In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (7 page)

I followed her lead and was soon sweating on the floor again.

She released me after morning colors and I found myself walking the circuitous route over to Building H. It housed the astrophysics classrooms in a rambling two-story building with a small observatory on the roof. Everyone had to spend a semester dealing with optics and angles, with stellar sequences and orbits. Some complained that it served no purpose when we could literally fly out and see the objects in question. It fascinated me, and I often marveled that our progenitors back on Earth had managed to learn so much simply by using such rudimentary tools. While our detailed understanding had changed over the centuries, the basic theories still governed our understanding of the universe around us.

When I got there, I had to check the position of the system primary to make sure I was on the east side. As I approached the building, I saw no lilacs. The planting beds beside the building looked empty. I remembered pruning those lilacs when I’d been a cadet. Every spring after they blossomed, we had to prune back about a third of the stems and watch for those that had gotten too large.

I had to walk right up to the beds to find the answer. I crouched down and ran my hand across the stumps sawed off flush with the ground. A bit of nearly dry sap stuck to my fingers. The entire stand had been taken back to root. I stood and surveyed the width of the building. Here and there I spotted the beginnings of new growth. A sprig of green here. A tiny stem with a few leaves there.

I wiped the sap off my fingers on the side of my pants and headed back to my cottage. Clearly, I had a lot more pruning to do and a decision to make about Pip’s offer.

Chapter Seven
Port Newmar:
2374, May 30

The therapist that Alys Giggone recommended turned out to be a thirty-something beanpole with a flattop haircut, slightly bulgy eyes, and an infectious grin.

“Malloy Gains,” he said when I made it to his office for my first appointment. “Mal to my patients.”

I shook his offered hand and grinned back at him. I couldn’t help it. “You know that means ‘bad,’ right?”

If possible, the grin got even wider. “Why do you think they call me that?” He pointed to a comfy-looking chair. “Have a seat. Tell me why you’re here.”

I settled into the chair and felt it hug me. It was a bit disconcerting. “I’m not sure why I’m here. It’s just—given the last few months—it seemed like a good idea.”

He pulled another chair over and sat down where he could look at me. For several heartbeats that was all he did. “So, death, dismemberments, serious illnesses. Money?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Not so much dismemberments.”

His bulgy eyes blinked slowly and I had the sense that he had to refocus on me. “For most of my patients, that’s a joke.” He paused. “No so much the money.” He settled himself into his chair and clasped his hands around one knee. “Tell me a story.”

“What kind of story? You want to know how my mother died?”

He blinked that slow blink again. “Do you want to tell me that story?”

I shrugged. “I can. It was a long time ago, but I thought therapists wanted to know about your mother.”

His grin came back. “Not all of us. How did she die?”

“Flitter crash back on Neris. Two decades ago.”

“Senseless, no warning. Left you on your own?”

“Yeah. Company planet. They were going to deport me unless I got a job. Just a few weeks after I turned eighteen.”

“What did you do?”

“That’s when I met Alys Giggone.”

“So, now I know how you got to the academy and made captain at such a young age.” He pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling. “What do you want to get from these sessions, Ishmael?”

“I don’t know. For a long time I’ve been focused on moving up the career ladder, making enough credits to be comfortable, and now I have.” I shook my head. “Over the last couple of stanyers, I made captain, bought a ship, started my own company, and then sold it. Money isn’t a problem. I’m probably considered wealthy at this point.”

“More than a million?” he asked.

“More than a hundred million.” I shrugged.

“Yeah. You’re wealthy. If that’s a problem, I’ll take it from you.” He winked at me. “And I think my hourly rate just went up.”

“It’s certainly life changing levels, but it’s barely enough for a down payment on another ship.” I thought of the
Chernyakova
.

“What was that?” he asked, sitting up and waving a finger in my direction. “What were you thinking about then?”

“A ship. A salvage claim I have on a ship over in Breakall. I commanded the salvage team that recovered it.”

His grin remained but his brow furrowed. “Tell me about that.”

“Crew gassed themselves on a rag fire. We found the ship on a ballistic course on its way out of Breakall. I took a skeleton crew over and stabilized the ship, and waited for the TIC forensics team to examine the remains.”

“You said that pretty smoothly. You’ve told this story before.”

“Just the other day, actually.”

He nodded. “It must have been horrific.”

“We found the crew where they’d dropped. Most of them in their bunks. Some at duty stations.”

“How could such a thing happen?”

I felt my jaw clench. “They removed the alarm-system board from their engineering section. Environmental instruments picked up the rise in carbon monoxide, but the alarm couldn’t sound because the board wasn’t there.”

“That makes you angry,” he said.

“No, it frustrates me.”

His grin came back full force, and he just raised his eyebrows.

“Yes. It makes me angry.”

“Why?”

“It was so senseless. They were operating on a shoestring, sure, but to take out the alarm? Gods, how much could it have cost to replace it?”

“Senseless. Another senseless loss,” he said.

I took a deep breath and the image of Greta’s body lying on the decking, her blood staining the back of her shipsuit, filled my mind. “Lots of senseless death.”

He settled in again, putting his feet flat on the floor and folding his hands in his lap. “And now we come to the real problem. Who was she?”

His comment caught me sideways. “My engineer. My lover.” My eyes stung and I had to swallow a couple of times. “My friend.”

“Senseless death.”

“She got between an assassin and his target. It was an accident.”

He did that slow blink thing again. “That hardly seems like an accident.”

“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She took a knife that was meant for somebody else.”

“And you think it was an accident?”

