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Chapter 3: Ship Choice
Jessica. Her name was Jessica and she owned two of the Sisterhood mail-runner ships personally. I couldn’t imagine living on a ship which wasn’t crew-owned, but those ships had all the expensive bits of a big cargo ship – engines and environment – and none of the cargo room for expensive trade or living space for a large crew to pool resources. Paying for one by combining income from six crew didn’t happen, so most of them were rentals. Jessica sat on the Marketplace Board of Officers and may be one of the three most powerful people in the Sisterhood. She was a founding signer, and had been over fifty when she had signed then, and had undergone two Roadsky rejuvenations, hence looking younger than Captain Blanche.
The bitch, and I use that term very, very deep internally and it would never pass my lips around her, offered to have my sperm viability tested to increase my value. She had nineteen daughters, all by different fathers, none by Marketplace crew, all conceived by fathers two weeks after they had been traded through the Brother Trade. Amazing what one can find when properly taught to do research. She wanted my child without paying for it.
Medical reupped my numbers, as they had tested me again on the way in-system. Since there had been no appreciable change, they hadn’t paid for the new long-distance upload, but with Trademinster Jessica asking the question, and with the docking arm link dropping the costs to effectively nothing, they registered the changes for the catalog.
Dodging that missile meant my most recent half decimeter of growth was recorded, and the related four kilo mass gain. I now officially exceeded environmental stress calculations on two of the ships in for Brother Trade, and clearly would exceed both of the mail-runners limitations before I finished growing. Radical Medical dropped a note in the file speculating I should have completed with my growing at age eighteen, but my body seems to be rejecting the three years of suppressants and reactivated to complete the growth expectation of my genetic potential to two point one meters which I should obtain in another eighteen months.
I’m not sure how much good slouching would be at this point.
Three ships sent early contact and we sent back a picture of an ear to each of them. We weren’t willing to risk losing Marketplace privileges even if they were. Easy Road had included a full offer of two Brothers for me. Turns out they were down to a single pilot and didn’t have the ship-pool to tempt another pilot worth her certification. Adding to the drama, the backup pilot had jumped to another contract as soon as they hit the Marketplace, even though Easy was her birthship.
I did not want to get in the middle of that, whatever that was.
The captain and I pawed through the entire catalog, including the two latecomers. I memorized ships, captains, known cultures, cargos, routes, department heads, ship diagrams. I wasn’t going to be caught without updated maps again. While pushing all the data cargo into my head, I added the Sisterhood Board. Not everything will stick, but I should be able to get through this afternoon’s trading floor.
If we could hunt down repair records for the ships, we looked for repeated repairs indicating a possible lemon ship or poor maintenance training. Of the eighteen ships in for the Brother Trade, including our own, we narrowed it down to four possibilities where the male, or choice of males if a larger ship, available to be traded would fit into our ship, and I, and my oversized mass, could fit onto theirs and into their culture.
While Collections and Emissions looked promising on paper, mother had regularly dealt with their captain and gave me a 50% chance of killing someone onboard within the year. And only that long because with my medical training as a corpsman, I can fix a lot of things before they get fatal. I trusted her judgement, even though that ship had four men available to trade, one was a certified mechanic.
I liked the look of Ever Faithful the best. Again, they had a lot of men available for the trade, in a wide variety of skills. It would be weird going from a ship of seventy to over a thousand. How do you even get to know everyone? Their slow-moving circuit took four years, with stays of four to six months at each stop. They took good care of their children, through the fathers had no rights except to chose who to share sperm with, but most ships had built that into the ship-contract.
Joyous Menagerie, an entertainment and cargo vessel, had promise. They chose a new circuit every time out with only three anchor worlds where they repeat annually. If I wanted to explore the galaxy, that would be the way to go. The problem was the Brother Trade had an animal accident and would need special psychological care. While Radical could handle it, did they want to?
Metal and Ores, one of the late comers, was the third largest ship in the system, and was just small enough to dock at the Marketplace. They nearly went on our short list until we hit their maintenance; their vent system had needed repairs eight times in the last twenty years. Looking deeper, we could find no unsealed medical records, but I did manage to cross-reference the required recorded births, which were about double normal for a ship their size, to ship certifications, which were normal amount for first certifications and half for second certifications. I did not want to watch half my children die before adulthood, and the balance to die young, and nor did my captain.
The Trinkets Trolley looked fun, specializing in mechanical repairs. Not every colony, especially the company mining factories, could repair everything. While I wasn’t there yet, my jack-of-all-trades mind would love to learn those skills. We Brother Traded once with them; it’s where we got the continuing education idea. The genetic ties would be tricky, as the captain descended from that trade, but my gravity-genes made the trade pass the Medical Inbreeding clause.
The other latecomer, a medium-sized cargo ship, was a speedster, their military engines from the Interspecies Alliance capable of ten-fold space, exceeding everything available in GHC space, and blowing the normal cargo speed of five-folds completely nova. Cargos don’t even bother to upgrade to tourist level of seven folds, since five-fold is the maximum speed at which the energy for collection equals usage. At seven-fold, cargos would be limited to systems with a working fold-reaction generation factory and the ship-pool would pay the system for the mass. The mail-runners and military vessels like the Athena could kick as high as eight-fold, but at least military vessels are big enough to house their own mass generators, slow as the generation is in normal space. For the mail-runners, what looks like cargo space is actually fold-reaction storage. Handshake and Guns at Dawn wanted to trade two males, but one was sixteen, so whoever took him would need to wait two years. Handshake lived a celebrity life, running mail and high valued items between governments. They also only had only two pilots and were nosing around for a third who was certified in all four sub-licenses. Four sub-licenses are rarer than wormholes, but picking up a man to train up could tempt them. The captain didn’t like it since half their circuit was outside of GHC space, but it wasn’t like I was coming home again.
I freshened my shipsuit and myself, did one last check of my pockets for the few things I owned, and stood for inspection. The captain approved, and we made no further mention of our relationship. I was Brother Trade. She reminded me to slouch.
(words 1,317; first published 5/24/2026)
Brother Trade series
Chapter 1: Radical Docking (3/9/2025)
Chapter 2: A Catalog Entry (3/16/2025)
Chapter 3: Ship Choice (3/23/2025)
Chapter 4: Trading Floor (3/30/2025)