The Bright Black Sea Page 7

  Chapter 07 Tallith Min

  Ensly Mirrior is a small, quiet, grey and dour woman. I sat watching her slowly plow through my accounts and wondered if she was born for this work or if the work made her so. Speaking from personal experience, dealing with ship captains is not for the faint of heart, so dealing with ship captains and their accounts must be pretty grim work.

  I'd had a brief interview with the office manager, Phylea Kardea, who welcomed me home, congratulated me on my modest success, and said Tallith Min hoped that I'd stay to meet with her when I finished my accounts. I was passed on to Ensly, who handles the Lost Star accounts and we set out to reconcile my verified accounts with their records.

  Interplanetary trade relies on a web of interplanetary financial institutions and a system wherein each transaction is authenticated by both parties with a set of codes, one of which is radio transmitted and the other delivered on a physical drive. Credits move in a complex chain of inner-bank transfers only after being verified by both codes. My transactions were transmitted to Min & Co via radio-packets, but the second, physical drive, versions of those transactions needed to match the transmitted codes to finalize the credit transfers. Every transaction had to be found in our two ledgers and reconciled to complete the transfers. In theory it should be a simple matter of merging the two accounts, but in practice, it's not. At least not for me. Miccall had handled the ship's financial side and his and Min & Co.'s conventions were unfamiliar to me. As a result, entries appeared under different headings in our two files. Tracking them down took a focused effort for more than two hours.

  Halfway through Illynta signaled to say Dyn had wrapped up his affairs. I told them not to wait, I'd take a shuttle up when, or if, Neb help me, I was ever able to find my way clear of these Neb blasted accounts.

  Fortunately, as grim as Ensly looked, she was patient (or resigned) and we worked our way through the accounts without harsh words. As the process was drawing to a close, I began thinking about my next meeting and asked her what she thought of our new boss. 'Nice enough. Doesn't say much. Has a lot to learn, but Phylea is confident,' was her assessment.

  'Do they get along? I'd imagine Phylea has had to step back, after running Min & Co for several years.'

  'Phylea's been running the firm for twenty years,' Ensly replied. 'The Mins brought in the clients and kept them well dined and happy. Phylea ran the actual operation. The accident was a tragedy, but it did not affect our operation much. The trade collapse is another story. We'll get by, thanks to the small ship traders whose business is now booming. They need bookkeepers and shipbrokers to keep everything straight. Still, we're moving down to the less expensive 5th floor in three weeks and half the staff will likely be looking for other employment before it runs its course.'

  'Aye, don't know what I'll be doing tomorrow.'

  'Don't go in for accounting,' she replied blandly without looking up.

  I laughed. 'Damn, that was my best hope.'

  'In that case you're bound for a Guild sleeper,' she replied drolly and hurried on. 'Hard times even for the owner. Sold off her parent's estate, including the Primecentra flat and the country house. The people in her office are buying her yacht.'

  'Why?' Calissant does not have private banks, loans are handled by the Ministry of Credit, which in fact, extends little credit, mostly short term loans so that almost no one is in debt on Calissant. Selling off didn't seem to make sense.

  'No credits to squeeze out of the business and the Ministry of Death wants its cut now. More to the point, the estate must be divided three ways – there's a sister on an Outward Survey mission and a brother on Kimsai with shares coming. We'd not fetch anything in a sale at the moment so the easiest way to settle the estate was to sell what could be sold, divide the proceeds and put the credits in a Ministry account.'

  'Has to be hard for her...' at which point Kardea appeared in the door and asked if we were done.

  Ensly nodded. 'I can finish up without the Captain.'

  I stood, thanked Ensly for her patience, promised to do better if ever given the chance again.

  She mimicked holding her breath and rolled her eyes, and said very seriously, 'Good luck, Captain.'

  I laughed. Ensly had her hidden depths.

  I tried not to take that Good luck as a warning and followed Kardea to Min's office. She knocked and waved me in, closing the door softly behind me.

