CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
By the time Rafe reached the bridge, Ky had the scans on full power. The defensive suite had come back on its own when the system resets were complete. She now had exact vectors on the two raiders and the Mackensee ship; the raiders’ icons showed them boosting, but they would still pass near enough to take a shot at her if they were minded to. Fair Kaleen, rolling drunkenly, continued to block them at unpredictable moments, but that was not protection she could count on. At least they were far enough away that they were not in danger of being struck.
“Lee, perhaps you’d go down and show Jim and Toby what controls you need first,” Rafe suggested as he came onto the bridge. “If that’s all right with you, Captain . . .”
“Yes—unplug your board, Lee, and take it down with you,” Ky suggested. “They know wiring, but they don’t know piloting.”
“I’ll need scan access,” Lee said. “I can’t pilot blind.”
“I understand,” Ky said. “But just give them some hints—make sure they don’t power up the wrong component or something.”
Lee shrugged, unplugged his board, and set off down the passage.
“Thanks,” Rafe said. “Now—we’ll need to set up the visual—”
“You can do visual?”
“Yeah.” Rafe pushed back his helmet, unsealed his suit, and reached inside, wrinkling his nose as he did so. “Bit of a whiff about that suit, Captain, if you don’t mind my mentioning.”
“I know,” Ky said.
“You might want to clean up before the mercs see it.”
“I’m sure they’ve seen worse,” Ky said.
He stopped and looked at her. “Are you performing some religious ritual of self-punishment, or is there something else I don’t know?”
Her patience snapped. “Like perhaps I have not had one second since I got back aboard without something critical for me to do? You, and the others, were all unconscious and all the ship systems were down.”
“Everyone?” His brows went up, and he continued to dig about inside his pressure suit, finally coming up with a length of cord Ky recognized as a connector of some sort. He tucked it into his wristband, then took his helmet all the way off and set it in Lee’s seat. He pushed back his hair, peeled back the flap over his implant access, retrieved the cord, and inserted one end of the connector into the implant orifice. “I didn’t know that.”
“Everyone,” Ky said, fascinated.
Rafe glanced at the scans. “They’re four light-minutes out; you’d have time to clean up now. I’ll call if anything happens.”
This time she felt a wave of exasperation. “Why do you care how I look?”
“First impressions are important in anything,” he said. “Right now you look like a bloodthirsty, violent killer, not a nice sane tradeship captain of good family.”
Ky grinned; she was aware again of those surges of pleasure she’d felt when killing. “I am a bloodthirsty, violent killer. I told you that before.”
“It’s not funny,” Rafe said, shaking his head. “I’m serious. Your mercs weren’t happy with you staying behind in this system anyway. You need them to see you as sane and sensible, which is what you really are.”
It was not the time to make her point, but the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m both,” she said. “But your point is taken.” She turned on her heel and headed for her cabin.
Stella was dabbing at blood marks on the carpet; she looked up when Ky came in. “Situation?”
“Improving,” Ky said. “I’m actually going to clean up a bit.”
“Thank you,” Stella said, with feeling. “I’ll go to the galley, then, and start heating some soup or something.” Her nose wrinkled, and she was pale.
Ky started to get out of the pressure suit, then decided it would be easier to clean under the shower. A hard vacuum would have been easiest, but that wasn’t available without going out past Osman’s corpse. The shower sluiced off the worst of the mess on the suit; she cycled it twice, then peeled out of the suit and her shipsuit and ducked through the water. She could still smell Osman’s death, but less. The drying cycle—into a clean shipsuit from her cabin—she looked at the pressure suit with distaste. It was damp from the shower on the outside, and sweaty on the inside. She hung it over her shoulder and made it back to the bridge in five minutes.
Rafe glanced at her and murmured, “Your hair.”
Ky raked at it with her fingers; he winced dramatically but said nothing more about it. Instead, he pointed to the cables he’d attached to the bulkhead outlet, her deskcom’s output, and his implant. “You can use your own com as usual; the video pickup’s just the same. I’ve already entered the initiating codes for the ansible hookup, and the device itself is live right now. I can’t move around much; I need to be attached to the power supply.”
“Right.” Ky sat in her chair, the pressure suit draped across her lap, and glanced at the scan screens. The two raiders were still boosting for jump; the mercenary ship had gained on them. She entered Gloucester’s ansible-access number. Instantly—so it worked!—her com screen lit with the INITIATING CALL icon. She glanced at Rafe; he looked blank and said nothing. She guessed he was monitoring the ansible function.
