CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
The convoy moved out on a slow arc. No incoming ships had been detected for days, but Mackensee had still advised a careful approach to the jump points. “If there’s trouble, that’s where it will be,” Johannson said. “Ships going for a jump point are usually at max delta vee; they can’t maneuver, and they offer an easy shot. What you want to do is go in slow, in formation, looking tough and preserving your ability to maneuver.” Behind them, another ship left Lastway, but on a vector that gave no concern; it looked to be headed for a different jump point.
Stella, working through the accumulated messages, found that the Lastway ISC manager had been holding up Vatta messages there—or some Vatta messages at least—since the last scheduled Vatta departure, some eight standard months before.
“If any Vatta ship had come through, they’d have been told there was nothing pending,” Stella told Ky. They were working in Ky’s cabin, and the remnants of a hasty meal were stacked on the end of the worktable. “You should have had all this when you arrived. Most of it’s not that important: updates on prices, margins, that kind of thing. The five-day bulletins I’ve put into the database for pattern analysis. Nothing’s shown up yet. I can’t figure out what good it would do to keep a Vatta ship at Lastway out of the Vatta loop, though. When were you originally supposed to arrive at Lastway? Did you have scheduled deliveries?”
“No, nothing with a late penalty, but we did have a tentative schedule. Let me see . . .” Ky called it up. “That’s interesting—we were originally scheduled to reach Lastway a day or so before the attacks on Vatta started.”
“So you’d have been there, incommunicado, rather than on a live ansible hookup to Slotter Key. Easy meat—no warning. I wonder if they specifically sucked off Vatta messages at the other stations where Vatta was hit?”
“Still doesn’t tell us why Vatta was a target,” Ky said.
“No, but it’s clear the plot was laid before you even went to Sabine,” Stella pointed out. “Then they had to rush assassins to Belinta, or find local talent, before you got back.” She sat back. “What would you have done, Ky, if you’d come out in Belinta local space and been told of the attacks? Would you have docked at Belinta?”
“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I never thought of that . . . I might have docked at their station, to complete delivery, but I wouldn’t have gone onplanet.”
“They must have been frantic,” Stella said. “Scrambling to adjust to your movements, knowing that you were the most dangerous Vatta to leave alive . . .”
“Me?” Ky had not considered she might be considered a special threat.
“You. Of course. Not just your military training, and your relationship to your father, but what you’d shown you could do at Sabine. Now . . . I would wager some of Aunt Grace’s diamonds that you are well above their threat recognition level.”
Ky felt a surge of satisfaction. “I hope so,” she said. “Let them worry.” It was ridiculous, in a way. She still had only the one small, slow, unarmed ship; Mackensee would desert her as soon as they had instructions from their headquarters; the other traders in the convoy were her putative allies only so long as they had Mackensee protection. Even so, imagining an enemy being afraid of her felt good.
“And now that you’re officially a privateer, that’s even more reason for them to worry.”
Ky looked at Stella, startled. “I’m not really. You know that.”
“Remember what the mercs told you?” Stella’s perfect brows arched. “Possession of the letter, whether you use it or not, constitutes presumption of intent.”
“But our enemies won’t know about that,” Ky said. “Will they? And I don’t see that it makes much difference. For all the license the letter gives me to cause mayhem, there’s not much mayhem I can cause with this ship. I’m sure they know about this ship.” She pushed aside the existence of those mines in the cargo holds. “For now, I’m just a trader captain; I’m not ready to hunt anyone down.”
“You’re a trader with two hired warships,” Stella pointed out. “That takes you out of the just-a-trader class right there. You had your mercs go in and kill some crooked ISC employees, and even though that was done with ISC authorization via Rafe, it was still done by your orders.”
Put that way, the raid on the ISC office did sound like the sort of thing privateers were reputed to do.
“Legally, I’m not sure,” Stella went on. “If you hold this commission from Slotter Key, does that mean that anyone contracting with you—for military services anyway—is actually working for Slotter Key?”
