Quarter Share: A Trader's Tale from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper (13 page)

Chapter 14

Darbat System
2351-October-26

After Mr. Maxwell’s little visit, we finished cleaning up the lunch service. Pip started the cargo analysis and I went back to studying for my engineman exam. I knew when he finished his empty-container exercise for Mr. Maxwell, he’d be leaning on me to get him ready for the cargo test. Having been through that material several times, the cargo exam didn’t worry me, but the engineering test did. I’d spent so much time with the instructional materials, I found I could practically recreate them from memory. The practice exams went pretty well, but I still missed about five percent of the answers. I hoped that would be good enough.

At 16:00 I headed back to the galley to help set up the dinner service. Pip and Cookie looked up from the portable when I came in, and stowed it when they realized the time. Dinner included some of the new stores and it went pretty well. The crew appreciated the variety in the menu and it didn’t hurt that Cookie had a great granapple crisp with vanilla ice cream for dessert.

While we were serving, I nudged Pip. “So? How’s it going?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I think. I should be done with another stan’s work, but I’ll be ready for a work out and a sauna.”

“Oh yeah, I’m with ya there. Tell you what. You finish your container and I’ll clean up tonight. With any luck, we’ll be done at the same time and we can hit the gym.”

He shot me a grateful look. “Thanks, Ish. That’ll help. I was a bit ambitious when I promised the results by midwatch. That’s a lot of mass. And there’s one other little distraction.”

“What’s that?”

“The manifest shows an empty container on the Gugara to Margary run.”

I froze in place for a moment and shot him a quick look. “Will he…?”

Pip shrugged. “Dunno.”

When we secured the dinner mess, I shooed Pip off to the computer and started tearing down the serving line and making the galley shipshape. The process was so familiar by then that I could do it on autopilot. I found my mind wandering back to the cargo and engineering exams. I’m a good test-taker, but this new context gave me more than a few butterflies. Before long I found myself chanting, “Filter the water and scrub the air down,” under my breath. It was one of those things that once you get it in your head, you can’t get it out. I found myself sweeping to the rhythm. It drove me crazy but I couldn’t shake it.

“There!” Pip’s sudden outburst from his corner of the galley startled me.

“Done?” I stowed the broom and looked in his direction.

Pip nodded. “Yup. Now, I need to go work out.” He downloaded his planning files and sent them off to Mr. Maxwell. “Only a twenty percent best case margin projection, but we typically run a twelve to fifteen percent margin. And that’s the least cost filled scenario. The gross margin goes down in the maximum probable return, but the actual profit triples.”

“How does that work?” I asked as he stowed the portable and we headed out of the galley. “How can we make more profit with a lower margin?”

“Easy. Which would you rather have? Ten percent of a hundred creds or one percent of a million?”

I sighed. “Of course. Sometimes my own stupidity astonishes me.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t failed the cargo handler test twice, either.” He sounded miserable.

“What? You failed the test?”

He nodded, his mouth screwed into a grimace. “Twice.”

“But the content isn’t that hard.”

“For you. I’m not good at tests.”

His bitter words caused a sinking feeling in my stomach, but I didn’t say anything while we changed up and went out into the gym. My mind had finally stopped repeating the doggerel about the filters and scrubbers but had gained a new chant, perhaps better suited to the situation. “I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble…”

Later that evening we got together on the mess deck with our tablets, and I walked him through the cargo handler instructional materials. “But I’ve been through all this.” He pushed the tablet away.

“I know, but you’ve also failed the test.”

“Twice.” He reminded me.

“Okay, twice. So you’re going to go over it again, then take the sample test and we’ll keep doing that until you get it right.”

It took less than two stans to get through the material together. “You don’t seem to be having any trouble with this.”

He shrugged. “It’s not the information. I practically grew up on a cargo deck.”

“Okay, well, let’s do the practice exam and see how it comes out.”

We settled in and I breezed through the test in a few ticks. I’d done them so often, they began to look familiar to me. It approached the level of silliness. When I got to the end, I’d gotten a perfect score again.

