Trading in Danger (6 page)

Ky paused for breath. Tobai had been nodding approval, but when she paused he didn’t say anything. She went on. “So now she’s due for recertification, but she probably wouldn’t pass, and they’re shipping her off to Lastway. I know all that, all that’s in the listing. What I don’t know is what her other peculiarities are. Things not in the list. I’m sure you do, because you’ve probably crawled all over her with a microscanner.”

“You’re right about that,” Tobai said. “I’ve shipped on her five times in all, but not in the past seven years, so I had to renew my acquaintance with the lady.”

“This old—”

“Now don’t say that. It never does for the captain to badmouth the ship. Ships are sensitive.”

Ships were metal, ceramic, polymer machines; they had brains of a sort, but no feelings. Ky had been told that the first time she came aboard a ship. But however sensitive the ship wasn’t, Gary Tobai was, and she wanted him on her side.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Better not to say it at all, then,” he said. “Now—what you need to know is that we have to load the starboard main hold first, then the port auxiliary, starboard auxiliary, main port, and the third auxiliary, if we use it, last. We need at least a half point more mass to starboard, or she won’t stay in trim. That last engine refit did something screwy to the frame, though no one will admit it. There’s also a problem with the attitude jets, but all I have is hearsay. Quince could tell you more about that.”

“Dad says they’ve assembled a cargo for us—are you satisfied with it?”

“All done, including crew trading,” Tobai said. “How much are you reserving for crew shares?”

“A scrap run, one-way? What’s the usual split?”

“I’d recommend the third auxiliary hold. That’s 15 percent of the total. Limit it to luxuries, is what I told them. Retain 4 percent for captain’s space, and split the remaining 11 percent by seniority.”

“I’ve already bought in for 10 percent; should I donate the 4 percent?”

“No, crew would wonder what was going on if you didn’t claim it. We’re going to have trouble enough; your father had to pay a surcharge for a one-way trip since they can’t make a profit on the way back. Whether you fill it or not, reserve it. Your dad sent over some; he said you wouldn’t have time to deal, but I could add a few things…”

“Fine.” She could put Aunt Gracie’s miserable cakes in there and no one would ever know. “If you come across something that would be prime at Lastway, let me know. I’m up to my nose in chores, and we’re supposed to push for a quick departure.”

He grinned again. “That’s what I like to see: captains doing more than sitting in the captain’s chair.”

When she got to her cabin, she found a stack of packages: presents from her parents, from her brother San, from… she stared at the card that had come with a child’s kit for a military ship, a Dragon-class cruiser. MacRobert had sent her a present? She ripped open the envelope. In the same precise, blocky letters that had once informed her, in her first winter as a cadet, that she had two demerits for the state of her bunk, he offered best wishes. “If you ever need to let us know about something,” the message went on, “remember that dragons breathe fire. I will be most interested in your progress with this model.”

That was beyond odd; Ky stared at it a long moment before putting the model kit on the back of her closet shelf, on top of the note. She could not imagine what she would need to tell the space service, besides something rude and anatomically impossible. MacRobert’s rumored connection to covert operations ghosted through her mind—but that was cadet gossip, surely? And why would he pick a disgraced exile like her to work with even if it were true? She turned to the other presents.

Her parents had, with their usual practical approach, sent her a sizable letter of credit for Lastway. For clothes, her mother suggested; her father, who signed it last, said “For yourself.” Ky measured the amount against the upgrades the ship needed and came up very short. Still, it was a start. San had sent her a polished tik seed; it fit comfortably in the palm of her hand, its glossy surface a rich red-brown. She put it in her pocket, where she could touch it often; the letter of credit she put in the lockdown of her desk.

“Captain?” Someone tapped at her door. “Need a time for castoff, Captain.”

She had forgotten that very elementary detail. She was the one who had to say “Cast off at 1400” or whatever she chose. She opened the door to find Riel Amat, her senior pilot, waiting with a databoard. He looked a little older than the picture she had in the crew list.

“We can be ready by 1320, ma’am, or anytime after,” he said. “Traffic Control says they’re expecting some congestion later, but should be clear until 1500. They’re asking for a time.”

“Advice?”

