Trading in Danger (4 page)

“I’ll take your bags,” George said now. “Your dad wants to see you right away.” He moved stiffly to the luggage compartment.

Ky turned to the office building. No one was coming out to meet her—normal. Were they going to pretend all this was normal? The sea breeze, moist and fragrant, lay its hand on her cheek, and she wanted to yield to it, to be soothed by it, but she was no longer the child who had left here four years ago.

Inside the front door, cooler air swirled around her. She faced a warren of desks and workstations, most occupied by obviously busy people who barely looked up as she entered. On her left, the familiar corridor led to the row of walled offices: her father’s, her uncle’s, her elder brothers’.

She hesitated a moment outside the door to her father’s office, then tapped, and opened the door.

Her father looked up from his desk as she came in. “Kylara, beshi… you look like you must feel.”

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not. Come here—” He came out from behind his desk and held out his arms. Ky leaned into his embrace. “Shhh, shhhh,” he murmured, though she had made no sound. He smelled of the tik plantations he must have walked around that morning, a complex scent she had known forever.

“I didn’t know,” she said, into his shoulder. “I thought I was helping…”

His shoulder twitched. “Do you remember your fifth birthday party?”

How could she ever forget when they kept bringing that up? She had pushed Mina Patel into the wading pool, and Mina had contrived to fall crooked and cut her head on the one place the rim’s padding had worn away, because she’d kept her hair bows on, in spite of Ky’s advice to take them off or they’d get wet. And it had been for a good cause, because Mina had been tormenting her little sister Asha, who was afraid of the water, and was about to push her, when Ky shoved Mina. Mina had grabbed at Asha when she overbalanced, so they’d both screamed and Ky had been sent inside, at her own birthday party, to sit in glowering misery in her room while her friends ate her birthday cake and her mother—her own mother—made a fuss over Mina Patel.

“You have to learn to think first, Kylara,” her father said now, his hands on her shoulders pushing her gently back so he could give her That Look.

“I did think,” she said. “At least, I thought it was thinking…”

“Well… I’m sure you meant well,” he said. “Now we have to figure out what to do with you—”

She had thought of that, in the last moments before landing. “I could go to the university and finish a degree,” she said. “I have almost enough credits—”

“No,” he said firmly. “We can’t have that. You can’t be here; there’s too much publicity.”

“I could go to Darien Tech, over on Secci…”

“No. It’s out of the question. I’ve already decided—” He paused as someone tapped on the office door. “Who is it?”

“Me.” Ky’s older brother Sanish opened the door and put his head in. “Are you busy—oh,Ky.You’re here.”

As if he didn’t know. As if they didn’t all know. As if he hadn’t come to gloat, in a big-brotherish way.

“Come on in, San. I was just telling Kylara what we came up with.”

“You were in on this?” Ky asked. She could feel her neck getting hot.

“All I did was look up figures,” San said, spreading his hands. “Don’t blame me.”

“We weren’t going to tell you until after supper,” her father said. “But since you are here a little early… and after all, your mother wants her time with you…”

Her heart sank. While she’d been sitting, bored and miserable, in the plane on the flight out, they’d had time to plot out her whole life, probably. Just like when she was thirteen, and they’d decided that a trip in space as an apprentice on a Vatta freighter would get that nonsense about the military out of her head.

“We think it’s clever,” her father said, with a glance at San that told Ky exactly who he thought was the clever one of the family. Not her, of course. “You’ll have a chance to prove yourself, and you’ll be well out of the way.”

Out of the way. Like a naughty child. She was not going to cry. “Well, what is your marvelous idea?” she asked in a voice that even she could hear sounded sulky.

“We’re sending you out to the Rift with a ship going to salvage,” her father said. “You’ll have a cargo on the way out, sell the ship, then come back commercial. Altogether it should take at least eleven months, and by then things will surely have died down.”

Ky glared at her father and older brother. “You’d think I’d blown up a ship,” she said.

“Don’t be overdramatic, Ky,” her father said. “No one’s accused you of anything like that. We’re trusting you to do family business. It’s an honor—”

“No. You’re sticking me in a corner. Hiding me—”

“We could do that well enough by giving you a job in inventory control right here at the tik plantations. Be reasonable,Ky.”

