H aving the tracking device fitted took only a few minutes, and the technician treated Ky with perfect courtesy. Ky restrained herself from any of the witty remarks that occurred to her; she suspected that Cascadian bureaucracy would not take kindly to that kind of wit. Afterward, Monitor Leary handed her a hardcopy list of the establishments she was forbidden to enter.

“And now you are free to go, and I will not trouble you further,” Leary said, smiling.

“Thank you,” Ky said, adhering to the cultural demand for perfect courtesy.

A few hours later, she was back on the ship when she got the call informing her that there was no official source of Vatta genetic material on the station or in the system. The Cascadian Bureau of Investigation agent explained that no Vatta family member had ever been required to give one; no question of identity had arisen before.

“It’s most inconvenient,” the agent said. “We do have basic bioscan data, fingerprints and retinal scans and so on, but that’s only good for determining if someone matches a single known individual identity. That’s collected from captains on arrival, as you know, and we have data from Josephine Vatta, as well as several others. Ergash Vatta, Melisande Vatta, Bromlan, Asil. But you aren’t claiming to be any of those, and we had no reason to request a sample for genetic identity.”

“So…what do you plan to do?”

“First we will inquire more of Captain Furman, who is already known to us as a legitimate Vatta employee. Do you deny this?”

“No, of course not. Assuming he’s not an imposter, this is the man under whom I trained. He should know me, and identify me, correctly.”

“We do have bioscan data on him, so when he arrives we can determine instantly if he is the same individual with whom we have been dealing. Do you have any identifying data?”

Ky queried her implant. In his personnel file she had both his bioscan and genetic pattern, as well as visual images; she offered to transmit those.

“Nothing external?”

“No. But since we hold opposing opinions, is there any reason for you to doubt the validity of my implant data if it confirms his identity?”

“Well…no. All right. Please transmit visual image first—full-face and profile if you have it—and then the bioscan data. We may not need the genetic data.”

“Just a moment.” Ky had not called on the skullphone, which she still found awkward to use, and now moved the files she wanted to send, plugged in, and sent them via ship com.

“Thank you,” the agent said. “The visual matches but I’ll send the bioscan to our records department.”

“Once he’s docked,” Ky said, “you might ask him whether he has any bioscan data on me. He might have, since my father asked Furman to go to Sabine on my behalf.”

The agent’s brows rose. “You don’t seem at all concerned that such data might implicate you.”

“Implicate me how?” Ky asked. “I am Kylara Vatta, and I know that, and any real identity check will prove it. If the ansibles weren’t down, you could contact Slotter Key for all the details.”

“But they aren’t working,” the agent said. “According to Captain Furman, the real Kylara Vatta was on a very different ship, the…er…Gary Tobai…

“Yes, I explained that,” Ky said. “Are you sure that ship hasn’t shown up in this system yet? I was expecting Stella to follow on directly, and she should be here by now.”

“I’m quite sure,” the agent said. “I will inform you if—when—such an event occurs.”

“Thank you,” Ky said, warned by his tone. “I didn’t mean to impugn your watchfulness, it’s just that I’m worried about her. I thought she’d be here by day before yesterday.”


_______

Stella stayed two extra days in Sallyon, doing her best to soothe the ruffled feelings of its administrators. “We are traders,” she kept saying to one after another unhappy official. “Yes, Ky is a bit impetuous, but Vatta Transport is what it has always been, commercial and not military.”

“In these dangerous times, we simply cannot have private individuals raising a military force…” This was the fourth official to call her in for a lecture. Stella held on to her temper with an effort.

“I quite understand. As you may have noticed, I’m not doing any such thing. I have traded ordinary cargoes—” The designer toilets had brought an excellent price here, as had the custom fabrics.

“But you are going to follow her, are you not? Your listed next destination is Cascadia; that’s where she went. That suggests to us that you are in league.”

She was getting very tired of this suspicion. I’m not like Ky at all, she wanted to scream at them. In truth, she did not want to follow Ky. If Ky had gone rogue, as she suspected, she could not help Vatta by playing along. Besides, she could pick up little here that anyone in the Moscoe Confederation would want. Still, more than she wanted away from Ky, she wanted to get Ky into a small room and shake some sense into her.

