Marque and Reprisal (21 page)

“Oh. Of course. Yes, ma’am, I do. Perhaps Master Sergeant Roth… he’d know. Can he… uh… just ping your implant?”

“I don’t have an implant,” Ky said. “Why not have Roth work something up, get your approval on it, and bring it over to discuss?”

“Yes, ma’am, I can do that.” He seemed much cheerier with a definite plan in mind, but then most people were. Ky would be much happier when she had a definite plan in mind. “Can we do this… uh… soon?” he went on.

Curiosity and amusement pushed her past tact. “Just how short of funds are you, Lieutenant?” Ky asked.

He reddened and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. “I—they—they just cut us off short, like that, and I know the ship captains have been after me to do something, but what could I do? I was trying to do the captain’s work and the major’s work and I didn’t know where anything was, and Dolan and Roth kept looking at me like I was a five-year-old and finally Dolan said why not ask you—actually he said that two days ago, but I thought maybe if I just talked to the bank—we’ve always had a good credit rating, and maybe a message would come through from home…”

Twit,
Ky thought. It surprised her that Mackensee had ever taken this one in, but maybe he had unexpected talents elsewhere… somewhere.

“I asked,” Ky said again, this time with a little edge to it, “how short you are. Are your people going to have food for the next meal, for instance?”

“Uh… maybe.”

Ky rolled mental eyes, and equally mental dice, and came to a decision she wasn’t ready to share yet. “Send me your Master Sergeant Roth,” she said, as if Lieutenant Mason were her subordinate. “Do it quickly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And can I say anything to the troops?”

Idiot.
” No,” she said. “Not now. Get Roth over here.”

“I’ll call him from dockside,” Lieutenant Mason said. She sent him away looking much happier, and looked at Martin.

“He must have got in trouble for stealing candy from babies,” Martin said. “He doesn’t have enough gumption for anything else.”

“Is he really that bad?” Ky asked. “I kept wanting to smack him, but—”

“Not officer material,” Martin said. “Not in my books. Mercs may have different standards.”

“Slotter Key has no dim-witted officers?”

“Well, no… I mean, yes, they do, a few. I suppose he might have slipped by for some other reason.”

“So, what do you think about his proposal?”

“If they’re messed up enough that they’re about to give the troops nail soup, they may not be any help.”

“They were better at Sabine,” Ky said.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the one young fool.”

Ky called for Stella.

“You’re looking lively,” Stella said. “What’s going on with those soldiers on the dock? Did the station finally come to its senses and give us official guard?”

“No. That’s Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation. The people I contracted with at Sabine, after they invaded the system, and the people whose surgeons extracted my implant.”

“The ones who nearly killed you.”

“That was my own crewman,” Ky said. “I don’t blame Mackensee for that, though I wish I knew how much data they pulled from my implant. It was only the Vatta basic, not the full dataset, but still. Anyway. Through a series of mishaps, their local leadership is down to one very junior lieutenant, who was supposed to escort their payroll here… and is now in command. And overwhelmed and underfunded.”

“He has the payroll—”

“But the banks have shut them down on credit, and the payroll intended for twenty doesn’t last long when you’re trying to support almost a hundred. He wants us to contract with them for protection, so that we can feed his hungry men and women.”

“Protection…”

“Thing is, Stella, I thought about trying to work something with Mackensee before. They have the expertise, the weapons, the trained personnel. We could use them.”

“Can we afford them?”

“Exactly what I need to know. Stella, I’m assigning you as financial officer, as well as G-2. You know what you brought into this. I’ll tell you what we’ve got—” She called up the figures from the trading they’d done and the remains of Aunt Gracie’s fruitcake diamonds. “We need to provision this ship, and decide what upgrades we can afford with and without hiring the Mackensee group. I’ll be talking to one of their senior NCOs shortly, someone with more sense than that lieutenant. Give me some numbers.”

“Right,” Stella said. “I can do that. Fifteen minutes… you had the list of upgrades already loaded, right?”

“Right.”

Rafe came back before Master Sergeant Roth arrived.

“Did you know the dockside area is full of big, noisy, obvious soldiers?” he asked Ky.

