To Fire Called (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 2) Read online

  “Where is this manager?” Pip asked.

  The server nodded at a petite redhead drawing beer behind the bar. “That’s her. Lori. She’ll be able to answer your questions when the rush thins out.”

  “Thank you,” Pip said.

  “My pleasure,” he said and circulated to the next table over.

  “I thought for a second there he was going to say he hoped to exceed our expectations,” Al said into her beer.

  The chuckles around the table left Ms. Sharps looking from face to face.

  “Sorry, Ms. Sharps,” I said. “Yard humor. We hear that phrase about twenty times a day from everybody we talk to over there.”

  She nodded. “I can see where that might get old.”

  “You have no idea,” Chief Stevens said, and poured a little more ale into her glass.

  The meal wound down just as the chrono clicked over to 1315. Our server cleared the rubble off the table. “Can I get anybody anything?” he asked, piling empty and near-empty plates along his arm with reckless abandon.

  “Coffee for me,” I said. “Perhaps a dessert menu?”

  “Anybody else?” he asked looking around the table.

  “I’ll take a coffee,” Sharps said.

  “Me, too,” Chief Stevens said. “But I’ll pass on dessert.”

  He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. He was back in about a tick with coffees and a dessert menu. “Lori said she’ll be along to speak with you about the room shortly.”

  I looked over the dessert menu but didn’t see anything that really appealed to me. The beer left me feeling bloated. I slipped the menu onto the table and pulled the coffee closer.

  “What do you like for dessert, Skipper?” Sharps asked.

  “You sucking up already?” Al asked with a wink and a grin.

  “Why, however could you think such a thing?” she asked, then grinned. “Just preparing my strategy for later.”

  The redhead, Lori, approached the table while we were still laughing. “Somebody’s having a good afternoon,” she said. “You wanted to see me?”

  Pip nodded. “You have an event room we can rent?”

  “We have a room, yeah. What kind of event?”

  “Our ship is coming out of the yards and we need to recruit crew.” Pip shrugged. “Ship won’t be ready for a couple of weeks, but we’d like to get the process going and we need a place to meet them.”

  “So you’re going to have a beer bash?” Lori asked. Her expression appeared polite and professional but her voice carried a tone of ‘are you mad?’ with it.

  “Last time we recruited, we had many more people than we could hire,” Pip said.

  “I’m sure,” Lori said. “Work is always scarce. Having the yards helps some, but crews get left here all the time while their ships get tied up. Sometimes for months.”

  The weight of beer in my stomach suddenly doubled.

  “We’d like to see how the various people get along. What better way than to have a little party?” Pip asked.

  “Maybe you should see the room first,” Lori said.

  Pip smiled. “Excellent idea.” He stood and looked around the table. “You coming?”

  Lori took us to one side of the pub near the kitchen and pressed a release. A person-sized door opened in the bulkhead and she led us through into the next compartment over. She flipped a couple of switches and ceiling lights came on, illuminating an area as large as the pub.

  “We got this space from Orbital Management with the idea that we’d expand into it, but the pub doesn’t actually need the space. We’ve been using it for weddings and birthday parties.” Her voice echoed against the blank walls.

  “So you could set up a buffet in here?” Pip asked.

  “Sure. Finger foods, tap a couple of kegs. We’ve got a list of bands if you want dancing.”

  Al laughed. “Oh, there’ll be dancing all right, but I don’t think we’ll need a band for it.”

  Lori looked from Al to Pip to the chief and back to Al.

  “Tap dancing across the truth, spinning a few yarns along the floor, and waltzing us around enough to get the job,” she said.

  Lori grinned. “Can’t blame them for that.”

  “I don’t,” Al said. “I’d be disappointed if they didn’t want it enough to work for it.”

  “How much?” Pip asked.

  “Room’s a hundred per stan.”

  “Food and drink?”

  “How many people?”

  “Say, two hundred?” Pip looked at me.

  “Two hundred people. Two stans. Maybe some tables and chairs. Data pickup,” I said.