“I have only this one small ship,” she said. “And as you pointed out, these are dangerous times. I hope to persuade my cousin that her duty is to protect me, and other Vatta ships, perhaps by escorting us in convoy.”

“We still find it suspicious—”

“You would find anything I did suspicious,” Stella said, her temper finally fraying. “I have met all your restrictions; I have conducted only normal trade activities. You simply want to believe I am part of some vast conspiracy. Let me turn that around. How am I supposed to know that your hostility to an interstellar space force is not part of collusion with these pirates who have taken over Bissonet?”

The man turned pale. “How dare you—?” he began.

Stella stood up. “I could ask the same question. Perhaps you cannot grasp that family members may disagree, even vehemently. Ky and I are cousins, not even sisters, and certainly not twins. We have been at each other’s throats more often than not since childhood. We are working together now only because of the peril that stalks our family. You met her; you have now met me. Can you really say we are alike?”

“My apologies, Captain Vatta,” the man said. “To look at, to talk to, you have been nothing like your cousin. You are beautiful; she is—”

“Plain as a post,” Stella said, in the tone of a beauty who has scant patience with the plain. She did not sit down again, but she stood less braced. “Always has been. Let’s be honest here, gentlesir. Children in a family aren’t all alike. I was the pretty one of the family—no credit to me; I was born this way. My sister Jo was the smart one; my brothers were the strong ones. Ky’s mother kept talking to my mother about how to dress her up, make more of her, but no matter what, she was not going to look like me. And she minded, of course. Anyone would. She liked to think I was nothing but a pretty face.”

“So she always hated you?” the man asked. Stella felt a stab of guilt at this—she had described a stereotypical jealous woman, and as far as she knew Ky had never cared enough to envy her—but she ignored it and went on.

“I wouldn’t say hate,” Stella said. “But we were rivals, of a sort, until she abandoned the competition.” Again, that tickle of guilt. “She made herself different from me—rough where I am smooth, so to say. It comes naturally to me to look for a way to avoid problems, to cooperate; it comes naturally to her to attack problems head-on, to argue. This doesn’t mean she’s always wrong. But if it’s possible to put someone’s back up, Ky will do it.”

“I see.” He cocked his head. “So…you don’t agree with her about this Bissonet business?”

“I don’t know exactly what she thinks,” Stella said, “because I haven’t had a chance to talk to her. The invasion scares me; I saw what happened to my family back home. If this is the same enemy who attacked Vatta, they must be stopped or we’re all in peril. But Ky as commander of a vast interstellar military force…that’s ridiculous.”

He relaxed visibly. “And you would tell her so?”

“I would,” Stella said. “If I ever catch up I intend to talk some sense into her. As her closest living relative, an older cousin, I think she’ll listen to me, even given our past friction.” She hoped she was right. She had the uneasy feeling that Ky was past listening to sense from anyone; that she was living out some adolescent fantasy of power and vengeance, perhaps intoxicated by something on Osman’s ship or simply the possession of a ship configured for war. “Vatta needs her,” Stella went on. “We need all our family members, and we need them all working for the family, to rebuild our business.”

After that, the station authorities gave her no more difficulties; she sold off the rest of their cargo, and refilled the ship with goods Orem thought might sell on Cascadia. “Nothing likely to make the profit we did in Rosvirein and here,” he said. “But we should cover expenses nicely.” When the cargo had been loaded, Stella didn’t push for a priority departure. She was already well behind Ky, and it would do Ky no harm to worry some. Maybe, if she worried, she would start to realize her responsibility to the family instead of daydreaming about a space navy.


_______

The days in FTL flight passed uneventfully. Between sessions in which she moved from division to division to learn more about ship operations, Stella planned one speech after another, finding flaws in each that Ky would surely exploit. It was infuriating. Anyone with a gram of sense could see that trying to raise an interstellar force was a job for governments or powerful, experienced, military leaders, not a young woman who hadn’t even finished her education. But the more she thought about Ky’s objections and how to counter them, the more she saw that the basic idea—having a real interstellar force that could control if not eliminate piracy and prevent attacks on systems—was a good one.

Both Quincy and Orem agreed when she brought them into the discussion.

