Marque and Reprisal (37 page)

“This is different,” Toby said. “That ship—nobody here knows her; she needs more crew and more expertise. You should take her.”

“I agree,” Stella said. “If you’ll let me load some of the ship systems stuff into my implant, I’m sure I’ll be able to do what I must.”

“I suppose.” Already Ky knew this would work. She ran it all as a fast sim in the implant. Yes, it was the best solution. Now to choose who would stay and who would go. She needed Lee and Sheryl with her: they could set up a tape for
Gary Tobai
’s crew to follow. Martin, of course. That meant Alene had to stay on here; she would be responsible for cargo. Environmental, she had to have someone from there, and an engineer. Mitt and Mehar, she decided. Rafe, for his expertise with nonstandard ansibles.

By the time the pinnace came back toward
Gary Tobai,
she and her prize crew were suited up and ready to leave. On scan, the pinnace edged closer and closer.

Then came another call from Johannson. “My people say there’s a limpet mine on your outer hatch.”

“Oh… yes.” She had forgotten about that. “That’s the one Osman tried to blow up the ship with.”

“Facing out… is it armed to repel boarders?”

“No,” Ky said. “That just seemed a good place to store it.”

“To store your enemy’s mine… any particular reason why you didn’t just give it a good shove out the hatch?”

“I didn’t want to hit the
Kaleen
with it,” Ky said. “Besides… a mine is a terrible thing to waste.”

Along silence, during which Johannson turned dull red and appeared to be having trouble breathing. Then a harsh bark of laughter. “Captain Vatta, you—you are indeed—interesting. We’ll send the pinnace to ferry you and your prize crew aboard.”

Fair Kaleen,
up close, looked even more battered than in the external vid pictures. The damage Osman’s limpet had done to the air lock, for instance. That was going to be expensive to fix properly—the implant gave estimates. The repair bots had welded a replacement in, roughly, but it was not the kind of work Ky wanted on any ship she owned for the long haul. Once into the crew quarters, she found not the squalor she had expected from an outlaw’s ship, but a tidy, workmanlike arrangement, marred only by stains from the recent conflict. The bridge, easily three times as large as
Gary Tobai
’s, resembled that of the ship she had apprenticed on, but with the addition of an extra row of boards.

“Weapons,” her merc escort pointed out. “He’s taken out part of two cargo holds to mount them. We haven’t checked them all out, but I wouldn’t hit those red buttons unless you want to kill something. We didn’t inventory the munitions, either, but the hold hatches had warning labels on them. We’ve checked out the bridge for booby traps and have discussed the rest of the ship with your security command.” He glanced at Martin, who nodded.

Ky looked at the control boards. Well, she had always wanted to command a warship. This thing could almost be a pocket cruiser, if the holds were full of missiles instead of cargo… no question at all that Osman had been a pirate. Which might help when a court adjudicated possession: whatever they thought of privateers, courts always thought poorly of pirates.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Captain—environmental’s salvageable. The cultures are fine; the higher taxons are badly shaken up, but I think we can boost production in the next few days.”

“That’s good to hear,” Ky said. “Stores?”

“The ship’s supplied for a much bigger crew, Captain, and none of the supply lockers I’ve seen so far was damaged. We won’t have any problems for another three standard months at least; there are more lockers, but I’m not yet sure it’s safe to get into them.”

“Good,” Ky said. “So we’re good to go, then.” Mehar and Toby hadn’t said anything, but the drives boards were all green. Quincy, back on
Gary Tobai,
had said things about idiots who went off to strange ships with greenies for Engineering crew, but she was still recovering from her blast injuries, and Ky wasn’t about to put additional strain on her. Quincy had finally subsided when Ky pointed out that Stella, as a completely inexperienced captain, needed the best engineer on
Gary Tobai
.

The Mackensee boarders had already tested the communications, ignoring the box they didn’t recognize, which Ky knew was the ship-mounted ansible. Now she called up Johannson.

“We’re ready to go as soon as your people are back aboard your ship,” she said. “We’ll be rejoining the convoy after jump, correct?”

“Correct. If your navigator is at the board, I’ll transmit the coordinates—”

“Go ahead,” Ky said, nodding at Sheryl.

“We’re on our way,” the merc escort said. “See you somewhere else, and good luck with this thing.”

“We’ll be fine,” Ky said, with more confidence than she actually felt.