“Fourteen thirty would be about right, ma’am, with a little leeway each way…”

“Fourteen thirty it is, then, Riel. Thanks. Anything else I need to be doing?”

“There’s paperwork on the bridge, sign-offs and stuff. Crew’s all aboard, accounting’s cleared, they just need your signature.”

“I’ll be right there.”

He nodded and turned away. Kylara took a deep breath, glanced at herself in the mirror… the uniform
did
fit well, no doubt about it. Still the whole situation felt unreal. She, Kylara Vatta, was about to go into space as captain of her own—well, her family’s—ship. And she didn’t even know enough to set a departure time without asking her pilot. What was she thinking? And yet, she was the captain, and she was going. Excitement stirred; for the first time, the thought of her former classmates brought no pain. They would be sitting in class—or studying—and she was on her way into space. It hardly seemed a fit punishment.

Quincy Robin, whose space-fresh skin belied her sixty-plus years of experience, met Ky in the starboard passage as she headed for the bridge. “I heard about you, youngster. Good work.”

“Not everyone thinks so,” Ky said, hoping for a compliment.

“What did you want, a ship
and
praise?”Quincysaid. “They don’t give ships to people for doing bad work.”

“Even old ones about to go to scrap?”

“Someone has to take them,”Quincysaid. “She’s not so bad. She was a good ship in her time. Did you know she pioneered the Foregone run? I wasn’t on her then, but a few years later I served on her when her class was the backbone of the Vatta fleet. Go anywhere, do anything—that was
Glennys
in her youth. And middle age, for that matter. It’s a shame she’s going to scrap.”

“What would she need to pass inspection?”

“Depends on whose inspection. She’s safe for this trip, in the hands of people with some sense. Her drives are good enough. Her attitude controls, though, really need to be replaced. The last three adjustments haven’t held more than a few months each. For Slotter Key registration, she’d need an upgraded environmental system. The one she’s got is safe, but not up to modern standards; the new regulations they passed last year will catch up with her. Her reserve tanks are five hundred liters short. Then her navigation system is out of spec for age. Thing is, it’s full of proprietary data and software that would be hard to transfer to a newer one.”

“So what would it cost to bring her up?”

Quincypursed her lips. “You could probably do it for—oh—five to seven million. And out on a frontier world like Lastway, she’ll bring ten to eleven as scrap, and some idiot may try to keep her whole and run her even farther out in the Borderlands. I wouldn’t, not without some work.”

Old Ferrangia Vatta had started with a beat-up tramp cargo ship when the Scattering suddenly pulled away the best ships and left the rest of human-occupied space in disarray.
Miss Molly
still belonged to the family, displayed in the Number One repair slot. Ky, along with her generation of school kids, had clambered through
Miss Molly
’s narrow passages and old-fashioned ladders, and listened to the story of those perilous first voyages.

And now she had a ship of her own… bound for scrap or glory. It seemed an easy choice. Easy, tradition said, was also stupid. It wasn’t really her ship; it belonged, as its registration stated, to Vatta Transport, not Ky Vatta. Ky settled into the captain’s chair on the bridge, inserted her command wand, and started working on the many, many, many forms that captains had to sign off before a ship could be cleared for castoff.

Between these chores, she glanced at the bridge crew. Sheryl Donster, navigator. Seven years with Vatta Transport, formerly on
Agnes Perry
. She was heavyset, light-haired, and staring intently at a screen full of numbers; Ky had no idea what the numbers were. Ky wondered why her father had wasted a navigator’s time on a run like this. The routes had all been mapped; she had current data cubes that should send the ship on automatic from one mapped jump point to another. They wouldn’t need a navigator unless something went wrong.

Riel Amat, senior pilot and second in command. Eleven years with Vatta Transport, and before that a space service veteran. Lean, dark, clearly an Islander like her. Her implant told her he’d been born on Little Gumbo. Ky wondered what he thought of her, if he knew why she’d left the Academy. His expression gave nothing away.

The least experienced, pilot-junior Lee Quidlin, had only two years deepspace, as pilot-apprentice on
Andrea Salar
, but he’d been born on Slotter Key’s main orbital station and had been planetside only during senior school. He had a broad, friendly face under a shock of taffy-colored hair.

