Trading in Danger

by Elizabeth Moon

  “We’re sending you out to the Rift with a ship going to salvage,” her father said. “You’ll have a cargo on the way out, sell the ship, then come back commercial. Altogether it should take at least eleven months, and by then things will surely have died down.”

  Ky glared at her father and older brother. “You’d think I’d blown up a ship,” she said.

  “Don’t be overdramatic, Ky,” her father said. “No one’s accused you of anything like that. We’re trusting you to do family business. It’s an honor—”

  “No. You’re sticking me in a corner. Hiding me—”

  “We could do that well enough by giving you a job in inventory control right here at the tik plantations. Be reasonable, Ky.”

  “But—I’ll be gone months and months—maybe years. And it’s boring—”

  “The heat will be off you by then, and it may not be boring. You’ll be heading out into the Borderlands.”

  “Maybe.” Ky glared, but she already knew she would take the job. What other choice did she have? “I guess it’s all right.”

  “Good. You’re taking the Glennys Jones to Lastway. We’ll send you some help. Gary Tobai for loadmaster, Quincy Robin as crew chief.”

  “Dad, they’re old.”

  “They’re experienced. You need that. New captains—”

  “Captain! You’re making me captain?”

  “Were you listening? I offered you the ship.”

  “I thought you meant as shipping agent or something. I don’t really know how to captain—”

  “You have a license.”

  “I have a license, yes, but I haven’t done it. I haven’t worked on a commercial ship since Tugboat . . . er, Turbot.”

  “That’s why we’re sending along someone with experience. You’ll do fine, Ky. All you have to do is be guided by Gary and Quince.”

  All she had to do was listen to her elders by the hour. But a ship—even an old wreck like Glennys Jones, and a captain’s listing—made up for a lot. “All right . . . thanks, Dad.”

  “That’s better. Now, go over to the house. Your mother’s waiting. Oh, and we’ve scheduled your implant replacement.”

  She knew better than to suggest a quick comcall instead, but she dreaded what her mother would say.

  Sure enough, she had scarcely come through the door when her mother started in. “Kylara, how could you? You were just getting to know that nice Berlioz boy, and now—”

  “Mother, I didn’t—”

  “And look at you! You haven’t a bit of makeup on! How can you expect to find a young man if you go around looking like some tough off the docks?”

  “Mother, please—”

  “And your father says you’re going away for months, and I’ve had no time at all to take you around . . . If you’re out of circulation too long, you know, people will forget about you—”

  “That’s the idea,” Ky said. Though if Charley Berlioz forgot about her that was all to the good. Despite her mother’s prodding, she had no interest in Charley. It was Hal . . . except now it wasn’t, almost certainly.

  “Well, it’s all very well on the political side, but on the matrimonial side, it’s a disaster. They’ll go and marry unsuitable girls, rather than you, and Slotter Key is not exactly full of eligible boys.”

  “Mother, I’m sure that eventually—” At least her mother was still harping on marriage into some civilian family; at least she hadn’t caught on about Hal, whom she would not have considered suitable.

  “Well, we have to do something about your clothes.” Her mother started off down the hall; Ky trailed behind, feeling the same reluctance she had so often before. She knew what spacers wore, and what ship captains wore, and she knew, without waiting for her mother to say so, that those simple outfits were not what her mother had in mind.

  “Even if you are in the wilds of the Borderlands,” her mother said, opening Ky’s closet. Ky could see that someone had already unpacked her luggage and put things away. “Even there, you must be prepared to present yourself properly. Perhaps even especially there.”

  When her mother was in one of these moods, it was easy to forget she was also a professional engineer of considerable reputation. It was the family background, Ky thought: being the eldest daughter of a socialite—for Grandmother Benton was still making news in the gossip columns with her endless string of admirers.

  “Not this. Not this either,” her mother said, flinging clothes to one side. “I know you thought you’d spend the rest of your life in uniform, dear, but surely you had more sense than this—” She held out an outfit in rust and green which, Ky had realized only after paying for it, made her look like someone a day away from death.

