CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

A long silence, during which Johannson turned dull red and appeared to be having trouble breathing. Then a harsh bark of laughter. “Captain Vatta, you—you are indeed—interesting. We’ll send the pinnace to ferry you and your prize crew aboard.”

Fair Kaleen, up close, looked even more battered than in the external vid pictures. The damage Osman’s limpet had done to the air lock, for instance. That was going to be expensive to fix properly—the implant gave estimates. The repair bots had welded a replacement in, roughly, but it was not the kind of work Ky wanted on any ship she owned for the long haul. Once into the crew quarters, she found not the squalor she had expected from an outlaw’s ship, but a tidy, workmanlike arrangement, marred only by stains from the recent conflict. The bridge, easily three times as large as Gary Tobai’s, resembled that of the ship she had apprenticed on, but with the addition of an extra row of boards.

“Weapons,” her merc escort pointed out. “He’s taken out part of two cargo holds to mount them. We haven’t checked them all out, but I wouldn’t hit those red buttons unless you want to kill something. We didn’t inventory the munitions, either, but the hold hatches had warning labels on them. We’ve checked out the bridge for booby traps and have discussed the rest of the ship with your security command.” He glanced at Martin, who nodded.

Ky looked at the control boards. Well, she had always wanted to command a warship. This thing could almost be a pocket cruiser, if the holds were full of missiles instead of cargo . . . no question at all that Osman had been a pirate. Which might help when a court adjudicated possession: whatever they thought of privateers, courts always thought poorly of pirates.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Captain—environmental’s salvageable. The cultures are fine; the higher taxons are badly shaken up, but I think we can boost production in the next few days.”

“That’s good to hear,” Ky said. “Stores?”

“The ship’s supplied for a much bigger crew, Captain, and none of the supply lockers I’ve seen so far was damaged. We won’t have any problems for another three standard months at least; there are more lockers, but I’m not yet sure it’s safe to get into them.”

“Good,” Ky said. “So we’re good to go, then.” Mehar and Toby hadn’t said anything, but the drives boards were all green. Quincy, back on Gary Tobai, had said things about idiots who went off to strange ships with greenies for Engineering crew, but she was still recovering from her blast injuries, and Ky wasn’t about to put additional strain on her. Quincy had finally subsided when Ky pointed out that Stella, as a completely inexperienced captain, needed the best engineer on Gary Tobai.

The Mackensee boarders had already tested the communications, ignoring the box they didn’t recognize, which Ky knew was the ship-mounted ansible. Now she called up Johannson.

“We’re ready to go as soon as your people are back aboard your ship,” she said. “We’ll be rejoining the convoy after jump, correct?”

“Correct. If your navigator is at the board, I’ll transmit the coordinates—”

“Go ahead,” Ky said, nodding at Sheryl.

“We’re on our way,” the merc escort said. “See you somewhere else, and good luck with this thing.”

“We’ll be fine,” Ky said, with more confidence than she actually felt.

 

At last they were on the move. On Osman’s excellent military-grade scans, Gary Tobai boosted for jump ahead of them, crawling along at less than half the acceleration Fair Kaleen could offer. Ky was not about to go off and leave her first command, though. Behind them, the Mackensee ship loafed along, keeping watch behind, weapons live. Ky kept Kaleen’s locked down. In those hours, Ky’s implant explored the ship and her data banks, easily circumventing Osman’s security routines: at root, the ship was Vatta, purpose-built for Vatta, and her deepest levels of programming gave anyone with the Vatta command dataset complete access to anything added later. Ky was able to tell Martin exactly where physical traps were located, and how to disarm them.

The cargo holds with the weapons held ample munitions for them, Ky found. In fact, the modifications Osman had made to the ship cut down her cargo capacity to just over half again as much as Gary Tobai’s . . . she would be uneconomical as a pure trader without ripping out all the changes. But as a privateer . . . she was perfect, except that the universe knew her as a pirate. She needed a new name, a new ship chip, an identity unsullied by Osman’s years of criminal activity.

