“That’s—that’s very generous. I don’t know if I should—”
“Riel, don’t argue. It’s my decision. Now get your gear while I call the bank.”
It took only moments to authorize a draft for him. Ky went to the bridge, where Lee and Sheryl were working on the departure sequence. “Destination still Leonora, Captain?”
“I’m not sure. Set us up for that, Sheryl; it’s days to the jump point anyway, if I change my mind. Lee, what have you got on departure clearance?”
“Anytime, basically. They like a half hour’s notice, is all. It’s not exactly a busy station.”
“Riel should be offship by then.” The sooner they were out in space, the better. She called down to Quincy. “What’s our status?”
“We’ve been on standby since yesterday, Captain. We’re ready to go, and, yes, before you ask, fully provisioned.”
“Good. I’ll contact the station authorities. Have Beeah check to be sure when Riel has cleared the ship, would you?”
“He shouldn’t be leaving,” Quincy said. “Your father trusted him—”
“At this point, I don’t,” Ky said. “I don’t need an unwilling pilot.” Quincy sniffed audibly. “Just have Beeah make sure he’s gone.”
“All right.”
Getting departure clearance from the stationmaster was as quick as Ky had hoped; clearly the local authorities would be glad to see the last of Gary Tobai. Ky instructed Crown & Spears to forward her balance to her account at Lastway. Leonora was only a stopover; she shouldn’t need much money there. She tried again to reach her father from the ship’s secured com desk. CONTACT UNAVAILABLE was all she could get, using any of his numbers.
Then Gary Tobai uncoupled from dockside; the station seals closed and vented the little airspace remaining around the ship. Lee backed them out smoothly; the insystem drive spun up normally, and she was once more in command of her own ship in space.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Now that we’re safely back in space,” Ky said to the assembled crew, “you need to know the latest information. You know about the attempted sabotage of this ship, and the attack on me personally.”
“Is it because of the Sabine affair?” Quincy asked.
“I don’t think so,” Ky said. “Not now. Too much is happening. The Slotter Key ansible isn’t functioning—that happened sometime yesterday. I was in contact with Vatta headquarters, and that signal was also cut off, but hours earlier, before the assassins attacked. I don’t know why Vatta would be a target, but apparently we are.”
“What can we do?” asked Mitt.
“The first thing we need to do is figure out what the situation is,” Ky said. “Right now we don’t know if Slotter Key’s ansible platforms were blown, or if there’s another reason their ansible’s offline. We don’t know enough to make a plan. But we do know there’s danger, and being a moving target will make it harder for our enemies to hit us.”
“Move fast, stay alert,” Martin said. The others looked at him. “Makes sense, Captain,” he said.
“Our stated itinerary is Belinta to Leonora to Lastway,” Ky said. “But we have supplies enough to go straight to Lastway—”
“Why go to Lastway at all?” Quincy asked. “Why not head back to Slotter Key, find out what’s really going on?”
“I’d rather stay out of systems with no working ansibles,” Ky said. “We’ve been in that situation before. Not good. Lastway’s remote enough, out on the fringe . . . I’m betting that it’ll have ansible function even if others are shut down. It’s also a high-volume system, plenty of traffic. That could bring us trouble, but it can also bring us news and allies. From there we can hop back to Leonora with their cargo if things settle down.”
“What kind of internal security scans does this ship have?” Martin asked.
“Just the usual for civilian tradeships,” Ky said. “Some of it’s down, too, thanks to the mutiny at Sabine. Video and audio to each compartment, mostly for communication. Why?”
“Someone tried to put explosives aboard—I’d like to be sure nothing else came aboard. No offense intended to your crew, but just in case.”
“Good idea,” Ky said. “You mean check out compartments personally?”
“That, and with some of the kit I brought along.” He patted his tunic.
Ky thought of asking where he’d gotten whatever it was, and decided now was not the time. “Go ahead, then,” she said. “Cargo’s secure; I’ll take the other sections’ reports while you learn where things are.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said; his arm twitched in what would, Ky knew, have been a salute.
