Her fingers reached for the disk and closed over it. “I’m aware that you don’t need an Assistant Medic aboard. No ship of the Queen’s class does, or believes she does, unless the incumbent plans to retire in the near future and wants to train in his replacement. I’m working my way as a jack-of-all-trades.”
“The Solar Queen is fully staffed,” Jellico interjected. “I’m not about to let go any of my permanent crew.”
“Hardly,” she agreed, “but tell me the department that can’t use a bit of help now and then—Mr. Van Rycke’s when cargo’s being laded or shifted, the Engineering section during preventive maintenance, even the Steward and Medic once in a while depending on the press of their particular duties. About the only place I won’t volunteer to serve is on the bridge. I’m as good as the next and probably better than most at basic astrogation, but that one is definitely best left to the experts.”
The smile she turned on them was winning. Rael was sure of getting the passage, but she was out for more than that. “I want to be part of the Solar Queen,” she told them frankly, “if only for one voyage.”
“Why?” Miceal asked bluntly. “She won’t match a Cofort ship, especially not the Roving Star, for comfort, and you can put credits down that we won’t be calling at the Federation’s most fashionable spaceports.”
The woman sighed. “You talk about our holdings as if we were a miniature Company. I assure you that is very much not the case. We have a few frills, aye, but we’re Free Traders like the rest of our kind. We don’t live soft.
“My interest in your Queen stems from two sources. First, your former Cargo-apprentice, Mara Ingrain, is the best Cargo-Master we’ve ever had. She obviously had superb training, and, happy as she is on the Star, she speaks with nothing but pride and affection of her time as part of your crew. Second is the response of your apprentices and Mr. Weeks to the crisis of being framed as a plague ship. They proved they could think quickly and clearly and then make and carry through the desperate plan needed to clear you. Furthermore, at the end, the Queen not only came out of it all solvent with a relatively good contract but managed to avenge herself on her enemies as well. I think I could learn more serving with you for a voyage or two than I could in ten years bumming around the rim.”
The violet eyes studied him somberly. “I have no ulterior motive for this. You don’t compete directly with my brother, and even if you did, Teague doesn’t deal in backalley work.”
“No one ever said that he did. Doctor Cofort,” he responded quietly.
She carefully closed her portfolio. “You have our offer. Take your time to talk it over, but please consider it well. It’s generous since we are seriously interested in acquiring the ship, and you’re not likely to better it, or equal it, either, in the foreseeable future.”
Van Rycke was silent for a moment. “That won’t be necessary. We accept your brother’s bid. — You’ll want to inspect the Wrack?”
“Of course, as will our Engineer when the crew gets here, as a formality in this case. You’ve been flying her, and none of you appears to be suicidal.— My request?”
“The Queen will carry you, but if you want to work, it’ll have to be as an unskilled temporary hand with no share in the ship’s profits.” They would have to check the rates. Only the huge transgalactics, most of those passenger liners, plying the inner-system starlanes, used unspecialized labor. Out here on the rim, no Captain could indulge in that luxury. Every crew member had his or her specific place and could usually back up at least one other shipmate as well.
“That’s all I had in mind, Mr. Van Rycke.” She glanced at Jellico. “If it is agreeable to the Captain. Hiring a crew member goes beyond a Trade agreement. I’ll have to honor his will.”
“It’s agreeable, Doctor.”
“Excellent! Thank you, Captain Jellico.”
Rael came to her feet. “I won’t be long. I’ll pick up my things and have the formal contract drawn up. You can check it over, and we can seal it when I return.”
3
Jan Van Rycke’s head lowered. He had done all he could, the little he could. The senior members of the crew would appreciate that, but he knew the others had expected in their hearts that he would pull off some bit of magic for them. Damn it to all the hells, he had half expected that himself. . .
Jellico looked at him. “Not bad at all,” he announced with satisfaction. “We’d already made our original cost and expenses back, so this is clear profit. As nice a pot as the Queen’s seen in many a long voyage.”
The tension melted from their comrades, and they crowded around the Cargo-Master to offer their own congratulations.
“The only question now is what we’re going to do with our new hand,” Steen remarked.
“No one has to worry about that,” Tau responded. “I can put her to very good use. I’ve been doing, or trying to do, a study of interspecies/interracial transmission of viral and bacterial infections on the planetary, interplanetary, and interstellar levels. The inputting alone is a galactic chore. If all Rael Cofort does is take over that, it’ll be worth it to me to ship her, and with a medical background she should be able to manipulate and interpret some of the data as well.”
“You do believe she’s not setting us up for anything?”
Rip pressed, voicing the nagging concern of most. They all had good reason to recall some of their recent passengers.
“As sure as we can be,” Van Rycke answered. “As Doctor Cofort pointed out, we’re not of a class to compete regularly with her brother, and we don’t even have a charter at the moment, much less anything he’d want to fight to get away from us, which he’d do openly anyway. He’s certainly not going to enter into a Trade war over an intrasystem mail run like this one. Miceal will have to confirm Rael’s credentials with him, but if she checks out there, we should be safe enough taking her aboard. It shouldn’t prove a loss to us, even apart from whatever she can do on Craig’s project. She’s at least proven she’s able to trade.”
“That she has.” The Captain shook his head, as if in amazement. “Hard as titanone, though she looks as fragile as one of Loren’s ghost lilies.”
Craig Tau chuckled. “The habitual errors of our kind! — Slight build is not the equivalent of either a weak body or incompetence in one’s field. The fair Medic was born aboard a Free Trader. The wonder would be if she could not handle herself in the business, particularly in a situation where the blaster was in her hand.”
“True enough,” Jellico agreed. He came to his feet. “I’ll start programming the navputer for Canuche. Send our recruit to my cabin when she comes aboard.”
Rael Cofort squared her shoulders and knocked briskly on the entrance panel of the Captain’s work cabin. She stepped inside a moment later upon receiving his permission to do so.
Because she knew from Mara’s descriptions what to expect, she gave no gasp of surprise, but her eyes glowed in appreciation at the sight of the montage of pictures covering all the walls, tri-dee images of some of the Federation’s rarer and more dramatic fauna. They were of the highest professional and artistic quality, and the work of which they formed a visual record had earned Miceal Jellico a respected place among the ultrasystem’s leading field xenobiologists.
There should be more in here than merely representations of strange life forms. Eagerly she sought and found the one she wanted to see. Behind the Captain’s desk, in a small, swinging cage, was one of the oddest creatures she had ever beheld, the only one of its kind she had encountered in the flesh. It looked like a lot of toad mixed with a little parrot, a bright blue feathered being with a neckless head and six legs, two of them clawed, arranged spider-fashion around its dumpy body.
“Queex!” she exclaimed in delight and quickly stepped toward the hoobat. “You’re wonderful!”
Jellico stared at her. This was not the reaction Queex usually inspired. To every previous visitor and to the rest of the Queen’s crew, his foundling was a frank horror.
He stared again, this time at the hoobat himself. Instead of his customary greeting of siren shriek followed by a distressingly accurate and far-reaching spit, the creature was gripping the wire bars of the cage with his feet and drawing his claws across the metal strands, producing a soft, droning hum, which, if not quite a violin sonata, was the first distinctly musical sound any human being had heard him produce.