In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (39 page)

She shook her head. “Weeks. Probably longer that it’ll take to fly her to Dree.”

“That’s my thinking, too.”

Pip and Al were wrestling the big cardboard containers into the lock so I stepped aside to get out of their way.

“That’s why I just hired three-hundred-and-eighty-four day workers.”

“What?”

Al and Pip had the same beautifully incredulous look. The chief spoiled it by merely looking confused.

“Well, no. Tomorrow morning, I’ll hire three-hundred-and-eighty-four day workers.”

Pip recovered first. “That’s insane. How are you going to pay them?”

“Already did,” I said, holding up the numbered sponge.

“I get that the number is their place in line,” the chief said. “How is that payment and how are you going to clear this with OMO?”

“Legally, we cannot have an exhibition,” I said. “Mr. Singer made it very clear that the only way we can get them aboard is as passengers or crew. Tomorrow, for a very short period of time, they’ll be crew.”

“You can’t bring crew aboard without having them work,” Pip said. “Davis S. Whatever will slap you with a summons faster than you can say ‘Are you out of your ever-loving mind?’”

“I plan to have them work,” I said. “That’s why they have the sponges.”

“You’re going to have them clean,” Al said.

“Of course. We’ll have to have a day-worker orientation session first. Groups of ten or twenty. For safety considerations we’ll need to show them around the ship. Warn them against playing with the engines. That kind of thing. After the orientation each will be given a part of the ship to clean. We’ll have crew at 0800 tomorrow to ride herd and keep them pointed. Maybe a half square meter of deck or something, then they leave.”

“That many people? You still haven’t said how you’re going to pay them,” Pip said.

“I told you. I already did.” I smiled. “They’re being paid in sponges.”

I heard a voice behind me. “Captain?”

The orbital security detail had lined up behind me at the ramp. “Yes?”

The man licked his lips and wiped his hand on his pants. “We, uh, overheard them talking about what you’re planning for tomorrow?”

“Yes? Is there a problem?”

He shook his head. “Oh, no, Captain.” He paused and glanced back at the handful of guards behind him. “It’s just—we’re off duty at 1800 and have tomorrow off?”

I looked to Al who shrugged. “And?”

“Well, Captain. We were wondering. Could we get sponges, too?”

Chapter Thirty-Eight
Breakall Orbital:
2374, August 9

After sitting in the open lock for a couple of stans, I found myself less than enthusiastic over the bagged sandwiches and the coffee was stone cold. Personally, I’d had about enough of tip-toeing around the mess in my own ship. It was probably just low blood sugar but I headed up to the mess deck. Somebody needed to do something and I was riding high from dealing with the crowd.

When I got to the mess deck, I went straight through to the galley. “Ms. Sharps, where are we on coffee?”

“In the urn, Captain.” She pointed to a rack of mugs. “Those just came out of the dishwasher. They’re probably still hot.” She stepped to the oven and pulled out a tray of honest-to-gods cookies.

The smell went right to my head.

She slipped the paper lining out of the baking tray and slid a fresh load of cookie dough onto it before slotting it into the oven and closing the door. “Something wrong, Captain?” she asked, wiping her hands on the sides of her shipsuit.

“Um. No. Thank you, Ms. Sharps. No. Carry on.” I breezed back out of the galley, taking a mug with me and filling it from the single polished urn. The coffee smelled not quite divine. The ship still had too much of its own nose, but I was able to overlook it in return for the warm life flowing down my throat and into my body.

Pip, Al, and the chief sat at a table, all with mugs in front of them, all looking at me as if I might not have zipped my shipsuit up all the way. Or perhaps had zipped it tightly enough to cut off blood flow to my head.

“Try a cookie, Skipper,” Pip said. “They’re delicious and you missed lunch.”

I took a seat and snagged one from the tray. “Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.”

Al and the chief kept trading glances.

“Something you don’t want to tell me?” I asked.

