The Dusters
“We were writing the final chapters of the Dussly shipyard, fitting I guess that they were proud chapters.”
Numbers tell the story of societies. I was always told this. Forty-five was one of several numbers I prepared for my whole life. That was my age when I was slated to take the reins at Dussly—on the corporate side that is. But the truth is that our entire small cylinder group depended on the corporate side. If our numbers stopped working there, then the government of the outpost soon would too. No small amount of pressure for a forty-five-year-old father-of-three taking responsibility for the futures of two-plus million families, especially with some other very troubling numbers on the horizon. I spent my life preparing, trying to figure my way out of those bad numbers, not just for me but for everybody.
The situation was both impossible and simple at the same time. We made a product here at Dussly. We were the sole manufacturer of a single big-ticket, high-value product. For thirteen generations our work helped to fuel the expansion of peoples from Dreeson’s and Hellenia into the Western Battery, particularly the Letters and Indies, but we sold more than our share of ships to the Trasp and Etterans as well through the years.
The Dussly D-14 Carrier is a hell of a ship. My father liked to call it the workhorse of the western Battery, a fair characterization. The D-14 fit. On the one hand, it slotted in between the behemoth freighters modeled after the colonial giants that brought all of our ancestors here from Charris; and on the other, it offered much more payload capacity than the mid-sized cargo carriers that dominate out in the Letters where lighter loads, maneuverability, and atmospheric entry are important. Big but not too big. And unlike most of the freighters on the Indie and Letters freight lines, the D-14 is fully enclosed with a pressurized cargo bay, ideal for perishables and liquid cargo of all kinds. And on top of that, there isn’t a commercial ship in all the Battery with a more reliable service record against a comparable service time. I can’t help myself. Here I am selling my hometown pride. But it’s true. We Dusters make a hell of a ship.
So what’s the problem, Gus?
The damn numbers. Not the ship itself. Not the cost of inputs. Hell, not even the volume of cargo flowing from the inner to the outer Battery these days. It was always the demographics. That intractable problem: numbers tell the story of societies. And the numbers had been talking for about twenty years, speaking in clear terms: Dussly was done.
It only took thirteen generations for us to saturate the inner Battery with D-14s. That was one way of looking at it. The other, and I think more accurate way, was that the growth of the entire Battery, population wise, was finally slowing. Nothing sinister or sad about it. Systems reach an equilibrium with their environments. Athos and Iophos—comfortably balanced. Hellenia—happily habitated. And out in the Letters, even though there was plenty of growth—a boom even—most of that growth was internal to those systems. Even the once-wild, far-flung systems of the outer Letters were beginning to build out their own infrastructure now. They weren’t shipping it all the way in on our ships anymore.
This was the problem my father handed to me when I became the Chief Executive of the shipyard. I saw my role as the manager of the transition, a process that would largely be out of our hands. The problem would be liquidity, and it would be a manageable one until our investors noticed. Then it would be a question of how patient they were and what the markets looked like at the time they noticed. These forces seemed mostly out of my hands and all but inevitable.
What I didn’t know was that Paul Slane was determined to have a say in the matter. Paul knew something about numbers, and he was watching them too from afar, and me as well. He’ll be back around again shortly. Wait for him. He’s a character.
The crunch really began in my third year as Chief. I had the sense that I still had more time. I suppose everyone usually does. Even with decades of the numbers staring everyone in the face, still, you never think the end is right around the corner, because you don’t want to. And when the representative for AIC arrived toward the end of the third quarter for a review, I actually thought it was a good sign she wasn’t one of the major players there. I thought she must be some sort of rising star. On first glance, she had to be ten years my junior at least, with a sunny disposition and either a well-faked or genuine curiosity about our operation. She came with an embodied Saraswathi clone “to review the operation”—her exact words. Julep Maier, I, and the Saraswathi split about equal time reviewing the books, touring the various departments, and discussing the strategies I’d implemented since my takeover, most of which were helping to prolong Dussly’s life, Ms. Maier agreed. I didn’t understand what she was. I thought it was another checkup.
I suppose she was about the break the news to me on the afternoon of the third day—it was a Friday on the standard calendar, so again, another sign I was too thick to see. We were returning to my offices to discuss Ms. Maier’s overall impressions from her visit. Our last stop was to visit the K-Dock, where we’d just procured, at a good rate mind you, a DC-AI FTL drive for our next D-14. We were still a few weeks from backing the frame in around it. She looked very much impressed by the whole operation. I imagine even for an Athosian as well traveled as Ms. Maier, it was a sight she’d never seen before, a naked starship drive fresh out of the wrapper, awaiting a ship to wear for a century’s worth of jumps around the galaxy. What she knew that I didn’t was that this DC-AI was the last one Dussly would ever procure. And it wasn’t something I could talk Ms. Maier out of. In fact, she didn’t have a voice in the matter. The spreadsheets had already done the talking.
And then there was Paul Slane, leaning against the outer window to my office as though he was waiting on an old friend. That wasn’t entirely untrue. I still thought of Paul as a friend, just one I hadn’t spoken to in years.
“The bank,” he declared, looking over at Ms. Maier. “So, Miss Bank, have you put poor Gus out of his misery yet?”
She had no idea what to make of Paul, and to be fair, I had no idea what he was doing there. It was a bad time to be catching up with a childhood friend—a bad impression, at least the way he seemed to be approaching it.
Tellingly, she shook her head in the negative, looking rather confused by the question and the encounter.
“Bankers dish out bad news with a sunny smile and a Saraswathi, am I wrong?”
“We were just about to sit down for a meeting, Paul,” I told him. “I could see you afterward.”
“I’m not sure you’re going to want to see me afterward, Gus. I’ve been looking at the numbers. They’re not great, am I right, Miss Bank? What was your name?”
“This is Ms. Maier,” I told Paul.
By that point my body language was attempting to usher him away from my office door.
“I’m Paul Slane,” he said, ignoring my subtle attempt to shoo him off. He stuck out a hand, and when she took it and shook, I could see her face register surprise at the handshake—the character of that hand, a working man’s hand.
“I’m Julep Maier,” she replied. “It’s been nice to meet so many of the workers here at Dussly these past few days.”
“She even has a bright name, Gus. We’re in real trouble, aren’t we?”
She smiled at that comment, but there was certainly an apprehension. She looked over to me, I thought, to see if I had a way out of the encounter. Before I could even try Paul was talking again.
“Julep, do you like money?” Paul asked. “You must at least be marginally fascinated by it to go into finance.”
She smiled at the question. “I suppose.”
He looked at her probingly. “You know, I get the sense that it’s just as much about the intrigue of it, the process, figuring out how capital flows, what makes the interstellar economy tick. That sort of thing?”
“You might be right about that,” she said. “Money’s nice too, though.”
“You may just be the perfect person to talk to.”
“I can feel a pitch coming on. I didn’t realize you had this in you, Mr. Fortizi,” Ms. Maier said, turning to me. “I’ve read this whole visit wrong.”
“I—” I was fumbling for words, again, the last to know.
