Galaxy's End: Book One by LeRoy Clary (pdf ebook reader txt) 📕

impasse, Fang upchucked into his flipper, rinsed it off, and handed a data chip to Stone.

Stone said, “I will hold onto this until we depart Franklin. You can retrieve it from the captain of this vessel. I’ll place it in his or her possession just before you lift-off. If you try or do anything else, including telling others about the reward for us, I will drop this in acid and watch the smoke rise as it melts. Do we have an agreement?”

Fang nodded silently.

“That is all I want from you. Leave us alone.”

Fang hesitated, then shifted his last set of eyes to me. “Kat, will you do me the honor of having dinner with me this evening?”

“I will not.”

Fang turned to Stone. “Breakfast? With you?”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“Come, come. The sorry business of capture and threats has been conducted. We have an agreement. Is there any reason why we cannot be friends? No, don’t answer that. I’ll tell you what, if I should happen to run into you aboard the ship, I’ll ask permission to join as if we are strangers and we can start over. Perhaps we’ll all have cooler heads by then.”

Stone stood with Fang’s data chip and access to his bank account in hand. “Come on, Kat.”

We left.

As we walked across the passage to our rooms, she said fiercely, “You’re a bigger liar than me!”

“It seemed called for,” I defended myself.

She was giggling like a schoolgirl as we went inside, an action uncommon for a starship captain. I believed we were going to work well together and have some fun along the way. Maybe I could teach her a thing or two. I was wondering how difficult it might be to steal a starship of my own and make myself captain. Say, the one we were inside. It probably was not the time to mention it.

CHAPTER SIX

 

Captain Stone

 

The girl, Kat, the empath weighed heavily on Stone’s mind. Kat’s presence was as heavy as dragging the anchor on any sea-bound ship. Kat didn’t need a mental power to be remarkable: it was a welcome bonus. Stone snorted again with humor at the very thought of her and their dealings with the frog. Kat had almost ruined that encounter with her humorous lies, and they had almost caused the captain to almost burst out laughing and ruin the encounter. It had been a thin disguise to pretend to cough, one she was not certain that Fang believed.

The encounter also displayed the girl’s ability to think quickly and adapt to changing situations. Of course, surviving on the streets in any slum on a planet tended to teach those skills. Those who didn’t learn them died young.

However, Kat was a cut above, a person that was not about to live a boring life on a backwater planet. Despite her youthful age, fourteen or fifteen, she was already gathering a crew around her. She had attracted Bill and Bert, and there seemed to be others, not as close, but equally willing to follow her.

Her mind drifted away, to explore other subjects. What if an uneducated street urchin who had empathic abilities was educated and at the same time taught a skill, such as negotiating deals on behalf of her ship? Of what value would that person become?

The obvious answer came quickly. She might become captain of a trading ship larger than most. The warning from her first mate about not accepting a stale sandwich in trade for the Guardia was not made in total jest.

Kat might become the most important crewman in the history of traders.

It was an interesting dilemma to ponder. Yet, Kat had one other trait that cannot be taught. She was loyal to her friends, as demonstrated by the reciprocal loyalty of Bill and the digging creature, Bert. Stone suspected that if they had not agreed to come along, she would have refused.

That was interesting, too. It suggested that if Kat became a friend as well as an employee, she might someday offer the same loyalty to the Captain of the Guardia. That was worth more than her empathic abilities. Being the captain of a starship means total command—which also means isolation. Even the First Officer is a subordinate. Kat would never become her friend, but perhaps a new relationship would develop between them. They may even become equals in a sense. She would have to think long and hard about how she would use Kat in her crew. She might set her apart from them, perhaps she would create a new position for her. It was worth considering.

Then there was Fang, the frog creature from the Dreamer’s galley to consider, a being who admittedly held no loyalties to any but himself. She had no idea of Fang’s sex. It would be simpler to refer to it as a male unless otherwise notified, which was the custom. Fang had somehow managed to acquire the captain’s description and the knowledge of her crime before liftoff. It had been too early for general knowledge to be widely known, which implied Fang had access to crime data that others didn’t. That implied the green thing routinely searched for criminals and those with rewards posted for them.

She fingered the data disk with Fang’s bank accounts and briefly considered accessing it long enough to find his net worth. But no, that would break her rules. She had made a deal with the little green thing and unless he broke that arrangement, she would hold herself to it.

That was part of being a trader in a starship. Some deals are better than others. You learn to accept that. Some jobs are financially terrible. But a trader that drops an agreement in favor of another, or cheats clients, loses more than credits. The trader loses reputation. Word travels fast, even from world to