The Bright Black Sea (45 page)

'Perhaps you know best, they're all different,' he
continued, turning a blind eye to my sarcasm. 'But from what I can
see, everything's not been settled. The sooner we get this settled,
the better it'll be, so don't hesitate to crawl back. Makes'em feel
good. And trust me, it's well worth it.'

'I'll keep that sage wisdom in mind for some time, in
the far distant future, when it may come in handy. However, for
your information, Riv – and get this straight – Min and I have an
understanding that requires no announcement, she employs me as the
captain of her ship. That's the beginning and end of it. Am I
making myself clear?'

He gave me a look. 'Then why are you getting so
angry? You never get angry.'

'I'm getting angry because you – and anyone else who
thinks like you – must think I'm a complete fool. I resent
that.'

'Awe, come now Skipper. You can't fool us. She may be
giving you the icy shoulder at the moment, but we can tell. All you
need do is make the first move. Why put it off?'

A rocket flared.

'You're making book on this fantasy, aren't you?'

'Why Skipper, I'd never make a book on something like
that...'

'Then you've got a pool up and running.'

'I've not, and well, I don't know why you'd get that
idea, anyway,' he said going for an innocent look which didn't make
orbit.

'You're evading my question, so put me down for
never. How much do I owe you?'

'Awe, come on, Skipper. Don't get mad. We're just
having a little fun.'

'Refund the credits. It isn't going to happen. The
whole idea is ridiculous. Think about it, mate. How'd it look for a
captain sleeping with his owner, or an owner sleeping with her
captain? Both of them would be suspected of being weak or a fool
and neither'd be respected. This misunderstanding has grown way out
of proportion.'

'You carried her off against her will... You're not
one to take a chance like that just to enforce a contract... We
know you too well to believe that for an instant.'

'Listen carefully. Here's the deal. Prior to her
inheriting the ship I'd offered her the pilot's berth promising her
we'd make a tramp spaceer out of her while giving her the chance to
meet all of her Min & Co's clients while doing so. After she
learned the ship was hers, she decided she needed to learn ship
owning by serving aboard and so she signed on with the
understanding that she'd be a pilot first and a shipowner only when
needed. And that's how things stand.'

'And she changed her mind and you kidnapped her.'

'I chose to enforce my Guild contract with her
because I'd come on hard evidence that she was in immediate danger
from the people who killed her folks and knew I hadn't the time to
convince her of that before we sailed. She knows she's a target and
didn't want to put us in danger by serving aboard. I think we can
deal with it, so I acted as I did. Don't read more into than
that.'

'Well, don't get so mad about it. You'd be more
convincing. And when you do decide to take the plunge, just give
your old shipmate a wink.'

I sighed. Back in the old days, before the robots
revolted, I wouldn't have needed a chief engineer... We live in
dark times.

Seventeen days out of Sanre-tay, still under power.
It was hot in the engine room. Hotter than I've ever known it to
be. I was leaning against the railing of the control platform
staring down into its depths and soaking in the dry heat and the
smell of working machines and ozone. It was the roaring heart of
the
Lost Star
and I found comfort in being close to it. Part
of it.

As a general rule, sightseers are not welcomed in the
engine room, especially while under power, but hanging out in the
engine room without a reason is one of the captain's privileges.
Not one to be abused, mind you, but if I paused and lingered awhile
on my nightly rounds, as I was now, they'd not kick about it. I
lingered to soak in the warmth and the life contained in the muted
fury and power of the nine rocket engines driving the ship ever
faster.

The control platform sits directly above the main
reactor and rocket engine, which together, make a ten meter
diameter column of nearly fifty meters in length. Around this
central feature is an intricate, organic looking web of struts,
grated catwalks and platforms mounting banks of fuel and cooling
pumps, generators and transformers linked to the main and eight
smaller rocket engines by twisting cables and pipes.