“Oh,” she said, laughing. “Wrong again. Who is this mystery man, Gus?”
“Paul Slane?” I said. “Paul. Well, Paul’s an old friend. We went to school together.”
“And he’s got a plan to keep the outpost running, keep the old D-14s coming off the line? Management here at Dussly, AIC, Saraswathi, none of them see solvency in the future of the outpost, but you do, don’t you, Paul?”
He shrugged. “I’m pretty good with numbers too, aren’t I, Gus?”
“Actually—” I was about to reply.
“Tell you what, Gus. I was about to break some bad news to you. Paul seems to understand that if you don’t, but I wasn’t here to assess the operation so much as evaluate how best to divvy up whatever assets we determined could be extracted from Dussly and at what cost. How that broke down between management and the employees and other stakeholders, that was the longer discussion for next time, after you’d had a few weeks to chew on it. That’s my least favorite part of what I do, giving that news. I’m willing to put that off for a few minutes if you think it’s worth my time to hear Paul out. What do you think, Gus? Should I listen to Paul’s pitch?”
“Now wait,” Paul replied.
“No,” Saraswathi said. “The odds this gentleman’s proposal is worth your time Ms. Maier is very nearly zero. We should proceed with the meeting.”
“Please, Julep,” Paul stated, his manner now very sober. “There’s no need to be condescending. I came here with an offer. Not for AIC, for us, for the people whose home this is—generations of us. And for you. This is a genuine opportunity.”
“I’m sorry, Paul. You seem like a fine person—”
“Yes,” I said. “You asked me, Ms. Maier, whether earnestly or not, you asked me whether I thought it was worth your time to listen to Paul Slane. Whether you do or not, I’m going to listen to what he has to say. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.”
“It will be a waste of our time,” Saraswathi replied, “unless you consider procrastination useful.”
“Who asked you, Sara?” Paul said. “I ran the numbers with Svaarta, and they run clear in the black for at least two decades, and that’s before we even think of investing the profits.”
“The D-14 is a lost cause,” the Saraswathi replied.
“Hear me out, Julep,” Paul said. “You came all the way out here from Athos.”
“What the hell, Paul Slane? I admire your grit at least.”
She gestured toward my office as though it was hers. We sat at the conference table to the side. Paul had the slides in a gold wristband that fit so snugly against his skin it almost looked like it would cut off circulation to his hand if he gained a few pounds. But in Paul’s line of work loose clothing or a band like that could catch on something and make for a very bad day. Before he began, Ms. Maier asked him that very question.
“What do you do here, Paul?”
“I’m a fifth-generation machinist. Right now, I make fittings—plasma couplings for the fusion outflow on the DC-AI. I’ve worked just about everywhere, though. Meaning I could pretty much fabricate all the D-14’s components manufactured here at Dussly—the internals anyway. The hull and the pipes and all that, those are under the purview of the fitters and welders and framing teams.”
“So you make the complicated parts.”
“That’s a good way of putting it,” he said.
“I’m curious,” she replied. “What’s your plan to save the D-14?”
“We don’t,” he stated. “No. Saraswathi’s right about that. Demographics are clear. But who said that’s the only way to make money on an outpost like Dussly?”
“So what’s your pitch? Blow us away, Paul.”
“Okay, Julep. Answer me this. How many spaceships are there in the Battery these days?”
Ms. Maier shook her head. “It’s funny. I know a lot about the ships themselves—AIC holds shares in several shipyards like Dussly, and that’s obviously my division, but as far as a total, I’m not sure. Millions probably.”
“Good guess. If we rely on data from the shipyards themselves, cross-referenced with registries in the major powers and Indies, the number is 1.8 million, roughly.”
“That’s a lot of ships.”
“It is,” Paul said. “But that’s just the start of the story, because I got curious. 1.8 seems like a lot, but when you consider the population, the extent of our migration, and the longevity of most models, I began to wonder. I started running numbers against production of outposts like Dussly, the major shipyards in Dreeson’s, Hellenia, the Guild, and the Protectorate, and do you know what I found?”
“Please tell us, Paul,” Ms. Maier said.
“There should be more. A lot more.”
“How many more?”
“Svaarta and I cross-checked every database we could access, including Athosian and Iophan archives from the earliest years—I’m talking Schism-era records. And by our count, there are at least one hundred thousand missing ships in the Battery.”
“We’ve been out here for a few millennia now, Paul,” I said. “It’s rare for a ship to go missing or derelict, but clearly it happens.”
“That it does, Gus, but where are they? A hundred thousand ships? That’s a fleet. That’s ten fleets. Just out there somewhere. Now just hold onto that thought for a moment, Julep, while I make my next point here.”
“Certainly,” she replied. “I think I see where you’re heading with this, but please continue.”
“Here in Dussly, we’re a fully-operational shipyard, a large one with tens of thousands of capable builders and facilities. You know about Truro, Ioniti, Deth, I trust?”
“Yes, Paul, but refurbishment will never save an operation of this scale. The margins are way too small.”
“I agree. But why are they so small? You take a ship that’s an asset and if you were to resell, you might get a fraction of the price of the new ship on the open market. Let’s be conservative and say a third of the original price when the ship was brand new?”
“Right, but the ship owner would keep that revenue—that’s if it was their intention to sell in the first place. Most owners bring their ships in for refurbishment when they’re getting older to extend the life of the vessel.”
“True, and the shipyards are only paid for the work they do.”
“I doubt you could even keep your doors open if you let half your staff go tomorrow,” Julep said. “and there’s not nearly a big enough market for refurbishment to support an outpost like Dussly.”
“What if we owned all the vessels we were refurbishing?”
“Your hundred-thousand missing ships?” Ms. Maier asked. “If you could snap your fingers and make them magically appear on your doorstep, this might be a conversation, Paul. A—you don’t know exactly where they are; and B—if they’re broken down out there, it’s going to incur a huge cost to get them here.”
“What if we could solve all those problems, not with magic but with mathematics and modeling? We have a shipyard, a hard-working community. They know ships.”
“But how would we get the ships here?” I asked Paul.
Paul put up a floatscreen. “Svaarta and I have been putting this together for a few years now.”
“A few years?” Ms. Maier asked in disbelief.
“Sort of a hobby of mine,” he answered, gesturing to the 3D map of the Western Battery. “Watch closely.”
We sat in silence for several seconds, waiting for something to happen. Ms. Maier began to look over at Paul, and then to me, shaking her head.
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“I do,” Saraswathi stated. “Remove the stars and lower the ambient lights.”
The pinpricks of light disappeared from the map, and what remained was a dull blue haze hovering above the table.
“The missing ships of the Battery,” Paul said. “Hundreds upon thousands of years of archived records of missing ships, rescues, control station logs, port inventories. I never could have done it without Svaarta.”
“How accurate are these locations?” Saraswathi asked.
“To the system certainly,” Paul replied. “Each case will be different of course, but these are good estimates to within several million kilometers. Close enough that a thorough light survey of an area will tell the rest.”