And what was in the other holds would easily pay for that new identity . . . the cream of a half dozen piracies, at least. Osman had kept all the compact, highly valuable prizes: luxury items such as jewelry, art, bioassays, implants—implants taken from “interesting” prisoners. Some had been downloaded into his own ship’s computer, and some awaited that treatment. He had reloaded salable data onto data cubes; a good part of his profit for the past dozen standard years had been from the sale of proprietary information gained from such implants, she found when she looked at his records. Pirate he might be, but he kept financial records like any other businessman. He also had a store of ship-mounted ansibles for sale to potential allies in the war against ISC.

Ky mused on this as Rafe went to work on the shipboard ansible console. Should she tell him about the others? No harm, probably.

“There’s about a dozen of these things in the hold,” she said conversationally. Rafe looked at her.

“Like this?”

“Yes. According to his internal records, he used to have more, but sold some. Do you need to know to whom?”

“I suppose I should,” Rafe said. “But that cat’s well out of the bag by now. I told them two years ago . . . but they wouldn’t listen.” He turned back to his work. “By the way, do you think Osman was the only reason Vatta was attacked? Was he just working out his grudge while helping his allies?”

“I’m not sure,” Ky said. “If they were looking to make an example of a shipping firm to put pressure on the others—which is what some of the other captains at Lastway thought—then Vatta is reasonably conspicuous and has supported ISC’s continuing monopoly in the past. Osman could have been a blessing to them, with his inside information and his personal interest in seeing Vatta suffer.”

“There are other systems that don’t like Slotter Key flags in general,” Rafe said. “I don’t suppose you know this, but Slotter Key runs privateers.”

Her own letter of marque seemed to be burning a hole in her uniform—she was very glad Rafe was looking at the console’s internal bits, and not at her. “I had heard something,” she said. “I wasn’t sure whether to believe it.”

“Oh, it’s true. Cheaper than enlarging their Spaceforce, I suppose. Privateers support themselves. From our end, we never knew Vatta to be involved in that, but this ship . . . your corporate headquarters disavowed it, but I did sometimes wonder.”

“You . . . knew about Osman before I did?” And you didn’t warn me? she wanted to add but didn’t.

“Not for sure,” Rafe said. “And if you were making rendezvous with the family privateer, I wanted to know more about it.” Now he did look over his shoulder at her. “Don’t look at me like that, Captain. It doesn’t violate our partnership—check the terms—and I warned you as soon as I knew for certain something was bent.”

Small comfort. She tried to think of something to say, but at that moment, Sheryl announced that they were entering countdown for endim transition.

“All stations, secure for FTL,” Ky said, instead of any of the lame comments she’d thought of. “Section seals locked.” Rafe got off the deck and strapped himself into one of the spare seats on the bridge, while the others acknowledged. Ky’s stomach knotted. How would the Kaleen handle transition with that crudely repaired air lock? At least, if it blew, only the passage behind it would lose air.

Fair Kaleen slipped through the transition as easily as Ky herself would have walked through a doorway . . . of course, a pirate would keep his ship perfectly tuned. After a brief hour and twelve minutes of FTL flight, during which Ky thought of all the things that might have gone wrong with Gary Tobai and then what might go wrong if any of them reentered normal space at the wrong relative vee, the ship dropped out as smoothly as she’d gone in. Ahead of them, Gary Tobai appeared as their scan cleared, and behind them the Mackensee ship dropped out still at the same interval.

“Brilliant job, Lee and Sheryl,” Ky said. She felt a wave of relief. There on longscan were the other Mackensee ship and the rest of the convoy. No unknown ships in the system. Here, the ansible wasn’t working, but Rafe would fix that. She reversed the compartment lockdown.

“Ten hours to rendezvous with convoy,” Johannson said.

Ten hours. She could not stay awake another ten hours. Who could?

“Toby, come to the bridge, please.” Toby of the inexhaustible energy. On their present course, with no changes to be made, he could surely keep watch while the rest of them recovered.

“Commander, most of my crew’s dead on their feet. I’m going to put us down, and leave one on watch.”

“Good idea. Call if you need anything.”

Toby, with Rascal bouncing at his heels, came onto the bridge. “Yes, Captain?”

“You have the bridge, Toby.” No need to ask if he was alert enough; his eyes sparkled with delight. “See, I told you you’d make captain someday.”

“Yes, Captain! I’ll call right away if anything happens.”

