Privateer Tales 3: Parley (9 page)

I walked back to Nick and Marny’s quarters. Nick looked up from a reading pad he had sitting on the small table. I sat on the comfortable L shaped couch that partially surrounded it.

“What else do we need to accomplish?” he asked.

“This’d be the perfect time to work on our team skills. Also, you boys are a little soft. We need to get you into an exercise regimen,” Marny said, completely serious.

Nick and I looked at each other and started laughing.

“So, let me get this straight. When Nick says shore leave, your immediate thought is to get us into better shape? Are you sure you’ve been on leave before?” It felt good to laugh.

Marny looked at us skeptically. “We can still enjoy ourselves, I just want a small budget, and four hours a day.”

“Four hours?” I was flabbergasted.

“How much budget?” Nick sat up straighter.

“I could get by with three hours and squeeze it all in for thirty-five hundred.”

“You’re serious?” I asked.

“Oh, come on, Cap. Tell me you wouldn’t like to be on the giving side once in a fight instead of on the receiving side.”

“Okay,” Nick agreed.

Damn his infatuated little ass. “Start Monday?” I could at least negotiate.

“Sunday. I promise if Tabby is who you’ve described, she won’t want to miss day one.”

I groaned. “What time on Sunday?”

Planet-side, in the town of Coolidge, it was 2200 local time on Friday night. Marny explained that the locals used the position of the Sun to adjust their clocks so midday was always 1200 and midnight was 2400. Moreover, they used a twelve hour clock that reset at those two points. I couldn’t have come up with a more ridiculous idea if I’d tried, but Marny insisted that’s how it worked.

The naval shipyard was connected to Coolidge by the same type of elevator / tether that most modern space ports deployed. While
Sterra's Gift
was capable of landing on Mars, we left her at the shipyard for repairs and upgrades.

The physics of a space elevator is terrifying. Each pod is a relatively small, four meter round, three meter tall capsule. Once loaded, it simply drops, in vacuum, accelerated by magnetic fields. A local gravity generator keeps the inhabitants stuck to the floor and magnetic forces keep the pod from touching the sides of the elevator.

The Coolidge Naval Yard was in orbit at five hundred twenty kilometers. From that elevation, it was a ten minute ride to the planet's surface. With
Sterra's Gift
in the shipyard, the elevator was an inexpensive way to get down to Coolidge, not to mention both Nick and I desperately wanted to ride on one.

The three of us stepped off the elevator platform, found a restroom and immediately changed into our civvies. Nick sported black jeans, a black collared shirt and a light brown blazer. I wore a black coat, white shirt and blue jeans. We had both opted to wear shoulder holsters with flechette pistols. Marny warned us that Coolidge, as a military town, was likely to enforce the 'no laser blaster law' most towns had. Marny wore tight fitting blue jeans and a colorful tunic with a Mao styled collar. She didn’t wear an obvious weapon, but I’d be willing to bet she had easy access to something.

“Boys, dinner’s on me tonight,” Marny said. We were standing in a large open area in the most spacious building I’d ever been in. The ceiling had to be at least twenty meters above our heads. Intellectually, I knew atmosphere wrapped around the entire planet but my spacer sensibilities were overwhelmed by the wanton waste of space. The atmosphere to fill this room alone …

“Cap … you with us?” Marny asked. I was lost looking around the room.

“Uh, sounds good. You know some place? I thought you were North American Navy.” I said.

“Sure enough, but I’ve been here plenty. We’re allies
, you know.” She winked at me.

The elevator terminal wasn’t overly busy. In the ten minutes we’d been here, perhaps twenty pods had arrived. The area was nowhere near the capacity it was made for, even if you just considered the floor and not all the openness. I wondered if it was built this way just to mess with spacers like myself. If that was the goal, they’d certainly succeeded.

“Cap. This way, big fella.” Marny had a grin on her face and Nick stood next to her with his arm wrapped around her waist. They didn’t show much affection on the ship, but apparently on leave, all bets were off.

As we neared the exit doors, we could see through the glass that it was very dark outside. I hear
d a loud rhythmic noise, as if the glass was being pelted by thousands of pieces of debris.

“Looks like we’re gonna get wet,” Marny said.

