Ships of My Fathers Page 14

  Michael felt particularly sensitive about this because he knew he was ultimately the cause of them being behind schedule. The announcement came shortly after down-tach during lunch. He had gone forward from engineering to eat and fetch lunch for Zane and Nathan, so he was in the galley when Corazon informed them all over the PA. A general groan swept through the assembled crew, but to their credit, Michael never saw any dirty looks sent his way.

  The liberty schedule was further cause for discontent. All of the crew that also had cross-ratings in cargo handling were restricted to the Heinrich to expedite the offload and re-loading of the cargo. Michael figured that meant he would have no liberty since he had such a cargo rating, but his name was not on the restricted list. He was slotted for general liberty from sixteen hundred until fourteen hundred the next day. As guilty as he felt about the delay, he could not let that go by unquestioned, so as soon they secured the drives after docking, he headed for the bridge.

  Corazon was still sitting in the forward bridge, on comm with someone from the dockworkers’ office. “Priority offload,” she was saying. “I have additional crew standing by to assist as soon as you can get the loader array moving.”

  “Understood, Heinrich. It’s going to be an hour, but I’ll get a team over there.”

  She flipped off the comm and turned to him. “Be brief, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “I have a cargo-1 rating, but I wasn’t listed for cargo duty, ma’am. I’d like to volunteer.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve never worked a radial container ship before, Fletcher.”

  “I’m a quick learner,” he argued.

  She granted him a smile. “I appreciate your eagerness, Mr. Fletcher, and perhaps we can let you work a shift at a future port, but this time is going to be fast and frantic. I don’t want any inexperienced hands out there. Is that clear?”

  He sighed. “Yes, ma’am. It’s just that I feel responsible for the delay.”

  He felt a few eyes turn towards him this time, but Corazon only laughed. “Mr. Fletcher, when you command your own ship, then you can feel responsible for the schedule, but if you’re eager to give up your liberty, I will gladly put you to work as a runner.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “See if you want to thank me when we pull out,” she said. “Sleep when you can, and keep your link turned up.”

  He went back to his quarters intent to at least rest, but he never got past taking off his boots before the first call came in. The captain’s manifest declaration had to be delivered to station headquarters before the offload could begin. He laced up his boots as quickly as he could and headed for the forward airlock. The line for liberty was already forming, and he cut through with the packet in hand.

  Billy Mason was working the liberty lock watch again, but before Michael could even start to explain, Billy called out to the crowd. “Make way for the runner,” he said. Everyone shifted to the left side of the corridor and let him pass. He and Brookstone were the first out through the lock.

  “You’ve got runner duty?” he asked.

  “Yes. You?”

  “Dockside lock watch.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a red card on a chain. “Here, this should get you wherever you need.”

  Michael took the card and read it as they floated down the docking tube. “Heavy Heinrich: Captain’s Runner,” it said, complete with an embossed logo and scan tag. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Are you getting any liberty?” Brookstone asked.

  “No, I’m on runner duty the entire stay.”

  Brookstone shook his head. “I’ve had that duty. Remember, sleep when you can.”

  They reached the station lock and passed through. A uniformed officer was waiting for them, but when he saw the tag hanging from Michael’s neck, he waved him through. He took off at a steady jog and only then realized he did not know where station headquarters was.

  He found a map at one of the section bulkheads and plotted a route. Headquarters was in the central core, but three rings away. He caught a tram into the core and then a lift down from there. On the one hand, it was nice. Everyone stood aside for him as soon as they saw the red runner’s tag. On the other hand, he knew that the entire cargo team was waiting for him to get that packet to headquarters.

  Once he reached the right level, signs were plentiful, and once he found the main entrance, he saw a bank of windows next to it. The large red sign said “Ship Runners.” He picked the shortest line and got to the head of it in moments.

  “Cargo manifest for Heavy Heinrich,” he said.

  The man on the other side took it, passed the seal beneath a scanner and placed it on a conveyer belt behind him. “Wait over there for confirmation.” Michael looked to see several runners clustered around a few tables, most of them drinking from cups.

  He walked over, found the cups and fountain and got some water. He sat down next to two other runners. “Morgan Ruth,” one of them said. Michael could see from her tag that it was not her name but rather her ship’s name.

  “Heavy Heinrich,” he replied.

  “Big ship,” she said. “You’re going to get a workout.”

  He was going to ask what she meant, but the PA blared out, “Morgan Ruth,” and she hopped up. Michael turned to the other runner at the table. He was slumped forward, resting his chin on his hands. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Three more hours,” he replied. “Three more.”

  “Heavy Heinrich,” came the call, and Michael went back to the window labeled “outbound.”

  A woman with her hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail handed him another packet. “Offload authorization. Put it in the dockmaster’s hands.”

  Off he went again, up three rings, and out on spoke number six. A number of dockworkers were milling around along with a few of the crew. He spotted Wally about the same time he spotted Michael.

  “Dockmaster!” Wally called and pointed.

