Lobscouse nodded. “I do. And they’re good specifications. Though it’ll be hard to justify the expense for one lance.”
“She says the expense is no object.”
There was so little flesh on Lobscouse’s face that it should have been hard to read his expression. It wasn’t. “Covering it herself, is she?”
I nodded.
“Call me an old cynic—”
“You’re an old cynic,” I replied automatically.
“—but I seem to recall that the captain has pledged her whole lay to whoever first sights the great Beast. So by paying for this lance from her own cut all she’s really doing is cheating some poor hand out of their promised reward.”
He was right. He was 100 percent right. I felt a keen need to defend the captain anyway. “Her lay is hers to do with as she pleases. Besides, if she’d made this purchase first and pledged the reward afterwards, the result would be the same and nobody would have had a problem with it.”
The myriad photocells that were Lobscouse’s eyes sparkled. “As an engineer, my girl, I can tell you that order matters. Very few things are commutative outside of pure mathematics.”
“And here I was thinking I was the only faux intellectual on the ship.”
Lobscouse laughed. And through his voice synthesizer it was a remarkable sound, largely unrelated to the actual air comingfrom his lungs. It was musical without being music. “No, no, child, you’re in good company where that’s concerned. Half the crew are philosophers in their off-hours, of one sort or another. Though mostly it’s another, I’ll grant that much.”
“But you can make it?” I asked. “The harpoon, as the captain wants it?”
“I can,” he replied. “I’d sooner not, but if she’s giving the order and paying the price then I’ve no choice in the matter.”
Duty—not even duty, really, just the ferromagnetic pull of the captain’s will—said I should leave it there, go back to her, and report success. Even if that success was grudging. But Lobscouse had baited me and like the ice fish of Europa, I bit. “Why would you sooner not?”
“Engine pins.”
I looked blank.
“It’s an old tale from Old Earth, and one I’m surprised you’ve not heard as a Prosperer. Long ago, there was a man in the old world who made groundcars—or just cars as they would have been called in those days—and one day he commissioned his best engineers to look at every car that went wrong and find outwhyit went wrong and what part of it had caused the problem. And you know what he found?”
I hated parables. “What?”
“That damned near every part of the car would fail in one way or another, except the engine pins. They’d last and last and last. So you know what he did?”
I did know. Or at least I could guess. Lobscouse had been right, this was exactly the kind of story the Church of Prosperity loved. “He told them to make the engine pins more cheaply.”
“Seems backward,” he said. “And probably not the mostpro-consumermove he could have made.”
In the Church,pro-consumerwas perilously close toblasphemy, so it took me a moment to process the sentence.
“But there was a kind of wisdom in it. No sense wasting resources making something wonderful when everything else will fail first. Tell the captain that I can make her the finestharpoon was ever darted. But if you’re feeling brave and honest”—I was feeling neither and I was sure he knew it—“tell her that it won’t make a damned bit of difference because there’s a hundred ways a hunt can go wrong and a fancy spear fixes at best one of them.”
I explained to him how short I was coming up in the bravery and honesty departments.
“You’ll also need to tell her there’s paperwork involved.”
“She’s the captain.”
An unreadable pattern of lights danced across the chief engineer’s eyepiece. “Means less than you’d think. Captain’s a little god until we hit port. Then she’s just another voider and answerable to the stakeholders same as anybody else.”
I relayed this information to the captain when I saw her next. It didn’t go well.
Without telling me to remove a single item of clothing or to kneelanywhereshe swept past me on her way to engineering. I trailed behind her, limply protesting that this could all be sorted out if she’d just sign the proper forms.
She wasn’t much of a one for signing forms, A wasn’t.