  Lori blew out a breath and her eyes focused somewhere other than on us. “Call it two grand. We’ll bring in a five-tray buffet and keep it stocked. Couple kegs of beer. Buy as many of them as you want at two hundred each after that,” she said with a grin. “We’ll make more.”

  “What size?” Pip asked.

  “Half barrel.”

  “Fair price,” he said and looked at me.

  “Don’t look at me. I’m just the bus driver. You’re the CEO,” I said.

  Lori’s face wore an expression that fell halfway between “are you people pulling my leg” and “holy crap, I’ve just scored.”

  “Two enough?” Al asked.

  “Two kegs?” Pip snickered. “You’ve got to be kidding. What will the rest of you drink?”

  “Two events,” Al said.

  Chief Stevens tilted her head to port a few degrees. “Deck and engineering?”

  “Would make sense,” Al said.

  “The idea has merit,” I said. “How will we pick them, though? That’s a lot of people in a room.”

  Chief Stevens nodded. “Yeah, it would be but if we do it all in one go, it’ll be the same number, just jammed together.”

  I tried to juggle the probabilities in my head and failed.

  “How do we find candidates who aren’t just interested in free beer?” Ms. Sharps asked.

  “We don’t tell them there’ll be free beer until they get here,” Pip said.

  “How long do you think that’ll last?” Al asked.

  “We’ll have to try it and see,” Pip said. “Where’s the entrance? I assume it’s not through the pub.”

  Lori led us toward the far bulkhead. “These panels slide away. You’ve seen our main entry on the promenade. Same size, but without signage in the insert. The compartment designator lights up on the outside when we want it to. We can put your event name out there.”

  “How do weddings handle it?” the chief asked. “They’d have to deal with gate crashers.”

  Lori shrugged. “Show your invitation at the door. We can take out just one panel, limits the access to an area you can cover with a table and a couple of people.”

  Pip looked at me. “All right, genius. How do we issue invitations to people we don’t know?”

  “Have them show the ad on their tablets?” I said. “Run their public profiles to make sure they’re actually deck or engineering before they come in?” I looked at Lori. “Can we put up a screen of some kind about here?” I stepped back a couple of paces from the entry. “Nobody can see in until they get past the watchdogs?”

  “You can put up whatever you like so long as it’s gone when your time is up and doesn’t leave marks,” she said, a faint smile on her lips.

  “This is all well and good,” Al said. “My original question still holds.”

  “Are two enough?” I asked.

  Pip shrugged. “I’ve no idea. Why don’t we start with one and see if we get enough people to fill our rosters. How many do we need?”

  “Two mates. A second and a third,” I said. “At least one spec two ship handler and a spec two astrogator. I’d take a spec three to round out three watch sections along with some combination of able and ordinary spacers for messengers.”

  “That’s eight. What about some quarter shares?” Pip asked.

  “Let’s see who we get first,” I said.


  Pip looked at the chief. “What do you need for the back seats?”

  “CPJCT says we need four in power, three in propulsion, and at least four in environmental. Make it four in each section with a spec two or three and some combination of wiper, engineman, and mechanic for each.”

  “Twelve for you,” he said. He looked at Al. “We need to do this twice?”

  “I’m thinking more of how many might show up rather than how many we might take.”

  The chief nodded. “She’s right. We only need twenty hands but we want an open field to choose from and if Breakall was any indicator, we’ll fill this room a couple times over.”

  “Let’s start with one,” I said, looking at Pip. “Unless you wanna override me on this? If we can’t find enough likely candidates, we could do it again.”

  He nodded. “I like it. When?”

  Lori pulled out a tablet and consulted it. “The room’s booked tonight and tomorrow. We’ve got something coming in on the eighth and another on the tenth. You can have the seventh, ninth, or eleventh. There are more dates after that. How soon do you want it?”

  “If we have the crew lined up, we could move them over on the eleventh and get them settled,” the chief said.

