Marque and Reprisal

by Elizabeth Moon

  “I think he wants to toy with me longer,” Ky said. “And I still want to know how—”

  “For the time it takes them to get here, maybe. Then he’ll betray you, and there won’t be time for talk. How far away are the mercs?”

  “Next ansible over, I hope,” Ky said. “But how do you know he’s got one?”

  “Captain . . . let’s go to your cabin.”

  “What?”

  “I need to speak to you privately,” Rafe said. He was still tense, pale, his eyes locked on hers.

  “If you must,” Ky said. She looked at the others. “Call me if anything changes. Make sure everything’s ready.”

  “Always,” Quincy said.

  Ky led the way to her cabin; Rafe followed her and shut the hatch without asking her.

  “What is this about?” Ky asked. “You’re—”

  “Just listen,” Rafe said. “I—there’s another new tech I didn’t tell you about.”

  “You have a shipboard ansible of your own?” she said. “Or some way to detect ansible activity?”

  He tapped his head. “I have one here. Miniaturized, implantable. The power system’s not adequate, so I need to hook into an exterior power source or link to an existing, working ansible.”

  Ky blinked. “You have an ansible in your head?”

  “Yes. Small, underpowered, but nonetheless workable. Experimental tech, of course. So far as I know the only working model; I got it direct from the lab. You must not tell anyone . . .”

  “I won’t,” Ky said. She was still fascinated. “So that’s how you know he has a shipboard one? How do you know he doesn’t have an implant like you?”

  “They smell different,” Rafe said. At her expression he sighed, shook his head. “They had to hook up a lot of weird connections to make it work at all. Humans have a lot of olfactory receptors we don’t really use, apparently tied to the biochemistry of the planet we originated on; they tied the detector function to that. It’s supposed to let me know when I’m in range and could tap power from an ansible, but my brain insists on giving me smells.”

  “I hope they’re pleasant,” Ky said. She could not help staring at his skull, every angle she could see. It could not be possible to fit an ansible in there; most of the ones she’d seen—the outsides anyway—were the size of a small ship.

  “Memorable is the word I’d choose,” Rafe said. “Whatever on our home planet smelled like that must not have been good for us. At any rate, I know he has a shipboard ansible and that he’s just activated it. Now will you please call the mercs on the system ansible before he blows it or something?”

  “You think he’d blow it?”

  “He wouldn’t want you calling for help, now would he?”

  “I wonder why he doesn’t just use the system ansible, now that we’ve got it unplugged.”

  “Because he knows we’d notice that, and he thinks his shipboard ansible can’t be detected. That alone should tell you he’s up to no good.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  On the bridge, Ky began the setup for an ansible connection and turned on the shipwide intercom. “We have a situation,” she said. “Quincy, bring the defensive suite active. Our friend over there is contacting someone, we don’t know who. Probably not someone we want to know.” The ansible connection winked green, and she entered the Mackensee codes she’d been given. The lightlag to the system ansible seemed interminable; she watched the chronometer ticking off the seconds . . . outbound signal . . . inbound signal . . .

  “Trouble, Captain Vatta?” Johannson must’ve been sitting beside the com shack. Ky had never appreciated instantaneous communication so much.

  “Possibly,” Ky said. “The ship was Vatta, and the captain . . . a Vatta troublemaker, apparently. It’s not a threat, but he’s just made an ansible call.”

  “Can your agent strip it?”

  “No.”

  “Advise you go to max power and head for jump point,” Johannson said.

  “Right into whoever’s coming in?” Ky asked. “And our insystem’s slow, if you recall.”

  “The idea is that they blow by you while they’re still having downjump turbulence fouling their scans. Shortens your vulnerability, though there is a risk. As I said before.”

  “And you?”

  “We do have responsibilities to the rest of the convoy,” Johannson said. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  Was he really going to leave them hanging out here alone? Or had that been a message designed to confuse an eavesdropper? Ky hoped it was the latter, but he certainly wasn’t going to share his plans over an open ansible connection. That made sense, but it didn’t make Ky happy. She looked at Lee, whose expression was more alert than anxious.

