Trading in Danger vw-1

by Elizabeth Moon

  From down the passage, loud voices. Of course. “Jeff, keep ’em quiet, keep ’em there. Skeldon attacked with a firearm—I don’t think they knew he had it. He’s dead. Captain’s injured, we’ll render first aid. Sheila, secure the bridge crew.” First thing, keep order. Next thing, did they have one deader or two?

  Her suit said the captain had P & R, BP dropping. Cally called up the med subroutines, and moved across the bloody deck—that carpet was going to be harder to clean than proper tiles—to the captain’s unmoving crumpled form. Experience helped. The small-caliber, low-velocity penetration of the damped pistol round in the arm—first-aid stuff, painful but not dangerous, need some rehab, nothing too difficult. IR scan showed heat already in an ankle, probably a sprain, trivial. Head or spinal cord injury was the worst possibility; she’d meant to knock the captain out of the way as gently as possible, but her crewman’s shove had created movement sums that flung her too fast, the wrong way. And she needed her helmet off to find out more. The way she was lying, it could be a broken neck, but the young sometimes had very flexible necks. Best not to move her. Best to call a real medic.

  “Pitt to Victor.”

  “What’s up, Pitt?”

  “Need a medic, possible C-spine injury, not ours. Captain of this tub.”

  “Just finish her, why don’t you? We’re in a bind; we don’t have time to play nursemaid to civs.”

  Because she was young and maybe dumb but not bad, Cally thought. Because she’d been straight-up about the whole thing, and if all the nineteen hells were coming down on Mackensee, a good deed might make the difference to whatever gods watched over mercenaries. Vatta Transport was, after all, Vatta Transport and this had to be family.

  “My call,” she said, which was true. “Send me a medic.” And to her team, “The captain’s injured; I’ve called for a medical team. I’ll talk to the rest of the crew. We’ll want to clean up this mess.” The mess that had been a handsome blond youngster who thought for some reason a punk pistol, a spacer’s bar special, would stand up to military-grade armor and weaponry. He’d probably had a crush on the captain or something; he’d wanted to show off; he’d wanted to protect her. And because of him she was lying there with a hole in her arm and maybe gorked as well.

  Cally had her own opinion of young men, having trained a goodly number. Young women could be just as stupid, but unless children were involved they rarely indulged in gratuitous heroics. Gratuitous backbiting was another thing.

  She clambered up from that first examination, and thought at the motionless form, “Live, damn it.”

  The faces that turned to hers in the crew rec space were all pale; the most senior looked at least ten years older than he had before. Cally undogged her faceplate and ran it back. Let them see a human face—they needed that right now, even though those nearest seemed fixated on her boots and legs. Probably the blood. With the faceplate open, she could smell it.

  “I’m Sergeant Pitt,” she said. “Your crewman Skeldon tried to ambush us; he’s dead. Your captain is alive, but injured; I’ve called in a medical team.”

  “How bad is she hurt?” asked the old man. Tobai, she reminded herself. “Can’t I go see her?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Cally said. “She’s unconscious, and my training is not to move unconscious victi—patients. Tell me about the medical facilities on this ship.”

  “Well, we have a medbox for minor emergencies…” One medbox. Victor had thirty, a double-row down one side of surgery.

  “No regen tanks? No trauma suite?”

  “Er… no. We don’t—we didn’t—ever need them.” He swallowed, licked his lips. “Please—let me go see her…”

  “Known her long?” Cally asked.

  “Since she was little,” Tobai said. “First time she came aboard ship, with her dad, I was a second-shift cargo handler. Not on this ship, o’ course. She was maybe hip high on him then, trailing her older brother.”

  “Good kid?” Cally asked. “Quiet type? Did everything right?” She figured yes, from the contained, controlled emotions the captain had shown.

  “Ky?” That got a momentary grin out of him. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly, not the quiet part. Good, yes, but no sugar baby. Honest—sometimes too honest. That’s why—” His mouth snapped shut abruptly, as if he’d almost said something he meant not to.

