Owner's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper) Read Free

station for me before tapping Mr. Schubert to relieve the watch.
    “Watch change, Mr. Pall, I’ll relieve you if you can spare a moment?”
    He nodded almost absent-mindedly, pulled up a fresh view on his second screen and I could see the log updating on the watch station in front of me as he typed. He banged the enter key and his window closed. “It’s yours, Captain.” His fingers beat another brief tattoo on the keyboard in front of him before he turned in his chair to look at me. “Orders, Captain?”
    “Get some sleep, Mr. Pall. I suspect we won’t know much until the chain of command gets squared on the orbital and, even then, the first thing they’ll need to do is damage control with the media.”
    “Any ideas what they’ll do, Skipper?”
    I took a deep breath and blew it out before responding. “If we don’t sail, we don’t make money, so whatever it is, it probably won’t change things here.” I hoped that I was right. Diurnia Salvage and Transport was not a publicly traded company, and Maloney wasn’t just the CEO, he was also the largest stockholder. I wondered what Mrs. Maloney would do with controlling interest.
    The talking head showing in the pulldown display changed to show a different head—a distinguished looking man speaking earnestly into the pickup. The crawl under the image read, “CPJCT rep dies. Long time member dies of heart attack.”
    His seat on the Confederated Planets Joint Committee on Trade would be hard to fill. He’d been a champion of shipping companies for decades. Along the way he had done a lot of good for crews, and never seemed to have forgotten that, without crews, the ships did not sail. Some cynical voices might argue that he had done that by mistake, but I knew Maloney did nothing by accident.
    “Does that seem odd to you, Skipper?” Mr. Hill watched his helm with one eye on the monitor.
    I scanned my proximity sensors and got a good look at the ship status while I mulled the question over before answering. “In what way, Mr. Hill?”
    “Who dies of a heart attack these days, sar?”
    Mr. Pall glanced at him, and even Mr. Schubert frowned.
    “Mr. Hill?”
    “His heart just stopped beating? Probably one of the richest men in the sector? How is that even possible, sar? Unless it just blew up in his chest, or he was cut off from everybody and everything so nobody noticed, and he couldn’t call for help?” Mr. Hill shook his head. “Just doesn’t seem right to me, sar.”
    I shrugged as Mr. Pall turned his attention to me. “I know, Mr. Hill, but that’s the story, so until we get more information, we really can’t do more than speculate, and I think we have a ship to sail here...”
    He took the hint and I nodded at the repeater screen. “If you’d cut that, Mr. Pall? We’ll get on with getting home safely.”
    He nodded and, a few key taps later, the screen darkened again. “I’ve put a filter on the incoming traffic, skipper. Anything from Home Office will be flagged and routed to both of us as soon as it hits the ship.”
    We sat in stunned silence for a dozen heartbeats before Mr. Schubert stirred himself and headed down the ladder. Mr. Pall followed, but I wondered how much he’d sleep.
    Mr. Hill and I settled in to keeping the ship on course. We were only a few days out of Diurnia and whatever else happened, we’d be there soon enough. I wondered why Jarvis had been on Breakall claiming to be the section head there. I pondered Mr. Hill’s point about dying of a heart attack. With all the technology we had to keep people alive, he would have had to either been cut off from aid—or died very suddenly.
    I sat back in my chair and contemplated the darkened repeater screen on the overhead, replaying it in my head. He had died at home, not at medical. I sighed and shook my head.
    “Yeah. I know what you mean, Captain,” Mr. Hill said.
    The chrono had just clicked over to 0335 when the incoming message alert flashed on my screen. It wasn’t