The Sea Without a Shore (ARC)

CHAPTER 6


Bergen and Associates Shipyard, Cinnabar

A shipyard crew was replacing the Kiesche’s High Drive nacelles under Mon’s direction. A wrench made the hull ring with a burst of impacts. Adele supposed she should think of Mon as Manager instead of Lieutenant as she continued to do.

She smiled mentally. For all that Mon’s present was one of plump success, she suspected that he still considered an RCN officer to be of higher rank than a wealthy businessman.

Another team from the yard was replacing the original purging system of the Kiesche’s plasma cannon with a much higher capacity unit salvaged from a 4-inch gun. Sun, Daniel’s long-time gunner, was on the bridge to oversee the work. The workmen didn’t appear to need much oversight and Sun, to his credit, wasn’t interfering.

The third group of workmen wore coveralls without markings and were upgrading the Kiesche’s sensor and commo suites. There were two women on the bridge and three men out on the hull. They came from Mistress Sand’s organization; Adele hadn’t bothered asking what their cover identities were.

As expected, they didn’t need any more help than those working on the plasma cannon did. Adele was, nonetheless, present. Like Sun, she was keeping her mouth shut.

Because the bridge was crowded by men who had removed an access plate to repipe the purging system—it squirted liquid nitrogen into the cannon between shots, cooling the bore—and the women who were working on the command console, Adele was at one of the workstations at the rear bulkhead.

Sun stood at the other, but he wasn’t watching the flat-plate display. He turned to Adele and said, “Do you know what they’re doing to your rig on the hull, mistress?”

“Not really,” said Adele, looking up to the man standing beside her. “As much as they can without it being externally obvious, I suppose. I’m not a hardware expert, as you know.”

She didn’t suggest that he talk to the crew doing the work, because she knew they wouldn’t tell him anything. She wasn’t sure they would tell her anything beyond, “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Mistress Sand, your ladyship.”

Sun, a close-coupled man in his early thirties, had the skill and experience to be Gunner on a battleship. His formal rank on the Princess Cecile was Gunner’s Mate because corvettes like the Sissie had no slot for the exalted rank of Gunner. As for tramp freighters like the Kiesche, in the rare instance when they had to fight it out with a pirate, the captain would probably control the gun.

“Did Six ask you to look over this installation, Sun?” Adele asked.

“No, ma’am, he didn’t,” Sun said with an unexpected look of concern. “I heard from a buddy here in yard that Six, well, ‘Captain Leary,’ he said, was fitting out a ship and they was fitting a bigger gun.”

He gestured to the bow. “Which they’re not, you know, but for lots of things a fifty millimeter is better than a four inch if it cycles fast enough. Which it does with this rig. Nobody’s going to be shooting missiles at a tramp like this, right?”

“I don’t imagine they will,” Adele said, answering out of politeness. She had no more knowledge—or concern—about the question than she did on what the must-have fashion accessory for the season’s debutantes was.

If a missile, tons of metal moving at a measurable fraction of light speed, squarely struck the Kiesche or even a battleship, everybody aboard would be vaporized. There was nothing a signals officer could do to prevent that from happening, so Adele didn’t think about the possibility. If it happened, she would be beyond all care.

“Well, anyway, I dropped by the yard to watch,” Sun said. He frowned and then blurted, “Ma’am, you don’t think Six plans to leave me behind, do you? Because, well, he didn’t call me before he started this.”

He gestured again.

“I don’t know what Six intends for crew,” Adele said carefully, because she really didn’t know. “This business—”

She turned up her right hand.

“—the antennas and the rest of it, they were decided less than twenty-four hours ago. That I can tell you of my own knowledge.”

Sun sighed with obvious relief. “Well, maybe he just didn’t have time,” he said. “Though, ma’am? When you see him, you’ll put in a good word for me, won’t you? I won’t let you down, I swear it!”

“You never have in the past, Sun,” Adele said truthfully. She didn’t answer the precise question, however. She would no more interfere with Daniel’s decisions on personnel than she would try to plot a course through the Matrix.

“Ah, Sun?” she said, since the gunner clearly wanted to talk. “A ship like this doesn’t carry a dedicated gunner, of course. I would think that even in peacetime you could find a place with much higher status.”

“Higher than sailing with Six, ma’am?” Sun said. “That’s a joke! Why, I’ll bet there’s not a gunner on a battleship, senior warrant officer or not, who’s earned a quarter as much as I’ve made from prize money sailing on the Sissie!”

