“Fiat lux,” Stella said. “But we have a hull, and air, right?”
“Right.”
“And Osman’s dead. So we won.”
“A battle. Not the war.”
“You’re such an encouraging commander,” Stella said.
“Thanks,” Ky said. “I try.”
On the bridge, Lee also was awake. His left eye looked more normal now, and he was working his way across the boards. “Drive’s not responding at all,” he said. “There’s a disconnect somewhere.”
“Number three nexus,” Ky said. “Slagged. Engineering’s working on it.”
“Mmm. Can I have some power for scan?”
She had to know where other ships were. If nothing else, a large ship was wobbling around not that far from them. She also needed communications. “Yes. Just let me—” She plugged her suit interface into the dataport and instructed her implant to supply power to the communications and navigation boards. Their status lights went from red to yellow, and finally to green. Lee’s screen lit with the current nearscan passive data. Fair Kaleen still rolled erratically in the near distance. Three other icons appeared, two whose position and courses were compatible with Osman’s allies, and one—her heart lifted—whose icon already carried the Mackensee ID. Only one? But of course—they would not have left the rest of the convoy unprotected.
Ky flicked on the communications board to the prearranged frequency.
“—Gary Tobai—Gary Tobai, come in.”
“Gary Tobai,” Ky said. “Bogies insystem.”
“Copy. Not a problem—they’re boosting out. Your condition?”
She didn’t want to let the enemy know that, not even if they were running. “Later,” she said. “D’you have an experienced boarding team?”
“A boarding—what’s going on?” Then another voice. “Rig secure contact. Give us a visual.”
“Can’t do that right now,” Ky said. “We have a few problems.”
“This is Captain Vatta?”
“Yes, this is Ky Vatta. We have disabled Fair Kaleen and I intend to claim it, but I do not have personnel experienced in boarding operations.”
“You—your crew?”
“All alive. Can this wait until you’ve seen those raiders out of the system?”
“Oh, we’ll see them out . . .”
A distant hum . . . and suddenly the lights came full on. The internal com crackled, then produced a loud drone, then went silent. Then Rafe’s voice: “Calling the bridge—can you hear me?” He sounded normal.
“Yes,” Ky answered.
“Good. Drive’s up. We have it patched into the #2 nexus temporarily. All diagnostics show it nominal at this end, so I went on and turned on the lights. Jim and Toby are working on attaching the bridge-end connection.”
“How’s Quincy? And Martin?”
“Still out . . . Sheryl’s keeping an eye on them.”
“Mmm.” Nothing she could do about that now, although since they had power again . . . “Can we draw normal power now?”
“If the connections to whatever aren’t messed up. What do you want?”
“The medbox, for Quincy and Martin.”
“Can do. Shall I send Alene up to help move her?”
“Yup. We’ll be drawing bridge power for a secure comlink.”
“Want to use . . . mine?”
“I . . . you’d let me?”
“You know about it already. Security matters. It’s secure, and I’ve got a power source right here. Cuts the message lag.”
“Yeah . . .” Ky thought a moment. “Can Jim and Toby handle the rest of that?”
“Yes. Jim’s got a knack, and Toby’s read and memorized every manual on this ship, I think. The boy’s got potential. Between them, they could probably make a functional ship out of drink stirrers and rubber bands.”
“Then yes, thank you, and come to the bridge.”
“Right away, Captain, ma’am.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
By the time Rafe reached the bridge, Ky had the scans on full power. The defensive suite had come back on its own when the system resets were complete. She now had exact vectors on the two raiders and the Mackensee ship; the raiders’ icons showed them boosting, but they would still pass near enough to take a shot at her if they were minded to. Fair Kaleen, rolling drunkenly, continued to block them at unpredictable moments, but that was not protection she could count on. At least they were far enough away that they were not in danger of being struck.
“Lee, perhaps you’d go down and show Jim and Toby what controls you need first,” Rafe suggested as he came onto the bridge. “If that’s all right with you, Captain . . .”
