CHAPTER
FIVE
During the passage to Lastway, the crew seemed to adjust to the new situation and crewmembers, though not without some friction.
“He’s so . . . so military,” Quincy said to Ky some three days into the passage. “Everything spit and polish, all the time.” Ky didn’t have to ask for a name: Gordon Martin, of course. “I think he’s too hard on that boy,” Quincy continued. That boy being Jim Hakusar, who claimed to be twenty-three. “Yesterday he had him down on his hands and knees for hours, scrubbing, just because he had forgotten to shower.”
“It won’t hurt him,” Ky said. “Are you getting soft on Jim?”
“Not soft, no. I agree he needs training. But Martin—”
“He is military, Quincy, just out. It’s been his career. You can’t expect him to change overnight, and frankly I’m more comfortable having him in charge of Jim than if I had to supervise him.” Ky stretched. “Is he bothering you any other way? Martin, I mean?”
Quincy shook her head. “Not really. He doesn’t want us to use his given name—that’s kind of odd, we’re all used to first names—but he’s not ordering the rest of us around or anything.”
“Do you think Jim will ever make a spacer? Is he doing well in his studies?”
“Maybe, and not really. Martin thinks he’s not applying himself; I’m beginning to wonder if he has one of those learning things. I was asking him about his schooling and it didn’t sound like the Belinta primaries had any of the corrective software we use.”
“Do we have any of that kind of thing aboard?” The crew had a library for continuing education.
“I’ll look,” Quincy said. “Sorry—I hadn’t thought to check that out.”
“If we do, see if it’ll help him,” Ky said. “I saw those original test scores—he’s about as far down the scale as you can go. If he’s going to be with us, he needs to be more than a drudge.”
Alene had accepted Martin as the new cargomaster—she’d already told Ky she didn’t really want the job herself—but she, too, found him rigid at times. “He wants a full inspection every day,” she said. “Gary never did that, and he had years of experience.”
“He might do it now, under these circumstances,” Ky said. “Martin’s got the background in security as well as supply; he wants to keep us safe.”
“I’m all for safe,” Alene said. “And I don’t mind the extra work, really. With Jim doing most of the scut work, there’s little enough for a cargo second to do en route. It’s just . . . his manner, I guess.”
“Is he rude?”
“No. But I can see him stopping himself from ordering me around the way he does Jim.”
“Give him time,” Ky said. “At least he’s trying to stop himself.”
As for the stowaway, Ky had little to do with him. She noticed that his shaggy hair had changed to a short bristle, and his face was always smooth, his slouching posture more upright, his expression less foolish and more alert. He always seemed to be busy; the galley and toilets gleamed, the decks were always swept. Every five days, she asked Martin for a progress report, and learned that “the recruit” was making progress, albeit slowly.
“It’d go faster in a real basic training course,” Martin said. He sat upright, as always, and Ky found herself resisting the urge to sit at attention herself. “Here on the ship, with no other recruits to measure himself against, he can fool himself, think he’s working as hard as he can. You remember that yourself, I expect, from your Academy days.”
“Indeed yes,” Ky said. Competition, as well as the staff, had fueled much of her hard work.
“And I do realize we’re civilians, not military. It’s just that boys like this need the discipline, or they’ll never give up their evasions. They always have excuses; they always have tricks to avoid the work. They’re not bad, exactly, but they’re thick-skinned as well as thickheaded. That learning software your chief engineer found is helping, though.”
“If you can make a decent, competent spacer out of him, that will satisfy me,” Ky said. “Just don’t break anything we need later.”
Martin laughed. “I’ll take care of him. Without breakage, I promise you. Another thing, though.” No laughter now; his expression hardened again. “We need to consider security issues for when we dock somewhere. I’ve been through the procedures manual you’ve got, and it’s totally inadequate. We’re lucky we didn’t have an entire crew of stowaways and a kiloton of weaponry aboard. This thing of trusting local police—”
“I’m sure you already have ideas on that,” Ky said. “Do you have them ready to present?”
“As a matter of fact—” He brought out several large sheets of hardcopy. “I could put this on a cube, if you want, but sometimes it’s easier to see in this format. We can cobble together some of our existing equipment for part of it, but we’re going to need better sensors, and many more of them.”
