Trading in Danger (17 page)

Ky, feeling much better now that she’d eaten, joined the conversation. “So… what about you, Paro? Where are you from, what’s your family like?”

Paro Hospedin grinned. “Westerling family, like Lucin’s. Shellfish farming, back in colonial days. Then shellfish processing, but we were bought out by Gramlin fifty years or so ago. Our side of the family moved into transportation—nothing to scare Vatta Transport, mostly ground routes from Westerling back east. I caught the spaceship bug early on, wanted to work on the ships themselves, see new worlds, all that. My father said I had to get an education first, and pushed me into the technical end.”

“Good for him,”Quincysaid. “It’s easier to get it in one lump than piecemeal, while you’re working.”

“Agreed. I wasn’t sure I wanted drives, but he said I had a good mind for it, and there’d always be ships that needed me.”

“As long as someone has a general background, too,”Quincysaid. Beeah and Mehar rolled their eyes.Quincyscowled at them. “It’s important,” she said. “You young people always want to specialize in the high-paying fields, but if you don’t have the background, you’re out of luck if the ship’s expert in the blogowitz generator gets a knock on the head and you have to deal with it.”

“What’s a blogowitz generator?” asked Caleb Skeldon.

“She made it up,” Mehar said. “It’s imaginary, what she calls a teaching tool.”

Caleb still looked confused. Beeah patted him on the shoulder. “Never mind,Cal, this is an old engineering argument. Probably as old as engineering. They have it in medicine, too.”

“Just trying to understand the ship,”Calsaid, applying himself to his rice and chicken.

“It’s fine,Cal. They can confuse me sometimes,” Ky said. That wasn’t strictly true, butCallooked like someone who needed a kind word right then. He wasn’t just handsome; he had the lost-puppy look that made her want to protect him. Danger signals pinged in Ky’s head.

“So,Cal, tell us about yourself.” From the look on Mehar’s face, she had the same impulse as Ky and it was safer for her. Ky mentally detached herself from the lost puppy and handed him over.

“EastbayCity,”Calsaid. “My family’s nothing special, just ordinary working folks. Ma works in the hospital, fluids tech, and my dad’s an accountant… that’s how I got into inventory control, through accounting. Accounting was boring. Inventory control, at least there’s something going on. I always wanted to go into space anyway. I guess it was playing
Harmon the Hero
games when I was a kid. I know there’s not really any Evil Overlord, but…” He chuckled and pushed his rice around.

“I used to play that,” Seth said. “Customized my copy so Harmon had my face and whoever I was mad at that week was the Evil Overlord. Got caught at school once playing it in class, and of course it was Professor Jesperson, and of course it was his face as Evil Overlord.”

“What did he do?” Ky asked.

“Laughed. It was worse than getting angry. I felt like an idiot.” Seth shook his head. “Then the headmaster came in and asked what was going on, and Professor Jesperson erased the set and said he’d just found an illicit game-player and erased it. I never did completely understand that man, but once I didn’t have the game-player, I managed to get top marks in that class.”

“My best friend and I modified our desk paks so we could chat in class,” Mehar said. “Nobody thought it was possible, so they didn’t check them out every time. We’d have gotten away with it all term if another class hadn’t used our room… Two kids started fiddling with the controls and, of course, they couldn’t keep a secret when they found out.”

Everyone had finished eating now. They all seemed relaxed, as she’d hoped. Ky caught Lucin Li’s eye. “Better clear up now,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way…”

“Yes, Captain,” Lucin said. The others all rose, some stacking plates and others picking up the serving dishes. Ky picked up the candlepair and switched it off.

“With the captain’s permission,” Riel said, “I’d really like to get back to the bridge.”

“Certainly,” Ky said. “We stretched the regs; we don’t want them to snap.”

He grinned, as she’d hoped, and headed upship to the bridge.

“Now,” she said to her section firsts. “About that schedule…”

“It’s all ready, Captain,”Garysaid.

“And I have the preliminary environmental report,” Mitt said.