Mitt was halfway through giving his report when muffled thumps made them all look up. The intercom clicked, and Martin’s voice said, “Intruder, cargo hold two. In custody. Request orders.”
“I’m on my way,” Ky said. “Mitt, Beeah, come with me.”
Just inside the open hatch of cargo hold 2, Martin stood guard over a prone figure in rumpled green tunic and kilt whose ankles and wrists had been trussed up with elastic cargo binders. “If you can take charge of him,” Martin said, “I’ll keep looking for any others.”
“Mitt, you stay with him; Beeah, be ready in case Martin needs you.”
It took several hours for Martin to be confident that no other stowaways were hidden away. “And I’m still not one hundred percent sure,” he said. “Just mostly sure.”
By this time, Ky had looked over their prisoner, an unprepossessing youngish man with straggly hair and at least a day’s growth of beard. He had a darkening bruise on one cheekbone. From his clothes, he was a Belinta native, but that was all she could tell.
Martin yanked the man up and propped him against one of the shipping containers. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t space you!”
The prisoner’s eyes shifted to Ky’s face. “Please! I didn’t do anything! Don’t let ’im kill me.”
“Didn’t do anything?” Ky said. “You stowed away on my ship. What were you up to? Planting more explosives?”
“No! I swear! Nothing like that.”
“What’s your name, boy?” Martin asked.
“Jim. Jim Hakusar. And I’m not a boy—”
“Really.” In that one word, Ky heard a tone that had turned many a raw recruit into a soldier. Martin turned to her. “Captain, this stowaway claims to be an adult, which means he’s legally yours; it’s up to you. I’ll be glad to get rid of him for you.”
“No! No, please! I—I can do things. I’ll—I can work for you. That’s all I wanted, was a chance—”
“You mean you wanted to be crew?”
“Yes . . . anything to get off Belinta. I can do a lot of things, really I can.”
“Like what?” Martin asked.
“Well, I . . . I can build things. You know, like sheds and fences and that.” Mitt gave a choked laugh; Ky fought down her own laughter. “And I can take care of critters, y’know. Carry feed and clean up . . .” His voice trailed away as he looked around the cargo hold and its obvious lack of wooden sheds, fences, or livestock. “I thought . . . I heard . . . ships grow their own food, right, and that means crops and things and I know how to plant and hoe and—”
“Large ships,” Mitt said. “Large ships grow some of their food in hydroponic gardens. We grow algae in tanks. We don’t use hoes.”
“But this ship is big . . . I saw it on the vidscreen. It’s . . . it’s lots bigger than our house back home; it had room in it for all those tractors and things.” He looked around at the cargo hold. “I mean, look at it. It’s huge.”
“I’m afraid—” Ky began, but he interrupted.
“Please, lady! Please let me work. I’ll work hard, I promise.”
“That’s the captain,” Martin said, with emphasis. “You say ma’am to her.”
“Please . . . ma’am . . .”
Why did it always happen to her? She could just hear what Quincy would say. But Martin’s gaze was direct, steady
ing.
“If there’s no evidence he was trying to sabotage the ship, I have no reason to space him,” Ky said. “That’ll be your responsibility, Martin—find out. Meanwhile, we’ll confine him—” And where would they confine him? And could he do anything at all useful, or would he be just another mouth to feed?
“I’ll take care of him, ma’am,” Martin said. “Find out what he’s done, what he can do, give him something useful to do.” He reached over and unhooked the cargo ties, then pulled the prisoner to his feet. “Now you listen to me, boy. The captain’s said you live—for now. But you’re under my orders, understand?”
“I—” The prisoner looked at Ky. “Don’t let him hurt me! I’ll do anything you say.”
“What I say is, do what he tells you. And Martin—the ship comes first.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ky turned away, prepared to ignore whatever Martin did, but his stentorian roar almost made her jump. “Stand up straight, you!” She clamped her jaw on a giggle. She had jumped when MacRobert first roared at their cadet class. She knew within a centimeter what that young man was going to be feeling in the next few hours, and for the first time since she had left, memory of the Academy lightened her heart instead of saddening her.