Pip, on the other hand, dithered over his tablet, checking, un-checking, and re-checking responses. He appeared to have no idea what he was doing. He finally finished and sighed. He turned his tablet so I could see his score: thirty-five percent.

“But you know this stuff,” I said with dismay.

He nodded miserably. “I just can’t take tests. Something in my brain shuts off as soon as I start anything remotely like a quiz or examination.”

The chronometer clicked over to 23:00 so we headed back to the berthing area and bunked down. The chanting in my head got louder. “I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble. I’m in
trouble
…” I kinda wished the filter and scrubber thing would come back. It didn’t seem so ominous.

The next day went by in a blur. Time was getting short. During our afternoon break, I sat Pip down and watched him take the test again. Once more, he picked, un-picked, and re-picked his responses. There didn’t seem to be any kind of pattern to it. It was almost like he chose them at random. He did better, forty percent, but still not good enough to pass. I thought he might actually have scored better using a random number generator. We both sighed and headed back to the galley to set up for dinner.

After clean up, Pip started to pull out his tablet again, but I stopped him. “Come on, Pip. You need a work out more than you need to beat yourself with that tablet further.”

“But the test is just a few days away.”

I sighed. “I know, but that’s not helping. You know the stuff. It’s the testing itself that’s killing you. More studying won’t fix that.”

“So what are we going to do?” He didn’t seem like the same cocky spacer I’d come to know. There was something desperate and sad about him.

“I don’t know, but there has to be something. Lemme think on it.”

We changed up and I headed up to the track and started pounding out my frustration. The I’m–in-trouble mantra beating out in time with my foot falls. Four laps later, Rhon Scham caught up with me and nodded a silent greeting. We ran together for three more laps before she spoke. “Wanna talk about it?”

I looked over at her, startled. “About what?”

“Whatever has you so distracted.”

“What makes you think I’m distracted?”

She nodded downward. “You’re not wearing running shoes. You’re either really distracted or just felt the need to tenderize your feet up here.”

I barked a single laugh and realized that she was right. My feet were beginning to get a bit tender from the rough grit that made up the track’s surface, but it wasn’t really that bad. We approached the top of the ladder so I slowed and stopped.

Rhon stopped with me. “Well?”

“It’s the ratings tests. Mr. Maxwell has ordered me to make sure Pip passes the cargo handler exam.”

“Aren’t you taking it, too?”

I nodded. “Yeah, and it doesn’t seem like it’s that hard. Not compared to the engineman one.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“Pip’s failed it twice.”

“Third time’s the charm.”

I just looked at her. “Maybe, but, Rhon, the instructional materials for that test are dead simple. There’s nothing tricky or difficult about it. If you can memorize a few facts, you should be able to pass it.”

“I’d heard that. Food handler is the same way.” After a tick she said, “Maybe he just has a poor memory?”

I shook my head. “No. Pip has a lot of issues, but memorization isn’t one of them. We’ve been going over the material together and he hasn’t been able to beat a score of forty percent. It’s like he starts the test and his brain turns off.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he can’t read well. He could ask for an oral exam.”

I blinked. “Oral exam?”

“Sure. It’s an old tradition but it’s still in
The Handbook
. Back in olden days, sailors weren’t known for their academic prowess. The standard way to move up in rank was to demonstrate their knowledge by performing various tasks.”

“That makes sense.”

“There’s a set of hands-on exercises that the Training Officer can do for each test instead of taking the tablet-and-stylus version. It’s not common because the tablet-and-stylus is just so much easier to deal with, but it’s still there.”

“Thanks. That might just be the answer.”

I headed down to the sauna where Pip found me a few minutes later. He still looked glum. The steam made the soles of my feet sting but I didn’t say anything to Pip. I wanted to talk to Mr. von Ickles first.

For the next few days, Pip and I struggled with the testing materials, quizzing each other as we served on the mess line or cleaned up afterward. I began to be a bit more optimistic because he answered correctly almost all the time when we were drilling each other informally like that. My conversation with Mr. von Ickles had gone well and I felt considerably less panicked by the time test day rolled around.

