“Well…” Mitt sounded less than eager.
“Why don’t you let me take care of Osman’s mortal coil,” Rafe said. “If you happen to have body bags.”
She didn’t. She’d hoped very much never to have a corpse on her ship again, but there he was, dead and in the way. “Not standard issue,” she said. “Can you improvise?”
“Sure. I’ll just go look for something… or we could wait for the mercs to show up. I’m sure they have body bags.”
Rafe went out; Ky told Mitt that Rafe would deal with the body, but might need a help finding the right container.
“Oh, we’ve got some supply sacks that might work,” Mitt said, sounding more cheerful already.
Ky thought privately that getting the passage clean would be worse than stuffing Osman’s corpse into a sack, but she wasn’t going to argue that. “Fine,” she said.
While the environmental techs worked on cleaning up the passage, she and Stella compared implant headings.
“I don’t have ship functions,” Stella said. “I told you that before. Mine’s optimized for financial analysis and contact information.”
“Who do you have at ISC?” Ky asked. “I’ve got about forty—everything from… uh… Mirellia Coston, executive assistant to the Slotter Key main rep—and her, too, of course—to Lew Parminer. I remember him; he came to Corleigh several times.”
“Forty? I have both of those but only a few more. Do you have Rilendo Varise, in Outside Contracts?”
“Yes. I wonder why Dad kept Louise Sims-Delont in this list—she’s just a file clerk.” Even as she said that, the implant unpacked the reasons and displayed them. Louise Sims-Delont had been too willing to look something up for him five years before, a willingness he interpreted as a possible security leak for the relationship between Vatta Transport, Ltd., and ISC.
What relationship, Ky wondered, and the implant suddenly flooded her awareness with a cascade of numbers, names, dates, reasons.
“What’s wrong, Ky?” Stella asked. Ky shook her head; she couldn’t answer, not now. Stella reached out, shook her arm. “Ky! Answer me!”
Had Stella known? “Too much information too fast,” Ky said. She took a long breath. “Uh… how much do you know about the relationship between Vatta and ISC?”
“Relationship? We depend on ISC’s communications, like all shippers. They’ve used us as general carriers—I don’t know what their total tonnage is, but I’d say we have a reasonably healthy fraction of their business, perhaps a dominant share on our main routes. Vatta’s always supported the monopoly—we didn’t want to risk fragmentation of services and uncontrolled charges. Several other major long-line transport companies have done the same.”
“Yes, and some have argued for open communications standards and competition. Pavrati, for instance.”
“Oh, Pavrati.” Stella wrinkled her nose.
“It’s more complicated,” Ky said. How much should she tell Stella? How much of their present problems related to the data on her implant, the implant that had been taken from her dying father? “This implant,” she said finally. “It’s… something we need to talk about at length, I think. In private. If we’re what’s left of Vatta—”
“There’s Aunt Gracie, or was when I left home.”
“Yes, well…” The compressed data under that heading was another problem. Ky had found it hard enough to reconcile her memory of the prickly, prudish Aunt-Gracie-of-the-Fruitcakes with what Stella had told her. The Gracie of the implant was several orders of magnitude less familiar. “You know she was almost tried for murder?”
“Gracie? Our Aunt Gracie?”
“Yes. They finally decided it was postcombat stress and hushed it up when the family put her in the spaghetti farm for a year.”
Stella’s eyes widened. “They thought about sending me to a clinic; Aunt Gracie said no, she’d take care of it—but if she… why did they listen to her?”
“Because she had more dirt on both our fathers than you could imagine,” Ky said. The internal memos recorded on this implant had more detail on that than she wanted. She wished Aunt Gracie had been there; she could’ve argued for her own father’s memory. He had always been so upright, so honest, so sensible; she could imagine he might have been a bit wild as a youngster, but not as… the word conniving slipped in and out of focus. Not her father. Not her father, dead after the attack on the Vattas. Or Stella’s, though she’d always wondered if Stella’s wildness came from her father rather than her socialite mother. “She was head of Vatta’s internal security—you know that, that’s the kind of work she had you doing. But she was also working with the Slotter Key government—well, part of it, anyway.”
