He looked up to find Claren Liu looking at him with grim amusement.
"Boss Conrad," she said, with a formal nod of the head. "As Surebleak portmaster, I request your approval to begin planetary defense planning, your permission to act in the name of Surebleak in the case of incident, and your agreement to assist in developing an on-going security net." She paused. "Without your OK, all I can do is pass a note to the guild, saying I've got possible pirates in-system."
Pat Rin glanced out the window. The second level port office was bathed in sunlight, and overlooked the tarmac to the east, and with a portion of a road that connected to the Port Road. On the tarmac sat two ships—the port's tug and the courier's surprisingly large vessel.
"I assume that I must regard this as an official request?" he finally asked, facing the portmaster once more.
"That's right. It has to be witnessed by two master pilots or a master pilot and three first class." She offered him a sympathetic grin.
"We can't have ships running around shadowing our incoming now that we have an ad out," she said. "It'd be—"
"Bad for business," Pat Rin finished gently along with her.
He rose, and inclined his head.
"I acknowledge your proposal, Portmaster, and I hereby approve your request to begin planetary defense planning. I give you permission to act for Surebleak in case of incident. As for a planetary security net—" he glanced aside, catching Cheever McFarland's eye. "I may be able to provide assistance, especially if there are pilots to hand."
Cheever's eyes widened, then closed. Pat Rin suppressed a smile and sat down.
"I will sign documents, if that is required," he told the portmaster. "Mr. McFarland, if you would do me the favor of going to the car and bringing up the contents of the back seat. Portmaster, I propose a working lunch."
She grinned at him merrily. "Right you are. I'll send for food—and there's a couple others we'll want here, if you'll let me call them in?'
He inclined his head. "Certainly."
"TOLD YOU THERE was something spooky about them 'quations, Shugg. I must know something deep down . . . " that was Andy Mack—the Colonel, so-called—idly stropping a credit chit along the flowing silver hair falling across the front of his leather jacket as he leaned against the back of second board's acceleration couch.
"Well, the screwy thing is it ain't exactly obvious, no matter how much you think about it . . . ." Shugg agreed.
The grizzled and short-haired Shugg—Flyer Shugg to his Surebleak acquaintances—sat second board at the moment, with Cheever McFarland at first. Crowding behind them were the other seven members of the expedition: Boss Conrad, Natesa, Etienne Borden, Juntavas pilots Darteshek and Karapov, Andy Mack, and "call me Dostie," the taciturn pilot of the port's official tug, whose hair—today at least—matched the electric pink tunic she wore beneath her jump jacket.
They had all sat second at one point or another during the trip. Pat Rin's glare had been ignored by the master pilot when his name came around on the roster; perforce, he had taken the seat warmed by Dostie, who had had it after the Colonel, who had it after Natesa, and had run his board with a cool aplomb he was very far from feeling. Now Shugg sat second, his grin slow and easy as he played with the screens.
"Lookit. We got a brown dwarf as primary and one-two-three neat as a pin stepping stone blue-and-green gas cousins with halos and then little Miss Blue running a bit askew in an outside orbit. Me, I'd like to know what happened to the missing planet!"
"Oh, hain't
missing
, Shugg!" Andy Mack scolded him genially. "You always want to find something
missing
. Check the resonance and you'll see . . . ."
Natesa smiled and raised her eyes; Pat Rin smiled in answer. He had, quite unexpectedly,
enjoyed
the trip, despite the crowding and the lack of opportunity to be private with his lady. But truly, he not found a group this convivial since . . . well . . . ever.
"Might be some rocks out beyond," Dostie offered. "But the Colonel's right, anything bigger than grains will get swept out of that gap because the mass ratio's almost a perfect 9, 5, 4, 3 . . . and with orbital periods being what they are—might be your Miss Blue
is
what's missing!"
"Now," Cheever said, raising his voice to be heard over the chatter, "we get to the fun part. If you were looking for a ship-stack out in the middle of this nowhere, where would you look?"
