Primrose and Thorn p-1 Read online

  Primrose and Thorn

  ( Primrose - 1 )

  Bud Sparhawk

  Nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1998.

  Primrose and Thorn

  by Bud Sparhawk

  “Build me straight,

  O worthy Master!

  Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel,

  That shall laugh at all disaster,

  And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!”

  The Building of the Ship,

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  “Why did I ever listen to you about this race? I already spend a bunch right here on Earth,” protested Jerome Blacker, president of JBI. “I’ve been having second thoughts about this Jupiter race.”

  The two tanned and muscular people facing him looked uneasy. A sales tag was still attached to the man’s sleeve and flapped as he waved his hand while speaking. “You already made the commitment, JB—you just have to follow through. Come on, it doesn’t cost you any real money.”

  “You sure as hell aren’t much of a businessman if you think this won’t cost me anything!” JB said nastily.

  “Mr. Blacker,” Pascal interrupted, “the publicity about this race will bring in more than enough to offset expenses.”

  Jerome leaned across the desk. “What about insurance, the cost of transport, the cost of the boats? Those things aren’t cheap!”

  Pascal sighed. “The funds from the Jovian ventures can’t be spent on Earth. Thanks to the treaty of ’54, you have to reinvest at least 75 percent of your profits.”

  Jerome winced. “Don’t remind me about those damn pirates! If it hadn’t been for my stations and hubs, the damned Jovians wouldn’t have a pot to piss in,” he grumbled.

  Pascal continued his attack. “GeoGlobal and the Times cartel are both outfitting ships for the race. No telling how many the Jovians are going to enter themselves. If we don’t race, JBI will lose a lot—the publicity about our entry will bring in more than enough revenue to cover our expenses.”

  Jerome mused, half to himself, as he rubbed his chin. “I remember your numbers, I’ve read the reports. So be it. What do I have to do to finalize the financial arrangements?”

  Pascal spoke slowly, not wishing to reveal how anxious he was to get JB’s approval. “I’ve already reserved Thorn, a used barkentine. You just need to sign the commitment for outfitting her. Once that’s done, the orbital factories will start fabricating the sails—we’ve already sent them our specs. We’ll use the Jovian funds for both of those efforts. The only cash outlay you need to worry about will be our transport out to Jupiter.”

  “Which leaves only the human element,” Jerome said. “Even now I find it hard to believe that we can win this race.” He swiveled in his chair to face the woman who sat beside Pascal. She was the best captain in his fleet and winner of more sailboat races than he could count. She’d been unusually quiet since she came in the office.

  “Do you think you can race one of those barques, Louella?” he asked her quietly. “Do you think you can sail a boat on the seas of Jupiter?”

  Pascal held his breath as he awaited her answer. The success of their entire enterprise, and the payoff for the past year’s worth of intense training, rested on her reply. The answer she gave would make or break the deal.

  “I could sail a fucking bathtub on the Sun if the price was right,” she spat back. “Now how the hell do I get a drink around here?”

  Rams had stopped at the station in the hopes that there would be an opportunity for business. That, and a chance to restock his supplies. In order to keep his ship, Primrose, he had to take advantage of every opportunity that came his way.

  Jake, an irritable old scamp who knew everything there was to know about sailing the winds of Jupiter, had taught Rams how to sail. Rams learned that every ship had its own personality. He learned how to balance keel and ballast, how to adjust the ship’s buoyancy to ride the turbulence.

  After teaching him the basics of sail, rudder, keel, and line, Jake went on to show him how to heave-to in the hurricane-force winds so that they would ride easily, neither making way nor being blown back. They’d used that technique to mine the edges of Jupiter’s storms. The updrafts in these dangerous hurricanes often pulled metal-rich meteorites and icebergs—worth their weight in gold to the floating stations—from the lower depths of the atmosphere. Jake showed him how to “cheat” the boat close to the edges of the turbulence, using jib and main to close in on these bits of rock and harvest them.

  Jake had shared all of his secrets of playing the winds of Jupiter’s storms and winning its rewards. Jake taught Rams to love the winds on the wine-red seas.

  Rams’s transition from crewman to ship’s captain hadn’t been easy. He’d scrimped and saved every cent he could, and signed away nearly all of his future profits—all to buy a fast, outdated clipper at one of JBI’s auctions. Clippers had been deemed too inefficient to achieve JBI’s “acceptable” level of profitability.

  Refitting the boat and replacing the instruments that Primrose’s former crew had stripped put him even further in debt. In addition, there had been the outlay for new sails and refitting the keel. Both cost more than he expected and, suddenly, his debt for Primrose started to look like a financial black hole from which there was no hope of escape.

  His first year had been a disaster. The cargo he’d hauled hadn’t generated enough to pay the interest on his loans. To keep from losing her he borrowed even more. If he wasn’t careful he could lose Primrose and be thrown in jail—that was the penalty for simultaneously using her as collateral for multiple loans. Since then it had been nip and tuck, keeping one financial step ahead of bankruptcy.