Ky stared at her. “That can’t be right.” Dim memories of military law classes cluttered her mind. But they had never studied the legal ramifications of letters of marque, she was sure. “It’s not exactly a commission, anyway. They’re not paying me anything, and they’re not giving me specific orders. I can just trade if I want to . . .”
“But you don’t want to,” Stella said. “You want to protect and help family members, and you want to find out who attacked us, and you want to take them out. That’s what you said.”
“Yes . . .”
“I see conflicts of interest, Ky. Mind you, I’m completely in favor of rebuilding Vatta as a trading empire. Locating, helping, protecting our remaining family. Destruction to our enemies, all that. But when I consider this thing—” She nodded at the folder. “—I see problems you may not have considered. You have to decide whether you’re fighting for Vatta or Slotter Key, for instance.”
“Both,” Ky said. “The ISC thing affects both, surely.”
“It does now,” Stella agreed. “In the long run, though, those are two different interests, and you need to know which has priority. So do I.”
“You?”
“I am carrying your father’s implant, remember? The Vatta command dataset. If you consider the recovery of Vatta your first priority, then you are the right person to take possession of it. But if you rank Slotter Key’s interests above Vatta? Then I’m not sure.”
“I suppose you’re glad now that I haven’t put it in,” Ky said, astonishment and confusion putting an edge on her voice.
“Yes,” Stella said calmly. She sat back, folding her arms. “Until I knew about the letter of marque, I had no doubts. Now I do. My interest is entirely family, I assure you. I still believe, like Aunt Gracie, that you are the one person who can help Vatta survive, if it can be done at all. It will take all your ability, though, Ky. If Vatta is not your top priority, we’re doomed.”
“I saw this letter as giving me a better chance to save Vatta,” Ky said slowly. “Not a conflict of interest at all.”
“A tool?”
“Yes. I’ve always thought the interests of Vatta and Slotter Key ran together. Whatever I needed to do to help Vatta would in some way help Slotter Key.” Even as she said it, she realized how naïve it sounded. Certainly the government of Slotter Key had decided that its interests were separate from Vatta’s.
“For now, that may work,” Stella said. “Someday, though, those interests will be in conflict. You need to decide now which has priority, before you have to make that decision in a crisis.”
Quincy’s call to announce that the defensive suite installation was complete came as welcome interruption.
“You managed it without Toby’s help,” Ky said, half joking. Quincy didn’t laugh.
“The boy’s very smart,” she said. “Good with his hands, too. He was helping—it was that dratted dog. But yes, we’ve got it in. Whether or not it works . . .”
“I’ll tell our escort, and then we’ll test it,” Ky said. She called the bridge and had Lee contact Johannson.
“He says go ahead,” Lee said a few minutes later. “They’ll observe with their scans and let us know if it looks right from the outside.”
“Do the honors, Quincy,” Ky said. Quincy started the initiation sequence, and the defensive suite’s control board lit up, segment after segment showing green telltales.
“This over here is the active shield function,” Quincy said, pointing. “And this is the electronic countermeasures, here.”
“They say the shields are up and look good,” Lee reported from the bridge. “No gaps spotted, but they want me to roll her once to be sure they’ve scanned the entire hull.”
“Go ahead,” Ky said. “Can they tell anything about the ECM stuff?”
Another pause, then Lee said, “No, they say not without launching something at us, and they’d rather not.”
“I feel the same way,” Ky said. “We’ll have to take that part on trust, then. How about power consumption, Quincy?”
“Right on target,” Quincy said. “Our insystem has plenty of reserve power; it’s speed we can’t get out of her.”
“Good job, Quincy,” Ky said. “You and your crew should take a couple of shifts off, except for the usual.”
“Thanks, Captain, we’ll do that. This is a new one for me. Now, can I tell Martin to restow the cargo?”
“Yes—or rather, I’ll speak to him. I think we should keep access open to as much of this as possible, for repair in case of damage.”
“I thought the whole point of this was to prevent any damage,” Quincy said. “You aren’t planning to get into a space battle, are you?”
“Not if I can help it,” Ky said. “But dangerous times . . . it’s just a precaution.”