“Good. Anything critical I need to see right away? I’m overtime myself; I’m turning in for six hours unless someone needs me.”

“No,” Mitt said. “Like I said before dinner, we’re in good shape. I have a couple of alternative models, but everything’s stable. Report’s on file.”

“Same here,” Gary said.

“Good,” Ky said. “We’ll all think clearer after some sleep.”

Back in her cabin, Ky stripped off her clothes—not
too
stinky—and put them into the ’fresher while she took a full shower. She ran through the calming exercises of Saphiric Cyclans as she dried her hair, laid out a fresh uniform, and fell into bed only to remember that she hadn’t written a log entry since she got aboard.

There was, of course, the recorded log, and Lee would have written up a pilot’s log, but tradition and training said a captain never slept without updating the log in actual writing.

At least she could do that wrapped in a soft robe and not in a uniform. Ky pulled out the logbook—still so new, most of its pages empty—and her stylus. She piled pillows behind her and started on the day’s events. When she’d finished a terse report, she looked at it a long moment before closing the logbook. If… if something happened, and that logbook were the only surviving evidence, would a reader understand it? Would he see choices she had not seen, better courses of action?

She could see nothing but one bad option after another.

She slipped the logbook and stylus into its drawer, and then turned out the light. Maybe a good night’s sleep would give her the wits to find a way out of this.

She woke up to the sounds of a ship on insystem drive, nothing more nor less. The ship was alive—air moving through the vents, liquids moving through pipes—she heard a distant gulp that she knew from experience was the galley drain. She stretched, feeling the mild stiffness of muscles held too tense the day before. But rested. She sat up, looked at the chronometer, and muttered a soft oath. She should have known they’d let her sleep too long. Into uniform, teeth clean, hair brushed smooth.

She came out into the passage feeling wide-awake and hungry again. In the galley, Cal Skeldon was wiping up the sink; she nodded to him as she checked her implant. Riel was off-duty; Lee was sitting the board. Alertly—he noticed the tick at his implant and answered at once.

“Nothing new, Captain.”

“Can I fix you something, Captain?”Calasked. That ingratiating smile again; Ky shook her head.

“I’ll just get some cereal,” she said. Before she could reach for a bowl, he had handed her one, along with a packet of breakfast grains.

“Thanks,” she said, turning away to open the cooler. She found a packet of berries and added them to the bowl, then took out the cream jug. He was still there, clearly ready to do anything she asked. She poured the cream onto the berries and grains, and handed him the cream jug.

“I have to get to the bridge,” she said.

“Of course, Captain,” he said, eyes bright. She would have a talk with Mehar, she decided; this had gone far enough. She took her breakfast up to the bridge. Lee looked up.

“Were you ever planning to wake Sleeping Beauty?” Ky asked. “Or were you waiting for a prince?”

“Gary and Quincy said to let you have at least eight hours,” Lee said. “Was that wrong?”

“No. I just didn’t plan to sleep that long.” Ky sat down in the captain’s seat and turned on the intercom. “Captain’s on the bridge. Section firsts, if you’re finished with that assignment, come on up.” She took a spoonful of berries and cream and grain. “Where are we, Lee? Anything to worry about?”

“No, Captain.” The plot came up on Ky’s desk. “We’re not going to hit anything in this system. Not anything mapped, anyway. The warships have moved in on Sabine Prime; there’s been an engagement of some kind with Prime’s space force, such as it is. They haven’t blown the station yet, though we’re far enough out it could have happened and we wouldn’t have heard.”

“Any sign of ISC?”

“No downjump markers that I can detect. If they’ve come in, they’ve come in with something small, distant, and careful. I wouldn’t know yet if they just arrived across the system, of course.”

Scan-lag was such a pain. It was possible to link ansibles to scan and get an almost-instantaneous scan of an entire system, but that took the ansibles off-line for other uses. Aside from that, they were limited to lightspeed or less. Ky finished her berries and grain, setting the bowl aside just asGary, Mitt, andQuincyappeared.