  “You heard the man,” she said. “Aim us at the jump point, and pour on the power. Not emergency max—we can’t outrun much of anything, but we can open distance.”

  She called back to Fair Kaleen. “Ah . . . we’re outbound, and I’ve decided on a destination,”

  “Wait a minute . . . that’s sudden. What happened?”

  “It was what you said about the humod issue. It just occurred to me that the right market for a third of my cargo is one of the humod worlds. Look at the list. With the ansible here working again, I was able to get a little market data—we’re off for Garth. Coming?”

  “But wait—girl—I mean, Captain, sorry—you don’t want to go to Garth—”

  “I don’t? Why?”

  “Well, just slow down there and we’ll talk about it. You don’t just make decisions on the first bit of info you get off a public board. How do you know it’s accurate?”

  “Look,” Ky said, finding it easy to simulate impatience. “We hung around in this system a lot longer than we meant to, waiting for you to match courses and then chatting. No disrespect to an elder Vatta, but if we’re going to rebuild the company, we can’t do it by sitting out here telling family stories. We need to be trading. I may be young and ignorant, but I know that much.”

  “Of course we need to be trading,” Osman said. “But rushing into things can get you in worse trouble. How do you know the folks after Vatta won’t be waiting for you in Garth?”

  Because they’re on the way here was on the tip of Ky’s tongue, but she said instead, “I don’t. But the only way to find out is to go there. I have some specialized electronics that will suit their humod market . . . just lying around, they were, and I got them at a good price.”

  “But—”

  “So are you coming, or shall we meet later somewhere else?” She had half an eye on the ship’s nearscan, which showed the range between them widening more slowly than she’d like.

  “I’ll . . . I’ll have to get my insystem drive up. I’ll follow you.”

  “Fine,” Ky said, and flicked off the link.

  He’d track her vector and report it, though if the allies he’d called were already in jump, it wouldn’t help them. “Rafe,” she said.

  “Yes.” He was close behind her.

  “Is there any way at all that ships can communicate between each other while in FTL space?”

  “No. Not that I know of, anyway. The advanced tech on the pin ansibles allows a ship in FTL to contact a fixed ansible platform, that’s all.”

  “Good.” She flicked on the shipwide com and explained the situation. “What we’re doing is running for the jump point. As soon as we can jump safely, we will. We don’t know where Osman’s allies are, or how fast they can get here. We are fairly sure he has no weapons capable of damaging us, so we’re not in immediate danger.”

  “What if they get here before we can jump?” Lee asked. “We’re at least eighteen hours from the jump point. Are the mercs coming?”

  “The mercs are not telling me or anyone else what they plan to do, but I’m hoping they’re on their way. We’ll deal with the other if it happens.”

  “Why did you even go talk to that old idiot?” Jim asked. He must have been near the Engineering com station. “
Wouldn’t it have been smarter to ignore him, like the mercs said?”

  “Jim!” Quincy muttered.

  “The only way to find out if he was legitimate or not was to talk to him,” Ky said. They were all probably thinking the same thing, but lacked Jim’s brashness.

  “But Quincy told you shifts ago. And she told us about him—”

  “Jim!” Ky could imagine Quincy trying to push Jim aside and shut him up.

  “I just don’t get it. We could’ve been halfway to somewhere else by now—”

  Ky’s temper boiled over. “You could be all the way to somewhere else in about two minutes . . . there’s an air lock.” Silence, complete, throughout the ship.

  “’M sorry,” Jim muttered finally.

  “Good,” Ky said. “Whether I made a mistake or not by talking to Osman will be clear in a day or so. In the meantime, we can increase our chances of survival by anticipating the bad guys and thinking of ways to make their task harder.”

  “We could put out a message on the ansible,” Rafe said. “We’ve cleared several along our back route . . . it will go somewhere, even if it isn’t picked up for a while. All stations, all recipients. Tell them about dear old Uncle Osman . . . or Cousin Osman, or whatever he is.”

