Privateer Tales 3: Parley

by Jamie McFarlane

Tabby finally relented, wrapping her arms around my back and pulling me on top of her. After a few moments we came up for air.

  “That's what I meant,” I said. “And for the record, Tabby, I hate this. I want you with me every day. But if the options are what we have now and nothing at all, I’ll take this. I chased you to Mars, I’ll follow you wherever you go until you tell me to go away.”

  “Only one way I’ll do this,” she said. “Completely honest and monogamous.”

  “Hah. I can’t have a girl in every port?” Which was not the right thing to say.

  Tabby drew back and slugged me hard. That one was gonna bruise. “Not even one, Hoffen. I’ll know and I’ll hunt you down and end you. Then we’ll be done.”

  “Won’t I be gone, since you ended me?” Again with the wrong thing. It earned me another slug, but that was fine by me.

  “I have five minutes. Don’t break my heart, Liam.” Tabby opened the door and started to climb out. I leaned into her and stole a final kiss. She ran toward the gate and looked back over her shoulder before she passed through and gave me a sweet smile. It was a memory I would treasure.

  The ride back to the resort seemed to take forever. I knew I would see her the next weekend, but I couldn’t escape feeling melancholy.

  Marny was stretched out on one of the couches with her head resting in Nick’s lap when I walked back into the living room at the Concord.

  “Guinness in the fridge, Cap.”

  I grabbed a bottle and flopped into the couch across from them. “What’s on deck for tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow we deconstruct what we did today. You guys did better than I’d expected. It wasn’t hard to tell you’d worked together before. I wish we could keep Tabby.” Marny stopped and looked at me guiltily, “Frak. Sorry, Cap.”

  “Nah, I get it. We’re better with her,” I said.

  “Not necessarily better, just she fits the team. It’s hard to find that kind of synergy. So tomorrow we’re going to work on theory. It’ll work fine with three. We’ll also work on common four-man formations.”

  “Just for the record, I don’t want to be doing much of this,” I said.

  “Practice?” Marny asked.

  “No, practice is fine. Chasing people who have guns, I’d like to avoid.”

  “We practice so we’re not making it up as we go.”

  “I’m in… I’m also exhausted. See you guys in the morning.”

  “Yeah, we’re headed to bed shortly,” Nick said, not even smirking at me.

  I checked my queued comms. There was a never ending stream of small details that Nick and I dealt with as budding entrepreneurs. I felt fortunate that Nick handled most of them. The one item that was solely in my wheelhouse was to line up loads and destinations.

  Loading Sterra's Gift was going to be easy, but the Adela Chen was still proving to be problematic. I’d made initial contact with several corporations hauling in and out of Jeratorn. However, the responses so far had only been of a generic ‘thanks for your inquiry’ type.

  Of primary interest, however, was a comm from Ada.

  Liam, I know this is short notice and I completely understand if you can’t make it, but we are having a memorial service for Mom on Monday afternoon. It will be informal, but Dad would love to meet you guys and … well ... no pressure. Talk Later – Ada

  It struck me again just how stoic Ada had been this past week. I still felt awful that we hadn’t been able to save her mom. The only comfort I could take from the whole mess was that Ada was now safely home with her family. I appreciated that she’d attached the address of the memorial to her vid-comm message so we could be there.

  The next comm was from Qiu Loo. I was a little surprised, since I wasn’t expecting to hear much from her. The note was flagged as urgent.

  Captain Hoffen, we may need to cut leave short. There are things I can’t discuss on comm that could change our priority. I have contacted the shipyard to see about further expediting the repairs and modifications. Please tentatively plan to leave next Sunday, 1400.

  I tried to tamp down my annoyance. She was busting to get going, but I didn’t think she was the type to pull a stunt. Qiu Loo was much more of an in-your-face, don’t-care-what-you-think type of person. I walked back out into the living room. Nick and Marny were still on the couch.

  “Did you get the messages from Ada or Qiu?” I asked.

  “Haven’t checked since we got back to the suite. What’s up?”

  I explained the messages.

  “What do you think Qiu’s on about?” Nick asked.

  “Any ideas, Marny?”

  “I agree with you, Cap. Qiu’s not yanking our chain. A lieutenant isn’t going to get the shipyard to do bupkis without having some real juice. The fact she’s been at them twice means somebody high up is pushing.”

  “That’s my read too. You guys going to Adela’s memorial?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Marny said. Nick nodded agreement. “Doesn’t get you out of practice though, so set your alarm for 0700. We don’t want to be late to the memorial.”

  I sighed and turned back into my room.

  At 0600 the next morning I jumped right out of bed without an alarm. I thought I’d be sore from all the bending, crouching and crawling from the day before, but I felt pretty good after a long hot shower. I decided it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself about the situation with Tabby. I had the love of the woman I most cared about in the universe and we’d make everything else work out.

  “Cap. Bacon and eggs? I make a mean omelet.” Marny greeted me cheerfully.

  “You cook?”

  “Nope. Room service.” She lifted the silver lid off a plate containing a large breakfast. I was starving. I wondered if the smell was why I’d woken up so easily.