Martin and Alene had spent the time it took to install the defensive suite working out the most efficient way to restow the cargo. Ky looked at their figures, and agreed with Martin that the “odor barrier” crates should be readily accessible. She hoped they’d never need those mines, but if they did she wanted them easy to find and use.
Rafe returned to the ship shortly before the transition into FTL flight. Ky and Johannson had agreed that they should first check on an automated ansible in the next system over. The convoy captains accepted the course without comment, except to point out that there was no profit where there could be no trade. Mackensee personnel locked in the jump coordinates in the nav computers of all ships—someone could change it, but that would both break the contract and alert them that the ship was probably part of the conspiracy. Jump insertion went smoothly; they had planned a 13.2-hour jump to the neighborhood of the nearest automated ansible platform.
“I suppose you want me to check out the ansible itself?” Rafe asked. Ky nodded. “And how are you going to explain that one to the ship crews?”
“Your expertise in communications,” Ky said. “They know about some of that already.”
“Yes, but . . . last time it was just a simple file switch, or close enough they believed it was. This time, I have to get in there and muck with the hardware and the software. All of it proprietary, and how would even a renegade Vatta know that?”
“I’m sure you can come up with something,” Ky said.
He gave her a dark look, then shook his head. “You really are a piece of work, Ky—Captain. You should have been born into a pirate family, not a nice staid bunch of law-abiding traders.”
“As staid as the Dunbargers?” Ky asked.
“A hit, a palpable hit. All right, let’s see. After being booted out of the bosom of your family—our family—I managed to sucker ISC into hiring me for a time, then quit in disgust because they expected me to keep regular hours.” His face settled into a sullen expression that went perfectly with not wanting to work regular hours. “How’s that?”
“That works,” Ky said.
Within hours, that ansible’s message bins were unblocked, and contact restored with Lastway and other working ansibles.
“An easy fix,” Rafe said when he came back aboard. “Just as I said before, it’s a form of sabotage that’s quick, requires no special equipment, and is easy to reverse. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make impossible, so if the raiders come back, they can undo my fix quickly.”
“Would ISC reimburse you for fixing this, if they knew about it?” Ky asked.
“You want a bonus?”
“I’m thinking of the others in the convoy,” Ky said. “If there’s some profit in stopping to fix ansibles, they’ll be more willing to do more of them.”
“Ah. There might be, but I can’t promise. And calling from here would reveal where we are, which I’d consider a danger.”
“Raiders could follow us by the restoration of access, couldn’t they?”
“Yes . . . but we might be an ordinary ISC repair crew, too.”
Ky discussed their next destination with her Mackensee liaison. “We’d prefer to clear ansibles between Lastway and our home base,” Johannson said. “Of course, that’s subject to your priorities as long as we’re working for you, but there are several automated ansibles along the way, and some excellent market worlds for the others.”
“Let’s talk to them all,” Ky said. In conference, the other captains agreed.
In the next system, they found not only an automated and nonfunctional ansible, but also a civilian ship whose beacon carried the familiar Vatta tag, moving slowly along far from the ansible, as if transferring between jump points.
“She’s a Vatta ship,” Ky said. “We can’t ignore a Vatta ship.”
“Her beacon says she’s a Vatta ship,” Johannson said. “We could say we were, oh, Fitch’s Rangers . . . would that make us Fitch’s Rangers?”
“You have a database of ship registries,” Ky said. “What does her beacon ID say?”
“It agrees with the call signal, but that’s just common sense. That doesn’t mean she’s a Vatta ship, or commanded by a legitimate family member. What does your implant—oh, that’s right, you don’t have one.” This time the disapproval in his voice was clear.
“I’ll check with Stella,” Ky said. “She probably has the complete list.”
“She’d better. You hired us to protect you and the others in this convoy. All my instincts say that there’s something wrong here . . . it’s the classic pirate trick . . .”
“It’s one ship and she doesn’t scan armed,” Ky said. “You have two armed vessels . . .”