It’s a kind of misnomer to call it test day. They were really test days. Each division had its own. Some of the tests were rather lengthy, especially as you moved up the ranks. Traditionally the first one was engineering, then deck, steward, and cargo was last. Cookie and Pip shooed me out of the galley right after breakfast and I reported to the ship’s office. I was the only one taking the engineman examination and Mr. von Ickles sat me right down to begin.

One of the reasons I’m so good at taking tests is that my brain goes into a kind of fast-motion and time slows around me. When I start any kind of formal test, the world fades away and I’m not really aware of anything except the flow of the test. I always thought it was kinda weird, but the results were usually good so I didn’t complain.

The engineman test was no exception. When I put down the stylus, it had only seemed like a few ticks, but the chrono showed that almost a full stan had passed.

Mr. von Ickles shook my hand. “Congratulations, Mr. Wang. I’ll add the engineman rating to your jacket this afternoon.” He smiled and showed me the grade. Ninety-two percent. I’d only needed an eighty to pass.

“What about cargo, sar?”

He smiled and winked. “It’s under control.”

Cookie and Pip congratulated me when I returned to the galley to help set up for lunch, but I couldn’t help think there was a certain desperate look in Pip’s eye. The lunch activities soon left no more time for worry and Pip and I both threw ourselves into the day’s work as if it would erase our fears. I was cautiously optimistic based on my conversation with Mr. von Ickles, but I hadn’t said anything to Pip about it. I didn’t know how to broach the subject and I was still worried that it wasn’t going to work and that I’d, somehow, let Pip down. After that I’d have to face Mr. Maxwell, but for some reason he didn’t seem so bad when compared to failing my friend.

Inevitably, we got through the next couple of days. The night before the cargo exam Pip started to pull out his tablet, I stopped him.

“Not tonight. By now you either know the material or you don’t—and you do. Beating yourself up won’t change that.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Not really, but it’s still true. Let’s get in a good workout, take a nice sauna and hit the bunk early. A good night’s sleep will do as much for you as anything.”

“Like I’ll be able to sleep.”

I tried to distract him. “Any feedback from Mr. Maxwell on your container load?”

He shook his head. “Naw, but I wouldn’t really expect it. We’ll need to revise it when we hit the jump point and grab the beacon data. That’s still a couple of weeks out.”

I nodded and we headed for the gym.

The morning mess went off like clockwork. Cookie planned an easy-to-clean-up-after menu for breakfast so we would make it to the test on time. Many people wished us luck on their way through the line. It surprised me how many knew and genuinely seemed to care. We finished serving, cleared away, and I even had time to make an extra urn of coffee. All the while, Pip seemed to get more and more agitated. He did his best to hide it, but he kept dropping things, like thirty-liter stainless steel pots. Cookie wished us luck and sent us off at the appointed time.

I felt really bad for Pip. As we made our way to the office, it felt like he was heading for the gallows. “Cheer up. If you don’t pass, I’m the one in trouble with Mr. Maxwell.”

He chuckled a bit at that and gave me a wry smile. “But I’m still the one who needs the rating,” he pointed out.

“It’ll be okay.”

There must have been a hint in my voice, because he looked at me sharply. “What’s going on?”

In all honesty, I had no idea myself. Mr. von Ickles handled the details and I really didn’t know how this whole thing would play out. By then, we were at the office and I just went in without answering. Mr. von Ickles wasn’t alone. Mr. Cotton, the head of the Cargo Division, stood beside him.

Pip glanced at me and I just shrugged.

Mr. von Ickles was all business, although I thought I caught a brief wink aimed in my direction. “Gentlemen, since there are two of you this morning, I’ve asked Mr. Cotton to administer the test for Mr. Carstairs. Mr. Wang, you’re with me. Do either of you have any objections?”

We shrugged and just said, “No, sar,” in unison. I struggled to suppress a smile. This was serious business, after all.

Mr. Cotton was a smallish man with huge shoulders, arms that looked as big around as my waist, no hair and a nose that looked like he’d run into a cargo container several times. He grinned. “Good. Mr. Carstairs, you will come with me please and we will commence, ya.”