Ky looked at the diagrams. “You’re talking military-grade coverage, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “From the little we know, things are coming unstuck in several places, and we may come out of FTL in a war zone. Civvie stuff to ward off the casual sneak thief just won’t do. Now, I’ve looked into the cargo manifests—that stuff we can’t deliver to Leonora includes components we could turn into the basic net I’m talking about.”
“We can’t breach cargo seals,” Ky said. “It’s against policy, not to mention law.”
He grimaced. “Policy . . . is for the last war but one, ma’am. Leonora won’t let us deliver, didn’t you say? So their cargo’s forfeit, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly,” Ky said. “In something like this, it would go before a magistrate to determine whether we could sell the cargo and put the money in escrow for the original consignors, or whether we could sell the cargo and keep the profit. Nothing in the law as I understand it allows us to break the seals and use the cargo for our own purposes.”
“We’re not going to be hauled away to jail if we’re in pieces because someone got to the ship,” Martin said.
“True, but—how much can you do without using the Leonora cargo?”
“Depends on what resources you authorize from engineering stores.”
“Let’s look at this again,” Ky said, leaning over the diagram. “Hm. Motion sensors, infrared—”
“Ma’am, I know you have some military training, but how much was specific to security concerns?”
“Not much,” Ky said. “I couldn’t help noticing how different it was, when we were taken to training venues, but we didn’t have it in class. That was coming later, once we were commissioned, they said.”
“Well, here’s the short and dirty. To keep a ship like this, and a crew this size, reasonably safe in the kind of situation we’re talking about, you need three things. Hardware—the sensors deployed in appropriate locations. Software set up to interpret input correctly. And procedures that everyone follows. I don’t mean any insult by it, but this is not a military crew. Your people aren’t used to discipline, other than doing their jobs, isn’t that right?”
“Right,” Ky said.
“I’ve been paying attention, listening to them talk about how they spend their time when a ship’s in dock. They walk in and out, go visit a station bar or café, go run errands, do some shopping—”
“Yes, that’s normal,” Ky agreed. “And?”
“Well, ma’am, seems to me normal just went out the door and didn’t look back. Somebody’s trying to kill you and destroy your ship. That means we—you—can’t be having any of that casual strolling around. I can make up some of the deficiencies with hardware and software—if I get enough of it—but you also need to set up procedures for how people behave on the next place we dock.”
“Procedures restricting their movements, you mean.”
“Movement, communications, everything. It’s not going to be easy; they’ll think they’re being careful when they’re leaving holes in your security I could walk a whole platoon through.”
“If that’s the hardest job, I think we should start with that part,” Ky said.
“What weapons do you have aboard?”
“Mehar’s two pistol bows and some knives,” Ky said. “And whatever that is you carry.”
“This?” He opened his tunic and pulled out a matte-black handgun, laying it on the table without, Ky noted, ever allowing the muzzle to point toward her. “Eleven millimeter, Standard Arms; manufactured on Slotter Key under license from Bascome. Same as our utility issue, but this one’s custom.” He cocked his head at her. “You don’t have a weapon? I expected you would.”
“I was rushed off Slotter Key in a hurry,” Ky said. “At the time, a weapon was the last thing in my mind. After Sabine, though—”
“I heard you killed two of them,” Martin said. “Mind telling me how you did it without a gun?”
“Crossbow,” Ky said. “Mehar’s pistol bow, in fact. The mutineers had knives, no firearms; the mercs had made sure of that.”
“Ah. Not a bad ship weapon, a bow. Not enough penetrance to damage a hull or even a bulkhead. But I would recommend, ma’am, that you arm yourself as soon as you can.”
“Lastway’s bound to have weapons shops,” Ky said.
“I could pick up something for you,” he offered. “Safer for you.”
“No, thanks. If I’m going to shoot it, I want to choose it,” Ky said. His brows went up, and she went on. “I did learn to shoot, you know. As a girl back home, as well as Academy training. Now, if you’ll draft some procedures for me, we can go over them and start training the crew.”
“Right away, ma’am. And given the lack of arms, I think I’ll add some basics in unarmed fighting techniques. Some of them might get it.” He nodded and left the compartment.
Down transition at Lastway went smoothly enough; Sheryl had dropped them in farther from the planet than usual, with as little relative vee as possible. Scan cleared in a few minutes, and Ky checked the Lastway ansibles, querying for “current sectorwide commercial news.” She didn’t expect much, but a large download came into the bin a half hour later.
