Ships of My Fathers (9 page)

“How often do you make it to Taschin?” Michael asked.

“First time, probably the last, too. Taschin doesn’t have enough trade to warrant something like the
Heinrich
. S&W normally serves Taschin with some smaller vessels. No, I diverted the
Heinrich
here specifically to get you.”

“Seems like a bit of a waste.”

“You’re family, Michael. Family is worth it.”

Docking took longer than it should have, but it always does. His luggage was checked through to the
Heinrich
, so Michael did not have anything to carry as they left the shuttle. They were not all that far from the
Heinrich
, so it was a short walk. This was due less to luck and more to the small size of Taschin station. All the docking was on a single ring, so the average walk from ship to ship was only a quarter turn.

From inside the station, the
Heinrich
looked no different than any other ship. It was simply a personnel airlock and an array of cargo locks. They walked up to the airlock, and a man in his thirties snapped to attention.

“Welcome back, sir.”

“Good to be back, Karl. Ship status?”

“Load-in should be done within the hour. Pushback scheduled for fourteen hundred local, fifteen forty-two by ship clock.”

“Excellent,” Hans replied. “Karl, this is your third cousin, Michael.”

The man stepped forward and extended his hand. “Karl Roth, good to meet you, Michael. Station comm said your bags will be here shortly, so I’ll see to them.”

Michael took the hand. Karl had a firm grip. “Third cousin, right.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve got a week before they test you on it.”

Michael chuckled and followed his uncle inside.

The docking tube ran about thirty meters, and the gravity inside was variable, heavier towards each end but almost gone in the middle. Michael had run into this kind of thing before and took his cue from Hans in front of him as to when he should be gripping the handrails and when he could trust his own feet.

The airlock at the other end was pristine. It was one of the ones that pulled in before hinging over. It was a better failsafe design, but it made the airlocks bigger, something smaller ships like the
Sophie
could not afford. The inner door had the same design, but it looked like it also had a second sliding hatch that could be closed more quickly. Everywhere he looked, the metal gleamed and the white fittings were spotless.

Inside, two crew were waiting, both standing, one behind a desk and another in the hallway. “Good afternoon, sir,” said the closer one.

“Billy, this is my nephew, Michael.”

They shook hands, and the other one stepped forward from the hallway. “And I’m Charlie Feldman, systems lead on the first watch. If I did the math right, I think we’re second cousins.”

Michael shook his hand as well. “Charlie, ok.”

“Don’t worry—”

“I know. I’ve got a week before they test me.”

Charlie looked back to Hans. “He’s going to fit right in, sir.”

“All right, Charlie, get him down to Harry for some uniforms, let him grab a bite, show him to quarters, and give him the tour.”

“The full tour?”

“No, keep to the fore. We’ll save the drive for another time.”

“Aye, sir. Come on, Michael, follow me.”

They went down the hall, passed through two open pressure doors, took a left, and then went down two sets of steep stair-ladders, and another set of turns. Michael had known the
Sophie
well enough to navigate it blind, upside down, and in zero gravity, but here he was already lost.

Their destination seemed to be the laundry, but the sign above the hatch said “Quartermaster.”

“Harry, you in here?” Charlie called out.

She came out from behind racks of uniforms and undershirts. “Hey, Charlie. Is this our new guy?”

Michael stepped forward and extended his hand, but she pulled him in for a quick hug. “Welcome to the family,” she said. “I’m Harriet, but most folks call me Harry.”

“Ok, why Harry?”

She chuckled and pointed to the stitched name patch on her shirt. It read “HARRIET THROCKMORTON”, the letters pressed together so close he could barely make them out. “It wasn’t until I got this post that I was finally able to tweak one of the machines into fitting it all in there. At my first posting, all I got was Harry Throckmo. Thankfully only the Harry stuck.”

“He’s going to need the usual,” Charlie said, “uniforms, personals, environmental, and I’m pretty sure Captain will want him to have a dress uniform.”

“No problem. Department?”

Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

Harry pulled a measuring tape out of her pocket and started stretching it across him in several places, rattling off numbers as she did it. “You’ve got big feet, Michael. Was your dad tall?”

“No,” he replied. Malcolm had come in well short of two meters. Then he caught himself. “Actually, I guess I don’t know.”

“Oh that’s right. You’re Peter’s kid.” She went on to measure the girth of his knees. “He was a tall one. Damn, but your e-suit is going to take a few days to size right.”

“You knew him?”

Harry stood up again and started jotting notes on a pad. “Not really. I met him once, long time back.”

Michael turned to Charlie. “And you?”

Charlie nodded. “Your mom, too. I was at the wedding.”

Gravity seemed to shift a bit, but nothing was wrong with the ship. It was only Michael. The idea of the wedding was a little too surreal, his mother in a gown exchanging vows with someone other than Malcolm.

“You okay?” Charlie asked.

“It’s a lot to take in.”

Harry had returned with a small crate filled with clothing, boots, toothpaste, and so on. “You didn’t know?”

Michael shook his head. “So these are my uniforms?”

“Nah, just a rough fit from stores. I have to make some adjustments, so it’ll be a shift or two before I can get you your real uniforms, but this ought to get you through today.”

He took the crate from her. “Thanks. It was good to meet you, Harry.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “See you around, Michael, and don’t worry.”

He nodded, already starting to worry. “Yeah, a week, right?”

“You’ll be fine.”

Charlie led him back, past the stairs, down another turn, and pressed a button on the wall. “Ladders are a bitch if you’ve got something to carry, so it’s ok to use the lift.”