“The only choices I see—other than just letting the pirates take over, which we all agree isn’t good—is that merchants form an armed league to fight them off or governments cooperate to create exactly that kind of interstellar force,” Orem said. “The system governments never wanted merchanters to create a force like that; they were afraid that we’d become a menace—controlling supply, able to attack from space. They weren’t any too happy about ISC having its own armed force.”

“That may be,” Stella said, “but that doesn’t mean Ky’s the one to do it. She’s younger than I am; she didn’t even finish at the Academy.”

“Ky’s smart,” Quincy said. “No, she didn’t graduate, but she had only a few months to go—she’d learned most of what they had to teach. And I’ve seen her in action.”

“So have I,” Stella said. “But even so, she’s a Vatta. We need to rebuild Vatta; that’s what she said she was going to do. We need every ship and every family member to stay focused on that as the top priority. It’s one thing to say that this kind of force is needed, and even to suggest what components might be in it. But to take a Vatta ship and try to do it herself is…is irresponsible at best.”

“Maybe,” Orem said. “I haven’t met her, of course; what I know I’ve learned from you, from Quincy and other members of the crew who were aboard with her. But rebuilding Vatta will take more than having ships to haul goods. It will take securing the spaceways, making them safe for trade again. If she can do that—if she can influence others to do that—that’s an important contribution to Vatta’s recovery.”

“I agree,” Quincy said. “And I don’t see it as disloyalty to Vatta; I think she cares as much about Vatta as you do. She sees beyond Vatta, though, to the society in which Vatta must function.”

“I suppose,” Stella said. “I still think she’s not the right person to organize such a force.”

“You’re still annoyed with her for leaving you behind,” Quincy said, with a knowing expression.

“I’m still angry about that,” Stella said. “All right, I understand her reasoning at Garth-Lindheimer. What if they didn’t adjudicate the ship to Vatta? We needed another ship. But Rosvirein I simply do not understand. You know the mess we jumped into there—if it hadn’t been for Balthazar’s expertise, we might all have been killed. And she left the moment trouble started, just bolted away; others stayed behind, and she could have. What kind of military commander is that? What kind of care for us?”

“Stella, I’ve told you—” Quincy began.

“I know what you’ve told me. I still think she could have stayed in dock, or found a way to meet us somehow. You just don’t want to see her as anything but your marvelous Ky.” Instantly she was ashamed of herself; she sounded like the jealous one now.

Quincy shrugged. “Either you’ll understand someday, or you won’t. I have work to do. Excuse me, Captain.” And with a nod to Orem, she withdrew.

Stella sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate to upset Quincy. I do take your points, Balthazar, but I’m not going to agree that Ky is the right one for that job…not yet, anyway.”

“I’m certainly not going to interfere in a dispute between my employer and her relatives,” he said with a wry grin. “I hope when we get to Cascadia that she is still there and you can reach an agreement.”


_______

Gary Tobai dropped back into normal space right on target; Stella had gained confidence in her experienced crew, but this was always a tense moment for her. She didn’t really like space travel; she’d be glad when she could settle down again on Slotter Key and stay there. That thought reminded her of Aunt Grace. She’d better have a good report for Aunt Grace if she hoped to live happily ever after.

As soon as scans cleared, Captain Orem called her forward. “Ma’am, there are two Vatta registry ships in system. Fair Kaleen, which we expected, and Katrine Lamont. Do you know anything about that one?”

Stella queried her implant. Katrine Lamont, transferred to this route after the Sabine affair—why? she wondered—captained by Josiah Furman. Excellent record until the Sabine affair…what had he done? Had he been involved with Ky in some way? Crossed her? Was she going strange even back then?

“It’s one of our larger ships,” she told Orem. “Captain Furman should be listed—”

“J. Furman, yes, ma’am.”

“He’s listed on this route, so that’s fine. I’m glad to see another Vatta ship whole and on its proper route; it gives us something to work with.” And it gave her someone certainly sane to talk with, as well. Furman, she now remembered, had been the captain on Ky’s apprentice voyage. Ky had thought he was difficult, but she herself had been difficult at thirteen; her animosity to Furman was surely no more than adolescent pique. Such an exemplary captain was surely levelheaded enough to be fair with his employer’s daughter. If Ky had complained about him again at Sabine, that said more about her than about him. Perhaps he would be an ally, someone to add weight to her own words. Ky wouldn’t like it, but she’d have to listen.

