Ships of My Fathers Page 16

  “Foolish?”

  He shook his head, remembering. “I remember one time, he and I were chasing down this fat whale of a ship, almost as big as that one you’re on now. He’d mined the approach to some transfer station with gravity warheads, and fouled up the winds for days, and this big boy was trying to make a run for it. I wanted to snake a missile up his ass, but Hammerhead had the lead position, and Malcolm insisted on closing in for a plasma shot. I swear he must have pulled to within ten kilometers before he opened up on them. He had a hot gunner then, and that gal shredded their cargo section front to back, top to bottom. It almost broke the ship in two, but she had left enough structure intact for the spine to hold.”

  Michael nodded, thinking about what that would look like on the Heinrich, with all the cargo containers arrayed radially around the long spine connecting engineering to the rest of the ship. Eighty percent or more of the central width was cargo at that point, and he could imagine how a gunner could wreak havoc with that while still doing minimal damage to the rest of the ship. “What’s so foolish about that?”

  “You never knew when one of those freighters was going to start shooting back. They weren’t armed at first, but as the war went on a lot of them started bolting on what they could.”

  “Maybe Malcolm didn’t want to kill anyone.”

  “Yeah, I used to think that, too.”

  Michael froze mid-bite. Is that what happened to Peter? Was his uncle telling the truth?

  “You see, we weren’t the only ones out there,” Bradley went on. “The Caspians had their own privateers as well.”

  “Well, weren’t they doing the same as you?”

  Bradley shrugged. “Some of them, but I also knew a few captains who weren’t very particular about who they got their letters of Marque from, or for that matter, how many they had.”

  “They fought for both sides?”

  He shook his head. “No, not really for either side, just their own.”

  Michael nodded. Pirates with a license, indeed.

  “Malcolm didn’t take a kind view to that particular practice, so he started keeping track of things: which ships showed up where, how long they were gone, what cargoes went missing, which ones showed up later on another ship, who crewed which vessels, that kind of thing. Before long, he was building a list of suspects.”

  “And what did he do with them?”

  “Well, at first he was satisfied just reporting them. He presented his evidence to the Navy’s review board and let them deal with it.”

  Michael tried to imagine Malcolm doing that, but it seemed a stretch. It was not that he was against law and order, but to Michael, he had always seemed to care much more about order than law. “At first?”

  “I don’t know exactly what happened, but somewhere along the way, he lost his patience with the review board. Maybe the wheels of justice weren’t fast enough for him, or maybe the Navy was willing to look the other way for certain captains. But about halfway through the war, he started taking matters into his own hands.”

  “No more review board?”

  Bradley shook his head. “No more surrenders, at least that’s what I heard. Maybe it was only the ones on his list, or maybe he just stopped caring.”

  “So he killed Caspian privateers?”

  “Yeah, even some of the ones who were supposedly on our side, too. If the war had kept up, he might have gotten them all, but after enough blood it was finally over. Of course, then he had you to look after. I suppose he let it go after that.”

  “And the privateer program?”

  “They maintained it for another two years in modified form, kind of an auxiliary navy while they got the sector back under Confederate control. I got out around then. They asked me back a few years later for some new thing, but I’d had my fill.”

  “But you still have the Hamilton James.”

  He gave a little smile. “She’s a good old ship, but she’s no fighter anymore. I ripped out the missile bays eight years back, turned one over to cargo and put some hydroponics in the other. The ship smells like spring now. I’ve still got the old plasma turret, but I don’t keep a gunner on board. If it came to it, I’d probably be up there myself trying to remember how to point the damn thing.”

  He remembered Malcolm talking about something similar on the Hammerhead, turning the missile bays into hidden storage areas for “special” cargo. Perhaps he had let it all go. They had sounded like bad times, like Bradley said, but nothing he had learned so far answered his most important question.

  “Tell me, Captain Bradley, did you ever hear of the Kaiser’s Folly?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “At least, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t one of ours.”

  “No, it wasn’t a privateer, just a freighter.”

  He shook his head. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was on it. That’s how Malcolm found me.”

  Bradley shrugged. “He never said much about how he ended up with you, but by then we weren’t very close.”

  “No?”

  “Well, after he went on the hunt, he wasn’t the best guy to be around. Don’t get me wrong, Michael. If it came down to it, I’d have had his back, but you didn’t want to be standing next to him when the shots started.”

  Michael returned to the diminishing food on his plate. “I guess I can understand that.”

  “Anything else I can do for you, son?”

  He started to shake his head, but then he remembered the girl. “Actually, yes. I met your runner today, Lana.”

  Bradley nodded. “Yeah, Lana Marcellus. She’s my junior mechanic. What about her?”

  “Well, I told her I had a packet for you. That’s how I found out where you were.”

  “So you lied to her.”

  “I know. If it’s not too much to ask, sir, can you tell her I’m sorry?”

  “I’ll do better than that, young man. You finish up that steak, and we’ll go tell her together?”

  He gulped. “You mean, in person?”