Apparently, the chief had drawn the short straw. “Have you seen the video tour, Captain?”

“No. It made the rounds while I was out on the docks.”

Al said, “When you get a few ticks, you might want to grab it.”

“That bad?”

“You were quite ...” The chief studied her coffee cup as if the word she needed might be floating on the top. “Eloquent.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

She smiled. “Eloquent is good.”

“It really was good, Cap’n,” Al said. “Really.”

“Then why are you two warning me about it?” I looked to Pip who simply shrugged.

“It’s got a tone that I don’t think you intended.” The chief shook her head. “You’ll have to watch it to see. Later. We still have a ship to prep for tomorrow.”

Her words snapped me back from wherever I’d been. Or perhaps it was the coffee. “Diagnostics still running on the Burleson drive?”

“Yeah, but early results confirm we got legs all the way to the ground.”

“Another fortune cookie?”

“No. Just something my second husband used to say about his first wife. Seemed appropriate.”

“You expecting to divorce the ship?”

“Not any time soon, but I didn’t plan on divorcing him either.” She shrugged.

“Al? Can we do this thing tomorrow?”

“It’ll take some doing, but I think if we limit the number of people who come aboard at once we should be all right. We can put different teams to work in different places. Start with berthing and the san in there with one group, add a couple groups for engineering. The crew coming in seem solid on their records, so if they’re not complete drones they should be able to point and sniff.”

“Pip? What am I missing?”

“I’m worried about the OMO’s reaction. If they see this operation starting up in the morning, will they come down on us like a ton of iron?”

“Should we visit with Singer again?” I asked.

Pip shook his head. “I’d just as soon ask forgiveness for being an idiot than for going against legal advice.”

“Well, what are the possibilities? We’re hiring civilian day workers to clean the ship. That’s done all the time.”

The chief and Al both nodded.

“We’re fulfilling the health and safety requirements by giving them training in how not to blow up the ship while we’re docked.”

They nodded again.

“We have a legitimate need. This ship is filthy. We’re giving them legitimate tasks to do in cleaning it.”

“No arguments there, Captain,” the chief said. “It’s the ‘paying them in sponges’ part.”

“There’s no minimum wage in CPJCT regs.”

“No, but there’s union scale,” Al said.

“For spacers hired on under contract and having signed The Articles. We’re hiring civilians on a fixed-term contract for a very, very short duration.” I shrugged. “I’m no lawyer but CPJCT regs are pretty clear that the contract binds so long as both parties agree to the terms.” I looked to Pip. “Right?”

He shrugged. “As far as I know, it’s never been tested like this.”

“Pull it back around to the other dock,” I said. “Would we be having this discussion if I had hired ten civilians to clean the ship for an hour and offered one credit per person per stan?”

“Nobody would do it for that,” Pip said.

Thinking back to the people in line, I wasn’t so sure he was right. “Assuming I could find ten people willing to work under those terms?”

“As long as we’re not underway, I don’t see why that would be a problem. Nobody would blink if we paid fifty credits an hour but you’re right. The regs are silent on the terms of the contract. I’m not even sure we’d need to prove we had a need for the labor or that they performed any.” He shrugged.

“It’s our company. You’re CEO. It’s our labor. Our ship.”

“Yeah, but it’s their orbital,” Al said.

“No help for it now,” the chief said. “How are we going to do this?”

“Crew comes aboard at 0800, those who’ve accepted,” I said. “I think it’s what? Twenty-one? Deck and engineering.”

“Something like that,” Pip said.

“So, seven teams of three. Four aft in engineering and three forward for berthing, bridge, and passages?”

“And how many day workers per?” the chief asked.

“What would make sense? I can’t see twenty people trying to clean the berthing area. They wouldn’t have room to swing a dead mop,” I said. “Ten?”

“So seventy day workers at a time gives us about five or six rounds before we run out of labor,” Pip said. “What could go wrong?”