“You don’t suppose she set it up—was working with Osman or something?”
“No,” Ky said, even though the same dire suspicion had flashed through her mind a minute before. The implant made it clear how deep Gracie’s dislike of Osman ran. “I’m sure she didn’t. But the fact is that all three of us now have to work together, if Vatta’s to come back… or just survive.”
“We have to survive,” Stella said. “There’s Toby…”
“Yes. Well…” Was this the time to admit to Stella the real reason she had resisted using the implant? No… no more than she could confess her disgusting joy in the act of killing. “We’ll need to spend considerable time, as I unlock various cubbies in this thing, figuring out what to do about what’s inside.” That sounded lame, but she did not want to get into the whole thing now. For one thing, she still felt limp. “And we don’t want to involve Rafe—there’s a lot of stuff about ISC.”
“Oh, I agree,” Stella said. “But he’ll probably keep trying to worm it out of you. That peeling-a-lime thing—” She sounded annoyed.
Ky laughed. “I’m not susceptible to his type,” she said. “Or any type, at present,” she added, more soberly. She pushed away the memory of that brief, crazy dance with Rafe. That was postimplant befuddlement, nothing more.
“Dad told me you were involved with a very nice young man at the Academy,” Stella said. “It’s too bad—but maybe you can get together when this is over—”
“No!” Ky lowered her voice after that emphatic negative. “No. That’s over and done with.”
“Well… there will be others.”
Not until this was over. Not until she understood more of herself. Not until she found a man who would not be horrified at what she really was… and would she want a man who would not be horrified? She was horrified.
“Besides,” she said, hoping to distract Stella. “He’s yours, isn’t he?”
Stella flushed but shook her head. “Come on, Ky, he’s not a commodity to be possessed. Besides… he wouldn’t be mine, in that sense, even if he were.”
“You said you were attracted…”
“Yes, attracted. But now, at this moment, we’re busy with something else. I’m not controlled by my hormones, you know, whatever my reputation in the family.”
“Sorry,” Ky said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Good. He’s… interesting, yes. Skilled. But I don’t know if he’ll ever be… someone to partner with, long term. I was worried that you might fall for him and get hurt, when all he wanted was your trust.”
“Never walk in on women discussing men,” Rafe said, doing just that. “Stella, Stella… I don’t know whether to be flattered by your interest—no one analyzes so minutely someone they care nothing for—or appalled at its erroneous conclusions.”
“Stop that,” Ky said, as Stella flushed again. “I don’t give a flip what your relational strengths and weaknesses are; your timing is atrocious.”
“My timing is impeccable, as always,” Rafe said, settling against the bulkhead. “I come bringing peace to your soul, Captain: Osman’s corpse is safely stowed for the moment, but retrievable when your mercs show up with proper body bags. Stella, did you know your baby cousin was a very thorough killer?”
“I’m sure she would do w
hatever was necessary in an emergency,” Stella said.
“I’m sure that his other wounds would have killed him without that stab through the throat to the brain,” Rafe said. His gaze, deceptively mild, had settled on Ky; she felt the heat rise in her own cheeks. “That’s not just a military cut direct, so to speak. That’s more, isn’t it, Captain?”
“Fatal, I’d say,” Ky said, trying for an offhand tone. “After all, I thought he was dead the first time, when their ship security was breached. It seemed a good idea to make sure.”
Rafe shrugged. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
She was glad to have that conversation interrupted by a call from the Mackensee ship. It was close enough to use conventional communications. “I see what you mean about the Kaleen tumbling,” her liaison said. “Do you think there are any live crew aboard?”
“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I haven’t tried hailing her since the running lights came back on.”
“Better tell me what happened,” Johannson said.
Ky explained briefly, starting with Osman Vatta’s relationship to the family and continuing through the full sequence that had ended with his death. Johannson’s professional expression wavered several times, but he didn’t interrupt. She was glad of that; she could imagine his comments on her idiocy in letting those boarders through the lock.