“Gloucester.” No visual. They should have her visual.
“This is Captain Vatta of Gary Tobai. We have established a secure link now—”
“Captain Vatta.” The screen now showed the Gloucester’s com officer and Lt. Commander Johannson. “What’s your status?”
“We’re repairing some damage,” Ky said. “Ship’s stable at this time, all personnel alive.”
“Do you need immediate assistance?”
“Not immediate,” Ky said. “Fair Kaleen is damaged; I don’t know her crew status. Her captain’s dead—”
“What happened?”
“He had boarded my ship and was setting a mine,” Ky said. “I killed him.” Again that surge of joy she must conceal, stronger now as she had time to reflect on it. “Anyway, Fair Kaleen appears to be tumbling, and if she’s not to be lost, I need a boarding team to go aboard and get her back under control. We don’t have any way to get over there. Then a prize crew—”
“Prize crew.” He scowled at her.
“She was a Vatta ship. She was stolen. I’m taking possession in the name of Vatta Ltd.”
“You do recall the details of our contract, do you not? You agreed not to act on that letter of marque.”
She had forgotten that letter again. “I’m not doing this as a privateer; I’m doing this as Vatta. The ship belongs to Vatta; I’m taking her back.”
“I see.” He did not sound convinced. “Whatever you think, Captain Vatta, this is skirting very close indeed to breach of our agreement. Privateers take prizes. We do not. We will not jeopardize our status as legitimate mercenaries by taking a prize or putting a prize crew aboard. We will, however, board the ship and attempt to stabilize her, and take prisoner anyone on her. If you can then arrange a prize crew out of your own, we will transport them in a pinnace to the other ship. The only reason I agree to that much is the Vatta ID of the ship’s beacon. If a court decides she’s stolen property belonging to your family, that’s different. I reserve judgment. Is that clear?”
“Quite clear,” Ky said. “Thank you.”
“Meanwhile,” he went on, “it seems important to chase these two all the way to jump, if they were involved.”
“They were,” Ky said.
“Ah—also part of the conspiracy against the ansibles, you think?”
“Definitely.”
“Any objection to our taking them out?”
Ky thought of stating the obvious—the two-to-one odds—but refrained. “None at all,” she said.
“We’ll be back in a few hours,” he said. Then the Mackensee ship vanished from scan, only to reappear in a tangled web of uncertainty brackets—VECTOR UNKNOWN, VELOCITY UNKNOWN—that dissolved to show it in the perfect position to fire up the sterns of the fleeing raiders. One blew almost instantly; the second produced a burst of acceleration that—less than a minute later—ended in another explosion.
Ky caught another whiff of her pressure suit. She would want it when she went aboard Fair Kaleen, and she’d prefer it dry and clean. It needed its internal powerpak recharged, as well. She was unlikely to need it immediately, with the raiders gone. She hung it back in its locker, hooked up the cable to the powerpak, and set the self-clean cycles to maximum.
The Mackensee ship stayed in the vicinity of the explosions for more than an hour—looking for survivors, Ky assumed—while her own crew continued to work on rewiring the drive control panels. She spent the time finally exploring her implant’s data structure.
It was tempting to explore FAMILY FILES and see what her father had said about her, but she searched the files for more on Osman instead. And there it was: what she could have known ahead of time if she’d not been so reluctant to insert this implant. Her father suspected that Osman had killed his own father, though it could not be proved. Certainly he had lied, embezzled, and made sexual advances and threats to crew. He had inherited his father’s shares of Vatta; he was going to be trouble no matter what they did. Her father and uncle, then the company troubleshooters when their father Arnulf was CEO, had been given the task of “taking care” of Osman. For a cash payment, Osman had been persuaded to give up his shares. He had decamped with a ship, and they had not prosecuted, on the grounds that they didn’t want him that close ever again. Osman’s section ended with her father’s recommendation that any Vatta captain coming across Osman take extreme precautions and report anything learned to HQ. Ky scowled. Someone should have blown him away years ago; it would’ve prevented a lot of trouble. And she would like her father to have known that she was the one who ended that threat to the family.
Ky turned from that to the section headed POLITICAL. Osman might not be their only enemy.
INTERSTELLAR COMMUNICATIONS. Under that heading she found subheads: Contacts, Policies, Negotiations, Potential Conflicts. That looked promising.
