Double Share (45 page)

“Mr. Maloney?” I called. “There is one thing.”

He stopped and turned back to me. “Yes, Mr. Wang?”

“Can you get me an introduction to a good tailor here on Diurnia?”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-NINE
D
IURNIA
O
RBITAL
2358-
N
OVEMBER-26

Say what you will about how boring it was to be underway, being docked for a week was enough to drive us crazy. The watches were long and really dull. I really felt sorry for the brow watch standers. Those people got to sit in the drafty lock for twelve stans at a time and watch nothing happen. They got relieved for meals and head breaks and that was about it. It was a good chance to study, but deadly dull after the eighth or ninth one.

Our time in port was not all dull.

The first excitement involved cleaning the cabin. There was precious little that Rossett had left that was personal. Mel appointed a couple of enginemen to help Arletta and I pack and ship what little there was. Bayless and Simon certainly knew their way around the place and I sensed a certain satisfaction in the way they
almost
folded Rossett’s clothing and jammed it into the grav trunks. Arletta and I pretended not to notice when they discovered the video archive. The captain apparently liked to keep a record of his “interviews,” and it’s possible a few items were damaged in transit.

We never did find out what the captain had been doing in there for week after week. I did discover that he had a huge personal archive of books. Most of them seemed to be romance novels written by the same author—Lenora Rossetti. I copied his entire library out of the ship’s system and burned the archive onto a permanent medium. That all went into the grav trunk too.

It didn’t take long to clear the stuff out of the cabin, and when the four of us were done and the trunks locked for transport, we got Ulla to organize a cleaning party. Fredi took some interest in this part of the activity and was soon up to her armpits in soapy water with the rest of them.

Two days after that, Mr. Maloney was back to announce the appointment of Captain Frederica DeGrut. It was a surprise to most of the crew, but I was pleased beyond all measure. She was a marvel. I followed her around just to watch her work with the crew. If she’d been an invisible entity before, now she was a glowing star.

One of the big surprises for me was Apones. I figured that once Fredi was made captain, he would be gone. She did something to him, though. I don’t know exactly what. It had started with that very first watch when she’d made him change his shipsuit. She never raised her voice to him again, as far as I ever heard. But while he may have been Burnside’s man before, he was Fredi’s now. He was universally polite, wore a clean shipsuit all the time, and bounced to Fredi’s beck and call. We were all a little leery, but Fredi appeared serenely unconcerned.

“He’s a good boy who fell in with the wrong crowd,” she told me one day when I asked. “He just needs a strong hand and high expectations.”

Of course, once there was a captain in place, things moved a little more expeditiously. Fredi promoted Arletta to the first mate position and there was another party to clean out Burnside’s space. Not as big as the cabin, it was still the largest of the staterooms and had a private bath. They dumped the loose clothing and miscellaneous personal effects into a grav trunk it and trundled it off to the DST office for disposition. Then the cleaning crew applied copious amounts of soap, water, disinfectants, and other cleaners to every surface.

Fredi and Arletta moved into their staterooms and their old ones were cleaned as well. For some reason, nobody felt the need to fumigate those. A simple sweep and swab had been sufficient.

While we were docked, some of the crew took advantage of their new ratings to find better jobs, but there weren’t as many as I had expected. Mallory was one of the first to leave which left room for Betts or Jaxton to move up. Fredi asked them to decide which one would get the new job, and Betts bowed to Jaxton’s seniority. I thought he’d leave the ship to find his own slot, but he didn’t.

When the dust had settled, we lost about five or six people, but that made room for some of our newer ratings to actually move up to their new pay grades.

More problematic was finding a new second mate to replace Arletta. There was not a plethora of qualified seconds floating around Diurnia, but within a couple days, they found a skinny drink of water with shocking red hair, feet the size of gunboats, and a sense of humor that was, frankly, disturbing. He went by the unlikely name of Chauncey Schott. It was inevitable that his nickname was “Long.”

Eventually we got the personnel issues resolved, the crew roster filled, and a cargo lined up. I could already feel the ship beginning to come to life. I stood on the bridge waiting for the last in port backups to finish when the captain came up the ladder and we stood together looking aft out into the Deep Dark.

“It’s a lovely sight, isn’t it, Ishmael?” she asked.

“I haven’t grown tired of it yet, Captain,” I told her with a satisfied smile. “When I first started I thought I might.”

I saw her smile in the faint reflection of the glass. Seeing her standing there, eyes gleaming in the light of the displays, serene in the mantle of captain, she was magnificent. I felt honored to be in her company and slipped a small bundle from the pocket of my shipsuit and offered it to her.

She looked at the small cloth package in my open palm and then at me. “What’s this?”

“I think this belongs to you, Captain. I’ve been carrying it for a long time.”

“What is it?” she asked, curiosity lighting her face.

I held my hand up closer to her. “Open it and see.”

She lifted it delicately and examined the string and wrappings in the lowered light, holding it up and turning it this way and that. She looked at me and said, “Thank you.”

“You don’t yet know what it is,” I said in chuckling protest.

Her face crinkled in a smile and she pulled the string that loosed the knot. She carefully unrolled the soft fabric from around the small figure within. I heard her breath catch as the glinting lights from the display gleamed off the polished wood and reflected on the bit of shell at the heart.

In her hand, an owl sat perched on a stylized limb, the lambent glow around us showing the delicately carved feathering and the graceful curves of the head and back. The talons gripped the wood, each toe articulated to show the power in that wooden grasp.

“It’s a whelkie?” she asked.

“Yes, Captain.”

“I’ve heard of them,” she said, wonder in her voice as she turned it this way, catching the light. “I thought they were a myth.”

