Owner's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper) (71 page)

“I’ve posted it on StationNet.”

Ms. Maloney and Ms. Arellone were trading some kind of look between them that I couldn’t interpret, but they stopped when they noticed I noticed.

“Something?” I asked.

“No, sar.” Ms. Arellone answered much too quickly.

Unfortunately, I was distracted by my tablet. The reply from William Simpson arrived with an appointment for the following morning. “Well, we’ll know by tomorrow night,” I announced.

“What’s that, Captain?”

“Whether or not you’re right about the ship, Ms. Maloney.”

She nodded her understanding. “Well, I’ll put in a replenishment order this afternoon. We should have stores up to snuff by tomorrow, Captain. Shall we go out to dinner tonight?”

Ms. Arellone perked up at that. “Let’s! We missed going out at Greenfields.”

“Ok. Where? Not the pub on oh-two, please,” I told them.

“Marcel’s?” Ms. Maloney suggested.

Ms. Arellone made a surprised “oh” sound and looked first at Ms. Maloney and then at me. “Could we, Captain? Can we even get in there?”

“I don’t know why not, Ms. Arellone.”

“Would you like me to make the reservation, Captain? I can message Julian, and have it set up for sometime unfashionably early.” Ms. Maloney grinned across the table.

“1900 work for you?” I suggested.

She shrugged and turned to Ms. Arellone. “Stacy?”

Ms. Arellone nodded eagerly. “Should we ask Perc?”

“I’ll make the reservation for party of four,” Ms. Maloney said with a smile. “If he doesn’t want to come, they won’t mind.”

“So, what will you do this afternoon, Captain?” Ms. Arellone asked as Ms. Maloney got busy with her tablet.

“Paperwork, Ms. Arellone. Always paperwork.” I grinned.

“Reservation set, Captain,” Ms. Maloney announced.

I blinked at her. “That was fast.”

She shrugged. “I know Julian’s private address.”

We adjourned the luncheon after a quick clean up, and I left the two of them with their heads together in the galley. I confess to a certain level of trepidation but I also felt sure I would get nowhere by asking.

In my cabin, I fired up the console, and began the glamorous work of captain. First order of business was topping off the tanks. If Ms. Maloney was correct, then we would have a ship, and it wanted to be ready to go. In less than a quarter-stan I had the machinery in motion, and moved on to another task.

For weeks we had chased cargo with no plan. Whatever looked good, we took. It worked out, but the truth was we had cargo space going begging and I had no idea what the cargo patterns looked like in the remote outposts in the quadrant. The archives on the cargo availabilities were a matter of public record so I grabbed about a stanyer’s worth, and started analyzing cube-cargo shipments and priority horizons.

It took some fumbling about for me to find what I needed to know, in large part because I was trying to remember a lot of my cargo analysis courses from the academy, and I made a lot of mistakes. What I discovered was that while a lot of priorities went to Greenfields, the most valuable ones went to Martha’s Haven. Unfortunately, those valuable cargoes constituted a tiny fraction of the traffic, and occurred only few times in the stanyer’s worth of data. Eventually I found that Kazyanenko had the most reliable revenue stream leaving Diurnia as cubed container cargo, and a simulation running Kazyanenko against Greenfields had Kazyanenko out performing Greenfields by about thirty percent.

I had to get the data from Kazyanenko to find out what happened after that, but I wanted to create the most effective circuit for generating revenues. Zooming in, grabbing whatever paid best at the moment, and zooming out wasn’t a good long-term strategy. Particularly if it meant I missed out on a better cargo because I booked a load too early. I hoped to develop a kind of triangle trade, or perhaps some other route that would put us on a regular path around the quadrant and not the catch-as-catch-can route we had followed.

A couple of stans worth of research gave me a lot of things to think about and, looking at the chrono, I realized I needed to get cleaned up. Dinner would be a stan later than I was used to, but I had reached the point where a hot shower sounded heavenly.