  “Sorry, Mother,” she said.

  “I don’t care what your father says, you simply must get some suitable clothes.” She eyed Ky up and down. “You aren’t shaped like anyone else in the family, worse luck. I can’t just tell you to put some meat on your bones. You have meat; it’s just not . . .”

  “Mother!”

  “Oh, be reasonable, Kylara. You’ll be representing the family; you must have clothes and they must fit. I’m not saying you’re ugly or misshapen; you’re just not . . .” Again her voice trailed away. “Well,” she said, after a moment’s awkward silence. “Measurements first and then we’ll see what we can order. Shops here on Corleigh are useless, but if something can be delivered to the ship before you leave, that will do.”

  The last thing Ky wanted to do was stand in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her, but she stood in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her anyway. Halfway through, with her mother tut-tutting about the way the uniform had concealed what was after all an acceptable shape, it began to be funny. She wasn’t ready for it to be funny—for anything to be funny—but a bubble of laughter caught in her throat and she could feel the corners of her mouth turning up. Here she was, back home being measured for clothes yet again, clothes that would, she was sure, turn out to be impractical and uncomfortable.

  “What are you laughing at?” her mother asked, from knee level, without looking up. Her mother always knew, without having to see Ky’s face, when the ill-timed laugh demon caught her in the throat.

  “Nothing,” Ky said, sulky again.

  “It’s not funny,” her mother said, scribing her lower legs, her ankles, her feet.

  It was, though. Everything else in the universe was horrible, but this one thing was funny.

  The dinner chime saved her from unseemly giggles; her mother stood abruptly. “You’ll want to get out of that,” she said, without specifying what that was. They both knew.

  Ky took off the uniform she had been so proud to put on that morning, stepped into the ’fresher briefly, and put on loose slacks, blouse, and overrobe for dinner. She left the remnants of her past on the bed. Someone would take them away, clean them, fold them, put them somewhere . . . She didn’t care where.

  Dinner on the wide veranda . . . Father, Mother, and Sanish. Ky slid into her usual seat, facing the garden. Candles flickered in the evening air. Someone had gone to the trouble of preparing a festive meal—they had had, she realized, the hours she was in the air to put it together. The haunch of ’lope, boned, stuffed, and rolled, in a pastry crust. The stuffed grape leaves. The “tower of heaven” salad. Once again her body surprised her with its insistence on refueling; she ate ravenously but barely touched the wine.

  Her father and San talked of island politics—not the labor dispute, but such things as the proposed new desalinization plant, the possibility of a branch of the central university on the island, the state of the waste recycling facility at Harbor Town. Ky listened as if to a debate on the vid; it all felt unreal. Too many changes too fast.

  “We have to have enough time to get her some clothes,” her mother said suddenly. Her father and San stopped in the midst of telling each other what an idiot Councilman Kruper was.

  “How long?” her
father asked.

  “I can get clothes offworld,” Ky said.

  “No,” both her parents said. Her father sighed.

  “Ky, you’re going to be a Vatta captain; you will represent Vatta Transport. You have to start out with something suitable. But Myris”—he turned to his wife—”it has to be quick. Three days.”

  “Impossible,” her mother said. “We don’t have a fabricator here; we’ll have to go to Harbor Town and that’s—”

  “Less than an hour by plane. Glennys would have left tomorrow, but I put a hold on her. We can’t delay; we have delivery commitments.”

  Delivery commitments were, her father had once said, a natural force. Vatta Transport’s default rate on delivery commitments was the lowest in the industry and one reason for their wealth.

  “Five,” her mother said.

  “Four. Absolutely no more. And she doesn’t need much. Captain’s uniforms, shipboard and port. Not much more than that.”

  “Kylara, we’ll start ordering after dinner,” her mother said. “Bond Tailoring will have to do. I’d much rather you used Siegelson & Bray, but they can’t possibly do it in less than a week . . .” Her mother glared at her father.

