"How long do you think he'll live, Ish?

"One thirty, one forty, maybe,"

"So fifty makes him old? He's still in the first half of his life."

She had me on that one and she knew it. "Okay, I guess you're right. But what's your point?"

"You consider him an old s.p.a.cer because you don't have anybody to compare him to. The only people older are the captain and Mr. Maxwell. Francis is actually still a pretty young man."

I thought back to mom's colleagues at the university and realized she was right. Many of them had been over a hundred and still teaching full-time.

"There are older people working in the Deep Dark but you don't find them on ships like the Lois. They run their own mom-and-pop ships. You won't run across them in a s.p.a.cer bar and you won't find them at the Union Hall."

"Why is that?"

"Think about it. If you worked for yourself and have your family around you, why would you go to a s.p.a.cer bar and get into that whole scene? Why would you look for a new berth?"

"Oh."

"Oh, indeed. Ish, most people work commercial like this for maybe ten, twenty stanyers, then they get out. Crew is, ultimately, a dead end job. It's fun for a while as you found out in Dunsany Roads, but it gets old fast. Eventually you get tired of chasing and want to start building. Brill's coming up on her ten stanyer mark. I've only been doing this for five and I'm already thinking about getting out and settling down myself. I'm not officer material. I just don't have any interest in that."

"Yeah, what about officers? There are a lot of older people doing that."

"Officers are different. It's the difference between labor and management. We're labor. They're management. They make a lot more money and have a lot more opportunities. They work very hard for both, but if you're an officer, you can always get your master's ticket and get your own ship and run it the way you want to."

"Doesn't that hat a.s.sume a lot of money and smarts?"

"So? What doesn't? Anybody can sit for an officer exam. A lot of people who never went to the academy do just that. You just need to pay the fee, show up on time, and take the test. The problem comes later. You're right to have your own ship takes a lot of money, but if you're a mate, you need to convince somebody to hire ya."

"Okay, so what's the problem?"

"Well, say you're a skipper and you want to hire a second mate. Are you going to hire someone who studied on their own and pa.s.sed the exam? Or would you prefer a person with the degree from the academy?"

"Oh." Sometimes I'm really stupid. "Of course."

Sandy shrugged. "Now aren't ya glad you talked to your Aunt Sandy?"

I sighed. "I'm no closer to figuring everything out, but you've given me a lot to think about."

"Hang in there, Ish. You're in a tough place now but it gets better." She flashed me a warm smile.

"Thanks, Sandy."

I finished my lunch, bussed the tray, and headed for berthing. I set my tablet to bip me at 13:50 so I would be sure to catch up with Pip. Lucky I did, too, because it bipped me awake before I even realized I was asleep.

Chapter Five.

Betrus System

2352-May-15

Pip was just putting away the swab from afternoon cleanup when I stuck my head into the galley. It seemed so familiar, like I had just stepped out of it, but it also felt like I had not been there in a year. Three months on the watch stander merry-go-round had done odd things to my time sense.

"What's goin' on, Pip?" I asked to get his attention.

He grinned and waved. "You've been such a stranger. I wanted to touch base about Betrus."

We got coffee and settled in at one of the tables. "So, what's the latest off the beacon?" I asked.

"Prices are good. We've got a bunch of mixed cargo in the empty container, and we've laid in extra frozen chicken and beef for stores trading. We should do all right."

The empty container started as a kind of challenge from Mr. Maxwell. The basic idea was to give Pip an empty container and see how good he was at picking cargos for it. So far Pip's container had contributed about two hundred kilocreds to the ship's profit pool. The stores trading was a way that Pip and Cookie reduced overall ship expenditures and got us higher quality ingredients to boot. The ship generally carried stores for four months while underway. Typically we were only out between forty and sixty days, which meant we carried a lot of extra stores from place to place. Pip had worked out a system of rotation and procurement where he bought extra of whatever was going cheap in one port and sold it at a good price where it was scarce. We always had our one hundred and twenty days of stores, but with the way they moved it in and out-buying, selling, and trading in each port of call-Pip and Cookie managed to take a cost center and turn it into a revenue generator. They fed the crew better than before and made creds in the process. It sounded like perpetual motion to me, but the food was great and the captain seemed pleased.

Pip used my portable to create and run some pretty elaborate simulations. He used automated routines to update his own personal trade database from beacon feeds. He usually ran the simulations for pairs of planets along our projected course. He even had what he called, level one alternatives, which were the ports that the Lois might go to if we got diverted. Mr. Maxwell was impressed and I thought that he might be grooming Pip for something, which would be great as Pip was a good guy and deserved it.

"-so I was thinking we could just barbecue the kids and sell the parents as slaves," Pip said.

"What?"

"Welcome back." He snorted a laugh in my direction.

"Sorry, I'm a bit distracted."

"So, I see." He sipped his coffee. "Wanna see the figures from Dunsany?"

"Are they good?"

"Very. We're walking out with about five thousand one hundred creds and the co-op grabbed another five hundred. There's a waiting list for booth managers for Betrus and I think we'll have something like seventy five percent of the crew selling there."

"Wow. That's up from what? Fifty percent on St. Cloud?"

"Yup. Something like that. Word is spreading and even people who weren't really interested in the past are now climbing on the cargo train."

"I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. von Ickles got in on the act. We had a little discussion about the co-op when I tested last cycle."

"What'd he say?" Pip asked.

"That we make more than he does."

Pip laughed at that. "Probably so. Third mates get a good share and a nice salary, but as good as we've been running lately, we're probably making as much as the captain."

"Well, if it hadn't been for Sarah selling all those Lucky Stones in St. Cloud, we'd have a whole lot less than we've got now," I told him. "Give credit where it's due."