“Captain Vatta, you may have almost graduated from a military academy, and I will grant that you performed well under pressure at Sabine, but you do not know diddly-squat about threat analysis in real life. What if that ship is mined? What if that ship is stuffed with biologicals that could kill us all? I do not have a full hazmat team aboard, and I do not want to die—or see my people die—because I walked into a trap.”
Ky bit back the angry retort she wanted to make. “I appreciate your concern,” she said instead. “I have no intention of asking your people to risk themselves. But as you recall, contacting and aiding other Vatta family members is high on my priority list. I’ll go myself.”
“Stopping at all is risking us. Doing anything but going back into jump is risking us.” He wiped his forehead, though he wasn’t sweating. “Look . . . you’re making the classic mistake that bold youngsters make. You overvalue your own resources and you don’t see all the problems. Did you ever read that old chestnut about the young officer trying to interdict a river crossing?”
“The Defense of Duffer’s Drift,” Ky said.
“Yes. The problem is, you don’t get do-overs, in dreams or otherwise. Maybe the farm family really is loyal—but you can’t take the chance. Maybe this ship really is your family’s, and everyone on her is loyal and honest—but you can’t take the chance.”
“Actually I can,” Ky said. “But I see that I can’t ask you to. So you carry on to the next jump point, and I’ll match courses and see what’s what.”
“You have lost your mind,” Johannson said. “We can’t let you do that; we’ve contracted to protect you.”
Ky choked back the You can’t stop me that came automatically and said instead, “Look. We want to unblock this ansible. We’ll just put Rafe on it, get that job done, and give this other ship a call, see what she does, all right?”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Maybe. But it was in my mission priorities.”
“I know that, but—” A deep sigh. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll support through the ansible repair. Then we’ll escort the convoy just outside the system and stand by in case of trouble. With an open ansible and only a few hours’ transit time, we should be close enough.”
“Fine,” Ky said.
When she called the crew together to tell them what was going on, Martin looked grave. “I have to say I agree with the mercs,” he said. “If you’ll take my advice—”
“Not if it means running away without finding out if a Vatta ship needs our help.”
“That wasn’t it. But have the defensive suite on, and keep the drives warm, even if you decide to match courses. Someone alert at the scans around the clock. And a plan for what to do if we’re attacked. Boarded.”
“A plan—”
“Who goes where and does what. That kind of thing.”
“Is this something you—”
“Ma’am, my expertise is in security, not full-out combat. I can suggest some things, but whether they’d work, I don’t know. And as for ship-to-ship combat, I can’t help you.”
“Get your suggestions in order, then,” Ky said. She had thought of a sudden attack, the ship being blown, but . . . boarded? Maybe she should still take Johannson’s advice and run for the jump point. But that left a Vatta ship here alone, a Vatta crew who might even, if they’d been in FTL space on a long jump, have no warning that they were in danger. “It’s going to take us several days to get closer to her.”
Martin nodded.
Fair Kaleen had the Vatta blue-and-red logo on the hull, but she looked battered by years of space debris. No weapons showed on the defensive suite’s analysis screen. Her crew had given no sign that they were aware of other ships in the same system, which was sloppy at best. Ky pursed her lips. Ships of that class were brought in for cleaning and repair every two years, at which time the logo was freshly painted. Ordinary light shielding protected it for that interval.
“Stella?”
“Don’t look at me. I’m not ship crew.”
“Quincy, I’m going to transfer an external feed to your board,” Ky said. “What do you think?”
“Fair Kaleen . . . haven’t crossed paths with that one in decades,” Quincy said. “She’s one of ours, right enough, but I don’t know what route she’s on. Looks a bit battered; that logo should’ve been touched up before now.”
“Well,” Ky said, and sat motionless, trying to think things through. Fair Kaleen had been a Vatta ship, might be one now, should be one again, since Vatta needed every ship it could muster. If someone else had taken a Vatta ship—one of her ships, she caught herself thinking—she could take it back. “Let’s give her a call,” she said, and nodded to Lee.