“I think I caused it.” I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. “If she hadn’t been with us, she’d still be alive.”

“Well, if she’d never been born, she’d never have died, either.” He gave a little chuckle. “The loss part. Sure. This was a woman you loved.”

I nodded but couldn’t find breath to speak. “She pushed me away at first. I was being an ass.”

“How so?”

“I had this really rigid stance about relationships among the crew.”

He nodded. “That’s not unusual in commercial environments. The power differential can feel insurmountable.”

“She was amazing. She had the sharpest sapphire blue eyes. Brilliant engineer. Learned at her father’s knee.” I looked up at him. “She was my conscience. Once I nearly made a fatal decision. If it had gone well, we’d have made a few credits. If it had gone wrong, we’d have all been smeared across the surface of an airless planet.”

He nodded. “Then what?”

“The longer we were together, the harder it was for me to see her there, just out of reach. She was everything I ever imagined. Brilliant, clever, gorgeous. A truly gifted engineer and a great shipmate.”

“Sounds like she’d have made a good mate-mate.”

“Except she was crew.”

“So you let this idea that because she was crew she was untouchable get between your head and heart.”

I looked down at my hands. The white knuckles surprised me; I unclenched the fists. “Yeah. When I became too much of an ass about it, she took me to the cabin and told me that it was impossible, that we’d never have a relationship. That I wasn’t going to be anything more to her than a captain.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. It made it better. A little.”

“How so?”

“Well, it wasn’t just my ethical considerations that stopped things from progressing. She didn’t care for me that way.”

“Unrequited love was easier to deal with than holding the key to happiness and not being able to use it?”

I looked at him, but his grin stayed in place. “Something like that.”

“That changed. What happened?”

“I started my own company and left the ship. She followed me a few months later. We hashed it out when we didn’t have the captain-crew barrier between us.”

“And then you hired her anyway?”

“Well, more like we formed a partnership. I couldn’t fly without an engineer, and she couldn’t engineer without a captain.” I rubbed a hand across my eyes, trying to dispel the images.

“So you blame yourself because she’s dead?”

“If I hadn’t started the company. If I’d been smarter about it. If I hadn’t hired her on.” I felt my breath shuddering in and out and had to stop for a moment. “She’d still be alive.”

“All right, let’s talk about this captain-crew barrier for a bit. Tell me about that.”

“Easy. I don’t screw with crew. Never have. Well, except her.”

“That’s charming. Where did you hear that?”

He surprised a short laugh out of me. “It started with Alys Giggone.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You had the hots for Alys?”

I laughed again. “She was my first captain. The
Lois McKendrick
was my first ship. They had a nonfraternization policy aboard.”

“No intimate relationships among the crew members.”

“Yeah.”

“Was it enforced?”

“How do you mean?”

“Did you ever see anyone engaging in fraternization? Did they get punished? Was it part of the standing orders?”

“I never observed it. It was just part of the culture of the ship.” I paused thinking of Bev and Bril. “We lost at least one crewman because he wanted more latitude.”

“He liked the idea of bunk bunnies?”

I coughed in surprise.

“I’ve heard the term before,” he said.

“Yeah. And he was roundly derided for his predilection.”

“You were what? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

I nodded.

“And you were good with this rule?”

“It made things a bit difficult for me, but I understood the rationale.”

“And you didn’t want to be seen in the same light as that other guy.”

I shrugged. “My mother raised me alone. I learned a lot from watching her suffer.”

“So, do you wonder why we headshrinkers like to talk about mothers?”

He caught me off guard with that one, too. “No, I guess it makes sense.”

“Were you ever in on a ship where this nonfraternization rule wasn’t in place?”

“My first posting out of the academy was a den of depravity called the
William Tinker
.”

“Den of depravity. That’s a bad thing?”

“It was. I’m not being overly judgmental with that. The captain abused the crew sexually and allowed his first mate to do the same. That went all the way to torture, assault, and hospitalizations. At least one crewman died under suspicious circumstances.”

He twitched and the grin left his eyes, but remained fixed on his lips. “What did you do?”

“That was my welcome to the fleet as an officer.” I sighed. “I did what I could. Worked with the crew that would work with me. I was the only male officer who didn’t abuse them.”

“Why didn’t Geoff Maloney do anything?”

I shot him a glance.

“Yeah. I’ve seen your public jacket. Alys sent it over,” he said.

“Back then none of the contracts allowed for appeal outside of the chain of command. What the captain did in space stayed on the ship until and unless the captain brought in the authorities. With the contracts he had, Mr. Maloney’s lawyers felt he had no grounds for dismissal and cautioned him against risking the company in court.”

“Yet, you broke it open.”

I shook my head. “No, I was just the catalyst. I didn’t actually
do
anything. That was the chief engineer and the cargo master. The first mate had his bully boys attack me one night. It didn’t work out well for the mate, and the captain made a mistake. That allowed the company to step in, remove him from command, and replace him with a captain who could bring in the authorities to put an end to it.”

“And you stayed there until you made captain.”

“I did.”

“I see.” He glanced at the chrono. “Well, our time is up for today but that sounds like a good place to pick up next time. How long will you be on-planet?”

“I was planning on a few weeks, but it may only be a few days.”

“All right. We’ll have to move fast. I’m going to give you some homework.”

“Homework?”

His grin lit up his entire face again. “Yeah. The family we’re born in has values and mores that color what we believe for our entire lives. Usually those values provide a firm foundation for growth. If they didn’t, the family of origin wouldn’t exist.”