“Yes—unplug your board, Lee, and take it down with you,” Ky suggested. “They know wiring, but they don’t know piloting.”
“I’ll need scan access,” Lee said. “I can’t pilot blind.”
“I understand,” Ky said. “But just give them some hints—make sure they don’t power up the wrong component or something.”
Lee shrugged, unplugged his board, and set off down the passage.
“Thanks,” Rafe said. “Now—we’ll need to set up the visual—”
“You can do visual?”
“Yeah.” Rafe pushed back his helmet, unsealed his suit, and reached inside, wrinkling his nose as he did so. “Bit of a whiff about that suit, Captain, if you don’t mind my mentioning.”
“I know,” Ky said.
“You might want to clean up before the mercs see it.”
“I’m sure they’ve seen worse,” Ky said.
He stopped and looked at her. “Are you performing some religious ritual of self-punishment, or is there something else I don’t know?”
Her patience snapped. “Like perhaps I have not had one second since I got back aboard without something critical for me to do? You, and the others, were all unconscious and all the ship systems were down.”
“Everyone?” His brows went up, and he continued to dig about inside his pressure suit, finally coming up with a length of cord Ky recognized as a connector of some sort. He tucked it into his wristband, then took his helmet all the way off and set it in Lee’s seat. He pushed back his hair, peeled back the flap over his implant access, retrieved the cord, and inserted one end of the connector into the implant orifice. “I didn’t know that.”
“Everyone,” Ky said, fascinated.
Rafe glanced at the scans. “They’re four light-minutes out; you’d have time to clean up now. I’ll call if anything happens.”
This time she felt a wave of exasperation. “Why do you care how I look?”
“First impressions are important in anything,” he said. “Right now you look like a bloodthirsty, violent killer, not a nice sane tradeship captain of good family.”
Ky grinned; she was aware again of those surges of pleasure she’d felt when killing. “I am a bloodthirsty, violent killer. I told you that before.”
“It’s not funny,” Rafe said, shaking his head. “I’m serious. Your mercs weren’t happy with you staying behind in this system anyway. You need them to see you as sane and sensible, which is what you really are.”
It was not the time to make her point, but the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m both,” she said. “But your point is taken.” She turned on her heel and headed for her cabin.
Stella was dabbing at blood marks on the carpet; she looked up when Ky came in. “Situation?”
“Improving,” Ky said. “I’m actually going to clean up a bit.”
“Thank you,” Stella said, with feeling. “I’ll go to the galley, then, and start heating some soup or something.” Her nose wrinkled, and she was pale.
Ky started to get out of the pressure suit, then decided it would be easier to clean under the shower. A hard vacuum would have been easiest, but that wasn’t available without going out past Osman’s corpse. The shower sluiced off the worst of the mess on the suit; she cycled it twice, th
en peeled out of the suit and her shipsuit and ducked through the water. She could still smell Osman’s death, but less. The drying cycle—into a clean shipsuit from her cabin—she looked at the pressure suit with distaste. It was damp from the shower on the outside, and sweaty on the inside. She hung it over her shoulder and made it back to the bridge in five minutes.
Rafe glanced at her and murmured, “Your hair.”
Ky raked at it with her fingers; he winced dramatically but said nothing more about it. Instead, he pointed to the cables he’d attached to the bulkhead outlet, her deskcom’s output, and his implant. “You can use your own com as usual; the video pickup’s just the same. I’ve already entered the initiating codes for the ansible hookup, and the device itself is live right now. I can’t move around much; I need to be attached to the power supply.”
“Right.” Ky sat in her chair, the pressure suit draped across her lap, and glanced at the scan screens. The two raiders were still boosting for jump; the mercenary ship had gained on them. She entered Gloucester’s ansible-access number. Instantly—so it worked!—her com screen lit with the INITIATING CALL icon. She glanced at Rafe; he looked blank and said nothing. She guessed he was monitoring the ansible function.
“Gloucester.” No visual. They should have her visual.
“This is Captain Vatta of Gary Tobai. We have established a secure link now—”
“Captain Vatta.” The screen now showed the Gloucester’s com officer and Lt. Commander Johannson. “What’s your status?”