Moscoe Confederation’s system ansibles were working, so she debated whether to call Ky or Furman first. Family won out. Before she sicced Furman on Ky, she should at least find out if Ky had come to her senses. Besides, the ship wasn’t synchronized to local time yet. According to the information transmitted by the local system, they were more than a shift off.


_______

Ky’s skullphone pinged an alarm, then transmitted the automatic message: Gary Tobai’s beacon had been recognized. She let out a sigh of relief and sent a quick thanks for notification. Stella had hired experienced crew, yes, but too many things could go wrong and she had dreaded losing her nearest relative. She wanted to place an immediate call, but Stella would have things to do. She’d be talking to Traffic Control, to the various official entities. Later would be soon enough, though she wished Gary Tobai had a faster insystem drive.

Another call waited when she got back to the ship. “It would help in the adjudication if Monitor Leary observed your initial contact with your cousin,” the agent said.

“Why?” Ky asked.

“For evidence,” he said. “If your cousin recognizes you as her cousin. That is not sufficient, but it is suggestive.”

“She might call anytime,” Ky said. “Did you want Monitor Leary to come back aboard?”

“With your kind permission,” he said.

Ky agreed, feigning a good grace she did not feel, and managed to smile politely at Leary when she came aboard. Shifts passed. Finally a call came in.

“I’m glad to hear from you,” Ky said. “I was beginning to worry.” No need to say she’d been worrying for days.

“We’re all fine,” Stella said. “And you?”

“There’s a problem,” Ky said. “The other Vatta ship in system, Katrine Lamont—”

“Yes, with Captain Furman. You don’t like him, do you?”

“That’s not the problem, Stella,” Ky said. “He’s claiming I’m an imposter.”

“What?” It was clear from Stella’s expression that this was not what she had expected to hear.

“You heard me. He thinks I’m—you will not believe this—Osman’s daughter pretending to be Kylara Vatta.”

“That’s—that’s ridiculous.” Stella’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever gave him that idea?”

“He thinks Kylara’s dead, he says, killed in the attacks on Vatta. He thinks Osman’s up to something and has put in a ringer. That’s what he’s telling the stationmaster, anyway. And with the Slotter Key ansible and those in between still down, I can’t prove differently.”

“Has he seen you? Surely he knows you.”

“He does, which is why I don’t understand it. He hasn’t seen me face-to-face, but he’s seen current visuals and he still insists I’m a look-alike imposter. It’s strange…no matter what he thinks of me personally, surely he knows who I am.”

“He should,” Stella said. She sounded tentative, as if she were really thinking about something else.

“Crown & Spears has a genetic sample from Jo; they compared it to mine before giving me access to the corporate accounts—”

Stella’s voice sharpened. “What have you done with the corporate accounts?”

“Nothing, really. I needed to pay docking fees on arrival is all. I’ve put it back, from a delivery payment. We had a load of medical stuff.”

“You were carrying real cargo?”

“Of course I am, Stella. What did you think?”

Stella didn’t quite meet her eyes. “I…was beginning to wonder.”

“Wonder? About what?”

“The people at Sallyon were really upset, Ky, about your plan to form some kind of space navy—”

“The people at Sallyon are idiots,” Ky said. “They’re more worried about upsetting the pirates than protecting themselves and their trade.” Surely Stella understood that. It was obvious enough. “Either system governments are going to have to get together and fund a real interstellar force, or we merchanters are, or we just give up and let the pirates take over system after system and run the universe. I’m not happy with that thought. They killed our parents.”

“It’s a job for governments,” Stella said. “Not us. We have enough to do just putting Vatta back together, if we can.”

This was not an argument Ky wanted to have at a distance; she needed to see Stella face-to-face. “I’m glad you’re here, Stella. How long before you reach the station?”

“Sixteen days, Balthazar says.”

“Balthazar?”

