Rinn's Run TIG: Chapter 8 – Cargo and Crew, Part 2 (Patreon)

Kalan stepped out of the ship to find a short, squat woman with a shock of white hair, deep lines creasing her face, and deep-set eyes the color of coal. She looked him up and down, sniffed, and then looked past him at the hatch. When no one came through the hatch, she frowned, and looked at him.

“What are you doing, boy? Go get this Captain Rinn so the grownups can talk.”

Kalan gave her a shallow smile and didn’t move. Her dark eyes went comically wide.

“You?! You got no business captaining anything. You can’t be more than, what, twelve? You’d drive us all straight into a star. I don’t know what kind of joke Petronan is trying to play on an old woman, but it isn’t funny.”

Whatever mild amusement the woman’s antics might have provided right at first, they were soon lost on the headache-afflicted Kalan. His expression grew colder and colder as the woman kept ranting at no one in particular. When she finally looked at him again, she froze in place and whatever insults she’d been about to speak died on her lips. Kalan regarded her with that arctic expression for ten excruciatingly long seconds before he spoke.

“Are you quite finished?” asked Kalan.

The old woman looked like she was about to have a heart attack, but she nodded. “Definitely finished.”

“You’re Rensin?”

“Aye.”

“Petronan spoke very highly of you. He also said you might have certain opinions. Let me be clear that I am not impressed by someone who assumes that youth means incompetence and that age equals wisdom. That is doubly true when the lives of everyone on one of my ships may depend on you doing as you are ordered to do. So, before you waste my time, I need to know. Are you even capable of following orders from someone younger than you?”

The woman stared at him with a very complicated expression on her face before she finally answered. “Aye, captain. I can follow orders.”

Kalan let his expression soften and the woman relaxed.

“Very well. Now, if you’re still interested in the job, let’s go look at the ship.”

“I’m still interested,” said the Rensin.

Kalan wasn’t convinced that she actually wanted the job. It seemed more like she wanted to get a read on him, but he supposed that was fair. Nodding, he started walking.

“Aren’t we going to look at the ship?” she asked, gesturing at the Ankala Rising.

“I don’t need you for that ship,” said Kalan.

The old woman hurried to catch up with him and strode along the docking ring next to him in silence. Kalan was just as content to let that silence stretch. Petronan knew his business, so he was willing to give Rensis the benefit of the doubt that she knew her business. He just wasn’t sure if he trusted that she’d actually follow orders from anyone who didn’t scare her half to death. He noticed her eyeing him with curious looks now and then, but she didn’t break the silence. When they finally reached the Zeren ship, Kalan strode toward the hatch. Rensin cursed under her breath.

“Is this some kind of joke?” she asked. “Cause that looks a lot like a Zeren Navy cutter to me.”

“Good eye,” said Kalan. “It was a Zeren Navy cutter until quite recently. Now, it belongs to me.”

“Seems like there must be one hell of a story there.”

Kalan shrugged. “I’ll tell you about it some time, assuming you stick around.”

Once Kalan got through the security procedures to get aboard, the pair of them started toward the engineering section. The old woman stared around at the ship with a look that was half grim disdain and half nostalgia.

“Haven’t set foot on one of these in thirty years,” she said. “Can’t say I missed it much. Terrible food.”

“If you can call it food,” said Kalan.

“Heh,” said the old engineer, before she sighed. “Can’t say I think much of the Zerens, but they do make decent ships.”

Kalan glanced over at the woman. Something told him that in Rensin’s world there were exactly two kinds of ships. There were decent ships and everything else. He thought for a moment before he asked a question.

“Why do you say that about the ships?”

Rensin pursed her lips for a moment and squinted an eye in a way that gave her a mildly piratical appearance.

“I know you aren’t an engineer, but you must know that ships are a big complicated mess of systems.”

Kalan nodded. “It may have come to my attention once or twice.”

“Well, here’s the thing. They are a way bigger mess of systems than you think they are. Frankly, it’s a miracle these damn things don’t explode every time someone fires up the engine and runs a coffee maker at the same time. All of those systems have a way of interfering with each other unless you get the magic just right.”

“The magic?” asked Kalan.

“You think I’m joking? I’ve seen systems that only worked right when a specific person was in the room. I’ve seen engines shot full of holes keep working for days after they should have shut down, only to cut out just as the ship got to where it needed to go. We can apply all the science we want, but that’s only half the equation. The rest of it is the magic.”

Kalan wanted to scoff at the idea, but he didn’t think he dared. It seemed like a truly terrible idea to tell a person you expected to keep a ship flying that they didn’t know what they were talking about when it came to ships. Kalan also wasn’t sure he disagreed with her. He’d seen ships come through things that they shouldn’t have with no good explanation. When confronted with those situations, his usual response was to chalk it up to the statistical outliers, but he supposed that was a just a mathematical way of saying that something inexplicable had happened. Maybe the woman was on to something with her claim that it was the magic. Maybe not magic in the traditional sense, but something more subtle. An intuition that let people briefly peek into a deeper working of the universe and sense some kind of harmony that no sensors could detect but that mattered all the same.

