Ky felt her neck going hot. They were treating her like a child, and—
“You’re so Vatta, is what he means,” Quincy said, through the laughter she was trying to control. “Trade and profit, right? If there’s an angle—and then it is your first ship.” She shook her head, still laughing.
“The thing is,” Gary said, “there was no way you were going to take this ship off to scrap if you could help it. I’ll bet you that you’d been wondering if you could possibly earn enough for a refit before you ever got aboard.”
“Not . . . exactly,” Ky said. They were both grinning now, not sarcastic grins, but genuine glee. “You knew,” she said. “You knew all along . . . did my father know?” Gaspard must have known, she realized. He must have assumed that any Vatta would find a way to save a ship from scrap.
“He knows you,” Quincy said. “I don’t suppose he knew about the Pavrati nondelivery, no, but he knew you.”
“I think Ted got it,” Gary said to Quincy.
“Depends on how we set the time,” Quincy said. “From the time she made the contract, or from telling us?”
“Now what are you talking about? Ted got what?” Ky asked.
“The ship’s pool,” Quincy said. “Actually we had two, one for you taking a contract, and one for you figuring out a different way to make a profit.”
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Ky said. She had not even imagined a ship’s pool on her performance. “You were all sure I’d try to save the ship?”
“Did anyone pick no?” Gary asked Quincy.
“I don’t think so,” Quincy said. “I’d have to look at all the entries so far.”
“Just what did you expect me to come up with?”
“Who could guess?” Quincy said with a shrug. “First-run captains have done all sorts of things. There’ve even been a few who followed exactly the line they’d been given, but most of those end up working for someone else. Now—let’s take a look at this contract you signed. Spec, and we have to buy the goods up front?”
“Yes.”
“Could be worse,” Gary said. “You’ve got a letter of credit from the family, I suppose?”
“Yes,” Ky said. “It’s on Crown & Spears at Lastway, but that should be negotiable elsewhere, but we also have the payment on delivery for the cargo we brought in. That’s actually Vatta Transport, money, though. I’d rather not use it.”
“Quite right,” Gary said.
“So, I thought Sabine Prime,” Ky said. “The Economic Development Bureau has given me the specs for what they want. Sabine has several manufacturers of the kind of equipment they want, plus used-equipment dealers.”
“Is that where they ordered it from in the first place?”
“Yes. From FarmPower. But they’d take equivalent stock from another manufacturer, or used, in order to get something here quickly, they said. And that’s in the contract.” Ky pointed out the relevant paragraph.
“And how much do you know about farm machinery?” Quincy asked.
“Me?” Ky said. “Nothing. But there are books, and it’s two months to Sabine.” Quincy and Gary both rolled their eyes. “What? You don’t think I can learn?”
“Mitt may know,” Gary said. “But let me see that—we may have a load problem.”
“I checked the hold layouts,” Ky said.
“Yeah, but . . . some of these brutes will have to be disassembled, and then—we have to shift the Lastway cargo around. We aren’t fully loaded, but we’ll need easier access in these tight spaces . . .”
“Store some of it here,” Quincy said. “They aren’t paying in advance, so they can store our stuff free.”
“It’s worth trying,” Gary said.
Somewhat to Ky’s surprise, the Bureau of Economic Development was willing to put Ky’s Lastway cargo into storage for no fee, as security against their timely return. Ky had Gary check out the sealed storage facility; to her it looked like any other sealed storage facility. They had no special requirements, so she wasn’t nearly as concerned about temperature, pressure, and so on as about pilferage.
“The locks and seals are good quality,” he reported. “If something goes missing, it’ll be because someone used the main hatch and the key for it.”
“What do we do if they do?” she asked.
“We have their ag machinery, and we keep their ag machinery until they return our cargo.”
This was getting more complicated by the minute. Ky extracted Aunt Gracie’s fruitcakes from the rest of the cargo—maybe she could unload them on Sabine, and they fit into one of the lockers in her cabin—and signed off on the stowage contract.