“We’re repairing some damage,” Ky said. “Ship’s stable at this time, all personnel alive.”
“Do you need immediate assistance?”
“Not immediate,” Ky said. “Fair Kaleen is damaged; I don’t know her crew status. Her captain’s dead—”
“What happened?”
“He had boarded my ship and was setting a mine,” Ky said. “I killed him.” Again that surge of joy she must conceal, stronger now as she had time to reflect on it. “Anyway, Fair Kaleen appears to be tumbling, and if she’s not to be lost, I need a boarding team to go aboard and get her back under control. We don’t have any way to get over there. Then a prize crew—”
“Prize crew.” He scowled at her.
“She was a Vatta ship. She was stolen. I’m taking possession in the name of Vatta Ltd.”
“You do recall the details of our contract, do you not? You agreed not to act on that letter of marque.”
She had forgotten that letter again. “I’m not doing this as a privateer; I’m doing this as Vatta. The ship belongs to Vatta; I’m taking her back.”
“I see.” He did not sound convinced. “Whatever you think, Captain Vatta, this is skirting very close indeed to breach of our agreement. Privateers take prizes. We do not. We will not jeopardize our status as legitimate mercenaries by taking a prize or putting a prize crew aboard. We will, however, board the ship and attempt to stabilize her, and take prisoner anyone on her. If you can then arrange a prize crew out of your own, we will transport them in a pinnace to the other ship. The only reason I agree to that much is the Vatta ID of the ship’s beacon. If a court decides she’s stolen property belonging to your family, that’s different. I reserve judgment. Is that clear?”
“Quite clear,” Ky said. “Thank you.”
“Meanwhile,” he went on, “it seems important to chase these two all the way to jump, if they were involved.”
“They were,” Ky said.
“Ah—also part of the conspiracy against the ansibles, you think?”
“Definitely.”
“Any objection to our taking them out?”
Ky thought of stating the obvious—the two-to-one odds—but refrained. “None at all,” she said.
“We’ll be back in a few hours,” he said. Then the Mackensee ship vanished from scan, only to reappear in a tangled web of uncertainty brackets—VECTOR UNKNOWN, VELOCITY UNKNOWN—that dissolved to show it in the perfect position to fire up the sterns of the fleeing raiders. One blew almost instantly; the second produced a burst of acceleration that—less than a minute later—ended in another explosion.
Ky caught another whiff of her pressure suit. She would want it when she went aboard Fair Kaleen, and she’d prefer it dry and clean. It needed its internal powerpak recharged, as well. She was unlikely to need it immediately, with the raiders gone. She hung it back in its locker, hooked up the cable to the powerpak, and set the self-clean cycles to maximum.
The Mackensee ship stayed in the vicinity of the explosions for more than an hour—looking for survivors, Ky assumed—while her own crew continued to work on rewiring the drive control panels. She spent the time finally exploring her implant’s data structure.
It was tempting to explore FAMILY FILES and see what her father had said about her, but she searched the files for more on Osman instead. And there it was: what she could have known ahead of time if she’d not been so reluctant to insert this implant. Her father suspected that Osman had killed his own father, though it could not be proved. Certainly he had lied, embezzled, and made sexual advances and threats to crew. He had inherited his father’s shares of Vatta; he was going to be trouble no matter what they did. Her father and uncle, then the company troubleshooters when their father Arnulf was CEO, had been given the task of “taking care” of Osman. For a cash payment, Osman had been persuaded to give up his shares. He had decamped with a ship, and they had not prosecuted, on the grounds that they didn’t want him that close ever again. Osman’s section ended with her father’s recommendation that any Vatta captain coming across Osman take extreme precautions and report anything learned to HQ. Ky scowled. Someone should have blown him away years ago; it would’ve prevented a lot of trouble. And she would like her father to have known that she was the one who ended that threat to the family.
Ky turned from that to the section headed POLITICAL. Osman might not be their only enemy.
