Quarter Share: A Trader's Tale from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper (3 page)

Chapter 2

Neris
2351-September-03

My peeda trilled sharply, jarring me awake. The display showed a simple text message from O’Rourke: Time to go! I was more than ready. I wanted to get on with it before the anticipation drove me crazy, or my money ran out. While the payout from the company had been enough to cover ninety days’ rent, I had other expenses to cover and my funds evaporated at an alarming rate. The sooner I stopped paying to live on Neris, the better.

Shipping the personal artifacts turned out to be part of Mom’s employment contract. A team from Neris showed up to take our stuff to a storage facility on Siren. Mom had designated it as origin-of-record on the employment forms but I didn’t recall any connection we had there. I think she named it because it was the nearest Confederation planet. The storage company would keep our stuff as long as I made the payments. Pre-paying for a stanyear took a big hit to my cred reserve, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about it.

Between O’Rourke and
The Handbook
, I’d managed to get my duffel properly stenciled with my name and ID. In the end, I’d kept Mom’s computer, a relatively new portable model. It had processing capabilities that my peeda didn’t. Her computer credentials gave me almost unlimited access to the university and I used them until administration cut me off. I got quite a bit of stuff downloaded including materials on astrogation, environmental sciences, advanced math, accounting, materials sciences, and even some on plant biology. These were all subjects recommended as useful by
The Handbook
. They looked overwhelming, but I burned them onto cubes and stashed them in my duffel. Even with the holo and music cubage, I was way under my allotment and only had about eight kilos.

I tossed what few things remained into the disposer, and shouldered the nearly empty duffel bag. At the door, I stopped and looked back before flipping the light switch. I could feel a lump start to harden in my throat and my eyes water. This apartment had been home for most of my life and I was walking away forever—the connections severed cleanly, surgically. I looked around, smiling at the memories and listening for the echoes of our time in the flat. In the end, I heard nothing except the soft whooshing of the environmentals. I flipped off the lights and locked the door behind me for the last time.

***

When I got to the Union Hall, it was a madhouse. For the first time I saw somebody there besides O’Rourke or the Assistant Hall Manager, a mousy man named Fredericks who didn’t talk much. People filled the hall. They queued up in lines to use the data ports or waited to see O’Rourke or Fredericks. All of them talked loudly to each other and their accumulated voices made the huge, echoing space almost unbearable.

Shrugging off the sensory assault, I got into O’Rourke’s line and arrived at the counter in a surprisingly short time. She smiled when she saw me. “You ready to go, kid? There’s no backin’ out once yer under Articles.”

I nodded. I knew the drill from
The Handbook
. Once I signed, I would be committing to serve for two stanyers. It wasn’t quite the military, but it was close and I had no other options. This door opened on a new future. My tongue stuck to the inside of my mouth and my stomach cramped. “Yeah, I’m as sure as I can be. Thanks for everything, Ms. O’Rourke.”

She smiled wider at that. “Good to go then, lad.” She pressed the buzzer that opened the counter and nodded toward a door. “Through there. Captain Giggone will want to talk to ya. Pass the interview and we can get ya processed.” She winked. “I put in a good word for ya so don’t make me look bad.”

Swallowing hard, I pushed through the gate and into the office. A harried-looking, gray-haired woman sat behind the desk. She appeared older than Mom but somehow more energetic. I stood at attention and waited for her to acknowledge my presence. The captain examined me for a few heartbeats while I did my best not to shake. “Sound off!” she barked.

“Wang, Ishmael. Unrated. Applying for an available quarter share berth, sar.” O’Rourke had coached me in the appropriate responses. She had me practice the drill several times on my last visit so I knew what to do.
The Handbook
also provided instructions on how to address various officers under different circumstances. The book covered this precise scenario, complete with a sample script.

“Why do you want to ship out?” she asked.

“I need to leave before the Neris Company kicks me off-planet. I don’t have enough creds to buy passage.” Belatedly, I remembered to add, “Captain.”