“So… you fired an EMP mine inside your own ship to scramble his mine’s electronics?” was all he said at the end.
“Yes,” Ky said, and clamped her teeth on justifications. She didn’t need his approval anyway: it had worked.
“And his lock was disabled by the combination of your EMP mine and his limpet—”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.” She knew that interesting wasn’t as mild as it sounded. “We’ll be sending a pinnace with a boarding party to… uh… Fair Kaleen. You might want to back off another thousand klicks or so, just in case. Can you?”
“Oh, yes,” Ky said. She glanced at her pilot. “Lee, back us out.”
“Glad to,” he said.
Ky followed that exploration by relay. The Mackensee boarding party found that the main-entry air lock was too damaged to function, and the entry passage was still open to space. However, inner compartment seals had shut when the ship systems reset. They rigged a temporary air lock and convinced the ship to let them in. Inside, they found sixteen dead—seven in space armor, dead because their suit systems had gone down, the rest not even in pressure suits, victims of decompression. As they worked their way from compartment to compartment, they found a few survivors in those compartments that had been aired up. Some were injured, some not; all were taken prisoner, even the three in a storeroom off the galley, who claimed to be prisoners of the crew.
In the midst, Martin appeared on the bridge. “The medbox says I’m cured,” he said. “Sorry I dropped like that, Captain.”
“You weren’t the only one,” Ky said. “I’m glad it didn’t scramble your brains permanently.”
“Why didn’t you just have Lee shut the ship system down?”
“Osman had a limpet mine inside the ship,” Ky said. “This was the only way I could think of to knock out its systems.”
“Oh.” Martin gave her an odd look. “You take the big jumps, don’t you, ma’am? And I suppose you killed Osman?”
“Yes,” Ky said.
“Very thoroughly,” Rafe put in.
“Martin, we’re going to be taking over the other ship,” Ky said, before Rafe could get started on that. “We need a prize crew—you’ll be on that, of course, since that ship may have security issues the rest of us wouldn’t recognize.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Martin said, looking more alert by the moment. “They’ll have traps in her and such, same as I set here against boarders.”
“Exactly. I can provide your implant with a layout of the ship as she was built and in use originally. We need a boarding plan as well, and if you have recommendations on crew.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on it.”
Johannson called Ky again when his personnel were sure they had cleared the ship to explain what he intended to do with those found. “We can sort ’em out later,” Johannson said. “I’m not having strangers running around loose on this ship… they don’t claim to be Vattas, anyway.”
The engineers with the boarding party began to stabilize the ship’s tumbling once they reached the bridge. Systems had reset correctly; it was simply a matter of giving the correct commands. In a few hours, Johannson informed Ky that the ship was ready to receive a prize crew.
“She’s down on reserve air, as you’d expect. Cargo holds are still aired up; our engineers recommend pumping that air into the crew space once you’ve done something about that air lock. The ship inventory lists useful spares. Here—” A block of data came across; Ky’s implant sorted it and displayed it for her.
“If we use your temporary airlock, we should be able to get to Section B-Four and put that replacement in,” Ky said. “Are Kaleen’s repair bots functional?”
“Some of them appear to be. You want us to run systems checks on them?”
“Yes. No sense risking lives if the bots can do some of the vacuum work.”
The Mackensee pinnace transported the survivors from Fair Kaleen to Gloucester while the repair bots started work on installation of a new air lock. Ky itched to get over there and see what her command implant could pull up from the ship’s computers, but she had no way to transfer. Yet. She had to organize a prize crew, anyway. Johannson had made it clear that providing such a crew did not fall within their contractual obligations, and he was not minded to widen them. Minimally—if they did nothing but transport the ship to the next port—the ship would need a commander, pilot, navigator, someone in Environmental, someone in Engineering.
“We need a Vatta commanding both ships,” Ky said finally, to Stella and Toby. “Toby, you know more about ships, but Stella’s old enough that station managers might accept her, even though she has no papers.”