COMMUNICATIONS BLOCKAGE STILL THREATENS COMMERCE was one headline. According to that article, ansibles had gone down in a number of systems within a few hours, disrupting not only communications but also trade. Several planets—Leonora was listed—had closed their systems to outside traffic. ISC had begun repairs at both the hub and periphery of its systems simultaneously, and Lastway now had unimpeded communications with two other systems. ISC wasn’t saying what it had found, just that “work is in progress to restore clear, reliable communication as quickly as possible.” Slotter Key was one of the systems listed as “still not open,” as were Belinta and Leonora.
Ky flicked through the list, and the next headline stopped her breath in her chest. VATTA EMPIRE FALLS. She scrolled down.
The quadrant’s second largest interstellar shipper, based on Slotter Key, has suffered a series of devastating attacks on its ships and personnel. Disaster has followed even onto their home planet, with explosions in warehouses and tik processing plants, as well as the deaths of many family members in explosions at the family compound on Corleigh. Bankruptcy seems imminent, as customers flee the ill-fated line . . .
Ky stared at that a long moment. Corleigh bombed? The house she’d grown up in . . . that garden, that pool, the cool tiled terraces, the comfortable rooms . . . gone? Her family . . . her busy, bustling mother? Her brothers, her cousins, her father?
It couldn’t be. They couldn’t be dead. It had to be a mistake. It made no sense anyway. Why would anyone attack Vatta like that? They had no enemies—commercial rivals, but not enemies. Her breath came short. She tried to find out more, but the writer preferred to speculate on the effect of Vatta’s disintegration on the price of shipping and the fortunes of rival firms.
Two others stories mentioned attacks on Vatta Transport, one from Highdare, a system near the sector hub, and one from ISC sources. More ships had been attacked onstation, and two Vatta ships were overdue at their next port. Insurance carriers had dropped Vatta as too risky; shippers were avoiding Vatta because of the lack of insurance. ISC issued a statement disclaiming responsibility for the attacks on Vatta:
We are quite sure that the involvement of a Vatta ship in the situation of Sabine System is not related to these attacks . . . ISC’s relationship with Vatta Enterprises, Vatta Transport, and individuals of the Vatta family has been strictly business and no closer than our relationship with other customers.
Ky stared at that. So someone else had thought this might result from her actions in the Sabine System? And then had discarded that idea? Were they right, or were her fears right? Was it her fault? For a moment, the invented mental images of destruction she hadn’t seen swamped her mind . . . the house burning, the office exploding, the warehouses and processing plants aflame . . . family members whose faces she would never see again . . .
No. That wasn’t going to help her get her cargo sold, her crew and ship safely in and out of Lastway space. They might be alive, some of them at least. She had to think that way; imagining the worst would paralyze her.
She scanned the rest of the download, concentrating on the here and now. She shunted prices to Martin and Alene in Cargo and Quincy in Engineering.
Two hours later, Lastway Traffic Control inquired if they were in transit or on approach.
“Approach,” Ky said.
“Be advised, Vatta ships are under special advisory concern,” Traffic Control said.
“Explain,” Ky said.
“How long have you been in transit?” came the answer.
Ky gave the date in universal.
“Ah. So you aren’t aware of the situation?”
“What situation?” Ky asked. What would they say? What would they do?
“Vatta Transport, Ltd., has been subject of some form of attack, and we have been informed that upon docking, all prior insurance coverage for Vatta hulls is canceled. Vatta personnel are considered to be at risk, and Vatta family members at special risk. Lastway Militia Services disclaims responsibility for their safety, and recommends extreme caution and additional private security—”
“Any Vatta hulls presently docked?” Ky asked.
“No. Yours is the first into our space since all this blew up.” Traffic Control heaved an audible sigh. “Whatever did you people do, and who did you annoy?”
“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I’ve been in transit. What have you heard?”
“Two dozen rumors, nothing solid,” Traffic Control said. “But here—if you dock here, you may have problems getting out, and you will have to pay cash—Vatta credit’s down the tubes.”
“If I don’t dock here, I may run out of air,” Ky said. “So bring me in.”
“Your choice,” Traffic Control said. “There’s an eight-hundred-credit cash deposit on docking; Immigration Control will be there to collect it.”
“Thank you,” Ky said through clenched teeth. Then she called the crew together.