“Balthazar Orem, the shipmaster I hired back at Garth-Lindheimer. You may remember you left me stranded there, just like you did at Rosvirein and Sallyon…” Stella’s beautiful face hardened; Ky realized that Stella was still angry. She had always been able to hold a grudge until it died of old age.

“Not because I wished to,” she said. “I’m glad you found a reliable capt—shipmaster.”

“I was very lucky on that account,” Stella said. “And he agrees with me that merchants have no business trying to set up a military force—” That wasn’t exactly what Orem had said, but never mind.

“You talked to him about my plans?” Ky said, with the slightest emphasis on my. “When you knew them only by hearsay?”

“Considering the reputation you were leaving behind yourself, it seemed entirely prudent,” Stella said. “I had no idea what I’d find when—if—we finally caught up with you.”

Ky choked back the first three things she wanted to say. So Stella was back to confiding in a man, and willing to confide in the handiest, even if he was a new hire. How handsome was this shipmaster, anyway? She’d assumed that Stella was over all that headlong romantic stuff, but now she saw the ill-fated first love, the spendthrift careless husband, Rafe, and this shipmaster as points on a very straight line indicating that Stella hadn’t changed at all.

“I look forward to your arrival,” she said instead. “Then maybe we can clear up this identity problem and have a nice long chat about Vatta business.” Without, she was determined, the intrusion of Stella’s new love interest. “If you’ll excuse me—”

“I’ll call again tomorrow,” Stella said. “I’m not going to wait sixteen days to talk to you. Who know what you’ll get up to in sixteen days? You might run off again.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ky said. “The ship’s locked down until the identity issue’s settled.”

“Good,” Stella said. “Then I see no reason to hurry to solve it. If you are stuck there, you’ll have to listen to reason.”

The contact blanked. Ky stared at the screen, puzzled and annoyed both. Stella was angry with her; that much was clear. She understood a little of that; she had left Stella to trail behind through several systems. If she’d been in Stella’s place, she’d have been annoyed, too. But surely Stella could understand that it had not been intentional. Stella was acting as if she, Ky, had turned into some kind of monster, even an enemy of Vatta, when all she’d done was try to make things safer.

Sighing, she swung her command chair around and met the monitor’s gaze. Leary’s neutral expression could not conceal the interest in her eyes.

“She recognized you,” Leary said.

“Yes,” Ky said. “That was Stella, as I’m sure you noticed.”

“Your cousin, I believe?” the monitor said.

“Yes. My father’s brother’s youngest daughter. Only living daughter now. It’s her older sister’s genetic material that Crown & Spears has on file.”

“She doesn’t look anything like you,” the monitor said.

“No,” Ky agreed. “She’s the beauty of our generation; she takes after her mother’s family more, and even there she’s remarkable. The Stamarkos family have more blondes, but her mother is dark—darker than Stella, anyway. One of her brothers had light hair. Some of her Stamarkos cousins are blond. I used to wish I could look like her; my mother was always telling me to watch how Stella dressed, how Stella stood and sat.”

The monitor cocked her head. “You really do seem to know her.”

“I should. We spent a lot of time together as children. She’s a few years older, but not that much.”

“You were in school together?”

“No. My uncle’s main residence was on the mainland, near the Stamarkos family’s; my father preferred to live on Corleigh—an island.”

“Then—”

“We were together on family vacations and outings,” Ky said. “Alternately on the mainland and on the island. She knew our house as well as I did; I knew their house. I even knew the gardener who—” She stopped abruptly. It wasn’t this woman’s business that Stella had become “idiot Stella” with that gardener. She became aware that Rafe and Hugh, as well as other bridge crew, were listening.

“The gardener who—” the monitor prompted.

Ky shrugged. “Old family stuff. The point is, we were in and out of each other’s homes as children and young people. Stella and I were sometimes rivals—she always won—and sometimes allies, especially when we’d have mock wars in the orchards between her father’s house and the Stamarkos house.” The memory made her grin; this story couldn’t hurt Stella’s reputation. “Stella was always so perfect and her mother was a stickler for neatness. One time the Stamarkos boys challenged us and we spent three days building a fort on our side of the orchard while they did the same on theirs. Then we had to capture their flag, and they had to capture ours.”

“How old were you?” Leary asked.