“Let’s say you’re right,” Ms. Maier stated, her eyes growing more serious by the minute. “They’re still out there. If they could get here, they would, presumably. Is this the part where you snap your fingers and bring them here, Paul?”
“It won’t quite be that easy. But, like I said, Svaarta and I, we do some good work together. Here are Dussly’s logs.”
I was familiar with that display. Failure rates on the D-14, part-by-part, proprietary info on how our ships broke down when they did. Often enough, we were able to salvage our ship in most cases, but the way he displayed the issues—spreadsheet and bar graph began to make his point clear, at least as far as our ship was concerned. There were problematic parts that caused failure of either the FTL or the sublight fusion drive.
“Notice something, Gus?” Paul asked. “I’m sure this isn’t news to you.”
“A few problematic systems cause the vast majority of ship stalls and breakdowns.”
“Turns out that’s not a unique phenomenon to the D-14. Are you catching on yet, Sara? What do you think my odds are at this point of being worth listening to?”
“Thirty-seven percent,” she replied, eliciting a wide grin from Paul.
“Watch them climb,” he stated, raising another set of charts. “Basically, with just about every ship manufactured in the Battery since we arrived here—we don’t have all the back-records, but it’s fairly safe to extrapolate based on what’s recent—anyway, it’s the failure of about nine or ten parts for any given ship design that results in over eighty-six percent of the drive failures. And because of the huge expense of the two modes of salvage, a fair amount of older ships just get abandoned out there.”
“There’s still those two modes, though,” Ms. Maier stated. “You want to buy an old colony ship and make a wrecker of it, Paul? That’s ...” she shook her head, not entirely frowning at the idea, but she didn’t look optimistic.
“No. The other mode, on-site repair, Julep. It almost never gets done, because it requires a team of mechanics to go out to the site, diagnose the problem, leave the site again, procure the right parts, return to the broken-down ship to install them, and then hopefully bring the ship in if they’ve diagnosed the problem correctly. Repeat until successful.”
“Takes forever. Labor intensive,” Ms. Maier replied, shaking her head doubtfully. “And to get the parts from the manufacturers, even after-market? Months in transit? I suppose you could schedule multiple routes with multiple ships?”
Julep Maier looked over at Saraswathi.
“Not impossible if done efficiently. It would require a tremendous amount of coordination and forward planning.”
“That might be a good backup plan,” Paul said, “but I had something better in mind.”
He sat there looking over at the AI grinning. Saraswathi sat still, awaiting Paul’s big reveal.
“So?” Ms. Maier asked.
“So, Gus?” he asked me, and I started to smile.
It was always a joke of Paul’s when we were in school together, so much so, that it was a joke of everyone in our classes. He used to say it all the time: “What’s the point?” That was always the question. He drove each new teacher crazy with it, until they realized it was all one big joke. Paul, perhaps more than any of our classmates, saw math as a great game, a way to unlock a codex to the universe, and he played that game as well as any of us, even in our advanced classes. To him, the math always was the point.
So I had to ask him. “What’s the point, Paul?”
“Yeah, Gus, what is the point?”
“The point is to refurbish the ships and sell them.” I replied.
“So?”
“So we’d be replacing most if not all of the key parts anyway.”
“I’m not following,” Julep Maier said.
“You’re looking at an extremely skilled machinist, Ms. Maier,” I told her, “one of hundreds of our master machinists here at Dussly. Unless I’m missing the mark, Paul’s proposal would be to take the parts to the ships, replace all the failure-prone parts on site, and fly the ships back here to complete the reclamation process.”
“Wait, all the parts?”
“Just the ten-or-so commonest failure-prone components on each vessel—enough to get the ships flying again,” Paul answered. “Then we’ll put the shipyard to work scrubbing them back to serviceable once we fly them here.”
“But, wait? You’re talking about, what? Hundreds, thousands of different models, different shipyards? Thousands of different parts?”
Paul shook his head. “Most of the engines are one of about seven standard Starcraft Charris models or their variants. And the bigger ships are mostly Athosian or Iophan make, DC Interstellar with maybe ten significant size variations. So an inventory of about twelve-hundred parts would make it possible to repair roughly ninety-percent of the broken ships in the Battery.”
“Where are you planning to get all those parts, Paul?” Julep Maier asked, she was suddenly quiet, emotional, almost indignant.
“That’s the fun part, Julep. We’re going to make them.”
I started laughing, not because it was foolish, but because it was just the kind of crazy idea I knew Paul Slane capable of.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ms. Maier said. “You’re going to make thousands of parts and then fly all over the Battery replacing random parts on broken ships in the hopes they’ll make it back here so you can salvage them?”
“No, Julep,” Saraswathi replied. “Not random parts at all. By now I’m confident you’ve done speculative work on production, Mr. Slane?”
“I have ... well, me and Svaarta together.”
“How long would it take you to build such an inventory of replacement ship components? You and your entire team of machinists here at Dussly, I mean.”
“To spin up production, a couple weeks. But we’ve got all the specs. We’ve been busy researching—that part was all Svaarta. It’d just be transitioning the teams to parts they’re unfamiliar building. For a full inventory, maybe three months. After that, once our people have made something once, we could replace the inventory we deplete in ... I don’t know, two, three weeks tops. That’s not the bottleneck. It’s how fast we can get teams out into the Battery salvaging. In a year or two, though, we could have the moorings outside Dussly swimming in ships.”
“One hundred percent, Ms. Julep. That is my assessment. This conversation was one-hundred percent worth your time.”
“He’s not crazy?”
“He may very well be,” Saraswathi answered. “But he is not wrong. If his production team is as good as he says, and they can manufacture such a wide array of parts, the business model is sound. Decades of solvency at least, as Mr. Slane claimed from the outset.”
“Hmm,” Ms. Julep Maier said. “I was supposed to start back tonight—after I gave you the bad news, of course, Gus.”
“I saw your arrival on Dussly’s newsfeed,” Paul said. “No offense, Julep, but you had liquidation written all over you. A junior executive and a Saraswathi, with our financial outlook? I had a feeling we were in for it, Gus. I wasn’t planning on bringing this to you for another quarter—prepare a better pitch, more modeling.”
“I suggest we stay at least through the weekend, Ms. Julep,” the Saraswathi said. “I’d like to see all the numbers and consult with your Svaarta, Mr. Slane. If the numbers look good, we should tour the facility again with a different perspective. Your machine shop will need to be first-tier.”
“Nothing about us is average, Sara.”
“If this meeting is any indication, I should say so. Do you have a file set for us to review?”
Paul nodded. “You can take the entire drive. It’s an open copy. Just swipe it.”
“I guess we will be meeting again Mr. Fortizi,” Ms. Julep Maier said, getting up from the table with Saraswathi.
Paul and I got up and saw them to the door. Then I invited him back in for a drink once they’d excused themselves for the night, picked up by our escorts to take them back to our best visitor’s suite.
“Paul Slane,” I said, shaking my head. “Timely intervention.”
“Seemed necessary,” he replied.
“Good to see you again, Paulie. Been far too long.”