Glennys Jones eased away from Belinta Station under her own power—Belinta’s single tug service being occupied with an insystem carrier—and Ky tried not to fret. Ted Barash, Mitt’s assistant in Environmental, had indeed won the pool, and used it to treat everyone to a meal just before they left. Ky tucked a mint she’d saved from the dessert tray into her mouth and went back to her calculations. Two months to Sabine. Say a week to locate the machinery, a week to do the paperwork, some days to load—to be safe another week—and then two months back to Belinta, and a week to unload, process the paper, reload with their Lastway cargo. Five months, all told, by which time the family would expect to hear that she was in Lastway, though Lastway would still be four months away.
She would have to let them know sometime, she told herself. But when? Not now, when they might tell her to stop, or send someone to help her fix her mistakes. Maybe once she had the cargo loaded at Sabine Prime? Or when she was back here and they’d be expecting word anyway?
The imagined message appeared in her mental vision, expressed in perky tones unlike her own: Hi Dad, all is well, I’m on Belinta with a load of tractors and we made a lot of money and don’t have to go to Lastway after all. Your loving daughter . . .
No. Definitely not. Slight delay, don’t worry wasn’t much better.
She forced her mind away from the wording of a message she didn’t have to send for several months, at least, and called up the ship’s reference library. Farm machinery. She knew what they used in the tik plantations back home; she had even been sentenced to a fortnight of hard labor—as she’d called it, bootlessly, at the time—driving one of the harvesters.
The Belinta Economic Development Bureau wanted ag machinery to convert thick forest into productive farmland. As a colony world with limited repair and manufacturing facilities, they wanted machines designed specifically for such use—very rugged, low maintenance, easily repaired. They were willing to trade off the advantages of multipurpose machines for the increased life-span of a dedicated single-purpose machine.
What they’d really wanted—what they had intended to have—were draft animals, horses and oxen, self-replicating, self-repairing, long-lived, but they’d been overruled by the aristos among them. Instead of draft animals, they had polo ponies—all owned by the rich, who weren’t about to let them pull a cart, let alone a plow. The machine equivalents were faster, if they worked, but right now they had nothing but small tillers people had planned to use in their gardens. Hardly suitable for serious farm work.
So—tractors to pull various field equipment. Multigang plows, harrows, planters, harvesters. Rugged trucks to haul their produce on rough roads. Ky thought they were making a mistake not to include road-building machinery in this order, but they were the customer.
She compared the specs the EDB had given her to the information in the database, and found nothing that the EDB hadn’t told her. All these things were fairly standard, and should be easy to find. The database also had the current market value of the equipment, in the currency of several systems. Unless Sabine Prime’s prices were over the top, she should have enough for the cargo.
It was going to work. She shut down the library link and allowed herself to relax. She’d been through it again and again, on her own and with Gary and Quincy. It was a good plan, and it had no obvious holes in it.
So why thi
s nagging cold chill that ran up and down her spine? She told herself it was just the leftover loss of self-confidence from that mess with Mandy Rocher. Naturally she would distrust her own judgment for a while. But this had nothing to do with Mandy or Miznarii politics. This was just straight-up trade and profit, something she’d known about since childhood. Simple, straightforward, easy. It was all going to work.
Endim transition felt even rougher with no cargo aboard; Ky would have crossed her toes for luck if she could.
“We really do need to get that tuned,” Quincy said, when the vibrations settled down. “It’s degrading faster than I thought it would, to be honest. There’s a pretty good shipyard on Sabine that could do us an interim fix, probably wouldn’t take more than three or four days.”
“And how much money?” Ky asked.
“We’d have to ask.”
“We don’t have much,” Ky said. “We can’t draw on the company accounts for this—the ship’s not authorized for repairs. And we’re using my letter of credit to cover expenses.” Maybe she should have been bolder about taking the Belinta delivery payment herself instead of depositing it to Vatta Transport, Ltd.
