Trading in Danger

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Gracie’s on the warpath about you,” her father said.

  “I know.”

  “You might want to do your bookwork here today,” he said. He didn’t quite twinkle at her, but there was an edge of humor in his voice.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Where’s an empty workstation?”

  “San’s off checking yield in the young plantations; you can use his office. Don’t answer the phone.”

  Ky dumped her shoes and boots in the corner of San’s office, and pulled up more of the data she needed on his station. Facts flowed into her mind: the history of the Glennys Jones, details of her last trip through maintenance, background information on the crew, details of the contract. She hardly moved until her father opened the door to tell her it was time for dinner.

  “I’m not sure what Gracie’s got in mind for you, Kylara, but you probably should come back here tomorrow. Or just go out. You won’t have a chance to snorkle or ride again for a long time.”

  “Would that be all right?” Ky asked.

  “You’ve been working hard. I’m sure you can decide how much more work you need to do. Take the day if you feel like it.”

  Ky dreaded the thought of dinner, but Aunt Gracie, her mother told her, had retired to her room with a headache. Ky thought about a late swim in the pool, but remembered in time that the guest room had a clear view of the pool, and sound carried over water. Instead, she rummaged in her closet and found her snorkling gear, then linked her implant to the home library’s marine database for an instant to download whatever she might need.

  Early the next morning, she was down at the shore shortly after dawn, squinting into the light to check the buoys supporting the protective nets that kept out the larger marine predators. How long had it been since she had a day to herself, a day free to do whatever she wanted? She couldn’t remember—years, anyway. Every brief vacation from the Academy had been filled with duties—courtesy calls on this or that family member, dinners, parties, required shopping trips. Now the day stretched before her, empty as the beach itself.

  Little waves slid meekly up onto the sand, leaving interlocking arcs of wet behind them; squirts of water revealed the hiding places of burrowing clams. Ky struggled into her wet suit, clipped on her safety beacon, put on gloves and flippers, and almost fell on her nose when she started toward the water and caught a flipper in the sand.

  Once in the water, she moved slowly out to the first of the broad, knobbly coral heads, where she knew she’d find a flurry of brilliantly colored small fish. Her implant gave her the names. A black-tooth undulated into her view; she turned to face it. It retreated to deeper water, then dove into the sandy bottom, fluffing sand over itself. Her implant marked that location; she would be careful not to step on it.

  She had set the timer for two hours; when the implant beeped, she stroked back to shallow water, then stood up. She felt heavier; she always hated coming out of the water once she was in. Her father had used that as a metaphor for growing up, leaving the easy support of a family and carrying her own weight, but she resented his lecture. Unless it meant you could drown in your support system, and this day she simply wanted to enjoy the beauty.

  She looked again at the lagoon, and thought about the rest of the day. She could saddle a horse and ride out through the plantation, or . . . she could stay here. She queried her implant. Aunt Gracie was on the move. All the horses were in use. Half-annoyed and half-relieved, Ky waded back into the water and let herself rest on its buoyancy. She wasn’t hungry, and the suit had its own water supply system. When she tired of the water, she pulled herself back up to the beach, to the shade under the trees, scooped out a hollow in the sand, and took a nap. She woke to the turquoise and pink sky of evening, and stared a long time at the colors as they deepened before she turned her back on them to head for the house.

  “I made this just for you,” Aunt Gracie said at breakfast the morning Ky was leaving. She handed over a gaily decorated sack. Ky almost dropped it when she took it; it must weigh, she thought, five or six kilos.

  She looked in. There, swathed in bright-colored flowery wrapping paper, were the unmistakable shapes of three of Aunt Gracie’s special fruit-spice cakes. Aunt Gracie beamed at her.

  “You’ll be gone a long time, and I always say that a taste of home is the best thing to cure homesickness . . .”

  Aunt Gracie’s fruit-spice cakes were, without doubt, the densest mass of flavorless, tooth-breaking pseudofoodstuff in the galaxy. She produced them at intervals, for birthdays and holidays, and the family disposed of them discreetly as soon as she was out of sight. Even a sliver of Aunt Gracie’s product left Ky with a day or so of gastric uneasiness.

  “Uh . . . thanks,” Ky said. She could always leave them under her bed as insect repellent blocks . . . she’d done that with the ones Aunt Gracie had given her each year to take to the Academy.

  “I know how rushed it can be, when people leave on a long assignment,” Aunt Gracie went on. “So let’s just let Jeannine put them in the car for you right this minute . . .”

  San made a sound; Ky looked at him, and his lips were folded tight but his eyes danced mischief.

  “Thank you,” Ky said again. She handed the sack to the maid and resigned herself to dumping Aunt Gracie’s creations into some unsuspecting trash container on the way to her command. She was not going to spend five kilos of her personal baggage allowance on inedible crud.

  She finished her juice, and made her escape—not without kissing that withered old cheek—to the car, where her father waited to drive her to the airfield.