It was never a class thing, Paul drifting out of my life. Dussly was never really like that, or at least I never got that sense about our home. And I think I would have, son of the former Chief. The expectation that I would succeed Dad had been there my whole life, from the moment I demonstrated the aptitude for math, for management. Similar peer outposts like ours—single or small-batch ship manufacturers like Eden, Benforth, Shai—there were novels written about class strife on those outposts. Even Hellenian shipyards had their tensions. But I couldn’t say I’d ever caught much more than a hint of resentment throughout the whole of my childhood, and surely not from Paul. We were friends. He was so damn smart and never in an aimless way. He’d always had this way about him, a directness about each question, as though he was always trying to figure out how things worked. Anyone else that naturally gifted at math, and I’d have wondered why he’d opted for a career in the machine shop. Paul, though, he was always bringing these metal knickknacks and toys his dad had made after hours. Dancing figures with long-armed pendulums that would spin wildly around the perimeters of tables without ever falling off—no computer guidance, nothing but metal, an initial push, and the certainty of physics.
We hardly said a word about Paul’s proposal that evening—a few questions about the modeling, which he assured me was solid. Then we talked about our families, our kids, their classes, their teachers. Dussly.
He told me I’d been doing a good job trying to save it. I told him it wasn’t as good as his miracle plan. But there was an immediate kinship there after all those years. Neither one of us had to make a case for why our little place in the Battery needed saving. That it was ours would have been enough. But it was special. The people here, sure, they’d have found work elsewhere, scattered all over the Battery. The Edens and Shais, the shipyards back at Hellenia, at Athos. Our people were as good as any of them. Every corporation, every city, every outpost, they all have their expiration date.
“Not today, August,” Paul said.
“Not tomorrow either, I hope. Or next week, or next month.”
“Just keep the doors open, my brother,” he told me. “I’ll keep scheming.”
It was mid-day Sunday again when Julep Maier finally pinged me. She’d been at the numbers with Saraswathi and Svaarta almost every waking minute since the meeting. She wanted to talk. She told me to make sure Paul would be present. There was much to be discussed, according to Ms. Maier. On that much, I was certain she was correct. I’d been running numbers on my end too, all the permutations of what AIC was going to need on our end to keep their spreadsheets balanced. We had investors and creditors. And we had assets. But we also had zero prospective contracts and liquidity problems on the horizon.
“AIC is never going to go for it,” she told us when we sat for a breakfast meeting Monday morning. “That’s the main issue. It’s too unconventional—too many variables. Sara and I did a lot of modeling, and frankly it almost looked too good to be true, in theory. But until something happens in practice and we have a genuine expected rate of return, it looks like a gamble. And AIC likes solid rates, steady, slow increases over fixed periods. Dussly is slotted into the flowsheet. AIC have done well by this place for decades now, and they stay in business by taking their profits before the investment turns the corner.”
“Interesting the way you put it, Ms. Maier,” I replied. “AIC; ‘they.’ Aren’t ‘they’ you?”
“No, she would be them,” Paul joked. “Or you would be they to she.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I thought we were us,” I replied.
“Our money is definitely their money, though,” Paul added. “I know that much for sure.”
Ms. Maier started laughing. “I’m glad you two have a sense of humor about this. I think it’s sad. Sara and I sat with this all weekend. I see the potential. There are deeper implications here. Another layer of modeling with a glut of suddenly affordable interstellar transport ships. It’s the type of unforeseen variable that changes growth and migration patterns across the whole sector. People who never could have afforded a ship, a fare, a move to an outer colony. Suddenly, options open. The Battery continues to grow. The difference in a half percent across the whole Battery? It could change the lives of millions. That’s the potential.”
“We all get rich,” Paul said, grinning. “That can all still happen, Julep. Who ever said you have to work for AIC for the rest of your life?”
The comment seemed like a throwaway, but it hit her like a revelation. She shook her head. Her eyes got wide.
“I mean ... I work for AIC. Do you have any idea how hard ...?” She stopped mid-sentence.
“Hmm,” was all she said.
No one talked again for what seemed like minutes. I was doing math in my head.
“You can’t shutter us with open contracts,” I said. “That would be a legal mess that would cut into those clean numbers. You came here to inform us of the transition, no?”
She looked at me as though puzzled, but nodded.
“That gives us some time.”
“Exactly,” Paul said.
“Time for what?”
“To privatize,” I said. “Convince them to push back the fire sale another two quarters. My numbers say that anyway. We have assets, they’re just not liquid. AIC doesn’t care what happens to the outpost, as long as their numbers check out. We do what we can on our end.”
“And my end?” Julep Maier asked.
“AIC isn’t the only bank on Athos,” Paul stated.
Everyone’s eyes simultaneously turned to the Saraswathi.
She turned her head, mimicking human consideration of a difficult problem. “Unethical, I’d say, but not technically illegal under Athosian law. That will, however, certainly end your future prospects with AIC, Ms. Julep.”
“Is she fired?” Paul asked. “You can tell them it was me.”
“Oh, I’m not with the firm,” Saraswathi said. “I’m with Ms. Julep. I would never betray her trust.”
“You have a personal AI quant?” I asked her.
“It’s a sign,” Paul said, laughing. “This was meant to be, Julep. Let Gus run the numbers. Buy us six months. I’ll get the shop humming—after work hours, of course. No cutting corners on our obligations.” He winked at her and then continued. “Then we’ll run a test—one month. However many ships we can get back here in Dussly, that’ll tell us if we’re crazy.”
“They’ll think I’ve gone soft,” she said.
“Have you?” I asked.
As soon as I said it, I realized Paul’s influence was rubbing off on me—the type of thing I’d have said as a kid sitting next to him in math class.
She paused, tilting her head at me, as though recognizing something in me she hadn’t seen before.
“Soft in the head, maybe, Mr. Fortizi, not in the heart.”
“It’s not a no,” Paul said.
“No,” she replied. “It’s not a no.”
It also wasn’t a sure thing, nor was it nearly as simple in execution as conception. Julep stayed in Dussly as long as she could, which was about long enough to see that we’d be prepared to handle the management challenges on our end. It wasn’t anything more than a handshake. I don’t think either party was prepared for anything more formal than a handshake at that point.
On our end, we had the equipment and expertise to shift our focus to refurbishment, but it was all in theory. Our people had spent generations building one ship. That meant one way of doing business, one process, one master schedule. The idea that we could go out into the galaxy and pick up a handful of small starcrafts, a few mid-size freighters, and a master colony ship here and there and suddenly be prepared to refurbish and resell those assets on a reasonable timeline? That was taking quite a bit on faith. I put it to Paul exactly that way.
“I’ll take that bet, Gus. We should have faith in Dussly. Believe me, the second the people of this outpost see a real path forward, they’ll show everyone what we’re made of.”