“What I know is all bad, but I’m sure we don’t know everything,” she said, then went on to describe the news. “It may be that all the other Vattas are dead. It may be that the news is all wrong and they’re all alive. But for our own safety, we have to assume that there is someone—apparently a lot of someones with plenty of resources—after Vatta.”
“You aren’t setting foot off this ship,” Quincy said.
“On the contrary, I must, to do what needs doing,” Ky said. “At any rate, it would do me no good to sit here and have my crew picked off one or two at a time. I can’t run this thing alone.
“But we are going to be careful. Those procedures that Martin developed, that we’ve been practicing—we are all going to adhere to them. No casual wandering around the station, no letting people wander into our dock space. We’re going to carry taggers; we’re going to put up extra security screening, the whole bit.”
“What do you think you have to do that requires you to go offship?” Quincy asked.
Ky looked at her, but Quincy didn’t back down. Not surprising. “To start with, I have to pay docking fees in advance, in cash. Vatta credit’s been frozen. I should have a private account here, but since we don’t know when the Belinta ansibles went out, I don’t know if the transfer I set up before we left actually went through. I need to exchange hard goods for cash, open an account, get us back into business. None of you can do that. In addition, I need a way to defend myself,” she said.
“You . . . are you talking about weapons? About arming the ship?”
“I’m not telling any of you all my thoughts,” Ky said. “Not even you, Quincy. Not because I don’t trust you—” Though she did not entirely trust the new crewmembers. “—but at this point the fewer people who know my plans, the fewer people can be forced to share them.”
Their expressions showed that none of them had considered that possibility yet.
“You think someone might—might grab one of us? Shake us down?” Mitt asked.
“It’s possible,” Ky said. “We have to think of things like that, Mitt. If they’ll attack corporate headquarters on Slotter Key, and kill family and crew on other stations, then a snatch isn’t the least likely thing to happen, if we’re unprepared. That’s why we’ll take precautions. Those of you with implants, make sure you keep your communications channels alive. Talk to the ship anytime you’re out . . . anything, everything.”
“You don’t have an implant,” Quincy said. “Isn’t it time to use that implant your father sent you?”
“It hasn’t been six months,” Ky said. “In the meantime, the first trip out is going to buy me the best nonimplant personal communicator on this station. I’ll wear it from then on, and when I go out I’ll have both crew and—depending on what I find out in the next couple of hours—hired security as well.”
“Captain, if Vatta Transport is really gone—really defunct—are you going to try to start it up again, or go independent?” Beeah asked.
“Beeah, I can’t answer that one now. I don’t know enough. We just fell into a war with these attacks. I don’t know who the enemy is, or why the attacks happened, or how strong the enemy is, or which of our forces are left. The main thing now is to survive, gather data, get someplace from which we can move, if a move is possible.”
“You ought to go back to Slotter Key,” Quincy said. “Your family needs you.”
“If I have a family,” Ky said. Images of horror flickered through her mind, and she shoved them away. “Attacks on headquarters, warehouses, processing plants, the private terminal, the family compound . . . where else would my family be? And it will do no good to go to Slotter Key and be cut off from ansible communication. What they need—if they live, if the whole corporation hasn’t been bankrupted—is someone out here doing trade and showing that Vatta ships still carry cargo safely.”
“But if we have no insurance, no one will ship with us.”
“Not the big shippers, no. But there are always people desperate to get cargo from here to there, and willing to assume the risk themselves.”
Quincy pursed her lips. “Vatta has never carried that kind of cargo.”
“Oh, yes, we have. Long ago, admittedly, but it’s in the family histories. Vatta wasn’t always completely pure and aboveboard—no one was, in the early days after the Rift. So what we’re going to do is trade and profit, along with skulking and hiding and being extremely careful.”
“I don’t see how we can carry the Vatta colors and be careful both,” Mitt said. “I’m with Beeah—why not go independent now, change the ship’s registry?”
“We can’t—we’re already widely known as Vatta,” Ky said. “If it comes to that, we’ll have to do it somewhere else, some port that is even less law-abiding than Lastway.”
They stared at her in silence.
Ky spent the next two hours looking at the threat assessment she and Martin had made on the approach when she had nothing else to do. Too many question marks, too many things she could not know. The lessons from the Academy came back to her. No commander ever knew everything; the ones who thought they did were often in the worst trouble. Good commanders took what they did know and made good plans—and contingency plans—anyway.