By third shift, Ky felt that the ship was running smoothly. With the help of the rest of the crew, Martin had finished searching the ship to his satisfaction and was sure that no more stowaways were aboard; nor was there any explosive device. The young man had spent hours scrubbing the decks and finally, after a modest meal, had been locked into a closet with a mattress, pillow, and blanket.
“He’ll be a challenge,” Martin reported, with the satisfied tone of someone for whom a challenge was welcome. “Not born on Belinta, but his family moved there when he was a toddler. Poor colonists, out on the frontier. I know the type, ma’am. Brogglers, we call ’em back home, the kind that live off trapping and frog sticking and the like. Thing is, they can make passable workers if you polish ’em up. He can shoot, he tells me. We’ll see about that later.”
“If it saves me scrubbing things,” Alene said, propping her elbows on the table, “I’m all for him.”
“Oh, he’ll scrub,” Martin said. “It’s about all he can do, at this point. Little enough education, and I doubt he paid much attention to the schooling available.”
“We’ll do something about that,” Ky said. “If he’s going to be in my crew, he’s got to be certified.” She looked around at the others who’d gathered in the rec area. “I know—there’s all kinds of trouble going on. But precisely because of that, we need qualified people aboard, not just pot scrubbers. I want him educated at least to basic spacecrew level.”
“We can try,” Quincy said.
“With all the expertise on this ship, we can do more than try,” Ky said.
The passage out began smoothly enough. Gordon Martin kept their intruder busy two shifts of the day, with four hours of schooling worked in. Martin seemed to get along well with the rest of the crew, too. The other men joined him for physical training; Ky, who maintained her own training program, found that the women were joining her—not all of them at each session, but even Sheryl, who had claimed to hate exercise, was now using the machines every other day. Ky shared piloting watch-and-watch with Lee. She worried about every blip on the scans, half convinced that marauders were lurking, ready to take out the ship. Each one turned out to be harmless: the Pavrati ship edging in toward Belinta Station, the Belinta ore haulers and service vehicles.
At closest approach, four days out, Gary Tobai and the Pavrati ship passed each other. Ky made a courtesy call to the other ship.
“You might as well skip Leonora,” the Pavrati captain told her. “They’re not letting anyone in. We were coming in from Darttin, headed this way, and they chased us right back out as soon as we’d cleared jump.”
“What—why?”
“Some kind of communications problem, and they’re convinced something like Sabine will happen to them if they let outsiders into the system.”
“They didn’t say what?”
“They didn’t say anything but Go away and tell everyone else to leave us alone. System closed indefinitely, they said. That was three weeks back; we were set up wrong for a direct vector here and had to use an intermediate jump point. They have some hot defensive ships, let me tell you, and acted like they’d just as soon blow us as let us go. But go if you want to—I’m just giving a friendly warning.”
“Thanks,” Ky said. “I appreciate it. Belinta’s still open, as far as I know, but if you’re headed for Slotter Key you may run into trouble. Ansibles down, apparently.”
The Pavrati captain muttered something Ky was just as glad she couldn’t hear. “Damn pirates,” he said then. “Or whoever’s doing this. It’ll be the ruin of trade. We need supplies; I was going to restock at Leonora, but I guess we’ll be satisfied with Belinta cabbage.”
When she’d signed off, Ky said, “Sheryl—make our course for Lastway. Let me know how fast we can make it, too.”
“This is a fine mess,” Gerard Avondetta Vatta said. He hurt all over and he looked as bad as he felt—he could see that in the faces around him, and he had no time to deal with his pain or his grief at the many losses. Or to worry about his youngest child, who had just survived a nearly disastrous first voyage. He had to think of the future, what could be salvaged from the bleak reality of loss.