Ky thought back. “I must’ve been ten or so. Stella would’ve been twelve, thirteen, something like that. Usually she took along a change of clothes and washed her face in the canal before going home, but this time—” She broke off, chuckling.

“You can’t stop there,” Rafe said. “Are you telling me the immaculate Stella got mussed?”

Ky glared at him for interrupting. “She always got mussed; she just cleaned up before showing up in front of her mother. This time we carried the fight into the part of the orchard that hadn’t been picked—which was forbidden. We just forgot; we were all throwing clods and overripe fruit off the ground, a running battle. Well, suddenly we were in among the pickers, and one of her brothers bumped into a ladder and a picker almost fell. The orchard foreman was furious and chased us out, all the way back to the house. There was Stella, her hair in strings and full of dirt and fruit pulp, her clothes spattered with purple, red, yellow. Just like the rest of us, but it was Stella, after all. I thought Aunt Helen was going to explode. Uncle Stav just laughed, but then he made us all apologize to the foreman. The Stamarkos cousins were sent home and I heard later they were put on house arrest for two days. We were, too, and put to work as well. Within ten days, they had a new fence around the orchards and we had to walk a half mile to get to the Stamarkos cousins and play in open fields.”

“If indeed you are the Kylara Vatta of her childhood, and she the Stella Vatta of yours, she should remember that story, don’t you think?” Leary asked.

“Yes,” Ky said. She knew Stella remembered it, but there were differences. Stella had blamed her, Ky, for urging her to play in the orchard even though she was really too old for such games. Ky had known better; even then, at twelve or thirteen, Stella liked to sneak off and try to meet one of the pickers she had a crush on. Ky had been torn between a desire to defend herself from Stella’s accusation by telling all she knew, and the promise she’d given Stella to keep her secrets. She had resented Stella’s unfair accusation then, flinging back at her the little bracelet Stella had given her at the start of vacation and storming off to an attic to sulk. It had worried her later: if she had told Aunt Helen then about Stella’s flirtations, would that have prevented the far more serious affair with the gardener?

“I will suggest to the stationmaster that he ask her,” the monitor said.

Ky wondered, for the first time in years, what had happened to the bracelet.


_______

Stella bit her lip as she stared at the blank screen. Ky could be just as irritating as ever. Once she made up her mind she was impossible to reason with. She glanced over at Orem.

“What do you think?”

“She’s very…determined, your cousin,” he said.

“You don’t think she’s right, do you?”

“Ma’am, it’s not for me to say. We’ve discussed this before. If this Gammis Turek fellow has indeed taken over a whole system at Bissonet, that argues for a lot of resources. It will take a lot of resources to fight him off. It wasn’t very tactful of her to talk to other captains back at Sallyon without talking to their government first, though.”

Stella seized on that word. “She’s not tactful,” she said. “Ky never has been. She got angry with me one time when she was nine or ten, something like that. I’d blamed her for getting me in trouble—and probably not entirely fairly—but she threw back at me a gift I’d given her, called me a liar, and wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the summer, which luckily was almost over. I tried to apologize but she stayed in a huff.” She had also, Stella thought with a guilty twinge, kept Stella’s secrets faithfully, angry as she was.

“Hot-tempered, then?”

“Yes. Impatient, impetuous, and very sure she’s right.”

“What are you going to do now?” he asked. His calm tone soothed her taut nerves; clearly he thought she knew or would think of something to control her wild cousin.

“I’m going to call Captain Furman,” she said. She was sure Ky would consider that disloyal, but as long as Ky wasn’t putting Vatta first, she was the disloyal one and Stella alone was faithful to the family. Recalling Ky to her family duty was her family duty, and it didn’t matter that she’d be talking to someone Ky loathed.

Stella had never actually met Captain Furman; her implant had a summary of his personnel file and his image. His narrow face stared out at her coldly, thin lips folded tight. No one, she reminded herself, looked their best in an official identification portrait, but he didn’t meet her standards of handsome.

When she placed the call, his communications tech, a round-faced woman about Stella’s age, answered. “Captain Vatta? Which Captain Vatta?”

