining colony? If we show up there with a half loaded ship and no contract to haul ore, we’re going to draw a lot of unwanted attention. I’ll get a load put together, but it takes work.”

  “I still don’t feel you’re prioritizing this mission, Captain.”

  “Let’s be clear, Lieutenant. I don’t know what this mission is, other than dropping you off.”

  “Is that why you’re dragging your heels? You’re miffed about not being read in?”

  “Not fair, Qiu. I’m not dragging my heels. You’re definitely holding back on us though. If all you want is a taxi, then there are a hundred cheaper ways to get that done. You asked us, remember?”

  “This discussion isn’t productive.”

  “Agreed. We’ll have the Adela Chen docked by 1500 and then Nick and I have some things to get through. How about you and I sit down with Nick after that and we can talk about schedule and expectations?”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “Hoffen out.” I terminated the comm. Damn, but she was exhausting.

  We were about twenty thousand kilometers from Mars. One of the great features of the Fujitsu tug we were flying was the ability to change the orientation of the cockpit by rotating around the ladder opening. For the final two hundred thousand kilometers I’d swiveled around so I could catch the first view of Mars. The glow from around the engines was so bright that it wasn’t until we were within fifty thousand kilometers that I was finally able to make it out.

  The scale of a planet is hard to understand if you’re from one of the colonies. As we approached Mars, it just kept growing. Precast Products' refining platform orbited Mars at eight hundred kilometers. At that distance, the planet would likely fill my entire view from the cockpit.

  I slid down the ladder and knocked on the bunk room door. “Ada, we’re getting pretty close, yo
u want to come up?”

  She opened the door. “I’ll be right there. I was thinking, once we unload the string, you could use our slip on Puskar Stellar’s orbital station. It’s not big enough for both ships but you could leave the freighter there until we take off again.”

  “Are you sure you still want to come?”

  “Yes. Are you sure you want to have this conversation?”

  I knew when to let it go. “Nope. See you topside.”

  After a few minutes, Ada slipped into the other pilot’s chair.

  “Oh, good, you rotated the cockpit. We’ll slide in like this at Precast,” she said.

  “I’m going to tell Nick to meet us at your dock at Puskar. Do they have any public slips?”

  “Yes, loads of them. I’ll send him the info.” Ada shot a message over to him from her reading pad. Less than twenty seconds later she announced, “That was fast, he already responded and said they’d meet us there.”

  “That’s Nick all right.”

  We both watched as Sterra's Gift cut across our field of vision, accelerating toward their destination.

  “Time to get busy,” Ada said.

  “Pardon?” I had a dumb smirk on my face.

  “Oh … Oh you’re terrible.” Her medium brown skin gained a slight shade of crimson. “Not what I meant. Initiate contact with Precast and they’ll give us the exact spot to drop the string.”

  Establish contact with Precast Products, request docking instructions, I said to the AI.

  “Good, that’ll do it. Our job from this point out is pretty straightforward. They’ll give us a zone to drop it in, we just need to make sure the load has a zero delta with the refinery.”

  “We just leave it?”

  “Yes. They have their own tug system that takes the material to the refinery.”

  “How do the barges get back to the colonies?”

  “Precast will contract them.”

  “You have a contact at Precast I could talk to?”

  “You really want to talk to them? They’re jerks.”

  “Your lawyer was the idiot. That was a heck of a clause to mess up.”

  “I suppose ... I have a contact.” She swiped at her reading pad. “There you go.”