Privateer Tales 3: Parley (16 page)

“Crystal,” I said. “So you’ll take it?”

“We’re in,” Tali replied.

“We sail at 1700 tomorrow from Coolidge Shipyard.”

“Jordy’s in the cab with our gear.”

“Tali, you and Jordy will be in BR-3 tonight. Sorry for the close quarters.”

“Wouldn’t have expected any different,” Tali said.

“You can keep your gear in your room or if you want, I can give you access to the armory. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to review our stock with you. I still have access to the Navy’s quartermaster if we’re missing anything.” Marny stood up, clearly looking to get moving.

Tali stood with her. “If you want to help, we’ve got a pretty decent stack of gear.”

“I’ll help,” Tabby offered.

I watched as the three of them disappeared from the room.

My HUD flashed an incoming comm request.

“Hoffen,” I answered.

“Lou Buggentower, Stevedore’s Union. We’re outside ready to load. Are you good to go?”

“I’ll be right out.” I walked down the hallway quickly and passed through the airlock.

A stout man in a white uniform handed me his credentials. I scanned them with my HUD. They checked out.

“Love these little cutters. Don’t take but a few minutes to load. Even faster to unload. Anything going in the bunk rooms?” He asked.

“No it should all fit in the cargo holds.”

“That it will. Any special weight distribution?”

“We’re pretty even. Ideally, heaviest on the inside about half way up. More forward than aft. Is that doable?”

“Whatever you like. It’s not a very heavy load, so it won’t matter a lot,” he said.

I should have thought about that. I knew where I wanted the weight, but didn’t think about the fact that the mass/volume ratio was low. He could load it any way he wanted and we wouldn’t feel it on the ship. I felt like a newbie, which of course I was.

“You got a tablet you’re crossing these off on?” he asked.

“Sorry, I’m pretty new to this, why would I do that?” He’d already outed me as a newbie, I might as well not add on.

“Heh, you are a greenie, then. Captains like to keep track of what they’re loading and match it up with the manifest. That way if anyone says they didn’t deliver a crate, you can prove if you got it all or not.”

“Frak, that makes sense,” I said.

“Record it with your HUD. Make sure you catch every crate’s serial number. You can go over it once you’re sailing.”

“Thank you, Mr. Buggentower,” I said.

“No problem. Everybody has a first day.”

Sterra's Gift
– 001, he said. “It’ll come up right there.” He pointed to what looked like a MAG-L track ten meters away from
Sterra's Gift
. A flatbed train, forty meters long, filled with crates of different sizes slid along the track and stopped in line with the ship.

Two squat robots
rose up off the far end, flew up next to the crates, and slid long metallic fingers under them. In concert, the bots lifted, using arc-jets similar to what our suits used and flew to us at a break-neck pace. Lou looked at his tablet and over to the containers and checked off the two serial numbers. I recorded it. I could see how a tablet that was running the same software he was running would make this quite a bit easier. Half an hour after we started, the cargo holds were both completely loaded.

“That’s it, Captain Hoffen. Thumbprint here?”

I pressed my thumb onto his tablet. “Thank you, Mr. Buggentower.”

“Call me Lou.” He offered his hand and we shook. “Safe passage to you,” he said over his shoulder.

Retract, pressurize, and seal cargo holds
. In tandem, the elevators lifted back into the ship.

“Nick, prepare for departure.”

“Aye, Captain.”

I smiled. Marny was rubbing off on him. I found Tabby on the ship helping reorganize the armory. I thought about asking what was up, but I really didn’t care. I looked back to the galley and saw Jordy sitting on a chair drinking a cup of something.

I walked back to him with my hand out. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Kelti. I know I speak for the rest of the crew when I say we’re glad to have you aboard.”

“My pleasure, Captain. If you’d asked me on Friday morning if I’d be sitting on a cutter headed into space the next day, I’d have bet everything I had you were wrong. But here I sit. Where’s Ada?”

“She’s on our freighter. Accompany me to the bridge? We’re about to get underway.”

“Certainly.”

“I recall Tali referred to you as a combat medic. Have you had a chance to look at our supplies?”

“Not yet.”

“Would you mind checking it out? I think we’ve got a good supply, but we’re no experts.”

“Happy to.”

“All sections, check in. Status for immediate departure.”

Nick and Marny replied in turn. “Green.”

All ship announcement
. “We’re about to get underway for a shakedown cruise. If anyone needs anything on Puskar Stellar, this’d be the time to mention it. Otherwise, you might consider grabbing a chair. We won’t be exceeding 1.5 gravity, but sometimes the transition is a little rough.”

“Mr. Kelti, if you’d like to join me in the co-pilot
's chair we can talk while we get going.”

“Can do, Captain,” he said.

Plot course. Triangulate our current position with Coolidge shipyard, at a distance of one-hundred thousand kilometers. Four hour transit
.

The course wasn’t much to look at and I saw that the burn plan was well within our normal rate.

Execute plan
.

I was enthralled
with how the ship interacted with the planet. The arc-jets lifted us and we slowly accelerated forward while rotating the nose of the ship skyward. As a spacer, I had no real affinity to the idea of ‘up.’ The ship’s gravity system was still pulling me to the floor, so to me, it didn’t seem like anything had changed. I looked over to Jordy to continue our conversation and was surprised to see him with his head back in the seat and his fingers gripping the armrests with what appeared to be a death grip. He was obviously having trouble with the ship being perpendicular to the surface.

“If you close your eyes, it’ll just feel like a heavy gravity environment
.” I was trying to be helpful.

“I’m not a big fan of takeoff,” Jordy said. He willfully loosened his grip.

“I was thinking we need a second on Ada’s freighter,
Adela Chen
. How do you and Tali work?”