I believed him to a point. I knew they would all want to do everything they could. But the task for the machinists alone would be immense. They would need to transition from manufacturing the D-14’s major parts and fittings to some thirteen hundred other parts—from diagram to fully fabricated and functional—in a matter of months. We needed to have confidence that we could pull any one of those parts off the shelf, install it in a broken-down ship, and trust that it would take the wreck home. And that huge leap in expectations and craftsmanship was merely one aspect of the project. We’d need raw metals, double the number of shop stewards, production ramped up to round-the-clock shifts, a three-fold increase in master ship mechanics, and all of that just to get the ships back here to Dussly.
Julep was equally worried about my part. We had shareholders and creditors to please, divisions of AIC being the majority player in both categories. And transparency and fiduciary responsibility required that I have good reasons for dipping into reserve funds, liquidating assets, and suddenly showing unexpected spikes in our operating budget in a period all the interested parties expected us to be contracting. I had resources, though. Dad didn’t enjoy retirement nearly as much in practice as in theory. He could hardly restrain himself from grilling me on every aspect of the outpost every time we got together. And Paul said there were plenty of old retired hands ready to put their decades of skill to use saving Dussly.
Periodically, as we began to spin up operations, Julep Maier would forward a report on her end. She wasn’t advertising her intentions yet, but she was quietly putting together a list of boutique investors outside AIC. She had a target in mind for privatization that would be feasible for us to meet with the help of those investors, provided the people of Dussly bought in—quite literally, as any pathway forward was going to require the workers to buy the majority share of the shop. I figured we’d have more luck convincing our own people to take a gamble on our humble little outpost than Julep would have back in Moses-Mesui, Ithaca, or New Corinth. I expressed as much in passing in a message to her, and I had to share her response with Paul: “Do you have such little faith in me, August?”
“I like her, Gus,” was Paul’s response to that. “She’ll make a hell of a CFO when we transition.”
Two months after Julep returned to Athos, I found myself working well into the early morning. My wife was getting so accustomed to my long hours that she started calling me “Au-Ghost” in passing—that she’d just imagined a me-shaped specter had hopped into our bed for an hour or two while she was dreaming, only to disappear again before the kids woke for breakfast. On the way to that bed one night, I stopped by the hot-hall, as the machinists called their cavernous shop inside the upper layer of the inner Dussly cylinder. I’m not sure what I expected. Paul had said they were scaling up, but he still wasn’t satisfied. I suppose I expected to see a fair amount of activity, maybe a fraction of our usual day shift. If I’d have seen a quarter at that hour, I’d have been happy, a third, ecstatic, a half, I’d have been tempted to roll up my own sleeves and pretend the various boxes and grinders and lasers and finishing stations weren’t so foreign as to seem anything short of magical to a soft-handed ignoramus from the front office. When the doors to the hot-hall parted before me, shortly before two-thirty in the morning, my jaw nearly dropped. Paul’s deputy on the project, Bud, was operating the transparent big board at the front of the hall, each station’s status lit up in red before him—nearly the entire board red, occupied. I stopped, neither wanting to disrupt Bud’s concentration nor to continue down the hot-hall itself. Never mind rolling up my sleeves, I didn’t dare walk through for fear of interrupting workflow. I looked over at Bud and nodded. He turned down his eyebrows and nodded back at me with a fiery determination. That was Dussly.
I walked back out pumping my fist at Bud and anyone who cared to see it.
That was all I needed to see to fully commit my office. Next, we needed a ship.
There were ships in Dussly, lots of them. But we needed the right ship. It had to be big enough to carry our entire inventory of parts. It would need to accommodate a sizeable crew of technicians, mechanics, and machinists to customize fittings for our installations. And in the case everything didn’t line up perfectly on site, one-to-one, it meant we’d need to have a modest shop on board. And, it wouldn’t hurt to have a large enough hold to salvage any valuable cargo from unsalvageable ships, or even to pick up small ships outright. I kept looking out the inner dock window at the D-14 we were currently building, thinking it would be the perfect solution if it weren’t already under contract. The D-14 was also well out of our modest price range. We could make one sure, but we couldn’t afford to buy one, not if we wanted to turn around and buy the company outright.
I started thinking about Paul’s map—all those tiny little points of light he and Svaarta’s research had pinpointed out there in the great wide darkness of the Battery. There had to be a ship out there for us—a good proof of concept. And then it occurred to me that as good as our performance record was, it wasn’t perfect. Somewhere on Paul’s map was a D-14 waiting for someone to happen upon it, and if we couldn’t refurbish our own product, we’d find out real fast this little venture of ours was going nowhere.
I brought this plan to Paul and to Dad, and both thought it was the right way to go. Julep loved the idea, especially when I laid out all the critical attributes we needed in our wrecker. The D-14 checked them all, and everyone thought we could just go get one. So we asked Svaarta to locate a derelict D-14 we could salvage.
Three months into our six-month reprieve, I took the radical action of appointing a shadow board of directors we started calling “the underboard.” Dad was chair. The rest were retired executives or promising young executives on my staff who would eventually grow into those chairs if Dussly lasted long enough for them to advance. I needed them to run the ordinary operations of the company, because Paul and I were about to take an inventory of parts out to the Kappas to salvage our wrecker and bring it back to Dussly to refurbish and customize.
We took Masto’s tug. It was one of our only FTL-capable vehicles big enough to carry our parts, tools, and crew. It was an eight-day trip out to Kappa-331, where one of our third-generation D-14s was free-floating after the main reactor had crapped out on their captain, according to the report Svaarta had pulled from our archives. The ship was nearly seventy years old by that time, which was a respectable service term for most commercial cargo carriers. For us, well, we didn’t feel good about average at our little shipyard. We expected our D-14s to be centenarians. This was our chance to right a wrong and get our salvage vessel in the process.
On day eight, we dropped into Kappa-331, a tiny little system with a single red dwarf sun and two modest gas “giants” that were only just kinda big. The archive stated the abandoned D-14 was christened under the name M-Steritsod, which meant absolutely nothing to anyone in our party. It once belonged to a shipping conglomerate that apparently had abandoned her under potentially suspicious circumstances during an era of imbalance in the insurance markets. Those years found many policy issuers overexposed, replacing a lot of old vessels with new ones, especially while those workhorse vessels were “in-transit” and completely empty. Until the insurers caught on, they were just happy they weren’t paying out for ship plus payload. Svaarta suggested it was even possible that we might find the ship in close to working order. It occurred to me that we might not find the ship at all. Why put it past scammers to not just turn up a few years later, pull the transponder, and resell the ship in some obscure outpost in the Letters?
The cynic in me was pleasantly surprised when our array caught a glimmer along the vector our archives had recorded for M-Steritsod’s last known position and heading. I called Paul up to the deck with Masto and I to witness as we came up on her, just within the outer heliosphere of Kappa-331.
“Glimmer” was a generous word for the light coming off her. In the depths of space, it was almost impossible to make her out with the naked eye until we were almost on top of her, but for a pack of Dusters, as we all were, that shape, the dull outline of our D-14, even in the blackness of empty space, it was such a major part of our lives. I had goosebumps.
“Tough to know what to feel, eh, Gus?” Paul said.
“How do you mean?” I asked him.