  “Good idea,” Ky said. “You draft the message, then let me see it before you send it.”

  “Do we have any ship weapons?” Rafe asked.

  “Not offensive weapons. Or rather, we have the popgun equivalent that all the ships carry now. It wouldn’t penetrate his ship.”

  “He may or may not know that.”

  “He’s boosting,” Lee said. “But he’s not going to keep up with us.”

  “He wants a safe distance,” Ky said, thinking aloud. “He’s got the power to overtake us, but he won’t. His scan trace will point to us but keep him out of trouble.” Which meant he was expecting help, though she didn’t say that.

  “He thinks,” Rafe said. Ky glanced at him. His expression was feral.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be drafting that letter?”

  “I have; I’ve forwarded it to your desk.”

  Ky managed not to snarl. Of course, he had an implant. He could do that while she was limited to indirect input. If only she’d been near a real clinic where they could test and see if it was safe to put an implant in, she could have had the basic module. “Don’t be smug,” she said. “You and your implant.” She opened the file on her desk. The letter looked perfectly straightforward; she hoped it was. She opened a query link to the system ansible . . . almost two minutes to contact.

  “You’re close to that six months you mentioned,” Rafe said. “You could put one in now.”

  “No med tech,” Ky said, watching the winking light that indicated the message was en route to the ansible. She wasn’t about to wait for confirmation that the ansible was ready to receive.

  “True, but it’s possible to put them in without. I have. Changing implants is sometimes very useful.”

  “Risky.”

  “Not really. You can get a headache, and you can be disoriented for a few hours. I try to do it overnight—lie down, pull one, and insert the other. You do have to know sterile technique.”

  “Which I don’t,” Ky said. “So I’ll wait, thank you.”

  “I do know sterile technique,” Rafe said. “If it would improve our chances of survival, I’d be glad to help.”

  He would be glad to get his hands on the Vatta command database, however briefly. She could only deal with one trickster at a time, and Osman was the immediate threat. “I think not,” Ky said. “It can’t make this ship faster or add weaponry. For plain maneuver, the brain I have will work just fine.” She hoped. A command implant would give her faster control of ship systems; it might even work with Fair Kaleen’s systems . . .

  “Glad to hear it,” Rafe said. “Is there any other assistance I can offer?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Ky said. “I’ll let you know if I think of something.” She turned to Lee. “Do you know the nearest mapped jump point?”

  “It’s the one the mercs went to. There’s another, a half point farther.”

  “So . . . the mercs should get here first. Maybe.”

  “If the bad ones didn’t use an unmapped point. If they were just offscan, they could do a short jump in and be here in a few hours. We have enhanced scan, but the range is still well under system radius.”

  “Any idea what vector they might use?”

  “No, why?”

  “Diversions,” Ky said. “The one thing that even defensive shields have trouble with is random mass.”

  Rafe snorted. “What, you’re going to throw out some cargo?”

  “You might call it that,” Ky said. “If you consider mines cargo.”

  “Mines?”

  “You’re familiar with the concept?” She could not keep all the sarcasm out of her voice.

  “Yes. I just didn’t know you had any, and you said you didn’t have weapons.”

  “Didn’t have offensive weapons. I have some mines. Not many, and maybe not enough. We’ll see.”

  “When will you drop them?”

  “When I see the whites of their eyes,” Ky said. At his expression, she had to laugh. “When I know what vector they’re coming in on,” she said. “Or if Cousin Osman gives us any trouble in the meantime. I hate to waste a Vatta hull—”

  “You surely don’t think you can get it back!”

  “If I can, I intend to,” Ky said. “Vatta Transport needs hulls. We’ve lost several that I know of, not to mention the capital investment in our headquarters. We make money by trade; it takes hulls to haul cargo. So—Cousin Osman’s hull belongs, by rights, to Vatta. To me, if it comes to that.”