“She does all of our tactical planning, but I can guarantee she’ll want someone on both ships if she’s got any hand in security.”

“Marny does our security. You suppose they’ve already worked this out?”

“That’s not the question, the question is when they’re going to tell us.”

We both laughed.

Ice vapor rolled off the outside of the ship as we pierced through the upper atmosphere. What a rush. Escaping the atmosphere of a planet was just something you didn’t experience if you spent all of your time in space.

Jordy’s discomfort seemed to lessen as the effects of the atmosphere stopped jostling the ship. It made me think that he’d spent a good deal of time in space and the black blanket around the ship was easing his anxieties.

“How does your team work? Do you have specialties?” I was hoping to take his mind off of the things that were bothering him.

“Tali’s always the tip of the spear. She likes to be first in. Most of the time she just drops ‘em and leaves ‘em for me to patch up. Jammin’s all about the heavy stuff. If we need to blow it up, knock it down, or make a general mess, he’s the guy. I’m the long range guy. Part of being special-forces is being good at all of it, though.”

“You guys were pretty impressive at the training facility.”

“Thanks. We’ve been doing it long enough, we better be. Jammin’s still pissed you got him. I told him how you set him up and it pissed him off even more.”

“Is that why he didn’t come along?”

“Nah, he doesn’t like to go off-planet.”

“You boys playing nice up here?” I heard Tali’s voice and looked around to see her standing at the door.

“Come on in,” I said. “Just grab any seat. We’re not real formal.”

“Marny told me you’d say that but she’s trying to instill more discipline. Permission to enter the bridge?”

“Permission granted,” I responded. “I think, technically, I was okay with ‘come on in,’ though.”

“Maybe.” She looked amused. “Jordy pinged me and said you wanted to talk about assignments. What’s up?”

I gave Jordy a single raised eyebrow. At least I knew where I stood.

“More a question. Let’s find Marny and hash it out.” I stood up and walked to the back of the bridge.

“You’re just going to leave the helm?” Jordy asked, concern causing his voice to rise.

“If we’re not in combat, you’re a lot safer if I’m not holding that stick,” I said.

He looked from me to the chair and back, still a little panicked. I held my hand up in surrender and walked back to the seat. “You had that coming,” I said under my breath as I sat back in the chair. “You guys play cards?”

“If you’re in the service, you play cards,” Jordy said.

“We’ve got four hours and we’ll clear out of this traffic fairly shortly.” Already, the number of ships I could see through the armored glass had dropped significantly. “Nick hasn’t had access to the ship for several days and the Navy’s been poking around in our systems. He’ll be busy for the foreseeable future. We’ll stay on the ship overnight, a hundred thousand kilometers off of Coolidge. It’s a nice random location so we don’t have to worry about visitors.”

“You’re my kind of paranoid, Captain,” Tali gave me an approving grin.

“Poker?”

“When’s dinner?” Jordy asked.

“We’ll set a schedule once we’re underway, feel free to dig in whenever you need. We’re overstocked for the trip. In the past, we’ve gotten together at 1200 and 1800 and we keep coffee going.”

“Permission to enter, Cap?” Marny asked.

“Granted. Where’s Tabby?”

“She’s back talking with Nick. Should I be worried?”

“I sure hope not. Poker?” I wasn’t sure why I was having so much trouble getting a game going.

“Sure, I’m in,” Marny answered.

I pulled out a deck of cards and started dealing them. We talked as we played, hashing out any number of small details.

The ship was running better than it ever had. Acceleration was smooth and the heat signature was way down. When we’d taken off from Mars and switched from normal gravity to ship-based, I hadn’t even noticed the transition.

Tali was an excellent card player. I thought I was catching on to her tells and then she switched up on me, almost like she figured out I was reading her. I liked the challenge. Most of the time I had a decent idea how Jordy was feeling about his cards and Marny was an open book.

We arrived at the destination I set around 1800. It was a good time for us to take a break and eat dinner. The galley-pro did a great job of reconstituting the compressed meals supplied by the chandler’s shop. I wasn’t overly hungry, so I stuck with a meal bar, but the food smelled good. I was happy that the mess table provided enough seats for the six of us. We could have squeezed in eight, in a pinch.

“We’ll sit out here tonight and first thing in the morning we’ll head back to the shipyard. We aren’t scheduled to leave until 1700, but if I can get hold of Qiu, I’ll want to get going before that.”

I continued, “We’ll catch up with Ada, who’s piloting the
Adela Chen
, sometime on Monday night or Tuesday, depending on when we get going. She’ll pick up a string of barges tomorrow morning and then set sail for Jeratorn. We’ve agreed on a navigational plan that she’ll modify along the way. We’ll have to catch her transmission so we can adjust accordingly. Anyone have anything they need to add? It doesn’t matter how big or small, this is a good place to bring it.”

“Why all the course changes? Are you expecting trouble on the way out?” Jordy asked.

“Not at all, it’s just a precaution. Ada’s ship was attacked by someone who knew their flight plan.”

“Cap, we need to talk about locking the bridge during the night watch,” Marny said.

“What’s your thought?”

“It’s not uncommon for the pilot to rest during that shift. They’d be easy to sneak up on.”

My mind jumped right to Xie Mie-su, our last passenger who’d very nearly taken Nick and me out. It wasn’t fair, but I probably projected some of my angst about her onto Qiu Loo. “Sounds like a good precaution. Do you have a proposed timetable?”

“Why not lock it all the time?” Tali asked.

I looked at her. It was a good test of the table. I’d invited everyone to participate and now I was getting an idea that I didn’t like.

“What’s your reasoning?”

“It’s the heartbeat of the ship. Leaving that door open makes you too easy of a target. It’s no different than requiring people to request entry, just makes it a little more formal.”

“Would anyone be able to override it?”