Ships of My Fathers (18 page)

“Annie, eh?” He took a sip this time. He was definitely starting to feel the tonja buzz. “Working girl?”

He nodded. “Yeah, you might try over at the Far Meridian after dark.”

“Thanks.”

Michael sat at the station next to Zane, rubbing his temples. Liberty had ended at nineteen hundred the night before, and they had pushed back and headed out during second shift. The
Wilhelm
had pulled out the day before that, but that had not stopped the party. Michael had thrown away every drinking lesson Malcolm had ever taught him, and as the drone of the tach drive morphed into a steady throb, he deeply regretted it.

“A little too much liberty?” Zane asked.

“More like libation than liberty,” he replied.

“Well, I guess that’s to be expected. I heard the
Wilhelm
was in port.”

He nodded. “How about you?”

“Oh, nice and quiet. My girl and I went groundside for a couple of days. She’s got a friend with a little hut down on the beach. It was a tad cold, mind you, but still a very refreshing change from this,” he said, waiving up at the maze of machinery and catwalks around them.

Michael remembered that last day out on the beach with Josie. He missed her.

“And how about you? Did you have any special rendezvous with anyone from the
Wilhelm
?”

He shook his head, feeling his brain bounce back and forth. He might have had a chance with that Celine girl from their mechanical department, but it did not happen. They talked and drank together for almost two hours on the second night, but he never got up the nerve to make a move on her. Finally, she retreated back to her crewmates, and he later saw her with Walter Brookstone. After that, he settled for making friends and tasting all that Ballison station had to offer. Clearly, it had offered too much.

“Well, no shame in it, my boy. There are other ships, other ports, and lots of other girls.”

He nodded, mesmerized by the flickering display of the tachyon capture rate. It dipped once, then twice, and then started to decline. “Hey,” he said, “I think we’ve got a sail change coming.”

Zane laughed. “I knew you were going to work out. Hungover, and you’re already spotting them before the navigator is.”

Sure enough, Gabrielle’s voice came pounding through the comm. “Navigator ordering sail change, starboard-side dorsal, one degree counter-clockwise, three degrees to port.”

Michael saw stars as her voice faded, but fortunately, the sails shifted according to orders.

Zane slapped him on the back. “Yep, you’re going to do just fine.”

Jimmy Anders sped through the video playback, pausing only at the movements. The camera was remote, tucked beneath a third-story balcony several blocks away. It was not a live feed, since a constant broadcast might draw the attention of some electronic snoopers, but he passed by once every ten hours to download the compressed video. The quality was pretty poor, but it was good enough to get the feel for what happened at Annie Fowler’s place.

He had found her easily enough, and she had remembered Fletcher, but as soon as he asked about the boy, she got a faraway look and said she could not remember any boy.

In his line of work, he had been lied to quite a bit. She was not even in the junior league.

So he had feigned confusion and bid her good night. He thought about following her then, but he knew she would already be suspicious. Of course, she was not suspicious enough to not go back to the same club the very next night, go out with another man, and then let herself be followed on her way home after leaving his hotel.

In his younger days, Jimmy would have simply busted down her door after she had gone in, but the prize in question here warranted more caution. So he watched and waited. Forty-eight hours of video surveillance taught him a lot. For starters, she did not live alone. The girl seemed a little old to be a daughter, and after following her one night, he realized she was just another prostitute. They never seemed to bring their business home with them, and from the pattern of window lights, it seemed that the girl had a room of her own. So, she was not a transient couch surfer.

A few more drinks at a few more bars gave him a name: Josie Coron. He had a list of her specialties as well as her usual hangouts. The best information, however, was that she had dropped out of the business for a few weeks the previous month. He checked the dates and saw that this would have been shortly after Malcolm’s wake. That was a coincidence worth following up on, so on the third day he followed her out of the apartment building, through the warren of the port’s residential district, and into the corner grocer.

He timed his introduction to bump into her rounding the corner of the bread aisle. She dropped her items. He dropped his. Amidst mutual apologies, they knelt to the floor and started sorting out the mess.

As soon as she looked up to meet his face, he feigned recognition. “I’m sorry, miss, but you wouldn’t be Josie, would you?”

She smiled. “Yes, I am. Have we met?”

He handed her the last of her items. “Once, maybe twice. I was a friend of Malcolm’s. Malcolm Fletcher that is.”

“Oh,” she said, her smile fading.

“It was just in passing, but Malcolm mentioned you a few times. Shame about him, though.”

She nodded. “Oh yeah, tragic really.”

“I know. I heard about it over on Nasar and came as soon as I could get away. Mostly I wanted to check in on Michael, see how he’s taking it.”

She frowned. “Yeah, he took it pretty hard. I didn’t go to the wake, but we talked about it after.”

“Oh, then you know him. How’s he doing?”

