The Bright Black Sea (9 page)

'Neb, that'd be great! Almost too good to be true.
You'd think BlueStar wouldn't pass on that cargo.'

'Well, the BlueStar Line may still send one of their
ships to fulfill their agreement, however, given their cost
structures, it might not be worth it. Lines operate on a different
scale than tramps. In any event, we'll know more in a few days. And
of course not only will there be other parties interested in the
charter, but we'll have to clear it with the Ministry as well. In
any event, just keep this to yourself for now. With your crew
downside, I'd rather not risk the word getting around. The local
tramp shipowners haven't given up and it's in their interest to see
as many of Uncle Hawk's ships taken out of service as possible,'
she added, and standing to dismiss me, 'I believe I've covered
everything for now. Thank you. It's been interesting.'

'Thank you. And anything I can do, don't hesitate to
ask,' I said pushing myself to my feet. Damn that gravity...

And like an undetected meteor, an idea struck me with
a mental 'clang' and I said, without thinking, 'Say Min, Are you
free tonight?'

'Captain Litang?' She gave a slight start, caught off
guard, but added in a distinctly chilly tone, 'I see I must learn
to deal with tramp captains who do things their own way...'

Blast! Just what I didn't want to do. Could I repair
the damage?

'We like directness,' I ventured with a tentative
smile. 'Saves time and money. However, in this case, I was speaking
as the thought struck me and should've chosen my words more
precisely. What I meant to say was, Would you honor us by being our
guest at a banquet aboard
ship
tonight? I'm
embarrassed that the idea hadn't occurred to me before this
instant. If I had my wits about me, I'd have sent you an invitation
on arrival. Please overlook my abrupt and offhanded invitation and
accompany me up to the
Lost Star
for a Mycolmtreian
feast?'

'Thank you, but I, I have work to do.' She looked
away, out into the grey mist, searching for a better, a believable,
excuse.

Perhaps I should've left the matter rest, but that
didn't suit my Neb may care attitude, so I said, 'I'll take that
feeble excuse as a yes. You can't work all night, so I'll wait
until you wrap up work and we can be off
to the
ship.
'

She looked back to me. 'I'm not sure what you're
inviting me to.'

'We're staging a banquet to celebrate surviving the
voyage under the command of yours truly. Since we're going to be
paid off and may be downside for some time, we've harvested our
moss garden crops and the Drays are even now preparing an expansive
feast. As a former shipmate, the agent of our current owner, great
niece of our late owner and daughter of our late bookkeepers and
agents, you must certainly be our guest of honor. Indeed, with all
those connections, I'd venture to say it's your duty. It'll give
you the chance to see everyone and make the old gang very happy.
Plus you'll see the ship alive with everyone on board. Please join
us,' I added earnestly.

She looked away again into the fog for a moment,
shrugged, and nodded, 'You've not left me any maneuvering room, so
all I can say is that I'd be delighted to join the company of the
Lost Star
to celebrate their safe return. I can imagine how
harrowing it must have been for them,' she added with a faint
smile.

'For me most of all. It'll be grand. You'll bring so
many good memories with you – a barrier against an uncertain
future, which is what this banquet is really about.'

'It will be wonderful to see everyone, the
Lost
Star
and taste Mycolmtreian cuisine once again. When should I
arrive?'

'We'll go up together. You'll be my surprise guest.
I'll just hang about and annoy your staff while you finish up. I'll
signal Molaye to bring the gig down for us.'

'Not necessary. These days I'm living aboard the
Silvery Moon
and go up every evening, so you can ride with
me. I suppose I should stop first at the '
Moon
to change
into something more festive.'

'You look dashing as you are. This will be, after
all, just a tramp ship soiree which'll doubtlessly sink into a
right carouse. And there's no need to hurry, it's not slated to
start before this evening. I'll wait out in the office.

We took a flier through the night to the glowing
patch of fog that marked Yacht Club clubhouse. Attempts at
conversation were tentative, bordering on awkward, so we let the
silences run on. An observation here or there sufficed.