  “If you’re planning to dump it somewhere,” he said without reference, “don’t do it in sight of anyone who might, by any conceivable means, know anyone who knows us. Your aunt Gracie’s connections are legendary. The only reason she doesn’t know the whole truth about your resignation is that it’s a state secret. But she suspects, and she’ll worm it out of someone inside another week, I’m sure. I don’t want to have to deal with her if she finds out you’ve tossed her cakes in the trash; it was bad enough when she found out you’d been leaving them under your bed.”

  “How did she find that out?” Ky asked.

  “Bribed the staff, I shouldn’t doubt,” her father said sourly. “But look at it this way. Anything is a commodity to someone. In a very large universe, your aunt Gracie’s cannonballs may be someone else’s favorite underwear.”

  Ky snorted, surprised into a laugh for the first time since her private disaster.

  “Courage, Ky,” he said, as he stopped the car and leaned over to give her a kiss. “You’ve got what you need to start a good life. Go.”

  Gaspard was waiting on the apron. “You look better,” he said, as he looked up from checking the oil. “So, what did the family do for you?”

  “I’m taking Glennys Jones to the scrapyard,” Ky said. She took her duffel from old George and slung it into the baggage compartment. “It will keep me out of the public eye.” The boring start to a dull, boring career as a truck driver in space, she did not say. She looped the tie-downs around the two bags, and slammed the door shut, latching it carefully.

  “And give you a chance to show your talents,” Gaspard said. He went on with the preflight check while she looked around, trying to fill her memory with the home she would not see for months, maybe years. Maybe ever again, space being what it was, and life being less certain than she’d thought the last time she left.

  “Well . . . assuming I have any.” What talents did it take to captain an experienced crew on a boring one-way run? Now if she could figure out a way to avoid scrapping the ship and surprise the family with a great triumph of trading . . .

  “Don’t fish, Ky; it doesn’t become you.”

  “Right. And we shall hope I don’t exercise my talent for leaping in to help . . .”

  “At least not until you’re a little more experienced,” Gaspard said. “Though you could help me, if you would, by agreeing to copilot on the way in. There�
��s some serious weather between us and the mainland.” She had seen the satellite images; a cold front nosing under the warm sea air and lifting clouds to towering heights.

  “Of course.”

  “Good, then. Let’s be going. That front’s going to toss us around some.”

  Ky climbed into the copilot’s seat, and concentrated on her part of the checklist as they finished preflight and started the engines.

  The first hour in the air, retracing her recent flight home, was almost pure sightseeing. The colors of the water, changing with depth, with the shadows of clouds . . . the reefs . . . the various islands. Puffy cumulus clouds arrayed in rows along the wind’s path, all white and innocent . . . but ahead, a line of taller clouds, their ramparts denser. Ky had no time to brood, as she helped Gaspard ease the plane through the front’s turbulence, and only the navigation instruments could have told where they were.

  The city lay under dense clouds spitting cold rain, just as it had been when she left. At least here there was little turbulence, and landing offered no problems. Gaspard turned onto the ramp that led to the private terminal, and then again to reach the Vatta hangars.

  “Good job, Ky,” he said, when he’d handed her down from the wing. “You’ll be fine with old Glennys. Shouldn’t wonder if you don’t start your own private fleet with her or something.”

  Ky started. Was she that predictable?

  “Have to start somewhere, after all,” he said cheerfully, and winked. Then he turned back to the mechanic who had come out to greet him.

  Her first task, she thought, was getting rid of Aunt Gracie’s cakes. She hadn’t asked Gaspard to let her toss them out into the sea—Gaspard might be her friend, but he might also be one of Aunt Gracie’s spies. At no point in the route from the airfield to the shuttle field was she alone and in reach of a disposal chute. The five kilos dragged at her arm. She had to carry them herself to have the chance to lose them . . . but a woman in a Vatta Transport captain’s uniform carrying a bright flower-patterned bag, obviously heavy, would be noticed and remembered. Blast Aunt Gracie!

  Vatta captains, she had been told, did not ride commercial shuttles to orbit. At least not here, where Vatta maintained its own small fleet of surface-to-orbit transport. As a captain, she had her own tiny compartment, outfitted as a workstation, with stowage for her duffel in the same compartment. She remembered her first trip alone to the orbital station, when she’d been thirteen and headed for three months as the lowest of apprentices on Turbot. She’d been crammed into crew seating with four other family apprentices (each going to a different ship) and fifteen regular crew, and she’d been stiff, as well as scared, by the time they arrived.

  This was much better. She spent the time reviewing crew information, committing faces and names to her implant’s perfect memory. At the Vatta orbital station, she debarked ahead of the rest, and caught the first tram outbound for the docks. She had given up on Aunt Gracie’s cakes for now; she turned them over to the Vatta handler along with the rest of her luggage. It would reappear in her cabin aboard. All she had in hand was the tidy little captain’s case, with its datalinks, command wand, and orders. She tried to sneak up on Glennys without being spotted, but Vatta security was far too good for that. She had an escort all the way from the Vatta gates to the boarding platform, and when she got there, Gary Tobai left off polishing the Vatta family seal on the rail and turned to her.

  “Well, if it isn’t the newest captain in Vatta Fleet.” He grinned at her, but Ky thought she detected a bite to his tone. “Mouth got you in trouble again, did it?”