Pip paused at that. "She's good. Do you suppose she cast a spell or something to get all those people to buy at ten creds?" He gave one of those little back and forth looks to see if anybody heard him asking a stupid question.

"I don't know. She is a South Coast shaman, after all. She stayed up all night stringing the stones with leather thongs and blessing them. Maybe she worked some kind of compulsion into them at the same time." I suggested with a little shrug.

He looked at me with a shocked expression, "You don't think..." he started to say until he saw my grin.

"Gotcha!" I said.

We both laughed at that. As many times as he'd gotten me in the past, it was good to have the shoe on the other foot, and I realized once more just how much I missed him. We had had such fun in those months when we worked hip-to-hip in the galley.

"How's she doing?" I asked.

"She's getting better. Works with Cookie every day on bread and they've starting changing the soup stocks too. One word: yum. They get together and it's-I hate to use the word but-magical. She cuts him no slack at all and he seems to enjoy that, too." He stopped there and gave a little shrug. "It's like a father-daughter thing almost."

"Yeah, well, I don't know much about fathers." Mine was somewhere out in the Diurnia quadrant but I didn't know where. He and my mom broke up when I was four and for all I knew he could be on the ship. Well, except that I'd see his name on the roster. All mom ever said when I asked was, "He's a good man, Ishmael. We just can't stand each other."

"Well, there's good and bad there," Pip said focusing on the coffee in his mug. Pip's father owned two ships but Pip enlisted his aunt's help to get aboard a freighter instead of working for him.

"What is the story with your family, Pip?" I asked.

"Dad casts a long shadow. I already told you that."

"Yeah, but what does that mean?" I pressed.

"It means that if I stayed on his ship-ships, now-I would have to do things his way. I want to do something else."

"That's no answer. What did he want?"

"Look, all I ever wanted to do was trading projections. Buying and selling is like-well, I suppose it must be what gamblers get addicted to. I started working on my earliest simulations when I was ten. They were terrible but they got better. My mom was the cargo picker on our ship. She knew what she wanted to move and she had a gift for finding good deals. n.o.body can out haggle her," he said with a little faraway look.

"So? Wouldn't they let you pick cargo?"

"Some, but they were always second guessing my decisions. Once in a while they'd let me pick some, and my projections beat theirs by a factor of two." He scowled. "But even so they just wouldn't listen to me."

I sipped my coffee. "You need to clean this urn."

"What?"

I held up my cup and said, "Number two is beginning to pick up some sc.u.m inside. Rinse it down with vinegar and hot water when you cycle it next time." My mouth was on autopilot but I was thinking about what he'd said. It sounded like every father-son cliche in the book, but then I remembered Diane telling me that cliches only got that way because they happened enough to prove true.

"So, what broke it for you?" I got back on subject. "What pushed you over the edge?"

"About the time I was getting ready to get my secondary ed certifications, they started pressing me about going on to school."

I snorted. "Ha. You should live with a professor."

He chuckled at that. "Good point."

"So? Why didn't you go? I agreed just to get my mom off my back." There was a bitter-sweet overlay on that one. I'd agreed but she had died. Now that I couldn't afford to go, I thought I might just want to. Ironic.

"They wanted me to follow in their footsteps. Go to their school. They were getting quite adamant. Even filled out the applications and were lining up their cla.s.smates to provide recommendations. Dad was more interested in me carrying on his reputation than in what I wanted. They'd done everything but buy the tickets to Port Newmar."

"Port Newmar?" I asked with a little p.r.i.c.kle of disbelief. "Don't tell me. They wanted to send you to the academy?"

"That's what I've been telling you," Pip said with no small amount of exasperation.

"Sorry, I'm a little slow today. Just woke up from a nap. Why didn't you want to go to the academy?" I asked in what I'd hoped was a neutral tone.

"Four years of course work?" he asked. "Just so I can take the test to be able to do what I was already doing?"

"Well, if you put it that way," I said.

"Besides, I can sit for the exam anytime. I don't need to go to the academy first."

"Really? I don't mean to bring up a bad memory, but do you remember your Cargoman exam?"

"Of course, it was horrible."

Phillip Carstairs, cargo genius, couldn't take tests to save his life. He knew the material backward and forward but he couldn't pa.s.s a written test. I'd arranged with the education officer to get him an oral exam and he pa.s.sed not just his Cargo Handler exam but he jumped up to Cargoman.

I just looked at him for a few heartbeats until he lost the belligerent expression and looked back down into his coffee.

"I probably couldn't pa.s.s it even with the four years of course work," he said into his mug.

"Why, Phillip Carstairs, do you mean to sit there and tell me that after having completed four years of extensive, intensive, and specialized training specifically established to teach you what you need to know in order to pa.s.s that test, you think you might actually fail it?" I asked him with a grin.

From behind me I heard Mr. von Ickles chuckle. "Very good question, Mr. w.a.n.g. I couldn't have said it better myself." He took his refilled coffee cup and sauntered off the mess deck.

"d.a.m.n, this ship seems small sometimes," I said. I could feel myself turning red.

Pip looked at me with his head c.o.c.ked. "Why do I get the feeling that I'm missing something?"

"Probably because it's the Lois," I said. "There's always something more than meets the eye."

"Don't make me come over there and hurt you," he said. "You know I can and would. What was that all about?"

"Mr. von Ickles told me the same thing. He wants me to consider going to the academy. Everybody's been on me about what I'm going to do with my life since we left Dunsany."

"Well, after that performance, they probably figure you need some direction."

I chuckled while Pip drained his coffee then and said, "Come on, it's gym time. I need to get in a work out before we start dinner, and you look like you could use a run."