“You do that,” Ky said, and clambered up, stiff in every muscle and joint. Martin had checked out enough of the crew quarters that they could each have a private cabin, though at the moment she was sure she could sleep on the deck in a pile with twenty others.

 

The captain’s cabin was half again as large as hers on Gary Tobai. Osman favored black and gray with red accents; the cabin had an odd smell, which she supposed was essence of Osman. Ky kicked herself for not having thought to have the ’fresher cycle on during those hours on the bridge. She pulled everything off the bed—she was not going to sleep on his sheets. In a locker, she found another set—synthsilk, in black, shiny and slippery. At least they didn’t smell like Osman. She threw the other bedclothes in the cleaning bin, turned the cabin ventilation to high, propped the hatch open, and was asleep before she thought to turn out the light.

She woke briefly once, as the light went off, then again when Toby’s voice announced that it was time, the time she’d said, but if she wanted to sleep longer everything was fine.

“I’m up,” she said. “I’ll shower.”

In Osman’s private bath—which deserved the name, having a tub as well as shower—she found the kind of mess she’d expected from the first, though most of it was due to the tumbling in zero-G. Smears of green and yellow and pink goo streaked the black marble walls and floor. She took one look and dialed the cleaner bots into action. While waiting for them to get the broken glass off the deck, she rummaged again through the lockers in his cabin. Clothes . . . he certainly liked black. And silk. Silk shirts, blousy silk pants. Shore rig: Vatta uniforms, including an old one worn thin. What must be costumes suitable for different worlds, various colors and styles. Underwear—it was a moment before she realized that the underwear could not all be his . . . it was a collection, male and female styles in various sizes, and all of it . . . she shuddered, and put the entire contents into the recycler. Maybe it would have been evidence, but she didn’t want to share space with it, even behind a closed door. In one drawer, she found other evidence of his proclivities: restraints, masks, items she almost understood and didn’t want to. She opened only one of the zippered leather cases; the array of tools horrified her, and she left the rest untouched.

She found clean towels, black but smelling of nothing but soap, just as the bots announced the bathroom was safe. Her implant informed her that the black marble wasn’t really marble, but a tunable crystal; Ky changed it to frosted white. Now she could feel clean . . . maybe. The shower worked as well as her own back on Gary Tobai, and she took extra time to comb her hair in front of Osman’s—her—mirror. That, too, was a tunable crystal; she changed the lower two-thirds to frosted white rather than reflective.

One by one her rested crew came back to the bridge or their stations.

“Could we redecorate the cabins?” Sheryl asked her.

“What, the gruesome murals bothered you?” Rafe asked.

“Rafe,” Ky said. Then, to Sheryl, “Of course. It’s our ship now. Osman’s cabin was pretty grim—were the others bad, too?”

“Let’s just say that Scovald’s famous mural of the invasion of Bettany does nothing for my dream life,” Sheryl said. “Not even when the previous occupant has added his own commentary and sketches to the original. And it smelled like that kind of person had been living in it.”

“Not nice people at all,” Rafe said. “I found what I thought was a simple one, plain walls with just a few pinups easy to ignore, but the instant I lay down on the bunk, the sound system came on. It left me in no doubt that whoever had that cabin was someone I do not want to know except over a weapon.” At Ky’s look he nodded. “Gone now. Flushed it. I figure you have enough on these people without that recording, and it was the only way to get it to shut up without dismantling the bunk. Which I was too tired to do.”

“I put some things in the recycler myself,” Ky said. “And I’m tempted to flush the bedding, too.”

“Oh yes,” Lee said. “In fact, I did. I’m not sure any cleaning cycle would take care of what was on those sheets.”

“Well, on our next long cycle with nothing much to do, we’ll get all that cleaned away. There’s plenty of crew space; we won’t be bored next transit.”

“I suppose disgust is better than boredom,” Sheryl said. “And it’s better than excitement, too,” she added. “I’ll get on it; there’s nothing for me to do before rendezvous. Unless you’re hungry and want a meal.”

Hands went up.

“I just hope I don’t find Selenki worms or something in the galley,” Sheryl said as she left the bridge.

Within the hour, she reappeared with trays; the smell of fresh-baked bread preceded her. “The galley’s fine,” she said. “And the supplies are . . . what I suppose pirates can afford. Prepacked from Escalion Catering, their gold-standard rations. I had to bake the bread, that was all. This is like that stuff the luxury liner had, remember?”