The control panels on the engine room platform are
duplicated on the bridge, but on the bridge you're remote, and
can't keep as close a watch on your charges as you can working
amongst them. By day seventeen, at mark 7.1 acceleration, every
element in the complex machinery that delivered fuel and controlled
the output of the nine rocket engines was being tested as it hadn't
been in fifty years. So the watch engineer kept watch on the
platform monitoring the readouts while a second and perhaps third
engineer scurrying about in the cavernous depths of the room,
looking after this pump and that generator, making sure everything
was running smoothly. Of course each piece of equipment had its
sensor and status light on the platform, but lights on a control
panel are just lights. You needed to see and touch each piece if
you're an engineer and want to really know what was going on with
your machines.

Lilm had the watch and was slumped on a tall stool
keeping an eye on the panel, listening and smelling the hot air for
the slightest trace of something running too hot or shorting out.
Tenry was somewhere in the maze below, inspecting the machines,
putting his hand on them to make sure they were running silky
smooth and cool, noting any questionable reading.

'Everything running smoothly, Chief?' I yelled to
Lilm, just to be polite.

She didn't bother to yell a reply, a curt nod was her
only reply.

Lilm and her partner Riv had a mutually agreeable
tempestuous partnership. As Riv said, she was a high spirited
woman. And so, while Riv was the Chief Engineer on our books, in
reality, that title changed with the watch. Lilm was every bit a
chief engineer, as tough and as stubborn as Riv, if not more so.
Who was actually calling the shots in that partnership, and in the
engine room, at any given time was an open question. In practice we
called both of them Chief, and when they were both present, we
usually asked a general question, “Say, Chief, what's the
status...” and waited to see who'd answer so we'd know who was in
charge at the moment. However, with Lilm on the platform and Riv
grabbing a nap, there was no doubt who was Chief at the moment.
Fortunately, she was in a relatively mellow mood and wasn't glaring
daggers at me to get lost, so I rested on the railing and brooded
in peace.

I wasn't brooding all that darkly. I was, in fact,
remarkably content for a captain on notice. Not that Min and I were
any closer than we'd been from day one, but that was actually
working out smoothly. She seemed to have settled seamlessly into
the routine of the ship and the society of her shipmates, and I was
quite content for things to go on that way a while longer. We'd a
long voyage ahead of us, plenty of time to sort things out between
us.

Mostly, I was just enjoying the heat and noise. The
composite D-matter hull which protects us from the full spectrum of
the electromagnetic radiation the nebula and our passage kicked up
also keeps the heat generated within the hull by its crew and all
the machinery inside as well, so it must be either converted into
electricity by our thermoelectric converters or moved outside to
the heat exchangers on the hull. After seventeen days under power,
both heat exchange systems were running just about flat out.

The
Lost Star
was designed to be primarily an
interplanetary freight liner which needed no more than two to ten
day burns to jump from planet to planet. An interstellar jump like
this, which required a twenty day burn to reach interstellar
velocity fell outside the ship's optimal range. Not dangerously so,
but still, it was noticeably warmer aboard the ship, and I, for
one, wasn't complaining. I'm certain we'd let the temps fall back
to Port Prime standard once we were done with the engine, but like
ol'Sunny Day I was coming to rather appreciating the ship's more
tropical climate.

Well, I'd best get on with my nightly inspection, I
thought, so I pushed myself off the railing and started for the
catwalk to the main access well. Having seventeen days of pseudo
gravity was another novelty. I was getting quite accustomed to it.
Not only did it made cooking and eating easier but it kept the cats
and dogs attached to the deck.

I gave Lilm a wave as I turned and climbed the stairs
that circled the well to the next deck up, the engineering deck.
The engineering workshop lay on my left as I stepped out into the
broad passage way of the deck, and the environmental office and
control room lay on my right. I looked in on both, but both were
empty, the bank of status lights in the environmental office a
solid green. I walked ahead, checking the locks on the supply
lockers and our food freezer before climbing a steep side access
ladder to the bridge deck.

Min and Kai had the bridge watch and I gave them a
break and headed up through the silent and dim lit crew and
passenger decks and on to the awning deck. Rafe and Myes were
playing Black Star on the Bistro table, and Illy was reading in the
dimness of the awning deck commons. I watched the game for a while
and headed up to no. 4 hold.

