Trading in Danger

by Elizabeth Moon

  Ky nodded, and worked her way through the excellent sorga—realizing that she had completely missed whatever meal should have preceded it, in her dash to get off the planet and then off the station. The others ate more slowly, and the talk picked up around her.

  Seth was explaining that his sense of humor had come from his grandfather Jandrai, not his grandfather Garlan. Lucin Li countered with a story about her grandfather Li, a custom knifemaker.

  “Chanhodri Li?” asked Gary Tobai.

  “Yes,” Lucin said. “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I have one of his knives. Fine piece of work. Inherited it from my dad, who got it from your grandfather. Small universe, eh?”

  “May I see it?” Lucin asked.

  “The knife? Sure.” Gary fished in his pocket and brought it out. Ky looked at it—a small black-handled folding knife. It looked smoothed by time, well-cared for, but nothing unusual.

  Lucin peered at it. “Ah . . . this was in his second series of blades. See—this little mark here? He wasn’t entirely satisfied with the first series—exchanged them for these when he found the owners. Did your father show you the second blade? It doesn’t look as if you’d used it in a long time.”

  “Second blade . . . ,” Gary said. “There’s no second blade . . . is there?”

  “Kind of a trick,” Lucin said. She did something Ky couldn’t see and another blade slid sideways out of the handle. “Grandfather was trapped in a collapsed building once—big sea storm, over on Westering. In the debris he couldn’t get his big folding knife out of his pocket—he couldn’t get his arm to move back enough to pull it out. He had a small screwdriver, and finally made a hole in his pocket so he could push the knife out forward, bit by bit. When he started making knives after that, he always had what he called the escape blade. Lot of people never noticed it.”

  “Isn’t that . . . illegal?” Gary asked.

  “Some places, yes. That’s why it wasn’t ever advertised, and why it’s not metallic. He didn’t think the laws should prevent someone saving his life. And a screwdriver, he said, was a damn poor way to cut through heavy cloth. Here—” She handed it back to Gary. “Feel this ridge? Run your thumb along it the way you want the blade to go.”

  Gary ran the little black blade in and out several times. “Huh. I sure didn’t know that was there. My dad . . . well, this came to me after his accident, so if he knew, he never had a chance to tell me.”

  Ky, feeling much better now that she’d eaten, joined the conversation. “So . . . what about you, Paro? Where are you from, what’s your family like?”

  Paro Hospedin grinned. “Westerling family, like Lucin’s. Shellfish farming, back in colonial days. Then shellfish processing, but we were bought out by Gramlin fifty years or so ago. Our side of the family moved into transportation—nothing to scare Vatta Transport, mostly ground routes from Westerling back east. I caught the spaceship bug early on, wanted to work on the ships themselves, see new worlds, all that. My father said I had to get an education first, and pushed me into the technical end.”

  “Good for him,” Quincy said. “It’s easier to get it in one lump than piecemeal, while you’re working.”

  “Agreed. I wasn’t sure I wanted drives, but he said I had a good mind for it, and there’d always be ships that needed me.”

  “As long as someone has a general background, too,” Quincy said. Beeah and Mehar rolled their eyes. Quincy scowled at them. “It’s important,” she said. “You young people always want to specialize in the high-paying fields, but if you don’t have the background, you’re out of luck if the ship’s expert in the blogowitz generator gets a knock on the head and you have to deal with it.”

  “What’s a blogowitz generator?” asked Caleb Skeldon.

  “She made it up,” Mehar said. “It’s imaginary, what she calls a teaching tool.”

  Caleb still looked confused. Beeah patted him on the shoulder. “Never mind, Cal, this is an old engineering argument. Probably as old as engineering. They have it in medicine, too.”

  “Just trying to understand the ship,” Cal said, applying himself to his rice and chicken.

  “It’s fine, Cal. They can confuse me sometimes,” Ky said. That wasn’t strictly true, but Cal looked like someone who needed a kind word right then. He wasn’t just handsome; he had the lost-puppy look that made her want to protect him. Danger signals pinged in Ky’s head.