  Rafe stared. “You’re either crazy or brilliant, I’m not sure which.”

  “Neither am I,” Ky said. “Time will tell.”

  “You seem amazingly calm about this. Are you scared at all?”

  Ky wondered if there was any way to explain, and decided it was a lost cause. “Not excessively,” she said instead.

  Fair Kaleen had increased her boost. On the ship-to-ship, a light blinked. Osman wanted to talk again. Ky didn’t. Anyone with a shipboard ansible had to be part of the conspiracy.

  “There they are,” Lee and Rafe said together. On the enhanced longscan, two tiny dots. Ky reached over and flicked a button. Both turned red. She spared a moment of thankfulness that the defensive suite’s designer had included a remote weapons detection function, and that she’d opted for the more expensive version.

  “Weapons hot,” Ky said. “They must be expecting trouble.”

  “Or a quick easy kill,” Rafe said. “Do you want me to plot their course, so Lee can concentrate on piloting?”

  “You know how?” It didn’t surprise her. Interstellar navigation, in its simplest form, was a matter of looking up tables of figures and inserting them in the navigational computer. And having Rafe on navigation would be better than Sheryl—competent though she was, Sheryl was better off not on the bridge right now.

  “Yes.” Rafe grinned. “I can still surprise you, too, Captain. Anyway, if you have a way to use those mines, I want you to be free of all distraction while you do it.”

  The enemy ships—she presumed they were enemy, since they had not contacted her—had emerged from jump at high velocity, and were braking only slightly. Ky interpreted this to mean that they were getting data on her directly, and instantly, from Osman on Fair Kaleen. She looked at their own trace. The old ship could not accelerate any faster, and she had to conserve fuel for maneuvering.

  “Lee, cut her back. We want to look like innocents heading for the jump point. I’m going to have a little chat with Osman and see what he tells me.”

  When she clicked the com back on, she started talking as soon as Osman’s face appeared, with the wavery edge characteristic of diverging signal sources.

  “Well, Cousin, are you coming?” Ky asked. “I have the feeling it’s not h
ealthy to stay in one place too long.”

  “Who would hang around in a deserted system like this?”

  So he was going to try to keep her ignorant . . . surely he had noticed trouble on the scans. “Looks like a fine quiet place for raiders or pirates to me, Cousin,” she said cheerily. “Surely they have rendezvous points far from heavily traveled routes.”

  “How would anyone know we were here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Blind luck maybe. Wait—” She pretended to look away. “Imagine that. I have two blips on my screen . . . what do you have?”

  “Blips—oh . . . those. Those are . . . friends of mine, you might say. It’s why I don’t have to worry about raiders.”

  The slightest emphasis on I, the slightest smugness in the tone. “Don’t worry, Kylara, honey, we’ll take good care of you.”

  “Will you?” Ky asked, in the mildest tone she could manage. On the scan, the two ships closed distance steadily. It looked as if they had tracked and analyzed her course and were planning to intercept to killing distance. “You didn’t mention your friends before, Cousin. Who are they?”

  “My dear, you really do not need to know. It’s better if you don’t. In case—” He paused. She could fill in that blank easily: in case she escaped to tell the tale.

  The ansible status light went from steady green to red. So they had blocked the ansible again.

  “Told you,” Rafe said softly, just out of pickup range.

  “And now the ansible’s not working,” Ky said to Osman. He shrugged.

  “These automated ansibles aren’t as reliable, I’ve learned over the years. Were you trying to send a message?”

  “Thinking of it,” Ky said. “I guess I’ll have to wait until we get to the next one.”

  A stupid exchange; surely he had detected her transmission to the ansible and surely he knew it had succeeded. But in following his misdirection, she might learn something useful.

  “Your friends are coming in very fast,” Ky said. “If you hadn’t told me they were your friends, I’d worry about an attack.” They were coming in spread formation, perfect for attacking a single ship and preventing its escape by any sudden maneuver. Not that her ship was capable of much evasive action.