Trading in Danger (3 page)

“Take care, Vatta,” MacRobert said. “And remember what I said; you have friends here…”

At the last moment, she stripped off the class ring and handed it to him. “You’ll know where this should go,” she said. She couldn’t keep it; she could only hope that MacRobert would get it back to him discreetly, that Hal would understand.

The car moved off, sedately, rejoining the traffic stream, and turning at the first corner; Ky glanced to the right and saw a crowd of news vans partway down that block. What, she wondered, did MacRobert want her to remember? That he was kind as well as brusque? Or how stupid she’d been?

The Vatta employees in the front seat didn’t talk on the way to their first stop, the warehouse office at 56 Missalonghi. There, the escort got out and her uncle Stavros climbed into the backseat with her.

“Kylara, my dear… are you all right?”

“I’m…” She did not want to come apart in front of Uncle Stavros, father of the notorious Stella. “I’m fine.” A lie, and they both knew it, but the right thing to say.

“We’re going over to the airfield—” That would be the private airfield, of course. “You’ll be on a flight to Corleigh; your parents had to run over there to take care of some business a week ago.”

Ky put her mind back to work: Corleigh. Tik plantations. Source of both wealth and problems, because the labor force knew all too well what tik extract brought on the interstellar market, and felt they weren’t getting enough of the profits. “Pickers or packers?” she asked.

Her uncle nodded approvingly. “Packers. The pickers got a new contract last year, and the packers insist they add more value and need another two percent on top of the five percent increase year before last.”

She hadn’t seen the sales figures for tik extract since the holiday before last. “So… what’s the quote running?”

“Thirty-eight two seven—down a hundredth from last year; Devann’s come into production, though we judge their product only third-rate. I think the market’ll be back up, but we’ll see.”

Ky knew her uncle had brought this up mostly to distract her, but it did make the journey easier. “What’s their production base?”

“Twenty thousand hectares, five thousand in eight-year-olds, five each in seven, six, and four. Rumor has it they lost their entire planting five years ago, and all the surviving trees lost a year’s maturity. Soil’s good, climate’s marginal.”

“Labor force?”

“Well, now, that’s more of a problem for them than they want to admit, and that’s where their quality falls off. They recruited from the immigrant lists, and none of ’em are experienced. Most of the ag-credentialed immigrants are row croppers who know nothing about trees. What I hear from the market is that their pickers are damaging the fruit, and the packers aren’t tossing the damaged stuff. It’s been a year longer than they planned, after all, getting any income off the place at all, so they’re trying to make it up.”

Ky glanced out the window as the car swerved; they were nearing the private airfield now, and a truck with the blue and red Vatta Transport insignia had slowed for the turn into the cargo bays. Their car sped on to the passenger entrance, paused at the check station for their driver to flash the scans, then followed the service road past the elegant little charter terminal with its tropical garden and colonnade, for those departing or arriving on chartered flights, and on around past the private terminals to the Vatta Transport complex, all in blue with red trim. Sitting out on the apron was the sleek little twin-engine craft in which Kylara had flown from island to island most of her life.

“You can’t pilot yourself today, Ky,” her uncle said, as the car slowed. “Under the circumstances—”

Her vision blurred. She knew she wasn’t safe to pilot anything, not like this, but—

“It’s Gaspard; you remember him.” She did; Gaspard Ritnour had been her first flying instructor, though the family wasn’t supposed to know that. “Let’s get you aboard.” Kylara moved quickly from the car to the aircraft. Automatically she put her feet in the right places on the step and wing, and started to slide into the copilot’s seat.

“You’d better ride in the passenger compartment,” her uncle said.

Ky felt herself flushing. “I won’t try to grab the controls,” she said.

“It’s not that, Ky,” her uncle said. “Gaspard—explain it to her; if she’s going to ride up front you’ll have to take steps. I need to get back—”

Ky buckled in and one of the ground crew slammed the door.

Ky said nothing as Gaspard finished preflight; he didn’t explain what her uncle had meant. She sat quietly, waiting. One thing she’d learned at the Academy was how to wait without fidgeting. She did not even put on the copilot’s headset.