  I sat down, plate in hand. “How’re we going to do training today?”

  “Two parts. First, we’ll walk through each of the scenarios. The studios are set up to replay the encounters. I’ll point out what we could have done differently as we walk through. After that, I’ll reprogram the scenarios to run, using the changes we talk about and you can see how things would go differently.”

  “What, with holographics and stuff?” I asked.

  “Yup, the studio is all holographic with programmable physical props like walls, trees, ponds, you name it.”

  “That’s pretty intense.”

  “Tuesday – another indoor. Wednesday – low gravity station. Thursday – outdoor. And Friday, we’ll volunteer to be baddies.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “What? Be baddies? It’ll give us a chance to see pros in action.”

  “We get to be the bad guys?” Nick asked as he joined us. “Frakking about time!”

  Working through the scenarios was humbling. Watching from behind our holographic figures, it became imminently clear how messed up our formations and approaches were.

  “Listen to your instructions here, Cap. See how much information you’re having to communicate? That’s because we don’t have a common frame of reference, like we do on the ship. You can’t make any assumptions, so you have to think about every bit of minutiae. You’re overloading on details and that means you can’t think clearly. You recovered, but try to remember how you felt right then. That’s why we’re doing this, so we can create a common set of phrases and hand signals to describe complex actions. It allows you to focus on things that are different, not on everything all at once. Let’s move to the next room.”

  Marny was complimentary at our approach to the first room. “You hit that pretty much textbook. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought you trained on that approach. Nice job, Cap. Let’s move down the hallway.”

  Our holographic images moved out of the first room and we watched Nick walking on my right side with his gun against the wall. If something bad happened he wouldn’t be able to move his gun anywhere and it would be going off right next to my ear.

  “As uncomfortable as it
sounds, you’ll have to switch shoulders in that situation. We’ll work on it so you are comfortable. You had the correct side but once you got to the corner, if something happened, Nick would have had no way to support you,” Marny said patiently.

  “Since you were already out of position when you reached the corner, you couldn’t possibly execute a correctly pie’d corner.” Marny grabbed my holographic figure and slid it around and directed the AI to make my blaster rifle point down the hallway.

  “If you ran into problems, Nick couldn’t have done anything to help you without stepping into your line of fire. It worked out in this case, but we need to fix it.”

  She walked us through all three scenarios like this, patiently explaining where we had messed up and where we had done a good job of improvising. We were such rookies, I was surprised she was even trying to train us.

  At the end, Marny made all of the adjustments she wanted and then re-ran the encounters. We flowed smoothly through the building and easily cleared the rooms. The concepts ranged from complex to fairly obvious. When standing next to a life-size version of yourself during the explanation, the concepts became clear very quickly.

  “Why do I feel like we’re just scratching the surface?” I asked while flying back to the resort. We all wanted to take a shower before the memorial.

  “That’s right,” Marny said. “But it’s like everything else, there are big ideas you can learn right away. Then, there are nuances that take forever. We’re going to focus on those big strokes. I appreciate you both being willing to do this, I think it’s important.”

  “You’re an important part of the team,” Nick said.

  I agreed with him, but it was still a little bit much for me to take in. “I just hope we don’t have to use our new skills.”

  “You already have Cap, unless you’ve forgotten about our incursion onto that pirate base.”

  “I know and that was terrifying.”

  “Tell me you weren’t just a little bit excited.”

  “Yeah, it was crazy, but you're right. I can’t say I wasn’t loving parts of it.”

  LIMIT YOUR DOWNSIDE

  Only a few people showed up to Adela Chen’s memorial service. It was a little sad. I was used to large services on Colony 40. On a mining colony, everyone knows everyone else and when someone dies, it's the right thing to show up and pay your respects.

  Mr. Shan (Sam) Chen, who we met upon entering the chapel, started the service by talking about how he and Adela had met. The story was pretty common. They’d met through the introduction of a couple of friends and one thing led to another. Adela worked for her family’s shipping business. It wasn’t too long after that they’d gotten married, scrimped and saved and finally put a down payment on their own freighter. He went on to describe their life, struggling to make it, the joy they experienced with having Ada and even the stress of being married.

  The story in and of itself was very ordinary, but there wasn’t a dry eye to be found in the small crowd. Through his story, Sam was able to communicate great love for his wife and a profound sense of loss at her passing. They had been good friends, even after their separation. It made me wonder about my life with Tabby and if we would be able to find time to develop that same closeness. I suddenly missed my mom and dad.

  It was equally hard to listen to Ada talk about losing her mother. She was gracious and acknowledged us in coming to their aid, but it was hard to feel good about anything, considering how much she had lost. I was never a big fan of these services because of the way they made me think about things I’d rather keep at arm’s length.

  We’d been invited to dinner with Ada and her dad. The restaurant was nicer than any I’d ever been in. Mr. Chen, who I couldn’t bring myself to refer to as Sam, told us it was the same restaurant where he’d proposed to Adela.

  “I can’t possibly express how grateful I am that you brought my daughter back,” Sam said for the umpteenth time. He'd been reminiscing about his first solo trips with Ada. Apparently, she had been quite a little terror on the ship, all full of energy and nowhere to run around.

