Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2) (8 page)

T
HE
new commander turned out to be right. Vicky and everyone else who thought eight drifting hulks could be converted back into working merchant ships in three weeks were very much the optimists.

Two ships were dropped from the fleet and three more added over the next four weeks as fitting out turned into more “fitting” than “out.” Only when all nine ships were declared ready and safe for space did the work of loading them with fuel, food, and various kinds of spare parts begin.

Vicky worried that every second’s delay meant little children starving to death. They haunted her dreams.

Then she discovered that delay could have benefits.

The small tramp freighter
Doctor Zoot
docked at the station, and Vicky found she had visitors.

Kit and Kat showed up, with Mr. Smith and Maggie in tow.

Vicky was delighted.

For all of five seconds.

Then paranoia kicked in.

“How did you know where I was?” she demanded of Mr. Smith.

“None of
us
knew
you
were the pot at the end of the rainbow,” he assured her. “The Navy asked me and these two gorgeous and diminutive assassins if we wanted to stay in the palace. What with you gone, it was getting rather boring. Hardly anyone was being murdered. A whole day might go by with only one new body, and it was hardly ever anyone we knew or cared about. So I said, yes, I’d love a free ticket to where I might have a better chance at snagging a job.”

Mr. Smith actually grinned. “It turned out that the Navy was negotiating a ride out with Kit and Kat as well. We didn’t know we were headed out together, or headed here until, well, we were headed here.”

“Maggie?” Vicky asked, turning to her oldest and best friend.

“I was spending my hours working in the palace infirmary,” Maggie said.

“And keeping us apprised of the odd assassination,” Mr. Smith added.

Maggie made a face. “I made no secret that I hated life in the palace and wanted to return to St. Petersburg. Passage was arranged. Imagine my surprise at the first meal to find these three seated at my table. There is no escaping the punishment for my many sins,” she said, eyes raised heavenward.

“I’m glad to have you back,” Vicky said, hugging the doctor who cared for her, really cared for her, in her youth. “I hope you’ll come with me.”

“Where are you headed?” Dr. Maggie asked.

“There are two planets where civilization has broken down. They’re past food riots and just short of cannibalism, or at least one of them is.”

“Eew,” Kit and Kat said, making faces.

“No doubt, they’ll need a doctor,” Maggie said.

“The Fleet of Desperation leaves as soon as we can get it all together,” Vicky said. “We should have sailed yesterday.”

“The Fleet of Desperation,” Mr. Smith said. “Are our chances any better than Kris Longknife’s Fleet of Discovery?”

“I’ll know more about that in a month or so,” Vicky admitted.

“So you’re just as optimistic as last time,” Mr. Smith said, with as inscrutable a shrug as you could expect from a part-time assassin/full-time spy.

“Pretty much,” Vicky admitted.

At least with her four friends, time passed a bit faster. Mr. Smith made it easier for Vicky to keep her vow of chastity toward all things Navy. He didn’t keep her from riding those who would have slowed down loading, but he might have contributed to her not chewing off any heads.

So it was that Vicky learned something from her two assassins.

That evening after supper, when Vicky was considering roaming the piers to see how the second shift was doing and knowing she could add nothing of real consequence to the effort, she noticed the two of them playing a game.

One would handcuff the other and hide a hairpin on that one’s person. The cuffed one would have to find the hairpin wherever it was, then get out of the cuffs.

The two of them were always out of the cuffs in under a minute.

Vicky watched them for a while, concluded she knew how it was done, and stepped forward.

“Can I take a try at that?”

“But of course, mademoiselle,” Kat said, and, maybe too eagerly, cuffed Vicky’s hand in front of her.

“Give me the hairpin,” Vicky said.

“Ah, but that is part of the game,” Kit said, and did something behind Vicky’s back. “Now find zee hairpin,” the assassin said with a wicked grin.

The two of them had made it look easy to twist around and retrieve the pin. Five minutes later, Vicky had turned herself into a pretzel, and the pin was still eluding her.

Kat took mercy on her, but five more minutes later, the cuffs were still on.

Kit showed Vicky how it was done.

Next round, Vicky rubbed her head up against the wall, knocked the pin out, and was free four minutes later.

She was down to two minutes when Mr. Smith showed up and dealt himself into the game. He beat the two assassins’ best time.