“I guess he was okay when he left.”

“Left? Where? I heard his ship was still in port.”

“His uncle came for him a few weeks back.”

Uncle? Malcolm had only ever mentioned one sibling, a dead sister. “Uncle? I guess I didn’t know about him.”

“Uncle, cousin, something like that... named Hans. He made a big deal about coming, diverting his ship and everything. Kind of a dick if you ask me.”

He thought of trying to pump her for more information, maybe the name of the uncle’s ship, but she was starting to move towards the checkout scanners. He tried to put on a reassuring smile. “Well, at least he’s with family now. That has to be worth something.”

“I guess,” she said. “I was going to write him soon. Anything I should pass along?”

He shook his head. “No, just one more old friend of Malcolm’s wishing him well.”

She paused at the scanner and looked back, but Jimmy had already moved into the next aisle. The last thing he wanted was for her to remember him as anything but a passing encounter. After she left, he made his way back to the Guild lounge and starting a search of recent ships passing through.

There it was, three weeks back, the
Heavy Heinrich
, one of S&W’s four big container ships. The captain was listed as Hans Schneider. Holy shit, but Hans Schneider? He was the most senior captain in the entire S&W fleet, and it would not be too many more years before he would be pulled up into the CEO slot at Callista Prime. He had never known Malcolm had any brothers, let alone someone like this. More likely, he thought, that Schneider had been a brother-in-law or something even more distant.

That kind of family connection would make any kind of extraction that much more difficult, but on the other hand, who was to say a simple data con game could not end with a little ransom to spice it up? That was outside of his skill set, but he knew the people who could make it work.

The
Heinrich’s
next port of call had been listed as Ballison, so he checked out of his hotel and signaled his crew to make ready to depart. They were going to have to push hard to get in front of the boy with the right lure.

Michael was in his quarters after dinner, looking over the navigation math again. Gabrielle had sent him the data log from the navigational computer from that day’s first shift along with some highlighted notes on which key pieces of data had told her how to react. It was still fairly dense stuff, but Michael found that this was much more concrete than the standard academic text was. That was all hyper-torus flux rolls and shock-wave rotations, but what Gabrielle had sent him was the missing half from his tach-drive engineering knowledge. Knowing how it fit with what he already understood suddenly made the math much more intuitive.

Well, at least a little more intuitive. After two hours of it, he was going cross-eyed over vector integrals. He decided to give it a rest and look for something more entertaining on the console. He still had not loaded his entertainment modules that he had brought from
Sophie
, but he did not want to attempt that tonight. A couple of the games were a little pornographic, and he needed to talk to Wally Brookstone again about how private the crew data partitions were before he installed any of those.

Other than the navigation studies, he only had easy links to the galley menu, the movie schedule, the planned maintenance work in engineering, and the files he had put together when learning the crews’ names. Certainly that was a mere fraction of the ship’s network. He simply had not searched beyond that yet.

Search, he thought. There was a search he had contemplated before Ballison that he had never followed through on. He sighed. It may as well be now.

He pulled up the personnel search and typed in the name: Peter Schneider. Two names came up: Peter K. Schneider, S&W founder, deceased 3312, and Peter F. Schneider, captain, deceased 3381. He selected the second name and froze when the file opened.

It was like looking in a mirror. The same hair, the same chin, the same nose, and even the same earlobes. The only differences were the eyes, which seemed more gray than blue, and the mustache. Quincy Williams’ words rang in his ears, “the broom of doom.” He smiled at it a bit. It was indeed as bushy as one of those push brooms he knew from the docks.

So this was Peter, his biological father. He pictured Malcolm’s face in his head, and even from his memory, he was left with no doubt. He had not wanted to believe the records, and even the blood types were poor evidence in his heart. Certainly he had accepted it intellectually, but until he saw that picture, it had not penetrated to his emotions.

Having done so, the facts left him numb. He knew so much about Sophia from all of Malcolm’s stories, but Peter was a complete blank. He seemed to be little more than a sperm donor with a face.

Text flowed on beneath the picture. Married to Sophia Grace Ross, 3379. Son Michael William Schneider, born 3380. Ratings: tach drives-3, environment-2, nav-1. Captain’s Guild ID #82245-HC-901.

So Peter had been a captain as well. Michael sat up a bit straighter for that. No matter what Hans thought about him going for his captain’s license, he had come from a line of captains: Peter by blood, and Malcolm by training.

He read on, seeing graduation dates, links to transcripts, promotion dates in S&W’s fleet, his posting to the
Kaiser’s Folly
, even a civilian commendation from the Navy in 3378. Then it ended abruptly. Died in border incident CasRb-733.

He selected the link for that last item. It came up as a terse navy report. All it had was the reference number, no title. It was not the Battle of Veraton or anything so glorious. Border incident, Caspian rebellion, file number 733.