“I hope you’re all as rested as I am,” Ky said. “What have you got for me? Mitt, you first.”

“Current consumption, we’re good for eighty-seven days.Garyspent all the government letter of credit on supplies, is why it looks so good. Our system’s designed for straight recycling of atmosphere and water; there’s no design capability for onboard food generation.”

“We could modify some of the equipment,”Quincyput in. “But we don’t have seed stock. We’d have to figure out a way to purify and prepare the basic cultures.”

“I can’t really recommend that,” Mitt said. “Unless it’s that or starvation.”

“We’ll hope it’s not,” Ky said. “You, Quincy?”

“Well, the ship’s in pretty good shape, aside from the problems we knew about already. Nothing’s leaking. Nothing’s coming apart under this acceleration. On the other hand, we have to consider insystem drive fuel consumption. Since we can’t jump out of this system with no FTL drive, we need to be able to get back where we came from in order to get that replacement sealed unit.”

“Fuel consumption so far?”

“Seven percent. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it all depends how long this goes on.”

“Gary?”

“Load’s all secure. I’ve been collecting the skills list, like you asked me to. Hand-painting flat-pics seems like a useless sort of thing to mention, but—”

“We don’t know what might be useful,” Ky said. “Let me see here… flower painting, yes. Surf fishing with rod and reel. Once achieved a perfect score in Bzzx—what is that?”

“A gameplayer classic. The one where you shoot little biting things that try to eat your garden plants.”

“Mmm… and designing and hand-sewing festival costumes.” She couldn’t think of anything more boring, herself. And that was Mitt, of all people. “Pistol-bow competition? What’s that?”

“That’s—you know what a crossbow is, right?”

“Ancient weapon, now used in sports. Sure, my brothers had one. They never would let me play with it, and it disappeared about the time Hanar moved out. He used to shoot fish with it, and sometimes rabbits.”

“Pistol bows are much smaller. I asked Mehar about it; she says they even proposed them to Vatta main office as a shipboard security weapon. They won’t penetrate hulls or bulkheads, and they don’t have any combustibles, so they’re legal on most stations. She says they look scary to dockside thieves and they had much less trouble on
Palatine
when the outside watch carried them.”

“That makes sense. So we have a pistol-bow expert—how many pistol bows do we have?” For a moment she imagined the glorious defense of the ship, her crew with pistol bows against—real riot-control weapons that could rip holes in the ship. Not a good idea.

“Only the two Mehar has—her own personal practice and competition bows.”

Just as well, then. She wouldn’t be tempted. Still, if Mehar could hit something with a pistol bow, she might be good with other weapons. If they happened to find any. She went on with the list. Two who could knit, and one who could crochet. One who could blow glass. Five cross-trained in another ship discipline than that on their primary papers.

Nothing that immediately sparked an idea for how to get out of this mess. Nobody claimed to know how to fashion an ansible out of yarn and some extra carrots, which is what they had most of.

“Well,” she said when she came to the end of the list and found her three section firsts looking at her as if they expected she’d come up with a complete answer. “That’s all very interesting, but I think the next step is to see if the Mackensee folks want to talk to us. I’d like to quit using fuel to go somewhere we don’t want to go, for instance. We’re well out of their way, unless they plan to blow up Sabine Prime itself.”

“Do you think they’ll answer?” askedGary. “If they’re busy fighting—”

“Won’t know until we try,” Ky said. “If they’re too busy they won’t answer, or they’ll tell us to be quiet. I’m going to suggest that we need to reserve fuel for maneuvering. Chances are they don’t know we’ve got this much left.”

Even though she had made the decision, Ky hesitated before trying to contact the mercenaries. They would be busy, probably in the middle of a fight… If she were their commander, how would she react to the interruption from a silly little civilian cargo ship?

It would depend, really. It probably wouldn’t be the first time that a civilian ship asked for further orders or wanted to change the ones it had been given. That must happen several times an operation. So there must be someone monitoring that channel, expecting ships to call in and complain or beg. What happened next would depend on the mercenaries’ protocol for handling such calls, and on her approach to them.