“Say, Charlie, is everyone in on this whole ‘week until they test you’ joke?”

“Oh, it’s no joke,” he replied as the lift chimed and slid open.

Michael followed him in. “You’re serious?”

“Deadly serious,” he answered. The lift showed five decks. Charlie selected deck four. “The crew is a team, a family in a very real sense. Say we have some emergency and we’re all running around in our environment suits, we can’t have people guessing at who’s who.”

Michael bit back his panic. “But that’s over sixty people.”

“Sixty-four, actually, and you’re one of them. Trust me, you’ll do fine.”

Michael nodded and took a deep breath. “If you say so.”

Hans strolled into his first officer’s ready room and signaled the door to close behind him. “He’s aboard,” he announced with satisfaction.

“No trouble with the locals then?” Felicia Corazon asked. She had been reviewing a systems report, but she set it aside.

“Nothing significant. I got a little brush back from one of his old crew, but I dangled the possibility of employment in front of him, and he knuckled under.”

Felicia raised an eyebrow. “Are you posting him here?”

“Oh heavens no,” Hans replied. “One of Fletcher’s thugs? No, I flagged him through the entire company network, but I suppose I should arrange something for him. Maybe we can foist him off on Takasumi Lines with some kind of doctored-up recommendation. We still owe them for that fiasco last year. Berkshire was it?”

She nodded. “Benny Berkshire. If only he had been as competent as his forged ratings. Do you need me to take care of it?”

He waved it off. “I’ll file something myself when we reach Cenita. No, for now I want you to focus on Michael. Have you had a chance to review his personnel jacket yet?”

“I downloaded his public file from the standards registry before we left Ballison. If it’s accurate, he’s got an impressive set of ratings for someone so young.”

“It might be. He’s got Peter’s ambition, I’ll grant you that, but I don’t know if it has translated into as much skill as his jacket would imply. Fletcher is the signatory on most of those ratings, so I don’t put much faith in them.”

Felecia shrugged. “I’ll see to it he’s put through his paces. The department heads should be able to sniff out any fishy ratings.”

“Good enough, but for now let’s try to treat him some respect. He may still have the stink of Fletcher on him, but he’s a Schneider. I want him to know that means something.”

“Understood, sir. Will you be killing the fatted calf for dinner tonight? Prodigal son and all that?”

Hans chuckled. “Excellent idea, Ms. Corazon. He is indeed our prodigal son, once lost, but now he is found.”

Michael finished unpacking in his quarters. He actually had his own stateroom. It was small, probably no more than six or seven square meters, but he had figured that coming in on a ship with this many crew he would have been in a bunk or at least had roommates. His room back on
Sophie
had been a little bigger, but this one was laid out better.

The bed was against the side wall, snugged up between the far wall and the side of his desk. The bed had a padded slope by the wall, letting it double as a sofa. His desk chair was on a forked groove, letting him reposition it several ways. It also reclined, which was an unexpected bonus. The room even had a fold-down bench seat across from the bed for a visitor. He had a sink by the door, and plenty of storage in the closet and the cabinets above and below his bed. He started to wish he had brought more of his things from
Sophie
, but he imagined he could fill up the space with other things soon enough.

The only amenity he missed from his old room on
Sophie
was his own toilet and shower. Those were at the end of this hall, and he had to share the banks of them with the other twelve crewmembers on this wing. Still, given the spread of shifts and the number of stalls, it seemed unlikely to cause a bottleneck. Plus, he mused, at least he would not have a toilet in his room if the gravity went out. He had had to clean up that mess too many times back on
Sophie
.

The rest of the tour had gone well, but he still had no firm feel for his way around the ship. At best, he could remember the decks. The bridge and control systems were up on deck one. Crew quarters, mostly the officers, were up on deck two. Deck three was the largest with the galley, the gym, the theater, and access to the long shaft running down the cargo section to the drives. It also had the main airlock and a ring of escape pods.

Michael’s quarters were down on deck four with the bulk of the rest of the crew. It turns out no one was in bunks. Two crewmembers were paired up as roommates, but it was voluntary. “Mark and Sylvia Carruthers got married last year,” Charlie had explained, “so we reconfigured a couple of staterooms to give them a double.”

Deck five had laundry and a couple of other support systems, but mostly it was dominated by the forward environmental systems. “CO2 has a tendency to sink, so there’s a slight efficiency to be gained putting the scrubbers down here at the bottom of the gravity gradient. Plus, the water treatment stinks,” Charlie had said with a grin, “and this puts it as far from officer country as practical.”

They had paused at the galley long enough to get Michael a sandwich, and they had ridden out the pushback from the station and the initial maneuvers while he ate it. It all felt very smooth. He could not explain it, but he had always assumed that the larger ships would be full of creaks and shudders when they moved. Apparently not. The transition to tach drive had been so seamless that had it not been for the announcement, he would never have noticed it during his unpacking.

Reluctantly, he hung up his old uniform in the closet with the
Sophie’s Grace
arm patch facing out. His new
Heavy Heinrich
uniform was nice but largely unadorned. The blue and gray were vaguely reminiscent of the one in his mother’s portrait, but the only symbols were the “S&W” logo for Schneider and Williams and the
Heavy Heinrich
arm patch featuring an overly muscular arm holding a hammer against a starscape. Still, he put it on. Charlie had passed along word that the captain and first officer were hosting a dinner in honor of his joining the crew. The least he could do is wear their uniform.