“We have a very dangerous situation,” Ky said. “As several people, including you, pointed out earlier. Have you got a better plan? If this works it will prevent a boarding situation.”
His plan if they were boarded had been complex, and she was not at all sure her crew could carry it out. Especially the last phase.
“I understand that, ma’am.”
“Oh, and Quincy—with just the EMP pulse aimed into his ship, estimate the damage to grapples, transfer tube, and our control systems . . .” She ripped open one of the cartons.
“Right,” Quincy said, sounding more cheerful. “And send Martin down here.”
Risks. If this failed, they might actually be captured. That must not happen. Toby must not fall into enemy hands, nor Stella, nor Quincy . . . nor she herself. She thought it would work—it should work, it certainly could work—but what if it didn’t? She called Toby, Stella, and Rafe to meet her in the rec area. They had a right to know the worst before the others. The final elements of Martin’s plan, the ones she hadn’t told them about before in case it never happened.
“The situation is . . . grave,” Ky said. Toby paled, but didn’t move. Stella, already paler by nature, sat as still.
“Hopeless?” Rafe asked.
“No. Not hopeless. Difficult, dangerous, tricky. Grave. But not ever hopeless.”
Rafe pursed his lips. “Sometimes, Captain Vatta, it is necessary to recognize when there are no viable alternatives.”
The formality alerted her. “You think there are not?”
“We’re outnumbered by larger, faster ships, several of them armed with ample weaponry to blow us away if the defensive suite doesn’t hold, and maybe even if it functions as advertised. Our enemies have proposed a plan that they claim will save some of the crew—do you believe that, by the way?”
“Of course not,” Ky said. “They have no interest in the crew’s lives. They assume I do.”
“And this plan involves letting this ship be boarded. So . . . it might be time to eat the bullet.”
“I think not,” Ky said. “I think it’s time to have our enemy eat the bullet. It’s just that ensuring it goes down their gullet is not going to be easy.”
“And the cost of error might not be a quick death,” Rafe said, holding her gaze.
“That at least lies within our power,” Ky said. She did not glance at Toby; she did not want to see that awareness enter his eyes. The pup moved suddenly, squirming out of Toby’s grip with a grunt; his claws clicked on the deck.
“Rascal!” said Toby in a tense voice.
“It’s all right,” Ky said, almost relieved by the interruption. “Rascal’s behavior is the least of our problems. I do feel it’s imperative that every crewmember have the capability to ensure a quick death . . .”
“You mean . . . suicide?” Toby asked.
She had to look at him now. His brow furrowed with the effort to act calm; his jaw was clamped, mouth in a firm line.
“Yes,” she said. “But only if it’s necessary, if the rest of this doesn’t work.”
“My . . . my family didn’t believe in suicide,” he said, looking down.
“Neither did mine,” Ky said. “For all the usual reasons. But Toby, if Osman captured you . . . it doesn’t bear thinking on.”
“I . . . don’t want to die.”
“Me, neither. I don’t intend to die, in fact. I intend to kill Osman, and my parents also taught me that killing people was wrong. But you’re signed to the contract as an adult, Toby. Adults sometimes have to do things they never thought they’d do. If you honestly can’t . . . well . . . we’ll take care of you.”
From his face, he understood that, too. “Can we kill them?”
“I think so. Or I’d blow this ship myself.”
“All right.” His face stiffened. Ky glanced at Rafe and Stella. “Don’t . . . I can do it myself, if I have to. Will it . . . hurt?”
“No,” Ky said. Honesty, brutal to the end, forced her to add, “Or at least, not as long as Osman would.” She handed out the packets.
Rascal was gnawing on her boot; she bent down and scooped him up. He wiggled furiously, managing to swipe his tongue over her chin before she was able to dump him back into Toby’s grip. “Here you go, Toby,” she said. She searched for something comforting to say and came up empty. What could you say, after telling a youngster he might have to kill himself? There was always the appeal to duty . . . and what teenager didn’t have secret fantasies of being the hero? “You take care of him, and do whatever Quincy asks. You’re clever—you may be the one who saves the ship.”
