CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Ky made it to the bridge before Rafe was through talking to their liaison. He looked grim; Lt. Commander Johannson looked satisfied.
“We’d like to have your . . . agent . . . aboard for this,” Johannson said. “As he has ISC authorization.”
“Rafe?” Ky said, looking at him.
Rafe grimaced. “My value, to you and ISC both, is at least partly in my being known only as a ne’er-do-well. If I’m part of the hit—”
“I didn’t mean part of the team,” Johannson said. “In fact we’d rather not have you; we have enough unknowns in the equation already. But aboard ship here, in direct communication, ensuring that our people got the right . . . mmm . . . evidence.”
“Then only a shipload of your people would know who I am,” Rafe said. “And how many is that?”
“Do you really think—” Johannson began, then stopped. “All right. I see your point. Even if they don’t know your name, information could be stripped from them. Disguise?”
Rafe gave Ky a strange look. “Could I pass as Vatta, Captain?”
“The only Vattas declared aboard are me, Stella, and Toby,” Ky said. “You’d have to have been . . . oh . . . hiding out on Allway, or something. Maybe a Vatta ne’er-do-well? Old Uncle Jonas, ditched from the family for . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Being a ne’er-do-well,” Rafe said. “It doesn’t have to be specific, whether I got the second upstairs maid pregnant with twins or embezzled to cover my gambling debts. Years ago and no one knew it; I’d been erased from the family tree. Of course that doesn’t explain how I know what I know.”
“Bad boys don’t explain,” Ky said.
Rafe shook his head. “You are entirely too knowing for a young sprig of Vatta virtue, Captain. I begin to think you’ve spent some time in the back alleys of the universe yourself.”
“So . . . is that the story?” Johannson said, clearly impatient with their badinage.
“All right. I’ll use the same cover name,” Rafe said. “I was suddenly recalled to a sense of family duty when the Vatta ship blew up at Allway—or Stella seduced me, whichever is more believable—and Captain Vatta here put my nefarious skills to good use.”
“Coming aboard may be a problem,” Ky said. “You know—well, maybe you don’t—but we don’t have a standard passenger lock, only the emergency.” At least the hatch would work smoothly now.
“We’ll send a pod,” Johannson said. “Do you need a suit as well?”
“I have a suit,” Rafe said. “I might just mention how much I hate wearing it.”
“You might get yourself into it and start checking it out,” Ky said.
“Give some women command and they go . . . all right, I’m going.”
Ky turned to the vidscreen. “Any progress on the convoy specs, Commander?”
“Yes: we can handle four ships, including yours. I’ll transmit the list of those we think acceptable, ranked by our preference, which of course need not be yours. And there’s a red list, of ships we would not accept.”
“Fine. I’ll start contacting captains at once.”
Captain Solein Harper of My Bess looked just as forbidding as the first time Ky had talked to him, but at least he didn’t cut off the contact the moment he saw her face.
“You’ve probably heard we’ve hired Mackensee for our next voyage,” she said.
“I heard,” he said. “Two warships to a trader is pretty hefty protection, I’d think.”
“So it is,” Ky said. “Would you be interested in convoy space?”
“Convoy?”
“Mackensee assures me that they can protect four ships in fairly close convoy.”
“Where are you headed?” He wouldn’t have asked that much if he hadn’t wanted to come, she knew.
“Haven’t decided yet,” Ky said. “Where were you bound?”
“Nowhere until I can be sure of communications, but I’m eating up profit sitting here.”
“Communications here will improve shortly,” Ky said, hoping she was right. “If you’re interested, a convoy share will be one-quarter the escort cost, minus the Vatta basic contract. Ten thousand.”
“Ten thousand! What, you think I haul platinum or something? Eight.”
“Nine,” Ky said. “For you.”
“Done,” he said. He would have gone to ten, she knew, if she’d pushed. But nine was a big help, and his goodwill might be a bigger one. “In Vatta accounts here?”
“On safe arrival,” Ky said.
“Ah.” His face relaxed; now he looked tough but not vicious. “That’s honorably done, Captain Vatta. You’ll want another one or two, will you?”
“You have someone to recommend?”
“Polly Tendel—independent, fairly new, broke off from Dillon four years ago. Seems a decent sort, kind of rough around the edges.”
Ky glanced at the Mackensee list. Tendel was there, though not in the first five. “All right. You want to contact her?”
“I can . . . same terms?”
“Yes.”