“Yes, of course,” Ky said.

“I hope you don’t think they’re better protection,” Rafe said. “They didn’t notice me coming until I was close enough to lob any sort of weapon—”

“I wasn’t counting on them for protection from sneaks,” Ky said. “And I’d told them you were coming. What did you find out?”

“The local ISC rep is crooked as a corkscrew,” Rafe said with relish. “The ansible is open all right—to him and whoever he’s in contact with, but he’s blocking all incoming and outgoing messages at will. He’s got a probe into what are supposed to be unbreakable automatic systems. I can’t tell yet if the next jump-point ansibles from here are really down, or if he’s programmed this one to think they’re down. That would take me several days. There are at least five in the deal on this end, though: the director, all three technical heads—one per shift—and a weasel in the records section. That one tried to convince me faked records were real, and of course I believed him—to his face.”

“Won’t they suspect something if you’re trying to bribe the records… er… weasel?”

“How’d you know—well, yes. They’ll know I want information. From the look on his face, he’s been taking bribes from everyone onstation who wants to know what’s going on. The shoes he’s wearing, the jewelry… he’s rolling in more money than someone at his level ever makes. But with everyone asking, another one asking is just another source of money—he doesn’t suspect who or what I am.” He cocked his head. “Aren’t you going to tell me about the soldiers?”

“There’s nothing to tell yet.” Ky sighed as he continued to look at her attentively. “No, I’m not going to tell you. When there is something to tell you, then I will.”

“You are entirely too cautious, Captain Vatta. I must admire that caution, inconvenient as it is for me. Where is the fair Stella?”

“Busy,” Ky said. “And your next project is?”

“Something I’m afraid you can’t help with,” he said. “I would give my left arm—or at least a couple of fingers—to get hold of a bit of technology no one is supposed to have yet. Ever hear of a pin ansible?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Ky said. “But I don’t have one.”

His eyes had widened, now they narrowed. “Where did you hear of it?”

“Never mind that… what’s it good for?”

“An ansible you can mount on a ship,” he said. “And more important, an ansible that allows real-time communications while you’re in FTL flight.”

Ky stuffed her first thought,
That’s impossible,
back in her mouth and said again, “That would be quite an improvement in communications… just having a shipboard ansible would be an advance.”

“Yes. And those do exist. The full-capability ones, those you can use in FTL flight, were in development the last I heard. But I suspect they now exist.”

“So why isn’t ISC bragging about this and selling them for vastly inflated prices?” Ky asked.

“Come, Captain, you have more business sense than that. I hope. ISC derives its revenues from per-message charges through the current ansible system—we don’t sell ansibles, ever.”

“Yes, but this is something that would make a bundle—”

“Comparatively? We would have to price it very high indeed, and we would be subject to competition, I’ve no doubt.”

“Yes…” Ky thought about it. “So you’re saying that there is a strong motive for ISC to freeze technological development that would risk its monopoly?”

He smiled at her. “I would not ever say that, Captain, because that would be revealing company secrets. Should you come to that conclusion on your own, I can’t stop you.”

Ky grinned back. “I’m glad we’re temporarily on the same side.”

“The thing is, if I had a pin ansible now, I could easily find out whether the more distant transfer lines are really blocked, or software clogged. As it is, I have to risk tapping into the station director’s control lines, and if he’s at all suspicious, he’ll realize someone’s snooping.”

Quincy called Ky on the ship com. “Can we find a time to talk?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m concerned about something.”

“Now, or a couple of hours? I’m expecting a visitor I really need to see.”

“Couple of hours is fine.”

Master Sergeant Roth fit Ky’s model for Mackensee much better than the callow lieutenant. Ky noticed that he and Martin looked each other over and came to some apparently favorable mutual conclusion. Roth brought with him a variety of Mackensee contracts. “Captain, I’m glad to meet you. Heard from our people at Sabine you did a fine job coping with those pirates.”

“Not much choice, Master Sergeant. Your lieutenant tells me you’re in a real bind here.”

The look on Roth’s face was eloquent. Ky remembered it well from MacRobert. “The lieutenant is… not too experienced,” he said.