  “So, Cal, tell us about yourself.” From the look on Mehar’s face, she had the same impulse as Ky and it was safer for her. Ky mentally detached herself from the lost puppy and handed him over.

  “Eastbay City,” Cal said. “My family’s nothing special, just ordinary working folks. Ma works in the hospital, fluids tech, and my dad’s an accountant . . . that’s how I got into inventory control, through accounting. Accounting was boring. Inventory control, at least there’s something going on. I always wanted to go into space anyway. I guess it was playing Harmon the Hero games when I was a kid. I know there’s not really any Evil Overlord, but . . .” He chuckled and pushed his rice around.

  “I used to play that,” Seth said. “Customized my copy so Harmon had my face and whoever I was mad at that week was the Evil Overlord. Got caught at school once playing it in class, and of course it was Professor Jesperson, and of course it was his face as Evil Overlord.”

  “What did he do?” Ky asked.

  “Laughed. It was worse than getting angry. I felt like an idiot.” Seth shook his head. “Then the headmaster came in and asked what was going on, and Professor Jesperson erased the set and said he’d just found an illicit game-player and erased it. I never did completely understand that man, but once I didn’t have the game-player, I managed to get top marks in that class.”

  “My best friend and I modified our desk paks so we could chat in class,” Mehar said. “Nobody thought it was possible, so they didn’t check them out every time. We’d have gotten away with it all term if another class hadn’t used our room . . . Two kids started fiddling with the controls and, of course, they couldn’t keep a secret when they found out.”

  Everyone had finished eating now. They all seemed relaxed, as she’d hoped. Ky caught Lucin Li’s eye. “Better clear up now,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way . . .”

  “Yes, Captain,” Lucin said. The others all rose, some stacking plates and others picking up the serving dishes. Ky picked up the candlepair and switched it off.

  “With the captain’s permission,” Riel said, “I’d really like to get back to the bridge.”

  “Certainly,” Ky said. “We stretched the regs; we don’t want them to snap.”

  He grinned, as she’d hoped, and headed upship to the bridge.

  “Now,” she said to her section firsts. “About that schedule . . .”

  “It’s all ready, Captain,” Gary said.

  “And I have the preliminary environmental report,” Mitt said.

  “Good. Anything critical I need to see right away? I’m overtime myself; I’m turning in for six hours unless someone needs me.”

  “No,” Mitt said. “Like I said before dinner, we’re in good shape. I have a couple of alternative models, but everything’s stable. Report’s on file.”

  “Same here,” Gary said.

  “Good,” Ky said. “We’ll all think clearer after some sleep.”

  Back in her cabin, Ky stripped off her clothes—not too stinky—and put them into the ’fresher while she took a full shower. She ran through the calming exercises of Saphiric Cyclans as she dried her hair, laid out a fresh uniform, and fell into bed only to remember that she hadn’t written a log entry since she got aboard.

  There was, of course, the recorded log, and Lee would have written up a pilot’s log, but tradition and training said a captain never slept without updating the log in actual writing.

  At least she could do that wrapped in a soft robe and not in a uniform. Ky pulled out the logbook—still so new, most of its pages empty—and her stylus. She pi
led pillows behind her and started on the day’s events. When she’d finished a terse report, she looked at it a long moment before closing the logbook. If . . . if something happened, and that logbook were the only surviving evidence, would a reader understand it? Would he see choices she had not seen, better courses of action?

  She could see nothing but one bad option after another.

  She slipped the logbook and stylus into its drawer, and then turned out the light. Maybe a good night’s sleep would give her the wits to find a way out of this.

  She woke up to the sounds of a ship on insystem drive, nothing more nor less. The ship was alive—air moving through the vents, liquids moving through pipes—she heard a distant gulp that she knew from experience was the galley drain. She stretched, feeling the mild stiffness of muscles held too tense the day before. But rested. She sat up, looked at the chronometer, and muttered a soft oath. She should have known they’d let her sleep too long. Into uniform, teeth clean, hair brushed smooth.