Fair Kaleen answered the hail with commendable promptness, and in moments her captain was online. Osman Vatta, his broadcast ID stated; stocky and dark, his black hair liberally salted with gray, he looked at Ky with an expression she could not quite interpret. “Whose are you?” he asked.
“Whose?”
“Whose kid. I’m sorry, you’re a captain, but to me, you’re a kid. I was just wondering whose.”
“Gerard’s,” Ky said. When he still looked blank, she added, “Gerard Avondetta Vatta . . .”
“Oh . . . old Moneybags Gerry.” He gave a harsh snort of laughter. “Gods, girl, you don’t look anything like Gerry. Luckily.”
Very few people, most of them now dead, had called her father Gerry. And she didn’t like his laugh.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, sobering. “I didn’t mean to make fun of him, but . . . he always was a bit stuffy. So, he sent you out to straighten out this mess, eh?”
“Mess?” Ky said. Something was very wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what.
“This whole thing with the banks,” Osman said. “Credit and all. I mean, he is chief high financial muckety-muck, so it makes sense that you being his daughter—”
He didn’t know. He didn’t know or he was a far better faker than she thought he was. “That’s the ansibles,” Ky said. “When ISC gets them back up—”
“Not what my fella back on Harmon told me. Said someone was going after Vatta, and our credit was shot.”
“Did your fella describe what going after meant?”
“Said someone had taken potshots at Vatta ships. Made me nervous, that did.” Nervous was not the word Ky would have chosen to describe his expression. Tense. Alert. But nervous?
She should tell him, but she was reluctant and didn’t understand why.
“Look, as you’re old Gerry’s kid—daughter, I mean—you can clear up the financial end, can’t you? Talk to the bankers and such? I have a load of cargo, good stuff, too—”
“Where was it bound? What route are you on?”
His gaze wavered. “Um . . . well, you know, I’m kind of independent. Experience . . . family connections . . .”
“Been a while since you came in for refit, hasn’t it?” Ky said, forcing sympathy into her tone.
“Oh, the ship’s fine. No problems there. It’s just . . . I can’t draw on company funds, they tell me, on account of whatever this mess is.”
Stranger and stranger. Not all Vatta captains were on fixed routes, but most of them were: profit lay in reliability. Senior captains vied for the most profitable routes, wanted the least variance in their schedules. And while this man looked like a Vatta, they weren’t the only family in the known universe with those features, that coloring. He had shown some knowledge of her family, but only what an outsider could have picked up from public sources. He had cargo . . . he could sell the cargo, set up a ship account . . . she’d done that.
Ky touched the control requesting an emergency interruption. Almost immediately, a red light flashed on her board, winking urgently.
She looked down, then back up at the com screen. “Excuse me, I’ve got a problem here—I’ll be right back.” She cut the connection, and opened the internal com. “Anyone get anything on this one?”
Stella spoke up. “The ship’s on a list from ten, fifteen years back as active, but on current lists as an adjunct.”
“Which is?”
“I’m not sure. It might be undercover work or something. I was on an adjunct payroll for a year or so. Osman . . . I’m fairly sure he must be Lazlo Vatta’s grandson, though there’s another Osman . . . how old do you think he is? Apparent age, or was that a disguise?”
“Voice analysis suggests sixties,” Rafe spoke up. “There’s that little burr—of course, he could be a heavy drinker or addicted to something that’s aged his voice.”
“That’d be Lazlo’s grandson. He’s not on the current captain list, Ky,” Stella said. “I can’t get into the old personnel stuff—it’s in the command dataset.” The one you didn’t install was unsaid but clearly communicated.
“A Vatta remittance man,” Rafe said in smug tone that made Ky want to hit him. “Skeleton in the Vatta cupboard.”
“So . . . why’s he in a Vatta ship?” Ky asked.
“Adjunct,” Rafe said. “They let him take a ship, but he’s not authorized refit, and I’ll bet he’s not authorized access to company funds, except his remittance. He sounds like a con man to me. He’s trying one on—he knows headquarters is down, he doesn’t know we have a command dataset.”
