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“No, why didn’t you say no?”

“Well, because you’re family,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You weren’t ready for Port Newmar. I knew that.”

“Then why did you push me?” he asked, his voice raw.

“I didn’t. That was just how you saw it. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I got the deep-space from Annie.”

“But you’ve gone along with the whole thing all this time?”

“The scholarship idea was genius. But don’t you think two years is a little long for a semester in space?” he asked with a grin.

“All this time and you knew?” Pip sounded amazed. “And you didn’t come after me?”

“I knew before you signed. Why would I come after you when it was too late?” he asked. “You’d tell me eventually. You’d have to—we’re family.”

“So what are you doing here now then?” Pip asked, half defensive and half defiant.

“Delivered a load of ship parts. What’d ya think? I dropped everything and flew out here for the hell of it?”

“Aunt P didn’t message you?”

“Well of course she messaged me!” he said with a chuckle. “She thought I was still under the impression you were at the academy.”

“And you just happen to show up here? Our next port of call?” Pip pressed.

Tom shrugged. “Well, I was in the neighborhood.”

“I’m not going back,” Pip said suddenly.

“Going back where?” Tom asked.

“Back on the
Epiphany
.”

“Damn straight you’re not! You’re under articles until next August.”

Pip fell back into his chair. “You didn’t come to take me to the academy?”

Tom screwed up his face in mock confusion. “How could I do that? You’re under contract.”

We sipped beer for a little, then he leaned forward and put his glass on the table.

“Okay, here’s the deal, Phillip. Yes, Penny messaged and I grabbed the first cargo coming to Umber. I humped it over here as fast as the
Epy
could haul. We made good time from Sargass and got here about three weeks ago. We’ve been running some small cargoes in and out of here while we waited.”

The waitress brought us another pitcher and Tom did the honors around the table once more.

“But I didn’t come to drag you away. Penny’s message said she thought you were ready and that I should let you know it was okay.” He turned to me then and said, “She gives you a lot of the credit, Ishmael.”

I just shrugged. “I don’t know what I might have done to give her that impression, but thank you, sar—er—Tom.”

“The point is—and you still haven’t answered my question—your academy acceptance is on hold. I just need to let the commandant know as soon as possible so he can slot you into the new class. So? If Ishmael goes, will you go with him?”

Pip looked at me then. His expression started out as a kind of whipped dog look, but it transformed into a funny, devilish grin. He turned back to his father and said, “Well, somebody needs to look out for him.”

“I still have to get accepted,” I pointed out.

“You’ll get in.” Tom said in a tone like you might say, “The sun’s out.”

“Everybody seems sure of that.”

Tom shrugged. “If Alys Giggone puts up a candidate, I suspect Commandant Giggone will listen.”

“You said that before—Commandant Giggone?”

“Her father. And Penny sent a letter, too, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, it was quite a packet of recommendations.”

“No kidding? Anything over eight is pretty much automatic. How many did you have?”

Pip said, “Ten. Three of them captains.”

Tom held up his glass, “Congratulations on your pending acceptance. Start thinking of how you’ll say yes.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“Because Alys Giggone is one of the best judges of potential candidates in the galaxy and her father knows that. That’s the only reason she’s not teaching there now. You have two sure tickets on your application. One is a recommendation from Alys Giggone. The other is that you’ve convinced two other captains that she’s right and they’ve put their reputations on the line in support of you. Bob Giggone may have a soft spot in his heart for his little girl, but ten letters including three from captains just proves that Alys is right.”

“But I didn’t convince anybody! I didn’t even know I was applying until the captain gave me the application packet to endorse. The recommendations were already in it.”

“And in spite of the evidence of your own eyes, you continue to persist in the delusion that you won’t make the cut?” he said with a grin. “Penny said you weren’t born to a spacer family so this probably seems crazy.” He turned back to Pip. “So, was that a yes? Can I tell Bob that you’ll be there for the next class?”

Pip looked at his father and smiled. “Yes, please. That would be very helpful. Thanks, Dad.”

Tom made a theatrical grasp at his chest, “Oh my gods and garters, he said thank you!” He had a proud smile on his face and he didn’t mug it up for long. Instead he filled the glasses one last time and raised his in a toast, “To Port Newmar!” and we drank.

After all the angst and anxiety of my first year in space, the next ten months seemed idyllic—if you think of idyllic as working twelve hours a day for weeks on end locked in a big tin can surrounded by metric mega-butt loads of nothing.

Nothing broke. The ship didn’t crash. I managed not to make any more a fool of myself than was necessary to maintain my reputation as a member in good standing with the Order of Young, Stupid Males. That is not to say we didn’t have a modicum of excitement now and again.

It started while we were still on Umber, the orders came down for a change in destination. We were scheduled to close the loop by running from Ablemarle back to Dunsany Roads, but the company diverted us to Barsi. We took about half the ship loaded in fertilizer and frozen fish. Pip and I did very well with the masks and silk carp in the flea market, leaving Umber with twelve kilocreds in cash and a bundle of necklaces made of shells, bones, and teeth from one of the large aquatic predators. I thought they were a bit tacky, but Diane liked them and I trusted her judgment.

By the time we got to Barsi in December, Pip and I had the new cargo systems smoothed out and we managed to bring the profit pool up by something like eight percent over projections by locking in some cargoes as early as we could and holding others until the last possible moment. That added a nice little bit to our shares, and it was a good thing too. I was accepted into the class of 2358 just as Tom Carstairs had predicted. The acceptance notification from the academy waited for me when we pulled the beacon data from the Barsi Orbital. Appended to it was a financial aid application packet. This form was not filled out for me, but it was not difficult. I had some awkward moments trying to figure out how to explain my parents’ financial status. Mom’s was easy, of course. “Deceased” covered it. Finally, Mr. von Ickles suggested, “Whereabouts unknown,” for my father. After that it was basically, just attaching my tax receipts for the previous year.