  The entire outside wall was deck to ceiling clearsteel, which, on a clear day would offer a panoramic view of Port Prime from over the lower buildings lining Star Gate Boulevard. On this afternoon in early spring, however, it was a merely a sheet of soft pale light etched with water droplets and rivulets. On my left, a wide clear desk faced the clearsteel wall, the softly glowing desktop the office's only other illumination. To my right, a setting of chairs and a sofa. Tallith Min, a slim, strange silhouette against the grey afternoon light, turned as I was shown in.

  She was dressed in a white blouse with a loose black tie, a black collared vest with a short black skirt that showed a lot of her black, elegantly shaped mech-legs which made her taller than me. Her gaze was guarded, her manner proper, cool, collected.

  'Greetings, Captain Litang,' she said extending her hand, paused, recognized me from the lift, and added, 'Again.'

  'My pleasure,' I assured her, taking her cool hand with an apologetic smile. 'I'm afraid it didn't strike me who you were until it was too late.'

  'Never occurred to me either, your cap has a first mate's badge.'

  I shrugged. 'That's what I am. Merely acting as captain. Didn't see any need to change it.'

  She considered that for a moment before saying, 'I see. Please have a seat,' and with a movement of her hand indicating the conversational area. 'I wouldn't want to keep a spaceer on his feet longer than necessary.'

  'Thank you.' I said, though I waited until she was seated on the edge of a chair opposite mine, carefully arranging her long mech-legs off to one side, before I settled into mine.

  Cloned replacement legs would likely take time to grow, and credits. She probably had the credits – her mech-legs looked elegantly expensive, so it may simply be that the cloned replacements were not yet ready. Still, very lifelike prosthesis are readily available, so the undisguised mechanical nature of her legs was still a curious choice. Nothing in her manner seemed to invite pity. Perhaps they were an expression of indifference to their loss or penance for a perceived failure on her part in the tragedy. She was, after all, piloting the boat when it crashed.

  I was on edge and chart-less. I needed to navigate this interview carefully. It should have been a clear orbit since we shared a common interest in keeping the Lost Star sailing, but the Belbania affair was unavoidably in the offing. I didn't know how she'd take that.

  As I looked across to Min I realized another danger as well – that first second of our encounter – that glimpse of an unguarded and vulnerable Tallith Min would always color how I thought of her. I knew this to be dangerous, for looking at her, it was clear that wasn't something she wanted the world to know and if I treated her in that light, I could well be on the beach tomorrow. I needed to treat her as she was now – cool, competent and in command. I needed to be modest, deferential, and it wouldn't hurt to be a bit boring as well.

  'Before we get down to the immediate business,' she began. 'I'd like to thank you for taking on Captain Jann's cargo. I appreciate how hard it was to help the Comet King avoid Calissant while you had to continue in. It may've seemed unfair to choose one ship over the other, but I'm pleased you saw the advantages of our plan.'

  'It was hard,' I admitted, watching her closely. Neither her eyes nor voice revealed what she knew of it.

  'It was hard for me as well,' she continued. 'However, Uncle Hawk held Captain Jann in high regard and given the current trade situation, I felt it best to keep a captain of Jann's experience operating as long as there is still a chance for cargoes and profit. I don't wish to undervalue your performance, C
aptain Litang, we're quite pleased with it, but, with Jann's four decades of solid profits behind him, I had to go with experience, even if it meant laying up the ship that has played such a big part in my family's history.'

  'I can imagine it's not easy to risk the ship the Four Shipmates sailed aboard for so long, being laid up and the old gang scattered to the eight stars,' I said. 'She's a delightful ship, I've been lucky to serve aboard her, not to mention as her acting captain for a voyage.'

  'Ah, the Four Shipmates.... I never tired of hearing Uncle Hawk talk about the old days. So many of his yarns involved the Lost Star, and when I was ten he took me along on a voyage to Rigtania aboard the very ship. It was the greatest adventure of my childhood.'