  She came out into the passage feeling wide-awake and hungry again. In the galley, Cal Skeldon was wiping up the sink; she nodded to him as she checked her implant. Riel was off-duty; Lee was sitting the board. Alertly—he noticed the tick at his implant and answered at once.

  “Nothing new, Captain.”

  “Can I fix you something, Captain?” Cal asked. That ingratiating smile again; Ky shook her head.

  “I’ll just get some cereal,” she said. Before she could reach for a bowl, he had handed her one, along with a packet of breakfast grains.

  “Thanks,” she said, turning away to open the cooler. She found a packet of berries and added them to the bowl, then took out the cream jug. He was still there, clearly ready to do anything she asked. She poured the cream onto the berries and grains, and handed him the cream jug.

  “I have to get to the bridge,” she said.

  “Of course, Captain,” he said, eyes bright. She would have a talk with Mehar, she decided; this had gone far enough. She took her breakfast up to the bridge. Lee looked up.

  “Were you ever planning to wake Sleeping Beauty?” Ky asked. “Or were you waiting for a prince?”

  “Gary and Quincy said to let you have at least eight hours,” Lee said. “Was that wrong?”

  “No. I just didn’t plan to sleep that long.” Ky sat down in the captain’s seat and turned on the intercom. “Captain’s on the bridge. Section firsts, if you’re finished with that assignment, come on up.” She took a spoonful of berries and cream and grain. “Where are we, Lee? Anything to worry about?”

  “No, Captain.” The plot came up on Ky’s desk. “We’re not going to hit anything in this system. Not anything mapped, anyway. The warships have moved in on Sabine Prime; there’s been an engagement of some kind with Prime’s space force, such as it is. They haven’t blown the station yet, though we’re far enough out it could have happened and we wouldn’t have heard.”

  “Any sign of ISC?”

  “No downjump markers that I can detect. If they’ve come in, they’ve come in with something small, distant, and careful. I wouldn’t know yet if they just arrived across the system, of course.”

  Scan-lag was such a pain. It was possible to link ansibles to scan and get an almost-instantaneous scan of an entire system, but that took the ansibles off-line for other uses. Aside from that, they were limited to lightspeed or less. Ky finished her berries and grain, setting the bowl aside just as Gary, Mitt, and Quincy appeared.

  “I hope you’re all as rested as I am,” Ky said. “What have you got for me? Mitt, you first.”

  “Current consumption, we’re good for eighty-seven days. Gary spent all the government letter of credit on supplies, is why it looks so good. Our system’s designed for straight recycling of atmosphere and water; there’s no design capability for onboard food generation.”

  “We could modify some of the equipment,” Quincy put in. “But we don’t have seed stock. We’d have to figure out a way to purify and prepare the basic cultures.”

  “I can’t really recommend that,” Mitt said. “Unless it’s that or starvation.”

  “We’ll hope it’s not,” Ky said. “You, Quincy?”

  “Well, the ship’s in pretty good shape, aside from the problems we knew about already. Nothing’s leaking. Nothing’s coming apart under this acceleration. On the other hand, we have to consider insystem drive fuel consumption. Since we can’t jump out of this system with no FTL drive, we need to be able to get back where we came from in order to get that replacement sealed unit.”

  “Fuel consumption so far?”

  “Seven percent. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it all depends how long this goes on.”

  “Gary?”

  “Load’s all secure. I’ve been collecting the skills list, like you asked me to. Hand-painting flat-pics seems like a useless sort of thing to mention, but—”

  “We don’t know what might be useful,” Ky said. “Let me see here . . . flower painting, yes. Surf fishing with rod and reel. Once achieved a perfect score in Bzzx—what is that?”

  “A gameplayer classic. The one where you shoot little biting things that try to eat your garden plants.”

  “Mmm . . . and designing and hand-sewing festival costumes.” She couldn’t think of anything more boring, herself. And that was Mitt, of all people. “Pistol-bow competition? What’s that?”