“First memory I have of the old girl had to be when I was three or four. My dad took us down to see off whatever serial number was coming out of the dock that Release Day—me, my mom, my brothers and sister. And I have this vague recollection of overhearing him explain to my older brother that he and all his friends made all the parts for that gigantic wonder we were looking at out the aperture. It seemed like such a big day when we were kids, watching on Release Day as she glided out into space, out for delivery. I thought he must be some kind of god or something back then, Gus, to make something like that, to even be a part of it. Then to see her floating here dead like this, even an older one. Hits me somewhere.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I remember those Release Days. They’re still big days, Paulie. I think our kids probably feel the same way.”
“I hope so. I hope we can keep that going.”
“We’re going to have to go get her,” Masto said. “That old girl ain’t going to fly herself back to Dussly.”
“No sir,” Paul replied, “we damn well are.”
Our small crew suited up and set to work with a focus and intensity I could scarcely describe. It was almost like a force of nature, instinctual, each person acting without direction, one coherent, symphonic mind setting about a singular purpose.
Within minutes, they had a tether from Masto’s tug running into her belly and had the lights on. Within hours they had a full assessment and systems diagnostic to work from. Vish, our head mechanic, thought we could get the reactor up and running with three replacements—the emergency control arm running into the reactor room; one of the head magnetic rings on the reactor itself; and the lower collar at the fusion thruster’s port exhaust bell.
“Hopefully, we can get the ship up and running in a few days,” Vish said, explaining that it would take some time to slowly bring the vessel back up to operational temperature after sitting in cold space for damn near a century. “Three days would be an excellent result.”
Paul and Masto and I sat up on the deck of the tug most of that time, watching the parts crew do their work over there. Paul, for as much of an expert fabricator as he was, he didn’t have the expertise of the mechanics who assembled all those parts on our lines. Ironically, I with my soft hands knew quite a bit more about it than he did, at least in theory. That was part of my training—Dad’s mandate: learn every system, every job, every input. I couldn’t learn them all well enough to do any of them, just well enough to understand what everyone needed.
In Vish’s case, it turned out he needed fifty-seven hours and a housebot to back up the D-14’s autopilot. Then we got all the humans back onto the tug once the reactor got hot.
Finally, the moment of truth. The sublights started spitting their beautiful, familiar white-orange fire, and I had no doubt about the old girl then. We tested a baseline set of sublight maneuvers, just to make sure the autopilot had full control of the vehicle. As soon as the George on the flight deck confirmed positive readings for the vessel’s control system and navigation, I gave the word.
To us, it never stopped being a magical sight—that single flash of light, a streak that we probably can’t truly see, and a mass of metal and mechanical genius roughly the size of Dussly’s inner K-Dock simply vanished into nothingness, bound for home.
“Julep’s going to love that,” I said, looking over at Masto, who nodded to confirm that he’d taken footage of all the maneuvers, from the moment they’d fired the reactor.
“Hell of a sight, Gus,” Paul said.
“Nothing left to do out here, boss,” Masto said to me. “Just say the word, and we’ll chase her all the way home.”
It was another eight days back, tracing a transponder signal from the Kappas all the way back to the Indies, our hearts in our chests each time we dropped out, until finally, we alighted just outside the home mooring field in Dussly. And there she was, our old banged-up D14, sitting on a mooring back in her birthplace for the first time in nearly two centuries.
We came into the main hall to a cheering crowd the likes of which nobody had seen in Dussly since our humble Dusters had won their only Third-League Indie championship, attaining the honor of getting beat up in the Second League for two straight years before being relegated again. But we still loved them. And our people, all of us Dusters, were there in the main cylinder cheering our triumphant return with M-Steritsod.
And that was just the start of it. Suddenly, within the hour, a spreadsheet went up with work details for refurbishment. Department by department, there were standby lists of volunteers—ten, twenty, thirty people deep—because every last available slot was full up with people ready to work a shift on the M-Steritsod with no compensation from the company whatsoever.
Paul and I were staring at the board. For my part, I was in awe and I guess a bit surprised. Paul wasn’t. It was just like the hot-hall that night—people clawing over each other to help save this place.
“We’re going to have to do something about that,” Paul said, looking up at the schedule as people milled about around us.
“About what?” I asked him.
He pointed up toward the top of the board.
“M-Steritsod? She’s ours now, Gus. We can’t call her that. What do you think we should call her?”
“She is ours,” I agreed. “There’s only one thing we can call her.”
I pulled the register first thing when I got back to the office and had our notary make the changes to the transponder. I was a little surprised, but in all the Indies and the Letters there wasn’t already a ship in the registry with our name. So M-Steritsod became The Duster. And our people set right to work rounding her back into form.
By the time Julep Maier returned to Dussly three months later, The Duster was shining. The hull was patched and scrubbed, and from a distance, it was almost impossible to distinguish her from the brand-new D-14—our last active commission—that had just come out of the K-Dock.
Inside, not only had our mechanics given the old girl a complete overhaul, but our people had sandblasted a century’s worth of grime off the hull and interior plating; painted all the hallways, service decks, and living spaces; and our outfitters and welders had constructed a custom machine shop and inventory hold for all the parts our crews had built from scratch.
Julep was blown away. When she looked at my internals on the cost, she couldn’t believe the number.
“Just materials,” I told her, “much of it our own inventory.”
“All that labor,” she marveled, shaking her head.
“We like our little home,” I said. “We want to save it.”
Julep sort of grimaced when I said that. I suspected it was her involuntary reaction.
“About that, August,” she replied. “We need to talk.”
It was a sobering discussion. Just me and Julep and Dad, and her Saraswathi, of course. Dussly didn’t have debts, but we had shareholders and a fair valuation for liquidation we would have to eclipse in our attempt to claw back ownership. She knew how Athosian corporate law and their markets worked better than Dad and I did. But it made some sense the way she explained it. More or less, we needed to either borrow or make 2o million D-Cr in the coming six months. But it wasn’t even that simple, because AIC knew our internals, which meant most of the Athosian market had a sense of it too, which meant nobody was going to loan Dussly 20 million. And when we mentioned liquidating assets, maybe to get us halfway there, Julep shook her head.
“Ten’s a stretch, Gus. Not right now. This little venture of ours is going to have to work immediately and demonstrate genuine promise—real profit. Big immediate returns, or there won’t be anything I can do.”
Twenty million was a blow. Snap my fingers and make six D-14s and their buyers appear in my office and we’d still need to dip into our reserves to shake free. And then we’d still be at zero, owning our outpost with no guarantee Paul’s scheme could even keep our people fed.
I didn’t tell anyone. I asked Dad and Julep to keep it quiet. There was no reason snatch back anyone’s hope before we even tried. We had a shot in the dark—Paul Slane’s mad hope to save Dussly. It was time to take out The Duster and chase that dream. Depending on what we brought back and how the refurbishments and sales went, Julep said she might be able to scrape together some investors.
Paul had selected our ace crew of mechanics, machinists, and all-purpose hands. It was a crew of forty, Paul, myself, and Julep. She had her embodied Saraswathi along, of course, and we all agreed it was important enough to invest the ship with our outpost’s Svaarta, who was only too happy to pilot our Duster. It was only fitting.