He grinned ruefully and said, “Mind, it didn’t stick to my fingers very well, but that’d be true of battleship pay too, for me at least. And status, that’s not something you buy with florins anyway. Ma’am, I’m a Sissie, and there’s not an RCN bar on Cinnabar where that won’t buy me free drinks for as long as I can lift my arm to pour them down.”


One of the workmen installing the purging system turned. He was a grizzled, heavy-set man with an artificial left foot.

“Amen to that, spacer!” he said, then went back to tightening a clamp.

Adele remembered that the fellow’s name was Hodson, a Tech 2 who’d lost his foot when a broken line swung a Stellite thruster nozzle wide as it was being replaced. That was on Sexburga, years before.

I wasn’t thinking of them as people, Adele realized. She had been talking to Sun as though the others on the bridge were images on a display.

Sun cleared his throat. Very possibly to turn the subject away from a disturbing one to which only Daniel could give an answer, he said, “What’s that you’re looking at, ma’am? She’s not the Kiesche, is she?”

Adele glanced at the flat-plate display. She’d been accessing the main console through her personal data unit, but the bulkhead display was echoing the data she had called up.

“No,” she said. She switched to an external viewpoint—a harbor-control camera.

“This is the Madison Merchant in Portinga Harbor. An acquaintance of mine was thinking of sailing on it. I decided to see what sort of ship it was while I’m waiting here.”

“You can read the diagnostics board of a ship in Portinga Harbor?” Sun said in amazement.

“Yes,” said Adele. She didn’t add, “You’re seeing the data, so obviously I can do that.” Sun was a good man and a shipmate; and he was quite skilled in his own specialty.

Sun frowned at the realtime image of the ship. “Ma’am, could you flip back to the diagnostics?” he said.

“Yes,” said Adele, doing so with a minute twitch of the wand in her left hand. “Is something wrong?”

“Ma’am, with a tramp freighter it’d be a miracle if there wasn’t something wrong,” said the gunner. “Right here, though…”

He looked at Adele with an expression of great concern. “Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t know how good a friend this guy is. But if you care about him, I’d say you ought to tell him not to ship aboard this Madison Merchant. There’s a lot of things about a ship that you’ve got to eyeball. Computers won’t tell you how much metal’s left on the thruster nozzles or the wear on the High Drive motors. But look at the pumps here!”

Adele followed Sun’s pointing finger. “It appears to say 15% flow,” she said. “But the ship is sitting in harbor, so it’s just keeping the reaction mass tanks topped off, isn’t it? Doesn’t most of the water go straight back into the harbor?”

“Right, right,” said Sun, “that’s the flow. But you’re not looking at the pump output up here, see?”

“A moment, please,” Adele said crisply. Even with Sun pointing again, it took her a moment; the data captions weren’t meaningful to her. “This one?” She highlighted a line. “83%?”

“That’s it,” said Sun. “Anything over 80% is in the red zone, and they’re only managing 15% flow from that output. Ma’am, it’s not just that it’s crap performance, it means that the pump’s failing. Pretty quick it’s going to quit dead, and where are you then if you’re landing the sorts of places that a ship like this one lands?”

The little gunner drew himself up with a look of moral outrage, like a priest objecting to the sinfulness of the times. “That was my specialty before I struck for gunner, you know, ma’am?” he said. “Tech 2, Fluid Systems Specialty.”

“I did not know,” Adele said, switching back to the external view of the freighter. “I assure you, I will inform my friend in the strongest possible terms that he should not travel aboard the Madison Merchant.

As indeed I have already done, Adele thought as she closed the connection.

***

Woetjans tilted one of the bank of windows on the outer wall of the fifth-floor office so that she could see the shipyard’s pool without looking through glass. Grimy glass, Daniel noticed. He suspected that Mon spent as little time as possible in this office even when he hadn’t lent it to Daniel and his bosun to put together a crew list.

“For riggers, I’ll just see who hasn’t shipped out since the Sissie landed,” Woetjans said, rubbing her big knuckles together. She was six feet six inches tall, rangy, and stronger than any man of her size whom Daniel had met. “We’ll have our pick.”

Woetjans was also as ugly as a weathered fencepost. She and the riggers which she as bosun commanded worked in suits stiffened with fiberglass armor—hard suits—to protect them from the punctures otherwise certain when they were moving quickly among the raw edges and broken wires of a starship’s rigging.