“Was there any com activity on channel seventeen?” she asked Lee.

“I logged some very faint,” Lee said. “It wasn’t for us, all we got was outwash.”

So the others were contacting the mercenaries. And by their plots, they weren’t being blown away instantly. That was something, but was it enough? Ky would have given a lot to ask the advice of experienced spacers, preferably military. Despite the air of distaste which had colored Commander Staller’s comments on mercenaries during their military law course, he had considered mercenaries true military organizations. He would know—any of them might know—what to expect in this situation.

Their expertise lay impossibly far away, in time and space; she had no connection there anymore, even if the ansibles hadn’t been out… but she did, she remembered.

The card that had come with the ship model from MacRobert… what was it he’d written? “If you ever need to let us know about something, remember that dragons breathe fire.”

But she wasn’t a dragon, and
Glennys Jones
wasn’t a dragon-class cruiser. Of course… Mac knew that. Mac knew… and somehow he’d given her a way to get their attention. Now she regretted the resentment that had kept her from plugging away at the mystery hidden in the instructions… some kind of recognition code, probably, if only she understood it. Not advanced communication devices; she was sure that the model wasn’t a compact ansible, for instance… but why?

Why was she sure? Would she know a compact military-grade ansible if she had one in her hands?

“Captain—” Lee was pointing to the comdesk when Ky shook herself out of her thoughts. A light had come on: incoming message.

“Captain Vatta,
Glennys Jones
,” she said.

“
Glennys Jones
, this is the Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation ship
Victor
. Does your ship have active gravity controls?”

“Yes,” Ky said, through a throat gone suddenly tight and dry. “Confirm active gravity controls.”

A long wait… minutes crawled past, each seeming years long, before a reply came through. Unboosted communication, then:

“
Glennys Jones
cease boost, repeat, cease boost. Transmit cargo manifest, personnel manifest, vessel’s operational status on this channel within one standard hour. Crew personal effects need not be enumerated but all weapons must be listed. Personnel manifest to include full name, state of origin, current citizenship, age, sex, occupation. Operational status to include systems status. Prepare for inspection. Acknowledge.”

“They’re going to
board
us?” Lee said; he sounded scared. Ky was glad someone else had voiced that fear.

“Maybe… maybe not.” Easier to be calm when she had someone else to be calm for. “They might just do an external inspection.” Unlikely but it was a chance.

“What can we do?” Lee asked. His voice was still tense, pitched higher than usual.

“Right now, what we’re told,” Ky said. “Cut the boost—we wanted to do that anyway. We can’t fight, we can’t run, and it won’t do us any good to argue.” She thumbed the transmitter. “
Glennys Jones
acknowledges: cut boost to zero accel, cargo and crew manifest, and ship operational status to be transmitted this channel within one hour.”

No immediate answer, of course. She looked at longscan again. There—one of the warships’ icons appeared next to one of the larger merchanters.

“Gary, I need the cargo manifest and an annotated crew list, including our four newbies—and check if anyone has anything a military boarding team might consider a weapon.”

“A good team could consider a pillow a weapon,”Garysaid. He sounded more grumpy than scared, but his expression was worried.

“Be serious. The kind of thing they’ll be upset about if we don’t declare it. Firearms, knives, that kind of thing.” Vatta Transport, like Slotter Key generally, had a relaxed attitude toward personal weapons. Crew were not supposed to take weapons off the ship onto foreign soil—which included orbital stations—but they could have anything on board which fit into their personal space.

“Ten minutes,”Garysaid. Ky turned toQuincy.

“You heard them. I need whatever they will consider relevant operational status.”

“Right. Fifteen minutes. I need to be sure I list all the warts.”