Francis surprised us in Barsi when he left the ship to take a teaching position.

He announced it to Brill, Diane, CC, and me on the mess deck just before we docked. “It’s your fault,” he told me with a grin.

“What did I do?”

“You were drunk on your butt in Niol that night with Penny and Quent, remember?”

“I remember very well,” I told him, “thereby putting the lie to your scurrilous commentary on my state of inebriation!”

CC turned to Diane at that point and asked, “What did he say?”

She leaned over and told him, “Ish just said he wasn’t drunk.”

CC nodded and thanked Diane for the translation.

“You told me that I should teach at the academy because the officers needed to know about astrophysics. I kinda liked that idea so I threw off an inquiry to the commandant. Did you know he’s named Giggone, too?”

“Yeah, he’s the captain’s father. What’d he say?”

Brill and Diane both looked at me as if to say “How do you know that?” but did not interrupt for a change.

“Well, they happened to have a search open and had no luck finding anybody who wanted to teach. They offered me a contract already on the basis of my credentials. They sent a ticket out of Barsi on the weekly packet ship. I should be there in time to start spring term if I leave on the next transport.”

He grinned at me then. “I’ll be ready for you when you get there. Expect to work very hard but I’m a fair grader!”

I laughed, remembering every teacher I had ever known saying that. He probably believed it as much as they all did.

The captain posted the opening as soon as we docked and we got a spec three from the
Ozymandias
as replacement within a couple of days. He was a nice enough guy named Emile Laslo. He had cropped black hair and grin that never seemed to go away—even in his sleep. He knew his stuff pretty well and, after getting lost only twice on the VSI, didn’t have any problems. Diane liked his shoulders.

While we were in Barsi, I got to meet Pip’s mother, Tammy Carstairs. A lovely woman with a wiry sense of humor that found the funny in the strangest of places. I suppose, living with Tom and raising Pip, you’d have to have some kind of defense mechanism and I took to her right away. Not so much as
surrogate mother figure
but more like
supplemental mom
. She was a hell of an astrogator, too, as I was coming to understand just what that meant. She asked what I was doing in systems and after describing the cargo tools—which Pip gushed about at some length—we talked about other astrogation problems. She had some interesting ideas including considerations of planetary positioning in orbital sequence to identify the true center of gravity for a system. Theoretically, it was possible to shave as much as two days off a long run out to the Burleson limit by taking planetary positioning into account. Taking two days off a twenty day run was a ten percent reduction in overhead and was certainly worth looking into. It wouldn’t work all the time, of course, because it required a specific alignment scenario with at least the major system bodies. Still, an awareness of it could certainly give us some options in laying out courses.

Pip and I didn’t have much success with our trades on Barsi. The shell necklaces didn’t sell that well and I didn’t find the kind of quality goods that I was hoping for on the return leg. We only made another kilocred in private trading, but we picked up a big pile of entertainment cubes to take back to Umber. Those we expected to do well with, although we were already sweating what we were going to take out of Umber when we left for Niol.

Dick Graves was familiar with the planetary alignment work, but lacked the necessary computational ability to actually calculate the course based on it. We worked on the problem all the way back to Umber—Ms. Avril, Mr. von Ickles, Dick, Sandy, and I. At least part of the issue was related to having the correctly updated astrogation ephemera. Those we had automatically updating by the time we picked up the Umber Orbital feeds again.

We docked at Umber near the end of January. As expected the entertainment cubes sold well, and we were left with a few of the shell necklaces, and about twenty kilocreds at the end of our second day in port. Personally, I began to get a bit worried. Unless we earned a lot more and quickly, I wouldn’t have enough creds for the ticket to Port Newmar, let alone the cost of my first year at the academy.

Pip and I had our heads together over beers at
Floyds
. Lee von Ickles was with us. He had adopted me when I joined the section, but we had been hanging around together off the ship ever since my acceptance came in. I appreciated it because we usually wound up talking about the academy. He had me convinced to start studying the advanced math course I had on my portable and when I got stuck on something, he was good about helping me with it. He had an ulterior motive, but at the time he just said, “It’ll help you when you get to Port Newmar if you have this down.”

“Well, how much risk are you willing to take on?” Lee asked us over the second round.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, but at this rate, I’m not going to be able to go.”

“Fertilizer,” Lee said.

Pip looked up at that. “What?”

“We’re going to Niol next. Check the prices on fertilizer. A container costs basically ten creds a ton to ship—about six thousand credits per container.”

“We can rent a container?” Pip asked.

He shrugged. “Anybody can rent a container. Long as you pay the freight on it. The challenge—and the risk—is in finding something that you can afford to buy a container full of that’s going to earn you more than the cost of the freight on the other end.”

“That first exercise we did for Mr. Maxwell was only ten kilocreds, wasn’t it?” I asked Pip.

He nodded slowly. “Yeah, but the ship doesn’t have to pay the freight, so the margins were much higher.”

“True, but if you’ve got twenty kilocreds to invest, six goes to pay the freight and that leaves you fourteen to fill the container with. The only problem is you need to fill it with something that’ll earn you more than the original investment. Fertilizer is the only thing I can think of that’s cheap enough per unit for you to buy a container load of here.”