  “When did Dakota say we can move over to the orbital?” I asked.

  “The twenty-fourth unless something else breaks,” the chief said.

  Pip nodded. “We’ll take the seventh. You want a deposit?”

  “Yes, please.” Lori flipped a couple of screens on her tablet and tapped some keystrokes. “One night, two stans. Five-tray buffet and two kegs. I said two grand. I’ll stay with that. Half on deposit. The other half at the beginning of the event.” She looked up. “Food is your biggest expense. Buffets cost a lot. If you need to trim costs, that’s where you should do it.”

  Pip shook his head. “That’s fine. Fair price for what we want and I’m not going to chip the paint over petty cash.” He looked at me. “Good with you?”

  “Hey, I’m a stockholder, too,” Chief Stevens said. “You should ask me.”

  Pip gave a theatrical sigh they could probably have heard in the pub next door. “Very well, Chief. Good with you?”

  Chief Stevens looked at Lori. “Can we get those little meat-filled dumplings?”

  Lori looked blank for a moment. “Like dim sum?”

  “Yes. Like dim sum. Or even real dim sum.”

  “Sure. You want to pick your menu now or leave it to us?”

  The chief shook her head. “As long as there’s dim sum.”

  Pip looked at her with a mock frown and a wry smile. “You held up progress for dim sum?”

  “I love those little suckers,” she said.

  “Are you good with this now?” he asked.

  “Carry on, dear boy.”

  Pip looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

  “I’m good. Let’s make it happen,” I said.

  Pip held up a thumb. “Where do I sign?”

  Chapter 3

  Dree Orbital: 2375, January 7

  I had to give it to Pip. The man knew how to get things done in a big way. In the two standard days between signing for the facility and the actual event, he managed to get the chandlery to print up a three-meter-square banner of our logo on a frame with a clever spring-fit mounting. It stood perfectly as a backdrop behind the entry at the venue.

  Al and I watched as Pip and the chief lined things up the way they wanted, spreading a cloth over the entry table and measuring the clearance to make sure nobody could enter without checking in with whoever guarded the table.

  As the event got nearer I found myself wondering how we’d make it work. I’d failed the course at the academy that taught wandering around in a crowd of strangers, drinking beer, and chewing finger food. Even when I was a kid back on Neris, my mother never made me go to the faculty receptions.

  While the minutes ticked down, I became more and more convinced that we had embarked on a foolish venture.

  “We should have just hired an office and set up appointments,” I said, wiping my palms against my pants.

  Al shook her head. “We’d be interviewing from now until hell froze. I bet you we leave here with the people we need.”

  “How?”

  “What do you mean how?” she asked. “We’ll mix and mingle and compare notes at the end. Announce the winners of the job lottery and off we go.”

  “So, you’re going to walk through a crowd of two hundred people. Keep their names straight. Talk to them and find out if they’ll fit in our merry band of ne’er-do-wells and scofflaws for two solid stans, and then be able to compare notes with us at the end of the night?”

  “Certainly not.” She stared at me like I’d sprouted a new head on each shoulder. “We’ll use the badges.”

  “The badges?”

  Al took me by the arm and dragged me to the table where Pip and the chief were just laying out stacks of oblong labels a little smaller than the palm of my hand. “Tell him about the badges.”

  “Neat little things.” Pip held up one of the labels. “Mark on them like paper.” He pulled out a marker and wrote “Cargomaster Phillip Carstairs” on one. “Peel off the backing and it sticks to whatever you press it on.” He pulled the backing off and slapped it on his left breast pocket. “You try.”

  “This is a bit silly,” I said.

  He grinned. “We haven’t gotten to the good part.”

  Al, the chief, and I all put our ranks and names on the badges. I slapped mine on my upper chest and looked at Pip. “All right. Now what?”

  With a stage magician’s flourish, out of his pocket he pulled a roll of gold foil stars mounted on backing paper. “These little beauties will sort our catch for us.”