The lists, when completed, came toKy.She looked them over… a sad little list it seemed now. A crew of seeming nonentities, all from Slotter Key, with a boring utilitarian cargo, on a ship that could serve as a textbook example of antiquated, inefficient, and scrapworthy. “Weapons” included Mehar’s two pistol bows, twenty-three personal knives—mostly small folding pocketknives like Gary’s—and nine kitchen knives, from paring to chopping. Ky wondered about that—the mercenaries hadn’t said to include kitchen cutlery in the list but the big butcher knife would certainly kill someone.

She sent the lists off in good time, and turned on the intercom.

“We’ve received communication from Mackensee,” she told the crew. “As some of you already know, we’ve cut acceleration on their orders, and sent off cargo and crew manifest. They said prepare for inspection, so I expect that when they get around to it, they’ll come out here and look us over. They may board the ship to check our actual cargo against the manifest. Keep in mind that they have the guns and we don’t—we will comply with their orders until further notice.”

She wondered if she should have included the last three words.

“If any of you have any personal weapons which you failed to tell your section head about, do it immediately. I can think of few things that would anger a military commander more than finding concealed weapons.”

An hour later, she got her answer from the mercenaries: “Folding knives under six centimeters in length are of no concern, nor is kitchen cutlery. You will receive specific instructions for inspection.”

Riel had relieved Lee, and they had all eaten a sketchy meal, when the icon of a Mackensee warship appeared only a few hundred kilometers away. Near-scan bleeped a mass-proximity warning as the comdesk lit again. Ky nodded to Riel, who damped the warning siren.

“
Glennys Jones
, acknowledge.”

“
Glennys Jones
,” Ky said, dry-mouthed again; her heart raced in her chest. “This is Captain Vatta.”

“This is Mackensee ship
Victor
. We will be doing an exterior inspection prior to boarding. Lock down your controls; we don’t want accidents.”

Ky nodded to Riel, who pulled the safety cover over the controls and latched it.

“Controls locked,” she said.

“Describe your personnel vacuum lock.”

“It’s an emergency escape lock that provides access to an escape passage leading from the stern to crew quarters. Capacity is four.” Ky added the schematics to her voice message and heard a grunt from the other end.

“How old is this tub, anyway? That design’s ancient.”

“Keel laid eighty-seven years ago, refits in ’04 and ’38, last drive replacement in ’43.”

“What’s your normal personnel access?”

“The dockside forward, but it only opens to equal pressure within a few millibars.”

“All right. Here’s what you’re going to do. We do our exterior inspection. Meantime, get your crew assembled—do you even have a space big enough?”

“Crew rec, just barely.”

“Fine. Get them in there except for bridge watch; you can have one com tech—do you have a com tech?”

“Not separately, no, sir.”

“Well, someone to handle communications, and your pilot on watch. They’re to sit quiet, hands off the controls, and wait. The rest of the crew, unlock personnel lockers for inspection, unlock all hatches, drawers, everything. Put all personal weapons except small pocket knives in the galley—you do have a galley, right? You listed kitchen cutlery—”

“We have a galley, yes.”

“Lay out all the weapons in the galley. Unlock, but leave closed, the food storage units. Now—your cargo holds are aired up or vacuum?”

“Aired up,” Ky said.

“Are your cargo loading hatches vacuum capable?”

“Only one of them,” Ky said. “And they’re small, compared to modern ships.”

“Umm… our exterior scans are showing that. And you claim your FTL drive is nonfunctional. About time to scrap that old crock.”

Not now, she hoped. Not right this moment with them inside of it.

“Now for you—I am speaking to Captain K. Vatta, right?”

“Yes,” Ky said. Cold sweat ran down her backbone.

“You will proceed alone down the escape passage to the lock. You will not wear protective gear. You will tab in on the hardwire ship com, and wait for the signal from the boarding party; the code IDing our boarding party will be
blackfish
. You will operate the lock for our boarding personnel. Following their entrance, you will obey the orders of their commanding officer. If you disobey, your ship is toast. Got that?”

“Yes,” Ky said. “Operate the exterior lock for your boarding party, alone, not in pressure suit.”

