On the other hand, if Alliance decided to bite the bullet and stimulate Virgo sales with a substantial price reduction, it would be more profitable to sell the Orion for scrap and use the money as a down payment on one of the newer Elliptic class ships that would be a drug on the market if the Virgos started selling at a discount.
Well, why should I care? I had my ticket and would no doubt get another berth if the owners decided to send the Orion to the breakers. Still, it bothered me somehow. I had seen an old flat pic at the Merchant Academy; I don’t know where it came from or even if it was true or just some writer’s imagination, but it upset me in ways I found hard to explain. It was only a few minutes long and had no plot. It just showed a great steel ocean-going ship grounded on a sand beach somewhere in Africa back on Earth. Hundreds of squat black men like an army of insects crawled over her from stem to stern and, armed with torches and pry-bars, wrenches, cables, and saws, they dismembered her right down to the waterline the way a swarm of ants might slice up and carry off a rotting pineapple.
Putting thoughts of broken ships and unemployed men from my mind I continued on down to the mess. Artificial gravity is a wonderful thing, I think, but unfortunately it’s impractical for anything smaller than carriers and heavy ships of the line. The military isn’t constrained with cost considerations—who cares how much power the damn things suck up if not having to carry spin means the difference between winning a battle and losing it?
Since we couldn’t afford the luxury of AG, the Orion maintained a spin sufficient to impart an apparent eight-tenths of a standard gravity at the ship’s hull, decreasing, of course, as one moved closer to the core. I didn’t care so long as the apparent gravity in the galley was sufficient to keep the food on my plate.
I grabbed a hurried dinner on the run and didn’t see Eves again until twenty-four hundred hours, when I wandered into the mess for a glass of tea before turning in. I had just left Calipha in the engine room where he swore that the coolant lines he’d jury-rigged around the converter housing should be enough to let us make three-quarters EV with a desynchronization of less than 2 percent. I took another swallow, not thinking of much beyond finishing my tea and falling into my bunk, then looked up to see Eves standing in front of me.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Have a seat. You get settled in OK?”
“When will the captain be able to talk to me?” he asked in a rush, ignoring my question.
“He’s going to be pretty busy until at least twelve hundred hours tomorrow, but he’s authorized me to have our engineer take at look at your ship.” Instead of an expression of relief, a few words of thanks, Eves frowned, then turned his gaze down to the deck.
“The Montclair is a very advanced design,” he said deliberately a moment later, struggling to control his frustration. “I’d prefer that no one fool around with its engines.”
“Moahmar Calipha doesn’t fool around with any ship’s engines. But if you want to leave the Montclair here instead of flying her back home, that’s up to you.”
“No offense meant, Mr. Dondero. I’m sure your Mr. Calipha is a qualified mechanic, but I’m somewhat protective when it comes to the Montclair. Couldn’t you just put it in your hold and take us with you to your next port of call—Coffernam, I think you said.”
“And what would we do with the cargo that’s already in the hold?”
“I suppose I could make good the loss,” Eves suggested gracelessly.
“Would you also explain to the consignees that we decided to throw their shipments overboard in deep space because you made us a better offer? What effect do you think that would have on the Orion’s reputation?”
Eves glanced around the mess, at the scarred plates, the bubbles in the dull gray paint where the walls met the curve of the ceiling, at the cheap plastic chairs and dented tables, at the chipped heavy white mug at my elbow, and suppressed a smile. “Surely the Orion could live with a little bad publicity, if the price was right,” he said easily. It was all I could do to keep from slapping his smarmy face. I took a slow swallow of lukewarm tea and turned back to Eves.
“The only way your ship will leave this pile of vacuum is if you fly her out of here yourself. As far as I can tell, her only problem is that you just plain ran out of fuel, but I’m not an engineer. I know I wouldn’t go charging off into Non-E assuming that’s all that was wrong. Quite frankly, it was a miracle that both our ships happened to drop out near each other this time. You can’t expect to be so lucky again.”
“Luck had—Look, Mr. Dondero, don’t you see—”
“I see that I’m tired and that I’m going to go to bed. I’d advise you to do the same. Get hold of me or the captain at 1200 hours tomorrow and let us know what you’ve decided.” Angrily, I stood up and roughly pushed my chair out of my way to the limit of its travel, then paused and turned back to Eves. “One more thing—if you expect us to supply you with any fuel you’ll have to pay for it at port standard prices. We’ll need hard funds, UCs or equivalent. Otherwise the whole question’s moot, anyway.”
I turned away from Eves’s burning glare, visited the head just long enough to splash some water on my face, and then crawled into my bunk. As I was lying there, balanced on the knife edge of sleep, I began to wonder what Eves had meant there at the end—“Luck had—.” Luck had nothing to do with it? He had to have meant something else. There was no way one ship could detect another in Non-E. Our drop-out so close together had to be the wildest stroke of fortune, equivalent to winning the lottery by randomly picking the right ten numbers between zero and ninety-nine all in the proper order. But people did win the lottery that way, every day, no matter how long the odds might appear to be. I rolled over, buried my head in my pillow and struggled to blot out all thoughts of Slater Eves.
At about 0500 I woke up with a start, my mind unnaturally clear. My cabin was still in deep shadow, the panels barely glowing at their lowest setting. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize myself falling back to sleep, but after a few seconds I knew it was hopeless, and I knew why. I had to take another look at Eves’s ship, to try again to figure out what was really going on. I pulled on a clean ’suit, splashed some water on my face, and headed for Calipha’s cabin.
“Get dressed, we’ve got work to do,” I told his bleary-eyed form when he finally staggered to the door.
“I just got to bed—” Calipha glanced at the chron near the door “—three hours ago,” he said wearily. “What’s happened? Did they find more damage?”
“We’ve got to check out Eves’s ship. Come on.”
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” he objected, his head sagging, his eyes already drooping half closed. “Captain wants to inject at 1400 hours.”
“So, take a stim. Come on, I’m not kidding. Let’s go.”
Calipha gave me one more exhausted glance, then wandered back into his tiny cabin. After a stop at the head and then the mess for hot sweet caff, we headed for the boat. I called the bridge and told Everson, the navigator who had the A shift today, to log Calipha and me as taking a check-out run on the boat.
“Eves know you’re doing this?” Calipha asked me a few minutes later, rubbing his face as the boat’s tube mated to the Montclair’s hull.