Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (30 page)

“Yep.”

“How’s it look?”

Natalya winced.

“That bad?”

“You’re the one who’s been putting in all the zeroes. What do you think?”

He shook his head. “To be honest, I stopped paying attention to what had numbers and what didn’t about half past day two.”

“I’ll be able to get a solid read on it now,” Natalya said. “I’ve been looking at the total spares value every evening and the number keeps going down and down and down. I’ll have the exact figure when I run the replenishment order against the Siren databases, but it’s going to be ugly. Into the six figures. Maybe as much as half a mill.”

Lyons’s eyes fairly bulged at the number. “Merciful Maude. That’s a lot of parts.”

“Literally. It’s metric tons. Maybe as much as a hundred.”

“How can anybody steal that much from a ship?”

“That’s the question. How did they get that much off the ship? How did they know what to take? There are some really expensive items here, but we’d have noticed right away if they’d been missing.”

“Without an engineer?” Lyons asked.

Natalya started to nod, but stopped. “Maybe. I’ll have to look more closely. Some of the oxygen filtration media. It gets used a lot but it also has a shelf life of only a few months. It has to be ordered fresh regularly.”

Lyons nodded. “So, while it’s expensive, somebody would have noticed.”

“It would also be hard to move with only a partial shelf life. If I were looking to make the most profit with the least risk, that’s the stuff I’d leave.”

“I don’t envy you the task of sorting it all out,” Lyons said.

“Thanks.” Natalya paused for a moment. “And thanks for helping me out.”

Lyons handed her tablet back and shrugged. He ran a hand across the back of his neck and looked at his boots. “I should probably thank you for dragging me out.”

“You’re welcome?”

He snorted and held out his hands. They trembled like a badly tuned fan. “Not as bad as yesterday. Having something to do helped.”

“You didn’t dive back into the bottle when you left here?”

Lyons sighed. “That first night? I had a couple shots but it was the end of the bottle.”

“Last one?”

He shook his head. “No. I’ve still got half a case.”

Natalya felt her eyebrows rise. “How much did you bring aboard?”

His mouth twisted into a grimace. “Just the one case.”

Natalya did the math in her head. “Yikes.”

“It’s not that much taken across the whole week. A fifth a day.” He lowered his gaze to his boots again. “Really long days.”

“I’m not judging,” Natalya said.

He looked up at her with a half-smile on his face. “Yeah.”

“Can I ask …?”

“I’d rather you didn’t. I’m working hard not to remember it. Any more than I have to.”

“How’s that working out?” She gave him a smile and a wink.

He laughed. “About as well as you might expect.”

“I asked Blanchard.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said to ask you. It’s not his story.”

“Huh.” He held out his right hand and watched it shake for a while.

“What will you do tomorrow?”

“Probably sweat a lot. Try to sleep.”

“What do you do when you’re not aboard ship?” Natalya asked. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“I run logistics for Dark Knight Mining and Manufacturing.”

“Challenging job?”

“Can be. When one of the mining fleets gets hit, that’s the worst.”

“Gets hit by what?”

“Belt rats. Iron Mountain thugs figure it’s easier and more fun to take the ore than mine their own.”

“Happen often?”

“No, thank Maude.” He sighed. “Once a stanyer maybe. Everybody going out figures it’ll be somebody else. Or not this trip. Or whatever rationale you tell yourself.” He shrugged. “Most of the time, they’re right.”

“How many fleets does Kondur run?”

Lyons bit his lips together and shook his head. “That’s probably information that you’re not in the loop for.”

“A lot?”

“A lot. That’s all I’m saying.”

Natalya thought about it for a long tick. “That’s why it’s so hard to defend. Targets are too spread out. Strikes are too spread out.”

“In a nutshell,” Lyons said. “I don’t know if they do it so randomly to throw us off or if it’s all they can manage. For that matter, even why they do it.”

“Well, there’s the value of the ore,” Natalya said.

“Which is not inconsiderable, but that’s a long way to haul ore.”