“It is a disgrace.” Gracie Lane Vatta, inimitable and invincible, sat bolt upright in her seat. “I cannot imagine what the government is thinking of, to let such things happen.”
A question Gerard didn’t want to consider yet was just how much the government had been involved. Or part of the government. Or what the disasters still falling on Vatta heads meant to the part of the government he had thought he influenced.
“How’s the roll call going?” he asked his brother’s widow, Helen Stamarkos Vatta. He liked Helen; he respected her abilities, but he could still hardly believe that Stavros was gone, that he would never have that steadying hand on his arm again.
“Two hundred nineteen responses,” Helen said. The dark rings around her eyes were the only sign of grief; those, and the mourning band she wore around her hair. She had lost her husband, her elder daughter, a son. “We know of thirty-seven deaths.”
But there would be more deaths, of that he was sure. The ones he knew were bad enough. His wife, his son, the household staff, the men and women in the office building.
He pushed the memories away. Myris was dead, drowned in the midst of a fireball, her skull crushed by some piece of debris. San was dead, with all but two in the office building. And he still had responsibilities, work to do that could not wait for him to recover either physically—from the burns and broken bones—or emotionally.
The remaining Vatta family members on Slotter Key were all present, crammed into the storm bunker under a tik warehouse now a pile of twisted blackened steel overhead. It was the safest place he could think of, but his skin crawled at the thought that someone else might know of it, and even now might be about to blow them all away.
“What about communications?” he asked.
“The ansible message bins are stuffed,” Helen said. “Timmis Hollander”—the local ISC manager; Gerard knew him well—“doesn’t know why, he claims. I suspect whatever the cause, it’s affecting more than Slotter Key. This list is just the ones who got through before—” She looked at her list. “—before 1453 Capital Standard Time yesterday.”
“All right.” Gerard took a deep breath. It hurt; he struggled not to cough. The family physician wanted him in a hospital, but he wasn’t about to sit still in so obvious a target. “We still have local communications with our remaining people on the mainland. Perry Adair is positioned in this system, not docked at the Slotter Key main station, and nothing has attacked the ship.” He didn’t have to add yet. “We have one remaining shuttle, now docked at the station, under local guard. We have been advised that permission to t
ransit planetside will not be granted at this time.”
“So we’re stuck here,” said Gracie Lane.
“Not . . . completely. Commercial carriers have agreed to transport less . . . er . . . prominent family members to the station for a hefty surcharge.” They would not transport him, or Helen, or any other officer of the company.
“Does anyone know why we were attacked?” Gracie asked. “Other than our being rich and powerful and making a move on Pavrati last year?”
“No,” Gerard said. “No definite indication has come. I suspect that it is not unconnected to the problems ISC is having, since we have long been public in our support of ISC’s monopoly, and opposition to it has been growing for the past few decades.”
“Is it because Kylara got involved with those pirates in the Sabine mess?” she asked, with an unerring instinct for the one thing he did not want to think or talk about.
“She did not get involved, as you put it,” he said. “She had no choice—”
Gracie sniffed. “She doesn’t see choices, that girl. She sees openings.” Then she grinned. “Not a bad way to fight a war, actually.”
Gerard blinked. He remembered suddenly that the scrawny, pestiferous old woman, the bane of the family in some ways, creator of the least edible but most valuable fruitcakes in the universe, was enough older that she had been in the last war. He wasn’t sure as what, but he remembered his father saying something . . . he queried his implant and there it was, her military file. Gracie? Behind the lines? Somehow he had not connected her expertise in surveillance and information collecting—suitable civilian activities for a nosy old lady—with their military equivalents.
“Well, don’t stare like that,” she said, misreading the cause of that stare. “It is a war, isn’t it? We have an enemy, whether we knew it or not. They killed our people, attacked our business and our homes, broke our line of communication. Did it fairly well, you have to give them that . . . we certainly weren’t prepared. But now—it’s a war, and we’d better win it. I do not intend to spend the rest of my days sitting in some smelly, stuffy bunker under the wreck of a tik processing plant.”
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