Trading in Danger

by Elizabeth Moon

  Finally they were all eating, and Ky had time to chat with Quincy about the plumbing work to be done. Quincy and her engineering crew, with the help of the environmental techs, had been working on the backside plumbing, from the environmental system to stubs with a separate set of cutoff controls.

  “Thing is,” Quincy said, “If they ever forgot and all showered and flushed and washed clothes or whatever at the same time, it definitely could overload the system. We could just hook up one shower, one toilet and one tub, but that would be really inconvenient. What I thought was, we could have it set up so that only two showers could go at once, one in each hold, with a timer on so they couldn’t just stand there for an hour.”

  “I know one who probably would,” Ky said, thinking of Kristoffson. “Good thinking, Quincy.”

  “We could also do a max water flow for the whole system, but that would mean drops in water pressure in every outlet when anyone used anything. So I decided against it. Mitt’s added another two units of culture, so he says in twenty-four to thirty-six hours we should be able to maintain maximum throughput.”

  “How’s it going to work when they leave?” Ky asked. “No—sorry—I should ask Mitt that.”

  “Already done,” Quincy said, grinning. “Twenty-four to thirty-sixhours to cycle down, and then we’re back on normal usage.”

  “So how do you want to organize the work crews?”

  “I’ll supervise one, and Beeah can supervise the other. Very basic stuff, just sticking pipes and seals together and then connecting them through the bulkhead to the stubs we have. Shouldn’t be more than two hours’ work, max.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Ky said. “I’m going to my cabin for a bit—”

  “Er . . . Captain, I’m sorry, but your cabin isn’t . . . exactly what it was. Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Oh.” In the flurry of activity, she had managed to forget about Skeldon’s attack. “I still have things I need in there . . .”

  “Well—if you need to switch cabins, we section firsts can move into yours and you can have number two.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Ky said. She hoped she was right. Now that she thought about it, she really didn’t want to go back in there. But she had to.

  “I’ll come with you,” Quincy said.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Ky said. “I’ll have to get over it someday.” She stood up. “In fact, someday is now.” She headed down the passage with a wave; Quincy trailed her.

  Her cabin, the hatch neatly closed. What would she find inside? She didn’t know. She took a deep breath and opened the hatch. At first glance it looked just the same. She had a moment of dizziness, a visceral memory of being shoved, of pain, of falling. She stood still, waiting for it to pass. Next she saw the state of the deck carpeting. Paler and darker blotches, the palest near the hatch . . . It looked as if someone had splashed bleach all over it and then stirred with a mop. Cabinets on the bulkheads looked streaky rather than smooth blue-gray.

  “They used something their ship sent over,” Quincy said. She had come up behind Ky. “Supposedly, there’s no chance of contamination now, and no toxic residue.”

  “Good,” Ky said. “But it’s a good thing we aren’t trying to sell this ship as a yacht or anything.”

  “So . . . we’re back to selling the ship for scrap?”

  “Right now we’re back to staying alive as long as possible,” Ky said. “Let’s not complicate matters.”

  “Yes, our situation is so simple,” Quincy said. Ky looked at her.

  “You must be feeling better; you’re back to being ironic.”

  “Ky . . . we’re just so happy to see you alive and . . . and well.”

  “Me, too,” Ky said. She thought about telling Quincy that she’d had a memory mod download, but decided against it. “I did remember to tell you that my implant’s nonfunctional, didn’t I? In fact, they took it out.”

  “Yes, but I thought those things were supposed to be indestructible,” Quincy said.

  “Unless someone takes them apart,” Ky said. “Which apparently they had to do for some reason, such as—I would guess—making sure I was who I said I was.”

  “Does that compromise anything we care about?”

  “Possibly, but there’s nothing I can do about it now, not until I can notify Vatta home office. Luckily, I had only the most basic package: this ship, this voyage, the first-level contact codes, standard contract format, that kind of thing. No company strategy, no other trade routes or conditions.”