I secured my console, and left my tablet on the desk while I stripped down and padded into the head. The shower soothed me, and I felt much more human when I finished getting cleaned up and climbed into one of my sets of civvies. I smiled as I thought of Mr. Herring’s upcoming experience, and I wondered if he was in a position to take advantage of it. The chrono clicked up to 1800 so I slipped into a pair of shoes, scooped up my tablet and IDs, and crossed to the galley where I found all three of my crew hunched over their own tablets and reading furiously. Before I could ask, my own tablet bipped and I opened to forty-eight unread messages.

“What the—?”

“You won’t believe it, Skipper,” Ms. Arellone called without looking up.

I started scanning down through the messages, and everyone seemed to have the same base request—”when are you leaving and can I go?” A few mentioned a specific port but most didn’t seem to care what our next port of call might be so long as they could be aboard.

I looked up to see that the crew had finished reading. They all stared at me. “My inbox seems to have suddenly overflowed with people wanting to take a trip with us. Does anyone here know why?” My tablet bipped again.

“Room with a view, Skipper,” Ms. Arellone answered brightly.

“I’m sure that means something in context, Ms. Arellone. Care to share?”

She held up her tablet. “We got written up!”

“I’ve been written up many times, Ms. Arellone, and it has never been a good thing before.” My tablet bipped twice more.

Ms. Maloney took her hand from covering her mouth to explain. “A travelogue article featured us, Captain. Apparently one of our guests was on assignment after all.”

My tablet bipped again.

“The Wanderer rode with us, Captain,” Ms. Arellone crowed.

I took a seat and looked around at them as my tablet bipped three more times. “Show me,” I said.

Ms. Arellone flipped her tablet around, and scrolled to the top of the page. I picked it up and looked it over, leaving my own tablet to bip randomly on the table.

The title read “A Room With A View: The trip you hope will never end by The Wanderer.” Some of what Ms. Arellone had been saying began to make sense. I scanned the rather glowing article briefly, noted that the author gave us four and half stars, and then looked around the table as my tablet bipped a few more times. In frustration, I reached over and clicked it off.

“And...?” I asked. “I don’t get out much, Ms. Maloney. Who is this Wanderer, and what’s going on?”

She grinned. “The local media outlet here has a semi-regular feature by-lined The Wanderer. Usually they visit resorts, hotels, liners, that sort of thing. The reviews are generally amusing, and very much in demand among a certain set. The Wanderer pulls no punches and if you look back through the archives, you’ll find that mostly he or she is very hard to please.”

Ms. Arellone jumped back into the conversation. “I bet it was that Ms. Hawkshaw!”

Mr. Herring looked up at the name. “This doesn’t sound like her.”

“Oh, Perc, it has to be her. She makes it sound like a romantic get-away. I think it sounds just like her.”

He shook his head. “All this atmosphere and cuisine and comfort and stuff. I bet it was that Muriel Lockhart. She sure had a romantic get-away.”

Ms. Arellone gave him an exasperated look, and it felt good not being on the receiving end for a change. “She was here with her daughter! How romantic is that?”

He shrugged. “Maybe, but you gotta admit it’s good cover if she’s The Wanderer.”

While they nattered, I read in more depth. The article had just been published, according to the date-time stamp on it, and the author gave us a very nice review. Ms. Maloney got high praise, and was described as “a classically trained French chef lurking incognito in a restaurant with no fixed address.” I snickered to myself at that. The fast transit time, the large ports in the compartments, and the romantically charged atmosphere all got prominent billing.

“I have to admit, if I didn’t know it was us? I’d want to go, too.” I told them, only half joking.

“But who do you think it was, Captain?” Ms. Arellone pressed.

I shrugged. “Coulda been any of them, including Sam Lockhart. She had plenty of time to observe, and nobody paid her too much attention except you, Ms. Arellone.”

She shook her head. “I still think it was Barbra Hawkshaw.”

I finished reading, and when I got to the end of the article, the last line gave it away.

“It’s a small universe.”

I grinned and let them argue for a while before I stood up and clapped my hands, rubbing them together. “Well, we have reservations for dinner. Shall we go?”