“I know,” Quincy said. “I thought she had at least ten more transitions in her, but that last one wrenched something. If she’s that rough coming back out, we’ll have to get it fixed. If not—I suppose we could risk the trip back to Belinta, but I’d rather get something done. I’ve only got the three engineers, you know.”
“There’s nothing we can do now?” Ky asked, already knowing there wasn’t.
Quincy shook her head. “Sealed unit. It either works right or it starts degrading. I’ll tear down the supports, try rebalancing before we shift back, but I don’t think it’s the supports. I think it’s the unit itself.”
Fine. A rotten little sealed unit the size of a large suitcase could mess up her whole plan. To keep herself from hovering behind Quincy’s shoulder during the rebalancing, she took out the ship model and forced herself to work on it. Even if it did remind her of what she’d lost, it was better than driving her crew insane. She kept up her exercise periods, using one of the now-empty holds. In a way, she found it reassuring that she did not need the rigid schedule of the Academy, the shouting of instructors, to make herself exercise. But then, she reminded herself, lack of initiative had never been her problem.
She was back on the bridge for the down transition; she could not help noticing how many of the crew found it necessary to be there as well. She nodded to Riel, who gave the slightest shrug before touching the controls.
Down transition brought them out where they should be—whatever was giving Glennys the problem didn’t seem to affect navigation, at least—but that was all the good news. The ship trembled, creaked, even groaned as vibration stressed her structual members. Ky clenched her teeth to keep from crying out along with her ship. It felt like hours, but only a few minutes passed on the ship’s chronometer. Finally it steadied. Several new status lights came up red.
“Mandatory repairs,” Quincy said. “We have to replace that sealed unit.”
Ky didn’t argue. She could still feel a faint tremor in the ship’s fabric. She certainly didn’t want to take this ship back through endim transition again without a repair. Instead, she began downloading Sabine local information. Sabine’s manufacturers, drawing on a wealth of raw materials in their system, produced solid, basic agriculture, mining, and construction equipment for many of the colony worlds in this sector. Their advance sales information systems offered everything Ky needed to plan the stowage of their intended cargo. Sabine also offered a variety of ship services, from consumables to complete refitting.
She and her crew pored over the information. If she spent all her letter of credit on agricultural equipment, she would have very little left for repairs. If she didn’t, she’d short the order from Belinta. Surely they’d understand if she had to repair the ship . . . surely a couple of tractors short wouldn’t upset them.
But it would. She knew in her bones that they were really as dour, as inflexible, as unforgiving, as they’d seemed. They’d accept a fait accompli, but they’d hold it against her—and worse, against Vatta and Slotter Key—forever. She had to find some way of doing it all—fulfilling their order, repairing the ship, getting back to Belinta . . . There was always credit, though the interest would cut into the profits . . .
“Welcome to FarmPower,” the interactive salesprof announced. The voice was cheerful. “We are here to serve your agricultural needs. Please select one of the following options. If you have items on order and wish to check their manufacturing status, please speak now . . . If you have items on order and have received notice of shipping, and wish to check their shipping status, please speak now . . . If you wish to place an order for new items, please speak now . . . If you . . .”
“I need to speak to a sales representative,” Ky said. Sometimes these things could be interrupted.
“ . . . need to register a complaint, please speak now. Have your invoice number ready . . .” The voice paused, and something that Ky knew was meant to be music tinkled uneasily in the middle distance. She had no invoice number, because she hadn’t placed an order yet. The salesprof paid no attention to her interruptions, and she finally gave up. She had to go planetside anyway; she’d contact FarmPower from there.
