In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (18 page)

Pip shook his head. “I didn’t spot anything.”

“Me, either.”

“You’ll have some time before you file on Diurnia. If you spot anything, message us and we’ll amend the files for you,” she said.

“Thank you,” Pip said. “Do you have an associate on the Diurnia Orbital who can facilitate this for us on that end?”

“We do. With your permission, we’ll send your file ahead so that they can make sure that everything is in order before you arrive. I’ll forward the particulars to you once we’ve received confirmation from that end.”

“Excellent,” Pip said. “We’ll be sailing on the
Prodigal Son
this evening.”

She gave a curt nod. “We have the contact information from your notes.” She spared a moment to look to each of us. “If there’s nothing else, gentlemen?”

Recognizing the dismissal when I heard it, I stood. Pip followed suit. Ball rose with us and offered a hand to him and then to me. “It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen. I suspect I’ll be hearing from you if you need anything else?”

Pip grinned. “You most certainly will.”

Alexander opened the door and led us all out to the lobby, Ms. Ball bringing up the rear.

“Thank you again, gentlemen. Safe voyage,” she said.

We took our leave and stepped out into the late morning light.

“Margaret Newmar?” Pip asked as we walked toward Erik James’s warehouse.

“My tai chi instructor,” I said.

“I know who she is, but how does a gardener have ten million credits to invest?”

I looked at him to see if he might be pulling my leg. “Where do you think you are?”

“What do you mean?”

“This town? Do you know the name?”

“Sure. Port Newmar.”

“And the planet?”

“Newmar.”

“Doesn’t that ring any bells?”

He stopped in his tracks. “No.”

“Daughter of the founder.”

“She’s a gardener!” he said.

“She’s also the richest person in the sector. She could buy and sell me and you and your family several times over.”

“But she’s a gardener!”

“She’s also a master of tai chi. She’s rich enough to do anything she likes. She likes gardening.” I shrugged. “Good enough for me.”

Pip blinked. “I had no idea. I thought she was just some sweet little old lady who volunteered to work on the academy grounds.”

“Well, she
is
a sweet little old lady who volunteers to work on the academy grounds. It’s the ‘just’ part that you had wrong.”

He shook his head and we resumed our walk. I chuckled the whole way.

We found Erik James waiting for us, leaning in the door frame of the warehouse and squinting into the sun. He either hadn’t changed or had an extra set of paint-smeared denims. His face lit up in a broad smile when we rounded the corner and started up his path.

“Great! I’m so excited,” he said, waving us in.

We stepped into building and I had to wait a moment for my eyes to adjust.

“Guys, after you left last night, I did some research on solar clipper company logos. I wanted to see what other companies used.”

“Good plan, but I thought we’d agreed on what we wanted.”

“We did. I did that.” He pulled a piece of paper from a basket and laid it down on the workbench. “That’s what we agreed on, right?”

Pip and I bumped shoulders looking down at the image.

“That’s pretty much what I expected,” Pip said. He looked to me.

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s also wrong,” James said.

“Wrong?” Pip asked, his eyebrows shooting up.

“Wrong.”

“Wrong how?” I asked.

He pointed to the far end of his studio. Two tiny patches of white—which were probably actually gray—lay in a single pool of light. One was a smudge of red and the other was a spiral of red. “Which one of those is your logo?” he asked.

“Neither,” Pip said.

“The smudge,” I said understanding where the kid was taking us.

“Right,” he said. “The smudge.”

“What?” Pip asked.

The kid held up the paper from the workbench. “Look, this is nice and all, but it’s too fussy. If you look at anybody else’s logo, it’s not fussy. It’s iconic. A crown with wings. A C in a circle. That’s yours,” he said to Pip. “All of them are simple shapes combined to form an unmistakable pattern.”

I looked back down the room and saw his point immediately.

Pip looked again and craned his neck forward, squinting. He had taken only three steps toward the small images when he stopped with an “Oh!” He turned with a grin. “Once you see it, it’s obvious.”

James pulled out another sheet of paper, this one with the bold spiral iconography in larger scale than the small one on the far wall. Under it he’d lettered “Phoenix Freight.” He stood back and waited.

I reached out to touch the paper. I don’t know if I wanted to make sure it was real or what. It was exactly what we needed and hadn’t known how to ask for.

“It’s ...” My brain couldn’t form the words.

“Perfect,” Pip said, joining me to stare at the image on the paper. Without turning he asked, “Will it work as a shoulder flash?”

James fished in the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled something out, handing it to him. “A buddy down the block does custom embroidery for the tourists. Mostly personalized polo shirts and crap. I asked him to run it up as a shoulder patch. I didn’t know what shape so I had him put it on a simple shield and left room at the top for the ship name.”

Pip fingered the sample for a moment, then handed it to me. “How’d you think to leave room?”

He shrugged and looked at his feet. “I didn’t know what a shoulder flash was, so I looked it up. Then I looked at some samples. Civilian flashes just list, like, the police or fire department name. That usually includes the city or town name. Military flashes list the branch and little else on the official flash, but some of them had ship names and designators as well.” He grinned. “Some of them looked pretty elaborate.”

“Some of them are,” Pip said.

“You can dress that one up with some gold thread or something, but you said something last night. Something like you should be able to look at the shoulder and know who goes with which ship.”

“This is good work,” I said, fingering the flash for a moment before handing it back to Pip.

“Albert said it was a simple setup, one of the simplest. He just ran it up on a piece of scrap for me.” He looked down again. “I know you didn’t ask for it, but I wanted to see what it would look like.”

Pip grinned. “Do you have the graphics files we need?”