It seemed a lifetime ago that there’d been a fuss over gold-eye raspberries. “Yes,” Ky said, around a mouthful of warm fresh bread spread with something sweet and crunchy.

“I suppose we should share this with the others,” Lee said, smearing his bread with a different spread, this one a rich purple.

“Already done,” Sheryl said. “I called ’em. That silence you hear is people eating rather than talking.” She started on her own meal, and silence covered the bridge, too, for a few minutes.

“Better than Aunt Gracie’s fruitcake,” Ky said, when she came up for air. She had not realized how hungry she was. “We can save it for another emergency.”

“Which I hope doesn’t come too soon,” Lee said, stretching. “Ah . . . that’s good.”

As soon as they were close enough, Gloucester sent a pod to pick up Rafe so he could work on the system ansible. While he was gone, Johannson called Ky.

“We have another problem,” he said. “It’s your ISC agent, so called.”

“Rafe? What now?”

“We’ve been running analyses of events since we left Lastway. It looks to us that Mister Whoever-he-really-is has to be the one who set up that trap. We’re going to bring him back here when he’s done with this ansible, and have a look at his implant.”

“You can’t think that,” Ky said. “He’s been fixing ansibles—he led us to the ISC conspirators at Lastway.”

“It’s not unknown for conspirators to sacrifice some of their people for long-term gain,” Johannson said. “To gain your confidence, to gain ours—”

“And then he helped us survive the attack,” Ky said.

“You say . . . I’m not sure you’re competent to judge that, Captain Vatta. How else could Osman have known which system we’d be in? Nobody at Lastway knew that. How else could he have contacted his allies so easily? I believe Rafe is—or was—associated with ISC in some sensitive position, but the evidence is clear that he’s using some kind of clandestine communications device.”

“You can’t just invade his implant,” Ky said, all too aware that they could do just that. “He’s my crew; he’s under my protection.”

“I’m afraid we must disagree on that, Captain Vatta. Your safety, and the safety of others in the convoy, is our primary mission. We believe he compromises that safety. I appreciate your sense of honor where your crew are concerned, but we can’t risk it. We don’t intend to harm him; we’ll just check out his implant—”

Rafe would suicide first. Ky knew that, even though he’d never said it in so many words. He was not about to let anyone get access to his implant, or to that implant-mounted ansible. Yet she knew that telling Johannson that Rafe would suicide might convince him all the more that Rafe was one of the villains. After all, would an honest man commit suicide just to conceal the fact that he was honest?

“Rafe has told me things about his background,” Ky said, trying to think what argument might work. “There is . . . sensitive material, things that I agree should not be widely known.”

“We aren’t planning to publish it, Captain Vatta. Just find out if he’s part of the conspiracy. If you wish, I can promise to wipe the record, provided he’s innocent.”

What would he consider innocence? A bad boy, a remittance man, a rogue company spy masquerading as a petty criminal—a smuggler, a gambler, whatever else Rafe had used for cover? Hardly.

“Do you think I’m part of the conspiracy, Commander?”

“You?” That had clearly stopped his train of thought. “No, of course not. Young, inexperienced, foolhardy perhaps . . . but not a conspirator.”

“Fine. Then perhaps you will let me examine Rafe’s implant, rather than your people.” If Rafe would let her.

Johannson looked flustered. “Captain Vatta . . . I don’t mean to belittle your integrity, but . . . you’re a young woman, and this Rafe is a good-looking man.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Ky said, falling back on one of Aunt Gracie’s expressions. “I am not a silly teenager, Commander. Yes, Rafe is handsome. So is my pilot. So is one of my junior engineering techs. I’m not romantically involved with any of them.”

“You have no . . . attraction to him at all?”

“Of course not,” Ky said. “He’s too old for me, and anyway he’s not my type.”

“Well . . . I’ll talk to the captain.”

Minutes went by. Lee glanced at her. “Handsome, am I?”

“You know you are,” Ky said. “In a rugged, sturdy kind of way.”

Lee grinned. “And which adventure vid are you quoting from?”