“Good. You have approximately twenty minutes to prepare for inspection.” The connection went dead. Ky sat back, and took a long breath. Always breathe, her Academy instructors had said. What they hadn’t said was what to do after that breath, when you were stuck in a ship with no options.

She took another breath, and addressed the crew again, repeating the instructions she’d been given. She could feel the same fear seeping along the corridor, out of the bulkheads, that she herself felt. Who could she get to sit the comdesk in her absence? Who was the most levelheaded?Quincy?Gary? Mitt? They were the most experienced, but she needed them to keep their sections steady. Certainly not one of the newcomers, whose steadiness she didn’t know.

She calledQuincyseparately. “I need a calm person to sit the comdesk,” she said. “I’m supposed to wait near the emergency lock to cycle the boarding party in.”

“Not alone!”

“Yes, alone. That was specified. Just find me a com-watch person, Quincy. We’re going to try to get through this without casualties.” If it was possible. If they didn’t plan to blow the ship after taking off everything of value. She turned to Riel. “You’re officially second in command, Riel. I’m leaving you on the bridge; use your best judgment if something happens to me—”

“I don’t know—” All the faint condescension he’d shown her until now—experienced crew to the unqualified neo—had disappeared. “I never expected—”

“None of us did,” Ky said. “Suck it up, Riel; this isn’t a game. You’re on deck.” She couldn’t believe she was the one talking to him like this. She was younger, less experienced…

His face changed. “You’re not scared…” It was not quite a question.

Ky shook her head. “Scared or not scared isn’t the issue. You know that. It’s doing the job. You’re trained; you’ve got the experience; you’ll do it. And after all, the most likely thing to happen is that they look us over and decide we’re insignificant.”

“What if they’re grabbing people—hostages or recruits or whatever?”

Ky spread her hands. “I can’t stop them, Riel. But I don’t expect they will, not on a campaign.” She should think of something for him to do, something to occupy his mind, but nothing occurred to her and she couldn’t take the time. “You’ll do fine,” she said as she left the bridge.

She stopped by her cabin to use the toilet and straighten her hair. If she was going to meet these mercenaries, she was not going to look like a rat pulled out of a drain. She made sure that her stowage compartments were unlocked, and then moved quickly through the ship, past crew who were coming to the rec area, and made her own check of locks as quickly as she could. No time to inspect contents, but at least she could see for herself that lockers had been unlocked.

The hatch to the emergency escape passage, never locked, opened away from her. The passage lights came on as she entered, and began pulsing in sequence—intended to guide escapees in the right direction, but annoying now. She didn’t have time to worry about overriding the automatics. Ahead, the small bay just inside the vacuum lock glowed with warm colors from the amber and red outlining the lock’s inner hatch. Ky plugged the cord of the wall-hung exterior com unit to her earbug and waited. She had ample time to review the instructions for manual operation of the lock which were shown in print and illustration both on the bulkhead next to the comunit, and to look at the empty cubicle of the lock itself, shown on the monitor from the vidcam inside.

The voice, when it came, was far too loud. “
GLENNYS JONES
. BLACKFISH. BLACKFISH. OPEN UP.”

“Captain Vatta here. Initating outer hatch opening.” She pushed the buttons; servos whined and a vibration shivered under her. Aside from inspections, the vacuum lock was never opened and it resisted, finally coming loose with a
smuck
of pressure seal. A vidcam went blurry as the pressure loss caused momentary condensation, then cleared again. Armored figures moved into the lock interior; behind them something thin and glistening stretched into the dark. Ky stared at the monitor. Dark armor, streaked with thin lines of metallic paint in a spare, abstract pattern, hung with bulges that must be equipment. Very obvious weapons—

“Close outer lock,” came the command in her headset.

“Closing outer lock,” Ky said. The outer lock closed slowly, hesitated. One of the figures reached back, grabbed the inside push bar, and yanked; the hatch thunked shut. “Pressuring up,” Ky said. Air hissed into the lock; when pressure equalized, inner hatch controls were enabled. “Opening inner lock,” Ky said.