  “I want the medics to see her first,” Cally said, returning to his question. “Best not move her. Best wait a bit. Someone’s with her, monitoring vital signs. Just you sit tight.”

  He nodded, mouth clamped on something he didn’t want her to know. And what could that be?

  She sent Jeff to check the galley, where—as per orders—the weapons the crew had listed were laid out on the table. He popped the video to her helmet display. Two pistol bows… she hadn’t seen pistol bows in a long time… some knives, including the obvious kitchen cutlery. All that was by the book. The crew lockers were by the book—no hidden weapons, and only the personal effects you’d expect from experienced crew on a ship they didn’t expect to be on that long. Spare ship suits, a properly primed good quality pressure suit for each, shore clothes, entertainment cubes and disks and viewers and players. Someone was studying for a higher rating in spacedrives and had the study cubes; someone else had yarn and needles and a half-completed sweater. Little keepsakes, not worth much—they’d have the good stuff back home, somewhere in Vatta Transport storage if they had no permanent residence.

  None of the crew were trouble but the one who’d died. That made sense.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do,” she said, as Gil reported the medics were coming through the lock. “You know your captain’s hurt—you know our medics are coming to work on her. As long as you do what you’re told, she’ll be fine. Cross us up, and she’ll die. Clear?”

  They all nodded, looking solemn and worried, just as they should.

  “Go back to your compartments and lie down on your bunks. If we need you to do something, you’ll be told. In fact—who’s on galley duty?” She knew that civ cargo ships rotated that, if they were too small to have a permanent crew.

  “I am,” came a small voice to one side. Small dark-haired woman. Mehar Mehaar, engineering fifth. Someone raised a hand. Mitt Gossin, environmental section first. So they mixed sections on galley duty… interesting. Many ships rotated it by sections. And she wanted the section firsts available.

  “Mehar,” she said; the woman startled to find that Cally knew her name. “Mr. Gossin, you’re a section first—you need to stay loose. Mehar, they’ll be sending over ration packs for the boarding party and medics, if the medics stay that long. All you have to do is heat them up. Jeff’s secured your weapons for the time being; you won’t need the kitchen knives. The rest of you, go to your bunks and lie down. We’ll keep you informed.”

  They clambered up awkwardly and moved to the side just as the medics came through with their equipment. Cally had already pointed them to the captain’s cabin; they’d had time to replay the vid of the engagement. They didn’t need her crowding that small space. When they’d passed, she went on forward to the bridge.

  There she found two more worried faces. “Is she all right?” asked the old woman sitting the comdesk. Quincy Robin, chief of engineering, almost as old as the ship.

  “She’s alive,” Cally said. “The medics are with her now.”

  “What happened?”

  Cally explained briefly. Quincy’s color had come back during that, and now she snorted. “Idiot boys!”

  Cally agreed with her but wasn’t going into that. “Understand you’re head of engineering.”

  “Yes.”

  “You reported no functional FTL drive. How did this ship get here with no functional FTL drive?”

  “It failed us coming in,” Quincy said. “I swear I thought it had ten more jumps in it, at least, when we left Slotter Key. But there was a little wobble coming into Belinta, and then it was worse leaving Belinta, and the downjump to Sa
bine—well, the sealed unit went haywire, and we’ve got cavitation damage downstream…”

  “Um.” So much for using this ship as a courier, which was what the Old Man had hoped for. Victor carried spare sealed units, but nothing that would fit on this tub.

  “We were trying to arrange repairs at the station when you blew the ansibles—” Quincy glared at her. Cally realized that the old woman wasn’t scared. Was that good or not?

  “What makes you think we blew the ansibles?” she asked.

  “You have the big guns,” Quincy retorted. “Nobody else would blow ansibles.”

  Civ thinking. People who have the weapons would use them, never mind why.

  “We didn’t blow the ansibles,” Cally said. No reason not to tell them that. No reason not to start setting the record straight. “We don’t want trouble with ISC.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Don’t know. Not us, that’s all I know. So, your FTL’s out. What about your other systems?”