Martin said, “I don’t like the whole setup. He sounds too glib, and I find it hard to believe his crew didn’t pick us up on scan a long time ago. We haven’t tested the defensive suite against concealed weaponry; the mercs weren’t trying to hide theirs.”
“Quincy,” Ky said. The senior Engineering watch were all below, by Martin’s plan. When the old woman answered, she said, “Did you ever hear of an Osman Vatta? Related to old Lazlo?”
Quincy’s gasp was clearly audible. “That bastard? What’s he done now?”
“Well, he claims to be captain of Fair Kaleen, which right now is matching courses about a hundred klicks away. I gather you know something about him?”
“Rotten little devil,” Quincy said. “Smooth as an egg, and no morals at all. Fools you because he’s not overtly mean, but he doesn’t care for anything but himself and doesn’t see why anyone would.”
“Our defensive suite says he’s unarmed,” Ky said. “I don’t see he can do us any great harm—”
“Don’t bet on it,” Quincy said. “If he’s here and talking to you, then he sees a profit to himself in it. Figure that out and however slimy it seems . . . that’s what he’s up to.”
“Here in the middle of nowhere,” Ky mused. “What is he doing here anyway? Just randomly jumping from one unoccupied system to another? He’s a long way from any regular Vatta route.”
“Trouble,” Quincy said. “He’s trouble, through and through.”
“Quince—what did he do? Any specifics?”
“Well. I was only aboard a ship with him once. He’d gotten in a fairly serious scrape his apprentice voyage—gambling debts he tried to cover with the ship’s account. His father—Lazlo’s son, Benalj that would have been—hauled him home and supposedly straightened him out. He was in his twenties when I ran into him again. I was engineering second that voyage, pulled off my regular ship because their first was injured. He was third in command; I heard scuttlebutt that he was under some suspicion of having done something earlier in the trip. But he was a Vatta; the idea was to straighten him out. Well . . . among other things he liked pretty faces, didn’t matter what gender, and he was putting moves on an Engineering junior. I told him off for it, and he tried to bribe me.”
“Bribe you!” Ky could not imagine that.
“Oh, yes,” Quincy said. “I wasn’t a gray-haired great-granny back then. He didn’t fancy me, I don’t think, but he was willing to try, if it would shut me up. It didn’t. He tried to get me fired for insubordination; the captain wouldn’t hear of it, and I watched my back very carefully the rest of the voyage. Good thing, too, as there were several accidents that could’ve been fatal. His father died young.”
“So . . .” The knot in Ky’s stomach tightened. “It may not be an accident that he’s here, or that he wants to travel with us.”
“I don’t see how he could have figured out where we’d be,” Quincy said. “That much could be accidental . . .” She didn’t sound as if she believed it.
“Jump options from Lastway . . . how many were there?” Stella asked.
“It’s not that.” Ky’s mind raced, throwing up an image of their route since leaving Lastway. “If they have those shipboard ansibles Rafe mentioned, and they’ve tracked us by the restored ansible functions, then here is the next logical place for us to go. Another node in the web, a mostly uninhabited system with multiple jump points.”
“Couldn’t we intercept their communications?”
“No more than with any ansible,” Rafe said. “And thank you for sharing that little secret with everyone, Captain.”
“You undoubtedly have others I don’t even know,” Ky said. “And that one, if it’s operational, isn’t going to be secret for long. Once others realize that the only way for certain things to happen is ship-mounted instant communications, they’ll deduce its existence.”
“I suppose. I still think—”
“Think it later. The question is, what do we do now? If I refuse to talk to him again, he’ll know we know something’s wrong.”
“Wouldn’t you? He’ll expect you to have an implant. Surely that would tell you he’s not on the main list.”
“I guess he can’t tell I don’t . . .” A germ of an idea sprouted. She went back to the exterior com. “Sorry,” she said to Osman. “We’ve got this pet someone brought aboard, and it keeps getting into trouble.”
“A pet? You let your crew have pets?” The tone carried the implication that only young, inexperienced, sentimental captains allowed pets aboard.
