“So, you’re still trading, but you’re keeping it quiet.”
He nodded with a little shrug.
We finished the clean up, and I went to prep for more coffee. I called back over my shoulder as I measured grounds into the filter.
“So, how’s it working out?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Well, I’ve only made a few hundred creds, but I haven’t lost any yet.”
“Did you pick up something on Neris?”
He looked at me like I was much stupider than I usually felt. “What do you think?”
“Come on, tell me.”
He lowered his voice. “Granapple brandy.”
“What?” I tried not to laugh. I didn’t want to be like those on the Duchamp but granapple brandy wasn’t exactly a luxury good.
“Grishom’s, thirty-years-old and aged in the cask. I have four, one-liter bottles.”
I practically choked. “But that’s a hundred creds a bottle,” I said in shock.
He nodded.
I just stared at him but then I made the connection. “That’s why you weren’t on liberty when I came aboard?”
He nodded again. “It took all my creds to buy them. I made one trip down when we made port to pick them up from my Aunt Annie. She’d found and held them for me.”
“Aunt Annie?”
“Anne O’Rourke. She’s the Union Hall Manager. You met her, didn’t you?”
“Small galaxy…hey, wait. How’d you get them under your mass limit? You must have almost nothing on board.”
He laughed. “Probably more than you. Four liters is only a bit over four kilos. Even with the glass bottles and presentation cases, it was under eight. How much mass did you bring up?”
He was right. “Less than ten kilos.”
I realized I could have done the same thing, except I didn’t know anything about private trading and didn’t have four hundred creds to spare.
“What will they bring you on Darbat?” I found the whole thing fascinating.
He shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. It depends on the market. Last one sold there went for two hundred creds, but a lot could have changed between now and then. I have a restaurant connection. He’ll give me a hundred and a quarter a piece. That’s my fallback.”
“Nice margin.”
Pip gave a self-depreciating shrug. “I doubled my money going into Neris.”
“Wow! Really? What’d you carry?”
“Computer memory chips.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Is there that much market for them?”
“You wouldn’t think so, but yeah. I was able to buy a case back on Gugara for almost nothing. Neris Company controls all the cargo coming into the stores there and they apply a hefty tariff. It means company people pay much higher prices there than anywhere else. It really makes it hard to live there and difficult to save enough to buy a ticket off-planet.”
“I noticed.”
“It also means that a case of memory chips, without the tariff, can be turned around with a pretty good margin. It’s lightweight, high demand, and practically liquid.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“I’m from a trader family. It’s in my blood.” He grinned.
“You’re full of surprises tonight.” I raised an eye brow at him. “But what’s a trader family?”
“Well, Aunt Annie has been a trader for going on forty stanyers. She’s been taking a little down time at the Union Hall, but I suspect she’ll be back on a ship within a few months. My father owns two ships now. I grew up analyzing trade and traffic patterns on the galley table on his first ship.”
I knew I was gaping, but I couldn’t stop myself. “You grew up on a ship?” I tried to picture kids on the Lois. “How’d you get aboard?”
He smacked me playfully. “Not all ships are like this one, buffoon. Dad and Mom are the owner-operators of a small hauler over in the Sargass Sector. It’s small, just a few hundred tons. They run light freight out to the hydrogen miners and asteroid prospectors. We kept up on the trade data from the surrounding area because sometimes it was actually cheaper to take a jump over to Deeb to pick up something the clients wanted than to go all the way in-system to trade on Sargass Orbital. Depending on the orbits, it could be as much as three weeks into Sargass, but only four standays out to the jump. Deeb maintained an orbital that was usually only eight standays in on the other side. We could get to Deeb, do the trade, and be almost all the way back before we could have made it to the Sargass Orbital.”
“So, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you still working with your father?”
Pip didn’t answer right away and when he did, he sighed first. “He casts a big shadow. I wanted to get out from under it. Aunt Annie is my mother’s sister and helped me get onto the Duchamp.”
“But if you grew up on ships, how could you have been fooled into the scrubber?”
Pip looked embarrassed. “I was playing the part of a wide-eyed innocent. I didn’t want them to know I was an indie brat So, I pretended I’d never been on a ship before. The scrubber thing got out of hand, but I couldn’t get out of it without letting on that I was playing with them.”
“What tangled webs we weave…” I quoted.
“Something like that.”
“So being an indie brat isn’t a good thing?”
“Not to professional spacers. There’s a bias and it can get pretty ugly, so don’t bring it up, okay?”
“But you’re a professional spacer now.”
“Right. Some professional. I’m still on quarter share after more than a full stanyer.”
“Well, if you picked a specialty…”
“But which one? I really don’t like environmental, and I just don’t have the chops for engineering. I’m an analyst, not an engineer. I’ve tried the cargo exam, but I just can’t seem to pass it.”
“Why not cook? You seem to do well with the inventory and accounting.”
“True.”
“I’m pretty sure Cookie would help. He likes ya and the two of you seem to work well in the galley.”
He nodded. “But I don’t know much about cooking. I didn’t even know how to make decent coffee.” He cast me an evil glance out of the corner of his eye.
“Bah, just look at it like a trade problem. Recipes are easy to come by and cooking is just imagination and technique. You’ve got plenty of imagination and the technique will come if you practice. Running the mess is more about getting the best food for the budget and that’s what trading is, isn’t it?”
I saw in his eyes that something clicked. I could practically hear the gears turning. “You know? That might work.” He smiled at me. “For a greenie, you’re darn clever.”
I smiled back. “Just trying to do what I can. You’ve been helping me so much the least I can do is repay the favor.”
“Well, this might be the answer I needed, Ish, thanks again.” He paused for a moment. “Dangle’s knees, I need to unwind a bit. Maybe get in a little workout and then have a nice sauna before sack time. Let’s head down to the gym.”
“The gym?” I didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him. “Are you telling me that after all this time, you didn’t tell me this ship has a gym?”
Chapter 7
Neris System
2351-September-16
You would think that I’d be observant enough to realize that all the passages I walked past, through, and around each day on my way to and from the mess deck should lead somewhere. Truthfully, I always felt just a bit lost on the ship. When I didn’t have a guide like Pip, I stayed on the paths I knew.
The gym occupied most of the deck directly under the crew berthing. Compared to the areas of the ship I’d seen, it was huge. The overhead was twice as high, and my spatial sense told me that we occupied an area almost as large as the galley, mess deck, and berthing areas combined. I looked at Pip incredulously. “Is this normal?”