She doodled on a blank page of her log. MISSION: what was her mission, anyway? She had no higher command, at the moment . . . surely the original mission, to sell the ship for scrap, was irrelevant at this point. Stay alive. Keep her crew alive. Keep her ship whole and functioning. Find out who was behind this. What were victory conditions?
As cadets, they’d been introduced to the concepts of tactics, strategy, grand strategy . . . but most of their time had gone into the things a junior officer might need to know. Strategy was for older, more senior, and hopefully wiser heads. Juniors succeeded insofar as they figured out ways to carry out the designs of their seniors.
Ky shook her head at that moment of nostalgia. Prepared or not, she was the person on the spot. She was senior now. It was all up to her. No use to whine that she wasn’t ready or didn’t know enough. Nobody was around to advise her.
Victory conditions: start with alive and free, all of them. Alive, free, with the ship. Alive, free, with the ship and crew and some prospect of making a living. And then doing something to save her remaining family members and if possible the family business. Revenge on whoever had done this would have to come later, much later, but survival itself depended on figuring out who it could be.
Paison’s allies were the obvious choice . . . and if true, that meant it was her fault. If she hadn’t killed Paison, they would not have attacked her family. But that made no sense. Why would pirates waste all that money and effort to attack her family when they had to know where she was? Why not just kill her?
Now was the time to find out who, and then how and why and the rest, while keeping herself and her crew alive and out of enemy hands. She looked at the locker in which she’d stowed the Vatta implant her father had sent her. It was still too soon, according to the Mackensee surgeon, to have an implant installed, but at this moment she would have liked access to the proprietary Vatta information. More important, though, was keeping it out of enemy hands—a security issue that hadn’t occurred to her until this moment.
When the crew reassembled, she asked for their ideas, their threat assessments. It occurred to her, as they ran down their lists, that they were doing much better than they would have before the Sabine mess. Still, Jim seemed to have a talent for thinking up ways someone might do them damage . . . his list was longer than anyone else’s.
Ky looked at him, when they’d all finished. “Where did you get those ideas?” she asked. He looked worried. “I’m not angry. I just wonder what else you were doing besides fixing ship engines.”
“I’m not doin’ it here,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t do anything to this ship, Captain.”
“I’m glad to know it—and glad you’re on our side.” She looked at Alene. “First, I’m going to see if the legal firm I contacted has any final word on that Leonora cargo, then we’ll list our cargo on the Exchange boards. Martin will concentrate on security issues, so you’ll have to run Cargo on your own.”
“Prices are volatile, Captain,” Alene said. “How long d’you think it’ll be before we get clearance?”
“Less than an hour after we dock, I’m hoping. Certainly by end of shift. As soon as we start selling, we start resupply. Environmental, insystem fuel, general supplies. Now: can we offload to the secure dock area without outside help?”
Alene shook her head. “I don’t think so. The Leonora cargo’s all palleted, too heavy to shift without a loader. We could rent a loader, I suppose . . . I’ve handled one. But who else?”
“I can,” Jim said. “At least . . . I’ve used one once.” With Jim, Ky thought, that could mean he’d seen someone else use one once, or he’d driven one off a dock into the water, or—possibly—he had actually driven one without incident.
“How long will it take with one loader, to clear the holds?”
“If some of the others will help with shifting and positioning, we can have the Leonora pallets off in a shift. The rest . . . you know our difficulties, Captain. Several days.”
“Here’s what we’ll do, then. First Martin will supervise setting up our security net. Meanwhile I’ll arrange loader rental, and as soon as we’re cleared for it, we’ll start unloading those pallets. I’d like to minimize exposure of personnel to possible . . . problems. The fewer outsiders who come aboard, and the less time anyone spends onstation, the safer we’ll be.”
On final approach, Lastway Station looked like what it was: a vast and complicated construction that had grown far beyond its original design to accommodate the needs of its local and transient populations. Below it, the planet’s cloud-wrapped surface was invisible. Two centuries earlier, terraforming had begun on a moderately appropriate base; the information packet supplied by the station to all incoming ships described in detail the processes that continued, but Ky was far less interested in the details of biogeochemical processes than in the price of refreshment cultures for the environmental system and what she could hope to get for the cargo originally consigned to Leonora.
As Lee eased the ship nearer and nearer to the docking booms, Ky reviewed the current list of ships docked, their origins and destinations. Another had been waved off from Leonora, and she learned that the onstation legal services had already certified its cargo as undeliverable, available for resale. At least she didn’t have to fight that battle on her own. She called Martin and told him that he could scavenge freely in the Leonora cargo.
