Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (36 page)

She stopped at the cabin and listened for a few heartbeats. She didn’t hear any voices. A quick knock brought Trask to the door. “Ms. Regyri,” he said, eyeing the lump of charred metal in her hand. “Come in.”

She stepped through the door and glanced around the cabin. “Are they gone?”

“Yep. Engineering was the last stop. We passed with a couple of minor infractions.”

“Good news.”

He shrugged. “Easily fixed, at any rate.” He nodded to one of the visitors’ chairs and took his own seat behind the desk. “What’s with the part? I assume that’s the emitter bus coupling from the spine?”

“Yes, Captain. It’s the right size for the class of Burlesons we’re running. I don’t see any obvious signs of sabotage or anything. Like I said before. Probably just entropy.”

He grinned. “Yeah, things break. What’s the problem?”

“The chandlery order isn’t for this part. It’s for a more expensive part. One for ships with the next generation Burleson drive.”

Trask appeared to chew on that for a few moments, his jaw working side to side. “Somebody fiddled the spares inventory?”

“I just ordered what was labeled. I didn’t check to see that the labels were actually correct.”

He shook his head. “Somebody compromised the inventory database so that it looked like the right thing on the surface.” His gaze met Natalya’s across his desk. “How many more parts are bogus?”

“I don’t know, Captain. I came to you as soon as I found out.”

He started punching keys on his console. “Read me that part number.”

She read it to him and he keyed it.

“That’s fixed that. You weren’t kidding about the cost difference. Those suckers are expensive.”

“Yeah, they are.”

He consulted his console again. “The chandlery confirms the change. I’ve asked them to hold on delivery until we’ve verified the order.” He looked back at Natalya. “Now, what’s the best way to find out what else might be wrong?”

Natalya shook her head. “It’s hundreds of items. Almost everything on the list costs a lot.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Trask said.

Natalya felt herself staring at him for a long moment before realizing what he had said. She felt an icy trickle of sweat down her back. “You’re thinking everything.”

Trask’s head bobbed once. “How do we find out?”

“Lyons.”

“Really?”

“He’s the inventory specialist.”

“Go see what he says,” Trask said.

When Natalya knocked on his door, she got no answer. “Mr. Lyons?”

Blanchard’s door opened and Blanchard stuck his head out. “Mr. Lyons is ashore. Something I can help you with, Ms. Regyri?”

Natalya shook her head. “More inventory issues. We’ll get it sorted.”

“Good luck.” Blanchard disappeared back into his stateroom.

Natalya stood there for a moment before heading for the brow. She found an able spacer she didn’t recognize lounging behind the desk. “Good afternoon,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The man looked up from a tablet. “You’re that engineer. Reggie?”

She held out a hand. “Natalya Regyri.”

He looked at her hand a moment before shaking it. “Aaron Wolk.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Wolk.”

He snorted. “Can I help you? Sar?”

“I’m looking for Mr. Lyons. I heard he went ashore.”

Wolk nodded. “Half a stan ago.”

“Did he happen to say where he was going?”

He snorted again. “To me? Not likely.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wolk. I’ll let you get back to your reading.”

Natalya turned and started down the passage leading back into the ship.

“He’ll probably be back in another stan or so,” Wolk said.

She looked at him.

Wolk shrugged. “He never goes ashore for more than a couple of stans at a time. Usually comes back with a load on and a case in tow, if you know what I mean.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wolk. Kind of you to share.”

He shrugged and settled back into his seat, lifting the tablet up to his face.

Natalya pulled out her own tablet and sent a message to Lyons before climbing the ladder to her stateroom. She paused before entering, then continued past and down the spine to the engineering office. The console there had a bigger screen and the chair had hardly been used. If she was going to grind though the list, at least she’d be comfortable.

It took her only a few moments to bring up the list and sort it in descending order by unit price. The emitter bus couplings weren’t near the top of the list. She found them near the bottom of the list and noted the new part number. She nodded to herself and went back to the top.

She spent the better part of a stan working through the actual specifications for the parts, rather than relying on the ship’s inventory. She filtered out the tools—like the bus coupling balancing tools and the fusactor test equipment. They represented a few of the top slots but not all. She was more concerned with whether the items coming as spares would even work on the ship.

Every one of the first dozen items were over spec and anywhere from half again to five times more expensive than the actual parts she needed. Some of them would work, but more of them would simply be excess mass. She pulled a comms interface and sent a note to the skipper to tell him of her findings before digging back into the long, long list of parts.

She made it a third of the way down the list before she had to stand and stretch. The muscles in her back and shoulders screamed at her from the tension of being huddled over the console. She checked the chrono and realized that she’d need to move to make it to dinner mess on time.

She hurried down the spine and slid down the ladder to reach the wardroom deck. She found the captain, Pritchard, and Zoya gathered around the head of the table. “Sorry I’m late. I got involved in some inventory issues.”

“Again,” Zoya said with a grim smile.

“Again,” Natalya said.

“Never mind that now,” Trask said and waved at the pantry door. “Mr. Bray, I think we’re all here now.”

Natalya looked around at the empty places.

“Lyons is still ashore. Charlie decided he wanted to eat on station tonight. He’s got the duty in the morning. What did you find?” Trask asked, looking at Natalya.

“About what you feared. I’m glad you held the order.”

“How long will it take you to fix the discrepancies?”

“At least a couple of days.”

Pritchard watched the exchange, his face turning toward each speaker in turn. “Whatever has happened?”

“Spares inventory problem,” Natalya said.

Trask stepped in when she took a breath. “Minor inconvenience, Steven. Nothing serious.”

Natalya looked at the captain and raised an eyebrow.

Trask looked down at his plate and gave his head a small shake.

