Her Brother's Keeper - eARC by Mike Kupari Page B

were paid up front, Captain.”
    “Uh, Cap’n, may I?” The question came from Mordecai Chang, the ship’s purser, bookkeeper, and quartermaster. Unlike the rest of her officers, he wasn’t present in person. His image appeared on a screen, as he was broadcasting from his workstation deep within the bowels of the ship. Catherine nodded at the screen, and Mordecai addressed the assembled officers. “Our contract with Blackwood & Associates stipulates that we are to find and recover one Cecil Ray Blackwood from the planet Zanzibar whether he is alive or dead.” The screen split, showing Mordecai’s image on one side and highlighted text from the contract on the other. “Our information is, obviously, months out of date, but he is being held for ransom. The client has paid half up front, given the distance we need to travel and the possibility that our subject may have expired long before we get there. The client agreed to a stipulation providing for a rather large emergency fund for the paying of ransoms, bribes, or otherwise greasing the proverbial wheels of commerce as necessary. If we get Mr. Blackwood home alive, we get not only the other half of the agreed payment but an additional twenty percent bonus, to be divided up equally amongst the crew, with the exception of the captain.”
    “This is personal for me. I don’t require a bonus for saving my brother,” Catherine stated.
    Mordecai continued, looking at something off-screen. “If Mr. Blackwood is dead, we lose the twenty percent bonus but are still paid the rest of our contract price. That’s unusual for a rescue mission, as is the amount they’re paying us. Cap’n, it’s none of my business, but I think it’d be more cost-effective for your father to just have another son.”
    Coming from anyone but her eccentric purser, that statement may have been insulting, but Mordecai was a wizard with money and tended to do a cost-benefit analysis on everything, almost compulsively. Catherine smiled lopsidedly. He was good enough at his job that she accommodated his severe social anxiety issues. “Aye, but we Avalonians are a clannish lot,” she said, laying on her accent. “It would’na do for a man in me father’s position to simply abandon his eldest son and heir.”
    “Understood, Cap’n,” Mordecai replied, though Catherine very much doubted that he did. He had been raised and educated remotely, by machines. He was brilliant, but had difficulty relating to people. He rarely came out of his workstation. “I’m not complaining, merely pointing out the obvious.” Such things were rarely obvious to anyone but Mordecai. “This endeavor is costing your father tens of millions of credits.”
    “Indeed,” the captain said with a slight nod, “and in this case we owe it to the client to make every effort to accomplish the task. As I said, this is personal for me, a matter of blood and honor. That said, I wouldn’t ask you all to go along with this if I thought it was going to get you killed. The mission will be risky, but it won’t be the craziest thing we’ve ever done. The payment for this one should be enough for us to get the reactor refurbished and the propulsion system overhauled, for starters.”
    Indira’s eyes lit up, though she maintained her reserve. “We’ll finally be able to get the reactor upgrades I’ve been asking for?”
    Catherine nodded with a slight smile.
    “Very good, then,” she said simply, actually smiling.
    Well, Catherine thought. That seems to have won them over. She knew her crew harbored unvoiced concerns that Catherine’s family was manipulating her into taking on a fool’s errand that could get them killed or leave them financially ruined. (Unvoiced by all but Wolfram; he had asked Catherine bluntly when she returned from her meeting with her father, like a good exec should.) Finding out just how lucrative this job could be seemed to have assuaged their concerns. But still, Catherine wondered. Mordecai