“T his is a situation we didn’t need,” Ky said. “A dead man and a prisoner…I can just imagine the local reaction to that.” And possible pirates in the system, and Stella somewhere between Garth-Lindheimer and here, maybe jumping into trouble. Rosvirein Station’s advisory to ships in the system had made it clear Rosvirein Peace Force thought these ships were dangerous.
“Hasn’t been any yet,” Rafe said.
“Somebody’s bound to have heard the shot,” she said.
“Begging your pardon, Captain, but I doubt it,” Hugh said. He looked, as always, completely professional and relaxed at the same time. “The shot was inside our dockspace, and you’ll remember we have a standard acoustic barrier, even when the gate’s open. Drops the volume thirty or more decibels. And Pod—the shooter—used a quieted weapon. The victim’s your crewman, who was clearly conspiring against you, and he tried to draw on your security forces.”
“Um.” Ky thought about it. She hadn’t given the order to kill, but she’d made it clear she wanted the ship secure. Which made it her responsibility.
“Would’ve been worse if he’d shot Pod,” Rafe said.
“I can see that,” Ky said crossly. “I’m not trying to second-guess my own security. I’m just thinking what to do now. We hired the dead man here, after all. He’s bound to have other contacts—”
“Who aren’t going to be asking questions, if he was undercover for someone,” Hugh said. “This is Rosvirein, which helps. I’ve been here five standard months, while Captain Janocek tried to make ends meet; I don’t think there’ll be any problems.”
“So did we get all the blood off the deck?” Ky asked.
“Complete biochem cleanup,” Hugh said. “I did the entire dockside and then reminded the station environmental squad that we were due a refund of the deposit you paid when you arrived for cleaning their grungy dock thoroughly so they didn’t have to do a complete decontamination. They argued about it, but sent over an inspector, and you’ll find the deposit refund in your accounts.”
Rafe grinned at him. “Hugh, I think you’re almost as devious as I am.”
“Not at all,” Hugh said with a straight face, though his eyes twinkled. “I’m merely doing my job to see that our departure is trouble-free, as any good first officer would.”
“Which leaves us the matter of our prisoner,” Ky said. “I understand he said he was willing to tell us why he placed the telltags?”
“Yes. I think you should let Martin and me question him,” Rafe said.
“I think I should be there,” Ky said.
“I agree,” Hugh said, as Rafe opened his mouth. “Someone from command must be there, and the captain bears ultimate responsibility. I can keep us moving on our departure schedule; the captain needs to be on the bridge only for the last part of that.”
“Word’s gone out. No more killin’ Vattas.” The man’s head lolled back; his eyes focused on nothing. He had not resisted their questions; he had even suggested himself that they might want to use interrogation drugs if they had any.
Ky had hesitated. Surely taking someone prisoner and questioning them privately was against the law—she knew it was against the law on Slotter Key—but Rosvirein’s laws were notoriously lax as long as nothing bothered its own citizens. And chem-based interrogation wasn’t physically painful. She really did need to know what this man probably knew. Yet she had the uneasy feeling that she was about to cross some line she had never crossed before, a line that Osman would have crossed without thinking about it. Maybe she’d already crossed it, when she hadn’t reported the altercation dockside…
“Reliable?” Ky now asked softly.
Martin shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Chemicals are always tricky, and we don’t have an enzyme scan on him.”
“Said it’s stupid,” the man mumbled. “Vatta right here, lemme do it, money’s good. No money, th’said. No more killin’ Vattas. Done enough. Blame Osman that slime. Just put the telltag on the carton and let Calixo know.”
Ky felt her brows going up. “So even his allies didn’t like him?”
“Nobody like Osman,” the man said, even as Martin shook his head at Ky. “Osman’s bad link. Ga—t’boss glad he dead.” His head rolled around, came up slightly, and his blurry eyes almost focused on Ky. “Y’pretty, honey. Wanna play?”
Martin’s knuckles whitened, Ky noticed, but his voice stayed even and soft. “Not playtime, sonny. What about t’boss?”
“He don’ like Osman. He don’ like anybody do more’n he told ’em. He—” A sudden flush ran up the man’s neck.