Chapter Sixty-Five
Diurnia Orbital:
2373-March-25

I had a 1000 appointment with William Simpson, and after a big to-do over bodyguards and security, I managed to convince Ms. Arellone that I didn’t really need her tagging along to make sure the throngs of potential passengers wouldn’t mug me along the way. Of course, I cheated by suggesting that she needed to standby in case Ms. Maloney needed help.

The office looked much the same as it had the last time. I thought the receptionist was a new face, but I couldn’t be sure. The gabbling from the pit seemed just as loud and confusing as I remembered. It was a relief to close the door behind me and enter the cool, dim sanctuary of Mr. Simpson’s office.

“Come in, my boy. Come in.” Mr. Simpson sat in his easy chair looking out at the ships, and didn’t look around when I entered, merely tilted his head a bit to send his words roughly in my direction.

I walked around to the front of the empty chair and offered my hand to him. He smiled up at me and shook it warmly. “Good morning, Mr. Simpson. Thanks for seeing me.”

“Not at all, not at all.” He patted the arm of the empty chair. “Sit! Sit. Tell me what’s been happening. You’ve made a very nice start, haven’t you?”

For nearly half a stan I recalled all of our adventures. Mostly he sat and listened. Occasionally he asked a question about this or that. He seemed most interested in the Dubois incident, and seemed intrigued by my firing of Chief Bailey.

“You’re stuck in port now, aren’t you, my boy?”

“Yes, sir. Until I find a new engineer. But I can’t take that kind of chance with crew and passengers. There’s just too much I don’t know to risk it, and I had no confidence in Chief Bailey’s knowledge and abilities.”

“Quite right, my boy. Quite right.” He glanced at me. “Tell me, was that a difficult decision?”

I shook my head. “No, sir. The difficult decision was making the run back from Greenfields with a chief engineer I didn’t trust.”

“And why did you do that?”

“Ultimately it came down to the contracts. The incremental risk of taking the expedient path seemed minimal, especially since I’d given the ship as thorough a going over as I could. We’d committed to getting the passengers and cargo to Diurnia. My base of support is here, and I reasoned that it would be easier to replace him from here than out on Greenfields.”

“Assuming you all made it, eh?”

I shrugged and gave a weak laugh. “Well, yes. There is that. Every time you leave port there’s a chance you’ll die a horrible, lingering death out there. It’s small but it’s always there.” I shrugged again. “I did what I could and, rightly or wrongly, rolled the dice.”

“I quite understand, my boy.” We sat then and gazed out. The slow dance of ships and tenders in the darkness offered a never-ending variety to the view. “So, how can I help you today, Captain?” Mr. Simpson asked with a small smile and a sidelong glance.

“I’ve come about the note, sir. It’s due in a couple of days and the ship hasn’t earned enough in so short a time. I wondered if you’d found a buyer for the stock so that we might avoid default.”

He reached over and patted my forearm with one bony hand. “Here’s what will happen on the twenty-sixth, my boy.” He laced his fingers together across his chest and continued. “Assuming you haven’t the liquid assets needed to repay the loan, you will default. Larks, Simpson, and Greene will take ownership of the single share of stock that you’ve assigned as collateral. Once that happens we’ll sell it to an investor, removing ourselves from ownership, and leaving you to deal with your board of directors.”

“You already have an investor, sir?”

“We do, my boy. We do.”

“Then why not sell them a share of unencumbered stock, and let me pay off the loan without incurring the default?”

He turned his head toward me. “If we did that, we’d forego the opportunity to earn a profit of two million credits.” He shook his head, and turned back to gaze out through the armorglass. “We’ve invested a great deal of time and money in getting you started up, Captain. You’ll walk away with an unencumbered company, and the opportunity to succeed or fail on your own without long-term liabilities. Please don’t deny us a modest profit on the transaction.”

I steepled my hands in front of my face, resting my elbows on the arms of the chair and sorting through what he had said. When the transaction cleared, I would have my ship, he would have an extra two million that probably belonged to me. He was taking advantage of his position in what was probably an inappropriate manner, but I had to admit that he had done very well by me, lining up enough credits to finance my start-up and go into business. Granted he took a commission on each sale, and while the twenty percent profit from the sale of that single share seemed like a large amount, taken across the total of forty million, it seemed a modest amount.