“None that I remember,” Ky said. “Though I watched plenty of them in my school days. But I’m sorry, Lee, you just don’t do anything for me otherwise.”

“Nor expected to,” Lee said. “I’m even older than Rafe.” He sobered. “You know, though, some of us did worry. Stella was certainly smitten.”

“I am not Stella,” Ky said. “And Stella’s over it, she told me.”

“Maybe,” Lee said. “But he is a charmer, when he’s not being an arrogant, sarcastic—”

“He likes to tease,” Ky said. “Get a rise out of people, if he can.”

“You’re defending him?”

“Against what Mackensee suspects, yes. You were there; you know how he was in the crisis. If he’d wanted us to lose to Osman, he could have done us a lot of damage.”

“Captain Vatta—” Johannson was back onscreen. “Are you willing to come aboard the Gloucester when we bring your man in for questioning?”

“Absolutely,” Ky said.

“No promises, but the captain’s willing to hear your argument.”

“Thank you,” Ky said. “You’ll send a pod?”

“For you, we send the pinnace,” Johannson said, smiling. It seemed to have no edge to it, but Ky wondered.

 

Rafe was under guard in sick bay, strapped into a recliner, when Ky, Johannson, and Captain Pensig came in. He looked pale and stubborn.

“Your captain argues for you,” Pensig said. “I’m not persuaded that a young female, even one with her background and experience, isn’t liable to influence from someone like you.” Someone like a mess to be scraped off one’s shoe, said his tone.

“I have no romantic interest in her,” Rafe said, not meeting Ky’s eyes. “She’s too young, too naïve, and entirely too priggish. And—no insult intended—she does not meet my standards of beauty.”

“You were aware of his opinion, Captain?” Pensig asked Ky.

Ky shrugged. “I told you already. Rafe’s not my type; I’m not his type. I respect his ability, which is considerable, and I’m convinced he’s been honest with me and true to our partnership agreement. But romance? No.”

“Our information from the Sabine incident suggests that you are susceptible to young men.”

Ky flushed. “He’s not a young man to me, Captain Pensig. And I would respectfully suggest that your report from Sabine was in error. The idiot that caused such trouble there was a new addition to my ship, a refugee of sorts.”

“He was in your cabin—”

Ky realized that this was being played out for Rafe’s benefit, as well, and that only increased her irritation. “He ran into my cabin without my knowledge,” she said. “Against my orders to stay in the rec area with the others. He’d never been in it before.” She let more of her anger show. “Whatever you think, Captain Pensig, I am not a hormonally dominated brainless twit who falls for every pretty face that comes along.”

“I didn’t suppose that,” he said. “But before I trust my ships and my responsibility to your interpretation of this man’s implant data, I want to be sure you will report it without bias.”

“If he is in fact collaborating with the people who killed my parents and my brothers and the rest of my family,” Ky said, “I will be glad to tell you.”

“Very well. Rafe Whoever-you-are, will you consent to having Captain Vatta connect implant to implant to determine if you are the traitor I suspect?”

“Yes,” Rafe said through set teeth. “On condition that she swear in front of you all not to reveal anything she finds in there that is not relevant to that one point.”

Captain Pensig glowered, but finally muttered. “All right with me.”

“I swear,” Ky said. She sat on the matching recliner and lay back.

One of the military medical techs pulled out a cable with identical plugs on both ends. “This won’t hurt,” said one of them, lifting her scalp flap and plugging the cable in. At first she felt nothing but a weird hum on that side of her head. Then the other technician made the connection with Rafe’s implant.

The sensory analogs of connection flooded her: smells, tastes, textures here and there on her body. Then she had control, a sense of some kind of pipeline . . . and she was in Rafe’s implant, faced with the hierarchal structure in his organization of his implant’s data. She could ask him for keys, but keys he gave her could be contaminated. She searched on keywords, values, and finally reached the area containing ISC-related information. Some subgroups were secured even against direct connection. Ky pushed harder.

At her touch, Rafe opened secured subgroups; Ky raced through them trying not to remember anything she saw that wasn’t relevant. She needed message logs, to prove he hadn’t been in secret contact with Osman and others. There . . . she reached into that area of the implant . . .

And time–space exploded around her. In her implant, the self-repairing modules scrambled to rearrange data, make new connections, build what was required.