Zoya offered her the tiniest of shrugs as Pritchard addressed his dinner.

“As long as it’s not a problem,” he said.

Natalya took a bite of her fish and cast about for something to talk about. Her head was full of the problem and she had to give it a good shake to think of something else to say.

Trask saved her. “You’ll be glad to know the inspection went off without a hitch,” he said.

“Oh, excellent,” Pritchard said.

“The boarding team was most impressed with you, Ms. Regyri. It’s not often they find an engineering third who knows enough about the ship’s systems to be doing repairs unsupervised.”

Pritchard looked up at that. “You were fixing something? Why wasn’t I informed?”

The captain reached over to pat Pritchard on the forearm. “Strictly routine, Steven. Nothing for you to be concerned with.”

Trask’s soothing words appeared to mollify the man and Pritchard turned back to his dinner again.

Natalya wasn’t sure she believed Pritchard, but she glanced at Lyons’s empty seat again. “Anybody heard from Mr. Lyons in the last couple of stans?”

Pritchard looked at her. “I believe I heard him getting ready to go ashore just after lunch.”

“Does going ashore have a specific sound?” Zoya asked, her head cocked sideways a little.

Pritchard shrugged. “I assumed he was going ashore. There was enough thrashing and banging next door to wake the dead.”

Natalya considered Pritchard’s words.

“Something wrong, Ms. Regyri?” Trask asked.

Natalya pressed her lips together and cast a sidelong glance at Pritchard. “I don’t know, Skipper. I have no reason to suspect there is.”

Was it her imagination or did Pritchard’s posture relax just a tiny bit?

Trask glanced at Pritchard and gave Natalya a shallow nod. “Perhaps you’d stop by the cabin after dinner mess? We can go over the inspectors’ punch list. It shouldn’t take long,” he said.

“Of course, Captain.”

The meal finished up in largely awkward silence, punctuated only by Captain Trask chatting with Zoya about navigation around Toe-Hold space. Natalya couldn’t shake the feeling of dread—the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.

Chapter 40
Siren Orbital: 2363, August 1

Trask led the way up to the cabin. “Close that behind you, if you please, Ms. Regyri.” He settled behind his desk and pulled a flask out of the bottom drawer. “Sit. We need to talk.”

She closed the door and sat across from him. “I’m at your disposal, Captain.”

He gave a single, chesty laugh at that—half chuckle, half grunt—and pulled a couple of glasses from the same drawer. A flick of his fingers released the cap on the flask and he dribbled a spare finger of the liquid into each glass. He closed the flask again and replaced it in the drawer. One fat finger chased a glass across the desk toward Natalya and he took the other.

Natalya looked at the glass and then at the captain.

He shrugged. “Rank still has some privilege. Even in Toe-Hold.” He nodded at the glass. “Humor me. I hate to drink alone.”

She lifted the heavy glass and gave the contents a quick sniff, then a deeper appreciative inhalation. “What is this?”

“It purports to be single-malt Scotch whisky, but it’s really just a good counterfeit. Far as I know the real thing only comes from a tiny portion of old Earth and nobody I know goes there anymore.”

She took a cautious sip and tasted smoke and an earthy flavor. As the fire slipped over her tongue, she thought maybe some kind of fruit flavor appeared for an instant and disappeared. It warmed all the way down to her stomach and spread. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Holy mother of pearl.”

Trask chuckled for real then, his eyes dancing as he took a short sip of his own. “About my only vice these days,” he said. “That flask is the last of it so you’ll pardon the parsimonious pouring.”

“I’m honored,” Natalya said. She paused, then looked into his eyes. “Why?”

He stared into his glass for a long moment before taking another small sip. Eventually, he looked across the desk at her. “I trust you.”

“Thanks, I think.”

He grinned. “You’ve saved our asses.”

“My own, too, don’t forget.”

“Well, sure, but we’ve also survived two close calls with TIC thanks to you and Zoya.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I can claim any contribution there, Captain. I still don’t understand how we can have TIC informants aboard, TIC inspectors, and even TIC special ops agents running through here and still be in danger of getting busted for smuggling.”

His eyebrows lifted and he smiled. “So, you caught that, eh?” He smiled and sipped. “Tell me about the spares order.”

“It’s screwy. Some of the stuff seems legit. Almost all the highest-priced items might actually fit here, but then there are the things like those emitter bus couplings. I don’t think they’d even fit in the inspection port, let alone into the gap between the bus bars.”

“Tell me about the Zeta drives.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

Trask grimaced. “I don’t get out as much as I used to.”

“Zeta is the next generation after Origami. More efficient in terms of power use and reach. They’re useless on small ships, but rumor around the academy was that Manchester is coming out with a new class of mega-hauler. Maybe a thousand metric kilotons.”

“So basically the same as five Barbells?”

“That’s the theory. Lots of speculation. Not much in the way of hard data.”

“Legs?”

“They’ve got to have something better than the stock Barbells or they’d not be worth doing.”

Trask pursed his lips and stared at the desk. “Yeah. Logic isn’t always the best predictor of human behavior, but businesses tend to be a little more hard-nosed about ROI. How many of these parts are like the bus couplers?”

“Some. They’re hard to spot because most heavy haulers use a lot of the same components.” She shrugged a shoulder. “Fusactor readout panels look the same regardless if the unit is one megawatt or a hundred gigawatts.”

Trask nodded. “How long will it take you to get the inventory back in line?”

She sighed and ground her teeth. “Weeks. Probably. I need to find out what we’re using now rather than what the system says we need for spares. Even then, I’m not sure I’d trust it.”

Trask’s head settled back on his neck and his eyes grew a little wider. “Is that even possible? There are a million parts on this ship.”