We got sent off like heroes. I’d never felt pressure like that in my life—that hope. I couldn’t even think the thought that we might let them down. It was too painful, and I didn’t know. I still believed Paul could be right.
Svaarta calculated a route that was going to take us out through the Indies into the Alphas, targeting ten ships we hoped to bring in. I thought seven would be realistic, or at least I hoped it would.
The first ship, an empty H-class freighter, was floating just outside the uninhabited Tell system, sixteen light years from Dussly. It should have been an easy grab for us, and it was a disaster.
It was only by chance that the parts we’d needed to replace on our Duster were external and not integral to the systems they were vital components of. I was not a mechanic or an engineer, but I was getting reports they’d put in common enough terms for me and Julep to understand. This H-Class had components on internal lines, both with direct gasses and liquids flowing into them, as well as magnetic lines for superheated plasmas. We had all the specs and circumferences from archives, and we had some of the best pipefitters around in Dussly. What we didn’t have was the expectation that those lines would warp following decades of temperature changes during their service life, followed by decades sitting in space near absolute zero.
At first, when the lines began to snap—almost always where we attached a new fixture or part—our technicians thought it was just a matter of dialing in the time we took to bring these compartments back up to operating temperature. But we spent three days snapping major components on this ship beyond the point of salvageability only to discover that a line with a diameter of 40 millimeters on spec would sometimes be 39 and other times be closer to 42, right at the point our techs needed to fit a 40-millimeter aperture.
Julep and I spent those three days growing increasingly more anxious and depressed. We couldn’t even get a part in, much less bring a ship back online. I hadn’t even thought of that problem, metals near absolute zero. It wasn’t even a consideration on my spreadsheets. Julep similarly hadn’t fully thought through the time we were taking to bring ships back up to temperature.
I made the mistake one evening of dropping into a heated meeting, where the fitters were shouting at the mechanics who were shouting at the machinists, and everyone was shouting at Paul. It looked like it was going about as well as I felt it was.
“We’ll get it sorted, Gus,” Paul assured me, bringing the room to near silence. “This is just how we talk it through.”
Two days later, as Julep and I were reaching our most pessimistic, Paul called me to the flight deck.
“We need to go back home, Gus,” he told me. “I think we’ve got a solution, but the shop here isn’t going to be enough. Plus we don’t have the materials. We’ll need pipe and fittings.”
“How long before we can go back out again?” Julep asked.
“Five ... six days at best. I think we have it, Gus, I really do. We just need a little bit of time.”
“It’s running out,” Julep told him. “Time’s the one resource we do not have, Paul.”
“Well, that and money,” Paul quipped back. “Don’t lose your sense of humor, you two. But we do have pipes back in Dussly, so let’s go get some.”
He tried to explain it to me on the way, but I didn’t quite understand. I still had the image of all those cracked pipes from that H-class stuck in my head. I thought for sure we were finding out the hard way why nobody had ever attempted such a crazy salvage scheme before. He started telling me about the idea they’d all come up with to solve the issue. It was like subatomic physics to me—something I could never visualize, even back when I was studying it.
Finally, I just told him to try. He was either going to solve it or he wasn’t. My spreadsheets would tell the tale either way.
It was a great concern for the people when The Duster came back a week into our mission totally empty-handed. It was an even bigger concern when they called down every last available hand to the hot-hall to go to work. And they kept working for six straight days. The word I kept hearing over and over was bi-collar. It was what Paul had tried to explain to me. We needed our parts to fit to spec. The pipes were no longer at spec. Thus we needed to refit those pipes around the parts with a fitting that was adjustable, fast-to-install, and just as strong and permanent as the original piping.
After six more days of work, we added fifteen welders to the crew and set out again. This time, we were laden with piping and bi-collars of all sizes, and I must admit, a dreadful sense of hopelessness on my part. I sensed the same from Julep. But Paul was more measured.
“We’ll give it a good go, Gus,” he said. “At least no one can say we didn’t try. I’m grateful to you and Julep for that.”
I shook my head at him. “Who should be grateful here, Paulie? We’d already be breaking up the outpost if not for this crazy scheme of yours. You talked an Athosian bank into giving us a reprieve. That’s more than I can say for myself.”
“Let’s go land us a big fish,” he said. “Svaarta’s got a few ideas.”
As it happened, though, the big fish were now out. Because of the time it took to bring the salvaged ships up to operating temperature, we had to adjust our strategy with our quickly closing window. Svaarta shifted our focus to smaller ships. The more boutique freighters and larger yachts were now going to be the only way we could demonstrate any sort of proof of concept by the end of the month. At that point, I hoped we’d be able to get four. If one was a solidly-framed yacht, we might be able to upgrade it with luxury fittings and at least demonstrate the potential for profits.
Paul and the entire team, with some help from Svaarta’s modeling, had developed a process to more uniformly warm the floating vessels using The Duster’s main reactor.
We had our first success a bit farther out from Dussly toward the Betas. It was a nice mid-sized Athosian starcraft-style hybrid freighter out of the Howard shipyard originally. It took a little over a day to bring her up to temperature, replace all nine of the pieces our spreadsheet said were required, and finally bring our first salvaged vessel back to life. She was small enough we probably could have fit her inside The Duster’s rear hold, but still, it was a relief to have even that small proof of concept. Paul’s bi-collars fit the various pipes in the four places they were indicated, and he was finally able to show us exactly how they worked, bridging the small half-millimeter gaps in two cases to the wider several millimeter gap in the most extreme case.
When that first starcraft disappeared out the front flight-deck screen, a huge cheer went up. It was a small victory, but it was a victory.
Our next victory came faster on its heels. Oddly enough, it was another Howard starcraft a few models up in frame size. Our team got over there and had her flying on her way back to Dussly in seventeen hours.
“We’re rolling, Gus,” Paul declared.
I gave him a pat on the back and words of encouragement, but I didn’t tell him the obvious. He probably already knew it wasn’t nearly enough. Two vessels like that, on resale, after all the costs of salvage and refurbishment were factored in, forty thousand each maybe, if that?
We still had ten days, though.
“Do you think you can buy us another six months?” I asked Julep.
“I don’t even think I can buy me another six months, Gus, not after I advocated for AIC to go against their models. They don’t like it when their analysts lose them money on smart bets. And this was never a smart one.”
As much as my heart wanted to protest, my head knew she was right. Dussly was dumb money. A couple banged-up starcrafts were the last hope of our proud little outpost. I imagine from her perspective it was depressing. But we were already halfway to Beta-Aurelius, so there was nothing to do but play the whole thing out.
In that next week, we went three out of five, bringing in a small freighter that had a resale value roughly double the two starcrafts combined, as well as two hybrid freighters that were pretty old and banged up. It was hard to put a valuation on them. But given our start, five vessels was a respectable tally.
Factoring in travel time, we had about two days left before we had to turn around, and according to Julep, who was now starting to open up about where Dussly really stood, we were about 12 million short of where she expected we’d realistically be able to make a decent attempt at private ownership.