“Captain, why don’t you go aboard the Kaleen?” Toby said. “This ship’s simpler. If you left Stella here, and a few of the old hands, she wouldn’t have any problems with her.”
“It’s… an idea,” Ky said. “But think of the trouble I got into by leaving this ship even briefly.”
“This is different,” Toby said. “That ship—nobody here knows her; she needs more crew and more expertise. You should take her.”
“I agree,” Stella said. “If you’ll let me load some of the ship systems stuff into my implant, I’m sure I’ll be able to do what I must.”
“I suppose.” Already Ky knew this would work. She ran it all as a fast sim in the implant. Yes, it was the best solution. Now to choose who would stay and who would go. She needed Lee and Sheryl with her: they could set up a tape for Gary Tobai’s crew to follow. Martin, of course. That meant Alene had to stay on here; she would be responsible for cargo. Environmental, she had to have someone from there, and an engineer. Mitt and Mehar, she decided. Rafe, for his expertise with nonstandard ansibles.
By the time the pinnace came back toward Gary Tobai, she and her prize crew were suited up and ready to leave. On scan, the pinnace edged closer and closer.
Then came another call from Johannson. “My people say there’s a limpet mine on your outer hatch.”
“Oh… yes.” She had forgotten about that. “That’s the one Osman tried to blow up the ship with.”
“Facing out… is it armed to repel boarders?”
“No,” Ky said. “That just seemed a good place to store it.”
“To store your enemy’s mine… any particular reason why you didn’t just give it a good shove out the hatch?”
“I didn’t want to hit the Kaleen with it,” Ky said. “Besides… a mine is a terrible thing to waste.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Along silence, during which Johannson turned dull red and appeared to be having trouble breathing. Then a harsh bark of laughte
r. “Captain Vatta, you—you are indeed—interesting. We’ll send the pinnace to ferry you and your prize crew aboard.”
Fair Kaleen, up close, looked even more battered than in the external vid pictures. The damage Osman’s limpet had done to the air lock, for instance. That was going to be expensive to fix properly—the implant gave estimates. The repair bots had welded a replacement in, roughly, but it was not the kind of work Ky wanted on any ship she owned for the long haul. Once into the crew quarters, she found not the squalor she had expected from an outlaw’s ship, but a tidy, workmanlike arrangement, marred only by stains from the recent conflict. The bridge, easily three times as large as Gary Tobai’s, resembled that of the ship she had apprenticed on, but with the addition of an extra row of boards.
“Weapons,” her merc escort pointed out. “He’s taken out part of two cargo holds to mount them. We haven’t checked them all out, but I wouldn’t hit those red buttons unless you want to kill something. We didn’t inventory the munitions, either, but the hold hatches had warning labels on them. We’ve checked out the bridge for booby traps and have discussed the rest of the ship with your security command.” He glanced at Martin, who nodded.
Ky looked at the control boards. Well, she had always wanted to command a warship. This thing could almost be a pocket cruiser, if the holds were full of missiles instead of cargo… no question at all that Osman had been a pirate. Which might help when a court adjudicated possession: whatever they thought of privateers, courts always thought poorly of pirates.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Captain—environmental’s salvageable. The cultures are fine; the higher taxons are badly shaken up, but I think we can boost production in the next few days.”
“That’s good to hear,” Ky said. “Stores?”
“The ship’s supplied for a much bigger crew, Captain, and none of the supply lockers I’ve seen so far was damaged. We won’t have any problems for another three standard months at least; there are more lockers, but I’m not yet sure it’s safe to get into them.”
“Good,” Ky said. “So we’re good to go, then.” Mehar and Toby hadn’t said anything, but the drives boards were all green. Quincy, back on Gary Tobai, had said things about idiots who went off to strange ships with greenies for Engineering crew, but she was still recovering from her blast injuries, and Ky wasn’t about to put additional strain on her. Quincy had finally subsided when Ky pointed out that Stella, as a completely inexperienced captain, needed the best engineer on Gary Tobai.
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