Nick and I looked at each other and simultaneously yelled, “Rain!” We bolted for the door, pushed our way through and ran out into the street. There was water all over everything and it was coming down heavy enough that it was hard to see much farther than ten or fifteen meters.

Marny watched with a bemused expression from under the terminal's awning. She
had hold of our bags, since we had impulsively dropped them. “Let me know when you’ve had enough.” She had to shout over the sound of the rain.

It grew old after a few minutes and we rejoined her. I was appreciative of our clothing’s ability to resist absorbing water. My hair was wet and I had water running down inside of my shirt and undies, but that would dry soon enough
and it was worth it.

“I’ll call a cab.” Marny still talked louder than normal due to the rain.

A silver vehicle pulled up next to the awning and a door opened. We all piled in and Nick and Marny got into some sort of wrestling match. Their playful happiness was infectious and I couldn’t help but sit back and enjoy just being in the moment.

“We have a place to stay tonight?” I asked.

“Yup,” Nick answered.
Take us to the Concord
.

“You’re really going to love this place, I’ve never stayed, but I’ve been in it a couple of times,” Marny said.

“Will it be raining there too?” Nick asked.

“Yes my gorgeous little man, it’ll be raining there too.” Marny apparently couldn’t resist getting back
to wrestling with Nick.

I couldn’t have been happier to have the cab start descending. The building we
approached was a minimum of forty stories tall and made entirely of reflective glass. It was dark outside and giant flood lights attempted to light up the building's exterior. The rain, however, was heavy enough that the lights had a difficult time illuminating the large building.

The cab gracefully pulled to a stop beneath a wide canopy and
its doors opened. It was 2200 local - which Marny insisted on calling ten o’clock - and the luxurious lobby of the Concord Resort was still very active. The people in the lobby appeared to be of two camps; either they were dressed for a fancy evening in suits and gowns, or they were dressed for play in shorts and t-shirts. I couldn’t see a single person in a vac-suit, which struck me as unusual.

We must have looked like we were lost since a man dressed in a uniform approached us and offered assistance. “Are you checking in?”

“Yup,” Nick said.

“Nigela would be happy to help you with that at the registration desk.” He gestured toward a long series of tall counters atop ornate wooden cabinets. A woman stood behind one of the counters and looked up at us expectantly.

“Thank you,” I said and we traipsed over to the desk. Checking in was painless and we found the glassed-in elevator that whisked us up to the thirty-second floor.

The suite Nick booked for us was, by spacer standards, extremely spacious. There were three large bedrooms, each with a bigger bed than I’d ever slept in. A living room joined all of the bedrooms together and a bar/kitchenette took up a portion of one wall. One entire side of the suite was glass from floor to ceiling. The only thing that broke up the glass was a door.

For me, the first order of business was to see what was on the other side of that door. I discovered, to my amusement, that it led to a balcony. The heavy rain initially made me wonder if the balcony had any sort of barrier to keep people from simply falling off the edge. As it turned out there was a perimeter wall, it was just made of some nearly transparent material. I wasn’t interested in getting closer to the edge or getting soaked again, so I soon came back inside.

“Were you able to see anything?” Nick asked.

“Not at all,” I said. “The rain is coming down so hard I can barely make out anything beyond the exterior wall. You guys getting hungry?”

“Marny’s already on it. She’s gonna order food, then take a shower.”

“Which room’s mine?”

“Two rooms left, grab one.” Nick said.

It was an easy choice. One room was near the door we entered and the other had an entire wall of glass with rain pelting off of it. I might not sleep well, but I sure would enjoy experiencing weather. I wondered if it might actually snow. It wasn’t out of the range of possibility at ten degrees.

I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew Nick was waking me up.

“Keep sleeping or eat?” he asked. I hadn’t eaten for at least ten hours so there was no decision to make.

“Eat,” I mumbled and groggily got up. It took a couple of minutes to recover from my short nap. Once I caught a whiff of the food, I woke up very quickly. In the living room there was a large pizza that had to be at least five centimeters tall with a crust that towered to seven or eight centimeters in places.

“You boys are in for the treat of your lives. This is made by real Italians.” Marny pronounced the last ‘eye-tal-yuns.’ “And for drinks, we have what’s been the best beer for more centuries than the North American Alliance has existed.”