The sound of the engines was muffled by the four
decks below, so the hold seemed strangely silent, and the large
space was lit only by several dim cargo lights. Deep shadows hung
about its far corners and from the mezzanine with its jumbled
surface of shadows and deeper shadows, I could sense more than see
the cats watching me. Even after exploring the mezzanine in our
search for the drone, I'm still not completely comfortable in no. 4
hold, alone, in the dim light. As I may have mentioned, I'm no more
superstitious than the next spaceer, but there seemed too many
memories about the place to be completely comfortable. People have
lived and died aboard this tiny little world for more than a
thousand years, and each of them has left something etched in the
atmosphere, the ether, of the ship behind them, and those memories
seemed to be strongest in no. 4 hold. I stood for a few moments in
the middle of the hold searching the shadows for something that
wasn't there, and checking the locks on the two strongrooms, and
headed down. And another day reached its home port.

The silence was deafening after 20 days of the low
but constant roar of the engines. Of course it's never completely
silent aboard a ship – there are aways a multitude of fans and
motors running all about the ship, but these small sounds often
only emphasized the silence of a ship in the endless black sea of
space.

I stepped out from the bridge into the passageway,
and noticed light streaming from the tech office's open door-panel.
It occurred to me that I'd not had a chance to talk with Rafe about
the true log project since we left Sanre-tay orbit, so I shuffled
free fall style in my magnetic soled boots once again, down the
short companionway and looked in.

'Hey Rafe, have a minute?' I asked from the
doorway.

He swung his chair around to greet me, 'Hi Willy.
Always a minute for the Cap'n.'

'I was just wondering how our project is going. I
realize you didn't have a lot of time to work on it since we left
Sanre-tay.' Running under power keeps everyone busy.

'Aye, not a lot. Still, I've been meaning to talk to
you about what I have found. Step in, and slide that door-panel
closed, will you?' And with a sweeping wave of his hand invited me
to take the other seat in the small office/workshop.

'What'd you find?' Curious now, as I slid the
door-panel closed behind me.

'Not very much at all, at least what we were looking
for. Truth be told, Willy, I'm afraid I've about reached the limit
of what I can do without turning up too much. With Tenny's help,
we've recovered all of the log I believe recoverable with all the
data we're likely ever to have. We've extracted a thirty five year
period backwards from when the current log gets real fifty three
years ago, so we've almost eighty-eight years of records that go
back to when Hawker Vinden actually purchased the ship,' said
Rafe.

'Well that sounds rather promising.'

He shook his head. 'I'm afraid you're going to be
disappointed. First off, if you expected the log to provide some
context to all their yarns, you're going to be disappointed. Most
of the tales they told likely happened, if they happened at all,
prior to Hawker's actual purchase of the ship. I believe they
served on this ship off and on for several decades before
purchasing it. I've no idea how things worked back before they
actually owned the ship. Those earlier logs were kept by a series
of different captains, for which we have no data to use as a hook
to fish and extract data. Plus with all the crew using different
names and constantly changing them, we really can't use much of
what we've learned to go back further. So prior to Tenny's first
contact with the Four Shipmates, it's pretty much a blank slate and
likely to stay that way, if we have to rely on the ship's log.'

'What've you learned from what we've recovered? They
had to be up to something in those thirty five years...'

'I'll turn the log over to you when I'm completely
finished fishing. There's just a few more treads to pull, but I
don't expect any surprises. From what I've found, I can tell you
there's nothing alarming in the log with which you need to concern
yourself. It's just a typical log, a complex record of the cargoes
they hauled between Unity ports and far more sketchy records of
their trading in the drifts, with several odd blank sections
lasting years at a time when they seemed to somehow avoid leaving
any record at all. Don't know how they managed that. The one factor
that may be significant is that many of those voyages begin and end
on Kintrine, a drift world of some sort. It would seem to have been
some sort of home port for them back . I don't know how helpful
that will be to the lass.'