  “Four days,” her father said. “You have the measurements; you can start without her. Tonight, Ky, we’ll go by the clinic and get your implant in—that’ll let you sleep on it so you’ll be in cycle in the morning. All loaded with the current codes and everything.”

  She had not had an implant since she left for the Academy—cadets weren’t allowed them. She was used to doing without, though she had missed her implant a lot that first year at the Academy. She was not sure she wanted one again. But she needed the extra capacity, with all she had to learn in a hurry. She shrugged. Better an implant insertion than more talk about clothes. “I’m ready,” she said.

  Insertion went easily; the implant access port still met all the specs, so all she needed was the device itself. She expected the moment of nauseating disorientation, the strange visual auras, the itch in her nose. Before she could access the implant, she had to go through the initialization protocols—the longest part of an insertion—and then the implant unfolded in her mind like a flower, each petal a gateway to another database. The displays flickered past, the communications links—now activated only for the clinic units—let her answer the questions without speaking aloud.

  “Checks out,” the medic said finally. “Any problems at your end?”

  Ky blinked at him. They both knew—because she was sending it—that she was seeing him with a vibrating pink halo, and they also knew this was a transient visual phenomenon common to implant insertions, like the other sensory auras she was having—the smell of freshly ground pepper, the echo effect to all sounds. It would be gone after a good night’s sleep, during which time the implant and her biological brain would have some kind of serious discussion without her consciousness around to kibitz. “No problems,” Ky said, aloud this time.

  “Good. Call me at once if you experience sensory auras tomorrow, or any difficulties with coordination, balance, after one hour from now. My recommendation is that you go to sleep as soon as you can.”

  “I will,” Ky said. Her father took her back to the main house, where she staggered only a couple of times going down the hall to her room. She remembered her first insertion experience very clearly; she had been seven, getting a child’s school expansion kit, and she had insisted that her balance wasn’t affected, she didn’t need to lie down and take a nap . . . all the way to the ground when she fell off the pony. I’m fine, she’d said, lying on the ground and looking up at a pony hazed in a supernatural golden glow, its wings waving gently in the breeze. My pony has wings, she’d said. No one had believed her. She’d woken from that nap with a bruise on her rump and her brothers prancing around the room waving their arms, pretending to be flying ponies.

  Enhanced memory was one side effect of implants and their insertion. She pulled off her clothes, put on a gown, turned off the light, and lay down.

  She had been sure she wouldn’t sleep, but the moment her head hit the pillow, she was out. She woke, remembering no dreams, at first disoriented because sunlight played on the opposite wall from the garden window in her room—and she expected instead the cold dim light of a winter dawn in the capital. Misery hit her again, and she rolled over, burying her face in the pillow. Her career. Her hopes. Her friends. Hal . . . he wouldn’t even know what happened. She hadn’t actually started crying when something landed with a thump on her back.

  “Rise and shine, lazybones,” came her brother’s voice. “You’ve got to hit the books.”

  Ky rolled out of bed, threw the offending roll of towels back at her brother—wet, he must have just come in from swimming—and stalked into the ’fresher with as much dignity as possible. Her implant offered the time, the temperature, the humidity, water temperature of the ’fresher, her own pulse and respiration if she wanted it. She didn’t. She ate a hasty breakfast in a corner of the kitchen, and then settled down to the pile of data cubes her father had left for her to read. Everything there was to know about Glennys Jones, about the route she was to take, everything she needed to know about the Vatta Transport codes. At intervals her attention drifted to her disgrace, but she yanked it back to the matter at hand. She could not think about it . . . any of it . . . without going to pieces. If she was to be a cargo ship captain, she had better things to do than feel sorry for herself. The implant fed her accessory information whenever she asked. She was deep in the revised space regulations applicable to licensed carriers Class C and below when her father and brother came home for lunch.

  “How’s it going?” her father asked.

  “These are done,” Ky said, pointing to that stack. “I’m into space regs. Why on earth did they restrict Class Bs from carrying nutrient components? Seems to me that’s what they’re ideally suited for.”

  “Politics,” San said. “But I’m not supposed to say that.”

