Quarter Share

Pip looked startled. “Captain?”

“If this little hobby of yours takes off, the crew will be selling hundreds, if not thousands of creds in your booth. The booth you two will be paying good creds for.”

We shrugged almost in unison. Pip answered, “True, Captain, but we’ll benefit as well. The overhead is low and fixed. The cost doesn’t go up with more sales.”

She nodded. “That’s true, but I don’t think you’ve thought this through. Are you going to use up your personal mass allotments for the materials needed in the booth? Are you planning to continue this beyond Margary? Will you both use up all your liberty time for every port we visit?”

Pip started to object, but I could see where the captain was heading so I spoke first, “You’re right, sar, we haven’t considered these things. With your permission, we’ll finish Margary the way we’ve started, and we’ll have five weeks to St. Cloud to figure out a better plan. Can we come back after we’ve had a chance to put our heads together in the Deep Dark?”

The captain nodded. “Not a bad approach at all, Mr. Wang. Permission granted. Any time you want to talk with me about this, please bip me for an appointment. Anything else?”

Pip and I shared a glance before we both said, “No, sar.”

She smiled. “Very well then, gentlemen. Dismissed.”

As we made our escape down the passage, Pip turned to me. “She never did say what she was going to do about the forty creds for the booth rental.”

I shrugged. “It’s probably coming out of petty cash. If regs say we can’t rent the booth, then it will probably go on the books as a ship’s expense.”

He nodded as we continued down the passage. “Yeah, I can see that, but technically it’s not rented by the ship.”

I remembered then where the reservation confirmation had come from. “What is the McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative?”

He shrugged. “I thought I knew, but I’m not so sure now.”

“I just remembered something else odd.”

He looked over at me but we didn’t stop walking.

“When we came back aboard and made our mass adjustments, the banner was pretty heavy. I wondered where it would be charged…you, me, or Bev.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Rhon had the watch this morning and said it came with the captain’s compliments.”

“So it was charged back to her?”

“No, it was charged to Lois McKendrick,” I answered.

“You mean the ship?”

I shook my head. “No, ship’s gear gets tagged as ship on the logs. This was the name, Lois McKendrick.”

Pip thought for a tick before speaking, “But…she’s dead, isn’t she?”

I slugged him on the shoulder. “Dead or not, she’s not a member of the crew, ya goof.”

We didn’t say any more until we’d made it to the gym for our nightly work out. I was in a fog from the exhaustion of the long day at the flea market and the confusing evening that followed. I wanted to run a few laps, steam my sore muscles in the sauna, and then take a cold shower to forget about how that belt had looked strapped low around Bev’s hips.

When I got back to my bunk, I started thinking about Lois McKendrick again. I remembered the captain’s comments about a proud tradition and the way her fingers had stroked the fabric of the banner under our trade goods. I took out my tablet and pulled up the ship’s records. Sure enough, I found an entry on the history from the ship’s origin. It was built in a Manchester yard over in the New Hebrides Quadrant. The ship itself wasn’t all that old, nineteen stanyers-just one more than me. It explained that the ship was named for one Lois Marie McKendrick, a trade organizer.

The entry said that stanyers ago McKendrick had changed the face of company owned planets. Back in the bad old days, they completely controlled all dirt-side production. At that time everything an employee did belonged to the company. So if you gardened for a hobby, or your spouse knitted sweaters, or you made anything at all, it belonged to the company who ran the planet you lived on. I remembered reading about this in history, but my schoolbooks didn’t really explain what happened to change the system. Mom often said the company texts didn’t always reflect the unvarnished truth.

If this blurb was correct, Lois Marie McKendrick organized an opposition against the New Anglican Planetary Development Company on New Edinburgh. She and her group won the right for people to make things that the company didn’t own. Her movement caught on and spread not just through the New Hebrides Quadrant, but throughout the organized galaxy. In many ways, she was responsible for the burst of trade that heralded the deployment of the big sailing freighters and prosperity of the trading houses that have grown ever since.

Apparently, Lois McKendrick died shortly before the ship was completed, but her great-granddaughter christened the vessel when it launched. The article featured a blurry digital of a young woman swinging a bottle of champagne against the airlock. I didn’t recognize her until I read the caption, “Cargo Second Alys McKendrick Giggone christens Federated Freight’s newest solar clipper, the forty-three thousand ton Lois McKendrick.” Under that was another digital of a group of people standing in front of a familiar blue banner with silver letters that read McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative. Front and center, was a straight-backed woman with a warm smile holding the shoulders of a young girl standing just in front of her. On either side of her were a half dozen folks of various ages and the caption read: “Lois McKendrick (center) stands with the members of the McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative outside the courthouse at New Edinburgh.” Judging from the looks, I guessed this was when the Galactic Circuit Court ruled in their favor. I also couldn’t be sure, but I was willing to bet that I recognized that little girl.

Chapter 22

Margary Station

2352-January-12

Next morning in the galley, Pip stopped by for breakfast before heading out to do his stint at the flea market and I shared with him the information I found about Lois.

Pip nodded slowly. “Okay, that explains where the name and banner came from. But why did the captain give it to us to use?”

“I understand that part,” I said. “It’s probably been sitting around in storage for the last, I don’t know how long, and when we started renting the booth, she broke it out.”

Cookie tossed a tidbit of his own onto the table as he walked by. “The captain was in cargo before she went to the Academy to get her officer stripes. As I understand it, her whole family is involved with trading in one way or another.”

I nodded. “See, that’s all part and parcel. Very consistent. I mean this ship is named for her great- grandmother and if that’s really her in this picture, then they were close.”

Pip nodded with a shrug. “So? What part are you confused by?”

“Who is Lois McKendrick?”

“You just answered that.”

I shook my head. “Not that Lois McKendrick. The one who has that banner registered on her mass allotment.”

Cookie over heard and chuckled. “Oh, that’s tradition, young Ishmael. Lois is the ship’s pooka-a kind of spirit. There’s always an honorary berth for the person that the ship is named after. It’s an unpaid position, of course, and they don’t appear on any duty roster, but that berth shares all the other benefits of being any other crew member. By tradition, a vessel’s captain can use that berth as a kind of alter ego to do things for the benefit of the ship. Usually they are a kind of conduit for random acts of kindness.”