Johanes knocked on the door of the quartermaster’s office. “Come in.” the man said, and he opened the door. Johanes walked in and the man quickly stood up and saluted. “Captain” the man said while at attention.
“At ease.” Johanes responded. “This isn’t the military, and I was never in one. I just captained cargo and passenger ships.”
“Sorry, sir,” the man said, relaxing. “Force of habit.” Jamal Dominiks was a former member of the Martian Planetary Militia, from Olympus City. It was there that he learned to be a ship’s quartermaster, though he mostly worked ground side. While Mars wasn’t at war, there was enough pirate and other criminal activity on the surface to keep them busy.
“That’s fine.” said the captain. “So, I hear that we’re having a bit of an issue with fuel prices.”
“Yes, sir.” he said. “The Jovian Mining Consortium has raised its prices on hydrogen deliveries to Luna three times since we arrived here. They just can’t keep enough fuel in stock down there on the surface. The cities are turning it all into water as fast as they can bring it in, so they are trying to expand the atmo harvesters at Jupiter. That means buying new ships, since they can’t make enough ships on their own, and sending them out to the gas giant, which costs a lot of money. If it wasn’t for the fact that the new ships can just be tethered to returning fuel tankers with their more efficient engines the cost would be even higher from just the fuel used to send them out there.”
Johanes nodded. “Any chance we can work out some sort of bulk purchase deal with them? I’m sure guaranteed sales will interest them.”
“We’ll be buying it anyway, but I can try. Maybe if we pay in advance, at least partially. That would let them get the ships they need faster and get us a discount. Might not be me that works out the deal, however.”
“Why? Isn’t the quartermaster authorized to sign contracts? I might have to countersign such a large purchase, but…”
“Oh, it’s not that. I actually only have a month left in this position. After that I’ll be moving to one of the factories and making nuclear batteries.” One of the ways the ship was making money to buy the upgrades it needed was to purchase nuclear waste from Luna’s many fission plants, after it had cooled down for a few years, of course, and separate the waste into its constituent elements. The material would then be turned into alpha, beta, or gamma voltaic devices, otherwise known as nuclear batteries. Because of how the reactors functioned, very little of the material had a half-life of more than three hundred years, so they could send more than 99% of the material back out to act as emergency power sources elsewhere in the solar system and only keeping the longest life ones for their own 400 year trip. Sure, the battery’s output was low compared to modern batteries, even for the short half-life devices, but if there was a possibility that you would be stranded in space you would want a battery that produces a few hundred watts of power for decades in your emergency supplies. They were also in demand for the long range probes sent out to the kuiper belt and beyond to look for minerals. “How about you, Captain? What’s your next assignment?”
“Oh, I can’t actually leave the role of captain.” he responded. “There’s only one more person on board that has captain experience, and he doesn’t want it. He’s too busy being a cargo shuttle pilot.”
“Do you mean General Fehim Theodoros?”
“So you know him?”
“I was on a mission with him. We were working with the Space Marines he was commanding and the Space Force to clear out a pirate asteroid colony out in the belt. He’s great at strategy and managing his troops. Thanks to him we got out of there with only a handful of casualties.”
“And what happened to the Pirates?”
“Indentured to their own mines in place of their slaves, last I heard. The Space Force turned the base into a military refueling and resupply station, and have a prison complex to provide them with the materials they need to make resupply equipment.”
“That works, I guess.” he said. With lifespans being so long, prison sentences focused on rehabilitation and reintegration into society rather that sequestration. Still, the prisoners would probably be stuck there for decades before being released, due to the seriousness of their crimes. “Assuming they actually have the fuel to sell.” Due to interplanetary convention, it was considered a crime to refuse to sell people starship fuel, as that would strand them in space, the only exceptions being in times of war and if the person was or was harboring a known fugitive. Due to that, even military outposts needed to be able to cover the fuel demands of civilian ships in the area.
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“No problem with that. Plenty of ice in the belt for hydrogen, and the pirates settled there because of the asteroid’s large deposits of Thorium and Uranium.” The military mostly favored nuclear fission engines which accelerated hydrogen, despite their poor exhaust velocities, as they were much smaller and capable of producing several Gs of thrust if needed. And the one thing that separated the military from most civilians as far as engines were concerned was their love for high acceleration. Military ships almost always traveled long distances by burning at one gravity of acceleration in the beginning, flipping the ship over, and burning at one gravity of acceleration to decelerate. It was that fact which most limited their range.
Two months later the captain was busy learning to grow a proper steak when he received a call from the bridge. A military fleet had arrived and was hailing them. The captain notified them that he was on his way, then left the clean area, removed his sterile equipment, and made his way to the bridge. Once there he answered the call. “Sorry about the wait. I am Jeremiah Johanes, captain of the Trappist Traveler. How can I help you?”
“I’m Captain Marcus Reilly of the USS Gettysburg. I was wondering if you have any fuel you can spare, as your ship is the largest one in orbit. We tried to refuel from the surface, but they say they are out of hydrogen. We were only able to refill our fissionables.”