  'I joined the ship a year or so after that,' I said. 'But the gang still tells stories of your time on board. You were a bright ray of youth in the old tramp. And before I forget, they've given me strict orders to pass along their greetings and to say they're looking forward to seeing you soon, without fail.'

  'I'm looking forward as well. And since I'm anchored here,' she indicated the office with a little movement of her hands on her lap, 'I won't have to run to make my ship like the last time. I'm looking forward to visiting the Lost Star again as well.'

  'Any time. We'd be delighted.'

  'My parents rarely talked of the old days,' she said. 'But Uncle Hawk would, if I annoyed him enough. I loved those wild yarns of his youth spent tramping the eight systems. Adventure and mystery never seemed in short supply in those days. So you can imagine how wonderful it was to go to space on board the very ship that was center stage for his stories. Every deck, every dent and stain was out of one of his tales. Or he made it seem so...' she added, rather wistfully.

  'Like that long dent in the lower hull where the Drift Dragon's tail sent the Lost Star spinning out of control when they tried to steal the silver asteroid that...' I started, recalling some of their more innocent, if unbelievable yarns.

  '...Was actually the Drift Dragon's egg!' she finished, with a quiet smile. 'And that big, dark gloomy no. 4 hold with all those dings and dents from the last stand of the Droid Pirate who tried to take over the ship. And the battered floater and the ancient flier above the strong rooms that they used in their escape from the Revolutionaries of Linlan-zey...'

  '...A drift planet somewhere deep in the Alantium Drift...' I laughed. 'They're still there.'

  'And all those dusty old crates and boxes piled in the strong room?'

  'I think everything is still there, and more gets added as time goes by. Much of Captain Miccall's gear ended up there as well.'

  'I suppose that's how it should be... Added to all the other fabled treasures. I was convinced that one of those crates held Captain vey'Cline's Travel Book of Faylyen. The one that he claimed that he could, by simply opening its pages and looking closely at the picture on it, transport himself to the actual place.'

  'Ah, yes, the world of Faylyen, the home planet of the First People whose sky is filled with the stars of the galactic center...'

  'And where Captain vey'Cline may be today since he disappeared in the middle of a voyage, leaving the opened book on his desk... And there was Glen Colin, the engine room's spaceer ghost who'd appear out of nowhere...

  'In a cloud of whiskey fumes.'

  'So solid that he would yarn and even stand a watch when the mood suited him.'

  'Which makes him sound more like a ship-hermit living somewhere between the hulls than a real ghost.'

  'A ship-hermit? Well, maybe, but even that's nearly as unbelievable as a proper spaceer ghost,' she said.

  'Not when you remember just how run down the old girl was in those days, sold, traded or gambled away from one shady owner to the next... A spaceer could easily make a nest amongst the fuel pipes and plumbing and never be found, even if anyone bothered to look...' I replied.

  'So you say.'

  'So I choose to believe. Ghost stories and drift dragons are entertaining yarns, but I must admit I hope most of them are more imagination than fact. I've not their taste for adventure...'

  'No taste at all, Captain?'

  'A quiet life of circling Azminn twice a year is about my limit, I'm afraid.'

  'You'd never want to cross orbits with the beautiful pirate Captain Astreya of the Careworn Lark?

  'I hope to avoid all pirates, be they as beautiful as a moon in a mist or ugly as a wort worm... Though I'll admit I briefly toyed with the idea of turning pirate myself just yesterday when I learned that we could slip out of orbit and be on our way to Sanre-tay before the Ministry of Death even knew we'd arrived.'

  'Really?' She gave me a taunting look.

  'Briefly. I believe the Four Shipmates did something like that once, but I'm not like them. I'm far too Unity Standard for piracy.'

  'Oh well, I suppose we'd best get back to business at hand. I believe I was telling you how much I appreciated your willingness to take on Captain Jann's cargo.'

  With all the talk of the Four Shipmate's exploits, now seemed the time to introduce the Belbania Affair – as modest of an affair as it was.

  'Well, there's a yarn attached to that too. Nothing as exotic as a Four Shipmate's tale, but one that needs be told.'