“You know this is going to be difficult, don’t you, Wang?”

I nodded.

“Excuse me, Wang? Did you say something?” she barked.

“Um, yes, sar, that is, no, sar. That is. I know it’s going to be difficult, Captain.” Gods, I sounded like such a jerk.

She stood up and looked at me. “Ms. O’Rourke says you’re good people. Why would she say that, Mr. Wang?” She asked the question with a softer tone to her voice.

The fact that she didn’t follow the script caught me off guard and I blinked in confusion. “I—I don’t know, Captain. I’ve only met her a couple times. She’s been very helpful.”

After a moment’s pause she resumed her previous tone. “You need to know I run a tight ship and don’t put up with crap. You’ll be the lowest of the low, and work your backside off for the next two stanyers. The work will be boring, difficult, and unrelenting. Your shipmates will taunt you, and the living conditions will be challenging to somebody used to having his own room on a nice, quiet planet. In short, your ass is mine and will be until I say it’s not, or your contract expires, whichever comes first. Can you deal with that, land rat?”

I paused for a second, or perhaps two, before answering her. She summed it up succinctly and brutally. I had no idea which quarter share berth I might get. It really didn’t matter. I needed to get off the rock and had few choices. “Honestly, I don’t know, Captain. But I’d like to give it my best shot.”

She smiled warmly then. “Good answer, Mr. Wang. Welcome aboard.” She stuck out her hand and I shook it. “You’ll get a standard contract, steward attendant pay plus quarter share. Do well and I’ve always got a slot open. Now, go get your contract signed and your shipsuit on. Most of the little band we call crew will be off the ship, and we can get you settled in without a crowd of hecklers to help.” She grinned and I saw a twinkle in her eye.

“Thank you, Captain,” I told her and meant it.

***

Time shifted to an accelerated pace. I thumbed my contract and was officially under Articles, employed by Federated Freight, the
Lois McKendrick’s
owner company. Fredericks, the Assistant Hall Manager, punched through the paperwork, sending the notifications to Neris Company and snipping off the few dangling threads of my old life. He showed me to a changing room. O’Rourke had taken my measurements earlier and already selected the right sized shipsuit and boots in Federated Freight colors of green and gold. The suit fit my meter and a half perfectly and the shipboots molded to my size twelves as if they had grown there.

As I packed my shore leave clothes into the duffel, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. A stranger stared back at me from what I realized was a mirror. He looked me over from the sandy mop on my head, down the tailored shipsuit, to my new boots. I was thin after three weeks of eating my own cooking but Mom had always said I was wiry. That was apparently a good thing. The stranger smiled and I found myself smiling back. He straightened up and shouldered his duffel. I gave him a kind of salute and headed out the “Crew Only” doors to find the shuttle.

The hallway beyond the doors led to a security checkpoint and an entry tube. Mom and I had taken trips up to the orbital before. It was a popular tourist destination for residents as it was technically Confederation space and not owned by NerisCo. The exotic shops and restaurants provided variety from the largely homogeneous life on a company planet. This trip, however, was much different. The stark behind-the-scenes entry had no decorative panels or padding. The floors, ceiling, and even the walls, had a certain gritty look—a kind of utilitarian plainness that felt disconcerting at first. Stenciled labels stood out on exposed pipes, electrical runs, and hydraulic lines. After the passenger port’s careful, pastel decor, the crew tube felt strange but refreshingly more real.

All this splashed across my brain in a surreal time warp where everything progressed at light-speed around me, but where I moved in a kind of paradoxical slow motion. In the next blink, I stowed my duffel in the overhead and strapped down on a well-worn shuttle seat. Again, the shuttle felt at once familiar and strange, like the difference between a passenger flitter and a cargo crawler. Even the seat belts were unfamiliar, with a cross-the-chest X harness instead of the single shoulder strap I normally used. It was easy enough to figure out, just different. This was going to take some getting used to. My eyes kept trying to focus, but the starkness of my surroundings made everything blur together.