At last they were on the move. On Osman’s excellent military-grade scans,
Gary Tobai
boosted for jump ahead of them, crawling along at less than half the acceleration
Fair Kaleen
could offer. Ky was not about to go off and leave her first command, though. Behind them, the Mackensee ship loafed along, keeping watch behind, weapons live. Ky kept
Kaleen
’s locked down. In those hours, Ky’s implant explored the ship and her data banks, easily circumventing Osman’s security routines: at root, the ship was Vatta, purpose-built for Vatta, and her deepest levels of programming gave anyone with the Vatta command dataset complete access to anything added later. Ky was able to tell Martin exactly where physical traps were located, and how to disarm them.

The cargo holds with the weapons held ample munitions for them, Ky found. In fact, the modifications Osman had made to the ship cut down her cargo capacity to just over half again as much as
Gary Tobai
’s… she would be uneconomical as a pure trader without ripping out all the changes. But as a privateer… she was perfect, except that the universe knew her as a pirate. She needed a new name, a new ship chip, an identity unsullied by Osman’s years of criminal activity.

And what was in the other holds would easily pay for that new identity… the cream of a half dozen piracies, at least. Osman had kept all the compact, highly valuable prizes: luxury items such as jewelry, art, bioassays, implants—implants taken from “interesting” prisoners. Some had been downloaded into his own ship’s computer, and some awaited that treatment. He had reloaded salable data onto data cubes; a good part of his profit for the past dozen standard years had been from the sale of proprietary information gained from such implants, she found when she looked at his records. Pirate he might be, but he kept financial records like any other businessman. He also had a store of ship-mounted ansibles for sale to potential allies in the war against ISC.

Ky mused on this as Rafe went to work on the shipboard ansible console. Should she tell him about the others? No harm, probably.

“There’s about a dozen of these things in the hold,” she said conversationally. Rafe looked at her.

“Like this?”

“Yes. According to his internal records, he used to have more, but sold some. Do you need to know to whom?”

“I suppose I should,” Rafe said. “But that cat’s well out of the bag by now. I told them two years ago… but they wouldn’t listen.” He turned back to his work. “By the way, do you think Osman was the only reason Vatta was attacked? Was he just working out his grudge while helping his allies?”

“I’m not sure,” Ky said. “If they were looking to make an example of a shipping firm to put pressure on the others—which is what some of the other captains at Lastway thought—then Vatta is reasonably conspicuous and has supported ISC’s continuing monopoly in the past. Osman could have been a blessing to them, with his inside information and his personal interest in seeing Vatta suffer.”

“There are other systems that don’t like Slotter Key flags in general,” Rafe said. “I don’t suppose you know this, but Slotter Key runs privateers.”

Her own letter of marque seemed to be burning a hole in her uniform—she was very glad Rafe was looking at the console’s internal bits, and not at her. “I had heard something,” she said. “I wasn’t sure whether to believe it.”

“Oh, it’s true. Cheaper than enlarging their Spaceforce, I suppose. Privateers support themselves. From our end, we never knew Vatta to be involved in that, but this ship… your corporate headquarters disavowed it, but I did sometimes wonder.”

“You… knew about Osman before I did?”
And you didn’t warn me?
she wanted to add but didn’t.

“Not for sure,” Rafe said. “And if you were making rendezvous with the family privateer, I wanted to know more about it.” Now he did look over his shoulder at her. “Don’t look at me like that, Captain. It doesn’t violate our partnership—check the terms—and I warned you as soon as I knew for certain something was bent.”

Small comfort. She tried to think of something to say, but at that moment, Sheryl announced that they were entering countdown for endim transition.

“All stations, secure for FTL,” Ky said, instead of any of the lame comments she’d thought of. “Section seals locked.” Rafe got off the deck and strapped himself into one of the spare seats on the bridge, while the others acknowledged. Ky’s stomach knotted. How would the
Kaleen
handle transition with that crudely repaired air lock? At least, if it blew, only the passage behind it would lose air.

Fair Kaleen
slipped through the transition as easily as Ky herself would have walked through a doorway… of course, a pirate would keep his ship perfectly tuned. After a brief hour and twelve minutes of FTL flight, during which Ky thought of all the things that might have gone wrong with
Gary Tobai
and then what might go wrong if any of them reentered normal space at the wrong relative vee, the ship dropped out as smoothly as she’d gone in. Ahead of them,
Gary Tobai
appeared as their scan cleared, and behind them the Mackensee ship dropped out still at the same interval.

“Brilliant job, Lee and Sheryl,” Ky said. She felt a wave of relief. There on longscan were the other Mackensee ship and the rest of the convoy. No unknown ships in the system. Here, the ansible wasn’t working, but Rafe would fix that. She reversed the compartment lockdown.

“Ten hours to rendezvous with convoy,” Johannson said.

Ten hours. She could not stay awake another ten hours. Who could?