It was, of course, a joke, and Pat Rin was relieved to hear Pilot McFarland refer to their destination as other than a "ship graveyard"—an image not conducive to hope, which had so delighted the pilot that he had used it in every other sentence. Likewise, he had dropped the word "derelicts," which the ships they sought assuredly would
not
be, from his vocabulary.
"Shall we ask them where they are, Mr. McFarland?" Pat Rin murmured.
Cheever, careful of watchful eyes, keyed in the call phrase, shrank the info screen to thumbnail on the second's board, and said, "I'll take bets. Who'd care to name time—minutes and seconds—before we get an answer from the beacon? Boss, you sit out, OK?"
The assembled pilots laughed, placed their bets, and settled into an animated exploration of the Sherzer system by instrument.
THE UNIVERSE was not something Pat Rin yos'Phelium contemplated often, he being too much in it to feel apart from it. Now, however, he sat at the second board of
Fortune's Reward
, listening to its systems chuckling wistfully against the sudden silence of a ship with no one else in it, and shivered.
He had been to the brown drawf's system only once before. Cousin Er Thom had brought him—as surly and as graceless a halfling as one might ever wish to drown—insisting first that he memorize the coords, the call phrase, and the gate codes.
He had not, of course, wasted his time with Er Thom contemplating the universe. Instead, he had with cold dignity refused the shuttle's controls when they were offered, having already failed his piloting test for the fourth time. The terms of his refusal must have distressed his cousin, but Er Thom had merely nodded and changed the subject, filling the hours of the trip with stories of Clanmother Cantra, tales of Uncle Daav, arcane bits of ship lore; and, as they approached their goal more nearly, he had told of the strange mechanism which kept this collection of ships and ship parts together, for the use of Korval—and those whom Korval allowed.
Unwillingly, Pat Rin had listened, and despite his firm intention, found himself charmed out of surliness, so that he actually enjoyed sharing the picnic lunch Er Thom had brought along. After, and in closer accord, they crossed to the automated office, where he was shown the keys and the folders, and had his palmprint filed with the guardian computers.
That done, Er Thom had taken him on a tour of the stacks, showing him the controls and several ancient ships—one of which was still spaceworthy some six centuries after it was built!
Eventually, they had returned to the shuttle. As the ship-stack dwindled behind them, Cousin Er Thom had spoken to him seriously of his future, offering several alternative courses of education—all of them based away from the homeworld—borne his clumsy, halfling scorn with patience, and taken him back to the
Passage
as if all were well.
Now Pat Rin—perhaps the last of his clan; perhaps Korval-in-Truth—had returned to mine the ship-stack, for the defense and preservation of the clan. He had been astonished that the access numbers he had memorized so long ago still worked; that the robot guardian recalled his palmprint; that the system of key and folder was precisely as the ill-tempered halfling had recalled it . . .
Around him, the ship burbled, and the familiar cycling of the air system failed to disturb his patient consideration of the past.
It was, truth told, the first time Pat Rin had ever been quite so alone. He had never—as his younger cousins had—done a solo run; and, though he not infrequently traveled alone, there had never been a time in his life when he had been more than a moment or two away from another human; even in space he had always had a pilot of superb skill to depend upon.
Now, the person nearest him was a pilot he'd barely met—Dostie. She, too, sat alone in a ship, more than two dozen Standard Minutes away from him. Natesa—alone in her vessel—was approximately three dozen Standard Minutes away, while Cheever McFarland, Flyer Shugg, and the nightside portmaster oversaw the checking and selection of the last of their potential fleet, lashed neatly together nearly four dozen minutes away.
To beguile himself, Pat Rin sat at second board, and began to tentatively explore the Sherzer system with instruments and screens. Sherzer II loomed in front of him; one long range screen showed the remaining cluster of ships to be explored, as well as the seventeen other "ship-stacks"—some no more than a collection of parts—with the limb of the planet and a distant view of the multi-hued planetary ring beyond.
Fortune's Reward
was in effect orbiting in formation with all of these ships, in the trailing LaGrange point of Sherzer II.
It was a lovely place for a junkyard, and Pat Rin found himself absorbed in the shimmer of the innermost ring; the colors of the storms swirling across the planet's surface; and the beautiful tracery of the lightning flashes—
"Boss?"
