2352-APRIL-13
Two days out of Dunsany Roads the captain passed the word about customs inspection. Because Dunsany was a Confederation system and not corporately owned, we had to go through an inspection exercise with the local authorities before we could leave the ship. A section in the back of the Handbook explained customs declarations and the kind of goods we were prohibited from taking into Confederation ports.
Pip and I sat on the mess deck after lunch and I asked, “What do you do if you have something that’s prohibited? It’s kinda late at this point to get rid of it.”
He grinned. “Do you have anything on the prohibited list? And can I have some?”
I laughed. “No, it’s just that none of the stuff listed is—technically—illegal on any of the corporate planets except maybe the radioactives and nerve agents.”
“And the biologicals,” Pip reminded me.
“Okay, and the biologicals, but what do you do if you have some poka-juice you just wanna pass through and sell at Betrus?”
“There’s an embargo locker down in main cargo. We put anything we don’t want to be considered in the inspection in there before we dock. The customs people put a tell-tale on the locker so that they know if it’s opened while we’re docked. Anything in there stays put and that’s all they care about. Cargo manifests are easy to check and track and they just lock the prohibited cargo canisters to the ship. We can’t leave without them.”
“Will they search the ship?”
Pip chuckled. “I doubt it. It would take forever. Commercial carriers generally operate on the honor system. They make it easy for us to comply with their rules and regs and so we do it. Occasionally you hear of some small indie captain trying to smuggle stuff into a Confederation port, but it’s really not worth it.”
“Why?”
“Ishmael?” He looked at me seriously. “Have you not noticed that we’ve just traveled through five other systems where anything you wanted to sell was legal? Why take the risk on smuggling when you can sell it legitimately in the next system over?”
“Oh,” I said.
The forms themselves were easy and I did not have anything to put into the embargo locker. Still, I could tell we were in for a rather different experience on Dunsany Roads than our other ports. Pip went for his afternoon run and I headed down to deck berthing to see how the crochet work was coming.
Sean had taught Sarah and Tabitha how to crochet. Tabitha only really needed a refresher because she had done simple lace tatting as a girl. Sarah knew the theory, but had never held a hook before. They had been at it about a week by the time we docked and I was shocked to see how much they had done. Sean, of course, had almost finished his afghans and supervised the shawl work. I found the three of them in Sean’s quad, Sean and Tabitha sat on opposite ends of Sean’s bunk and Sarah occupied the lower bunk across from them. Sean was working on his sixth—and last—afghan.
They seemed cozy, all settled in and surrounded by their yarn and talking softly together. Sarah looked as comfortable as I had ever seen her, and Sean looked pleased to have Tabitha nearby. They had not talked about the arrangement when in the sauna so I wondered if they were keeping the project quiet for some reason. Tabitha kept up the queen bee posture when in the sauna, but I thought she and Sean had an easiness between them while they crocheted that I did not really see in the gym.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Great!” Sarah answered without looking up. “This is my third and I think it’s going to be the best one.” She held it up then for me to admire.
“Wow, that looks excellent!” I told her and it did.
Tabitha added, “I’m on my fifth, but I think she’s beginning to catch up to me with those young fingers,” she joked.
That startled me. Somehow I had the idea that Sarah was actually older than Tabitha, but that was probably just because of how she had been when she first came aboard.
“So? What do you think of this as a way to pass the time underway?” I asked.
“This is fun,” Sarah said. “I can take my hook and a ball of yarn up into my bunk in the evening and get all cozy and think about the money I’m making.”
“I’m dreaming these silly patterns,” Tabitha said. “I close my eyes and I can see them in my sleep.” They all chuckled at that. “But I like it.” She sighed. “Takes me back to when I was a kid.”
“So? How much yarn do you need to hold you over to Betrus?”
Sean looked at me speculatively. “Seriously?”
“You’ve burned through twelve skeins in a week. That’s almost two a day and we’ve got almost fifty days to Betrus. We don’t have a hundred skeins left anymore.”
Tabitha looked at me out of the corner of her eye and asked, “How much would you charge to sell us the remaining stock?”
I shrugged. “Talk to Pip. How much you thinking?”
“I’ll give you two hundred fifty for the hundred skeins and take the mass onto my allotment right now. That’ll give us the stock we need for our crochet work and you’ll get your mass allotment cleared along with a nice profit on the deal without having to do anything,” she rattled off.
“Talk to Pip,” I said again. “He’s the money man. I just find the deals. That would take us out of the picture on the shawl deal, but that’s okay with me. I only wanted to find some way to leverage our investment.”
“Thanks, Ish. This was a really good idea,” Sean said. “It’s a lot more fun as a group.”
I checked the chrono and realized I still had two stans before dinner, so I pulled out the spec two environmental materials and ran through a practice test. Brill had been drilling me on watch for the last week, so I was getting a much better handle on it and a lot faster than I would have expected. The test went smoothly and when I finished, the score popped up—eight-five. Enough to pass, but the real tests were tougher so I needed to do better. I went back through the test and started digging out the questions I had missed. With a mid-watch coming, I had some time to study before I would see Brill the next afternoon.
I began to think that Francis had actually done me a favor.