  “Good, then. I’ll leave you—it’s about time to get those working parties working.”

  “Call if you need backup,” Ky said. Quincy waved, and Ky was left to look around her cabin alone. She opened and closed the cabinets and drawers—yes, clearly they’d been searched, but most things seemed to be in place, even Aunt Gracie Lane’s fruitcakes, their flowered paper messily taped down. She didn’t see the ship model, but the box was there, and it rattled. Probably the model had been broken; she didn’t feel like looking at it right then. Her logbook was still in the desk drawer; she ruffled the pages. None were missing.

  She checked out her private facilities—clean, ready to go—and plugged into the ship’s system to check on shower availability. Only one shower was in use; she stripped and showered quickly, then changed into an informal jumpsuit while running her uniform through the ’fresher. She yawned, shook her head, and then realized she had been up and working for two full shifts. She called the bridge, to let Lee know that she would be going to bed.

  Bed, however, did not bring sleep, tired as she was. She lay first on one side and then on the other . . . Her head felt strange, without the implant. She’d gotten used to that at the Academy; she knew she would get used to it again, but . . . it still felt strange. She had no real traumatic memory of the fight, because she’d been knocked out so fast, but she had all too clear a memory of Skeldon’s face before she fell, distorted with fear and desperation. What had he thought he was doing? Why had he been so stupid?

  And was she really such a sucker for handsome young men who acted stupid or helpless? Or . . . for anyone she deemed in need of rescue? No. But people thought she was.

  It was not a soothing thought. Mandy Rocher, Caleb Skeldon . . . all the way back to various children she’d protected from siblings, parents, classmates. In the silence of her cabin, she could remember every person who had given her advice on the subject . . . but most of the time, they’d assumed her motive even when that hadn’t been the motive at all.

  Yes, she’d pushed Mina Patel to protect Mina’s little sister. But she had gotten in a scrap with her older brother Han because he’d booby-trapped her sports locker, not because he was picking on the gardener’s son. It had been merely happenstance that when she attacked him, he’d been shoving Kery around . . . yet the adults had assumed she was trying to protect Kery. She hadn’t argued with them, not at that age. Maybe she should have, but her cut lip had hurt too much to talk and she’d been glad to eat ice cream and keep quiet.

  She had not trusted Cal Skeldon; she had not been attracted to Cal Skeldon; she had done nothing to him or with him that any reasonable captain would not have done. No special favors, no melting glances, nothing. He’d done what he’d done for reasons of his own, and it was unfair to blame it on her.

  Mandy was different. She had trusted him—at least, to be telling the truth when he said he needed a chaplain. But he had been a duty assigned, not someone she had chosen for herself. She’d been told to help him. Clearly he thought he was good-looking and attractive, but she hadn’t found him so. She’d helped him because it was her duty. Yet in the end, it all became her fault, and the image of softhearted, softheaded Ky Vatta had another layer painted on.

  Why did people keep making this mistake? What was she doing that gave the impression of a gullible idiot?

  Major Harris’ advice to run the other way when she felt someone’s need assumed the same motivation. Anyway, that mig
ht work for mercenaries, but she wasn’t a mercenary. She had taken in the four Slotter Key spacers because that’s what good ship captains did when their embassy asked them for help. Standard procedure, not a quirk of hers. She wished she’d been clearheaded enough to tell him so at the time.

  But what if he was right? What if the others were right? What if her motives weren’t what she thought they were, and she actually attracted the lost puppies of humanity, setting herself up for trouble? Instead of the practical, problem-solving, energetic young woman she saw in the mirror, could she really be a dreamy, fog-minded fool?

  She drifted from self-examination into sleep without realizing it. She woke to the intercom; a glance at the chronometer told her she’d been in bed, nominally asleep, for only four hours.

  “Captain’s here,” she said to whatever emergency had arisen.