Sabine Prime smelled very different from Belinta; Ky sneezed as something acrid got up her nose as soon as she cleared Customs. She saw no humods at all in the passages, and only about half the people had the telltale bulge of implants. This time her security escort—a tall, thin man named Seward Humphries and clad in the charcoal brown livery of his employer—met her at the shuttle station, and guided her to a bubbletube. He seemed alert and competent, but radiated an unwillingness to chat with clients. Ky didn’t mind; she had plenty to think about as they neared the capital city. Sabine City—commonly called Sabine or even Prime—had sprawled across a river; the far side appeared to be more industrial, judging by the stacks and cooling towers.
The Captains’ Guild here was much larger than that on Belinta; the status board listed dozens of ships. Ky checked in, sent her luggage up to her room, and went directly to the Slotter Key embassy. It was only a few blocks away; she chose to walk, her escort silent beside her. Sabine’s citizens favored bright colors—a relief after Belinta—and some of them carried a small, round, bright-colored object in one hand. Ky had no idea what it was, but the shapes were the same even though the colors varied. Ornate glazed tile designs livened the fronts of the buildings, with exuberant decorative arches over doors and windows. Ground vehicles varied from large mass-transit cars—some red, some green—to tiny three-wheeled confections in various pastels, which unfolded to reveal a single seat inside. And the noise—after Belinta’s relative silence, the busy chatter of Sabine’s city crowds almost deafened her. She and her escort, she thought, must be the only two walking together who were not talking loud enough to be heard a block away.
The Slotter Key embassy was hardly larger than Belinta’s small legation—or so she thought, until she noticed the bustling staff and realized that it must also occupy the adjoining buildings.
“Captain Vatta,” said the desk clerk. “So nice to see you.” He was heavily tattooed and freckled around the tattoos. “We’re always glad to see Vatta people here. What can we do for you?”
“Trade and profit,” Ky said. “I’m on a contract run from Belinta, picking up agricultural machinery. Do you have performance files on repair yards?”
“Repair yards? For ag machinery?”
“No, for ships. I’m wondering whether to have a minor problem fixed here or wait until I get back to Belinta.” She was reluctant to reveal just how big the problem was.
“Oh, you’d want to do that here,” the desk clerk said. “Sabine has superb repair yards, and yes, we do have performance stats as reported by Slotter Key citizens who’ve used them. Would you like that now, or popped to your ship?”
“Both, please,” Ky said. “My engineer has the stats from Belinta for comparison, but I suspect you’re right.”
“Just a moment,” the clerk said, and blinked, accessing the legation’s internal database. “There,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Reputable sources of used farm machinery,” Ky said. “I already have contact with FarmPower, but they’re not selling used equipment anymore, they say.”
“No. They dropped their used equipment sales two years ago. Higher profit margin in new, and they’d just unloaded almost all their stock to the Chigwellin Combine anyway. Chigwellin got the contract for a twin-world system about eight jumps away, and they bought up just about all the used farm equipment anyone here had.”
“So . . . no one has used?”
“No one you’d want to buy from, Captain Vatta. FarmPower and the other manufacturers all quit taking old machinery in trade after that, and put the money into new manufacturing capacity. Our local agricultural unions sometimes have used machinery, but it’s low quality.”
“I see.” What she saw was the start of a problem she hoped wasn’t as big as it looked. If she was stuck buying new equipment at top price . . . but had no ship to get it back to Belinta . . . she might as well not buy it. On the other hand, fixing the ship—assuming she could—would leave her with no cargo to take to Belinta.
“Thank you,” she said, after a pause, and the clerk nodded.
“You’ll want to pay respects to the consul,” the clerk said. “He takes courtesy calls at 1600 local time on the second and fifth day of the local week . . . that’s tomorrow, which around here they call Umpord. Shall I put you down?”
“Yes, thanks,” Ky said.
“And here is a hardcopy of another file I loaded for you, local regulations and current warnings pertaining specifically to Slotter Key citizens. I call your attention to the Foreigners’ Curfew, underlined in red: they are serious about that, and you will require a local citizen escort to be abroad after curfew. You have an escort, I presume?”