The Yacht Club's underground velowalks may be
cleaner, faster and warmer than those of the Smallcraft Field but
the tarmac was just as cold and damp, the snow banks just as sooty.
The puddles were refreezing and I feared Min might have trouble
navigating them, but she walked with total confidence and reached
her boat without incident. I had a few close calls. Damn that
gravity.

Her elegantly white space boat,
Ghost
, a
fifteen meter StarSprite Elite 7ZX looked comfortably at home on
the Yacht Club tarmac. A hybrid atmospheric/space boat, it had
stubby wings, a split tail with its rocket engines set in its
wings. She keyed the hatch open as we neared and we hurried
onboard. The main compartment was furnished with half a dozen
convertible seats forward with a conversational area and a compact
galley aft. As she headed for the cockpit, I hung back, unsure of
where I was expected to ride.

'You can copilot,' she said, climbing into her seat
without a backward glance. 'We all have our tickets here,' she
added, and indicating that I could sync my com link into the system
as well.

'Thank you,' I said as I settled in the copilot's
seat, buckled up and synced my com link to the
Ghost
. 'I've
never had the opportunity to fly in a boat of this caliber.'

'It's my dearest possession, a gift from Uncle Hawk
on my fourteenth birthday. Since his daughter was not interested in
space, I was the focus of his enthusiasm for space boats and space
boat racing. My parents didn't approve, of course, but Uncle Hawk
believed the earlier you fly, the better you fly. He'd take us up
for an atmospheric or space flight and hand the controls over to
me, saying Fly her. I suspect my enthusiasm reminded him of his
youth as well.'

'It's quite a gift.'

'He claimed to have won it in a game of Black Empire,
but I doubt it. It was one of his ways of encouraging me to follow
in his orbit. I owe him for far more than the
Ghost
,' she
continued as she went through the preflight checklist. 'Between his
yarns and his tutelage, he gave me the encouragement and
opportunity to follow him into space. Only the last time I saw him,
when he visited me on Kimsai, was he suddenly more cautious about
my spaceer career. No doubt my crash had a lot to do with that. I
wish he was here now.'

'We miss him too. It's hard to imagine an owner that
will come within a moon's orbit of replacing him.'

'He can't be replaced,' she said simply, and reaching
for the radio, pinged port control for clearance. She fired the
lift engines, and after getting our taxi clearance, pulled into the
access lane and out to the short runway.

With our final clearance she opened the main rockets
wide. An invisible hand pushed me back against the seat cushions
and in an instant we were airborne at forty-five degrees that swung
to ninety several seconds later, the heavy hand pressing on my
chest never letting up. This is, by the way, how you properly fly
rockets.

I closed my eyes to better follow her course via the
com link. The boat calculates the trajectory to rendezvous with the
Lost Star
based on its realtime position and speed. However
a rocket boat under power is constantly accelerating so the course
is constantly being recalculated and lags slightly behind the
actual convergence point. You can program a course and just follow
it or you can add predictive variables, but those can get rather
speculative, small changes getting ignored or magnified. Min simply
did it all in her head, following an instinctive course instead of
the boat's slightly dated one. She rode the rockets, effortlessly
adjusting for patches of turbulence and wind drift. And she didn't
let up. She kept the rockets firing to the mid-point where she
briefly paused to swing the boat about and begin an equally fierce
deceleration, keeping me pressed to the seat. I'll say it again,
this is how you fly rockets.

And before I was ready for it to end, the pressure
let up, the boat grew loudly silent, gravity was gone and via the
boat's sensors, I could sense my ship hanging a kilometer off to
starboard. I sighed, contented, and muttered, 'I think I'm in
love.'

I opened my eyes and turned to express my admiration
of her piloting only to see her watching me with an expression that
looked, even in the instrument lit cabin, fierce.

'Captain Litang?'

'Ah,' I said, gathering my wits. 'My apologies,
again. What I meant was
I love your piloting
. You handle
rockets the way they're meant to be handled. Sorry, I seem to be
saying things without thinking today.'

She shrugged, muttering under her breath, 'Tramp
spaceers.'