  The chief kept pulling her lips in between her teeth. I got the feeling she was trying not to giggle. Whether at the situation in general or me in particular, I wasn’t sure—and that made me uneasy.

  “All right, Carstairs the Unbelievable. Show me your trick,” I said.

  “We have to try to talk to everybody who comes through that door. Well, gap, but you know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” I said, pressing my hands against my thighs so I wouldn’t choke the life out of him.

  “So, we need a way to know if we’ve talked to somebody.”

  “Yes. So we give them a gold star?”

  “Precisely, but that’s not enough. We need to know who to keep and who to show the door.” He held up his roll of stars. “So, I’m talking to you and you are an interesting candidate that I think we might want to keep around.” He peeled a star off the roll and stuck it to my badge. “There. You’re tagged. Later in the evening, we can corral the people who have four plus tags.” He looked at Chief Stevens. “I assume you want to play along?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t miss this,” she said.

  Pip peeled another star off. “Now, I also chatted with the chief and decided that she just doesn’t seem to fit. So I tag her with a minus tag.” He stuck the star onto her badge. “Nothing personal, Chief. I think you’re swell and we’re going to make beautiful music together, you and I.”

  The chief laughed.

  I looked at the chief’s badge and down at my chest. “Uh. How do you tell them apart?”

  “They’re chipped—badge and star, both.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

  He pulled a little penlight out of his pocket and shined it on my badge. The gold star glowed green. “Green is yes.” He pointed the pen at the chief. Her star glowed red. “Red is no.”

  Al grinned at me. I suspected my expression carried my sense of utter consternation clearly.

  Pip held up the roll of badges. He tapped the next one in line, then peeled it off and stuck it on me. “So far so good?” he asked.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  He tapped the next label in line twice, peeled it off, and stuck it on me. His eyebrows went up as he looked at me. “Got it?”

  “W
hich is which?”

  He shined the pen light on my badge. The last star glowed red.

  “If I like them, tap the star. If I don’t, tap it twice?” I asked.

  “See? You’re trainable,” Pip said. “Tap before you peel. It doesn’t take much.” He held out a roll of stars to me. “And don’t fiddle with them. They’re sensitive.”

  “All right, smart ass. How will we know if we’ve seen everybody?”

  He reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a roll of foil wrenches, which he handed to the chief with great ceremony. Without speaking he pulled out a roll of foil ship’s wheels, handing it to Al. He reached in and pulled out a final roll, holding it up for us all to see.

  “Are those beer bottles?” Al asked.

  He beamed.

  “I gotta hand it to you,” I said. “I had no idea this kind of thing even existed.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’re lucky you have me.”

  The hole in his scheme seemed too obvious. “Other than the possibility of fritzing the label, which doesn’t seem trivial to me, how will we know who’s got the lucky tickets? We going to shine lights on the crowd?”

  Pip giggled like a little boy. “That’s the best part.”

  He pulled a blank badge off the pile and wrote “Sam” on it. He peeled the backing off and slapped it on his sleeve. “Now, if each of you would give me a yes vote?”

  I tapped a star and stuck it to the Sam badge. Al tapped one of her stickers and the chief followed suit. Finally Pip tapped one of his beer bottles, peeled it off, and stuck it to the badge. The entire badge glowed a pale green. “Four yes votes makes the badge glow on its own. Has to be four. If the badge detects more than four, it turns black. Less than four, no response.”

  I had to hand it to him. He’d thought of everything.

  Almost.

  Chapter 4

  Dree Orbital: 2375, January 7

  The staff from Rock and Roll laid out a long buffet table and wheeled in a portable bar. Pip’s setup at the front of the compartment looked good. The staff opened one panel in the bulkhead at 2000 and I settled in for the duration. The applicants trickled in, a few at a time at first. They looked a little sheepish coming around the side of the huge banner and peering around the huge empty room. They stood clustered around the entry. Newcomers had to push through the crowd but stopped at the first empty floor space, adding to the clot just inside the door.