The shuttle pilot came through the cabin smiling and nodding professionally as he examined the craft. “We’ll be up to the station in just a few ticks,” he said. “No time for beverage service and if you need to use the head, I’d do it now.” This was apparently some kind of joke because he chuckled.

“Thanks,” I answered, somewhat dazedly.

As he finished his inspection, half a dozen people wearing gray and blue shipsuits came into the cabin and strapped down. Small patches on their shoulders read
“Murmansk.”
I assumed that was the name of another of the ships docked at the orbital. They nodded pleasantly to me, but absorbed themselves in chatting up one of their group who apparently had engaged in some misadventure overnight. She seemed embarrassed by the attention but the group teased her in good-natured fun and she gave as good as she got.

My ears popped when the pressure doors closed and the locking rings thumped away from the hull. The speakers gave a ping-ping-pong sound and a woman’s voice said,
“Secure for lift.”
With no more ceremony than that, the shuttle got underway and boosted into the clear, golden afternoon light. I took one last look out the port at the rows of granapple vineyards arrayed across the landscape as we spun upward crawling out of the gravity well. The acceleration pressure pinning me to my seat seemed incongruous with the perceived decrease in speed as we gained altitude. The shuttle rolled and I lost sight of the ground, just the darkening sky and a bit of the stubby wing, flashing red from the blinking navigational lights along the side of the ship. The engine noise ramped back as we climbed and the air outside became thinner. Soon, the only sound came from the airframe itself. I settled down and zoned out completely until the heavy clunks of the docking clamps shuddered the craft. The trip had taken a full stan, but my warped time sense made it feel like a tick. The cabin speakers gave a pong-ping sound and the other passengers unbuckled even before the woman’s voice said,
“Docking complete.”
I let them clear out before I hit the releases and retrieved my duffel.

***

Outside the shuttle bay, a kid waited in a green and gold shipsuit like mine. I thought he might be older than I was, but his baby face made him look younger. He grinned when he saw me and held out his hand. “You must be Wang. I’m Philip Carstairs. Everybody calls me Pip.” His green eyes had a laugh in them and I found myself grinning back.

“Hi,” I replied. “Call me Ishmael.”

He blinked a couple of times then looked at a note on his tablet before guffawing. “Oh my gods and garters—that’s really your name?”

The familiar reaction usually grated on my nerves, but somehow coming from this guy it didn’t seem so bad. “Yeah,” I admitted a bit sheepishly. “My mother had a strange sense of humor.”

He clapped me on the shoulder and motioned down the passage. “The first mate sent me over to collect you. Let’s get you settled aboard and you can tell me all about it. By the way, you don’t snore, do you?”

It seemed like a strange question and it caught me off guard. “Snore?”

“Yeah, Gilly, the guy whose berth you’re getting, gods, but he made a racket. I don’t think I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep since we left Albert.”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I never noticed.”

He laughed, again. “Well, then we’ll let ya know.”

Pip led me through the utility corridors halfway around the orbital. We left the shuttle bays and moved into the commercial docks. The decor didn’t seem quite so spartan, or perhaps, I was growing used to the blatant utility exhibited at every turn. It somehow already began to feel right.

As we threaded our way through the station toward the ship’s lock, I was conscious of my old life spooling out behind me. Each step took me further into an unknown world and I began to get a bit, not scared, exactly, but anxious. The what-have-I-done feeling had just settled around my lungs when my escort stopped at a lock. On the display above it read:
Lois McKendrick
51-09-07 16:00. Pip swiped his ID card and tapped a quick code on his tablet. The status light flipped to green and the lock cycled open. We stepped in and the lock cycled closed behind us. The inner lock revealed a crew member who looked up from her screen at a station just inside the hull.

“Hey, Pip. This the greenie?”

They butted knuckles and he answered, “Yup. Meet Ishmael Wang. Ish, Sandy Belterson.”

Her dark brown hair and ice blue eyes were an odd combination. Added to the distinctly olive skin tones, she was an anomaly on two legs. She nodded with a friendly smile and said, “Welcome aboard, Ish.”