“But—I’ll be gone months and months—maybe years. And it’s boring—”

“The heat will be off you by then, and it may not be boring. You’ll be heading out into the Borderlands.”

“Maybe.” Ky glared, but she already knew she would take the job. What other choice did she have? “I guess it’s all right.”

“Good. You’re taking the
Glennys Jones
to Lastway. We’ll send you some help. Gary Tobai for loadmaster, Quincy Robin as crew chief.”

“Dad, they’re
old
.”

“They’re experienced. You need that. New captains—”

“Captain! You’re making me captain?”

“Were you listening? I offered you the ship.”

“I thought you meant as shipping agent or something. I don’t really know how to captain—”

“You have a license.”

“I have a license, yes, but I haven’t done it. I haven’t worked on a commercial ship since
Tugboat
… er,
Turbot.
”

“That’s why we’re sending along someone with experience. You’ll do fine,Ky.All you have to do is be guided byGaryand Quince.”

All she had to do was listen to her elders by the hour. But a ship—even an old wreck like
Glennys Jones
, and a captain’s listing—made up for a lot. “All right… thanks, Dad.”

“That’s better. Now, go over to the house. Your mother’s waiting. Oh, and we’ve scheduled your implant replacement.”

She knew better than to suggest a quick comcall instead, but she dreaded what her mother would say.

Sure enough, she had scarcely come through the door when her mother started in. “Kylara, how could you? You were just getting to know that nice Berlioz boy, and now—”

“Mother, I didn’t—”

“And look at you! You haven’t a bit of makeup on! How can you expect to find a young man if you go around looking like some tough off the docks?”

“Mother, please—”

“And your father says you’re going away for months, and I’ve had no time at all to take you around… If you’re out of circulation too long, you know, people will forget about you—”

“That’s the idea,” Ky said. Though if Charley Berlioz forgot about her that was all to the good. Despite her mother’s prodding, she had no interest in Charley. It was Hal… except now it wasn’t, almost certainly.

“Well, it’s all very well on the political side, but on the matrimonial side, it’s a disaster. They’ll go and marry unsuitable girls, rather than you, and Slotter Key is not exactly full of eligible boys.”

“Mother, I’m sure that eventually—” At least her mother was still harping on marriage into some civilian family; at least she hadn’t caught on about Hal, whom she would not have considered suitable.

“Well, we have to do something about your clothes.” Her mother started off down the hall; Ky trailed behind, feeling the same reluctance she had so often before. She knew what spacers wore, and what ship captains wore, and she knew, without waiting for her mother to say so, that those simple outfits were not what her mother had in mind.

“Even if you are in the wilds of the Borderlands,” her mother said, opening Ky’s closet. Ky could see that someone had already unpacked her luggage and put things away. “Even there, you must be prepared to present yourself properly. Perhaps even especially there.”

When her mother was in one of these moods, it was easy to forget she was also a professional engineer of considerable reputation. It was the family background, Ky thought: being the eldest daughter of a socialite—for Grandmother Benton was still making news in the gossip columns with her endless string of admirers.

“Not this. Not this either,” her mother said, flinging clothes to one side. “I know you thought you’d spend the rest of your life in uniform, dear, but surely you had more sense than this—” She held out an outfit in rust and green which, Ky had realized only after paying for it, made her look like someone a day away from death.

“Sorry, Mother,” she said.

“I don’t care what your father says, you simply must get some suitable clothes.” She eyed Ky up and down. “You aren’t shaped like anyone else in the family, worse luck. I can’t just tell you to put some meat on your bones. You have meat; it’s just not…”

“Mother!”

“Oh, be reasonable, Kylara. You’ll be representing the family; you must have clothes and they must fit. I’m not saying you’re ugly or misshapen; you’re just not…” Again her voice trailed away. “Well,” she said, after a moment’s awkward silence. “Measurements first and then we’ll see what we can order. Shops here on Corleigh are useless, but if something can be delivered to the ship before you leave, that will do.”