“Yes, Captain,” Toby said. He still looked scared, and no wonder, but his eyes also held a spark of interest beyond fear. “I’ll—I’ll try to help.”
“Toby, you’ve helped already. You’re going to make a fine captain someday.” If he lived. If any of them lived. If she had ships for him to captain. But that was her job.
Her father had once said that the easiest person to cheat was the person who expected to be cheated. She’d heard that repeatedly from others, as well, most recently from Osman himself. He would certainly expect tricks, but what tricks would he expect? That the mutiny was faked, that her crew would really resist? That she would find out? What would he consider clues that this was happening?
Delay, probably. If her crew started equivocating, delaying, he’d think they were up to something. If, on the other hand, they urged him to get with it, from the beginning . . .
She called Lee on the private circuit. “Tell him it’s got to be quick,” she said. “Tell him you’re worried that I’ll find out, rally the loyalists or blow the ship, and it’s got to be quick.” Then another thought struck her. “Tell him you’ll get my command implant.”
“You don’t have an implant.”
“He doesn’t know that. He asked what I had, if I could give him an update. I lied and said I had only the most basic, probationary one. But he won’t believe that; he wants to think I have an advanced one.”
“But you don’t . . . do you?”
“Not in me. That’s why he’ll find a view of me unconscious with my head laid open proof that it exists. It’s your safety lever, Lee. If he blows the ship, he loses a treasure—the information in a Vatta command implant. Bargain with him. Tell him you can deliver that, and the cargo, if he’ll let you and the crew go with the ship.”
“But—what about you?”
“It’ll only be for a short time, while you put the vid pickup on me to prove I’m captive and helpless.”
Stella shook her head. “It won’t do,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll be you—he doesn’t know what you look like—”
“He would have vid images from Lastway,” murmured Rafe. “If he suborned someone at MilMart, they could have taken plenty of shots.”
“A wig, makeup,” Stella said. “I’m good at impersonation; you know that. Likeliest thing, he’ll want a constant vid pickup, not just that one glimpse.”
“A bag over your head,” Ky said. “That’s even safer. But the close-up to show that the implant’s out . . . that has to be my head. No matter what you do with makeup, your cheekbones don’t look like mine.”
“What about the implants? You have two extra now, the one your father sent to Sabine, with Furman, and the command dataset one from . . . from him.”
“What’s yours, Stella?”
“Currently? Admin Level Two. Lots of data, no command functions.”
“The one Furman sent would give you command functions for this ship,” Ky said.
“I don’t want it,” Stella said. “Remember, I was never trained for shipboard duties. Without time to assimilate what’s in the database, I’d mess something up. Why don’t you give that one to Toby? And you really need to have the command dataset yourself.”
True, and she’d already thought of that. “There isn’t time,” she said. “If I can’t make a quick adjustment, I’d be unable to act when they board.”
“Rafe says it’s possible,” Stella said.
“And you believe him?” Ky said.
“It’s his life, too,” Stella said. “The best chance for us is for you to be augmented as much as possible, isn’t that right?”
It was. Her earlier objections to putting in the implant now seemed foolish. If she had done it on Lastway, or in the safety of FTL flight . . . they would have had time to cope with whatever problems occurred. Even if it left her completely incapable, Stella could have asked the mercs for assistance. But she’d left it until the last minute, hoping to wait out the whole six months, and now—
“All right,” she said, and turned to Rafe. “So . . . is it possible in the time we have left?”
“Possible to do, of course. Possible for you to regain full function . . . that’s less certain. Probably; you’re young, and the implant is presently set to a close genetic match. But it’s going to be rough to push the adaptation. Things your brain normally does while you sleep, you’ll have to do rapidly while awake. And you’d best do it now—you’ll need every minute of time to adapt.”
