Pip stopped and thought for a moment. “Okay, say, after this run into Gugara, the ship has a profit of a thousand credits. The company gets two hundred the captain gets one hundred. The remaining seven hundred is divided up by the crew shares. So, if you’re full share, you get a full allocation of however much the crew share turns out to be.”
“Yeah, but what’s a crew share?”
“We have forty crew, if all of them are full share, then we divide the seven hundred by forty and everybody gets an extra seventeen creds or so.”
“But we’re not all full share.”
“Yeah, but you can add up all the ratings and figure out how many full shares there are. In practice, all the officers and some of the department heads are double share. You and I are quarter share. So, you add up all the ratings for all the crew and say the total is fifty. Divide the seven hundred by fifty and a share is about twelve creds. You and I, at quarter share get three each. The half share people get six. The full share people get twelve. The double share people get twenty-four-”
“Okay, I get it. What about this stores scheme you have with Cookie? It’s not part of the normal freight arrangement, is it?”
“Correct, but remember that share is from profit. The galley is an expense. If we can reduce that expense, then the profit gets bigger and there’s more to share.”
I finally began to get a glimmer of what he was talking about. “Got it. I think. But how much can you do really? Are ship’s stores really that big a part of the expense?”
“Depreciation is probably the largest accounting item that comes out. These ships are expensive and their operational lifetime is relatively long, but they’re depreciated over thirty stanyers. So, we basically have to cover about one thirtieth of the cost of a new ship every stanyer. The next largest is salary and benefits, followed by insurance. The ship’s stores are next, I think. I can tell you we spend about five hundred creds a week on foodstuff.”
The number surprised me, but I don’t know why. Twenty-kilo buckets of coffee were expensive and we used a lot of them when we were underway. “So, how much will you be taking off the expenses?”
Pip shook his head. “I won’t know until we get a final settlement, but we’re shooting for a twenty percent reduction in costs over a stanyer. It’s not a lot, on the grand scheme of things, but it would amount to something over five kilocreds added to the shared profit for the stanyer.”
“That sounds like a lot to me.”
“Well, the share pool for the last stanyer was about a hundred kilocreds, so we’re talking about increasing it by about five percent. Nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but the real benefit is that we can get better meals out of it.”
“How? I mean, I know Cookie explained it to Mr. Maxwell, sorta, but how does this work?”
Pip grinned. “We buy low and sell high.”
I slugged him in the arm. “Try again.”
“Okay, look, the most expensive foods are the fresh ones because they have a short shelf life. Typically we can’t afford them, but they really make a difference in the quality of the meals. Frozen foods are cheap. Canned and processed foods are somewhere in the middle.”
I nodded for him to continue.
“Look at coffee. We use the Arabasti because it’s readily available, of a relatively good quality, and frankly, pretty cheap. Thanks to your magic touch, the crew has gotten to like it a lot better.” He grinned at me to make sure I caught the teasing before he continued, “As a trade good it’s not much use. Everybody has it and it’s usually consistently priced from place to place. Sarabanda Dark, on the other hand, has a more volatile market price. It’s limited in range because it’s only grown on Gugara. The price fluctuates a lot based on availability and it is generally considered a better grade of coffee. Normally, it’s too expensive and so we don’t buy it.”
“I suspect that’s just snob appeal, but if it’s more expensive won’t that drive our operating costs up?”
“Yes, if we were planning on drinking it. But we’re buying it to trade for things that are even more expensive.”
“You are making my head hurt on purpose, aren’t you?”
He laughed. “What we’re doing is converting creds into trade goods that are worth more as goods than the creds would be. We’re doing that two ways. First, a bumper crop of Sarabanda Dark is letting us buy it for fifteen creds. Normally, it would cost twenty. But more importantly, we’re taking it someplace where that same bucket would normally be worth thirty creds. We’ve taken what is usually a ten cred profit and made it fifteen. That’s a fifty percent increase because the price of Sarabanda happens to be low just now. It makes a good deal even better.
“If we buy a hundred buckets, it costs a kilocred and a half. When we sell it for thirty creds it gives us three kilocreds. We get back the original kilocred and a half that we paid to begin with and an additional kilocred and a half. We can use that additional cred to reduce cost or we can buy something like fresh fruit for pies, or some other ingredients that our stores budget wouldn’t usually allow. We’ve taken idle creds and made them work for the ship.”
“Why isn’t everybody doing this?”
“I’m sure many are. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. For us, since we’re going to Margary anyway, we get the transportation basically for nothing. We have the surplus capacity to carry the goods we need to trade and a limited number of creds to invest. What we need to do is build up our stock of trade goods so that where ever we go, we have something extra that’s worth more to the people there than it is to us. Almost everybody has something they don’t want that we can buy cheap. In Gugara this trip, it’s Sarabanda Dark. Next time, it might be beefalo steaks. Sarabanda Dark should be worth more on Margary, but not as much as it would be on St. Cloud because that is farther away. We’ll need to sell some of it at Margary Station and use the creds we make to buy something that’s cheap there but more expensive on St. Cloud.”
“Margary has no planetary system. They import all their food.”
“Actually, that’s not true, but it’s a commonly held belief.”
“What? They have planets?”
“Well, yes, they have two gas giants, but that’s not what I meant. They don’t import all their food, most but not all. They do grow some.”
“What?”
Pip just smiled. “Wait and see, Ishmael, old son. Wait and see.”
Chapter 16
Gugara Orbital
2351-December-09
I finally got ashore on Gugara Orbital. After Pip’s experience on Darbat, the more experienced crew adopted us. The problem was that he and I couldn’t leave the ship at the same time. We were the only two mess crew so we were, by definition, in alternating watch sections. One of us had to remain aboard at all times. It seemed a bit silly to me. We never did anything after the evening meal clean up, but those were the rules. The upside was that I got to know some of the other crew members better.
Pip and I flipped a coin for first night liberty, and I suspect that he threw the call so I could go. I think he felt guilty because I’d missed Darbat entirely when he got mugged on the first night.
“You go and have a good time. I’ll poke about the station net from here and see if I can find a deal we can go in on, okay?”
“But where’s good? You know Gugara. Gimme some recommendations.”
We sat on the mess deck and before I knew it, people surrounded us, all talking at once with advice on where to go.
Brill Smith took me by the arm and drew me out of the throng. “They’re all crazy. Half of them will be broke by the time we leave. What do you want to do?”
“I have no idea. This is the first time that I’ve been off Neris since I was a toddler. I don’t remember much
