Trading in Danger

by Elizabeth Moon

  ISC had invaded the system—as they had invaded systems before where someone destroyed their ansibles—and that political group no longer existed.

  “Although we had considered the possibility we now face, in previous adverse events the military force at hand was the one which intentionally destroyed ansibles. That’s a simple situation. If in fact Mackensee is not responsible here, either by accident or design, as you have stated, then we are faced with something we had considered in theory but not faced in practice. Policy, written in advance of experience, requires that we obtain a bond from you, to be returned upon proof that your personnel were not responsible.”

  “What kind of bond?” Arlen asked warily.

  “The usual. Monetary, or a lien on equipment.” She smiled, the kind of feral smile that Arlen knew very well from his own people. “Not quite ruinous, but serious.”

  “What kind of proof of our noninvolvement will you require, and who will adjudicate this?”

  “It is not the practice of the ISC to seek or submit to the judgment of civil courts, as I believe you already know,” she said. “We will determine that involvement or noninvolvement on the basis of evidence collected by our own personnel. On the other hand, since we are apolitical except with respect to the communications business, we have no motive for finding one way or the other.”

  “You’re apolitical,” Arlen said, spreading his hands on his knees. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “It’s quite true,” she said. “We do not care who is the government anywhere; we are not concerned with the crime rate, the state of the planetary environment, or any of the other things which motivate other corporations to interfere in local politics. Thus we need no lobbyists, no political backing. We have one focus: maintaining our interstellar monopoly. No one else can do what we do, and even if they could, we wouldn’t let them.” She ticked off these points with those delicate pink fingertips.

  “But surely—”

  She shook her head before he could get that thought out. “We haven’t diversified. That is our strength, that others would find weakness. We do one thing well—superbly, in fact—and we protect our market. Since that market is not limited to any one planet, it is in no government’s interest to interfere. Some of them are too stupid to realize that, but we educate them.” She smiled again.

  “All right, you’re apolitical. And you want us to post a bond. With whom?”

  “You have a choice, since Mackensee hasn’t had a prior incident with us. We will discount the amount if you choose to place it with us, or you may choose the full amount placed in escrow at Simmons & Teague.”

  “And the amount?”

  “Twenty million, which I believe is in the range of your contract amount with Secundus.”

  How the devil did she know that? Curiosity almost swamped outrage.

  “There’s another thing,” she said. “There’s a civilian ship captain in the Sabine system of some interest to us.”

  “Oh?” Curiosity gained ground; outrage subsided. If ISC wanted something, he might have wiggle room on the bond issue.

  “I understand from your literature and your history that you do not usually interfere much with neutral shipping, but clearly this operation has not been ordinary. If you could explain what procedures are likely to have been followed, and the likelihood of this individual being unharmed, it would be much appreciated.”

  By whom? he wondered. Did the CEO of ISC have an errant grandchild on the scene or something? “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Vatta Transport, Ltd., out of Slotter Key. Their chief financial officer’s daughter was on her first voyage as commander, and was reported in Sabine system just before the ansibles went down. Any information you receive or could provide—”

  Vatta Transport, Ltd. He didn’t have to look that name up. Vatta had a star rating with their offplanet suppliers. They weren’t the cheapest, but they were reliable: their on-time delivery rate was above 97 percent.

  “I don’t know anything now,” he said, spreading his hands again. “We’ve heard nothing since the ansibles went down. But I can say that our policy is always to disrupt neutral shipping as little as possible. Of course we recognize Vatta Transport as a legitimate shipping company and would have no reason to cause harm.” If a young, inexperienced captain hadn’t done something stupid, that is. He hoped very much that Mackensee hadn’t killed off the daughter of the CFO of a company they needed, but he knew it was possible. “With the ansibles being blown, the onsite commander might have chosen to check out every ship in the system—board them, choose one for a courier, and intern the others.” He hoped the Vatta ship had been chosen for courier, in which case it would show up in a few days, in range of an ansible, and they’d have some hard data.

  “If you hear—”

  “I will let you know. Should I contact you and Vatta, or just you?”

  “Either is fine. Now, about that bond . . .”

  From her tone, no wiggle room there at all. And whatever profit they’d thought they’d have out of their employer, posting that large a bond would knock it back to a bad idea and a contract they should never have signed. That he should never have signed. “I have to get Sig to sign off on this, you know,” he said. “Let me just contact him . . .” Though of course he would agree. No one could afford to have the ISC as an enemy.

  Undoing the damage the mutineers had done proved more difficult than Ky had hoped. She dared not trust any of the passengers to help. Some of them might still want to mutiny, no matter what they said. She had no specialist with expertise in reconfirming an AI’s original command set.

  “It’s an old system, though,” Beeah Chok said.

  “Don’t I know it.” Ky stared at the panel she’d just pulled. “But that doesn’t make it better.”

  “It might. Do you have the system manual anywhere but in the system?”

  “I had one in my implant.” If the mercenaries had returned it . . . but they hadn’t. “And there may be one in the command console.” Ky clambered up. “I suppose you want me to look.”

  “Yes, Captain. It’s just possible that the system could be taken down and restarted, if we had the manual.”