  “We have a message from the Victor.” It was Lee’s voice. “They’re advising that they will be out of contact for at least one standard day, maybe more.”

  “Did they say why? Ask for a reply?”

  “No to both. But I thought you should know. In case you have anything you want to tell them.”

  She wanted to tell them to hurry back safely, relieve her of her passengers, and deliver payment. That was not a message they wanted to hear, she was sure. “Right. Thanks. Just send ‘received,’ and log it.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The intercom clicked off. This time Ky lay awake wondering what was actually keeping the mercenaries out of contact. Were they going into action? Had another ship come into the system? And what, if anything, could she do about it?

  She rolled over and went to sleep, waking at the shift-turn signal.

  The ISC ship Cosmos released a stealth drone, programmed to make a low-vee downshift into Sabine’s system and report via a tiny onboard ansible. One-channel ansibles, tuned to the repair ship, could not be detected by other ships unless they knew the code.

  The jump itself required only a few hours, and the ansible’s return signal related information about the system, with the scan delay of its passive scans. The low-vee downshift meant minimal scan blur, but ensured that information about the inner system would not be obtained for some hours. Its location was a solid seven light-hours from Sabine Prime.

  But in eighteen hours, the drone had transmitted the ID beacon signal of every ship in Sabine system, including that of the Glennys Jones.

  That report reached the desk of Lewis Parmina at the ISC home office within another ten hours, and he found it when he came in to work at seven A.M. local time. He looked at it, and wondered whether to contact Vatta now or later. The report said nothing about the safety of Gerard’s daughter, only that the ship was transmitting its ID from a location far from Sabine Prime. No other communication related to it had been received. The existence of the ship did not mean the existence of the captain.

  But he himself would have wanted to know even that much. He clipped out the location data, and sent a brief note: “Glennys Jones is still in the Sabine system, no longer docked at the Sabine Prime orbital station. We have no information about personnel at this time.”

  Gerard Vatta had set up his office system to ping his implant at any contact from ISC; his implant woke him at three A.M. local time, when he was, for reasons he never understood, dreaming about dancing fish. He signed off the ping, and heard the message in the impersonal voice of the office AI.

  So the ship was there, and whole, its beacon still transmitting its identity. But Ky—? He didn’t know. He also didn’t know if he should tell the family yet. The secret had been hard to keep, but it would be harder to listen to them all wondering about her, when he had no more news.

  He rolled out of bed cautiously, not waking his wife, who had not slept well lately. He’d been aware of that, wondered if she had dreams of Ky, and had not asked. She still did not know . . . He wandered out to the kitchen. He didn’t want coffee; he didn’t want tea. He wanted Ky home safe. He looked in the cooler twice before making himself pour a glass of juice and drink it. From there to his office, and onto the secure line to Stavros . . . no. Better to look at the newsfeed.

  The newsfeed, full of the details of the latest dispute about the export tariffs, did not help either his mood or his insomnia. He tried sports, and arts, and finally admitted that it was now almost dawn and he might as well get up properly. He entered the master bath from the hall side, and stood under the shower a long time, eyes squeezed shut against the spray, trying not to think.

  He came out of the shower into the bedroom only to find his wife sitting up in bed looking at him.

  “Don’t try to tell me there’s nothing,” she said. She had pulled the flower-patterned wrapper around her shoulders; she must have been sitting up for some time. “It’s Ky, isn’t it? I looked all over the newsfeed yesterday and couldn’t find anything about Belinta or Leonora or Lastway. So—what is it? What’s happened to her?”

  He scrubbed at his head with the towel, trying to think of some way to divert her, but he knew it wasn’t going to work. Once on the trail, she wasn’t easily distracted.

  “Ky’s in Sabine system,” he said. “She took a contract from Belinta, and went to Sabine.”

  “The Sabine ansibles,” she said. Even in the dim light of the bedside lamp, he could see that she had paled, her eyes suddenly darker against her skin.