All solid, experienced, personnel who could probably make this trip with no captain at all. She would have to prove herself. She would have to make no mistakes. With that thought, she went back to the paperwork.

Undock and castoff went smoothly; Ky had nothing to do but sit in the captain’s couch and watch her experienced crew do what they had done so often before. The tug towed them out to regulation distance and stood by while Engineering powered up the main insystem drive and tested the backup. All functioned nominally.
Glennys Jones
set off on course with no fuss and no surprises.

And with no speed. Functional, efficient insystem drive though she had, it produced less than 80 percent of the acceleration of newer systems. It would be days, not hours, before they dared shift into hyper. Before anything disastrous was likely to happen.

During those days, Ky tried to adjust to her new reality. No fixed schedule, no rapid alternation of classes, physical training, study periods. The empty hours seemed endless. Ky read and reread the manuals for every ship system and followed her crew around asking questions until everyone was snappish. They had seemed so levelheaded before the journey; she worried about the possibility of contamination in the environmental system until, on the fourth day, she overheard Tobai explaining to Beeah Chok, engineering second, that it was just new-captain’s-disease, and they both laughed. She backed away, went to her cabin, and dosed herself with a soporific.

Ten hours later she awoke clearheaded and cheerful. Even Aunt Gracie’s cakes didn’t seem an insoluble problem. She could almost believe that someone, somewhere might find them palatable… or useful as doorstops or something. She tried not to think about her past, and found that not-thinking easier when surrounded by the worn fabric of old
Glennys
and the routine of a ship in passage. She set herself daily tasks—exercises both physical and mental.

Day by day she learned more about her crew, always uncomfortably aware that they were all older than she was, all more experienced. The youngest, Mehar Mehaar, had still spent several years on ships. How could they respect her, she wondered? How could they believe she was anything but a rich girl, captain only by the grace of wealth? She continued to study, pushing herself to disprove what she was sure they thought. At the end of each ship day, she wrote up her log, though it mostly consisted of one paragraph listing all systems as nominal. If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror—as one of her instructors had said—then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection.

Only now and again she wondered what her classmates were doing—what had happened to Mandy Rocher? what was Hal thinking? were the critical midterms coming up or just past?—and put it quickly out of mind. That was behind her; now she had a mission—a job, she corrected herself—and she could find some busywork to keep her mind occupied and those moments of reflection few and far between.

One of those mental occupations centered on the ship. Gaspard’s words kept picking at her. What if… what if she could make enough in trade to buy
Glennys
herself? And fix her up, and get her through an inspection, and own her own ship? Be an independent trader, like her ancestor.

Her father would have a cat. Her father would have a full-grown mountain cat sprouting green-feathered wings and a forked tail. Her orders were very specific. Transport the goods. Sell the ship. Bring the crew home commercial on the profit. She knew if she did that, she would be offered another position—maybe a better ship, maybe not—on another run, and in a few years she could be captain of one of Vatta’s showpieces. Her mother would keep looking for suitable husbands; she would in the end marry the scion of some other commercial family—someone from the energy field, perhaps, or even ’lope ranching. Not Hal, of course. Even if they ever met again, even if he still cared for her, he wouldn’t risk his career—she wouldn’t let him risk his career—marrying a woman who had been expelled from the Academy for a security breach. She would marry someone suitable for a rich commercial family, someone dull. She would leave ships, settle down, have a few children, work in the firm’s head office.

That put a chill down her back. The firm’s head office, across town from the Academy: plushly carpeted, paneled in solid wood of exquisite grain, with handwoven drapes, custom desks the size of her bed at home, and soft-spoken staff waiting hand and foot on the senior members of the family. As a senior member of the family—she saw herself twenty years on, a formidable matron in a watered-silk business suit, in an office like her uncle’s—she would interact with members of government, with the military. She imagined, so vividly that she broke out in a sweat, having to shake hands with one of her classmates—gods grant it wasn’t Sumi, who was probably working off a dozen black points for not being satisfied with someone’s explanation of where Ky had gone. Gods grant it wasn’t Hal. Whoever it was in uniform would know—would know she’d been expelled in disgrace—and in that handshake express either pity or ridicule or… something she didn’t want to face.