Cheever McFarland's voice boomed into the quiet ship, startling Pat Rin out of his reverie.
"Yes?" he snapped. There was a delay, longer than could be accounted for by the relative nearness of their ships.
"Um, yeah," Pilot McFarland said. "Sorry to bother you. But anyhow, we might have ourselves a problem, a kind of decision problem, if you know what I mean?"
Pat Rin shook his head, a habit which his mother had deplored in his cousins, and to which he had finally succumbed on Surebleak.
"Pilot, I am destined for
problems of decision
on this project," he said, making a conscious effort to lighten his tone. "If you can explain the situation in non-technical terms I will hear it and contribute what I may to the solving."
Again, he shook his head. The decisions. First had been the decision of which cluster of ships was most promising; then, after nearly two days, the decision to abandon them in favor of a potentially more . . . useful . . . solution.
The first cluster chosen had been a mixed collection of ships, all operable, but with visible problems ranging from missing space-suits to thruster fuel supplies too ancient to be reliable. A notation in the folder indicated that they had been for sale and were awaiting inspection of a potential buyer—fifteen Standards before. Apparently they had been passed over, and for good cause.
The possibly more useful solution came in the form of a pod of vessels of strange design and even stranger decor. Passed over in the first glance because they were parked among what looked to be random parts of two or three space stations, they proved on second glance to be asteroid miners. One side of each ship was painted flat black, and other a white so bright that it was nearly silver. And gaudily adorning each side—in white on the black side, in green on the white side—was the tree-and-dragon shield in so large a size that it could easily be seen before the true shape of the ships.
There was no way, of course, to quickly alter the look of the fleet, and because they were non-standard ships, checking them for utility was more difficult. Morever, their keys had been filed in a folder marked "reserved," though for whom Pat Rin had been unable to discover. Thus, each vessel was serially inspected and tested, and proved to be in remarkably good repair for ships left on their own in deep space. So far of the dozen, five had been found unfit.
Cheever McFarland cleared his throat. "Boss, this boat here is the queen. Call it a command ship. We got the complete package running and everything looks to be in great shape. Got a test program right here on the board that lets me check out the other ships remotely."
Pat Rin considered. This hardly seemed to be a problem . . . but the other man was continuing without waiting for an answer.
"Thing is, we got eight ships here that are in great shape. Got a lot of power, a lot of shields—these things are set for heavy duty asteroid belt mining!—Shugg says we can modify some of the rock drills and blasting charges—set 'em up as weapons."
Again, thought Pat Rin, this was good news, and not a problem at all. Eight ships and eight pilots was perfect.
"So, I'm thinking that the best thing is for us the bring these back and for you to fly that one home," Cheever McFarland finished.
Pat Rin froze; the words "I cannot!" stuck edgewise in his throat, caught up somehow with the lightnings across Sherzer II. With memory's ear, he heard Cousin Er Thom's soft, sweet voice, explaining why it was that Korval bought used ships, out-of-date ships, ships that had been foreclosed on—and why it was that they invested in repair yards, gave scholarships to pilots, and paid a good percentage of the Scout's maintenance bills.
"Your mother—she lives for the Code. Its study has become her life, and she excels at it. But, Korval—Korval is not the Code. Korval is
ships
. Always remember: Korval is ships."
He was brought to himself by Cheever McFarland's voice. "Boss? Other thing we could do is leave that one here and come back for it later."
Pat Rin blinked. Leave his ship? "No," he snapped, and took a deep breath.
"I will bring
Fortune's Reward
home, Mr. McFarland," he said, deliberately calm.
There was a slight pause, then, "Right. That's settled, then."
"WELCOME PILOT." The words were warm amber against a dark screen. "Please log in."
Taking a deep breath, Pat Rin leaned forward, gingerly set his fingers against First Board's keypad and typed
Pat Rin yos'Phelium Clan Korval
.
"Please insert license."
Pat Rin glanced at the place in the board where a true pilot would slot his license for the ship's perusal, then back to the screen.