  The second year of operations had taught him where the good money could be earned—carrying perishable goods on quick dashes. JBI’s huge, lumbering cargo ships could move things cheaply, but they were neither speedy nor very maneuverable. Like the old square-riggers of Earth, they flew with the wind, stolid as the stations, and scarcely moving much faster. Sometimes their crew endured months between station-falls.

  Rams usually got the best return when he had to make a darting emergency run from station to hub and back. Double charges both ways, and no hassle for it, either! Best of all, the fees kept him out of prison.

  “Wind one-thirty meters per second and rising, Cap’n. Satellite shows some deep turbulence spinning off the edge about twelve thousand klicks upwind and heading to intercept your destination. Weather advises you should try to stay within the central laminar flows of sub-bands MM and KK until you’re almost to Charlie Sierra One. That should keep you out of the storm,” the station master said.

  “Put it down that I acknowledge the limits on bands MM and KK,” Rams replied as the ’master logged his ship out. “How much margin does Weather give me before that storm hits?”

  “Best they can project is that you have about a sixteen-hour margin, give or take six hours. Of course, if it swings south of CS-42 the edge winds might give you a lift.”

  “When did I ever see one of those storms change course in a way that would help me?” Rams asked rhetorically. “I’ll plan on beating the weather the last leg of the trip. I just hope that Weather’s prediction is right.”

  “I agree with that,” the ’master replied. “You’d better keep a watch for any miners who might be prospecting on the periphery of the storm.

  Wouldn’t want to run into one of those crazies, would you?”

  Rams grinned, remembering when he had been one of those crazies. “I’ll watch out for them,” he promised.

  “Well, it looks like you are all set to go, Primrose,” the station master said as he popped the record from the computer and handed it to Rams. “Fair winds and good
passage, Cap’n.”

  Rams checked the ballast tank when he returned to the ship. According to the leveling mark on the wall of Primrose’s berth, she was riding low—just a little too heavy probably from the extra cargo he’d taken on. He switched on the heaters in the ballast tank. That would create enough steam pressure to drive the excess ballast out, lightening the ship. When Primrose’s bull’s-eye was almost up to the mark, he turned the heater off. In a few moments more she was floating level with the station.

  “Ready to cast off!” Rams said over the intercom. He listened for the ’master to loose the clamps that held Primrose in the station’s embrace. Four loud bangs resounded through the pressure hull as the clamps released. Rams immediately felt the ship list to starboard as she drifted backwards into the fierce winds of Jupiter.

  Primrose heeled as it caught the full force of the wind. Rams braced himself, checked the instruments, and then turned the ship downwind as it emerged from the lee of the station.

  The station’s infrared image quickly faded as they exceeded the viewer’s range. A few seconds later the sonar return vanished as well. Only a fuzzy radar image, quickly dissolving into a cloud of electronic noise, told him where the station rode. Even that image would fade once he got more than a kilometer away. After that he’d be sailing blind.

  Primrose ran with the wind as he lowered the keel. He pointedly ignored the keelmeter as the diamond mesh ribbon uncoiled from its housing. The thousand-ton weight at the keel’s end started its familiar swinging motion as the keel was unwrapped from its spindle. Primrose rocked in response to the motion. The pendulum’s swing slowed as the ribbon paid out farther and farther into the thick soup of the atmosphere.

  Finally the rocking motion dampened and Rams halted the winch, locking it in place. Only then did he check the keelmeter. Although he relied more on the feel of the ship’s trim when setting the keel depth, he liked to assure himself of the setting.

  A single glance told him that his instincts had been correct. He’d halted the keel at 1,400 meters, one hundred meters shy of the theoretical setting the station master had calculated. He let an additional fifty meters of the mesh keel pay out; it wouldn’t hurt to have Primrose a little bottom-heavy on an upwind run.

  Rams reached for the sail controls. Primrose was being blown downwind at thirty meters per second, relative to the station. The station he’d just left plodded along slower than the wind, held back only by her massive drogues—a fancy word for sea anchors. The drogues that swung beneath the station’s bulbous form created drag and provided a measure of control. It was sailing, but using anchors to steer instead of sails.

  Rams hit the switch to release his mainsail from its housing on the main mast and braced himself. The ship tilted even further to starboard as the wind bit the suddenly increased surface area. He immediately played out the traveler, letting the main find the angle that would allow the fierce wind to flow across the sail’s face. He kept a careful eye on the pressure gauges from both sides of the wishbone that constrained the sail, adjusting the sail’s angle to maximize the front-to-back pressure differential. He wanted to get as much lift as possible from the airfoil effect.

  Primrose finally stopped rocking and curved into the wind as Rams adjusted the line. Primrose was running at about sixty degrees to the wind when she finally balanced out and was making an appreciable sixty meters per second.

  “All right, girl, let’s show old man Jupiter what we can really do,” he said, deploying the jib from its housing at the prow. There was a hellacious rattling from forward as the chain hoist protested the way the wind whipped at the small jib and smashed it against the pressure hull. Rams winched the line back until the jib sheets were taut and the small forward sail was funneling the wind along the back of the mainsail, forming a venturi between them.