A half hour later, Ky had the rest of the convoy lined up: Harper’s My Bess, Tendel’s Lacewing, and Sindarin Gold’s Beauty of Bel. All the ships had passed muster with Mackensee, and—according to the transmissions from the station—all were in the process of clearing for departure. As the contract specified, Mackensee had control of the convoy, and thus the rendezvous point. Ky let them handle it. She spoke to Rafe before he transferred to the Gloucester, then tried not to hover over her engineering crew as they finished installing the new defensive suite. She could not resist loading the installation manual to her own workstation, where she could follow their progress without interfering.
She caught herself yawning, and remembered that many hours ago she had been wishing for time to take a nap before the Mackensee officers came aboard. Had she really been awake that long? Another jaw-cracking yawn, and she decided that awake might not be the right term. She called down to Engineering.
“What now?” Quincy asked.
“Sorry,” Ky said. “Just letting you know I’ll be in my cabin, hopefully asleep. You need a break, too.”
“I had one, and it’s about time you did. I’ll put anything new on your board.”
Stella, when Ky came into her cabin, said the same thing. “And someone will call you if they need you; you know that.”
“Yes, Cousin,” Ky said. She should shower . . . but she was on the bed, asleep, before that thought ended.
When the call came, she’d had almost five hours of sleep. It was Rafe, on the Mackensee ship.
“I’m going to have to go with them,” he said. “I can’t . . . explain how certain things work, and how to secure the evidence needed without compromising my other oaths.” He grimaced. “Not as part of the . . . er . . . main team, but in a separate group. These people don’t trust me, which I suppose is natural, so they won’t let me go to the local office alone.”
“If it’s necessary,” Ky said.
“Oh, it’s necessary.” Rafe glanced aside; though only his face appeared on the screen, Ky was sure he was conveying the presence of an auditor.
“Well, then . . .” Ky couldn’t think what to say. Be careful seemed both unnecessary and insulting.
“I believe Lieutenant Commander Johannson wants to speak to you,” Rafe said, turning away.
“Captain Vatta,” Johannson said, coming into pickup range. “The other ships in the convoy are now beyond primary danger range, headed for rendezvous. Your representative has convinced us there is sufficient reason for the actions planned. I must now formally ask if your orders concerning ISC personnel remain?”
“Yes,” Ky said.
“All right; just checking. We’re scheduled to start the operation within the hour, with the transfer of your representative and certain other personnel.”
“What’s the plan?” Ky asked.
“You mean in detail?”
“Yes,” Ky said.
Johannson frowned. “It’s need-to-know, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t think you should be too concerned—”
“We studied this in the Academy,” Ky said. “I’m just curious to know how you’d go about it.”
He looked askance, eyebrows high. “You studied how to set up a take-out?”
“Yes. It was part of special ops, level two.”
“Slotter Key must be an interesting place,” he said. “Suppose you tell me how you’d set it up, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”
Ky thought back to Colonel Aspin’s lecture. “You can do it with a minimal team, if you have to,” she said. “Sniper and spotter. Better is a half squad, and better yet a squad. Squad leader commands the squad, but the spotter ranks the sniper. Ideally, you’ve got plenty of intel about the area. You have routes in and out planned. You are hot on com, half the squad spread, covering the routes, the other half in reserve.”
“Hmmm. So . . . what do you know of the station manager’s routine?”
“Not much. I know the ISC offices are on Hub Three, and I’d presume the manager’s would be the most secure . . .” Rafe knew. They knew Rafe knew; they had Rafe aboard with them.
“Almost. Quite central, anyway. He lives on the same hub, two sectors away. Travels any of five routes, all distinct, and has staggered random times for arrival and departure. Once he’s past the first intersection, he can be almost anywhere.”
“Tagger? We were told to tag if possible.”
“Tags are traceable. We prefer CAID—you know what that is?”
Ky did. It was considered the latest and best method of remote identification. “So you’d have a plan, and internal line of travel, from each of his known alternate routes, plus a way of detecting if he’s off track and getting someone to him. Here, you’d probably use your people who were stationed here in the recruiting and consultancy positions. They know things about the station that aren’t in the public specs, I’d bet.”
“They do,” Johannson said, without elaborating further.
“Now you need some kind of disturbance,” Ky said. “Something to cover the moments around the hit, give the sniper time to break down the weapon and move out of the range of concern. Lots of ways to do that, but there’s another place your local staff could help. Bet they’ve made friends with people onstation.”
“You do have the main elements,” he said. “But I still see no reason for you to know the specific details. One of the rules you haven’t quoted at me yet is, there’s no such thing as secure communications.”