“What about another partner?” I asked, just to get a sense if there’d be anyone back in Dreeson’s to stake an outpost like Dussly in our crazy little endeavor.
She just smiled at me.
As we approached Aurelius, Svaarta had two options for us: a very old yacht that might be considered a classic if properly refurbished or a clunky old mid-sized freighter that had fallen derelict nearly three centuries prior between Aurelius and the Eden cylinder group. The yacht was a more valuable ship, as the freighter was already a century-old junker by the time it broke down. The cost of getting the freighter into commercial shape again would be prohibitive from both a labor and resource standpoint. Realistically, neither were going to save Dussly, not by a long shot.
Julep was content to leave it to Paul and me. I advocated for the yacht.
“At this point, we’re just trying to make a case, right?” Paul asked us. “We’re trying to show investors there’s a workable process here?”
“It’s a very weak case at this point,” Julep leveled with him.
Paul shrugged. “It may not be enough to save Dussly, but The Duster, all the parts, maybe we could find another place to open a shop? After everyone gets their money, maybe we open the business somewhere else, eh, Gus?”
I hadn’t considered that idea. The prospect wasn’t ridiculous on a smaller scale. But the thought of all our folks back home immediately came to mind, and that seemed like failure.
“I vote for the big ship,” Paul said. “If we’re going to make a case, proving we can get a commercial vehicle like that back to port, in my mind, that makes a better case.”
“It’s not going to tip the financial scales either way,” I conceded. “And, it’s only fitting it be your call, Paulie. This was your crazy idea, and I don’t regret a minute of it.”
So we had Svaarta drop out and adjust course.
My first thought as we approached that old ship was how vastly superior our D-14 was. Even in the dark, that old freighter was an eyesore. I couldn’t help but think it was a soulless unit that had come off some Hellenian assembly line, churned out without pride or love. The Duster was about her size, and by comparison, well, there was no comparison. Sure I was biased, but it was true. A sad truth that was just hitting me. We were writing the final chapters of the Dussly shipyard, fitting I guess that they were proud chapters, if a bit sad.
When the initial team reported back, their first impression was that she was just as ugly on the inside. She only ran a number and Hellenian colors in the register, but when Paul got to the deck with his team, he reported back that the old girl had a name painted on the inside of her front screen: Auri-Knossos, an ode to some sort of fallen empire from long ago.
Paul gave the word that she looked salvageable and called for the other teams to get the heating lines started.
About a half hour later, Paul called back to The Duster.
“We thought she was abandoned, Gus, but one of the boys found the Captain in his stateroom. He never got off. Could be that’s why she went missing. Maybe he died en route.”
“Have you found any bots?”
“Negative. You’d think a ship of this size would’ve engaged the autopilot to take her in at least as far as the port system. Could be she dropped out and the captain died trying to get her up and running again. Could be in the logs.”
“I suppose we’d be destined to come across a few mysteries if we stayed in this business,” I told Paul. “Might even solve a few too.”
“Well, anyway, we’ll leave him alone until we can get him back to Dussly. Proper respects.”
I was floating by the window at the side of the flight deck, looking out on that old ship, when Julep floated up behind me.
“You Dusters are real decent people,” she declared.
I was thinking about it, thinking that on balance I felt the same.
“I think you and Julep should get over here, Gus,” Paul’s voice came over comms again. “Turns out the old man wasn’t our only surprise of the day.”
“Can’t you just relay it?” I asked.
“It’s worth suiting up,” he replied. “Some things you have to see with your own eyes.”
Paul kept telling them to clear comms. But we caught partial blips of laughter and yipping, like something funny might have been going on over there. Julep and I speculated that maybe the captain wasn’t alone. And then it occurred to me as we pulled ourselves across the tether line between the two ships, that cargo carriers spent the vast majority of their service life with at least a partially-full hold; and that anyone coming to recover a cargo, probably would have known to recover the captain’s body. I started thinking about Eden, the ship’s port of origin in the Garvin 9 system. The Eden cylinder group had a pretty nice shipyard there—a larger sister city of sorts to Dussly. If I wasn’t mistaken, though, there was also a significant mining outpost on one of the planets in the system.
Paul was there to greet us as the umbilical opened into the port corridor of the Auri-Knossos. I couldn’t help but take a glance back at our Duster through the porthole and marvel that she had been hovering dead in cold space just like this sad cargo ship only a dozen weeks prior. What are the odds? I thought. One dead ship rescuing another.
“One of the boys had a thought,” Paul said as he greeted us, leading the way down the port corridor.
“I think I had the same thought on the way over,” I replied. “If the captain’s still here ...”
“Then maybe the cargo?” Julep finished my sentence.
“Turns out, Ms. Maier, we are in need of an assessor.”
We later learned from Saraswathi that she had a sister clone running operations on that mining post back in the Garvin 9 system—Minerva-C16. Primarily, it supplied iron, titanium, and other building materials via mass driver to Dreeson’s System. In the process of extracting those building materials, the Minerva mine also extracted and refined other minerals and metals in smaller quantities. Auri-Knossos, she suspected, could have been a cargo carrier contracted to move these “less desirable” resources out into the major trading hubs in the Letters.
By the time we got to the port cargo hold, the lights were on. Unlike the D-14 that old ship didn’t have a pressurized hold, so the carrier opened to space. I knew instantly there was no longer any sense in salvaging the ship. It wasn’t worth the risk of losing her again in transit.
“Platinum?” Julep said, staring wide eyed at a stack of metal plates that were chain-bound, floor to ceiling along that first section of the hold.
“And silver,” Paul replied. “And gold, palladium, rhodium. What’s your pleasure, Ms. Maier?”
“Platinum,” she said again. “Oh, my.”
“Is that your professional opinion?” he joked.
“I think you’re going to be able to buy back your outpost,” Julep said. “That’s my professional opinion.”
“Say that again, please,” I insisted, opening the channel to the whole site.
“I said I think you Dusters are going to be able to keep your home.”
The eruption of cheers that came back over that channel, with one exultant voice stepping over the other, lasted for nearly a minute, a moment none of us there that day would ever forget.
No crew that small had ever manually unloaded and resituated a cargo that large in deep space so happily. Julep’s final assessment on the cargo was between 14 and 15 million D-Cr outright, which meant we were in position to both salvage Dussly and hire an extremely overqualified CFO.
“We’re not quite as cosmopolitan as Moses-Mesui,” I told her when I offered Julep the job.
“They’re not nearly as decent as Dussly, August,” she said when she accepted. “I do have one demand, though, before I sign on—something I wouldn’t have been able to afford for another two decades if I stayed with AIC.”
“If we can manage it, I’ll put it in your acquisition files.”
“I want my own spaceship, Gus. Nothing too flashy. Something classic, like that little yacht we passed on the way here.”
“Ms. Maier, that won’t be a problem in Dussly. I think our little shipyard is about to change the Indies for the better, and there’ll be plenty of ships to go around.”
Glad to have you back Rowe. Here, here for Mother Mars!