  Primrose heeled even more as the force on her increased from the additional sail surface exposed to the wind and turned tighter into the face of the wind. She was now running at about a forty degree angle. Rams grinned in satisfaction as her speed increased proportionally. He watched the knotmeter rise past seventy, seventy-five, and settle at nearly eighty meters per second.

  He checked his location on the inertial positioning display and made a minor adjustment to the rudder, then adjusted both the mainsail and jib to account for the new angle of attack.

  “Clipper Ship Primrose out at 1400 hours, under way and on course for Charlie Sierra Four Two,” he said into the radio. The station master probably wouldn’t be able to hear the formal sign-off, given the usual overwhelming amount of static in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, Rams was always careful to observe the formalities.

  As Primrose pulled steadily away, Rams made a thorough examination of the ship. He wanted to ensure that everything on board was shipshape. He double-checked the straps and buckles on all of the cargo crates, just to make sure they’d been properly secured.

  Next he checked the topside sail locker, taking care to see that the spare sails were properly stored and ready for deployment when the need arose. If all went well he wouldn’t have to replace the sails on this trip, which would help his profit margin. Having them fabricated in orbit and brought down by elevator was bloody expensive.

  He swung the power-lifters from their clamps and started working on the new sail. He strained against the resistance of the tough foil of the sail as he refolded it. Even so, he tried to keep from flexing the thin metal more than was necessary.

  As soon as he had the sail properly folded and secured, he moved it into its canister. His arms ached as he struggled to get it into the correct position, cursing the financial situation that forced him to fire his crew three months before and the expediency that kept him from having the time in dock to do this sort of housekeeping. One person could barely cope with the bulky sails against the drag of Jupiter’s heavy gravity. Even with the one hundred-to-one ratio of the lifters, he still had to depend on his own muscle to force the cumbersome rig into the canister.

  Finally the sail was loaded. He stowed the lifters and rubbed his aching back before fastening the heavy chain lines at the head end of the sail; one line that would lift it into place on the mast and another to connect it to the traveler that limited a sail’s movement across the top deck.

  Whenever he had to blow the main its lines would go with it. The lines were another expense he wished that he could avoid. But the only way to save them was to suit up, climb out onto deck, and try to disconnect them while fighting hurricane force winds. Only a fool went outside without a backup crew, no matter how securely he was clamped to the deck! The lost money for lines wasn’t as important to him as his life.

  By the time Rams worked his way back to the cockpit, Primrose had moved far north of the station. From this position he could start to tack without the risk of running into it. Just to make certain of his clearance, he peered at the screen, cranking the radar to maximum sensitivity to check.

  The screen showed a uniform blur of undifferentiated noise; not even a shadow that could be suspected of being something other than the swirling electronic mist of atmosphere.

  Rams and Primrose were now completely on their own and, in five days, more or less, he hoped to see the faint, white heat signature of his destination. He hoped that the storm wouldn’t spoil his plans—he needed the money to make the next payment!

  “What a dump,” Louella complained loudly. She threw her bag against the bare metal deck and watched as it lazily bounced back into the air. “Not even a bar on the place! To make matters worse I have to share the damned cabin with you. I can’t even have some gods-be-damned decent privacy before the race!”

  Pascal winced at the strident tone of her voice. He regretted accompanying her throughout the long voyage from Earth to the Jovian system. He should have come on another ship.

  Louella’s growing catalog of complaints had increased throughout the long transit from Earth. Thankfully, there’d been enough distractions on the transport to silence her com
plaints, once in the while. The transport had a bar to keep her amused, and enough willing young crew members to keep her bemused. But those diversions were short-lived. Too soon she came back to the fact that she wasn’t racing, wasn’t in control, wasn’t at sea.

  It made her bitchy.

  “How the devil am I supposed to keep my sanity if they can’t even provide civilized, basic amenities?” Louella continued in a rasping voice that cut across his nerves like fingernails on slate.

  “Bad enough that I have to miss three seasons of the circuit for this fool race! Bad enough that we have to stay in this stupid can until the others get here! But that doesn’t mean I have to live like some freaking Spartan in the meantime!”

  She lifted the lid of the utilitarian toilet. “Jesus, we even have to share the damned can!”

  “Perhaps you should complain to the hub master,” Pascal said quietly as he floated across the tiny cabin and anchored himself with one hand. “Maybe he can provide whatever it is that you need.”

  Louella spun gracefully around on her hold and frowned at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Pascal winced again. What had he said now? It didn’t matter; she’d be hell to live with if he just let it be. “Nothing,” he said. “I just thought that maybe the captain has resources we don’t know about. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

  “Humph,” Louella huffed, as if unsure of the meaning of his answer. She kicked her floating bag into some netting to secure it. “You’ve got the bunk beside the door, asshole. And don’t get any ideas about us sleeping together.” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Pascal replied dryly and turned to fiddle with the controls on the wall. Under his breath he added, “Nightmares, perhaps, but not dreams.” He pressed the switch to open the viewport.

  “What did you say?” Louella asked sharply. “Something I wasn’t supposed to—oh my god! Would you look at that!” Pascal didn’t answer, he was as awed by the sight as she.