“I’m Stella Vatta,” she said. “Stavros Vatta’s daughter. I need to speak to Captain Furman.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the comtech said. “He’s eating now.”

Stella felt a trickle of anger. That was not the way to speak to the daughter of Vatta’s former CEO, even if the CEO was dead. “And I’m acting CEO of Vatta Transport,” she said. The woman’s eyes widened. “I’m certain that Captain Furman will want to speak to me. Now.”

“Oh…oh…yes. Mmm…I’ll send someone.” She turned away from the screen and muttered something Stella couldn’t quite hear.

“And while you’re at it,” Stella said, “do you have any Vatta family members aboard?”

“Ummm…I don’t think so…” The woman was obviously upset, but surely she’d know the names of crewmembers. The Katrine was big, but most of that size was cargo capacity; her crew numbers shouldn’t be over forty, and probably less than that.

Stella queried her implant quickly. Yes, the usual crew for this size ship was thirty-four to thirty-eight. “Would you check, please,” she said, making it more order than request.

“Yes…er…Captain Vatta.” She saw the woman look down as if scanning a reader. “Er…no, Captain Vatta, we have no Vatta family members aboard at this time.”

That was unfortunate. She had hoped for additional allies to put pressure on Ky. It was a little odd, too, since most Vatta ships did have Vatta family members. Not all were captains; they might be found in almost any of the ship departments, though perhaps with a preponderance in Cargo. She queried her implant again. While she did not have the full command set that Ky had received from her father, she had loaded the most current list of family members and their ship assignments. Odd indeed. Maynard Vatta and Baslin Vatta should have been on this ship.

She opened her mouth to ask the communications tech when the tech’s face was abruptly replaced by that of Captain Furman. A very angry Captain Furman.

“Whatever you’re playing at, it won’t work, young woman!” he said, looking down at something below screen level. “And trying to intimidate my crew won’t work, either. As soon as I dock, your entire fabrication will come apart!” He looked up, then, and the angry flush blanched to a sickly pale. “You’re not—they said Captain Vatta—”

“I’m Stella Vatta,” Stella said. “I did tell your comtech that. Who did you think it was?”

He took a long breath; normal color seeped back into his face. “Stella…not Chairman Vatta’s daughter? I didn’t know you were ship-qualified.”

He had not answered her question, but she would pursue that later. “Yes, Captain Furman, I’m Stavros Vatta’s daughter, and presently acting CEO of Vatta Transport.” She watched that sink in; his expression hardened, sour as a plateful of pickles. “Now, whom were you ranting at?”

He took a visible deep breath. “There’s a renegade docked at the station, pretending to be a Vatta family member,” he said. “If you are who you say you are, you know about Osman Vatta—”

“Yes,” Stella said. “My father and uncle threw him out of the family decades ago; he stole a ship—”

“Quite. And turned pirate. That very ship is now docked at Cascadia Station. There’s a woman who claims to be Kylara Vatta—I suppose she’d be your cousin, if she were alive—but is almost certainly one of Osman’s by-blows. I don’t know where Osman is, but when the authorities take her into custody I’m sure they will find out.”

“Osman’s…by-blows?”

“The man was notorious,” Furman said, his upper lip curling a little. Despite her plan to get his cooperation in talking sense into Ky, Stella found herself disliking him already. “He was a sexual predator who left illegitimate children everywhere he went.”

“And you know this how?” Stella asked silkily.

“I was supposed to look for the…er…orphans and bring them back to your father, if I found any. There was some kind of scheme to adopt them into Vatta families. Waste of my time, but I do my duty no matter how ridiculous it is. And that was the second most ridiculous thing I ever had to do for Vatta Transport.”

“Did you find any?” Stella asked.

“No. I know some were found, but not by me. Wasted time checking orphanages, foster homes—”

She was not surprised he had found none. Would anyone want to turn over a child to this sour, rigid person even with the promise of a better home far away?

“What was the most ridiculous thing?” Stella asked.

His face darkened again. “Sending me to Sabine to rescue Kylara Vatta. Not only was there no need, but the…she…refused to let me help. I was perfectly willing to take her and her crew aboard and sell the ship for scrap—but away she went, disobedient as always, and then of course she died.” He said that in a tone that bordered on satisfaction.