“Special case,” Ky said. She could feel her neck getting hot. “But back to your problem . . . what do you understand is going on?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Frankly, I’ve been out on my own, pretty far out, not paying much attention to what’s going on back home. But it sounded like trouble, so I came back to see what I could do . . .”
To help or scavenge? That was the question. Quincy’s story was probably true, if this was the same man, but twenty years and more had tamed many a wild boy, her father always said. We don’t blame people for who they were, if they act well now, her mother had insisted. She wondered what Rafe would be like in twenty years and pushed that thought away.
“It’s pretty bad,” Ky said. “Hard to tell with the ansibles down, but it looks like someone has it in for Vatta.”
“Heard anything about your family?”
“They’re dead,” Ky said flatly.
A moment’s shocked stillness, then his face creased into a scowl. “That’s . . . that’s monstrous,” he said. “You poor kid—I mean, you’re not a kid, I can see that, but still. Poor old Gerry dead . . . how’d they get him? He wasn’t on a ship, was he?”
“No.” Ky felt again that reluctance to reveal details, at least yet. “I wasn’t there; I only heard they’d died. If the ansibles come back up—”
“I can’t believe it,” he said. His gaze was direct, his expression exactly what it should be. So why this reluctance? Just Quincy’s belief? That wasn’t fair. “Look,” he said with sudden determination, “I can help. Let me help. Either of us alone, we’re just a single ship, easy to ambush. But the two of us—I don’t mind telling you, I’ve rambled around in some pretty rough places. This old ship isn’t the worn-out hulk she looks like. We could help each other a lot. Family sticks together, eh? Blood thicker than water, all that.”
Sincerity flowed out of him like water out of a spring. Ky could not believe he was anything but a rogue coming around . . . except for the bitter memory of another sincere, pleading voice, Mandy Rocher and his problem that had become her disgrace.
“I can’t figure out why,” Ky said, talking just to keep the talk going, trying to think behind the chatter. “Why would someone—anyone—take after Vatta Transport? We’ve got a better record of service than, say, Pavrati.”
“Oh, lass. We’re rich, that’s why. The rich are always a target—”
“Not that rich,” Ky said. “I can imagine an envious minor shipping firm resenting us, but it would hardly have the resources to attack us so widely.”
“Well, no,” he said. “But this attack on the ansibles . . . Vatta’s always supported ISC’s monopoly on ansible services. Could be it’s our allies got us in trouble. Or it could be part of the humod base-stock controversy.”
“What?” Was this just a distraction, thrown out to make her lose track of his argument?
“There’s growing friction, you know, between the base-stock worlds that want to preserve what they call human nature, and the humods. From the base-stock point of view, we’re all humods because we have implants. Makes us mech deviants. I don’t suppose you’ve run into many base-stockers.”
“Only the Miznarii,” Ky said. “Back home.”
“Good grief, are they still around?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “I’d have thought they’d died out long ago; went in for natural childbirth, I thought it was. I meant places like Allgreen and Purity—they’re not on regular Vatta routes, but I’ve traded there. Took me for a criminal, they did, at first. No one has cranial implants, not even fertility mods. One of my old crew was a four-arm, genetic, and Immigration Control wouldn’t even let him off the ship at the station. You’d have thought he’d been able to spit sperm straight into their precious daughters—sorry, did that shock you?”
She had to do better with her face. “I’m shocked that anyone would refuse entry to someone just because they had four arms,” she said. Would he believe that?
“Oh, good,” he said. “I remember Gerry was something of a prude and I should have thought before saying anything, but I’m glad you’re old enough not to flinch at a little physical reality.” His laugh grated. Ky smiled, but followed him into this side topic as if really interested.
“So, do the people on Purity avoid all medical care?”
“No, but they’re strict about its limits. No genetic modifications, and no modifications that enhance normal human ability beyond a half sig above the mean. Of course that means their mean intelligence is well below that of most of us, but they get along reasonably well on their own world.”
“Are they Miznarii?”