The chief shook her head. “No, we’re going at this backwards. We don’t want the most number of people in the ship at a time. We want the smoothest flow of people through the ship.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

She waved a hand. “We got the mess deck cleared away. This should be our staging area. One of our crew teams should be assigned to orientation. So, they go pick up ten day workers, give them a trot through the ship stem to stern and back again. Take them to where they’re going to work and leave them with the crew team there. They go pick up another ten and repeat it. We can swap around that duty once a stan or so.”

“Yeah, that would get old,” Pip said.

“By the time they’ve gotten the other five groups working, they get the first group and escort them off the ship.”

“How long for the orientation tour?” I asked, trying to estimate it.

“We can time it tomorrow and fine tune,” Al said.

I looked to the chief. “How long is VSI?” I asked.

“On this ship? No more than half a stan. Generally closer to fifteen ticks.”

“And that’s a slow walk. Let’s start with a ten-tick tour. Bring them here. A little welcome. Take them up to the bridge. Aft to engineering. What there, chief?”

“Main engine room. Take them down to environmental by way of the kickers. Bring them back up through power and grav, then back through the spine to berthing?”

“Makes sense, then off to their assigned duty station. Give them a few ticks to clean?”

“If we follow that pattern, they’ll be cleaning for a stan and a half, just waiting for the tour guide group to make a cycle.”

“That feels awful fast to me,” Pip said. “I don’t know that I could walk that path in ten ticks, let alone see anything along the way. We need to move more people through the tour faster or we’ll be here the rest of the month. Sixty a stan is over six stans to get them all through.”

“All right,” I said. “A hundred a stan is still going to be four stans to get them through.”

Pip started chuckling. “Even if they only actually work a quarter stan, that’s a lot of labor.”

“Are we making it too hard?” Al asked.

“Maybe,” the chief said.

“At the core of this isn’t actually cleaning the ship, is it?” she asked.

“No,” I said with a shake of my head.

“Anything we can do will be a plus but I don’t really feel like babysitting four hundred day workers who’re only going to give us a few ticks of labor each.”

“Agreed,” I said. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we put a couple of buckets of soapy water along the way and have them clean while on tour. Drag a sponge along the bulkhead as they walk. Maybe hand out some swabs so they can run the swab along the ceiling.” She shrugged. “Walk them in. Show them around. Even if they never touch the bulkhead, we’re ahead of the game because we’re spending next to nothing and four hundred people slopping soapy water around will go a long way. Especially down in berthing. Then walk them out and swap them for the next group.”

“Won’t that leave more of a mess?” I asked.

“Than what we have now?” she asked. “Really?”

“I’m just thinking of the liability if somebody slips on the deck.”

“Add a waiver to the contract,” Pip said. “You ever read yours?”

I shook my head.

“If it’s a problem we just send one or two of our boys and girls out to run a fast damp swab around the corners and pick up the drips. Twenty people running field day routines shouldn’t take forever. By this time tomorrow, the tour’s done. The ship’s had a bit of a spiff. We can get back to getting ready to fly her to Dree,” Al said.

I looked around the table.

The chief nodded. “I like it. We’ll have more cleaning to do after that, but some of it I wouldn’t want a day worker doing anyway.”

Al nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. I don’t really like the idea of turning people loose with wet sponges on the bridge.”

Pip shrugged. “Seems likely to me. Meets all our goals and gets out from under the riot potential.”

“That’s what we’ll do then. Break our boys and girls into pairs tomorrow. One to lead and one to keep stragglers from straggling. A couple people spare, maybe, to relieve the walkers and keep the soap buckets full,” I said.

“Who do you want to stay aboard tonight, Cap’n?” Al asked.

“I will.” I glanced at the chrono. “I’ve got a spare sponge and I’ll get a bucket from the galley. If I order a mattress now, I can probably have the rack ready to take it by the time it gets here.”