“Thanks, ma’am,” he said. “As it happens, those containers were right handy . . . won’t take much time at all . . .” The suspicion crossed her mind that he had already taken what he wanted from them, but there was no reason to push the issue. None of the ships on station now seemed like a pirate ready to blow her ship away, but she hadn’t spotted Paison as a problem until too late. She had to assume that danger lurked here, everywhere.
Her own ship’s needs ranged as usual from must-haves like refreshment cultures for the environmental tanks; to very desirable, like better longscan; to wishful thinking, like an insystem drive that would move them faster than a snail on a hot rock. At least she hadn’t spent all her money on Belinta.
Lee docked neatly, and the station crew hooked up the support umbilicals. Ky found several small chores to do until she realized she was anxious about opening the hatch, then made herself go down to cargo hold 1 and do it. Martin materialized from one of the cargo hatches, and stood in front of her as the hatch opened.
Lastway Immigration Control—one unarmed and six armed—were waiting at dockside, by their expressions none too patiently. The one without weapons had two forearms on one arm, and a wrist tentacle on the back of the other wrist. Ky managed not to blink in surprise; that was a humod form she hadn’t seen before. “Eight hundred, cash or trade goods to be valued by an independent assessor,” said the humod. The tentacle uncurled elegantly, and the input connectors glinted.
“Trade goods,” Ky said. She handed the tentacle one of Aunt Gracie’s diamonds.
“Submitted for assessment,” the humod said. The tentacle transferred the diamond to that hand, then removed a sealable pouch from a pocket, plucked up the diamond again, and inserted it, then sealed the pouch. “You will want a receipt.”
“I will want an assessor here, at dockside,” Ky said.
“You think Lastway Immigration Control is dishonest?” That with a ferocious scowl.
“I think diamonds are too easy to misplace or confuse with other diamonds,” Ky said.
“I will call.” Silent moments, as the humod communicated by interface; then it nodded sharply. “Yes. One expert in assessing crystals comes.”
“Are you from here?” Ky asked.
Again the humod scowled. “Why ask that?”
“No insult intended, but your accent is not the same as what I heard from Traffic Control—I merely wished to know which accent is native here, to adjust my interpretation to that norm.”
Its face cleared. “Ah. You have old tech implant, yes? Mine adjust by self.” On input maybe, but the output wasn’t. “From Vastig, I am, eight years agone taking ship away from sad family. You know Vastig?”
“No,” Ky admitted.
“But such ships come there, Vatta Transport. Many ships Vatta has—or had. Someone likes Vatta not.”
“True enough,” Ky said. “And I don’t know why—do you?”
“Not I. Others make guesses, only guesses. On Vastig we do not make guesses. We say the truth. But here comes one to assess . . .”
Ky looked around to see a man in a dressy business suit; as he came closer, she began to wonder if he, too, were a humod. One eye appeared to have a magnifier built into it, the rim sunken into the skin. When he opened his mouth to speak, his tongue was dark and heavily furred.
“Licensed assessor Grill, at your service,” he said clearly enough, bowing to both the Immigration Control officer and Ky. “A crystal for assessment, yes?”
The Immigration Control officer transferred it to Grill’s hand—a hand that appeared to be normal, to Ky’s fascinated gaze—and Grill put it into his mouth for a long moment, then spat it back to his hand. “Carbon,” he announced. “Impurities negligible to value.” Now the magnifier extended, lenses telescoping from his eye. “Cut . . . Melique-cut diamond, crystalline structure excellent, flaws . . . minimal. Value for official purposes 2,443 credits.” He handed it back to the Immigration Control officer, who tucked it into the sealed pouch again. “Good day,” Grill said to the space between them, turned on his heel, and walked away.
“Your receipt for a credit balance of 1,643 to be set against docking and service fees,” said the Immigration Control officer, handing Ky a hardcopy strip that had just extruded from his lower forearm. “Welcome to Lastway and enjoy your stay.” Then he and his escort marched off.
Ky shook her head and spoke to the ship’s intercom. “All clear now. I don’t see the loader that should be here; I’ll contact them and the security company again.”
“The captain should reenter the ship,” Martin said. “I’ll want to get the net set out. I’ll need Jim, Beeah, and Mehar.”