  “Fine so far.” The old woman was still angry. Not scared a bit—well, the old were like that, if they weren’t scared of everything.

  Ky woke slowly, as from deep sleep. It didn’t feel right. What didn’t feel right, she wasn’t sure at first. A smell… not the smell of her cabin. Astringent, even medical. She opened her eyes. Above her, too close, was a shiny curved surface; when she tried to move, her arms bumped into something firm and unyielding.

  The curved surface lifted away from her face. Now she could see more—and nothing reassuring. Too far away, now, the overhead with rows of lights; too big, the compartment in which she lay enclosed in something uncomfortably like a coffin. Medbox, her mind told her.

  She struggled to put facts together in a string that made sense. Medbox meant injury… She had been injured? When? Where? And this place she was in… what was it? Where? A face hung over her; she had never seen it before, that she was sure of, if nothing else.

  Its expression was serious. The mouth opened.

  “Do you know your name?”

  Name. What you call yourself, that is your name. Ky fumbled around in a brain that felt like a basket of wool puffs, until a sharp angular fact prodded her inquiry. Name. Your name from him meant my name to me… My name is… “Kylara Vatta,” she said.

  “Ah. And do you know where you are?”

  She looked around as far as she could see over the rim of the medbox. For some reason it seemed more like a ship than a hospital onplanet. “I’m in a medbox,” she said. “On a ship? I don’t know for sure.”

  “Do you know the date?”

  She had no idea. The whole concept of date seemed slippery. “No…”

  “No matter,” the man said. The knowledge that he was a man and not a woman had slid into her mind without her thinking about it. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  She didn’t remember anything, but she pushed at the gray fuzzballs. Past the screen of her mind ran the equations for calculating oxygen output from a Class III environmental system per square meter of reactive surface—so she recited that, and then the ones for calculating drift on downjump.

  “Think of a person,” the man said.

  She tried, but couldn’t remember anyone to think of—person meant someone like her, like the man leaning over the medbox. Suddenly a cascade of faces appeared on the screen. Her father, her mother, her brother, her uncle, Cousin Stella, Aunt Gracie Lane, Gaspard, the Commandant, Mandy Rocher…

  “Ah…” the man said.

  The faces combined in scenes, in actions. Then a white streak blanked out everything for an instant, as if lightning had fired inside her head, and she was abruptly completely awake, oriented, rememoried, and very, very frightened.

  She knew what that was. That was a memory module insertion. Someone had her memories on a mod, and they’d just reloaded her brain.

  Which meant her brain had been… at least stuck in off and at worst completely gorked.

  And she knew why.

  “That idiot!” she said, meaning Skeldon.

  “It was a stupid thing to do,” the man agreed. “I gather you didn’t know about it.”

  “No, I didn’t know about it.” Residual fear made her cranky. “I told them—”

  “We know that much—it was on your recorder. What I’m asking is, did you know he had that crush on you?”

  “No,” Ky said. Then, less willingly, “Not exactly. I knew he was too grateful that we took them aboard, but I thought he’d go for Mehar in the end.”

  “The end wasn’t long enough,” the man said. “Here’s the situation: you were knocked cold and got a bullet in the arm. The bullet was no problem; the stray needle we took out of your ankle was no problem either. But the head injury was bad enough that we did a pattern extraction and replacement once we’d stopped the bleeding and controlled swelling.”

  “You’re… the mercenaries. Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation?”

  “Yes. And you’re aboard the Victor, our command ship for this operation, because your ship lacked the right medical facilities.”

  “My people?” Ky asked, trying to sit up. The medbox restraints held her back.

  “They’re all right so far,” the man said. “Now—before you exit the medbox—I need to do some final tests of function. Just lie quietly and answer my questions.”

  She couldn’t do anything else… The medbox restraints held her and even if she got her arms loose, she didn’t know how to unlatch a medbox from inside.