“Damn it,” Martin said very softly. He grabbed one of the other syringes laid out on the box and stabbed the man’s arm. But the flush deepened, pink to red to rose-purple. “He’s got a suicide link. To the boss, whoever that is. We’re going to lose him, if this isn’t the right antidote—” Then to the man, louder. “Boss name—who?”
“Boss?” The man’s breathing had quickened to gasps. “Boss he don’ like…he…Ga—Gammisssss.” And on that hiss, his body convulsed against the straps as his skin went from purple to blue-gray.
Martin had the oxygen mask on his face; Rafe helped unstrap the man and they laid him flat. But nothing worked. He was dead.
“What was that?” Ky asked.
“Suicide circuit, probably in his implant. Some of them trigger on any interrogation drug, some are keyword-specific. There are different drugs they use: cardiotoxins, neural solvents. This was clearly an oxygen decoupler.” Martin shook his head. “Propagates really fast in the bloodstream, and just about impossible to reverse. If you have a hemoglobin replacement and a lot of other equipment, you can sometimes save ’em, but otherwise not. And their implants are always wiped.”
“Keyword was his boss, or the boss’s name,” Rafe said. He and Martin were stripping the body now. Ky wondered what they would do with it.
“Gammis something,” Martin said.
“Gammis…” Rafe paused. “There was a pirate gang operating over near Woosten maybe five years ago, and someone said the head of it was named Gammis something. Turek, I think. Supposedly he had some kind of protection racket going on with the system government and local ships. But he was leaving ISC alone, so I didn’t pay much attention.”
“Captain, how long till we leave?” Martin asked.
“Just a couple of hours,” Ky said. “What are you going to do with him?”
“If it’s that quick, we can just stick him in cold storage and dump him in space later. His friends aren’t going to be asking the authorities about him anytime soon anyway.” Rafe had brought a packing wrap and laid it out. He and Martin rolled the body onto it.
“We can’t just—” Ky began, then stopped. They could. It was wrong, certainly against the law, but so was killing someone in an interrogation. For a moment, the weight of the deaths she had caused lay on her shoulders.
“If we try to dump him on the station,” Martin said, “we could be observed. Probably would be. Even if we got away clean, our record here would be tainted. If he just disappears, they might suspect something but they wouldn’t know. Another scum with a record vanishes, who cares?”
It made sense, but it made sense that felt uncomfortably close to the dead man’s values.
“Wait a minute,” Ky said as the other two started to fold the shipping blanket over the man’s face. She knelt beside the corpse, ignoring Rafe and Martin except to ask, “What’s the name on his ID?”
“Pietro Duran,” Martin said. “A fake, I’m sure of it.”
“But it’s the name we have,” Ky said. She had said no words over the first men she killed; they had been trying to kill her, and she had felt no impulse to speak for them. But this Pietro, evil as he might have been, had done her no direct harm, though by his own words he would have if his boss paid for it. Saying words over his body felt right, something more real than real. She looked at his face, blue-gray and sharp with death. “Go in peace, Pietro Duran,” she said. “If you had those who loved you, may they find peace without you, and if there is life beyond life, may you have a better one than you had here.”
When she stood again, she felt better, more solid to herself.
Martin and Rafe looked confused, and no wonder. “I didn’t know you were religious,” Rafe said.
“I haven’t been practicing for a while,” Ky said. “But I needed to do this.”
“Does it bother you he’s dead?” Martin asked.
“Not particularly,” Ky said. “Though the thought of having a suicide circuit in an implant disgusts me.” She shook her head. “Get him into the freezer and this cleaned up. I’ll be on the bridge, making our farewells.” That would make two corpses in the freezer. Even Rosvirein’s relatively lax law enforcement would probably detain them for having killed two people, if they suspected.
Ky made the usual round of calls, trying to leave Stella with the best possible arrangements at the bank, with the Captains’ Guild, with merchants, and finally with station authorities. She noticed, on the system status board, that other captains were also reacting to the arrival of the armed threesome.
“Cleared,” the stationmaster’s office said at last. “All accounts green, no outstanding warrants, no complaints. We understand about your cousin. Fair travel, Captain Vatta. Did you want to list a destination?”
“No,” Ky said. “Outsystem only.”