  Ky felt a chill stab of terror. “Nobody takes down ships’ AI while they’re operational, Beeah. That’d take down life support as well.”

  “Not necessarily.” Beeah laid a diagram on Ky’s desk; she tried to make sense of its many interlaced lines. Finally she shook her head.

  “I can’t see it, Beeah. If you’re absolutely sure that you can do it without taking down life support—”

  “Well . . . eighty-five percent sure.”

  “Not enough percents. What if you can’t get it back up? We don’t have suits for all those people, and the suit air supply’s limited anyway.”

  Beeah muttered something she couldn’t hear, but thought she understood.

  “They’re our—my—responsibility, like it or not. I’ll space them in a heartbeat if they endanger the ship or crew again, Beeah, but I’m not going to risk them on a chance like this.”

  “Well . . . that’s all we have, Captain. We can attack the control sections one at a time, but it’ll take time. A lot of time; we may be out of fuel before we can shut the drive off.”

  “It’s a chance we have to take,” Ky said. “Protect the environmental system above all.” She fought back a yawn. They were all exhausted, emotionally and physically, pushing themselves.

  She could just sit there and let them drift farther and farther away from their expected location until they starved, or she could do something—anything—to fix the situation. Dumping the passengers still appealed, as a way of easing her frustration, but she knew she wouldn’t do that. What were the options, with both the drive and the ship beacon out of order, with ship systems responding only erratically to her crew’s instructions? She called a crew meeting.

  “Here’s what’s happening,” she told her crew. “We haven’t yet regained control of the dr
ive, so we’re still accelerating to someplace we don’t want to be. The ship’s ID beacon seems to be nonfunctioning as well. So not only can we not get back, but no one can find us without very good active longscan. And the only people in the system with very good active longscan are somewhere else. The good news is that the environmental system is still working, so we have air to breathe and water to drink. The food supply, though, at our present rate of usage, will run out in five days. Rationing can do something about that, but not enough to give us a lot of leeway, and we have no idea when someone may find us. Our own scan is still working, but it’s not that great, as you all know. It’s very likely that ISC or someone else will come into the system before we starve, but they won’t know we’re here if our beacon isn’t up. So beacon repair has to be a priority.”

  “I don’t know anything about beacons,” Quincy said. “They’re another sealed system; users aren’t supposed to tinker with them.”

  “Well, Paison did, and unless we can figure out how to undo what he did, we’re about as visible as coal dust at midnight.”

  “There are two com engineers among the passengers,” Beeah said.

  “I hope we don’t have to trust them,” Ky said. “Because so far the passengers have been nothing but trouble.” They knew that, but she needed to say it.

  “Why did he disable the beacon, anyway?” Quincy asked. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “To hide us from the mercs,” Riel said. “He wanted to get away, right?”

  “But he’d been told they were already headed outsystem,” Ky said. “He must’ve had some other reason.”

  “It doesn’t matter why he did it,” Quincy said. “What matters is we can’t undo it.”

  “We haven’t undone it yet,” Ky said. “I’m going to talk to the passengers, and tell them why they’re not getting lunch. Mitt, figure out what you need to do to cope with stretching our survival time . . . with less outside caloric input.”

  “They’re going to complain.”

  Ky’s patience snapped. “If they complain, I will space them. Damn it, without them we could last another twenty days, easy.” She turned to Alene, who had scarcely spoken since Gary died. “What’s the minimum for survival? We’ll need to cut ourselves down a third, probably, but we’ll cut them to the minimum. And then tell me what that gains us.”

  While Alene worked on that, Ky went to talk to the passengers. On the intercom; she wasn’t risking anything this time.

  “You need to know what the situation is,” she said. “Paison disabled the insystem drive controls, so we have not been able to gain control of the drive and retrace our course. Paison also disabled the ID beacon, so the ship is now invisible to most scans. Your . . . leader”—she allowed the anger she felt to seep into her tone—”ensured that you, as well as we, would go hurtling off to the far reaches of the system and that no rescue vessel was likely to find us. My crew are attempting to fix that, but as most of you know ID beacons are sealed systems not intended to be manipulated by the user. Unlike Paison and his assistant, my crew has no experience in such illegal activities. That means that our original supply of foodstuffs will not suffice us even if a rescue ship were to show up, so I am instituting survival rules now. My crew goes on reduced rations; you go on minimal rations. I will still try to get you all out of this alive, but believe me that at this point, if any one of you fails to cooperate fully, or attempts to contravene my orders, that person will be spaced. No excuses. Now, Captains Lucas and Opunts, you will come to the number one cargo personnel lock, where my crew will pass you through to confer with me.”

  She didn’t wait to hear their reaction but went back to the galley, where Alene was working on the rations.

  “Forty seven of them, thirteen of us. That’s sixty. But the rations loaded were for sixty-five, so we have sixty-five times five which is three hundred twenty-five day-rations providing a minimum of two thousand four hundred kcal per day, which is seven hundred eighty thousand kcal total . . . How long do you estimate we’ll have to live off this, Captain?”

  Damned if I know was the real answer, but not a useful one. “At least ten days . . . twenty if we can eke it out that far.”