“You’re right,” Ky said. She didn’t want him to be right. She wanted to see it all, learn it, but in this instance learning could be followed by dying. Though she was paying for them to take the risk, that didn’t justify making it bigger. She left it there, not asking how big a team would go with Rafe to secure evidence and get the ansible working properly again.
Hours crawled by. She didn’t know when to start worrying, when to stop worrying. They were still in close enough to pick up some near-com chatter, but Ky could make little out of it. Ship to ship, the convoy reported in as they cleared local traffic control. Ky, on her own bridge, waited for what she could not really anticipate . . . except trouble. Going back to sleep was not an option. Instead, she munched on food she barely tasted, and tried to concentrate on the operating manual for the defensive suite.
Finally the READY light on her Mackensee-installed secure com winked; Ky keyed in access. “Got ’im,” was the terse response. “Clean, employee’s agent reports ansible hookups restored, and backfiles accessed. Estimates less than fifteen minutes to open ansible contacts and file dumping.”
“If anyone else has a working ansible,” Ky said. “The backfiles should be interesting, though.”
“We already have someone working on ours,” Johannson said.
Lee turned to her. “Captain, the Lastway ansible reports eight blocks of stored messages for Vatta personnel . . . haul or wipe?”
“Haul ’em all,” Ky said. “Somewhere in there might be a clue to what exactly is going on.”
Ship chatter rose around them as the Lastway ISC operation opened the equivalent of vast ears and tongue and began responding to everyone. Evidently Vatta messages hadn’t been the only ones sequestered.
“Hailing Vatta ship Gary Tobai,” came from Tendel on Lacewing. “What happened to the ansible? We’ve got a mass of backfile messages.”
“Seems to be working better,” Ky said. “That’s all I know. We picked up eight blocks ourselves.”
“Coincidence bothers me, Captain Vatta.” Tendel’s narrow scarred face tightened. “I prefer no coincidences.”
“Seems a good one, to me,” Ky said. “We leave, things get better. Might mean less trouble ahead.”
“And maybe I don’t need convoy protection.”
“Maybe not. But you signed a contract.”
“So I did. Well, people always said trading with a Vatta you had to watch your credit balance. I wonder if this is happening everywhere or just here?”
“Time will tell,” Ky said.
Ten minutes. Twenty. Ky forced herself not to pace back and forth.
The secure line blinked again. She picked it up. “Yes?”
“Team’s out safely, including your man. Genius with the com stuff, our fellas say. Everyone’s on course; the squad’ll be picked up by our courier.”
Ky went to tell Stella that Rafe was safe. She took along the eight blocks of back messages; some were sure to be proprietary information, and she couldn’t ask anyone else on the ship to go through them.
“How are they sorted?” Stella asked.
“By date, I think,” Ky said. “I haven’t really looked yet, but isn’t that how backfiles are usually organized?”
“We can hope,” Stella said. “Have a spare reader?”
“Use this one,” Ky said, nodding to her desk. “We can isolate it from the rest of the ship.”
“Oh. Of course.” Stella loaded the first cube. “Mmm. I haven’t done the dating conversions yet, but I think this is from before the trouble started, which would mean the ISC manager here was fiddling with Vatta data in preparation . . . let me see . . .” She pointed to the screen. “Just the kind of routine notice Vatta HQ sends—sent—every five days to all ports. Corporate news update: no hint of trouble.”
Ky looked at the bulletin, its format familiar to her for years, the linked VT in blue and red, the summary of tons shipped, percent on-time deliveries, percent expedited-shipment bonuses earned, lists of retirements, promotions, new assignments. Her own name leapt out at her: the change in ship name from Glynnis Jones to Gary Tobai as the result of “uncontrolled conditions,” the successful delivery to Belinta, and her promotion from contingent captain to list captain. Had it been her status as contingent captain that had convinced Furman he could order her around in the Sabine mess?
“Successful delivery at Belinta: it must’ve been posted just as I arrived, because trouble started shortly after that. I got a ping from my ship about trouble, and was on an ansible uplink to Vatta headquarters when I lost the connection. That’s when things got really interesting, because a team of assassins came into the Captains’ Guild—”
“You didn’t tell me this before!” Stella said, wide-eyed.
“And we’ve had how much time to chat?” Ky said. “Anyway . . . it’ll be in my log, the universal date. Let me check.” She pulled out the notebook. “Here—”
“You keep a paper log?”
“Yeah. Anyway, it’s . . . 13.34.75. What’s the date on that message?”
“It’s 13.32.75. Where would you have been then?”