“Yes, well, Luna has been experiencing fuel shortages of late. They had around five hundred kilotons a week ago, but then a company bought it all to turn into water. And that wouldn’t be the first time. With the mass migration from Earth, the cities are just expanding so quickly that they are having a water shortage. Buying up all of the hydrogen to burn with the oxygen from their refineries is the fastest way to fix it. Unfortunately, though, our solution to that issue doesn’t really help you. We signed a contract with the Jovian Mining Consortium to purchase hydrogen in advance for below market value, but the contract restricts us from reselling it.” It was actually well below market value. They had locked in a rate of one hundred and twenty five credits per ton, and the price on the general market had just increased to 162.
“Surely there’s some way you can help us out.” said the other captain.
“Well, I do have one idea. How about this. I’ll call you back in a few hours. I need to consult with my business attorney and quartermaster to see if it will work out, though.”
The Space Force Captain nodded. “Very well. I’ll be waiting for your call.” He hung up.
“Strange that the US sent him out here without guaranteeing his fuel supply.” said one of the bridge crew. “Shackleton is a US colony. They should know about the hydrogen shortage.” Judging by the woman’s accent she was from the southern part of the United States.
“Unfortunately, that would be politics, and we don’t get involved with politics.”
“Yes, sir.” she said. “Would you like me to call the attorney and quartermaster for you?”
“Yes, please. Have them come to my office. We can talk about the situation there.”
Five minutes later they sat in his office. Both of the other two were women, Jamal having been replaced a month ago. “So, here’s my plan.” the captain said after filling them in on the situation. “What if we sell them the fuel that we bought before the contract? We can then just expand the contract to buy a bit more to replace it, and earn a bit more in the process.”
The attorney nodded. “That might be a possibility.” she said. “I don’t remember anywhere in the contract where it was specified that we couldn’t use the fuel we already had as we pleased. I’ll have to go over it again to make sure, though. Give me an hour to work with the search AI just to make sure.” The contract was over one hundred pages in length, with contingencies for just about everything that could happen, from micrometeorites damaging the shipment to the end user using the fuel to make chemical weapons, and everything in between. The use of AI in business and law had made it easier to write and read contracts, which had made them more and more complex over time. This bureaucracy meant that even something as simple as “I’ll pay you in advance for 30 megatons of hydrogen if you give me a discount” turned into a hundred page document full of stipulations on everything that could possibly happen, like a provision that it could be used for the construction of fission weapons if the system were invaded by aliens, even though humans were the only known sapient race. And it was that bureaucracy that was driving more people to other star systems, where things were much simpler because no one had time to spend several days studying contracts and minor laws.
“How about logistically?” the captain asked, turning to the quartermaster. “Any problems transferring enough fuel to refill their entire fleet’s hydrogen reserves?” He couldn’t remember her name, but he seemed to remember that she used to manage supplies for a colony out in the oort cloud.
“No problems that I can see. It will mean some fuel loss, though. Assuming we connect everything properly, it shouldn’t be more than a few hundred tons, maybe a kiloton, but the fuel hoses aren’t as good at preserving our fuel reserves as the tanks are.” The tanks were triple walled, with pumps in each of the two gaps that would pump out and reliquify any hydrogen that leaked into their area as soon as the pressure in that area got above one pascal. This meant that they would lose less than a hundred kilos of fuel per day through leakage. Even at that, a four hundred and seven year trip would lose around 15 kilotons during the trip. The fuel lines didn’t have the recovery system, which meant a loss of up to a ton of fuel per minute spent pumping. Their was simply no known way to reliable pump hydrogen with the extremely low losses the ship had when storing it.
An hour and a half later the lawyer had gotten back to the captain. They could, indeed, sell the fuel from before the contract went into effect, though they might not be able to purchase replacement fuel at the decreased price. They had paid in advance for 30 megatons, for a total of 3.75 billion, and if they ran short on the amount of fuel they had because of this sell, they would have to buy more at market prices.
Still, they had enough excess built into their contract to chance it. They had actually planned on sending the excess to a depot that the Trappist Colonization Group owned on the lunar surface anyway, the same one that all of the incoming cargo ships were currently using. It could be used in their cargo ship’s fission engines as a reaction mass and to fuel the reactors at their surface bases under the contract. The captain had made sure that was possible before signing the contract, as they needed a way to store any extra fuel.
Johanes contacted the military fleet the next time they had line of sight for direct communications and agreed to sell them up to 350 kilotons of fuel, almost all of the fuel that the ship had before they signed the contract. After a bit of price negotiation between the military quartermaster and the ship’s quartermaster, they sold 327 kilotons of fuel for 220 per ton, earning a nice profit which would be cycled back into the budget.
With the transfer complete around a day later, the military set course for Ceres, where they would no doubt have to buy more fuel before getting to work hunting down pirates.