“All the way back to Iron Mountain?”

“Yeah. It’s a long haul for a bulk hauler to get all the way up there from a belt in Dark Knight.”

“A bulk hauler like this one?”

Lyons nodded. “Two hundred metric tons, even with as long legs as she has, it would take a while. You can’t just skip across the pond in a straight line like we did to Albert.” He paused. “We did go to Albert first, didn’t we?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there’s a messy bit of dark out there between Dark Knight and Iron Mountain. Lots of random rocks. Lots of gas. Proto-stars lighting off at weird moments. You can’t fly through it, even ballistic. You never know if you’re going to jump into a rock that wasn’t there before. Or into a gravity well you can’t jump out of. Assuming you survive jumping in to begin with.”

“What if they’re not going to Iron Mountain?” Natalya asked. “My father always claimed that Iron Mountain got blamed for a lot of stuff they didn’t do. Made it easy for people to make the odd smash-and-grab knowing Iron Mountain would take the heat.”

Lyons shrugged. “That would change things, but doesn’t change the frequency of hits.”

“Yet.”

Lyons raised an eyebrow.

“If they’re just setting up the operation? Maybe they haven’t been in a position to hit more than once a year until now.”

“Possible,” he said. “The last hit was just a couple months back. They shouldn’t hit again until this time next stanyer. Plus or minus a few weeks.”

“So if they strike in less than a stanyer?”

“Depends. How much less? A few weeks, even a couple of months, aren’t significant.”

Natalya gave a little sideways nod of the head. “Granted.” She raised her eyebrows. “So what
are
you going to do tomorrow?”

“Read any good books lately?”

“I have a couple I can loan you, if that’s the question.”

His gaze seemed to focus somewhere on the far bulkhead. “I used to like to read. Used to read a lot.”

“What happened?”

He bit his lip and shrugged. “I stopped.”

Chapter 32
Siren System: 2363, June 26

The captain reviewed the report on his console and sighed. “How in the name of all that’s holy did somebody do this?”

“Physically, you mean?” Natalya asked.

“Yeah. Greed and desperation make common cause, but this must have been a huge amount of work to pull off.”

“It’s tons of parts. It either took a lot of time or it wasn’t one person.”

“Could one person have done it?” Trask asked. “Whoever masterminded this had to know a lot about the ship and how she flies. Does any single person have that kind of knowledge?”

Natalya shrugged. “I don’t, but I’m the new kid. I passed my environmental classes so I know what has to be done, but Knowles is operating on a completely different level down there.”

Trask snorted. “He operates on a completely different level wherever he is.”

“Not surprised.”

“You got Josh Lyons out of his stateroom to help. I’m impressed.”

“Wasn’t as hard as I thought. I hit him when he was weak.”

“Drunk?”

“No. Nearly sober. I just pestered him until he had no choice but to choke the life out of me or get on board.”

Trask frowned at her. “How was he to work with?”

“Pretty good, actually. Once I got him up and moving in the morning, he hardly ever complained. We just plowed through the locker, one bin at a time. He knows his inventory.”

“I almost swallowed my fork when he came into the wardroom for lunch the other day.”

Natalya grinned. “He was nervous and still kinda shaky. I don’t know if he kept any lunch down but he’s been eating regularly again.”

Trask cocked his head to the side. “Again?”

“Yeah. He wasn’t eating much, if at all. Then when I got in the way of his bottle, he had a little withdrawal. I wasn’t sure he was actually going to stay upright the first day but once we got beyond that, he’s been getting stronger ever since. Hands hardly shake at all now.”

“His? Or yours?” the captain asked with a nod at the console. “That’s a hefty chunk of change to replace.”

Natalya sniffed. “Not like I’d be able to do anything about it.” A stray thought pinged a nerve. “We will be able to replace it, won’t we?”

Trask eyed the list again. “Siren should have most of this. Confederation systems like to keep things lined up proper.”