Time . . . time slipped away, the minutes disappearing far too fast. Ky prepared one of the mines MacRobert had sent her for its peculiar use and explained to Jim just what he should do when the time came. Martin would take command of the ship’s defensive response if she could not. They would have just that one chance to disable Osman’s ship, or part of it, one chance . . . she did not let herself dwell on the likelihood that they would all be dead in a few hours. They were not going to die; she was not going to let that happen.
The picture of Ky unconscious, with the implant out, they shot just before Rafe put the command implant in. “He’s going to want continuous feed,” Ky said. “He’s going to want to know it’s not a trick. So we give him continuous feed or what looks like continuous feed. Jiggly, a handheld remote brought in for the purpose. No vid pickups in the captain’s cabin; he’ll believe that. Show me with the implant out, with the implant in someone’s gloved hand, then someone putting a pillowcase over my head and tying me up. Then wobbly, panning briefly, before it steadies again on someone else tied up on my bunk. That’ll be Stella . . . are you sure, Stella?”
“I’m sure,” Stella said. “I’m most expendable.”
She wasn’t. No Vatta was expendable. But neither were crew.
“Just be sure he doesn’t get me alive,” Stella said. “Me or my implant.”
“He’s not going to get you at all,” Ky said with more confidence than she felt. A few minutes later, they had arranged the setup as well as they could. Ky lay on her bunk and let Rafe slide the needle into her vein; her last thought as darkness took her was a quick prayer that she had guessed right about him.
She woke after what seemed only a moment, on the dining table in the rec area, feeling sick and disoriented. Rafe’s face and Quincy’s were close above her. “Ky . . . ,” Quincy was saying. “Do you know who I am now?”
“Quincy Robins,” Ky said, struggling with her tongue, which felt clumsy. Her vision blurred, shimmered, and cleared again, this time with a foreground of text and icons: Quincy’s entire confidential personnel file, retrievable by focusing on the icons that brought up additional text. “You were married four times?”
“That answers my next question,” Quincy said. “Your implant’s working, at least.”
“Sorry,” Ky said, putting a hand to her head. “It’s . . . a little overwhelming. How long—?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Rafe said. Somewhat to her surprise, data on him also popped up, referencing his association with Stella and filled with query marks. “It took a bit longer than I’d planned; that is one complicated implant, and the adjustment routines are . . . tricky. How’s your vision?”
“Weird,” Ky said. Everything she looked at brought up a screen of data; she should be able to suppress that, but so far the usual damping controls didn’t seem to work. Had her father dealt with this visual complexity all the time? “How much time do we have?”
“Osman plans to grapple on in about three hours, he says.”
At the name, Osman’s data came up . . . even worse than Quincy had remembered. He had been sent for counseling, for mandatory psychiatric treatment, for mandatory control implantation . . . but he’d escaped then . . . he’d stolen, both by force and by embezzlement; he’d gambled, dishonestly; he’d tried to cheat shippers and his own ship alike. His approaches to sexual partners were abusive, threatening; his penchant for violence showed up early and never abated.
She’d been an idiot, just as Johannson said. She’d risked the remaining Vatta command structure, and only now did it occur to her that she might have sent Stella and Rafe aboard one of the escort ships, to safety, with the Vatta command implant, and risked only herself.
No time for self-recriminations, though. She felt around mentally, pushing every implant control she could find to see what happened. Dizziness . . . nausea . . . she was briefly aware of someone holding a bowl under her mouth . . . and then plunged again into the datastream. This was not how you were supposed to meld with a new implant, certainly not one of this complexity, but she had no time for that, either.
Finally her vision cleared. She looked at Quincy. No data screen blurred that worried old face. Rafe. Same there. Her head felt overstuffed; she wasn’t sure of her balance, but she had to function.
“What do you take,” she asked Rafe, “when you have to go on right away?”
“Coffee helps,” he said. “Here’s a mug. Unless you still want to spew.”
“No, my stomach’s fine now,” Ky said. She tried to sit up and the room lurched, turned pale yellow, then settled back to normality.
“You don’t look it,” he said, steadying her with one arm and holding the mug with the other hand.