  Alene fiddled with the handcomp. “Well, at ten days that’s thirteen hundred kcal per day, which is just above basal metabolism. People will lose a little weight, but not much. Twenty is six hundred fifty kcal per day, which is seriously low. Crew won’t be able to work well like that. Now if you put thirteen people at one thousand two hundred, as low as you’d want to go and expect alertness to stay up, that’s fifteen thousand six hundred per day, and forty-seven people at six hundred, that could give us seventeen days. Crew efficiency shouldn’t drop much, but the passengers will be just barely making it.”

  “We’ll try that,” Ky said. “Is there going to be any problem with water? Does changing the diet that much affect recycling efficiency or anything?”

  Alene shook her head. “No . . . water’s not the limiting factor, nor is air. Just food.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Ky said. “I’ll donate my great-aunt’s fruitcakes. Three of ’em, each an easy two kilos. I don’t know what their caloric value is, but you can chew on a piece for a long, long time.”

  “Some people like fruitcake,” Alene said, brightening. Apparently she was one of those people.

  “Those people can eat it,” Ky said. “And I’ll bet they never had my aunt’s fruitcake.”

  Scan was empty. Ky would have been glad to see any ship but none appeared. Her stomach growled and she growled back at it. So far nothing they’d done to the ship’s beacon made it work; they were still receding from Sabine Prime as a ghost ship. On anyone else’s scan they would show up only as an object in motion. The thought occurred then that some other ship might also be moving out here with no beacon. That was not comforting; it was too easy to run into what you didn’t know existed. Day after day . . . she had never been hungry that long in her life, and it was worse for her passengers. The only good thing about being that hungry was that she couldn’t sleep . . . because sleep brought the nightmares: Gary’s eyes staring into hers the moment before he died, the smell of blood and death, the terror . . .

  Icons appeared on the screen all at once: six ships, all identified as ISC. Ky tried to estimate range, but this far out from Prime she had no ranging model. An hour later, another four ships appeared on scan; she had no way to tell if they were an actual hour behind the first group, or had entered the system a light-hour farther from her. These also carried an ISC icon.

  “Well, our rescue is here, if we can get their attention,” Ky said. She looked around at the bridge crew, who looked like she felt. Nobody cheered. “They may or may not know about us, but either way it would be helpful to be able to talk to them. We have got to figure out a way to generate a signal out of this system.”

  “We need a real com tech,” Beeah said.

  “We have real com techs among our passengers, but can we trust them?” Quincy asked.

  “Offer them a real meal,” Beeah said. “Even a piece of fruitcake.” He hadn’t liked the fruitcake either. Alene kept insisting it wasn’t so bad, but they had cut up only two of them.

  Ky mimed gagging. “That might make them sabotage it. Still, it’s in their interest to cooperate. The sooner we’re found, the sooner we can feed everyone.” She hoped that was true. “I suppose I’d better go talk to them.”

  “Not alone,” Quincy said. “You can’t go in there alone.”

  “No, I know that,” Ky said. “Mehar, Beeah, you’ll come with me. Bring the pistol bows. Look fierce.” They looked more grumpy than fierce; she hoped that would suffice.

  The captives, seated on the deck, looked pale and miserable. She hated herself for that, but at least they were all—except Paison, Kristoffson, and Paison’s mate—alive. “Here’s the situation,” Ky said. “ISC just dropped a fleet into the system. They can’t come help us, however, because Paison and his little clique
disabled our beacon and we haven’t been able to fix it. That puts our chance of rescue pretty low; on active scan we’ll show up as a dead ship unless someone comes in really close, and they probably have other priorities. It could be weeks before they find us, if they do, and the rations run out in another few days. So if one of you has the expertise to fix the beacon, this would be a good time to tell me, and do that job honestly.”

  Silence. They stared back at her as if she’d spoken to them in an alien language. “We really are running out of rations—you’re not just punishing us?” That was a short, balding man toward the back of the group.

  Ky shook her head. “No. Why would I do that? You weren’t all in on it anyway, and making you hungry wouldn’t be the way to make you friendly. Paison and company did us all a bad turn. I don’t know what his plan was—”

  A hand went up. “I do.”

  Ky felt a prickle down her backbone. “And you are—?”

  “I was his number-two com officer. You killed the number one. I wasn’t supposed to be in on it but—he knew all about the ansible attacks. He wasn’t about to wait around here until ISC showed up . . .”

  “Where did he think he could go in a ship like this with no FTL drive?” Ky asked.

  The man looked even paler; his skin glistened in the lights as those around him turned to look at him. “I—I don’t think I should say.”

  “You’d better say, Corson, or we’ll break your stupid neck,” growled the man next to him. “If you get us killed—”

  “And you are?” Ky said.

  “Hemphurst, first officer off Balknas Brighteyes. Idiots have caused enough trouble. Corson, you cooperate or else.”

  Corson was clearly scared of the big man, but still scared of something else.

  “Paison’ll—or his group’ll—get me if I tell.”

  “They aren’t here and I am,” Hemphurst growled. “I don’t want to die of starvation because you’re scared they’ll come after you . . . If you’re already dead, what difference does it make?”