Lee came back up the passage with his board, glanced at Rafe and the extra cables in the bridge, and slid into his own seat without commenting or touching any of them. He plugged his board back in. “All right to test functions?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” Ky said. Her implant followed along the test patterns, offering her a choice of views. Then, as time passed, she checked on the medbox. Quincy, the medbox reported, was physically stable, but had suffered some blast damage, probably due to her age. Consultation with advanced medical care for long-term therapy was advised. Ky told Alene and the others to take Quincy out and put Martin in the box. She would have liked to check on them both herself, but she had to stay on the bridge.
With the drive now fully functional again, Ky warned her crew and instructed the ship to bring the artificial gravity back up slowly. As she settled deeper into her seat, she felt the aches from her exertion. At least she was sitting down.
Her screen came alive again, a call from the Mackensee ship. “We got both of them; we’ve picked up several prisoners. Your ISC rep will probably want them taken to ISC offices.”
“I’m sure,” Ky said, with a glance at Rafe, who still looked blank.
“We’ll be back with you in another hour,” her liaison said. “Out of communication for maneuvers until then.”
“Understood,” Ky said. She watched as the Mackensee ship disappeared from scan again, reappearing twice on its way back to her. Slotter Key Spaceforce had a few ships with that capability, but not many. She wondered what it felt like, those rapid transitions in and out of FTL flight, and how they navigated. She turned to Rafe. “Rafe—you might as well take a break.”
He nodded without really looking at her, unplugged himself, and shook his head. “Makes my ears feel strange,” he said. “That and the smells.”
“Monitoring transmissions?” Lee asked.
“Something like that,” Rafe said. He rotated his shoulders, stretched, and folded back up neatly, catlike.
Stella appeared at the bridge hatch with mugs of hot soup and a plate of ship biscuits. Ky sipped the thick broth, realizing as she felt alertness return just how much of her reserves she’d used. “I’ve already fed the others,” Stella said. “Toby asked me to defrost one of Aunt Gracie’s fruitcakes. He hasn’t ever had one.” She grinned.
“Some people like them,” Ky said.
“Boys that age will eat anything,” Stella said. “He’s on his third slice.”
“Stella carried that thing all the way from Slotter Key,” Rafe said. “I asked her why, and she wouldn’t tell me.”
“I had two of them,” Stella said. “The command implant was in one—”
“Is that where it was?” Rafe said, brows rising.
“And I have no idea what’s in the other,” Stella went on. “If anything. Aunt Gracie’s sense of humor at work.”
“We need to get the escape passage cleaned up,” Ky said. “And the air lock, and Osman’s body put somewhere.”
“Why not just space it?” Rafe asked.
“There will be formalities,” Ky said. “I’ll need documentation. Anyway, I don’t want to space it right now.” She didn’t want to move right now. What she wanted, suddenly, was a night’s sleep.
“Heat soup, slice cake, clean corridor, move a body,” Stella said in an odd tone of voice. “My, what my life has come to. Of course, I am still alive, and don’t think I’m not grateful, Ky. I was very, very glad not to have to play the captive princess close up. And glad you foiled Osman’s last ploy, however you did that.” She paused. Ky thought of giving a blow-by-blow, but decided against it. “But,” Stella resumed, when Ky said nothing, “when I thought of life as Vatta’s secret agent, it didn’t mean domestic chores. Though it has, as often as not, more’s the pity.”
“I’ll get some of the others on it,” Ky said. “I could use your advice on some of the things I’m finding in Dad’s implant.”
“Seriously?” Stella asked.
“Seriously. You’ve been home—well, in contact with home—the past four years and I haven’t. Just a second . . .” Ky called Environmental and, after making sure everything was functioning normally there, told Mitt to take over cleaning up the corridor. “It’s nasty—I’d suggest wearing suits. There’s a body in the air lock; put it in a sealed bag and into one of the cargo holds. We’ll move it over to the other ship if we can.”
“Do we have to . . . touch it?”
“The corpse? Yes—why? As far as I know, it’s not infected with anything. And you’ll have gloves on.”
“Well . . .” Mitt sounded less than eager.
“Why don’t you let me take care of Osman’s mortal coil,” Rafe said. “If you happen to have body bags.”
She didn’t. She’d hoped very much never to have a corpse on her ship again, but there he was, dead and in the way. “Not standard issue,” she said. “Can you improvise?”
“Sure. I’ll just go look for something . . . or we could wait for the mercs to show up. I’m sure they have body bags.”