Ky stiffened. Was it a brainworm? Was Rafe taking her over? Her vision clouded, and suddenly a strong, unpleasant stench seemed to rush up her nose and make her sneeze.

No . . . desecrations! Don’t do that! That was Rafe, but not the Rafe in the recliner. This Rafe was in her head, in the implant. Direct contact through the cable?

No. Function transfer. Don’t tell.

Don’t tell what? She managed not to say that aloud, opened her eyes (when had she shut them?), and said the first thing that occurred to her. “He has some fairly disgusting porn tucked away in there.”

“Oh . . . not unexpected,” said Pensig. “What about ISC?”

Ky took a deep breath. “Well, he is one of their agents. No, he’s not a traitor. I got into his message logs for all forms of communication; he drafted everything in his implant. There’s no record at all of any communication with Osman, or to anyone we didn’t already know about, between my meeting him on Lastway and our meeting with Osman. He’s innocent—of that, anyway.”

“You’re quite sure?”

“Yes. What we think is that Osman and his allies have shipboard ansibles—”

“You think that’s more than a rumor?”

“I’m sure of it,” Ky said. “Now if you can have him returned to my ship, there’s something I’d like to discuss in private . . .”

“You still don’t trust him, then?”

“This is something that doesn’t concern him. Something between us—Vatta and Mackensee.”

“I can take a walk,” Rafe said, “If someone will release me.”

When he was released, Rafe asked directions to the bathroom, and left Ky alone with Pensig and Johannson.

“Rafe does not know about the letter of marque,” Ky said. “And I don’t intend to tell him anytime soon.”

“Ah,” Pensig said. “The letter of marque . . . you’re right, we do need to discuss that. This matter of the prize—or return of stolen property. You’ll take it to court, of course.”

“If I do,” Ky said. “it will be seized and sold for payment of debts—defaults on delivery and the like. Vatta needs that ship.”

“You’re planning to seize it without due process?”

“Not exactly,” Ky said. “I’m just planning to keep it out of the hands of the breakers.”

Pensig looked at her a long time before speaking, his lips folded tightly. “I’m trying to be fair,” he said finally. “You are young; you have been through a very difficult time. Nonetheless, I have stretched our regulations to their elastic limit and beyond. If you do not submit that ship and its title to proper adjudication, I will have to consider your acquiring it as an act of privateering, which with possession of a letter of marque clearly makes you a privateer. Someone we cannot have a contract with. I can take the rest of the convoy to the next system with a market, but my contract with you is null and void at this point.”

“You mean we can’t come along?”

“Oh, I suppose . . . I’m in enough trouble already . . . but we’re not bound to protect you.”

“Sorry,” Ky said.

“Oh, and you might want to change your ship’s name, so we don’t just blow you away on spec someday.”

Ky smiled and said, “So, you will transport us back to my ship, right?”

“As soon as possible,” Pensig said. “Immediately, in fact.”

 

Back on Fair Kaleen, Ky took Rafe to her cabin, past the appraising eyes of her bridge crew. “We have to talk,” she said. “What was that?”

“That, dear Captain, was my cranial ansible.”

“So how did it produce that bad smell in my nose?”

“A theoretical problem with the tech,” Rafe said. “The reason there was only ever one. With an implant-to-implant link, if the implant is advanced enough, the possibility existed that the ansible would replicate itself in the linked implant. We now know that’s possible.”

“You mean I—”

“Now have one, too. Yes.” He sighed. “I should have just blown my head off. I didn’t think the theory would hold in real life.”

“I wish you’d warned me,” Ky said.

“Thank you for not telling them,” Rafe said, not responding to her comment. “And by the way, I don’t really think you’re ugly, immature, and priggish. Nor do I think you have absolutely no feelings for me.”

“Trying it on, Rafe?”

He moved closer. “I think you’re a very accomplished liar, Captain Vatta.”

Her heart beat faster, but she kept her voice cool. “That’s for me to know and you to find out, Rafe.”

“And I intend to,” Rafe said, closing the distance.

Without thinking, Ky hooked a foot behind his leg, blocked his intended embrace, and shoved; he hit the floor hard and looked up at her, eyes wide, shocked out of his usual pose of amused superiority.

“Not like that, you won’t,” Ky said.