Then the game took an interesting turn.

Vicky was none too sure exactly how it happened, but
somehow she ended up cuffed to the bed by her right hand and left ankle. Naked.

“Where’s the hairpin,” she demanded.

“You’ll get it in time,” Mr. Smith assured her.

It was a very delightful evening. Vicky was thoroughly and pleasurably exhausted before Mr. Smith gave her a good-night kiss and somehow slipped the hairpin from his mouth to hers, then said his good-byes to the other two and left Vicky to free herself while the two diminutive assassins did their best to distract her.

S
IX
days after Vicky’s security team showed up, she was on the bridge of the Imperial heavy cruiser
Attacker
shortly after it jumped into Presov space.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded the first message from the planet that had once produced a quarter of the Empire’s crystal.

The skipper of the
Attacker
, a small, dapper man, handed the question to Vicky with a raised eyebrow.

“Hello, I am her Imperial Grace, the Grand Duchess Victoria of Greenfeld. I am leading a trade delegation and convoy of merchant ships from St. Petersburg. We would like to reopen trade with Presov.”

As expected, there was a long break between Vicky’s answer and the next response.

“You sure you’re not a damn invasion fleet? I’m making out what looks like two Disdain class cruisers and an Anaconda class attack transport.”

Vicky was in civilian clothes, her red power suit. It was easier to come the Grand Duchess if she didn’t display lieutenant commander stripes. She centered herself on the camera, rested both hands on her hips, and leaned into the camera, all business.

“When I passed through this system six weeks ago, you looked
in bad shape and headed for a whole lot worse. We didn’t know when we got here if there would be normal trade options or if we’d have to use Marines to guard our goods from theft and rioting. Our next planned stop is Poznan, and when we were last there, it already
was
a mess. We expect to have to protect ourselves while we hand out famine rations.”

Vicky paused to let that sink in. “As for the cruisers, you may have heard there are pirates out this way. Ten loaded cargo vessels are a tempting target. No doubt the cruisers will help honest men stay honest.”

Vicky turned to Charles Vickun, the senior member of the trade delegation. “You want to send them a list of some of the product we have available for them?”

He dispatched a message with a carefully chosen database of goods. Later, Vicky would discover just how carefully they had been chosen.

The next message was very terse. “Come on down.”

T
WO
days later, Vicky pulled herself down into her place for dinner with her nine-member trade delegation and the eleven representatives of the Mine Manager’s Cooperative. The dinner was in the wardroom of the
Attacker
; the cruiser’s chefs had outdone themselves despite the lack of gravity.

Marines in dress black and reds, sidearms in evidence, served as waiters.

Milton Adaman, the president of the Mine Manager’s Co-op, eyed the weapons from where he sat across the table from Vicky.

“Do you think those are necessary?” he asked.

“We live in troubled times,” Vicky answered evenly. “We are transporting a fortune in foodstuffs, spare parts, and light equipment. The famine biscuits on Poznan may be the difference between life and death for them. So, yes, we are careful. We intend to deploy the Thirty-fourth Armored Marine Battalion on Poznan along with Sevastopol’s First Rangers. The Fifty-fourth Light Marines is assigned to ship duty on the cruisers. If we need some ground security here, a couple of their companies should suffice.”

“We have mine-security personnel and local police,” Milton pointed out.

“Yes,
you
have them, sir,” Vicky said, pointedly. “
We’d
like to have some skin in the game to keep honest men honest.”

“About honest men’s honesty,” he said. “It seems to me that in times like this, with belts cinched in as tight as they are, it might get hard to figure out just where honesty lies.”

“That’s a rather vague statement, Mr. Adaman,” Vicky answered. “Would you care to explain to me what you’re getting at? It only seems a riddle to me.”

“What’s the honest value of an item when one side of the market has a gun and the other side has, shall we say, a very empty stomach?”

“Ah,” said Vicky. “I think I understand your meaning now. However, we have the recorded value of the last shipment of raw crystal that arrived on St. Petersburg, seven, no eight months ago,” she said, glancing at her chief trade delegate. Charles was on her left.

Commander Boch, complete with Sam Brown belt and weapon, was dining at Vicky’s other elbow and almost across from Milton.

That fact was not lost on the mining man.