  “Best way to apologize, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Besides, maybe you do have something for me after all. Your dad, I mean Malcolm, had a recipe for this chicken and pepper soup that I swear could resuscitate the dead. Do you have any of his old files?”

  “I’d have to check, sir.”

  +++

  Captain Elsa Watkins held the decrypted message in her hand. It looked like Anders had been productive after all.

  “But there is an end-around to the security on the ship,” his message read. “The boy should have access to it himself as soon as he’s of age. I have good data on the S&W routes, and I’m attempting to skip ahead to intercept him. Schedule is attached. Join me at Latera if you’re interested.”

  She scanned over it again. “Mr. Neiru,” she called out. “How soon can we be ready to leave port?”

  “A few hours, Captain,” her first officer replied. “Do you have a destination in mind?”

  “Tsaigo,” she replied. Latera was much too far to reach in one leg, but if they hurried, they could probably catch up with Anders and the boy in time.

  Chapter 18

  “Sometimes you get sucker punched, and sometimes you just walk into a fist.” — Malcolm Fletcher

  MICHAEL SAT AT HIS DRIVE station alone. Evidently, Terri Schwartz had decided he no longer needed babysitting, so she and Zane were tackling some maintenance on the sublight drives behind him. The tachyon winds were particularly stable as well, so he had little else to do but sit at his station waiting for orders that did not come. He had gone so far as to pull up some of the same navigation displays that would be on Gabrielle’s bridge station, but even with his limited knowledge, there was nothing to concern him. In the early afternoon, he thought he saw the leading edge of an eddy coming in from starboard, but it faded rapidly, a mere ripple.

  While it was nice to have a relaxing shift, it also left him with entirely too much time to reflect. He had
no idea when his request to the Navy would yield results, and given the recruiter’s response, he was not sure how much information they even had to give him. Meanwhile, Captain Bradley’s tales had left him with even more questions than he had had before. Which side had the Kaiser’s Folly been on? Had Peter taken them over to the Caspian side of the rebellion? And if so, had Malcolm offered them the chance to surrender? Or had the Kaiser’s Folly somehow ended up on Malcolm’s list? Could they instead have been bystanders to a fight between the Hammerhead and the Reilly? Which side was the Reilly on? Who had been her captain?

  He shook his head to try to clear it all away. Running through it over and over was not going to get him any answers. He knew that, but it did not help. Variations on the scenario kept coming into his head unbidden.

  At least he had something of a date planned with Karen that night. The layover at Tortisia had been a bust as far as that went. Another ship with a “special” friend had arrived on their last day in port, so Karen had begged off plans with him to get in a quick visit with the other crew. He had managed to spend a pleasant evening with Lana from the Hamilton James, but it had ended with merely a hug and a promise to be looking for one another in some future port.

  A movement on the navigation display caught his eye briefly, but the inflection point reversed itself, the slope holding near zero but positive.

  He sighed. The quiet shifts were always the worst.

  Gabrielle made several marks on the pad as Michael watched. She scrolled down, made some more marks, chuckled, and scrolled some more. When she finally set the pad down, Michael could no longer contain himself. “Well?”

  “Close, but you still didn’t pass. Sixty-eight percent. The ratings board requires a seventy, but most commercial vessels want a ninety before they consider the rating valid.”

  He slumped in his chair. They had the small common room to themselves this evening. Everyone else was up in the theater watching a vid of the xeroball semi-finals. Many had placed bets before they had pulled into the last port, and while the results were already theoretically known, most had kept quiet until they could watch it together. Michael knew he had already lost — Stonefall Comets by three in overtime — so he had convinced Gabrielle to proctor the test for a navigation rating.

  “I’m curious, what score does the Heinrich require?”

  She shook her head. “Dad requires an unblemished one hundred, and he gives his own tests to confirm the public ratings.”

  Michael frowned. “Any tips?”

  “From cases eighteen and twenty-two, it looks like you’re using a right-handed coordinate system with your spin calculations. For tachyons, it’s a left-handed spin coordinate.”

  He nodded. He knew that and was not sure how he had missed it on the test. “What else?”

  “Well, I have no idea where you went wrong on case nine, but if you had done that in a live test, your sails would have been slammed so hard, they would have fed back into the generator. Even if everything else had been correct, I think most captains would fail you for that one answer alone.”

  He cringed. “That bad?”

  “Sorry. Maybe you’re simply not cut out to be a navigator. Sure, there’s some overlap with the tach drive rating, but not every engineer makes a good navigator and vice versa. Take me, for example, I’m flummoxed by power systems. Put me in your chair back there, and I’d be as likely to short out the generators as push out the sails.”

  “I hear you, Gabrielle, but I need to keep working at it.”

  “Why? Where’s it written that you have to know everything?”

  He allowed himself a little smile. “In the Captains’ Guild licensing regulations.”

  She pushed herself back from the table. “You know, I’d heard a rumor that you were shooting for a license, but I didn’t believe them. Whatever for? I mean, you’re seventeen years old. Someday, sure, maybe even I’ll try for captain, but why are you wasting your energy on it now?”