While Kalan didn’t share those kinds of insights about the workings of a ship, he couldn’t say that he’d never touched on an experience like that. There had been moments when he was fighting someone that it felt like he was touching something more, something that let him understand what was happening better than the other person. It wasn’t all the time, or even often, but it had happened. He had no better explanation or proof of that than Rensin’s talk of the magic. He hadn’t even been certain that it had really happened or had assumed that he’d subconsciously picked up on things. That was as plausible an explanation, which brought him back to the same place that he always ended up when he entertained those kinds of thoughts. It was the wholly mundane truism that the universe is complicated. An idea that no could refute because it was so self-evidently true, yet also an idea that provided no useful guidance. Kalan hated truisms. So, he shook off his largely useless thoughts about the magic and led Rensin into the engineering section.

“Here we are,” he said. “Take a look around. Tell me what you think.”

Rensin just stood there about ten seconds, her eyes distant and her face screwed up into a scowl. Then, as if a cleansing wind had blown through her soul, the woman’s face relaxed. She looked around at the room that was for all intents and purposes the beating heart of the ship and harumphed. Sen didn’t say anything. He expected that the woman had her own process for dealing with a new engineering space. Rensin reached into a pocket and pulled out a black bandana covered with images of gears and sprockets. She tied it over her hair and rolled her neck, which let out a series of cracks and pops that made Kalan want to drag her to the medical bay immediately. She put her hands on her hips in something that Kalan had once heard described as a superhero pose and nodded.

“Alright,” said Rensin, “let’s see what those idiots have done to you.”

For the next hour, Kalan leaned against a wall while Rensin moved from station to station. He heard her muttering under her breath more than once. At one point, she stood straight up, pointed at the screen, and started yelling.

“No! No! No! What were they thinking?! Did a monkey train them?”

Shaking her head and looking up as if to invoke the patience of the gods, Rensin took a breath and went back to examining the various stations. When she had finished her inspection, she walked back over to Kalan.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think that the last engineer on this ship should have been shot.”

“She was,” said Kalan.

Rensin frowned at him and then gave him a fierce nod. “Good! Because she didn’t have any clue how you get the best from a ship.”

Kalan gave her a serious look. “Is the ship safe to fly?”

“What?” asked Rensin, her expression baffled. “Oh, yeah, she’s safe to fly, but safe to fly isn’t the same thing as being the best she can be. Like I said, the Zerens build good ships. But you need good people to take care of them. Damn Zeren careerists.”

Kalan blinked a few times as he tried to process the unfamiliar phrase. “Zeren careerists?”

“It’s a real problem in the Zeren military. People who are technically competent but hate their jobs. They stick it out because it’s their career. I guess that’s fine if you’re a janitor, but it’s not a good thing in an engineer.”

“I can see how that might be a problem,” said Kalan.

“So, tell me more about this job,” said Rensin. “Petronan was a little hazy about the details.”

“We’ll be taking this ship into Ikaran space. Frankly, I plan to stay there for a while. The Zerens aren’t going to be happy with me for a long time. So, depending on how attached you are to this part of space, it’s either a very short-term job or it may turn into a long-term job. If you want to come back here, I’ll see to it that you get comfortable transport back.”

Rensin looked back at the collection of stations and displays. “And just what are you planning on doing with this ship once you get to Ikaran space?”

It didn’t take a lot of reading between the lines for Kalan to understand what she was really getting at. She wanted to know if she’d be signing on with someone who planned on turning to piracy.

“The only thing I know how to do with a ship. I’m going to use it as a freighter. I don’t have many contacts in that part of space, so the actual work might be erratic for a while. But I should be able to guarantee everyone’s pay for six months. At that point, I’ll decide if we should keep going or if it’s time to sell the ship.”

“Probably smarter to just sell it. You could make a fortune.”

“Only if I don’t care who I sell it to.”

“Do you care about that?”

Kalan shrugged. “I care about what they’ll do with it.”

“Do you realize what that says about you?”

“That I’d rather not help people shoot down ships like mine.”

Rensin snorted. “Well, yes, but that’s not what I was getting at.”

“Okay?”

“It says that you think you’re the only person with good enough judgment to handle the responsibility of a ship like this.”

Kalan mulled that over. “So, you think I’m being arrogant?”

Rensin shrugged. “You’re a captain. Every captain is arrogant. You have to be. What it says is that you don’t trust very many people.”

“That’s not really a secret,” said Kalan with a laugh. “Is it a problem?”

“Not for me. It’s just interesting.”

“I’ll take your word for that. So, am looking for another engineer?”

“With six months of steady pay on the line and a ship that’s not falling apart at the seams? Are you mad? Of course, I’m taking the job.”

“Are you going to need any help?”

“I will. Engineering on a ship like this is too much for one person. If we’re just heading out to Ikaran space for the first run, though, I can probably get by with two people to assist. After that, we’ll need more.”

“Fair enough. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“I can probably find a couple of people,” said Rensin, before she got a quizzical look. “Will you be in command?”

Kalan shook his head. “No. Not for this. I’m looking to recruit Nielle Bareine to command, at least on the way out.”

Rensin nodded slowly. “Aye. She’s probably ready for that.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Plus, I think I can get her on short notice.”

Rensin burst into laughter.

“What?” demanded Kalan.

“Everyone on this station knows that you could get her on no notice.”

“It isn’t like that,” said Kalan wearily.

“Ha! It’s exactly like that.”

“Don’t you have consoles to yell at?”