  “All I said was . . .” Ky shut her mouth and shook her head at him. “If you know that much, you know I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Wrong? No. Wrong way to do something right, maybe. I thought you were supposed to be our white hope with the military.”

  “I thought so, too. So when I found something that needed to be fixed—”

  “You jumped in and fixed it. I understand that, but you could have anticipated it would cause trouble.”

  “I was trying to avoid trouble.” Should she even explain how convoluted the right procedures were, and why she’d chosen to work through contacts the family had given her? No. He wanted to condescend, so he would, no matter what she said.

  “You were not bred to avoid trouble,” Tobai said. “Your family takes it on, shakes it like a dog shaking a rat, and tosses it to one side.” His voice softened. “As you did, Captain.”

  Captain. He had actually called her Captain. She pushed aside the rest of what he’d said. “So, now that I have a ship, what can you tell me about her?”

  He scowled. “You haven’t looked at the listing?”

  Ky closed her eyes and recited. “Glennys Jones, three hundred meters overall length, 200 meters beam, keel plate laid in Bramley’s yards eighty-seven years ago, refitted in ’04 and ’38, drives replaced in ’43 with expanded cruising range, fully loaded to one hundred seventy-nine days, or two hundred fifteen days empty and crewed. She has two main cargo holds, three auxiliary holds, and no autoloading capability. The largest container that will fit through the main cargo hatch is three meters by two point seven meters, and standard access now is three by four, which limits her pretty much to specialty cargo. She can’t take loose bulk cargo like grain, another limitation. She’s been used to haul perishables, but on her last trip the refrigerating system broke down, and Vatta had to pay the shipper for the goods as well as a penalty for nondelivery, and insurance didn’t cover it all. The company’s out seven hundred thousand credits. Repair of the refrigeration system would cost another five hundred thousand, so Ships decided to use her for base-supply runs and sell her for scrap when her inspection ran out.”

  Ky paused for breath. Tobai had been nodding approval, but when she paused he didn’t say anything. She went on. “So now she’s due for recertification, but she probably wouldn’t pass, and they’re shipping her off to Lastway. I know all that, all that’s in the listing. What I don’t know is what her other peculiarities are. Things not in the list. I’m sure you do, because you’ve probably crawled all over her with a microscanner.”

  “You’re right about that,” Tobai said. “I’ve shipped on her five times in all, but not in the past seven years, so I had to renew my acquaintance with the lady.”

  “This old—”

  “Now don’t say that. It never does for the captain to badmouth the ship. Ships are sensitive.”

  Ships were metal, ceramic, polymer machines; they had brains of a sort, but no feelings. Ky had been told that the first time she came aboard a ship. But however sensitive the ship wasn’t, Gary Tobai was, and she wanted him on her side.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Better not to say it at all, then,” he said. “Now—what you need to know is that we have to load the starboard main hold first, then the port auxiliary, starboard auxiliary, main port, and the third auxiliary, if we use it, last. We need at least a half point more mass to starboard, or she won’t stay in trim. That last engine refit did something screwy to the frame, though no one will admit it. There’s also a problem with the attitude jets, but all I have is hearsay. Quince could tell you more about that.”

  “Dad says they’ve assembled a cargo for us—are you satisfied with it?”

  “All done, including crew trading,” Tobai said. “How much are you reserving for crew shares?”

  “A scrap run, one-way? What’s the usual split?”

  “I’d recommend the third auxiliary hold. That’s 15 percent of the total. Limit it to luxuries, is what I told them. Retain 4 percent for captain’s space, and split the remaining 11 percent by seniority.”

  “I’ve already bought in for 10 percent; should I donate the 4 percent?”

  “No, crew would wonder what was going on if you didn’t claim it. We’re going to have trouble enough; your father had to pay a surcharge for a one-way trip since they can’t make a profit on the way ba
ck. Whether you fill it or not, reserve it. Your dad sent over some; he said you wouldn’t have time to deal, but I could add a few things . . .”

  “Fine.” She could put Aunt Gracie’s miserable cakes in there and no one would ever know. “If you come across something that would be prime at Lastway, let me know. I’m up to my nose in chores, and we’re supposed to push for a quick departure.”

  He grinned again. “That’s what I like to see: captains doing more than sitting in the captain’s chair.”

  When she got to her cabin, she found a stack of packages: presents from her parents, from her brother San, from . . . she stared at the card that had come with a child’s kit for a military ship, a Dragon-class cruiser. MacRobert had sent her a present? She ripped open the envelope. In the same precise, blocky letters that had once informed her, in her first winter as a cadet, that she had two demerits for the state of her bunk, he offered best wishes. “If you ever need to let us know about something,” the message went on, “remember that dragons breathe fire. I will be most interested in your progress with this model.”

  That was beyond odd; Ky stared at it a long moment before putting the model kit on the back of her closet shelf, on top of the note. She could not imagine what she would need to tell the space service, besides something rude and anatomically impossible. MacRobert’s rumored connection to covert operations ghosted through her mind—but that was cadet gossip, surely? And why would he pick a disgraced exile like her to work with even if it were true? She turned to the other presents.