  “That’s—you know what a crossbow is, right?”

  “Ancient weapon, now used in sports. Sure, my brothers had one. They never would let me play with it, and it disappeared about the time Hanar moved out. He used to shoot fish with it, and sometimes rabbits.”

  “Pistol bows are much smaller. I asked Mehar about it; she says they even proposed them to Vatta main office as a shipboard security weapon. They won’t penetrate hulls or bulkheads, and they don’t have any combustibles, so they’re legal on most stations. She says they look scary to dockside thieves and they had much less trouble on Palatine when the outside watch carried them.”

  “That makes sense. So we have a pistol-bow expert—how many pistol bows do we have?” For a moment she imagined the glorious defense of the ship, her crew with pistol bows against—real riot-control weapons that could rip holes in the ship. Not a good idea.

  “Only the two Mehar has—her own personal practice and competition bows.”

  Just as well, then. She wouldn’t be tempted. Still, if Mehar could hit something with a pistol bow, she might be good with other weapons. If they happened to find any. She went on with the list. Two who could knit, and one who could crochet. One who could blow glass. Five cross-trained in another ship discipline than that on their primary papers.

  Nothing that immediately sparked an idea for how to get out of this mess. Nobody claimed to know how to fashion an ansible out of yarn and some extra carrots, which is what they had most of.

  “Well,” she said when she came to the end of the list and found her three section firsts looking at her as if they expected she’d come up with a complete answer. “That’s all very interesting, but I think the next step is to see if the Mackensee folks want to talk to us. I’d like to quit using fuel to go somewhere we don’t want to go, for instance. We’re well out of their way, unless they plan to blow up Sabine Prime itself.”

  “Do you think they’ll answer?” asked Gary. “If they’re busy fighting—”

  “Won’t know until we try,” Ky said. “If they’re too busy they won’t answer, or they’ll tell us to be quiet. I’m going to suggest that we need to reserve fuel for maneuvering. Chances are they don’t know we’ve got this much left.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Even though she had made the decision, Ky hesitated before trying to contact the mercenaries. They would be busy, probably in the middle of a fight . . . If she were their commander, how would she react to the interruption from a silly little civilian cargo ship?

  It would depend, really. It probably wouldn’t be the first time that a civilian ship asked for fur
ther orders or wanted to change the ones it had been given. That must happen several times an operation. So there must be someone monitoring that channel, expecting ships to call in and complain or beg. What happened next would depend on the mercenaries’ protocol for handling such calls, and on her approach to them.

  “Was there any com activity on channel seventeen?” she asked Lee.

  “I logged some very faint,” Lee said. “It wasn’t for us, all we got was outwash.”

  So the others were contacting the mercenaries. And by their plots, they weren’t being blown away instantly. That was something, but was it enough? Ky would have given a lot to ask the advice of experienced spacers, preferably military. Despite the air of distaste which had colored Commander Staller’s comments on mercenaries during their military law course, he had considered mercenaries true military organizations. He would know—any of them might know—what to expect in this situation.

  Their expertise lay impossibly far away, in time and space; she had no connection there anymore, even if the ansibles hadn’t been out . . . but she did, she remembered.

  The card that had come with the ship model from MacRobert . . . what was it he’d written? “If you ever need to let us know about something, remember that dragons breathe fire.”

  But she wasn’t a dragon, and Glennys Jones wasn’t a dragon-class cruiser. Of course . . . Mac knew that. Mac knew . . . and somehow he’d given her a way to get their attention. Now she regretted the resentment that had kept her from plugging away at the mystery hidden in the instructions . . . some kind of recognition code, probably, if only she understood it. Not advanced communication devices; she was sure that the model wasn’t a compact ansible, for instance . . . but why?

  Why was she sure? Would she know a compact military-grade ansible if she had one in her hands?

  “Captain—” Lee was pointing to the comdesk when Ky shook herself out of her thoughts. A light had come on: incoming message.

  “Captain Vatta, Glennys Jones,” she said.