  The truth was that he had started on the path to prove to Malcolm that he was capable of it, but that hardly seemed a good answer now. “Well, there’s Sophie’s Grace. She’s going to need a captain, and it may as well be me.”

  “Sophie’s Grace? That’s your old ship, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, though I guess it’s really my ship, not my old ship.”

  She shook her head. “Look, if you want my advice, and you’re getting it whether you want it or not, you should sell that ship and put every last credit into ship shares here.”

  He laughed at her. “Why would I ever do that? Trade an owner’s share for the scraps of an engineer?”

  “You still don’t get it, do you? I cleared eleven thousand on my ship shares from this last run alone, and that was a bad run. If you came in with the proceeds from the Sophie, you’d easily get double my shares, maybe triple. How much did Malcolm clear on his runs?”

  Michael frowned. Honestly, he did not know how much the Sophie had made on its runs. He had helped load the cargo, helped sell the cargo, even did a few side deals on his own, but Malcolm had never shared the finances with him. He had had his allowance, and that was it. Still, he knew enough to know that after fuel costs, docking fees, crew salaries, and whatever other side business Malcolm had been conducting, clearing eleven thousand would have been a decent run. And that was for the entire ship, not the navigator.

  He looked at Gabrielle. “Well, less than the Heinrich, but that’s to be expected. She’s a smaller ship, but Malcolm knew what he was doing.”

  “Yeah, Malcolm knew.” She started gathering her things. “It’s your own life, Michael, but I hope you figure out that there are better role models out there than him.”

  “Wait, what do you mean? Are you buying your father’s story now?” Michael fumed. “I should have known you’d stick to Daddy.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You know, Michael, I’m doing my best to welcome you into the family. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, and I wanted to extend that to Malcolm. If you’d lived with my father as long as I have, you’d understand how much I’d like to prove him wrong just once.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s not. I’ve been asking around in port, other crews, other captains.”

  Michael’s interest both picked up and cooled at the same time. “And did they know what happened to the Kaiser’s Folly?”

  “No, but they knew about other ships. I talked to a pilot who had seen your precious Malcolm gut a ship from stem to stern, and when that was done, he started shooting at the escape pods.” She shuddered. “The escape pods, Michael! Who does that?”

  “I, um… I don’t know.”

  “Merciless Mal, that’s what they called him. You may think he was a good man, but from what I hear he was a vicious bastard. And for the record, the role model I was talking about was Peter Schneider, your real father.”

  He stammered at her as she left, but in the end he had no retort. Merciless was as apt a description for Malcolm as he had ever heard.

  Michael did not bother making plans with Karen for the Folsom liberty. He had learned his lesson at Tortisia, and while she did not say anything about it in their brief times together, he was certain she would find someone at Folsom whom she had not seen in far too long. It turned out three such crews were vying for her attention, so he did not even bother trying to keep track of her.

  Gabrielle kept her distance as well. At least at Ballison he had been able to use her for introductions, but without her he drifted from table to table, club to club, bumping into various crewmates, looking for anyone he knew. Finally, he settled in at the bar of some club on the ring above where they had docked. The bouncers had stopped giving him any grief about his age. He was not sure if he actually looked any older or if he simply looked too glum to be that young.

  He was into his third round at this particular club when a girl slithered into the seat next to him. He glanced at her once, saw the blond hair, and then did a
double take. For a second, he thought it was Josie, but it was not.

  “Wow, you look like you saw a ghost,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Sorry, you just reminded me of someone.”

  “Someone good or someone bad?” she asked.

  “Good,” he replied. “Very good.”

  “Then why don’t you buy this good girl a drink, and maybe I can help you relive some old memories.”

  He waved the bartender over. “Michael,” he introduced himself.

  “Fini,” she said. “I’ll have whatever he’s having.”

  “So, Fini, are you a good girl?”

  She took a sip from Michael’s glass. “Depends, Michael. How good do you want me to be?” She took another sip, her puckered lips lingering on the shot glass.

  Michael could not help but to react. What Fini lacked in Josie’s sweetness, she more than made up for in raw sexual allure, but given Josie’s profession, that was not much of a reference for this girl. So, are you a professional? He could hardly ask her that. Instead, he settled on, “Do you live here?”

  She shook her head. “Groundside. I’m up on a joyride with a friend of my mom’s. She’s got a semi-regular squeeze passing through.” She made a motion back towards the corner. “He’s another spacer like you.”

  The bartender arrived with her drink, and Fini lifted it up to Michael’s mouth and tipped it for him. “I owe you a few sips,” she said.

  This one seemed stronger than the previous ones, so Michael pulled back before he drank too much of it. “So, what ship is he from?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Wanna meet him?” She reached under the bar and squeezed at his knee. “He’s got a suite at the Velocity. Hot tub, auto-massager, the works.”

  “Sure,” he said. After all, Karen was off having her fun. Why not him?

  Fini led him over to a corner booth where an older man and woman were locked in an embrace, their drinks forgotten. “Look, Vera, I got one too.”