  One man turned and Michael waved the packet over his head. He reached out for it as soon as Michael got to him, tore it open and looked briefly over the first page. “All right, boys and girls, let’s get suited up and moving.”

  Movement swirled around him as Michael bent over and panted. Eventually, Wally guided him to a seat. “Drink,” he said, handing him some water. “And try to get some sleep. You’ve got an hour, maybe two.”

  By morning, he was starting to understand why everyone had been talking about sleep. Over the course of the night, he had made two trips back to station headquarters, one to the S&W corporate office, one to the representative of the construction equipment’s manufacturer, and one to the local branch of Fidelity Union Bank.

  He was on the way back from that trip, riding the lift down from four rings up. He was starting to look a lot like that tired runner from the day before, but he still had six hours left. Alone in the lift, he leaned against the wall, and he did not even hear the other passenger come on at the next level. His first notice was when he heard the voice.

  “Michael, is that you?”

  He turned and saw his uncle. His eyes bolted open. This was the first time they had been alone since he first came aboard. “Captain!” he said in alarm. “Uh, yes, sir, it’s me.”

  “Ah, I see she has you on runner duty. Takes me back,” he said. “Remember, sleep—”

  “When you can,” Michael finished for him. “Yeah, I think I was about to do precisely that.”

  “Heading back to the ship?”

  He shook his head. “Corporate office... coming down from Fidelity Union.”

  “Of course, that would be the performance bond.” He checked the time on his link. “Good, we’re still on schedule.”

  Michael started drifting again, but his uncle’s voice brought him out again.

  “Things working out in engineering?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Gabrielle tells me you’ve been studying the navigation logs.”

  “Yes, sir. I still don
’t have a rating there.”

  “Still have your heart set on that captain’s exam?”

  He came wide awake with that. “Yes, sir. Still.”

  His uncle sighed and turned to face him directly. “Michael, about the name…”

  Michael stood straighter, doing whatever he could to point his name patch at Hans. “Yes?”

  “Understand that I can never forgive what...” He paused. “The loss of my brother eats at me even now. It’s hard to get past, but given the qualities you have shown the rest of the crew, I can admit that Malcolm Fletcher did a reasonably good job in raising you. It can never erase what he did before, but I can see that perhaps you softened him, helped him turn away from… from his past.”

  “And the name, sir?”

  “You can use whatever name you choose, Michael. I mean that, but I want you to know that your father was a good man. You don’t have to take his name, but his is a heritage you can take some pride in.”

  “And Malcolm’s isn’t?”

  Hans turned away. “I don’t want to spar with you, Michael. I only wish you could have known your father as I did. He would have been proud of you.”

  Michael saw it for the compliment it was, but he could not bring himself to thank him for it. “Yes, Captain. Is there anything else?”

  Hans opened his mouth to say something, but closed it with a shake of his head. He got off one ring before Michael, and as soon as the door closed, Michael regretted how it had ended. He felt that there was much more he wanted to say. He simply did not know what.

  Three more errands kept him moving, but he did not run into his uncle again. At the end of his duty, he was all set to go back to his quarters and sleep at last, but he ran into Zane along the way. “Come on, Michael. We’re still on first shift duty. We’re doing pushback and up-tach before dinner.”

  Groggily, he made his way back to engineering, lasted through the pushback and up-tach, and only fell asleep at his station once. He was not so lucky at dinner. After planting his face in the potatoes and gravy, Zane and Charlie carried him down to his quarters and tucked him into bed.

  He woke in the morning and swore to never pass up liberty again.

  Jimmy Anders rapped his knuckles against the security window twice. A bearded man leaned forward from his chair and slid the glass to the side. “What are you doing in here, mister? This is a restricted area.”

  Jimmy looked around the dark warehouse with shipping containers stacked two and three high. No one else was near. “Are you Rufus?”

  “Yeah, what’s it to you?”

  “Can you get a message to the Winged Lady?”

  Now the security guard looked around himself. “Sure, for a price.”

  Jimmy handed him an envelope. It contained five crisp hundreds and a data card. “I think that’s the going rate for priority traffic.”

  “Priority, eh?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Get it to her quickly enough, and I’m sure you’ll be in her good graces.”

  “All right, I’ll make sure it goes out on the next run. And your name?”

  He shook his head. “She’ll know from the message.”

  Michael stopped in at the galley past twenty-three hundred. He had dropped Karen off in environmental for her shift and wanted a snack before he went to bed. Very little remained to choose from at this hour, but he did find a leftover dish of raspberry sorbet in the refrigerated case at the end of the line.

  “If you were looking for the pudding, I’m afraid I got the last one.”

  Michael turned to see Corazon sitting at a table in the corner with a tablet. “No, ma’am, this will be fine.”

  “It looks like you’ve recovered from runner duty at Arvin,” she said, pointing to the seat opposite her.

  “Mostly. I think I lost a kilo in the process,” he said, taking the seat. “Is it always that hectic?”

  She shook her head. “Hardly, but everything was so compressed at Arvin. Plus, the Captain and I usually make about half of those runs ourselves, just to keep up our own contacts.”