  Her father gave San a look. “P & L,” he said. “They’ve moved into nutrient component production, over on Chelsea. They transport the stuff very efficiently in purpose-built Class Ds; they’re just protecting their investment.”

  “Closing out competitors, both producers and shippers,” San said.

  “San.”

  “They’re our competitors; I don’t see why we can’t be plainspoken at least at home,” San said.

  “They’re also our friends. You might have married the girl—”

  “Not me,” San said.

  Ky watched this interchange with interest. San arguing with her father? That was new.

  “Lunch,” her father said firmly, leading the way to the veranda. At midday, it was shady, breezy, scented with roses and jasmine. Her mother didn’t appear. She often skipped lunch with the family. Ky wasn’t hungry—she’d done nothing all morning but read—but she picked at a salad. Her father frowned at her. “You should get out a little, Ky. If you don’t eat, your mother will pester me.”

  “I need to finish these,” Ky said.

  “Not today. I didn’t think you’d be half so far along. Take the afternoon off.”

  Two hours later, Ky lay stretched on a towel by the pool. An hour’s swim had worked out kinks she hadn’t realized she had, and now she dozed in the warm shade. Her father had been right. She had needed the break.

  “Kylara Vatta, what do you think you’re doing?” That voice, harsh as a parrot’s cry, nearly sent her rolling into the pool in a defensive maneuver. Aunt Gracie Lane. Aunt Gracie Lane, who disapproved of idleness at any time, and also had strong views on appropriate bathing costume. “Anyone could see you!”

  Anyone who was a member of the family, or a guest. Possibly a lascivious gardener peeking over the wall of the pool enclosure, but certainly no one else.

  “I’m resting after swimming, Aunt Gracie,” Ky said.

  “You’re lazing about doing nothing useful,” Aunt Gracie said. “Get some proper clothes on a
nd get busy. You’re supposed to be helping your mother arrange your wardrobe.”

  Her mother, just coming to the pool behind Aunt Gracie, shrugged.

  “Yes, Aunt Gracie,” Ky said, scrambling to her knees with the towel clutched to her.

  “I would have thought the Academy would teach you some discipline, but clearly . . . I suppose that’s why you quit.”

  Too many things wrong with that to argue. Ky held the towel between her and Aunt Gracie’s disapproval, and sidled around, pricking herself on one of the gardenia bushes, to back gingerly toward the house. The moment Aunt Gracie transferred her gaze to something else, she whipped the towel all the way around her and scuttled for the veranda. Some things never changed.

  Clad in slacks and shirt, she emerged from her room to hear Aunt Gracie’s voice down the hall. “—do something about that girl, Myris, you’ll be sorry! I can’t believe you and Gerard are actually letting her go off alone, unsupervised—”

  Ky thought of running away, sneaking out through her window, but Aunt Gracie would certainly have something to say about that, too. It was going to be a very long four days. Three point three eight, her implant said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Most of the ordering could be done remotely. The next day Ky flew the single-seat herself to Harbor Town where Bond Tailoring’s senior fitter checked her mother’s measurements and admitted that they’d been correct. Ky picked out ship boots, dock boots, formal and informal shoes for nonbusiness wear. Despite her mother’s complaints about her shape, she was close enough to stock measurements that only slight alterations would fit her for most things. The captain’s tunic, however, had to be custom-made.

  “Still, that cuts a day off our estimate,” the fitter said. “Only four items. We’ll have them tomorrow evening.”

  “What time?”

  “Oh, you should plan on picking them up the next day,” the fitter said. “Just in case.”

  Ky left the shop with her footwear, stopped by Amerson’s for some personal items her mother didn’t need to know about. If she was going to be off on her own alone, and not under military discipline, she could choose the lotions and scents she preferred, ignoring her mother’s ideas of appropriateness. Her crew would just have to put up with it. Then she walked back up the street to catch the shuttle to the airport. She was back home by lunch . . . or rather, back at the home airfield. She stopped by the office to tell her father when the clothes would be ready.