  “Yes. We don’t know what’s happening. I called in every favor I could with ISC—you remember Lewis Parmina; he’s probably going to be their next CEO—and I just got a message from him. They have a drone probe in the system, and the Glennys Jones is still transmitting—still there, still whole. But nothing about Ky.”

  “I’ve had dreams all the past week,” she said. “But this morning when I woke up, I felt better.”

  “We have to hope,” he said, not sure he could.

  “At least she has the right things to wear,” she said. And then, scowling, “I know you’ll think that’s trivial, but it’s not. The right things to wear just might make the difference.”

  “I hope so,” Gerard said. “I sincerely hope so.”

  “When are you telling the others?”

  “Stavvi knows. He was there when we first got the word, and we already knew she was in Sabine system. The com watch at headquarters . . . but that’s it.”

  “And now?”

  “I think we should wait,” he said.

  “I think we shouldn’t,” she said. “Not everyone—just the family—but they should know.”

  “A secret shared is no secret,” he said. “I don’t want the media to get hold of this, not after the Academy mess.”

  “Yes . . . I see your point, Gerard. All right. What can I do?”

  “Nothing more than I can. Wait. Pray. At least the ship is there in one piece. Was there, when the drone reported . . .”

  “Is there,” she said very firmly. “It is there. And for all Ky’s blunders, she’s had the habit of surviving.”

  Ship’s morning brought a rash of complaints from Kristoffson that conditions were intolerable and he would hold Vatta Transport responsible for a laundry list of deficiencies. Ky looked up relevant portions of the Interstellar Universal Commercial Code to reassure herself that she was not making the company liable for vast damages and then reminded him that in time of war, which this was, passengers were obliged to cooperate fully with ship’s officers.

  “I am cooperating,” he said. “You are simply being unreasonable in your demands.”

  She was tempted to ask if he thought he could do it better, but he certainly did think that, and she wasn’t going to give him the opening. Her job wouldn’t be easier if he thought she could be manipulated that way.

  “You will have ample opportunity to make a formal complaint later,” Ky said. “In the meantime, you will simply have to accept the reality of the situation.”

  He clicked off and managed to make that mechanical sound into something snippy. Ky shook her head at Lee, who was back in the pilot
’s chair. “He’s trouble,” Lee said. “I’m glad you’re not one of the temperish Vattas.”

  “I am,” Ky said. “But four years at the Academy taught me to handle it.”

  “How are you feeling?” Lee asked.

  “Better than I could have expected,” Ky said. “From what the medic said . . .”

  “You looked dead,” Lee said. “We were all scared. Those horrible people—”

  “It was Skeldon,” Ky said. “If that idiot hadn’t tried to be a hero, Master Sergeant Pitt wouldn’t have hit me.”

  “But there was no reason to hit you . . . You hadn’t done anything.”

  “Protocols,” Ky said. “Just typical military; I don’t blame her.” Now that she thought about it, though, she was being remarkably calm about it. Had they tweaked her memories? Her personality?

  “You’re more forgiving than I would be,” Lee said.

  “It’s not forgiving, it’s understanding,” Ky said. “They figure that the captain is the key to the ship, and responsible for everything that happens. That’s in the law, too. If you suddenly went crazy and I didn’t manage it, it would be my fault.”

  “So—if they blamed you for Skeldon, why didn’t they kill you, too?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ky said. “But I’m happy about it, and I’m not going to annoy them.”

  “This thing with the passengers . . . is it really a contract or did they just dump them on us?”

  “It’s a contract. Strange, but a contract. A good one, too.” No reason to tell him about the clause she had insisted on adding. “I hadn’t realized that mercenary companies are . . . just a business, really. The contract for haulage looked just like the ones we use for regular cargo, only specifying passengers.”

  “But why us? They have the other ships they’ve interned.”

  “I don’t know. If I were guessing, it’s that they have a use for the other ships, or that they wanted all these individuals away from their own ships for some reason.”