“Very well. You’re cleared for a least-boost course to jump point gamma. At this alert level, you must have clearance from Rosvirein Peace Force to deviate from that course.”
Ky scowled. “I was going to take the slow route and see if my cousin showed up.”
“No. We want all ships insystem either docked or boosting out, not hanging around where they could interfere with system defense. Remember that if you attack a ship in this system, we will retaliate.”
“Even if they fire at my ship?” Ky asked.
“Yes. Keep your weapons cold; our forces will fire on any ship that goes hot. Is that quite clear?”
“Very clear,” Ky said. She hoped Rosvirein’s defensive forces were as good as they thought.
Undock went smoothly; behind them, ships peeled off Rosvirein Station like beads off a string, with Fair Kaleen leading the parade. Ky watched the system scan, highlighting the incoming ships with threat icons. Nothing happened as the hours passed. Were they pirates after all? Had she skipped the station for no reason? How upset would Stella be, to find her gone? She stared at the plots, trying to make Gary Tobai appear by the force of wishing, but it didn’t.
After the first uneventful day on insystem drive, Ky called Rafe and Martin aside. “We’ve got to figure out who’s behind all this,” she said. “This Gammis Turek or whatever—what is he after? What does he want?”
“This is more than one pirate gang could do,” Martin said. “It’d take a space fleet, near enough.”
“He worked with Osman,” Ky said. “What if he worked with other pirate gangs? Got them to cooperate?”
Martin snorted. “Cooperate? Pirates? They’re too independent for that.”
“Maybe,” Rafe said. “And maybe not. It would make sense—organized crime’s a lot more profitable and safer than the same criminals doing things on their own.”
Martin gave him a look that clearly conveyed You should know; Rafe sketched a salute.
“Of course I have reasons to know,” he said. “I’m still right. Enough pirates working together, linked by ansible, could overpower any one system’s defenses, especially if it was cut off from others, if its ansible failed. There’s no organized interstellar force. Just a few privateers running around with no coordination, even if they are authorized by the same government.” He stopped and looked thoughtful a moment. “Just how many privateers does Slotter Key have out, anyway?”
“I have no idea,” Ky said. She felt the glimmer of an idea, but couldn’t quite bring it to consciousness. “Martin?”
“I never heard,” Martin said. “I suppose…twenty? Thirty? And Slotter Key’s not the only government that uses them. Let’s see—there’s Mannhai. Cirvalos. Bissonet.”
“The original signatories to the Commercial Code all had privateers at one time,” Rafe said. “But only a handful do now. Not worth the bad publicity.”
“Which Slotter Key just ignored,” Martin said. “Cost us diplomatically, some said.”
“Making Slotter Key the logical target for a group of pirates that wanted to expand its influence,” Ky said. She could almost see it now, the pirates’ whole plan. “If you could show that privateers weren’t effective protection—for that you’d have to attack tradeships—then you could convince governments and shippers they needed better protection—”
“It worked over in Woosten,” Rafe said. “The protection end, anyway. I don’t think they ever had privateers there. Not a bad system to test it in…Woosten’s too poor to interest many of the big firms.”
“So they cut off communications and hit one particular shipper really hard. Probably chose Vatta because of Osman—”
“Or because Vatta is big, well known, and had never been part of Slotter Key’s privateer fleet,” Martin said. “Lots of publicity, less risky—no Vatta ship was armed.” He paused, frowning. “But for the attack on Slotter Key itself, they must’ve pressured the government somehow. From what Stella said, someone knew about the bunkers under your headquarters and placed charges belowground. You can’t do that from outer space.”
“But if this is what’s going on, and we can find more clues, we can tell people—” Ky said.
“Tell them what?” Rafe asked. “That there’s danger? They know that. Just giving them a man’s name won’t help.”
“I’m thinking of the other privateers. We need to find them, get them working with us.”
“Working with us? You mean to find out more?”
“As a…a fleet,” Ky said, as the concept she’d been groping toward came clear. “If Slotter Key has as many as thirty, and the others have that many, too, we’d have a fleet bigger than the pirates.”
“First, we don’t know how big their fleet really is,” Rafe said. “For all we know, they have hundreds, thousands, of ships. Second, you’ll never get fifty or a hundred independent privateers to agree to fight together as a fleet.”