Milton nodded. “So you have a potential value for our side of the trade. What about the price of the food you brought?”

Charles now jumped in. “We’ve had our problems, too. Prices for food on St. Petersburg have jumped fifty percent in the last six months.”

“Fifty percent!” was somewhere between an echo and a shout from down the miners’ side of the table.

Vicky had seen Kris Longknife negotiate with balky or troubling people. One thing Vicky noticed was how Kris kept a wide table between potentially violent parties. Tonight, Vicky had the miners on one side, the trade delegation on the other.

This matter was something Vicky had foreseen. She moved quickly to soothe. “I imagine your production has suffered dislocations as well. We might consider increasing the value of your crystal over old crystal by forty percent.”

She’d run that number by the trade delegation. There was a lot of grumbling, but they finally agreed to 40 percent as a starting offer.

With some major grumbling from those who wanted to start at 50 percent . . . of the old price.

“We get forty percent allowance for inflation while you get fifty percent?” said Milton, looking up and down his side of the table. “Where’s the honesty in that?”

“It’s open to discussion,” Vicky said, tasting her soup. “This is a delicious bisque. You might want to enjoy it while it’s still warm.”

The dickering went on around the table as the mine managers produced the last delivery of food, some six months ago, and the prices they’d paid then.

At the end of the haggling, there was a deal. The miners would sell their new crystal for 50 percent over the old and buy their food at 50 percent above their last order.

“Do you have any crystal to sell?” the trade rep asked as the haggling wound down.

“We’ve got plenty,” Milton said with a scowl. “The next pickup ship isn’t due here for two months. They should have been here last month, but they seem to have problems getting out this far.”

“My question is,” a mine manager near the center of the table said, “how do we pay them when they get here? Yes, it’s nice to eat. This meal is the best I’ve tasted in months, don’t get me wrong. But we have to pay our taxes and make a payment on the mines’ mortgages. How do we do that?”

“They aren’t bringing you food and spare parts,” Vicky pointed out.

“But we have to pay our taxes, and if we don’t meet our mortgage payment, someone will buy us up for pfennigs on the mark.”

“Can’t you produce enough in the next couple of months to meet your fiduciary obligations?” the senior trader asked.

The mining bosses around the table just shook their heads. “Production is way down. Half our gear is broken and off-line. You can’t cut crystal with broken crap.”

“Charles,” Vicky said to her senior trade advisor, “didn’t you provide them with a list of the spare parts and light equipment we brought?”

“I thought food was their main concern?” he said with a smooth smile. Butter would have melted in his mouth.

“We did bring spare parts and other products, didn’t we?” Vicky asked, her voice letting the full power of a Grand Duchess out.

“We might have, Your Grace,” came from what she’d considered
her
side of the table.

Someone apparently considered the negotiations about food and crystal as only a children’s game, or maybe as a warm-up to the serious haggling over the prices for the spare parts.

Clearly, the ranchers and farms representative didn’t see it that way.

Neither did Vicky. She leaned back in her chair. “I was led to understand that you passed that list along with the first transmission.”

“It may have gotten cut off,” Charles said with a notable lack of sincerity.

Vicky considered what lay before her . . . and didn’t much care for it. She would have to speed this up or face a long, boring evening.

“Well, Charles, you will need to do your trading here quickly. Aren’t
your
spare parts on the ships that have
our
famine rations?”

An oily smile vanished. Possibly he spotted her rare use of the Imperial we. “They are, Your Grace.”

“I’ll be taking those ships out with me tomorrow morning. Afternoon at the latest. Children are starving on Poznan.”

“But if you take those ships with you, we won’t be able to deliver the spare parts that are on board them. The next trade convoy will be here before you get those ships back.”

“You might want to consider that and get your bargaining over quickly,” was all Vicky said.

Now it was the miners across the table who grinned happily. As dessert was served, a second round of haggling began. Vicky did her best to stay Navy bland as she seethed inside.

Don’t you dare play games with me, buster.

The prices for the spare parts were settled on before the Marines served coffee and brandy.

The Mining Operators Co-op officers’ talk at the table now sounded confident they could buy food and parts from this convoy and still have enough product in their strongrooms for the tax man as well as the mortgage.

Vicky let Mr. Smith escort her to her room with a smile on her face and a happy song in her heart.