  I’d run out of ways to verbally acknowledge his gratitude and apparently so had Nick and Marny.

  “So what’s next for you youngsters?” We’d been at the restaurant for the better part of two hours.

  “We’re trying to line up a couple of loads to Jeratorn for early next week,” I said.

  “That sounds risky. Lots of rumors of pirate activity in and out of there.”

  “Plan is to convoy out with our cutter. Loads are selling at nearly double the normal trip rate.” I didn’t like that this painted us as opportunistic, but we were under a confidentiality agreement with the Navy.

  “You said trying. If loads are selling so well, what’s the problem?” he asked.

  “TradeNet has nothing for the tug,” I said.

  He nodded, knowingly. “The vendors pulled all of their deliveries from TradeNet coming from Jeratorn.”

  “Why’d they do that?” I asked.

  “Too many bond payouts, most likely. They’ll open it back up once things settle down.”

  “Any ideas how we can line up a load?”

  “I don’t think you should be going out there. Especially not with my Ada.”

  “Dad,” Ada interrupted. “That’s not your call.”

  “Seriously? After all this? We talked about this.”

  “Ada, he’s right. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m so sorry.” I silently berated myself for not considering the circumstances.

  “What will you do if you can’t find a load for the tug?” she asked. I knew my answer was going to annoy her, but I didn’t see a way around it.

  “We have a contracted load for Sterra's Gift already, so we’ll be taking the cutter either way.”

  “Dad. I know how you feel about this but I’m getting a gig no matter what.”

  “But Jeratorn?”

  “With an armed escort. Would you rather I crew for Belstak? I doubt their heavy blasters even work. Liam's tug is a brand new Fujitsu-FF718, top of the line. It doesn’t get better than that.”

  Talk about an awkward moment. Somehow at a memorial, I’d caused Ada and her father to argue. I looked to Nick uncomfortably, unfortunately he was staring at his plate. I needed to say something.

  “This won’t be our only load. We’ll be back in less than a month,” I said.

  Ada and Mr. Chen both looked at me. Ada was first to respond.

  “What, so we’re supposed to pass all routes through my Dad?” So much for getting out of this cleanly.

  “I can’t lose you too, Ada.” Shan Chen’s eyes glistened.

  “I’m a sailor, Dad, it’s who I am, not what I do.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Don’t hold me so tightly.”

  “I don’t like it, Ada.”

  “I know, but you need to do this for me.”

  “You could do a spec run,” he offered.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Rent a three-string and work directly with the mining co-op. You find a buyer once you’re en route to Mars.”

  “We don’t have that kind of money. A three-string has to be half a million in ore alone.”

  “More like three quarters of a million. You don’t need to have it all. For that matter you don’t need to have any of it as long as you have enough bond. You just need investors.”

  “That’s a lot of money to come up with in a short period. What kind of terms do you normally get?” Nick asked.

  “Do you have three-quarters of a million bond?” He asked.

  “Yup.” Nick answered.

  “That makes it easy. How much do you want to put in?”

  “We’ve got nothing,” Nick said.

  “That’s not a problem, it just affects your profitability. The way I’d structure it is for expenses to come off the top. Investors get half of the remaining and you split the rest with your crew.”

  “Give me a minute,” Nick started punching on
his tablet. “If we do standard crew and ship shares we’d stand to clear about eighty. That’s assuming we get a second crew for the tug.”

  “That might be a little high,” Sam said. “Mind if I see?” He motioned to Nick’s reading pad.

  “Ah, right, the public bid-ask is wrong on ore. You won’t get that, but it’s close. Discount that ten percent and you should be pretty accurate. I’d be interested in investing a quarter of a million as long as it’s backed up by a bond.”

  “How do we sell it once we get back?” I asked.

  “Your man, Nick, already has it,” Sam said. “There’s a public commodity market. Once you have the load and are headed back, you start watching the market. You lock the price based on a window of time. So look here,” He slid the tablet over so I could see it. “This is the forty-eight hour price and these are the tonnages at that price. Say, today you had seventy point five kilo tons of iron, that’s what they’ll pay for it, minus that ten percent I was telling you about.”

  “How do we set a price with the co-op?”

  “Good question. That’s all about timing too, based on when you pick it up.”

  “So what if the market goes down between when we buy and sell?”

  “Then it’s a bad time to be in a commodities market. It’d have to sink a lot though. Undelivered ore is discounted almost fifty percent. We can also put in a zero loss clause. Basically, if it all goes to crap, the investors have to pay for expenses. Ship comes out at zero.”

  “I can see why people like TradeNet,” I remarked.

  “You’d think, but TradeNet is expensive, so it’s almost always the least profitable. Don’t be so quick to dismiss the gamble. It’s more work, but you almost always come out ahead. The trick is to figure out how to limit your downside. Since I’m investing, let me help you when it comes time to lock in prices.”

  “Thank you. I think we just got a free lesson in trading.” I grinned across the table at him, hoping to put him a little at ease with what we were doing.

  “I couldn’t be more invested in your venture, between Ada and most of my capital. I’ll get you a contact for the co-op. They know me so that should help.”