“Even if they were trained to fleet maneuvers,” Martin said, nodding. “Which they aren’t.”
“Nobody could support a fleet of thousands,” Ky said. “Not without more resources than could be put together in the past few years. Hundreds, maybe. Slotter Key’s a wealthy world, and we have fewer than two hundred real warships, plus the support craft.” She ran the figures in her implant again: that was right. The economy would not stand more without adjustments that had not been made. “As for training,” she went on, “Slotter Key puts Spaceforce officers aboard its privateers, and they’re trained in fleet maneuvers. Maybe others do the same, or maybe we can borrow fleet officers.”
Martin looked at Rafe. Rafe opened his mouth. She held up her hand. “No. Don’t tell me why it won’t work. Help me find the right way to do it.”
“But—”
“Captain, you don’t understand the difficulties—”
In her mind a cascade of possibilities rained down, glittering like polished coins. “I do understand,” she said, putting an edge to her voice. “I understand that we are one ship—that Vatta has, to my knowledge, only two ships, one of which is an old, slow, toothless tub. I understand that the enemy has many ships, efficient communications, and the advantage of initiative. But I also understand—and you had better understand—that this family, my family, is not finished. I am not finished. My aunt Grace is not finished. I don’t intend survival—I intend victory.”
The moment she heard the words, she thought how brash they sounded, how unlikely to be true, but Rafe and Martin both looked at her as if they’d heard trumpets.
What had she done? Did she really have command presence? She pushed that question away and went on quickly.
“The pirates have a combined fleet right now. Even if it falls apart, it will cripple trade and communication. The resources to deal with that are already out here, if we just put them together.”
Rafe had recovered his breath. “And you think you can do that.”
“I had better do that,” Ky said. “No one else seems to be doing it.”
Martin nodded slowly. “Combining privateers might work. But what about the space fleets in systems that have them? Wouldn’t they be more use?”
“They’d be a big help,” Ky said. “If their governments released them. But most operate in their own system only. Some don’t even have FTL capability; they’re like block police. What we need is a true interstellar force.”
“What about communications?”
Ky grinned. “Those shipboard ansibles,” she said. “We have enough to equip at least a strike force—it puts us equal to the pirates. And we can have more built.”
“No,” Rafe said, paling. “You can’t do that. You mustn’t do that.”
“Yes,” Ky said. “Rafe, the tech’s already loose in the universe. You can’t suppress it now. Chances are some of your renegade development people are already manufacturing them. You’ve looked at Osman’s inventory lists. How many do you think are out there?”
“At least sixty,” Rafe said. His shoulders slumped. “But I don’t see why we can’t try to destroy them with the ships—”
Sixty ships with constant real-time communication independent of system ansibles…Ky shivered. She had hoped for fewer; she’d need a lot of allies to take on that many—or more.
“We can’t defeat them without communications parity,” Ky said. “Tactically, instantaneous communications between ships at scan-lag distances gives them incredible advantages in command and control.”
“If the system ansibles come back up, we could use those.”
“And if they don’t? And considering how vulnerable they are to skilled attack? No, Rafe. The only way to fight them is to use those ansibles ourselves.”
He shook his head but said nothing. The ship’s intercom bleeped.
“Captain!” That was Hugh Pritang on the bridge. “More ships downjumping.”
“On my way,” Ky said. She hoped one of them would be Gary Tobai, perhaps in a convoy. On the bridge, she found tension almost as thick as Aunt Grace’s fruitcake.
“Four more armed ships,” Hugh said, pointing them out on scan. “No sign of your cousin. Rosvirein Station hasn’t—ah, there they go.”
The station’s automated message center displayed a crawler on the lower edge of the navigation screen: ATTENTION ALL SHIPS. ALERT STATUS XENO. HOLD COURSE OR BE FIRED ON. MAINTAIN WEAPONS LOCKDOWN OR BE FIRED ON. SHIPS MAY ACTIVATE DEFENSIVE SHIELDS ONLY. ALERT STATUS XENO. SYSTEM ANSIBLE NOT AVAILABLE FOR PRIVATE USE.
“Shields up,” Ky said. “Lee, give us a calculation on time to jump if we don’t wait for the jump point.”
