polish. None of them was more than three centimeters across. Each had a hole bored widthwise through the top. They looked like the accent stones on Neubert’s necklaces. I picked up one and didn’t want to put it down. The stone slid smoothly under my fingers as I rubbed it.
“Where’d you find these?”
“A guy back in the gem aisle had a booth. Just him and a couple of buckets full. They were three for a cred and I liked the way they felt.”
“How many of them do you think it would take to mass a kilo?”
Pip grinned. “A lot. These three averaged ten grams each.”
“Can you find him again? Because I think you found something here.”
“Yeah, how many do we want?”
“Let’s go with the ten buckles for the belts, twenty buckles extra. That leaves us, what? About six kilos?”
Pip nodded. “Something like that.”
“Two kilos of these would work out to about two hundred of them. The actual income isn’t very large but the margin is potentially pretty big.”
Pip shrugged. “Let’s go all six kilos. It’s not going to take that many creds so if we get stuck and need the mass we can just toss ’em.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said excitedly. “Let’s do it.”
Pip nodded and headed back out to finish the trading.
With Cookie back in the galley and lunch all ready, there wasn’t much for me to do and I had the afternoon clean up done almost as soon as lunch ended. Cookie planned a spicy beefalo dish for dinner and he began humming as he puttered around the galley. I pulled up a stool and watched for a time but he waved me off. “Go, young Ishmael. You didn’t get a break this morning, and I can certainly handle making a small batch of this by myself.” He smiled at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Thank you again for doing such an excellent job with the morning duty.”
“My pleasure, Cookie. I’m glad you got some time in port. Any time I can help like that, you know I’m always willing.”
“You’re a good shipmate, young Ishmael. Lois is happy to have you aboard.”
I chuckled. “I’m going for a run and a sauna then.”
He pursed his lips in question. “No environmental this afternoon?”
I shook my head. “I’ve taken enough of their time lately.”
Cookie chuckled. “I heard-sludge duty.”
“And algae! Don’t forget the algae.”
He laughed and waved as I left him humming over his sizzling beefalo.
I ran three extra laps beyond my normal workout. My wind had gotten much better and the extra exertion felt good. The showers sluiced off the grime and I had the sauna to myself. It felt odd. I enjoyed not having to share, but it seemed empty without the good-natured banter that usually filled the room along with the steam. Afterward I stretched out in my bunk and went back to reading up on being a steward. The quarterly exams were just a few weeks off.
At 16:00 I went back to the mess deck to help Cookie set up the dinner buffet. I could smell the spiced beefalo all the way from the berthing area and it made me drool. I suspected the dinner turnout would be better than usual. I was right. About halfway through, Pip showed up wearing his shipsuit and a big grin. We didn’t have time to talk until we’d secured from dinner, but he came to help me clean up after.
Cookie eyed his jaunty grin. “Judging from your smile, your trading went well.”
Pip grinned even wider. “Very well, indeed.” He turned to me. “Ingo gave us thirty buckles all at ten, so three hundred creds and just under six kilos. There’s some serious upside potential there. The rock guy was surprised that we’d want to buy them by the kilo, but he had a ton of them so he was happy to unload some. He gave me as many as I wanted for five creds a kilo. I bought the six we agreed to.”
I blinked, trying to do the math in my head. “You got about six hundred of them for thirty creds?”
He nodded. “Twenty per cred. The total upside is nothing to write home about, but even at a cred a piece on St. Cloud, the margins are huge.”
“I’ll take six hundred creds. That’s more than the salary and share I got for the Margary leg.”
“Yeah, but you have to split it with me. Even so it’s really good.”
Chapter 26
Margary System
2352-January-15
We pulled out of Margary right on time. The captain scheduled it for just after dinner, so we didn’t have to make bento-boxes. Always thinking, Cookie called the captain and offered to distribute coffee and cookies at 21:00. That was about halfway through the evolution and a lot of bleary-eyed spacers who’d celebrated port-side until the last possible tick appreciated the pick-me-up.
Around 22:30 we set the normal watch and I could almost hear Lois sigh as we settled into the familiar routine of sailing between the stars. It didn’t often strike me, this romantic notion that we were out here in our little ship spreading our sails to catch the solar wind, but when it did I remembered a snatch of ancient poetry that my mother used to recite to me. It was a kind of lullaby she used when tucking me in. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,” I mumbled to myself as I drifted off to sleep.
Pip and I convened what we were calling a steering committee on the first day out of Margary and invited Beverly, Diane, Francis, Rhon, and Biddy. We agreed that the finances should come as part of a sales fee, and most liked the one-percent capped at ten creds. Biddy wanted the cap at twenty and Francis wanted five because she only wanted to cover expenses, and not build up reserves. In the end, we decided on ten because it provided some contingency funding and we didn’t really know how much we’d need as startup. Diane provided the deciding argument. “You’ll have less opposition if you decide to reduce the rate than if you try to raise it.” Nobody had anything to dispute that so we left it at ten.
Over the next few days we kept having meetings figuring our way through all the various problems that could arise. The stickiest issue was the idea of consignment. Beverly brought the idea up about two standays out of Margary. “What if somebody has stuff to sell, but doesn’t want to sit around the booth? If we’re going to be there anyway, could we have an arrangement to sell for them? Maybe take a flat percentage for doing it?”
Rhon objected, “But we’re doing the work and they’re getting the benefit.”
We threw different ideas around including reduced fees for working the booth or an hourly stipend. That last idea wasn’t popular because it increased overhead without assuring revenue. We still had a lot to work out.
It seemed we’d barely got underway when suddenly we were at the St. Cloud jump point. We were still stymied over consignments, but we all agreed that we probably should find some kind of solution. I knew from my brief experience on Margary that we needed some kind of system of coverage so the booth would be available the whole time. It was important that this obligation should carry some benefit to those doing the work. My time selling had been fun, but if we were going to do this as a regular thing, I didn’t want to be stuck doing it all the time and I didn’t think anybody else would want that either.
We’d no sooner secured from transition stations in the afternoon when my tablet bipped with a request from the captain to meet with her, “at your earliest convenience.” I had been on the ship long enough to learn that the phrase was officer-speak for, “get your butt over here.” Pip had a similar message so we hustled to her cabin.