Rigging suits were a better alternative than watching your air supply vanish into the Matrix, but on the inside they pinched and rubbed the wearer’s every projecting body part from the forehead to the toes. Woetjans’ skin was worn into calluses on cheeks, knuckles and doubtless many of the places which her clothes covered. While that didn’t greatly detract from the bosun’s appearance, it certainly didn’t help.

“I’m only offering standard wages, you know,” Daniel said doubtfully. Spacers weren’t in desperately short supply as they had been for decades while the fleets of Cinnabar and the Alliance battled across the length and breadth of the human universe. Still, every member of the Sissie’s crew was exceptionally skilled. They wouldn’t have any difficulty finding berths.

“And I don’t want you telling them that they’ll have shares in a treasure,” he added. Though they would of course, if there were a treasure. “Cleveland believes the treasure exists and maybe his mother does, mothers being as they are, but I don’t. I’m going to babysit the boy as a favor to a friend. And a friend of Adele’s. Lady Mundy’s.”

“I guess any of those things’d be reason enough,” Woetjans said, returning to the console where Daniel sat. “A friend of yours or the mistress, I mean. And I don’t care what you say—if the people who’ve sailed with you in the past hear that you’re going to look for a treasure, they’ll be sure they’re going to find one. No matter how you warn them.”

Daniel sucked in his lips and nodded agreement. “I know,” he said, “but they’re wrong. Well, they’re all adults.”

He grinned. “As much as I am, anyway. And I guess telling the Sissies that we’re going into a war zone and it’ll be dangerous wouldn’t put any of them off either.”

He felt his muscles tighten. “By Hell and all its demons, we’ve been through some hard places together,” he said. “I’ll tell the world we have!”

And that was the key: been through. The surviving Sissies believed that because of what they’d survived in the past, they didn’t need to fear anything that might happen in the future. That was nonsense; logically they knew how many of their former shipmates had been killed or maimed during the years they had sailed under Daniel Leary—under Six, his communications identifier.

But superstition has a bigger part than logic in the way spacers view their world; and Daniel, a spacer to the marrow of his bones, felt the same childish confidence.

“That leaves us the ship side,” Daniel said. He brought up that portion of the crew list of the Princess Cecile at the moment she landed on Cinnabar after the recent operations in the Macotta Region.

Daniel had wondered whether the Bergen and Associates office would have a decent computer. In fact it had a console salvaged from the Milton, similar to the one on the Kiesche’s bridge. As he rode up the elevator to this top floor, he had noticed the bracing Mon had added to the building. When he saw the massive console, he understood why.

The bosun as Chief of Rig was responsible for all the personnel whose duties were on the exterior of the hull during operations. Woetjans knew the riggers personally, their strengths and weaknesses.

The ship’s internal workings were the province of technicians under the chief engineer, the Chief of Ship. The captain and bosun knew the technicians by sight, but they didn’t have the intimate knowledge of them that Pasternak had. He had been chief engineer on the Milton and since then on the Princess Cecile, though a corvette was far smaller than the normal berth of so senior an engineer.

“Can Pasternak help us?” Woetjans said. “I figure we only need two, three techs on a ship this size, right?”

“I intend to sign on four,” Daniel said firmly. Every spacer on the ship side was one fewer under Woetjans. “And any Academy graduate will be able to turn a hand to the fusion bottle. We’ll have several officers besides me.”

He stretched at the console. “I’m hoping to get a response from Pasternak today with his recommendations,” he said. “To tell the truth, I was hoping to hear something yesterday, but I don’t know how well Pasternak keeps up with message traffic when he’s relaxing at home. I gather he’s something of a celebrity in Wassail County where he comes from.”

“Master?” somebody bawled in the yard outside.

Daniel and Woetjans both went to the windows and looked out, moving faster than a civilian would have believed possible. Hogg stood on the drive which circled the pool. He hadn’t bothered to look for a loud hailer, let alone a wired link to the office console, but he’d cupped his hands into a megaphone.


“Pasternak’s here,” Hogg bellowed. “I sent him up to you.”

“Right!” Daniel said. He waved in case Hogg couldn’t understand the reply, since he wasn’t sure his lungs were as good as those of his servant.

To Woetjans he added, “Well, I guess that explains why I haven’t heard from the Chief sooner.”

She laughed. “In Wassail County, he probably had to take an ox cart to the nearest tram station,” she said.