“I pushed all the buttons,” Ky said. Upright again, she felt better but still strange. She held out her hands. The left one twitched in a slow rhythm. She willed it to be still, to no effect. Her right was steady. “Good thing I’m right-handed,” she said, and took the coffee. A few sips later, her vision had sharpened to extreme clarity and she could feel her blood vessels vibrating. “Enough,” she said to Rafe.
“The extra sensitivity wears off in about four hours,” he said.
Four hours they didn’t have. Ky opened her implant to the ship circuits and for the first time in months felt the direct connection to all functions that she thought she hadn’t missed.
“How’s Osman taking the video show?” she asked, then realized she didn’t have to ask. Her implant linked to the ship’s communications, and she had her own view of Osman’s face on half a screen while also receiving the vid feed he was getting on the other half. She shrank both to an unobtrusive level, listening in to Lee on the bridge.
“They’re still barricaded in the engine room,” Lee was saying. “I can’t get a feed down there; they’ve blocked the pickups.”
“That would be Quincy,” Osman said. “Well, we can handle her when we get aboard. Where’s the implant?”
Lee looked stubborn. “I don’t want to tell you, not yet,” he said. “How do I know you won’t just kill us all?”
“You don’t,” Osman said. “But I won’t. I just want your captain, and Quincy, and the implant. I will take your cargo, since you offered it, but then you’re free to go. Or join us, if you wish.”
“Some do,” Lee said. “I haven’t decided, myself. I . . . it would be strange, not being Vatta . . .”
“You’d still be Vatta,” Osman almost purred. “I am Vatta, after all. The Vatta heir, in fact.”
“That’s true, I suppose . . .” Lee looked thoughtful. Ky began to think he’d missed his calling; he was as good an actor as he was a pilot.
“So why don’t you tell me where the implant is?”
“We put it in someone,” Lee said. “But I won’t tell you who. That way you won’t want to kill any of us . . . for a while.”
A shadow crossed Osman’s face, but
then he smiled again. “Ingenious. I admire ingenuity.”
Ky grinned to herself. In that case, he should admire hers . . . about ten seconds before he died.
Her plan, such as it was, had too many failure points to satisfy her, but it was the only one she’d been able to devise and it was above all ingenious.
She pushed herself off the table and staggered; Rafe steadied her again. “Your coordination will return faster if you move around a lot,” he said. “But you’re going to fall into walls a few times.”
“Great,” Ky muttered. One leg felt longer than the other, then that reversed. Normally, a night’s sleep allowed a brain and an implant to work out peacefully what individual differences mattered here, but she didn’t have a night to sleep. She had a battle to fight. “Someone get me Mehar’s target bow,” she said. “If I can’t walk straight I have to at least shoot straight. And I need my pressure suit.” She took a couple of steps, feeling very unsteady, then sat in a chair and stood up again.
“Here, Captain.” That was Mehar herself; Ky quickly damped the data screen that matched her face and voice, and took the target bow with its blunted bolts. Mehar had already placed a pillow on a chair across the compartment. Quincy now held her pressure suit, unfastened and ready.
Ky took the bow and aimed at the pillow; the bolt thwacked into it. “Well, that’s something.” She stepped sideways, and nearly fell into the table. “And that’s something else . . .” Another shot, this one a foot wide.
“Dance it,” Rafe suggested.
“Dance—?”
He did something, she couldn’t see what, and music came from the speakers. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
Confused and still unsteady, Ky allowed herself to be held, and then he began to move to the music, dragging her along. “You do dance . . . ?” he asked in her ear.
“Er . . . yes.” Like all the Vatta children, she’d been given dancing lessons in many styles; dance was, everyone agreed, a good preparation for space flight, teaching body awareness and control. But since . . . since the Academy junior ball, when she’d danced with Hal, she had not danced, or thought of dancing. Now the music and Rafe’s movements brought it back. Her body’s quarrel with the implant receded as melody and rhythm worked on older parts of her brain; she moved more and more smoothly with him. The tremor in her left hand ceased; she felt the warring components slide into harmony. More than that, she felt warm, alive, happy in a way she had not since . . .
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