'Liner poshes,' I muttered under mine. I, however,
was attempting to be humorous, which fell short of orbit, so I
added, 'You liner pilots don't know what its like in tramp service.
Once in my early days I flew the ship's gig like you just did and I
was immediately summoned by Captain Miccall and told very plainly
that's not the way boats are handled in the tramp service. Was I
under the illusion that rocket tubes and fuel come free in packets
of breakfast cereal? If I wished to wantonly expend rocket tubes
and fuel for my own pleasure, I could buy my own, for he had no
intention to subsidize my extravagances. And for the last fifteen
years, I've piloted boats like they were made of lace. So you see,
I was merely expressing my appreciation for the beauty of something
done right and sadly, in my experience, rarely.'

Before she could reply, the radio broke in with Myes
Qilan gruffly warning us that we were within the ship's safety
zone.

With a nod from Min, I answered, 'Hi Myes, Wil here
with Tallith Min. We'll be boarding the port gangplank.'

He acknowledged with a short. 'Right, Skipper.
Hey,Talley. Port gangplank.' and closed contact.

'I'm not a liner pilot any more,' she said as she
began her approach, adding, 'Never wanted to be one. I always
wanted to be in the tramp service. When I was eighteen I presented
myself to Uncle Hawk expecting to be given an apprenticeship on one
of his ships. He told me to finish my education, so I did. At
twenty-one I again presented myself, and instead of one of his
tramps, he arranged my apprenticeship with the Zenith Line,
insisting that a few years on a regular freight liner would do me
good. Never said why.'

'Well, you now have more experience under power than
a tramp pilot with ten or fifteen years tramping. That's worth
something,' I ventured. Freight liners like the Z-Line Aurora make
their whole voyage under power, accelerating the first half,
decelerating the last half while most tramps, are under power only
a day or two at the beginning and the end of the passage.

'Still, except for a brief overview of the other
departments, I spent my entire time on the bridge. If I'd been on a
tramp I'd know a whole lot more about ships by now.'

'True, but there's still time. You're young...'

'My spaceer days are over. I don't know where my
Z-Line seniority puts me these days – probably on the beach. But
even if I could go back, I wouldn't want to toss some poor pilot on
to the beach when I don't need the wages. Plus I've my family's
firm to look after, even though I know next to nothing about
shipbrokering. I owe it to my parents' memory and my brother and
sister to learn and earn the dividends the firm pays us each
quarter.'

'It must be hard... Still, having a boat like this
should make being a shipbroker a little more tolerable. I'm hoping
that by the time my watches in space are over, I'll have found my
own space boat. I'll have it out in the barn... A vintage boat,
mind you, that I'll slowly restore... And on those restless spring
nights of Faelrain, when the sky's so clear and too bright and the
wind so reckless that I have to go somewhere, I'll roll it out and
take it up to the moon and back. Under power the whole way.'

She gave me a quick, unreadable glance, but said
nothing as she edged
Ghost
alongside the extended gangplank.
It did not move a centimeter when the
Ghost
contacted the
lock. Docking done right.

We unbuckled and swarmed over to the upper hatch
aligned with the dock. 'Perhaps I best go first, Astro and Orbit
are undoubtably waiting and they can be rather enthusiastic.'

'Astro and Orbit are still aboard?' she said, with a
smile. 'I wonder if they'll remember me?'

'Doesn't matter, everyone's a long lost pal,' I said
and instantly regretted it. Again.

I swung out first and Min followed. Illynta Tin,
keeping Astro and Orbit in check, was waiting on the landing stage
and she called out her greeting as Min settled in beside me.

'Hello Aunt Illy,' Min said as she hurried past me to
meet her.

Astro and Orbit, however had grown quiet, edging
back. Min was something new to them. This allowed Illy and Min to
exchange a hug and some greetings without dogs floundering about
them. They considered the whole proceedings carefully. You could
tell this because they tilted their heads, it's what passes for
thinking with them. They edged closer and when she knelt to talk to
them, they must have recognized her scent or voice or just decided,
any old orbit, a new pal! And they were their old barking, licking,
bounding selves. This brought up Riv and Lilm from the engine
room.