“Oh, sure.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a data cube, and held it out. “Both designs are on there. I gave you the one you asked for and the other one. Albert added the machine layout for the shoulder flash with that design on it. He said it’d work on most commercial embroiderers.”

Pip took the cube and wrapped his fingers around it. “If not, I’m sure the graphic is enough to jump-start the process.”

The kid beamed. “I still can’t believe my design is going to be on the side of a space ship.”

“Mr. James, your design is going to be on the side of a space
fleet
before we’re done,” Pip said. He winked at me.

“What do we owe you?” I asked.

He rummaged around on the work bench for a moment and pulled up an invoicing tablet. “I—uh—ran up the invoice. We didn’t agree on a price before you left last night.”

“Sorry about that,” Pip said. “We were just so excited.” He took the offered tablet and frowned at it for a moment before handing it to me.

I took it and looked at the total. I looked at the designs on the table and then at the two little images across the room and shook my head. “This is not anything close to satisfactory, Mr. James.” I handed it back to him with a glance a Pip who had a grin hiding behind his hand.

“Oh. Uh. I can make an adjustment. It’s just the normal price, but if it’s too much—” He took the tablet back from me.

“You misunderstand, Mr. James. It’s not too much. It’s not nearly enough. We are purchasing these graphics from you for the sole use of our company in perpetuity. You’ve charged us for the paper to print it on. We wish to purchase the rights to use it however we deem necessary.”

He looked up and the lost expression on his face made me take a couple of stanyers off my estimate of his age. “Well, uh. I’ve never done that before.” He looked from me to Pip and back. “How much were you thinking?”

“Add a couple of zeros to the end of that,” I said.

“Then double it,” Pip said.

“That’s more than I make in a year,” James said.

I shrugged. “Not my problem, Mr. James. We’ll need a receipt for our records.”

“And we’re in rather a hurry,” Pip said. “If you’d make those adjustments, we’ve got a ship to catch.”

The poor kid fumbled it a couple of times before he got it right, but I thumbed the invoice and sent the receipt to Pip’s tablet.

We left him staring at the invoice, his jaw slack and his head shaking back and forth like a loose shutter in a light breeze.

At the door, Pip stopped. “Oh, Mr. James?”

He looked up. “Yes?”

“Thank you.”

His breath whooshed out. “Thank you!”

We closed the door and headed for the shuttle stop.

“Was that too extravagant?” Pip asked.

I looked over at the shoulder flash that he still held. “We got the better of that deal,” I said.

He looked down at it, flexing it between his fingers. “Yeah. I guess we did.”

Chapter Eighteen
Port Newmar:
2374, June 9

Pip and I rode the noon shuttle back to campus. We had a few stans before we had to catch the orbital shuttle from the academy’s spaceport.

“How soon do you want to go up?” I asked as we separated at the cottages.

“There’s a shuttle at 1700. We can get dinner upstairs and that gives me time to finish wrapping up the loose ends from the convention.”

“I’ve got to see my therapist in a stan, so that’ll work.”

He waved a hand and disappeared into his cottage while I confronted the mess that remained in mine.

The frantic stan or so I’d spent in the morning had crystallized my thinking on what might be important. I went to my “Keepers” trunk and went through everything there one more time. Rank insignia. Master’s license. Uniforms across a range of utility.

I swapped the civvies I’d worn to town for a set of undress khakis and addressed the unruly pile of castoffs. That uneasy feeling I’d thrown away something I shouldn’t have still nagged. I had plenty of time before my appointment with Gains, so I spent it pulling everything out of the discard trunk and making sure I’d not left anything in the pockets nor wrapped anything important in a cast-off garment.

Within half a stan, I found myself standing with an empty grav-trunk and a pile of odds and ends of clothing. Rich or not, I had qualms about discarding the trunk. The clothing would go into the recyclers and be extruded as fresh fabric and fittings, but I’d paid good credits for the trunk. I suspected Gains would say my family-of-origin frugality interfered with my new reality.

For a moment I wondered if Pip wanted it.

Then I knew what I’d use it for. I got on the network, placed an order with the academy store, and paid for expedited delivery. It took a bit of math for me to calculate just what I needed, but I was grinning when I latched the door behind me and headed for Mal Gains’s office.

He greeted me as always and after satisfying the preliminaries got down to it.

“You’ve accomplished a lot in a short time,” he said.

“I’ve got more to do, but I’ll have to deal with it later.”

“You’ll manage. Tell me about this deal you’ve got going?”

“Pip and I are going into business. Again. It’s going to be fun, I think.”

“I don’t usually hear people talking about going into business as fun.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, well. I know it’s going to be a lot of work. Long hours. Probably some disappointment. We’re still waiting to find out if we have the funding we need. And I’m going to have to deal with the
Chernyakova
again.”

“What made you decide to do that?”

“Pip made me see that a lot of my emotional response was fear. Rationally, it’s just a ship. A ship with an unfortunate past, but just a ship. I know how to fly that ship. How to make it safe.”

“You’re going to exorcise your demons,” Gains said.

“Sounds silly.”

“Why?”

“It’s such a cliché isn’t it? Face your fears and defeat them.”

“What are those fears?”

“That I might make the same mistakes they did. That I could kill people out of negligence or stupidity or just bad luck.”

“Are those real fears? Or just something you’ve layered on to help you deal with the horror.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know how I’d know. The
Chernyakova
was pretty horrible.”

“I’m not talking about that horror.”

He didn’t say it very loudly but it echoed in my head.

The flashes of reality as I’d watched Greta die in front of me while I lay helpless beside her on the deck all came rushing back. I felt the room compress around me, like I was about to pass out from blood loss again. I had to force myself to focus on breathing.