Gaspard murmured into his own voice pickup—contacting traffic control, she assumed. Then he turned to her.

“Put your headset on,” he said.

“Why?” Ky asked.

“You’re visible up here.” It took her a moment to figure out what he meant. Anyone looking in—with a long lens for instance—could see her, whereas back in the passenger compartment the smaller windows had little shades.

“Damn,” Ky said, snatching the headset. It wouldn’t be enough, she knew. She shrugged out of her uniform jacket and tossed it onto the seat behind; Gaspard pointed behind her. A Vatta crew flight jacket, matching Gaspard’s, hung there. She pulled it on quickly, then twisted to see if she could shut the window shades back in the passenger compartment… but someone had already done that.

“They’ll assume a regular flight crew,” Gaspard said. “Unless you’re sitting there in cadet blue… with insignia…” Ky fumbled at her blouse collar; she’d forgotten the collar insignia, which a long lens might be able to catch. They were embroidered; she would have to turn the collar under. She did that while he signaled the ground crew, and let the plane roll forward slowly.

“Better,” Gaspard said.

Would the headset obscure enough of her face, though? She swung the voicelink up as far as possible. They were out from between the Vatta hangars, onto the taxiway. A single-engine yellow plane swung onto the taxiway in front of them. Ky looked down at the familiar checklist. If she was to be the copilot… this is what she would be doing.

They moved on. As they passed the little terminal parking lot, Gaspard said, “Do something that looks good.”

Immediately, Ky pulled up the manual checklist and reached overhead as if going through a final preflight.

“What I love about flying with you, Ky, is that you always react the right way,” Gaspard said. Ky looked at him, surprised; the grin he was aiming down the centerline of the taxiway looked genuine. “That couldn’t have looked more natural if you’d rehearsed it for days. I spotted a fire truck in the wrong place. Now… we’re going to be really exposed during takeoff and for the first hour. Since you’re already up here, and I entered for two crew just in case, you’ll have to stay here.” He paused. “I know your uncle said no flying, but someone’s got to be traffic watch, and if you can help…”

“I can help,” Ky said.

“Good. I’ll take ’er up, but you stay on the controls with me.”

Ky turned up the volume in her headset and heard traffic control give them clearance for takeoff after the little yellow plane. They paused as the yellow plane swung into position; she could see it shudder and then begin its takeoff roll. She checked the boards. This plane had every avionics gadget, and an AI autopilot perfectly capable of handling almost every contingency, but Gaspard preferred to take off and land on manual, to keep his skills current. “And because it’s just plain fun,” he said now, as he usually did. “There’s something atavistic about shoving the throttles forward myself.”

She felt the same way, as they turned into position and the power of the engines fought the brakes for a moment before Gaspard released them. She loved it all, from the acceleration down the runway to the moment when they left the ground to the steep climb out over the factory district.

Once they were a half hour offshore, at cruising altitude, Gaspard relaxed and pulled out his hotpak of coffee. “Well, girl, I’m not sure what anthill you kicked—or kicked you—but your father and uncle were certainly upset. Want to tell me about it?”

“I… can’t. Can’t fly and talk about it, anyway.”

“Fine. Let me finish this and I’ll take it back.” He swallowed quickly and relieved Ky at the controls. “Not that I’m pushing you, you understand, but.” But he wanted to know. Of course.

“I had to resign from the Academy,” Ky said.

He whistled. “Didn’t you keep your antifertility implant up to date?”

“Not that! I wouldn’t…!” She stole a glance at him.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—what else could make you do it? Your family’s not yanking you out for some business reason…?”

“No,” Ky said. “I… did something stupid. It caused a stink. Such a big stink they wanted me gone.”

“You? I can’t imagine what big stink you could cause. Now if you were a bonehead like that kid who told a Miznarii priest that he was being treated unfairly and prevented from practicing his religion, and that the service was hostile to Miznarii and had a policy of putting them—how did he say it? first in danger, last in promotion—that is what I’d call a big stink.”

Ky’s heart sank. “That… was my fault.”

“Your fault? How? You aren’t even… oh shit, Ky, you were just helping someone again, weren’t you? What’d you do, get him in contact with this Miznarii?”

