Nathan Lowell - Quarter Share

Bev thought for a moment. “A thermos of coffee would have been good. There’s a shop around the corner but the coffee was expensive.”

I chimed in with my two creds, “And muddy. The only other thing I really missed was a place to sit between sales. My feet and legs are killing me.”

Bev nodded. “Did you see those folding chairs what’s her name had in her booth?”

“Oh, you mean Virgil’s wife?”

Bev nodded. “Yeah. They had tubular frames with a mesh seat and back. They looked very light. When things got busy she just folded it up and stashed it under the table.”

“Yeah, I saw that, but I don’t know where to find them, or how we would stow them.”

Pip pondered. “I wonder if we can rent them.”

Bev and I both shrugged.

He turned his attention back to the buckles. “These are exquisite. What booth again?”

Bev spoke up, “Two sixteen. He’s expecting to see you. His only concern is that we take them off-station to sell so he’s not competing against himself in the flea market.”

“That was the same thing that Drus Martin was worried about on Gugara.” Pip turned to me. “How many of the belts should we try to fit with buckles and take to St. Cloud?”

I shrugged. “You know better than I do. We were selling the bare belts for thirty to forty creds each. The buckles should drive that up to fifty or sixty.”

Bev shook her head strenuously. “Oh, no. More than that.” She went to her locker and pulled out the belt she’d put the buckle on at the booth. “Look at this. It’s worth at least a hundred creds.” She strapped it on around her waist and let it ride low on her hips. She only wore a ship’s tee and boxers that made up the standard dress around the berthing area for men and women alike.

I found that I really didn’t breathe right all of a sudden and Pip’s voice came from a distance. “Well, if you model them like that, I think we can get a lot more.”

Bev looked down and laughed. She took the belt off then and laid it on the table. “You get my meaning, wise ass.”

Luckily, my tablet bipped to remind me that the captain was expecting us. Pip and I headed for officer country while Bev stowed the stuff back in her locker.

“Are you okay?” Pip looked at me as we headed down the passage.

“Yeah, why?”

He shrugged elaborately. “Oh, I don’t know. You just seemed like you were having trouble breathing there for a tick.”

I slugged him on the shoulder as we arrived at the captain’s door and I knocked before he could say anything else.

The captain acknowledged our knock with a single, terse word from the other side of the door, “Come.”

When we entered the cabin, we found her seated at her desk. We stood in the approved handbook fashion and I did the honors. “Carstairs and Wang reporting as ordered, sar.”

“Thank you for coming, gentlemen. Please, sit.” She nodded toward two chairs. “Make yourselves comfortable and tell me how the enterprise is fairing.”

I gave my recap and Pip gave his. We tried to be brief and succinct. When we finished she looked back and forth between the two of us.

“You’ll have enough to sell for the rest of our stay, then?” she asked.

Pip smiled. “It looks that way, Captain. Although it really depends if the pace can be repeated, and how many of the crew have goods to sell.”

“Of course.”

Pip grinned. “If we sell everything we have before we leave, I don’t think I’ll mind.”

The captain chuckled. “No doubt.” She turned serious. “Now, about this reimbursement to the ship?”

Pip glanced at me before going on. “Well, Captain, this isn’t, strictly speaking, ship’s business…”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“While it’s not a lot of creds in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like a ship’s expense.”

I nodded. “Yes, Captain, I agree with him. I appreciate…we appreciate…the opportunity to sell our stuff and help the crew, but-”

Pip finished for me, “Well, actually, we had no idea what the right thing was, so we just split the cost to reimburse the ship.”

“Who is we?” The captain looked back and forth between us.

“Pip and I, Captain.”

“So you two are underwriting this, and the rest of the crew can just take advantage of you?”

Pip and I glanced at each other before he answered, “Well, I don’t know that we thought of it that way, but fundamentally, yes, Captain.”

She nodded. “Very altruistic of you- and also extremely short sighted.”

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.