The last thing Ky wanted to do was stand in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her, but she stood in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her anyway. Halfway through, with her mother tut-tutting about the way the uniform had concealed what was after all an acceptable shape, it began to be funny. She wasn’t ready for it to be funny—for anything to be funny—but a bubble of laughter caught in her throat and she could feel the corners of her mouth turning up. Here she was, back home being measured for clothes yet again, clothes that would, she was sure, turn out to be impractical and uncomfortable.

“What are you laughing at?” her mother asked, from knee level, without looking up. Her mother always knew, without having to see Ky’s face, when the ill-timed laugh demon caught her in the throat.

“Nothing,” Ky said, sulky again.

“It’s not funny,” her mother said, scribing her lower legs, her ankles, her feet.

It was, though. Everything else in the universe was horrible, but this one thing was funny.

The dinner chime saved her from unseemly giggles; her mother stood abruptly. “You’ll want to get out of that,” she said, without specifying what that was. They both knew.

Ky took off the uniform she had been so proud to put on that morning, stepped into the ’fresher briefly, and put on loose slacks, blouse, and overrobe for dinner. She left the remnants of her past on the bed. Someone would take them away, clean them, fold them, put them somewhere… She didn’t care where.

Dinner on the wide veranda… Father, Mother, and Sanish. Ky slid into her usual seat, facing the garden. Candles flickered in the evening air. Someone had gone to the trouble of preparing a festive meal—they had had, she realized, the hours she was in the air to put it together. The haunch of ’lope, boned, stuffed, and rolled, in a pastry crust. The stuffed grape leaves. The “tower of heaven” salad. Once again her body surprised her with its insistence on refueling; she ate ravenously but barely touched the wine.

Her father and San talked of island politics—not the labor dispute, but such things as the proposed new desalinization plant, the possibility of a branch of the central university on the island, the state of the waste recycling facility at Harbor Town. Ky listened as if to a debate on the vid; it all felt unreal. Too many changes too fast.

“We have to have enough time to get her some clothes,” her mother said suddenly. Her father and San stopped in the midst of telling each other what an idiot Councilman Kruper was.

“How long?” her father asked.

“I can get clothes offworld,” Ky said.

“No,” both her parents said. Her father sighed.

“Ky, you’re going to be a Vatta captain; you will represent Vatta Transport. You have to start out with something suitable. But Myris”—he turned to his wife—”it has to be quick. Three days.”

“Impossible,” her mother said. “We don’t have a fabricator here; we’ll have to go toHarborTownand that’s—”

“Less than an hour by plane.
Glennys
would have left tomorrow, but I put a hold on her. We can’t delay; we have delivery commitments.”

Delivery commitments were, her father had once said, a natural force. Vatta Transport’s default rate on delivery commitments was the lowest in the industry and one reason for their wealth.

“Five,” her mother said.

“Four. Absolutely no more. And she doesn’t need much. Captain’s uniforms, shipboard and port. Not much more than that.”

“Kylara, we’ll start ordering after dinner,” her mother said. “Bond Tailoring will have to do. I’d much rather you used Siegelson & Bray, but they can’t possibly do it in less than a week…” Her mother glared at her father.

“Four days,” her father said. “You have the measurements; you can start without her. Tonight, Ky, we’ll go by the clinic and get your implant in—that’ll let you sleep on it so you’ll be in cycle in the morning. All loaded with the current codes and everything.”

She had not had an implant since she left for the Academy—cadets weren’t allowed them. She was used to doing without, though she had missed her implant a lot that first year at the Academy. She was not sure she wanted one again. But she needed the extra capacity, with all she had to learn in a hurry. She shrugged. Better an implant insertion than more talk about clothes. “I’m ready,” she said.

Insertion went easily; the implant access port still met all the specs, so all she needed was the device itself. She expected the moment of nauseating disorientation, the strange visual auras, the itch in her nose. Before she could access the implant, she had to go through the initialization protocols—the longest part of an insertion—and then the implant unfolded in her mind like a flower, each petal a gateway to another database. The displays flickered past, the communications links—now activated only for the clinic units—let her answer the questions without speaking aloud.