  “That makes sense. I ran into the captain on one of my runs.”

  “He mentioned it. How are you two getting along?”

  He shrugged. “It’s still a lot to take in.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Yeah, I looked up Peter. I see why people keep talking about my chin.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “You never met him?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t join S&W until about twelve years ago, and I understand the Captain’s brother died during the war.”

  Michael nodded. “I saw the report, but it was pretty spotty, not much more than a list ships. I found our old ship there, the Hammerhead, listed as one of two privateers.”

  She nodded. “There were a lot of privateers back during the war.”

  “How did that work? I mean, were they handing out a free pass to anyone with a missile rack or plasma gun?”

  “I never knew their criteria. It probably wasn’t the best, but I doubt the Caspians were much more prudent. They gave out their share of letters of Marque, too.”

  “But why? Where was the fleet in all this?”

  “They had their own problems. What started as a civilian political problem escalated into a shooting war, and the next thing they knew, over a third of their ships were on the other side, including two whole carrier groups.”

  “And the merchants?”

  “We were trying to pay our bills and make our shipments. I was only a junior navigator on one of Takasumi’s ships back then, but it was a mess. No one wanted to carry anything with military value and risk becoming a target, but the Navy didn’t give us much choice. In the end, it didn’t matter. Soon enough, all the shipping was at risk. I lost a good friend of mine to a hull breach.”

  “How?”

  She shrugged. “She got lazy. I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t want to put on her environment suit one more time, and that was the time the other freighter turned out to be a privateer.”

  “Which side?”

  “We were still in the Confederacy, and my captain would have plucked out the eye of anyone who suggested we pull out.”

  “No, I meant the privateer.”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  He looked at the sorbet, slowly melting. “It’s hard to think of Malcolm that way.”

  “They weren’t all bad. I knew a few who were good solid captains.”

  “A few? But not most?”

  She tried to make a smile but it did not hold. “Where do you think Yoshido recruited his fleet?”

  Every spacer in the Confederacy had heard of Yoshido. No one knew if he was still around, but dead or alive, he had left a considerable piracy organization behind. If you were wary, you would come through all right, but every now and then, you would still hear about ships disappearing near the borders. It was not nearly as bad as the Neridians of the early Republic, but it was bad enough.

  But Malcolm? The way he had always talked about pirates, Michael could never believe he was one of them. “I wish I knew more about that battle.”

  “You can always request the records. The Navy may not have much more than you’ve already seen, but you won’t know without asking.”

  “How?”

  She frowned. “It’s a pity we didn’t have this talk last week. Arvin would have been the ideal place for it. Given how short our time was, I don’t know if you’d have even gotten to see anyone over at the fleet’s station, but you could have at least had real-time communication.”

  “Oh,” he replied. “When are we coming through again?”

  She paused to do the calculations. “Seven, maybe eight months, but you don’t have to wait that long. You can start the request by mail at our next port. I’ll even help if you’d like.”

  “I’d like that,” he replied, but even as he said it, he was not so sure. As long as he did not know for certain, he could still believe that Malcolm was innocen
t.

  But what if he was not?

  Chapter 16

  “It’s good to have friends on other ships as well as friends at each of your ports, but when you really need those friends you have to remember one thing. Ships move. Ports don’t.” — Malcolm Fletcher

  MICHAEL RESTED HIS HEAD AGAINST the wall in the shower, holding the valve chain down with one hand as the water beat on his back. It had been a long, exhausting shift. They had had nine axis shifts that day, and the sails sank into fluttering oscillations on four of them. Zane, Nathan, and Michael had been climbing over the generators making adjustments to the sails all day. Finally, at around fifteen thirty, Gabrielle had ordered a course change.

  At dinner, she had looked as tired as he felt. “Tachyon storm,” she explained. “Looks like a big one coming in from coreward. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the downwind shake out of either a nova or something big hitting the core’s accretion disk.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to get forecasts of that kind of thing?”

  She shrugged. “Only after someone reports it. Looks like that’s our job this time.”

  She promised to send him the logs and ask the overnight navigators to do the same. He had thanked her, but he had no intention of looking at them tonight. He only wanted to shower and go to sleep.

  And showering was exactly what he was doing, letting the water course over him, but after a few minutes a warning light came on. He knew from talking to Charlie that if he kept the water running it would signal an alarm down in environmental, so he released it. He soaped up with the water already clinging to his skin and then rinsed off as quickly as he could. He ran the towel over his head and chest before wrapping it around his waist.

  He stepped out and came face to face with Karen in her robe. “Good evening,” he said. “Or morning, whatever.”

  She reached out and put a hand on his bare chest. “Oh, Michael, what are we going to do with you?”

  He blinked twice. “I’m not… what do you mean?”

  She shook her head. “Three weeks of flirtation and you still haven’t made your move? I think this calls for direct action.”

  He was about to ask what she was talking about when she reached down and yanked the towel from his waist. He tried to cover himself but relaxed when she let her robe drop to the floor.