Owner's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper) (72 page)

The reality was that I had no choice in the matter. William Simpson held the cards, and like it or not, they added up to a winning hand.

“I understand, sir,” I said at last.

He arched an eyebrow and cast a look in my direction. “Do you now?”

“You took a risk on the note, and you deserve the reward. I’ve got a going concern, so while that extra capital would be welcome, lacking it is not going to interfere with my operation. It was a shrewd move on your part, sir. Well played.”

The left side of this mouth twitched up in a small smile, and he turned to gaze out once more. “Thank you, my boy. I’ve learned a few tricks of the trade over the decades.” He paused. “How did you get The Wanderer to review your ship?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure but I suspect that it was as a result of the Dubois incident. It gave us a higher profile than we could have expected.”

He smirked. “Silver linings and all that, eh?”

“I don’t believe it was merely luck, sir, but it could have been nothing more than being at the right place at the right time. When I posted the passenger availability, it placed us at the top of any list sorted by arrival date.”

“Well, you’ve done a very good job establishing your niche, my boy. Very good, indeed.”

“Thank you, sir. The ship is a brilliant design, and I really don’t understand why it didn’t catch on.”

He snickered. “Freight moves the money, Captain, and it doesn’t molest your crew.” He shot me a sidelong glance.

Bitter experience forced me to grant him the point.

He blew out a short breath. “Well? I think that’s it then.” He held out his hand and looked at me. “I’ll send you the name of your new board member after the transactions clear in a couple of days. In the meantime, I believe you’ve an engineer to find?”

“I do, Mr. Simpson, and thank you for your time.”

As I walked back to the ship, I considered the exchange and realized that I should be getting another ten million in my own right from the
Chernyakova
settlement. I snickered softly when I realized that the whole enterprise was founded based on a salvage claim that I hadn’t yet received. The reporter had been correct in his accusation that, without the settlement, I wouldn’t have founded Icarus. It just wasn’t in the way he had laid it out.

I pondered the improbabilities involved all the way back to the ship. When I got back aboard, I found a grav trunk locked to the deck at the base of the ladder. I trotted up the ladder to the first deck, heading for the galley and some explanation.

I rounded the corner and found Ms. Arellone and Ms. Maloney talking to a shipsuited figure sitting with her back to the door. As I opened my mouth to speak, she turned and stabbed me with a sapphire smile.

“I heard you needed an engineer, Captain.” Even though her words were barely audible, Chief Gerheart’s voice seemed to echo in my head.

“What are you doing here?” The inanity of the question made me wince.

Her eyes danced, and the left corner of her mouth twitched in a wry smile. “Having coffee and catching up on the news with the crew.”

I finally realized that I stood rooted to the deck just inside the galley door and moved, experimentally, just to see if I could. I managed to cross to the coffee pot, and pour a cup without tripping on my feet or breaking anything.

When I turned back to look at them again, Ms. Arellone had a smug smile on her face while Ms. Maloney looked more amused than anything. Chief Gerheart’s expression was at once amused, resigned, and calculating.

“Yes,” I said at last. “I need an engineer. You know of anyone who might be available?”

She gave a little sideways bob of her head. “I might. Depends on the terms.” Her expression lost some of the amusement, and took on something a bit more determined.

Before I could respond, Ms. Maloney rose smoothly from the table and turned to me. “Captain, I need to get lunch going. Perhaps you and Chief Gerheart could move your negotiations to the cabin?”

Ms. Arellone muttered, “And it was just getting interesting.”

“Thank you, Ms. Maitland. We’ll get out of your way. Chief?” I led the way out of the galley, and across the passage to the cabin. I held the door open for her, and then closed it behind us as she sauntered in and gave the room the once over.

“Not exactly as spacious as your old cabin, is it, Ishmael?”

I gave a small shrug. “It’s not much to look at but I don’t get to look at it much.” I waved her into a seat, and took the one across from her.

She laughed and I almost forgot what we were doing. “So I heard. Ms. Arellone and Ms. Maloney have been quite entertaining.” She arched an eyebrow in my direction. “How’d it go with the money man?”

“We’ll be sailing again. The old scallywag is getting an extra two million, but I’m getting the company back unencumbered.”

“And you need a chief engineer.” Her words were statement, not question.

“I do. The last one wasn’t exactly competent, or perhaps I’d just been spoiled.” I felt the smile on my face, weak, but there.

“I’m interested in the job, Captain.” She sat back in her chair, and folded her hands together in front of her chest, elbows on the arms of her chair.

“You mentioned terms?” I asked.

“Yes. We need to get some things straight.”

“Ok. That seems reasonable. What did you have in mind?”

“Your attitude toward me, Captain. And I need to know a few things.”

For a moment, I thought I might need to check the grav plates because it felt like the whole ship twisted sideways.

“My attitude?”

She nodded and stood. The chairs weren’t that close together, but the step she took toward me brought her close enough that I could feel the warmth of her body.

“Your attitude, Ishmael.” I looked up to where she looked down at me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but at this moment, I’m not in your crew.”

My mind wouldn’t keep up for some reason, but I managed a nod. “Yes. You’re not in my crew.”

“I haven’t decided whether I’m going to work for you or not, so we have that understood?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said and reached down, grabbed the lapel of my shipsuit and tugged. She pulled me against her, stopping with her lips only centimeters away. “In that case, captain-my-captain,” her voice was a low growl. “You and I need to come to a little understanding about your attitude about fraternization.”

Negotiations lasted a couple of stans but in the end, I believe we pounded out a lasting agreement.

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

“We’ve missed lunch,” she mumbled sleepily.

“I know the cook,” I told her looking up from where my fingers stroked lazy circles on her skin.