Rafe went out; Ky told Mitt that Rafe would deal with the body, but might need a help finding the right container.
“Oh, we’ve got some supply sacks that might work,” Mitt said, sounding more cheerful already.
Ky thought privately that getting the passage clean would be worse than stuffing Osman’s corpse into a sack, but she wasn’t going to argue that. “Fine,” she said.
While the environmental techs worked on cleaning up the passage, she and Stella compared implant headings.
“I don’t have ship functions,” Stella said. “I told you that before. Mine’s optimized for financial analysis and contact information.”
“Who do you have at ISC?” Ky asked. “I’ve got about forty—everything from . . . uh . . . Mirellia Coston, executive assistant to the Slotter Key main rep—and her, too, of course—to Lew Parminer. I remember him; he came to Corleigh several times.”
“Forty? I have both of those but only a few more. Do you have Rilendo Varise, in Outside Contracts?”
“Yes. I wonder why Dad kept Louise Sims-Delont in this list—she’s just a file clerk.” Even as she said that, the implant unpacked the reasons and displayed them. Louise Sims-Delont had been too willing to look something up for him five years before, a willingness he interpreted as a possible security leak for the relationship between Vatta Transport, Ltd., and ISC.
What relationship, Ky wondered, and the implant suddenly flooded her awareness with a cascade of numbers, names, dates, reasons.
“What’s wrong, Ky?” Stella asked. Ky shook her head; she couldn’t answer, not now. Stella reached out, shook her arm. “Ky! Answer me!”
Had Stella known? “Too much information too fast,” Ky said. She took a long breath. “Uh . . . how much do you know about the relationship between Vatta and ISC?”
“Relationship? We depend on ISC’s communications, like all shippers. They’ve used us as general carriers—I don’t know what their total tonnage is, but I’d say we have a reasonably healthy fraction of their business, perhaps a dominant share on our main routes. Vatta’s always supported the monopoly—we didn’t want to risk fragmentation of services and uncontrolled charges. Several other major long-line transport companies have done the same.”
“Yes, and some have argued for open communications standards and competition. Pavrati, for instance.”
“Oh, Pavrati.” Stella wrinkled her nose.
“It’s more complicated,” Ky said. How much should she tell Stella? How much of their present problems related to the data on her implant, the implant that had been taken from her dying father? “This implant,” she said finally. “It’s . . . something we need to talk about at length, I think. In private. If we’re what’s left of Vatta—”
“There’s Aunt Gracie, or was when I left home.”
“Yes, well . . .” The compressed data under that heading was another problem. Ky had found it hard enough to reconcile her memory of the prickly, prudish Aunt-Gracie-of-the-Fruitcakes with what Stella had told her. The Gracie of the implant was several orders of magnitude less familiar. “You know she was almost tried for murder?”
“Gracie? Our Aunt Gracie?”
“Yes. They finally decided it was postcombat stress and hushed it up when the family put her in the spaghetti farm for a year.”
Stella’s eyes widened. “They thought about sending me to a clinic; Aunt Gracie said no, she’d take care of it—but if she . . . why did they listen to her?”
“Because she had more dirt on both our fathers than you could imagine,” Ky said. The internal memos recorded on this implant had more detail on that than she wanted. She wished Aunt Gracie had been there; she could’ve argued for her own father’s memory. He had always been so upright, so honest, so sensible; she could imagine he might have been a bit wild as a youngster, but not as . . . the word conniving slipped in and out of focus. Not her father. Not her father, dead after the attack on the Vattas. Or Stella’s, though she’d always wondered if Stella’s wildness came from her father rather than her socialite mother. “She was head of Vatta’s internal security—you know that, that’s the kind of work she had you doing. But she was also working with the Slotter Key government—well, part of it, anyway.”
“You don’t suppose she set it up—was working with Osman or something?”
“No,” Ky said, even though the same dire suspicion had flashed through her mind a minute before. The implant made it clear how deep Gracie’s dislike of Osman ran. “I’m sure she didn’t. But the fact is that all three of us now have to work together, if Vatta’s to come back . . . or just survive.”
“We have to survive,” Stella said. “There’s Toby . . .”
“Yes. Well . . .” Was this the time to admit to Stella the real reason she had resisted using the implant? No . . . no more than she could confess her disgusting joy in the act of killing. “We’ll need to spend considerable time, as I unlock various cubbies in this thing, figuring out what to do about what’s inside.” That sounded lame, but she did not want to get into the whole thing now. For one thing, she still felt limp. “And we don’t want to involve Rafe—there’s a lot of stuff about ISC.”