“Twenty-two minutes at present acceleration,” he said. “I’ve got it running, along with an estimated downjump variance.”
“Good,” Ky said. “Engineering: get the FTL drive on standby for an emergency jump.” She was not going to be caught, as at Belinta, no matter what happened here.
On scan, Rosvirein’s embedded systems defenses showed up as red dots, as did the system’s ships. Ky looked at the ship plots. The three original problem ships, inbound for Rosvirein Station…the outbound traders, some of them undoubtedly privateers just like Fair Kaleen… Rosvirein’s own Peace Force ships…and the four newcomers, which had come through the jump at high delta vee relative to the system and showed no signs of deceleration.
Ky’s stomach clenched. Eight Rosvirein ships, shadowing the first three, were now bracketed between them and the newcomers.
“That’s not good,” Hugh murmured even as she thought it. “C’mon, get yourselves out of there.”
“Scan lag’s almost an hour,” Lee said. “What’s done is done.”
All Ky could think of was Stella, Stella in a small, slow, defenseless ship…minutes passing like hours as she watched the outdated scan, as the newly emerged ships spread out, as the shooting began, from ship and embedded platforms both.
It was hard to remember that what she saw was almost an hour old, when shields flared.
“They’re not after ships,” Ky said. “They’re after system defense, the embedded installations.” The attackers’ shields flared under Rosvirein Peace Force fire, but none had failed yet.
“Look at that!” Lee pointed; Ky had already noticed one of the ships in line behind them veering from its assigned course. “Armed tradeship Iron Gate, and she’s loading on the delta vee.” She was much closer to them than the seven attackers; they were able to watch her in near real time.
“Course estimate,” Ky said.
“Nowhere near us; looks like she could be on a least-time course for…” He paused. The navigation screen showed the first blunt arrowhead of Iron Gate’s course change narrowing as the acceleration closed her options. “The system financial ansible platform.”
“A decoy attack,” Ky said. “These others are just covering the attack on the ansible. They have to know that ship weapons won’t—” But a flare on the screen belied her words; one of the embedded defense batteries was gone. “Prepare for transition,” Ky said. Even as she said it, another crawler came on the screen.
ALL SHIPS ALL SHIPS READY FOR UP TRANSITION. ALL SHIPS JUMP IN ORDER OF DEPARTURE, 30 SECOND INTERVAL, FAIR KALEEN FIRST. SHIPS NOT UPJUMPING WILL BE TAGGED AS HOSTILE.
“They want us out of here,” Hugh said. “If they have more of whatever that was, Rosvirein’s system defenses are in trouble.”
“So are we,” Ky said. “Lee?”
“Fifty seconds.”
It felt more like fifty minutes, but Fair Kaleen slipped into transition with the smoothness of perfect alignment.
“That was…interesting,” Rafe said. “I hope it’s over with before Stella gets there.”
It was the first time he’d expressed concern about Stella; Ky looked at his impassive expression, wondering.
“I hope the right side wins,” Ky said.
“They should,” Hugh said. “Unless a fleet follows that probe, Rosvirein’s Peace Force has plenty of firepower to run those raiders out. I read it as a test of the system’s defenses—”
“They blew an embedded installation,” Ky said.
“I’d bet it’s a peripheral automated one,” Hugh said. “Let’s look at the scan data when the ship’s secured for FTL flight—”
“After we set up a training schedule,” Ky said. “Clearly, we can expect trouble anywhere but in FTL. I’ll take bridge watch; you and Martin rough up a schedule for me.”
“It’s almost shift change,” Rafe murmured.
“It was my watch next anyway,” Ky said. “If you’re tired, you’re off duty.” Through her implant, she checked ship functions, one after another. No problems: Fair Kaleen hung suspended in indeterminacy.
“I meant, the captain’s a long way from her last meal,” Rafe said. “Aren’t there rules about that?”
Ky started to say she wasn’t hungry, but now that immediate danger seemed past, she was. And with the ship fully crewed, she now had galley staff; she called down and requested a meal. “Satisfied now?” she asked Rafe.
He put his hands together and bowed slightly. “I have only the captain’s welfare in mind.”
“I’m sure,” Ky said, trying to keep the same light tone.
Three hours into the new shift, Martin and Hugh reappeared with a training schedule and more questions about her plans.