  'I'm not sure I follow you...'

  'Well, when Captain Jann proposed unloading his cargo on me, I must admit I declined to even entertain the plan.'

  'Why? Surely you saw its advantages.'

  'Yes and no. What I saw was that with the arrival of the Comet King and the plan of sending only one ship on to Calissant, the chances of the Lost Star avoiding the uncertainty of Calissant fate suddenly jumped from none to 50-50 – but only if I refused to go along with it as proposed,' I replied and proceeded to spin my yarn.

  Min hadn't spent the better part of two years living amongst the Taoist adepts of Kimsai without adopting something of their quiet ways. After her initial protest, she merely listened and watched – revealing nothing of her thoughts – allowing me to sail through the story as I'd rehearsed it countless times.

  'Had Jann not actually cut a comet and I, a star, I'd had to invent that piece of business since it seems so apropos,' I said with a nervous smile and shrug, earnestly adding, 'So, even though everything ended up as you planned and nothing lost with my insistence that my ship be given its fair chance, I feel you needed to know the full story. I'd not feel right letting you believe I'm something I'm not...'

  'And you had to assume Jann would tell me all about it anyway,' she added calmly, 'And risk being caught in a lie.'

  'True. But I'd be willing to wager Jann said nothing. And if I wasn't actually convinced I did the right thing, by my charts anyway, I might've risked it.'

  'Well, he didn't. Why?'

  'Likely because he couldn't tell you without it sounding like he was bragging about his loyalty. And because we settled things the way two tramp captains would've done it. Nothing more need be said. I, however, have no problem giving him his proper credit. He's a good and loyal captain.'

  'And you, Litang?' she asked watching me closely. 'Are you a good and loyal captain?'

  'Oh, I'm neither selflessly loyal nor naïve,' I said, carefully. 'Jann and I settled the issue as any two tramp captains would've. Still, there's no denying I chose to take a very narrow view of my orders – or rather the lack of them – and was prepared to ignore them completely if Jann decided not to put the Comet King in play. I don't know how you view that, but I'm prepared to pay the consequences.'

  'What do you think those consequences should be?'

  'Not for me to say. You should, however, employ people you can rely on. My appointment as acting captain ended with the delivery of the verified accounts, so the Lost Star is now without a captain. You're free to appoint whom you'd like.'

  'Why do you say your appointment has ended?'

  'While Captain Vinden confirmed my acting appointment after the death of Captain Miccall, he specified that it was only to our return to Calissant and implied t
hat he'd others in mind with stronger claims to the berth.'

  'I wasn't aware of that understanding. I don't believe it's on record, though much of his business was conducted in his head.'

  'I still have the radio-packet which I can send along to you.'

  'Oh, I believe you. Are you that anxious to give up command?'

  I shrugged. 'I was, at one time. Now, well, less so. Truth is, I've come to rather like being Captain if I'm to be completely honest.'

  'And I'll be honest with you. At the moment, I've no one at hand to replace you. Can I assume you'd be willing to continue on as captain until we know its ultimate fate?'

  'Yes, of course. I don't want to complicate things. Keeping the Lost Star sailing is my only concern so if there's anything I can do to help, just ask.'

  'Right. Then we'll keep things as they are and postpone any further discussion until after we've achieved that goal,' she said briskly, adding, 'Now I've some practical matters to cover concerning the current status of your ship, Captain.'

  'At your service,' I said, enjoying the little jolt of happiness your ship and Captain gave me.

  'Right.' She proceeded to briefly outline her plans to negotiate with the Ministry of Death, and what she needed from me, and on to the practical details of paying off the crew and the necessity of informing them that if the Lost Star remained in commission, emergency Guild wage rates would apply.