I nodded a greeting and answered something I don’t remember but it must have been adequate.

She turned to my escort. “Mr. Maxwell wants to meet with him in the office. He’s there now.”

“Yeah. He messaged me, too. Thanks.”

Sandy waved and settled back to her reading. As I passed I noticed it was a lesson of some kind, charts rotated in simulated 3D while text scrolled rapidly across the bottom of the screen.

Seeing my glance Pip said, “She’s studying for Spec II in Astrogation. Let’s go see Mr. Maxwell before settling you in. We don’t want to keep him waiting.”

Aboard ship, the corridors—passages, I corrected myself—were barely wide enough for two people to pass. I followed Pip as he led me confidently through the maze. Every so often he’d comment on a space, “environmental section down there” or “officer country that way” but little of it meant anything to me. I hoped there wouldn’t be a test later. He halted outside a door simply labeled: Office and knocked.

A rumbling voice behind the door said, “Come.”

We reached a door, a real one with a knob and hinges and all, not like the airtight hatched we had pass along our way. Pip stepped into a cramped room, and announced, “Attendant Carstairs reporting with Attendant Ishmael Wang, Mr. Maxwell, sar.”

The man behind the desk didn’t look up from his screen but just waved us in and wordlessly indicated we should wait. He was built like a knife with razor edges outlining his face and hardened steel in his bearing. A solid gray buzz-cut covered his scalp, not the white-gray the faculty members on Neris had, but a hard, dark gray. I didn’t know if that reflected his age or just some genetic variation I hadn’t seen before. Whatever the cause, it suited him. He wore the green and gold with collar pips and some discrete hashmarks around the sleeves that were pushed up to his elbows. He tapped a few keys and the document on his screen vanished.

“Mr. Wang.” His head didn’t just turn—it swiveled. His eyes tracked like the twin barrels of some odd gun, precise, mechanical, dead. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. “The captain sent me your file and I’ve assigned you to the open quarter share berth in the ship’s mess. Mr. Carstairs will show you to the berthing area and introduce you to the rest of the mess crew.”

It was as much instruction to Pip as it was a command to me and he responded with an, “Aye, sar.”

Maxwell continued, “It should come as no surprise to you that you’re taking the place of a crewman who failed to perform to our satisfaction, Mr. Wang. Please see to it that we don’t have to provide the same courtesy to you in our next port of call.”

“Aye, sar. I’ll do my best,” I replied in what I’d hoped was a steady voice.

“Dismissed, gentlemen.” He swiveled back to his screen, bringing up the next document.

Pip stepped back into the passage and I followed as quickly as I could without making it seem like I was running. After we closed the door I started to speak, but a shake of Pip’s head stopped me and we headed down the passage the way we’d come.

After we’d taken a couple of turns, Pip took a deep breath and said, “That went well.”

I blinked at him. “Is he always like that?”

Pip shook his head. “Naw, he’s usually not so friendly. You must have got him on a good day.”

“Friendly? Are you crazy? That guy scared the crap out of me. Are all the officers like him?” I didn’t remember being afraid of the captain—awed, maybe, but not afraid.

Pip chuckled. “No. Actually, Mr. Maxwell is pretty decent. With him, you never need to wonder where you stand.”

“He was like some kind of robot,” I exclaimed.

“Yeah, most people say that when they first meet him. But after you get to know him, you’ll realize a robot is actually much warmer than he is.” He lowered his voice. “Rumor is that he’s ex-Spec Force. He moves like that because he doesn’t want to kill anybody.”

I gaped at him.

“Close your mouth, greenie,” he snickered. “It may or may not be true, but either way he’s the best first mate I’ve ever served under. He really knows how to keep the ship running efficiently.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“You bet. The more efficiently we run, the larger our shares,” Pip said as he headed down the corridor.

I started to wonder if I’d done the wrong thing by signing up, but I pushed that aside as soon as it entered—it was too late for second thoughts. I hurried down the hallway to catch up with Pip.