“Yes.” She could hear that her voice was choked with tears.

“Um. I can understand they might be peeved with you—it’s headlined in the news—but it’s not bad enough to make you resign.”

“They think it is.”

“They’ll wish they hadn’t,” Gaspard said. “Though it may take them a while. So… you’re in disgrace, is that it?”

All the misery broke through, and she felt tears burning in her eyes. She couldn’t speak.

“Thing is, Ky, disgrace doesn’t last forever.” She caught the quick movement of his head as he turned to look at her and looked away, out the window, where a blanket of cloud lay between them and the East Shallows.

“It can,” Ky said.

“Usually doesn’t,” Gaspard said. “Whatever stupid things you do, you can do smart ones later.”

“Somehow I don’t think so,” Ky said. “When I try my hardest, that’s when I do stupid things.”

He looked at her. “It’s not my place…” he began.

“Oh, go on, everyone else will lecture me, too.”

“I’m not going to lecture you.” He looked out the side window, sighed, and engaged the autopilot. “Logged: all boards clear, no traffic reported or scanned. Estimated flight time three hours fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll be home in time for supper,” Ky said. Her throat closed again. It had all happened too fast. She’d awakened as a senior cadet, in the honor squad; she’d eaten breakfast at the head of a table of cadets, in charge of that table, reminding the lowly cads to sit straight on the edge of their chairs and take no sugar in their drinks. She’d eaten that scrap of lunch in the Commandant’s library as a disgraced ex-cadet, and tonight she would eat supper in the family dining room, the family disgrace come home to roost.

“You want to talk about it?” Gaspard asked. He was only ten years or so older than she was, she thought. Younger than the Commandant or her father, older than all but one of her brothers.

“You know.” Her hands moved as if of themselves. “I tried to help, and it blew up in my face.”

“You know this kid well?”

“Mandy? He’s—he was—in my diviso. Last year the cad intake officer asked me to take him under my wing. Third-years get handed a cad to baby-sit. Mandy was mine. He had a rough time, being Miznarii, but he did fairly well.” The Miznarii considered even implants immoral modifications of the basic human, so those of their children seeking higher education were always at a disadvantage. They attended only those institutions where students had to study without implant assistance, but, as with the Academy, the other students had used them before.

“As well as you did?”

“No, but—” Her voice trailed away. Who would expect a Miznarii from Cobalt Hole to do as well as she had? “Better than expected,” she finished.

“So… you give the kid a model he can’t reach, and he asks you to do him a favor, and then he backstabs you. Think he did this just to cross you?”

She hadn’t considered one way or the other. What did Mandy’s intention matter? It was betrayal even if not intended.

“I think… I think he meant to get the Academy in trouble.”

“More than you?”

“Yes.” As she thought about it, more than that, even. “I think he wanted to get the whole system in trouble. The War Department, the Academy, the military, maybe even Slotter Key.”

“Yeah. And you were collateral damage, maybe.”

“Probably.” It hurt, even so. She had thought Mandy appreciated what she’d done for him, all the hours spent tutoring and rehearsing.

“He want to sleep with you?”

Ky felt the wave of heat up her neck. “If he did, it would have been unpro—wrong of me—to have noticed.”

“If? You honestly don’t know?”

She knew, all right. She knew perfectly well why Cad Mandy Rocher had pulled off his overrobe slowly, stretching, before the underclass wrestling matches. She knew he’d wanted her. No word had been spoken. No word need be.

Gaspard nodded as if she’d answered aloud. “So he lusted after you and you repulsed him.”

“I didn’t repulse him!” Ky said. “I just didn’t encourage him.” He could stretch all he wanted and it did nothing for her; she had Hal in her mind’s eye and there was no comparison.

“Dirty little scum,” Gaspard said. Ky glanced at his face; he looked like someone about to be very angry.

“I’m sorry,” Ky said.

“Not your fault,” Gaspard said. “You’re a good girl, Ky; you always have been. Taken advantage of, and thank all the gods you don’t believe in it went no farther. You’re well out of that.”