I hadn't noticed the three frosted glasses sitting next to the pizza. Next to those glasses were eight tall sealed black bottles. Marny caught my eye, opened one of the bottles and poured out the dark umber-colored liquid into a glass
and a two centimeter creamy foam formed on top. I accepted it, took a seat on one of the couches and started to drink.

“Hold on there, Cap. Let’s make a toast,” Marny said.

I waited for her to finish pouring their drinks.

“To
Adela Chen,” she toasted. We clinked glasses.

I took a long drink of the beer. It tasted like nothing we’d had in previous ports or back on Colony 40. It
s smooth, buttery taste made it the finest drink I’d ever experienced. I looked to Nick. He didn’t seem to be enjoying his.

“What is this magic elixir? Nick, you don’t like it?” I asked.

“It’s not bad.” Nick put his glass back down on the table and snaked a piece of pizza.

“Guinness, and you’ll learn to love it, Nicholas,” Marny said.
He just looked sideways at her.

The pizza was equally awesome but after a third beer, the day started to catch up to me.

“Guys, I’m gonna turn in,” I couldn't help yawning.

“You sure, Cap? Nick and I are gonna go swimming.”

“Swimming, really?” I asked.

“Yup,” Nick had a huge grin on his face.

“That’s almost tempting, but I’ll wait for Tabby.”

“Suit yourself. Did you set your alarm?” he asked.

I hadn’t, so I did. I lay down in the bed and understood why I’d fallen asleep so quickly before. It was luxurious. I’d never slept in a bed this comfortable, with blankets and pillows so soft. I fell asleep immediately.

The next thing I knew, the alarm on my reading pad was going off. I’d given myself an hour to shower, dress and get over to the Naval Academy. It took a moment in the shower to realize I was standing next to the glass exterior of the building. My first concern was that I was naked. Fortunately, there were little glowing letters at eye level that read ‘window is opaque.’
I finally realized that opaque meant ‘unable to be seen through’.

The rain from last night had stopped and I could see that the hotel was on the edge lake so large I was unable to see a shore on the opposite side. Closer to the hotel were a multitude of sailboats with colorful sails deployed. Further out were larger ships going about their business. I had to tear myself away from staring out over the water. I wanted to be on time to pick up Tabby.

Neither Nick nor Marny were in the living room and I suspected they had been up fairly late last night. The pizza was still on the table, so I grabbed a cold piece and headed out. The elevator had the same external lake view as my shower and I gawked the entire way down.

I carried a reading pad since I had no other way to communicate with the AI while dressed in my jeans and dress shirt.

Hail a cab
, I said. Exiting the hotel through the large sliding doors, I was surprised to see flowering plants growing in abundance in large pots. For the most part, flowers weren’t overly common on a space station. I’d seen them before but generally in small groups. It was one of a hundred new experiences I’d had since arriving on Mars. A taxi-cab was waiting for me under the large awning. When I approached, the small silver vehicle opened its door.

Mars Naval Academy, negotiate with Tabby Masters for pickup
. By letting my AI know where I was going and who I was picking up, it would be able to get specific directions. The AI wouldn’t actually need to talk to Tabby, but simply communicate with her AI. The cab gently lifted from the surface and joined the traffic. I estimated we were flying at an altitude of six hundred meters. It provided a great view of the planet beneath me.

This part of Mars was covered by forest that had been seeded many centuries ago when Mars was terraformed. The abundance of plant life was surprising to me in that I knew Mars hadn’t originally had any indigenous plants. Everything I saw below had been seeded from either Earth or one of the four ‘new’ planets. According to what I’d read, however, the plants and trees adapted to the Martian environment and had become unique to Mars, only
faintly resembling their ancestors on Earth. I supposed that was true of people also. Nick and I were a lot like Marny but our small spacer builds were significantly different from her heavily muscled frame.

The Naval Academy was thirty minutes away from the Concord Resort. For the last twenty minutes the air traffic had thinned out and there were fewer and fewer structures below. I’d been flying over land for the entire trip, but the low white buildings of the academy were all lined up in neat rows along the shore of what I assumed was the same lake as the resort.

The cab set down next to a building on the outside of a ten meter tall fence. Cabs probably weren't allowed to fly over the grounds of the academy. It would cost me additional to have the cab wait, but we were far enough from town that I didn’t want to be stranded out here. The academy was in a remote area and we certainly wouldn’t be able to walk back.