“Your OIC had a medical emergency?”

“He told you that?” Roth scowled. “He doesn’t—sorry, ma’am. But he shouldn’t have.”

“Well, let’s see what you have,” Ky said. “We both seem to have a situation that would benefit from cooperation.”

“Thing is, we can’t get through to our headquarters,” Roth said. “We aren’t sure that the local ansible manager is being straight with us.”

“He’s not,” Ky said.

“You know that?” His eyebrows shot up.

“I have sources,” Ky said.

“Your own G-2?”

“You could put it that way.” She wasn’t going to compromise Rafe’s situation if possible. “We know he’s not straight, but we haven’t defined how bad it is.”

“So… what are your mission parameters?”

“My mission priorities are what you’d expect,” Ky said. “Survive, find other surviving Vattas and protect them, find out who’s doing this and how, and intervene.”

“Makes sense to me, Captain. You seem to have the intelligence; we have muscle. What would your strategy be if we were partners in this?”

“Unblock Lastway’s ansibles first, then work out from there. Collect a surcharge from other users to bankroll the project that far. If we’re out in space, we’re harder to find; if we unblock communications, it’ll be easier to figure out who’s blocking them. Once the financial ansibles start coming online, trade should resume, including bank transfers, which will make everyone’s life easier, including yours.”

“So you’d like us to do what?”

“Be the muscle you are. This ship is old, slow, unshielded, unarmed. I’d rather spend money hiring you than trying to turn it into a warship. But I don’t have much. As you may have heard, most accounts are frozen, not just yours. We have the money we made in trade, selling the cargo we had when we came.”

“Ma’am, if you can provision us, I believe the Old Man would not be displeased at a contract that put us back in contact with our people.”

“I believe I can do that, Master Sergeant. But what about your lieutenant? Will he sign off on this?”

“I certainly hope so. Our ship captains aren’t directly in his chain of command, but they’ll lean on him.”

“Another thing,” Ky said. “I’ve had a subcontract under Mackensee, but I’ve never been the contract holder. Who calls the shots in something like this? You? Your OIC? The ship captains?”

“Employer defines the mission, but has no direct command of Mackensee personnel. Ship captains command ship crew in space; troop commanders command troops but under the captains in space, and independently otherwise. In something like this, I’d advise stationing a Mackensee NCO as liaison aboard your ship, and your communications would be through him or her to our senior ship captain in space, or to the OIC otherwise. Would you anticipate any station or groundside actions?”

“Possibly station, not groundside. I would, however, like the option of direct consultation with your ship captains, captain to captain, should anything come up in space. If they’re protecting my ship, they may need to give me data quickly—”

“Oh, that’s fine. It’s just that you can’t tell them what to do, other than to carry out the mission you assigned in the first place.”

“Then let’s get it nailed down, get your lieutenant to sign off on it, and I’ll contact the banks to release funds. I presume you’d rather provision yourself than have civ do it—”

“Yes, ma’am, that would be ideal. Our immediate need is for rations; if the captain will take my advice, release just enough for, say, three days’ rations for a hundred troops, then your liaison can contact the ship captains and find out their needs. That would come to—” He looked blank a moment. “—just under five thousand credits.”

“Fine,” Ky said.

“There’s just a couple of things,” Roth said. “I’m sure it’s not a problem; you had a contract with us before. I know your record. But it’s something I have to say, since you’re the primary contractor here; please don’t take offense.”

“All right,” Ky said, wondering what was coming.

“Are you now or have you ever been engaged in slave trading?”

“No!” She could not keep the shock out of her voice.

“Sorry, ma’am, I’m sure these don’t apply; it’s just routine. I have to ask; it’s regulations.” He looked embarrassed but went on to the next. “Are you now or have you ever been engaged in transporting goods you knew to be stolen?”

“No.” Now that she knew the kinds of questions coming, it was easier not to react to them.

“Are you now or have you ever been engaged in piracy?”

“No.”

“Are you now or have you ever been in possession of a letter of marque issued to you by a planetary or system government?” Shock again. She paused, and Roth looked up. “Ma’am?”