Ky paged back. “Unloading cargo, Belinta Station. After that I went downplanet hunting cargo; we were headed for Leonora but had another several cubic meters of space. I was trying to come up with enough to finance a refit of the ship; she’d been destined for scrap, originally, but the hull is sound and I thought maybe I could save it.”
“I don’t have a paper log,” Stella went on. “It’s in my implant.” She tapped her head. “Universal time, also 13.34. Odd, really. Even with ansible transmission, how did they set up almost simultaneous attacks light-years apart? Unless they used all local talent . . . ship schedules just aren’t that precise.”
“We had a course on interstellar terrorism,” Ky said. “A large enough organization, with enough financial support, and enough lead time . . . and we don’t know how many planned attacks didn’t go off on schedule, because the ansibles went down.”
“Did all ansible traffic at Belinta go down when you were cut off?”
“No. At least, no one said anything. The Slotter Key consul on Belinta told me the Slotter Key ansibles were down, but when we left, Belinta’s seemed to be working fine. It was such a low-traffic system I’m not sure anyone would’ve noticed.”
“Did you call out on it?”
“No, I didn’t. I figured the bad guys knew exactly where we were, and we should get into space, go somewhere else, try to outflank them.”
“I still can’t figure out why anyone would want to do it,” Stella said. “Okay, attack the monopoly, I can see that, but why disrupt all communications? Why not just display the ability and bargain from there?”
“If we knew that, we might know why Vatta was chosen as another target,” Ky said. “Did those ISC couriers tell you that ISC ships were being hit?”
“No—but then they didn’t tell me much. Not even the route we were taking.”
“Which suggests to me they were worried about attack,” Ky said. “I hope Rafe can pry more information out of the local ansible before we clear space. Something about all this just doesn’t make sense. Why Vatta? We’re—we were—important on Slotter Key, and we’re a major shipper, but we’re not the only major shipper, and Pavrati hasn’t been hit that we know of.”
“But we are, after the Sabine thing, known as a friend of ISC,” Stella said. “Even before that, corporately, we’ve supported them in discussions with other shippers. And our unarmed ships travel on scheduled routes, making them easier to find than ISC couriers, which don’t.”
“Point.” Ky rubbed her face. “So if I hadn’t been so prominent at Sabine . . . if I hadn’t been so obviously in tight with ISC . . . maybe none of this would have happened.”
Stella touched her arm. “Ky, I don’t think it’s your fault. No one back home even hinted it was your fault.”
“They didn’t have time, did they?” Ky said.
“A few could have, but they didn’t. You can’t blame yourself . . .”
“Oh, yes, I can,” Ky said. “I certainly can—and I do, in part. I know it’s not all my fault, but I didn’t make things better. Hindsight’s no good if you don’t use it.”
“I just don’t want you taking all the responsibility—”
“Not all. Just some. A mistake I don’t intend to make again.” Though how she was to avoid it, she had no idea. Wars are won by those who make the fewest mistakes, one of her instructors had insisted.
Stella looked at her with an odd expression. “Ky . . . is that coming out of your military training, or have you really changed that much?”
“Changed?”
“Well . . . I don’t want to insult you or anything, but back when you were a kid—before you went off to the Academy—I thought of you as kind of a dreamy, impractical sort. You’d come out of it to do something hopelessly romantic, like champion some natural-born loser . . . we were always hearing about your lost pups.”
Ky felt her neck getting hot. “Hard to lose a family identity even when it doesn’t fit,” she said. “You should know about that.”
Stella’s face hardened. “True enough. But you were different.”
“Was I?” Ky turned away. “They even had me convinced that I was too softhearted and softheaded. If everyone tells you . . . what did they tell you, Stella, that led you to that first mess?”
Stella’s eyes widened in shock, then she looked thoughtful. “I suppose . . . everyone always made a big thing out of how pretty I was. Jo was the smart one, Benji and Tak were the strong athletic ones, and I was . . . Oh look at Stella, isn’t she adorable and Good grief, Stefan, you’ll have to use a cannon to keep the boys off her. I couldn’t outscore Jo—she’s—she was—brilliant, and I never wanted to outsweat Benji and Tak.” She paused. “So . . . are you telling me you aren’t softhearted and an easy mark for stray pups? When we have a literal stray pup on this very ship?”
Ky snorted. “Puddles isn’t my fault. Oh, I suppose I could’ve let the locals kill the beast, but they annoyed me.”
“You saved the dog to spite the Garda?” Stella said, brows arched.
“More or less, yes. And it might prove useful yet. The vet’s assistant said this breed makes good watchdogs.”
“I suppose, if you have foot-tall assassins, it might be of some use,” Stella said. “But otherwise?”