“Toby, come to the bridge, please.” Toby of the inexhaustible energy. On their present course, with no changes to be made, he could surely keep watch while the rest of them recovered.

“Commander, most of my crew’s dead on their feet. I’m going to put us down, and leave one on watch.”

“Good idea. Call if you need anything.”

Toby, with Rascal bouncing at his heels, came onto the bridge. “Yes, Captain?”

“You have the bridge, Toby.” No need to ask if he was alert enough; his eyes sparkled with delight. “See, I told you you’d make captain someday.”

“Yes, Captain! I’ll call right away if anything happens.”

“You do that,” Ky said, and clambered up, stiff in every muscle and joint. Martin had checked out enough of the crew quarters that they could each have a private cabin, though at the moment she was sure she could sleep on the deck in a pile with twenty others.

The captain’s cabin was half again as large as hers on
Gary Tobai
. Osman favored black and gray with red accents; the cabin had an odd smell, which she supposed was essence of Osman. Ky kicked herself for not having thought to have the ’fresher cycle on during those hours on the bridge. She pulled everything off the bed—she was not going to sleep on his sheets. In a locker, she found another set—synthsilk, in black, shiny and slippery. At least they didn’t smell like Osman. She threw the other bedclothes in the cleaning bin, turned the cabin ventilation to high, propped the hatch open, and was asleep before she thought to turn out the light.

She woke briefly once, as the light went off, then again when Toby’s voice announced that it was time, the time she’d said, but if she wanted to sleep longer everything was fine.

“I’m up,” she said. “I’ll shower.”

In Osman’s private bath—which deserved the name, having a tub as well as shower—she found the kind of mess she’d expected from the first, though most of it was due to the tumbling in zero-G. Smears of green and yellow and pink goo streaked the black marble walls and floor. She took one look and dialed the cleaner bots into action. While waiting for them to get the broken glass off the deck, she rummaged again through the lockers in his cabin. Clothes… he certainly liked black. And silk. Silk shirts, blousy silk pants. Shore rig: Vatta uniforms, including an old one worn thin. What must be costumes suitable for different worlds, various colors and styles. Underwear—it was a moment before she realized that the underwear could not all be his… it was a collection, male and female styles in various sizes, and all of it… she shuddered, and put the entire contents into the recycler. Maybe it would have been evidence, but she didn’t want to share space with it, even behind a closed door. In one drawer, she found other evidence of his proclivities: restraints, masks, items she almost understood and didn’t want to. She opened only one of the zippered leather cases; the array of tools horrified her, and she left the rest untouched.

She found clean towels, black but smelling of nothing but soap, just as the bots announced the bathroom was safe. Her implant informed her that the black marble wasn’t really marble, but a tunable crystal; Ky changed it to frosted white. Now she could feel clean… maybe. The shower worked as well as her own back on
Gary Tobai,
and she took extra time to comb her hair in front of Osman’s—her—mirror. That, too, was a tunable crystal; she changed the lower two-thirds to frosted white rather than reflective.

One by one her rested crew came back to the bridge or their stations.

“Could we redecorate the cabins?” Sheryl asked her.

“What, the gruesome murals bothered you?” Rafe asked.

“Rafe,” Ky said. Then, to Sheryl, “Of course. It’s our ship now. Osman’s cabin was pretty grim—were the others bad, too?”

“Let’s just say that Scovald’s famous mural of the invasion of Bettany does nothing for my dream life,” Sheryl said. “Not even when the previous occupant has added his own commentary and sketches to the original. And it smelled like that kind of person had been living in it.”

“Not nice people at all,” Rafe said. “I found what I thought was a simple one, plain walls with just a few pinups easy to ignore, but the instant I lay down on the bunk, the sound system came on. It left me in no doubt that whoever had that cabin was someone I do not want to know except over a weapon.” At Ky’s look he nodded. “Gone now. Flushed it. I figure you have enough on these people without that recording, and it was the only way to get it to shut up without dismantling the bunk. Which I was too tired to do.”

“I put some things in the recycler myself,” Ky said. “And I’m tempted to flush the bedding, too.”

“Oh yes,” Lee said. “In fact, I did. I’m not sure any cleaning cycle would take care of what was on those sheets.”

“Well, on our next long cycle with nothing much to do, we’ll get all that cleaned away. There’s plenty of crew space; we won’t be bored next transit.”

“I suppose disgust is better than boredom,” Sheryl said. “And it’s better than excitement, too,” she added. “I’ll get on it; there’s nothing for me to do before rendezvous. Unless you’re hungry and want a meal.”

Hands went up.