“Oh, I agree,” Stella said. “But he’ll probably keep trying to worm it out of you. That peeling-a-lime thing—” She sounded annoyed.
Ky laughed. “I’m not susceptible to his type,” she said. “Or any type, at present,” she added, more soberly. She pushed away the memory of that brief, crazy dance with Rafe. That was postimplant befuddlement, nothing more.
“Dad told me you were involved with a very nice young man at the Academy,” Stella said. “It’s too bad—but maybe you can get together when this is over—”
“No!” Ky lowered her voice after that emphatic negative. “No. That’s over and done with.”
“Well . . . there will be others.”
Not until this was over. Not until she understood more of herself. Not until she found a man who would not be horrified at what she really was . . . and would she want a man who would not be horrified? She was horrified.
“Besides,” she said, hoping to distract Stella. “He’s yours, isn’t he?”
Stella flushed but shook her head. “Come on, Ky, he’s not a commodity to be possessed. Besides . . . he wouldn’t be mine, in that sense, even if he were.”
“You said you were attracted . . .”
“Yes, attracted. But now, at this moment, we’re busy with something else. I’m not controlled by my hormones, you know, whatever my reputation in the family.”
“Sorry,” Ky said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Good. He’s . . . interesting, yes. Skilled. But I don’t know if he’ll ever be . . . someone to partner with, long term. I was worried that you might fall for him and get hurt, when all he wanted was your trust.”
“Never walk in on women discussing men,” Rafe said, doing just that. “Stella, Stella . . . I don’t know whether to be flattered by your interest—no one analyzes so minutely someone they care nothing for—or appalled at its erroneous conclusions.”
“Stop that,” Ky said, as Stella flushed again. “I don’t give a flip what your relational strengths and weaknesses are; your timing is atrocious.”
“My timing is impeccable, as always,” Rafe said, settling against the bulkhead. “I come bringing peace to your soul, Captain: Osman’s corpse is safely stowed for the moment, but retrievable when your mercs show up with proper body bags. Stella, did you know your baby cousin was a very thorough killer?”
“I’m sure she would do whatever was necessary in an emergency,” Stella said.
“I’m sure that his other wounds would have killed him without that stab through the throat to the brain,” Rafe said. His gaze, deceptively mild, had settled on Ky; she felt the heat rise in her own cheeks. “That’s not just a military cut direct, so to speak. That’s more, isn’t it, Captain?”
“Fatal, I’d say,” Ky said, trying for an offhand tone. “After all, I thought he was dead the first time, when their ship security was breached. It seemed a good idea to make sure.”
Rafe shrugged. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
She was glad to have that conversation interrupted by a call from the Mackensee ship. It was close enough to use conventional communications. “I see what you mean about the Kaleen tumbling,” her liaison said. “Do you think there are any live crew aboard?”
“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I haven’t tried hailing her since the running lights came back on.”
“Better tell me what happened,” Johannson said.
Ky explained briefly, starting with Osman Vatta’s relationship to the family and continuing through the full sequence that had ended with his death. Johannson’s professional expression wavered several times, but he didn’t interrupt. She was glad of that; she could imagine his comments on her idiocy in letting those boarders through the lock.
“So . . . you fired an EMP mine inside your own ship to scramble his mine’s electronics?” was all he said at the end.
“Yes,” Ky said, and clamped her teeth on justifications. She didn’t need his approval anyway: it had worked.
“And his lock was disabled by the combination of your EMP mine and his limpet—”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.” She knew that interesting wasn’t as mild as it sounded. “We’ll be sending a pinnace with a boarding party to . . . uh . . . Fair Kaleen. You might want to back off another thousand klicks or so, just in case. Can you?”
“Oh, yes,” Ky said. She glanced at her pilot. “Lee, back us out.”
“Glad to,” he said.
Ky followed that exploration by relay. The Mackensee boarding party found that the main-entry air lock was too damaged to function, and the entry passage was still open to space. However, inner compartment seals had shut when the ship systems reset. They rigged a temporary air lock and convinced the ship to let them in. Inside, they found sixteen dead—seven in space armor, dead because their suit systems had gone down, the rest not even in pressure suits, victims of decompression. As they worked their way from compartment to compartment, they found a few survivors in those compartments that had been aired up. Some were injured, some not; all were taken prisoner, even the three in a storeroom off the galley, who claimed to be prisoners of the crew.