“How are the tradeships going to know we aren’t pirates, too? How are the system governments going to react? And the mercenary companies?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Ky said. “The traders…well, Vatta still has a reputation for honesty, Osman aside. I can talk to them. Unless the mercs have thrown in with the pirates, they have no reason to attack us. They make their money out of insystem conflicts, anyway. Governments—”
“Governments that don’t like or trust Slotter Key, remember—” Rafe said.
“I know, I know. First things first. We find the other privateers. One at a time if we have to, but I’ll bet they’re already joining forces if they’ve run into the pirate gangs.”
Two days out from Rosvirein, Ky called Rafe into her office. “Did you tell that ISC manager about the shipboard ansibles?”
He looked shocked. “Good gracious, no! She’s not cleared at that level. Why?”
“Is there any way to use these shipboard ansibles to hook into local communications networks?”
“Not really,” Rafe said. He steepled his fingers. “The difficulty in integrating shipborne ansibles with local facilities is one of the big problems with using them. It’s easier to call ship-to-ship across systems than to access the local communications network. The system’s just not set up for that.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ky said. “It’s closer—”
“Closer physically, yes, but that’s not the point.” Rafe frowned. “This is getting into proprietary secrets again, but you need to understand at least part of it. System ansibles access local-system communications through hardware and software that ensures cross-identification. The ansibles themselves are protected by requiring all incoming messages to carry valid initiation and destination codes, which—except for ship coms, which are in another database—are preloaded at manufacture. Each system ansible is custom-made to respond to its destination’s signals. Got that?”
“Yes, I suppose. It’s an expensive approach—”
“True. But it’s kept ansibles safe from the kind of takeover that used to happen with planetary and systemwide nets. Meanwhile, ISC sets the parameters for the system’s lightspeed net to match those of the ansible to form a unique connection. Part of our monopoly agreement is that systemwide nets will not link with other ansibles. Ansible-to-ansible links are possible, of course, but access to the system lightspeed net is limited to one ansible.”
“But some systems have more than one—many have both a financial and a commercial—”
“We—ISC—will manufacture more than one ansible with the same internal code, of course. But there’s only one connection code for each customer system, and our service agreement ensures that the customer can’t connect with any other ansible. If ISC opened customer systems to shipborne ansibles, that would mean a massive security hole.”
“There’s got to be a way around that,” Ky said. “I can’t believe that Osman and his allies weren’t contacting locals with theirs. It would keep their communications secure from any surveillance that ISC was doing through the system ansibles.”
“If they did, they had tech we don’t know about,” Rafe said. “Not that it’s impossible. Some of ISC’s research division have been unhappy with the no-proliferation policy for decades. Management has suspected that they’re using ISC funds for research we never see.”
“Let’s assume they had that tech,” Ky said. “It’s safer that way. And then let’s assume you can figure it out and build us an equivalent.”
Rafe stared at her. “Me? I’m not a designer or engineer. I can’t possibly—”
“Rafe, you’re the one person we have who’s expert in ISC hardware. Until we find a designer or engineer who wants to work with us, you’re it. I’m sure Osman had information on this somewhere. Find it.”
“But you need me to help you with the contacts—”
“Yes. You can do both. It may slow you down.”
“To a dead stop,” Rafe said.
“Not really. If you can even define what we need to know, we can start trolling for more expertise.”
“I’m getting close to the edge of what I can do,” Rafe warned. “My primary loyalty is still to ISC. You’re asking me to help subvert it.”
“It’s my contention that in order to help ISC, we have to have communications that work,” Ky said. “ISC’s enemies already have the tech I’m asking you to find—we’re not making things worse. We’re using the new tech to help.”
He scowled at the table. “Maybe. And maybe not. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t think too long. By now the enemy knows who we are.”
“What about Stella? How will she know where you’ve gone?”
“I’ve left her a message, at the Captains’ Guild.”
“She’s not going to be happy about that.”
“I know,” Ky said. “But we didn’t have a choice. On the way we can stop off and…er…practice some things.”
“Drills,” said Rafe with distaste.
“It’s not as if you didn’t have your own drills,” Ky said.