Was this the time to confess to a family member her self-discovery at the moment of killing Paison? No. Stella would be spooked, and she needed Stella’s support . . .“I’m not just an idealistic nice girl,” Ky said. Her voice sounded rough to her own ears. “Any more than you’re just a sexy pushover for handsome men.”
“Thank you for that,” Stella said, in a voice that could have been expressing either anger or amusement. “So we’re both renegades, are we? The surviving senior family members, barring Aunt Gracie, who is a renegade in her own way?”
“I suspect,” Ky said, her good humor restored, “that Vattas have always harbored a fair number of renegades. Do we even know how our great-great-great-grandfather obtained his first ship?”
“I do,” said Stella. “It’s in my secured files. And I’m afraid you’re right—he was not entirely respectable.” She shrugged.
“Was he a privateer?” Ky asked.
“Privateer? Maybe. Definitely a raider of some kind, at least for a while. Why?”
“Remember that letter of marque? I was thinking maybe it runs in the family.”
“But you didn’t ask for it; you aren’t using it.”
“Yet,” Ky said, as she got up to leave. Stella stared.
Down in Engineering, Ky found Quincy hunched over a screen, reading through the installation instructions again. Toby sat on the deck, with Puddles upside down in his lap; the pup looked ridiculous, kicking one stubby leg as the boy stroked his belly. Jim, across the compartment, leaned on an upright, scowling.
“How’s it going?” Ky asked.
“It would be going fine if that idiot dog hadn’t eaten a corner out of one of the cartons so we didn’t have all the connectors . . . we spent hours hunting and we’re still missing one. I think I can cobble something together. I hope.” Quincy gave the pup a poisonous look; Toby hunched over it protectively.
“You aren’t going to space it, are you, Captain?” Toby asked.
“No, of course not,” Ky said. “But we probably need to confine it somehow out of the way.”
“Not in a shipping carton,” Quincy said. “It eats them. And then throws up.”
“I told you—” Jim began, but Quincy silenced him with a gesture.
“Jim thinks if we give the pup the run of the ship, it will learn where everything is and be less trouble,” she said. “I think it would be disastrous. As with that carton. I can just imagine us arriving someplace—wherever we’re going—and finding that our salable cargo has been converted into dog messes.”
“Dogs can be . . . er . . . trained, can’t they?” Ky asked. Her family had never kept dogs. Cats, horses, birds, and some of the small arboreal creatures, mingas, but not dogs. She’d had friends with dogs, and those dogs didn’t seem to be much trouble. They made their messes outside. Of course, here outside was a hostile environment. “Didn’t we pick up some supplies from the vet?”
“And a book on training,” Jim said, nodding. “They can be trained to use a box or something. But it takes time.”
“You’ve trained a dog?” Ky asked.
“Not myself, but I’ve watched an uncle.”
Ky was about to say It’s your dog; you found it when she glanced again at Toby. The look he gave her said more than words. “Toby,” she said instead. “You’re caught up on your classwork, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Quincy, how many hours a day do you need Toby’s help?”
Quincy pursed her lips. “Right now? Not at all, really . . . systems are all green, and the rest of this setup is software alignment. Why?”
“Because I need him to do something else. Toby, that pup’s your responsibility: I want you to keep it out of trouble, train it, take care of him. I know Jim found it—” She glanced at Jim. “—but, Toby, you’ve had a dog before, and Jim has other duties. If you need help, ask for it, but primarily I want this to be your job. Is that fair?”
His face lit from within for the first time since he’d come aboard. “Yes, Captain! I—I’ll make sure he’s not in the way.”
“I’m sure you’ll take care of him,” Ky said. She felt a pang of guilt. The boy had been through horrendous stresses, and she’d spent how much time making sure he was doing all right? Next to none. “I hope he turns out to be a good little watchdog for our dock area, on stations where dogs are allowed. Be sure to keep me informed how he’s coming along.”
“Captain, could I change his name?”
“His name?”
“Puddles just isn’t . . . a good name for him.”
“What would you name him?”
Toby glanced at Quincy. “How about Rascal?”
“Sounds good to me,” Ky said. “Now get Rascal out from under Quincy’s feet so she can get on with her work.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The boy scrambled up, all ungainly legs it seemed, and headed for his cabin with Rascal—now awake and wiggling wildly—in his grip.
When he was out of sight, Quincy cocked her head at Ky. “That was well done, Captain. Annoying as I find that animal, he’ll be good for Toby.”
“And you won’t be distracted while finishing the installation,” Ky said.
“I certainly hope not,” Quincy said.