INTERSTELLAR COMMUNICATIONS. Under that heading she found subheads: Contacts, Policies, Negotiations, Potential Conflicts. That looked promising.
Lee came back up the passage with his board, glanced at Rafe and the extra cables in the bridge, and slid into his own seat without commenting or touching any of them. He plugged his board back in. “All right to test functions?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” Ky said. Her implant followed along the test patterns, offering her a choice of views. Then, as time passed, she checked on the medbox. Quincy, the medbox reported, was physically stable, but had suffered some blast damage, probably due to her age. Consultation with advanced medical care for long-term therapy was advised. Ky told Alene and the others to take Quincy out and put Martin in the box. She would have liked to check on them both herself, but she had to stay on the bridge.
With the drive now fully functional again, Ky warned her crew and instructed the ship to bring the artificial gravity back up slowly. As she settled deeper into her seat, she felt the aches from her exertion. At least she was sitting down.
Her screen came alive again, a call from the Mackensee ship. “We got both of them; we’ve picked up several prisoners. Your ISC rep will probably want them taken to ISC offices.”
“I’m sure,” Ky said, with a glance at Rafe, who still looked blank.
“We’ll be back with you in another hour,” her liaison said. “Out of communication for maneuvers until then.”
“Understood,” Ky said. She watched as the Mackensee ship disappeared from scan again, reappearing twice on its way back to her. Slotter Key Spaceforce had a few ships with that capability, but not many. She wondered what it felt like, those rapid transitions in and out of FTL flight, and how they navigated. She turned to Rafe. “Rafe—you might as well take a break.”
He nodded without really looking at her, unplugged himself, and shook his head. “Makes my ears feel strange,” he said. “That and the smells.”
“Monitoring transmissions?” Lee asked.
“Something like that,” Rafe said. He rotated his shou
lders, stretched, and folded back up neatly, catlike.
Stella appeared at the bridge hatch with mugs of hot soup and a plate of ship biscuits. Ky sipped the thick broth, realizing as she felt alertness return just how much of her reserves she’d used. “I’ve already fed the others,” Stella said. “Toby asked me to defrost one of Aunt Gracie’s fruitcakes. He hasn’t ever had one.” She grinned.
“Some people like them,” Ky said.
“Boys that age will eat anything,” Stella said. “He’s on his third slice.”
“Stella carried that thing all the way from Slotter Key,” Rafe said. “I asked her why, and she wouldn’t tell me.”
“I had two of them,” Stella said. “The command implant was in one—”
“Is that where it was?” Rafe said, brows rising.
“And I have no idea what’s in the other,” Stella went on. “If anything. Aunt Gracie’s sense of humor at work.”
“We need to get the escape passage cleaned up,” Ky said. “And the air lock, and Osman’s body put somewhere.”
“Why not just space it?” Rafe asked.
“There will be formalities,” Ky said. “I’ll need documentation. Anyway, I don’t want to space it right now.” She didn’t want to move right now. What she wanted, suddenly, was a night’s sleep.
“Heat soup, slice cake, clean corridor, move a body,” Stella said in an odd tone of voice. “My, what my life has come to. Of course, I am still alive, and don’t think I’m not grateful, Ky. I was very, very glad not to have to play the captive princess close up. And glad you foiled Osman’s last ploy, however you did that.” She paused. Ky thought of giving a blow-by-blow, but decided against it. “But,” Stella resumed, when Ky said nothing, “when I thought of life as Vatta’s secret agent, it didn’t mean domestic chores. Though it has, as often as not, more’s the pity.”
“I’ll get some of the others on it,” Ky said. “I could use your advice on some of the things I’m finding in Dad’s implant.”
“Seriously?” Stella asked.
“Seriously. You’ve been home—well, in contact with home—the past four years and I haven’t. Just a second . . .” Ky called Environmental and, after making sure everything was functioning normally there, told Mitt to take over cleaning up the corridor. “It’s nasty—I’d suggest wearing suits. There’s a body in the air lock; put it in a sealed bag and into one of the cargo holds. We’ll move it over to the other ship if we can.”
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