“You realize you have one of the richest women in the quadrant working in your galley?” she asked.

I shrugged. “At the moment she’s as broke as any of us, but she has the advantage of a good education.”

She grinned at me. “Are you ever serious?”

I sighed in satisfaction, and thought about it. “Sometimes.” I refocused on her face. “She is broke. Jarvis froze her assets for the duration. She’s as broke as somebody with apartments on at least three separate orbitals and a string of her own art galleries can be.”

She chuckled. “Well as long as she has something to fall back on if this whole chef-who-will-take-over-the-biggest-company-in-the-quadrant thing doesn’t work out.”

“It’s important to have options.” I agreed. I looked at her for a while, savoring the moment. “Can I ask? Why?”

“Why what?”

I waved a hand. “All this. I very distinctly remember you putting me right about your feelings about me, and this seems inconsistent.”

“You complaining?”

“Curious.”

“Well, I needed the job, and I thought maybe I could trade my body for a berth.”

I stiffened, and not in a good way.

“Gods, you should be named Insufferable, not Ishmael.” She reached up and pulled my head down for a kiss. “Joke, ya twit.” She kissed me again. “I wouldn’t trade my body for anything less than the whole ship.”

She made my head swim, and I stared at her trying to make enough sense out of the situation to reach understanding.

She settled herself and looked up at me. After a moment she began speaking. “Ishmael, you were being an ass. Mooning about. Making everybody on the ship crazy. You weren’t getting your job done very well, I wasn’t getting my job done very well, and nobody on the ship could figure out why in the world we didn’t just get it over with.”

She smiled at me very sadly.

“You’re such a stiff-necked bastard, you couldn’t let your precious ethics go long enough to figure out whether they meant anything or not. You made your mind up, and by all that was holy and right, you were gonna live by your code. So I put you out of your misery.”

“You lied?”

She chuckled, and I was momentarily distracted by the way it made her body shimmer in the light. “Yes, ya putz, I lied. It practically killed me, but I lied.”

I thought there were tears at the corners of her eyes, but I couldn’t be sure. I felt hurt and a little angry that she hadn’t told me the truth. “But didn’t I have any say in that? You sacrificed yourself for the good of the ship, and I didn’t even know?”

“Hmm,” she said with a bit of a playful smile on her lips but a look of deadly earnestness in her eyes. “Very good questions, captain-my-captain. Don’t you think maybe you could have thought of them a little earlier?” She paused to add a little emphasis. “Like maybe before you got all high and mighty and decided that you weren’t going to ‘screw with crew’ perhaps?”

I collapsed on the bunk beside her, staring up at the overhead. “Damn,” I said.

“You’ll learn to really hate it when I’m right,” she whispered.

“I already do,” I told her, turning my head to look at her.

“You only think you do, now. Wait until you’ve had a few decades to really get to deal with it.” She grinned.

I smiled back, and reached over to stroke her cheekbone with the tip of a finger. “You know what? That’s one threat I really like the sound of.”

She waggled her eyebrows. “Thought ya might.” She reached for me, pulling me to her for another kiss. She let me go, and pulled back far enough to be able to focus on my eyes. “So? Do I get the job?” She grinned.

“We’ve got no hot tub on this ship,” I pointed out.

She snickered. “Somehow, I bet we manage to stay in hot water anyway.”

“Considering what’s happened in the last three months, I suspect you’re right.”

She arched an eyebrow. “So? How about it, Captain-my-captain? Or are you gonna put me ashore to slink back to Gwen with my tail between my legs.”

I sat up a bit to admire the legs in question from a better angle. “Hmm. Could you roll over so I can see the tail?”

She punched me on the arm, and the ensuing wrestle lasted until our giggling got the best of us.

“Standard contract? Double share? Base plus ten?” I offered when we finally caught our breath.

“Cheapskate!” she said. “Base plus twenty?” She took a firm grip on an exposed region of my anatomy and arched an eyebrow. “It’s not a figure of speech in this case, captain-my-captain.”

“Base plus fifteen,” I countered, daring her.

She dared, but capitulated after a moment. “Okay, but you have to paint the cabin.”

“I just painted it!”

“Paint it again!”

“What color?”

She let me go with a grin. “I’ll let ya know.”

I held out my hand. “Deal.”

She looked at my hand and shook her head. “I’ve got a much better way to seal this deal, captain-my-captain.” She reached up and pulled me down to her again.

She was right. It was better but it took longer than a simple handshake.

Much later, I rolled over and asked her, “When can you start?”

She smiled lazily back at me. “That depends. Have we put this fraternization issue away?”

I made a show of considering it, but grinned. “I’m feeling pretty fraternized at the moment.”

“In that case, I can start right away.”

“What about the
Agamemnon
?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “We got them a new engineer at Breakall. I rode back with them to help with his orientation.”

“Then what? You were just gonna wait for me to show up?”

“Something like that. I didn’t figure you’d be away very long, and imagine my surprise when you showed up on the scanner while we were on final approach.”

“And you just packed your kit and came over?”

“Well, my kit was already packed. We only docked the day before you did. I was getting ready to put it into storage when I got the word from Stacy that you needed an engineer.”

“Ms. Arellone?” I blinked in surprise.

“Is there another Stacy aboard?” She shrugged. “And Ms. Maloney seems to be working out nicely judging from the press. Why’s her shipsuit say Maitland?”

“Cover story for security. She’s supposed to be on a grand tour while in mourning for her late father.”

“Uh huh.” She looked at me skeptically. “Have you seen the newsies? I’m not sure anybody’s buying it.”

“I’m not either but we’ll play along until the end of the stanyer. She’s already working without a bodyguard.”