“No, no. They’re evangelical Hurists, whatever that is. Doesn’t help them any in business dealings, I can tell you that.” He laughed again, with a wink that invited Ky into his scam, whatever it was. She wanted to wipe the screen, but knew better. “It’s the weirdest combination of paranoia and gullibility you’ve ever seen. They’re terrified of some outsider cheating them, but they make it so obvious what they’re afraid of that it’s easy to make whatever profit you want by just doing something else and pretending fear of their suspicion.”
So the rogue hadn’t reformed. “So you prefer humod planets?”
“Well, not the extremes. It’s like some of them make themselves ugly on purpose, y’know? But a lot of ’em are just like real people, only with extra. Pretty much think like us.” He peered at the screen. “You do have an implant, right?”
“Of course,” Ky said, as if offended. “Got it at seven, like everyone else.”
“So you have a current Vatta update? Because I haven’t updated in a while, been out of touch y’see.”
“Not really current,” Ky said. “I was on my way back, actually.” He couldn’t know anything different, unless he was as bent as she suspected, and then it didn’t matter. “As you probably guessed, this was my first trip, so I’m just a probationary captain, as it were. Only the most basic dataset. When I got home, I was going to get the full one, but—things happened.”
“I see.” He looked down a moment then suddenly back up, with a sharp glance that seemed intended to startle. Then his face softened again. “Well, we shall do well enough, I guess. Youth and enthusiasm, age and experience . . . we’ll be partners, shall we?”
“But we are already family,” Ky said, as if puzzled. She had been half expecting this offer, or demand. “Isn’t it forbidden to make private contracts of partnership within Vatta?”
His brows went up. “What, you think I want to cheat you?”
“No, not that.” Worse than that, but she had had four years—almost four years—in which to learn that earnest and tedious explanation of well-known rules had its uses. “But Dad said nobody should make private contracts because we should all be working for the benefit of Vatta as a whole. Private deals, he said, were like stealing from the company. And I want to save Vatta.”
Now his expression shifted to benign amusement. “I forgot,” he said. “You are Gerry’s daughter; of course you would be a stickler for all the rules. But my dear, this is an extraordinary situation. We may be the only surviving Vattas—or do you know of others?”
Ky felt a chill roll down her back. She was not about to reveal the existence of Stella or Toby. “You’re the first Vatta ship I’ve met since this happened,” she said.
“And I suppose, for your first voyage, they stuffed the ship with faithful old retainers rather than family members, eh?” he asked.
“Pretty much,” Ky said. “I hired a couple myself along the way.”
“So, under the circumstances, we should cooperate and be partners—fine, if you don’t want to enter a formal partnership, I understand that, given your father—but we can do better together than either of us alone.”
That was true, if partners were true to their defined mutual goal. Otherwise, one could gut the other even more neatly than a stranger. Ky was tempted to refuse and depart, trusting her new defensive suite to handle anything he was likely to have aboard, but what if he knew more about the conspiracy and the attacks on Vatta than he’d yet revealed?
“Where are you going next?” Ky asked, deliberately furrowing her brow. “I don’t know if we can—”
“Look,” he said, exuding a fatherly concern that bordered on sickening. “I’ll go with you, wherever you go; I can help keep you safe.” He paused for her reaction; apparently she had not hidden it well enough. “I’m sure you’re brave and resourceful; Vatta doesn’t breed idiots or cowards. But you need someone to watch your back. I won’t even pull seniority.” Onscreen he shrugged, spreading his hands. “You’re Gerry’s daughter; he was our CFO. You can take over, if you want. I just don’t want to see us die out because we couldn’t work together for mutual profit.”
He wanted her more than she wanted him. Why? And how had he known that her father was Vatta Ltd.’s CFO, if he’d been gone so many years? Unless he was legitimate in some covert way, as Rafe claimed to be with ISC.
“I suppose,” Ky said. “Look—why don’t you send me your cargo info, and I’ll compare it with what we’ve got and decide where to go next.”
“We share,” he said. “You send me yours, too.”
“Fine,” Ky said. “I’ll get my cargomaster to port it over for you.” He would learn nothing from their cargo list except that they’d bought low and hoped to sell high. He would certainly not learn about the mines she had aboard, either kind.