“I was thinking more of the credits involved. That’s going to be a deep cut.”

“Kondur will probably make it good through a blind account at High Tortuga. He’s not going to be happy about it.”

“Don’t blame him.”

Trask sucked his teeth for a few heartbeats, his face turned to the console but his mind clearly elsewhere. “You said you thought the ship was idle.”

Natalya had to scramble to remember the conversation. “Knowles said something about the particulate count being off for a ship that had been in service all along.”

“So somebody could have had access while the ship was docked.”

“Makes sense.”

“Not really.” Trask chewed his lip. “Caretaker crews make a living by being trustworthy. They’d not be doing anything like this. It would be too easy to trace back to them.”

“How long do you think this has been going on?”

Trask sighed. “That’s the hell of it. I can’t be sure. We might have been flying without significant spares for a long, long time. Without an engineer, we’d never have known.”

“When was the last time you sailed with a real engineer?”

“Pritchard’s been with us so long, I don’t remember. I’m not sure if the guy before him was really an engineer or not. Seems like he might have been, but that’s still at least almost half a dozen stanyers. There was a guy trained in propulsion systems for a time.”

“The guy who trained Solomon?” Natalya asked.

“Yeah. Henry something. Something Henry. Don’t know that I ever heard anybody call him anything but Henry, now that I think of it. Old guy. Retired and left the slot to Solomon.”

“So, we’re back to who has the knowledge to be able to do this.”

“Yep. I have no idea. I certainly wouldn’t. An engineering chief could probably take a pretty good shot at it. The problem is that they’d have to know that we weren’t flying with somebody who’d catch them out.”

“Wouldn’t they know you were smuggling?”

Trask boomed a great laugh. “Lass, everybody in Toe-Hold space is smuggling, one way or another. It’s just part of the culture.”

“But I mean, how many people know you’re not flying with a qualified crew?”

Trask shrugged. “Depends on what you mean by qualified. A lot of spacers out here don’t bother with CPJCT credentials. Your old man must have told you that.”

“He did, but I guess I didn’t think that all the way through.”

“You were always bound for the academy, I suspect.”

“Yeah. My mother insisted that I get an education before I hared off to the backside of the beyond.”

“So, you and Usoko are Newmar grads. I am. Lyons is. Blanchard isn’t.”

“He’s not? He certainly seems like an academy grad. How’d he get started?”

Trask shook his head. “Apparently, he’s been plotting courses since he was a kid. Learned on his parents’ ship and just kept at it. He’s a good navigator. One of the best.”

“He seems nice enough.”

The captain humphed. “As long as you’re on his good list. Don’t get on his bad list.”

“He has a bad list?”

“Albee was number one on it.” Trask rubbed a hand across his mouth. “I shoulda paid more attention to that.” He nodded at his console. “Which of these are priorities?”

“All of them if we get boarded.”

He snorted. “I got that, but we have a couple of problems. First, Kondur may not want to pay for parts here that he might be able to get cheaper there.”

“It’ll be real expensive if we get boarded and they confiscate the ship because we don’t have the appropriate spares aboard.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. I appreciate that’s important to you but the probabilities run against you.” He held up his right forefinger. “We’d have to be boarded
after
we leave Siren. If we’re boarded before then, we have the excuse of getting to Siren to replace the missing spares. It takes a lot of red tape to tie up a freighter. They’ll let that slide.” He held up a second finger. “They’d have to notice the discrepancy in spares. That’s not very likely. Sure they check, but they don’t check very far beyond immediate consumables.”

“Like scrubber filters,” Natalya said.

“And water filters. They’re more concerned that we have proper gasses and fuel tankage and that we’re not irradiating the crew.” Trask held up a third finger. “Assuming both of those unlikely events happen, they have to decide it’s serious enough to roll out a really big ball of red tape to keep us from harming ourselves. They
can
do it, but will they? Odds are they’ll give us a warning and a writeup rather than trying to get us to kill our outbound velocity and dock up again.”