Daniel smiled as the elevator out in the hallway whined to a halt. That was a exaggeration, but Wassail County certainly wasn’t known as a technological hub.

“Good to see you, Chief,” Daniel called to the spare, slightly stooped man of sixty who got off the elevator. His hairline was moving back. “But you didn’t have to come here, you know. I just needed recommendations for the Power Room crew of a tramp.”

“Your message came and I got here as quick as I could make it,” Pasternak said. The engineer looked more agitated than Daniel had seen him since the time they were outside the ship and under small-arms fire. “I left my duffle bag down with Shorty Graves at the gate. I knew him since he was a wiper. Before his lost his legs, I mean.”

“Chief,” said Daniel, “All I expect from you is recommendations. This isn’t the Sissie, it’s a tramp that’ll be crammed to the gills with a crew of twenty. And, ah—we’re heading for a mining world where there’s a war going on. On the ground, I mean, where we’ll be.”

“Well, I’ve got a recommendation,” Pasternak said, suddenly forceful. “Me. And don’t tell me it’s just a small plant, they can be trickier than a battleship installation. I’ve run both and I know!”

He paused to lick his lips. While Daniel was still deciding how to reply, Pasternak resumed, “If you’re short of crew, I can run the plant myself. That’s all a tramp usually has, and there’s nobody you’ll find who’ll do as good a job as me.”

“I know that, Chief,” Daniel said. “I plan to assign four to the Power Room.”

“Right, that’s plenty,” Pasternak said, nodding. He looked at the bosun and said, “And Woetjans? I’ll make sure that a couple of them have rigging experience so they can double in brass if they have to. You’re signing Sun, right? I’d want him even if you didn’t need a gunner.”

“I’ve talked to Sun, yes,” Daniel said. “Ah—Chief? I’m surprised that you’re so determined to ship on a voyage which I expect to be both unpleasant and unprofitable.”

“Then you’ll have me?” Pasternak said with a sigh of relief. “Thank the blessed heavens!

Daniel smoothed what would otherwise have become a frown. He most certainly had not given the Chief a slot…though he knew he was going to.

“Sir, you don’t know what it’s like at home,” Pasternak said. “My wife, she figures she’s the Squire’s wife now, so she wants me to stay home and play the Squire, you know? And I’m not the bloody Squire, I’m the third son of the mechanic on the Squire’s estate. And Emily can’t see that, she thinks it’s enough to own the estate myself now, which I do, and have more money than anybody else in Wassail County. Which I do too, not that that’s saying much.”

He took a deep breath and then another. Daniel had seen Pasternak running repair operations on ships that had been battered by plasma bolts or, in the case of the Milton, had lost fifty feet of hull to a missile. The Chief had been fiercely decisive, and he hadn’t shown either worry or relief.

“I can’t say, ‘I want to ship out,’ not and not have Emily and the boys shouting so loud you could hear them in Xenos,” Pasternak said. “But I tell them, ‘Six needs me,’ and there’s not a word from any of them. The Squire is off to do his duty, you see. That’s what a gentleman does.”

He smiled raggedly. “Well, that’s what Ivan Pasternak does too,” he said. “Only I’m no bloody gentleman.”

Daniel stepped forward and clasped hands with the engineer. “You’ll do for me, Chief,” he said. “Round up the rest of your team and report back here soonest. I’ll want your report on the plant, not that I don’t trust Mon’s people.”

Pasternak strode back to the elevator. The smile on his face could have lighted a stadium. The door closed behind him and the cage started down.

Daniel grimaced. He turned to Woetjans and said, “Look, I know that for a job like this, you’d expect a younger engineer who didn’t mind mixing it up if things got rough. But demons take me if I could turn down the Chief when he begged me!”

Woetjans shrugged. “It’ll be a cold day in hell that you hear me say that my riggers need help from the ship side in a dust-up,” she said. “And so far as that goes, I figure Pasternak’ll bring Evans, and he’s worth two in a fight anyway.”

She grinned. It made her look even uglier than usual. “That’s mainly because you can’t hurt Evans but hitting him in the head,” Woetjans said. “But with you and Mistress Mundy aboard, nobody else needs to think, right?”

Daniel seated himself again. “I don’t know that I’d go that far,” he said, “but so long as you’re satisfied I suppose it’s all right.”

“Six,” said Woetjans. “I’ve never served with a better engineer than the Chief there. But as for what makes me satisfied—you making the decisions satisfies me. It’s sure worked so far.”