In the midst, Martin appeared on the bridge. “The medbox says I’m cured,” he said. “Sorry I dropped like that, Captain.”
“You weren’t the only one,” Ky said. “I’m glad it didn’t scramble your brains permanently.”
“Why didn’t you just have Lee shut the ship system down?”
“Osman had a limpet mine inside the ship,” Ky said. “This was the only way I could think of to knock out its systems.”
“Oh.” Martin gave her an odd look. “You take the big jumps, don’t you, ma’am? And I suppose you killed Osman?”
“Yes,” Ky said.
“Very thoroughly,” Rafe put in.
“Martin, we’re going to be taking over the other ship,” Ky said, before Rafe could get started on that. “We need a prize crew—you’ll be on that, of course, since that ship may have security issues the rest of us wouldn’t recognize.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Martin said, looking more alert by the moment. “They’ll have traps in her and such, same as I set here against boarders.”
“Exactly. I can provide your implant with a layout of the ship as she was built and in use originally. We need a boarding plan as well, and if you have recommendations on crew.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on it.”
Johannson called Ky again when his personnel were sure they had cleared the ship to explain what he intended to do with those found. “We can sort ’em out later,” Johannson said. “I’m not having strangers running around loose on this ship . . . they don’t claim to be Vattas, anyway.”
The engineers with the boarding party began to stabilize the ship’s tumbling once they reached the bridge. Systems had reset correctly; it was simply a matter of giving the correct commands. In a few hours, Johannson informed Ky that the ship was ready to receive a prize crew.
“She’s down on reserve air, as you’d expect. Cargo holds are still aired up; our engineers recommend pumping that air into the crew space once you’ve done something about that air lock. The ship inventory lists useful spares. Here—” A block of data came across; Ky’s implant sorted it and displayed it for her.
“If we use your temporary airlock, we should be able to get to Section B-Four and put that replacement in,” Ky said. “Are Kaleen’s repair bots functional?”
“Some of them appear to be. You want us to run systems checks on them?”
“Yes. No sense risking lives if the bots can do some of the vacuum work.”
The Mackensee pinnace transported the survivors from Fair Kaleen to Gloucester while the repair bots started work on installation of a new air lock. Ky itched to get over there and see what her command implant could pull up from the ship’s computers, but she had no way to transfer. Yet. She had to organize a prize crew, anyway. Johannson had made it clear that providing such a crew did not fall within their contractual obligations, and he was not minded to widen them. Minimally—if they did nothing but transport the ship to the next port—the ship would need a commander, pilot, navigator, someone in Environmental, someone in Engineering.
“We need a Vatta commanding both ships,” Ky said finally, to Stella and Toby. “Toby, you know more about ships, but Stella’s old enough that station managers might accept her, even though she has no papers.”
“Captain, why don’t you go aboard the Kaleen?” Toby said. “This ship’s simpler. If you left Stella here, and a few of the old hands, she wouldn’t have any problems with her.”
“It’s . . . an idea,” Ky said. “But think of the trouble I got into by leaving this ship even briefly.”
“This is different,” Toby said. “That ship—nobody here knows her; she needs more crew and more expertise. You should take her.”
“I agree,” Stella said. “If you’ll let me load some of the ship systems stuff into my implant, I’m sure I’ll be able to do what I must.”
“I suppose.” Already Ky knew this would work. She ran it all as a fast sim in the implant. Yes, it was the best solution. Now to choose who would stay and who would go. She needed Lee and Sheryl with her: they could set up a tape for Gary Tobai’s crew to follow. Martin, of course. That meant Alene had to stay on here; she would be responsible for cargo. Environmental, she had to have someone from there, and an engineer. Mitt and Mehar, she decided. Rafe, for his expertise with nonstandard ansibles.
By the time the pinnace came back toward Gary Tobai, she and her prize crew were suited up and ready to leave. On scan, the pinnace edged closer and closer.
Then came another call from Johannson. “My people say there’s a limpet mine on your outer hatch.”
“Oh . . . yes.” She had forgotten about that. “That’s the one Osman tried to blow up the ship with.”
“Facing out . . . is it armed to repel boarders?”
“No,” Ky said. “That just seemed a good place to store it.”
“To store your enemy’s mine . . . any particular reason why you didn’t just give it a good shove out the hatch?”
“I didn’t want to hit the Kaleen with it,” Ky said. “Besides . . . a mine is a terrible thing to waste.”