  'Finally, and this is strictly between us for the moment – Phylea has heard a rumor that the BlueStar Line is no longer going to serve Calissant. If true, it leaves the Tiladore Planetary recruitment operation in the lurch. They've lined up three thousand immigrants and are set to sail in little over three weeks. If this rumor proves true we might be able to charter the Lost Star to them. Between the suspended animation boxes and the immigrant's worldly goods, it looks to be an eighty container consignment with the usual human cargo premium – a very profitable charter to secure should it indeed become available. Plus, it would get her back to the Sanre-tay quarter where there's still cargoes to be found.'

  'Neb, that'd be great! Almost too good to be true. You'd think BlueStar wouldn't pass on that cargo.'

  'Well, the BlueStar Line may still send one of their ships to fulfill their agreement, however, given their cost structures, it might not be worth it. Lines operate on a different scale than tramps. In any event, we'll know more in a few days. And of course not only will there be other parties interested in the charter, but we'll have to clear it with the Ministry as well. In any event, just keep this to yourself for now. With your crew downside, I'd rather not risk the word getting around. The local tramp ship-owners haven't given up and it's in their interest to see as many of Uncle Hawk's ships taken out of service as possible,' she added, and standing to dismiss me, 'I believe I've covered everything for now. Thank you. It's been interesting.'

  'Thank you. And anything I can do, don't hesitate to ask,' I said pushing myself to my feet. Damn that gravity...

  And like an undetected meteor, an idea struck me with a mental 'clang' and I said, without thinking, 'Say Min, Are you free tonight?'

  'Captain Litang?' She gave a slight start, caught off guard, but added in a distinctly chilly tone, 'I see I must learn to deal with tramp captains who do things their own way...'

  Blast! Just what I didn't want to do. Could I repair the damage?

  'We like directness,' I ventured with a tentative smile. 'Saves time and money. However, in this case, I was speaking as the thought struck me and should've chosen my words more precisely. What I meant to say was, would you honor us by being our guest at a banquet aboard ship tonight? I'm embarrassed that the idea hadn't occurred to me before this instant. If I had my wits about me, I'd have sent you an invitation on arrival. Please overlook my abrupt and offhanded invitation and accompany me up to the Lost Star for a Mycolmtreian feast?'

  'Thank you, but I, I have work to do.' She looked away, out into the grey mist, searching for a better, a believable, excuse.

  Perhaps I should've left the matter rest, but that didn't suit my Neb may care attitude, so I said, ‘I'll take that feeble excuse as a yes. You can't work all night, so I'll wait until you wrap up work and we can be off to the ship.'

  She looked back to me. 'I'm not sure what you're inviting me to.'

  'We're staging a banquet to celebrate surviving the voyage under the command of yours truly. Since we're going to be paid off and may be downside for some time, we've harvested our moss garden crops and the Drays are even now preparing an expansive feast. As a former shipmate, the agent of our current owner, great niece of our late owner and daughter of our late bookkeepers and agents, you must certainly be our guest of honor. Indeed, with all those connections, I'd venture to say it's your duty. It'll give you the chance to see everyone and make the old gang very happy. Plus, you'll see the ship alive with everyone on board. Please join us,' I added earnestly.

  She looked away again into the fog for a moment, shrugged, and nodded, 'You've not left me any maneuvering room, so all I can say is that I'd be delighted to join the company of the Lost Star to celebrate their safe return. I can imagine how harrowing it must have been for them,' she added with a faint smile.

  'For me most of all. It'll be grand. You'll bring so many good memories with you – a barrier against an uncertain future, which is what this banquet is really about.'

  'It will be wonderful to see everyone, the Lost Star and taste Mycolmtreian cuisine once again. When should I arrive?'

  'We'll go up together. You'll be my surprise guest. I'll just hang about and annoy your staff while you finish up. I'll signal Molaye to bring the gig down for us.'

  'Not necessary. These days I'm living aboard the Silvery Moon and go up every evening, so you can ride with me. I suppose I should stop first at the 'Moon to change into something more festive.'

  'You look dashing as you are. This will be, after all, just a tramp ship soiree which'll doubtlessly sink into a right carouse. And there's no need to hurry, it's not slated to start before this evening. I'll wait out in the office.