I held up my dolphin. “No myth, Captain,” I said.

Her eyes widened slightly at the smooth, oiled wood of the dolphin, and she glanced into my own and back to the dolphin, then back to her owl. “How…?” she asked.

“Long story, but the
Lois
visited St. Cloud while I was with her. I got these on that trip along with some others. I intended them as trade goods, but I was never able to sell them.”

“This is worth a fortune, Ishmael,” she said blinking in realization of what she held in her hand. “I can’t possibly—”

“Do you know the story of whelkies, Captain?” I asked her.

“Story?” she asked.

“Legend has it that the whelkie finds the person who needs it,” I said.

“Then what does it do?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a kind of totem, perhaps a spirit guide. The shaman carves the spirit of the animal out of the wood and places the shell to give it heart. The deeper the purple of the shell, the more powerful the spirit.”

My words sounded odd in that technological space. Two people surrounded by the flickering fire of display monitors and console repeaters, we stood in the eternal night of space, in a bubble of air held by fragile metal, glass, and composite shell. I felt a moment of almost dizziness as I realized that while the planet seemed huge when compared to the ship, they weren’t that much different in size when compared to the vastness of the Deep Dark.

Both just pin-pricks of life.

Both equally fragile.

“Why me?” she asked at last, breaking the silence that held us together.

“I don’t know,” I answered. I felt the smile tugging my lips. “It just seemed right to me.”

She gazed at it for a moment, and then looked at me. “Thank you, Ishmael,” she said at last.

“You’re welcome, Captain.”

We stood there on the bridge, the moment passing. Reality edged back into the world around us. She carefully rewrapped the whelkie and tied it up again, slipping it into a pocket of her shipsuit. I just held my dolphin, as I had so often before. The smooth wood felt warm from my touch.

“Why did you decide to go to the academy?” she asked after a couple of ticks.

I snorted. “Alys Giggone is a very persuasive woman.”

She chuckled a little at that. “Yes, she is, but still…why?”

“We had a saying on the
Lois McKendrick
. We used to say ‘Trust Lois’. Whenever things went wrong, or right, or east or west, and we didn’t know what to do, we’d say ‘Trust Lois’ and everybody would do what needed to be done. And by doing so we always pulled through.”

“So, you applied that principle to going to the academy?”

“Yes, Captain. A lot of people thought I should go. People I respected. People I loved. They thought it was something that would be good for me, and even if I couldn’t see it, I needed to ‘Trust Lois.’ So, off I went to the academy.”

She looked at me for several heartbeats, weighing me with her gaze.

“You’re a dangerous man, Ishmael Wang.” she said at last. “A very dangerous man.”

B
OOKS IN THE
G
OLDEN
A
GE OF THE
S
OLAR
C
LIPPER
S
ERIES

T
RADER
T
ALES

Quarter Share
Half Share
Full Share
Double Share
Captain’s Share*
Owner’s Share*

S
HAMAN
T
ALES

South Coast*
Cape Grace**

F
ANTASY
B
OOKS BY
N
ATHAN
L
OWEL

Ravenwood
* Available in audio (itunes and podiobooks.com), print and ebooks coming soon
**Forthcoming

T
HE
G
OLDEN
A
GE OF THE
S
OLAR
C
LIPPER

If you enjoyed this novel, you will be happy to learn that…

Double Share is the fourth in the six book
Trader
series from The Golden Age of the Solar Clipper. Nathan’s series tells the tales of everyday men and women, real people doing ordinary things and forging bonds of friendship while traveling the stars in the Deep Dark. It is a continuing story of Ishmael Horatio Wang—a broke, uneducated, orphan from a backwater planet at the edge of no where. He’s not a “hidden prince.” and he wasn’t adopted. He’s just an average Joe trying to make a living.

This series was originally released as Podcasts, an audio format distributed for free (donations accepted and appreciated) where episodes are released serially. All six of the podiobooks in the series are available now and can be listened to at
www.podiobooks.com
. Ridan Publishing plans to publish each book in the Trader series in both printed and ebooks formats and editing is underway. If you wish to be notified as the books are released please send an email to:
[email protected]
and we’ll let you know when they become available.

Nathan’s stories are some of the most popular out of the hundreds of offerings from
www.podiobooks.com
, and as of May 2012 he held 6 out of 10 Top Overall Ratings by Votes (#2 Double Share, #3 Quarter Share, #4 Full Share, #5 Captain’s Share, #6 Half Share, #9 Owner’s Share) and 2 out of 10 Top Overall Rating (#8 Double Share, #10 Captain’s Share).

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Nathan Lowell has been a writer for more than forty years, and first entered the literary world by podcasting his novels. His sci-fi series, The Golden Age of the Solar Clipper grew from his long time fascination with space opera and his own experiences shipboard in the United States Coast Guard. Unlike most works which focus on a larger-than-life hero (prophesized savior, charismatic captain, or exiled prince), Nathan centers on the people behind the scenes—ordinary men and women trying to make a living in the depths of space. In his novels, there are no bug-eyed monsters, or galactic space battles, instead he paints a richly vivid and realistic world where the “hero.” uses hard work and his own innate talents to improve his station and the lives of those of his community.
Dr. Nathan Lowell holds a Ph.D. in Educational Technology with specializations in Distance Education and Instructional Design. He also holds an M.A. in Educational Technology and a BS in Business Administration. He grew up on the south coast of Maine and is strongly rooted in the maritime heritage of the sea-farer. He served in the USCG from 1970 to 1975, seeing duty aboard a cutter on hurricane patrol in the North Atlantic and at a communications station in Kodiak, Alaska. He currently lives in the plains east of the Rocky Mountains with his wife and two daughters.