“I thought you thought I would be a good officer…”

“I did. You would have been. But a waste, in a way.” He grinned at her. “Never mind. Just think of them all, in their stiff scratchy uniforms, while we’re flying down to the sunny isles of delight. Out of that nasty cold—”

“I like the cold,” Ky said. She did not want to think of Hal, who might be storming up the stairs to the Commandant’s office to find out where she was at this very moment…

“That’s not what you’ve said other leaves.”

“No, but—all right. Yo ho for the tropics.” Her laugh sounded hollow, and he shook his head at her.

“I know it seems like the end of the world to you—that’s because you are a good’un and you care. But life goes on, Ky, and you’ll get over this. You don’t want to hear it but it’s true, just like you didn’t want to hear that there were things you couldn’t do with an airplane… but that was also true.”

“All right, all right.” She stared out at the blanket of cloud. Ahead, it frayed into puffs more and more isolated… and as they flew nearer that edge, the blue sea showed below. There to starboard, the distinctive hook shape of Main Gumbo, from this altitude a flat outline of white surf filled in with dark vegetation. She looked sunward… the wakes of ships showed clearly as darker ripples against the even pattern. In the passage betweenMainand Little Gumbo, a tanker surrounded by its attendants. Crawdad, beyond Little Gumbo, was a many-legged dark blot.

An hour later, the dark blue lightened as they neared the Necklace Reefs. From cobalt through every shade of turquoise, as the water grew more shallow, until at last the ragged brown tops of the reefs broke through white surf.

Corleigh showed at last: a dark line that thickened, surrounded by shallower water that looked, from this height, like bands of blue and turquoise, each shade defining a depth. They flew over the main harbor, with its guardian headlands rising sharply from the water; surf broke white on the rocks. Ky counted two cargo ships, the interisland ferry, and a thick cluster of small craft before they were past the harbor and over the warehouses of the harbor district. Beyond those, the neat little town, with its central park, a green square with the spire of the War Memorial glinting in the sun. Corleigh’s small commercial airfield had a scatter of small craft parked in a row; Ky knew that the daily Island Air service would be two hours behind them.

Inland,HarborValleysloped gently toward the central ridge; Gaspard banked left and Kylara looked down on the vast tik plantations between the coastal cliffs and the higher ridge with its mixed scrub. Not a monoculture: these were old plantations, interplanted with secondary and tertiary crops in a careful balance to maximize both production and resilience.

On the far side of the ridge, she knew, were the newer plantings. She had imagined bringing Hal to meet her family, on graduation leave; he was a mainlander and had never seen the far islands. She would have been explaining it to him, the order of the plantings, the yields of the different ages… She pushed that thought back.

Ahead, the island narrowed and the central ridge sloped abruptly down to end in a rumple of lower hills; she could see the outer reef’s ruffle of surf beyond them. Taller trees, the sheltering groves of the Vatta household, cloaked the landward side of the hills. Gaspard called the Vatta home field as he eased their plane down, neatly countering the predictable gusts that swept between the twin hills. Ky felt her throat close. She had been able to let her mind drift, while in the air, but soon she would have to face her family.

She stared out the window, noting that the jabla trees were in bloom, pink fluffy puffs among the darker green of the haricond and jupal. The red tile roofs of the house and outbuildings showed among the green, with a sudden flash of light from the big pool. Nearer to the runway were the office buildings, utilitarian cream blocks topped with solar panels, but neat, with a ruffle of red and blue flowers on either side of the main door.

“Give us a hand, Ky,” Gaspard said. Ky yanked her attention back to the instruments, and called out items on the checklist as Gaspard made the final approach. Then they were down, and rolling. Ky turned her collar right side out, and reached back for her uniform jacket. She was not going to come home disheveled and disorganized. By the time Gaspard had taxied to the parking line, where old George waited to hook up the tie-downs, she was ready to pass—well, not any official inspection, but any of the staff.

“Good to see you home,” George said. “You didn’t belong with the likes of them slimes anyway.”

Ky knew it would do no good to tell him they weren’t slimes. George, veteran of the Second War, loathed mainlanders. He had refused regen treatment for his leg because it would have meant a mainland hospital.