  “I’m projecting a visual chart above you, and what do you see on line ten?”

  Ky read off the symbols. After that came a color vision test, and a test of depth perception, and then pictures of her crew, to see if facial recognition was working. It was.

  Finally he unlatched the box, removed the restraints, and helped her sit up. For a moment, she felt dizzy and nauseated, but it passed, and she was simply there, inside a warship’s surgery, sitting on the opened case of a medbox in a row of medboxes, wearing a pale blue shift with MMAC PROPERTY stamped on it. Across the wide compartment was another row of medboxes, six with their status lights on, and down the middle a row of operating tables, shrouded in the hoods that kept them sterile until needed.

  “It’s—as big as a hospital,” Ky said. She had not really thought about how much medical treatment a mercenary force might need. For that matter, she hadn’t seen this part of a Slotter Key warship, either.

  His lips twitched. “War isn’t a pretty business. We have thirty medboxes, ten operating sets, five regen tanks—and that’s active. We have the stored capacity for field hospitals as well. Now—ready to stand up?”

  Ky pushed off the edge of the medbox. Her knees felt rubbery, but she was able to stand.

  “Immobilization does that—nothing we’ve come up with prevents at least temporary weakness. Now—I’m sure you’ve got your own medical personnel back home; I’m giving you a cube with details of the treatment you received here, some of which they may want if you need other treatment within the next standard year. Slotter Key does use standard calendar units, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Ky said. She focused on the “back home.” If they were giving her medical reports for the doctors back home, surely that meant they weren’t intending to kill her…

  “Your arm and ankle responded well to the regen tank treatments; you should however do fifteen minutes a day of rehab exercise—the details are on the cube—to regain strength at the maximum rate. Your C-spine injury may cause you some difficulty as you get older; I would advise you to consult your medical personnel about a regen treatment when your neural recovery is complete. We’ve got it stabilized, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a little soft-tissue damage which we couldn’t regen because of the primary brain injury.”

  “C-spine injury?” Ky said.

  “Yes. Luckily, Sergeant Pitt knew enough not to move you until the medics got there. But it’s perfectly stable now.”

  Ky resisted the sudden
urge to put her hands up and feel around her neck. It didn’t hurt—nothing hurt, really, but the knowledge that she’d been knocked silly and taken off the ship like a bundle of rags… she, the captain, who was supposed to ensure the safety of her ship and her people.

  “When can I get back to my ship?” she asked.

  “I don’t know—after the major talks to you, probably. It’s up to command, not to me. You’re fit for duty, as is. Well, once you get clothes on. I’m afraid your uniform is… pretty much gone. Just a moment.” He walked to the far side of the compartment; Ky leaned against the medbox she’d come out of and wondered about the six others with lights on. That was easier than wondering what she was going to do now.

  The man came back with a neatly folded bundle; for the first time she noticed what must be a nametag stenciled on his tunic. Dubois.

  “Your ship’s sent over a clean uniform. You’ll want to change, and any moment now you’re going to want to use the toilet.”

  She did, she realized.

  “Right through there: you can also shower, if you like, though the medbox does a sonic clean every four hours. When you’re dressed, come out and you’ll be escorted to the major’s office.”

  He did not tell her not to try to escape. She could figure that out for herself, and clearly he knew it. Ky took the bundle and retreated through the door marked STAFF ONLY. Inside she found three shower cubicles, deep sinks, and a row of toilets. Sonic cleaning or no, she wanted a shower and shampoo, and the brisk water washed away another layer of confusion.

  When she combed her hair at the mirror above the sinks, she could see nothing of what had happened. Her arm had a puckery scar that looked old, well-healed, but no soreness, even when she raised it high overhead. Her ankle’s scar was smaller, hardly visible. Her hair seemed shorter. She put on her uniform—the alternate one her mother had insisted she buy; it was annoying even now that her mother had been right—thankful that whoever had sent it had included underwear. When she’d pulled on the soft-soled ship boots, she felt much more like herself.