At the next jump point, Ky ordered the ship to lay over a few days. She took them close enough to one of the larger masses that debris from their successful shots at components of its ring system would stay in that area, not complicate the jump-point transit for other ships. The two corpses vanished in the first salvo.
Watching things blow up was less fun than it had been when she and her cousins set off illicit fireworks on the beach, but in three days she knew that the Gannetts were definitely a superb gunnery team and the others were as good as what she’d been shown in the Slotter Key Spaceforce. Osman had kept his weaponry and supporting electronics in superb condition, so only slight adjustments were required. On the fourth and fifth days, she and Hugh set up simulations for the crew to play through.
“I wouldn’t like to be the odd pirate that tried to take us on,” Hugh said, after the first round of simulations. “When do we go hunting?”
“We need to do more than pick them off one by one,” Ky said. “That could take a lifetime. There may be sixty or more with the portable ansibles. That’s how many Rafe thinks were dispersed just through Osman’s services.”
“Ouch. You’re right; we need a fleet. But assembling one—”
“Is not going to be easy, certainly not if I try to talk to governmental entities. I’m hoping to find some privateers at Sallyon, though. Surely they’ll be more willing to listen.” He nodded without much enthusiasm, and she went on. “We also need more than gunnery drills, Hugh. That last fire-emergency drill was pitiful, response far too slow. Keep us awake nights if you have to, but I want to reach Sallyon with a crew that’s thoroughly familiar with every compartment and every procedure.”
“Beats scraping paint,” Hugh said. Ky laughed.
In the next FTL passage, she had reason to wish she had not said keep us awake nights, because the drills he devised interrupted everyone’s sleep repeatedly. Power loss, environmental leaks, hull breaches, fire in the galley, armed stowaways holed up in cargo, artificial gravity failure…and the captain had a role in every emergency, usually involving getting to the bridge in nothing flat. She wondered where he’d found the variety of drill-enhancing objects and substances that smoked, stank, flared, and made scary noises like escaping air, crackling flames, gunshots, and gurgling liquids. Or the makeup that turned some of the crew into gory “wounded” or “dead” heaps here and there about the ship, and others into strangers—stowaways, assassins, the enemy.
“At least it’s not boring,” Rafe said one day, when they were hunched over the table eating a hasty meal after two hours of struggle to control an imaginary flood. “The man shows real creativity in his approach to drills, I’ll say that for him.”
“Thank you,” Hugh said, coming in behind them. “And I’m pleased to report, Captain, that performance has been steadily improving, reaching commendable on the past three drills. With the captain’s permission, I’d like to let up now. I think they need a reward for good work.”
“You have the captain’s permission,” Ky said. “The captain would like a full night’s sleep—or any shift’s sleep—so I don’t get to Sallyon looking like this—” She gestured at herself.
“The captain is always impeccable,” Hugh said. She gave him a look. “And diligent as well,” he added. “Some captains would’ve told me to lay off days ago; I appreciate your willingness to let me push this crew to a higher standard.”
“You’re welcome,” Ky said. “And I appreciate the work you put into this.”
“Mutual admiration,” Rafe murmured and rolled his eyes. Hugh looked at him with a mild expression that seemed to convey something far less than mild; Rafe suddenly turned red and got up hastily.
“Interesting young man, that,” Hugh said to Ky.
“Very,” Ky said. “My cousin Stella knew him awhile back; he showed up with her at Lastway.”
“He is…er…attached to her?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. They had a legal partnership; I had one with him myself after Lastway, because Stella said he would honor a partnership.”
“Is it operative now?”
“No, it’s long run out. I forgot to renew it.”
“And yet he chose to be on this ship with you. Interesting.”
“He had the expertise with communications systems,” Ky said. “I needed him.”
“Ah.” Now the mild look was turned on her. “He’s quite good looking.”
“Not you, too,” Ky said. When he said nothing, she went on. “Martin worries all the time that I’ll fall for him or something. I won’t. He’s not my kind.” If she had a kind, which with Hal’s defection she wasn’t sure of. “I’m going to bed,” Ky said. “And I would appreciate it if there were no surprise drills for the next eight hours.”
“Certainly not, Captain,” Hugh said. She hoped that was not a twinkle in his eye.
Three days later, they dropped into the Sallyon system and eased in toward the Sallyon Main Station.