Marque and Reprisal (9 page)

“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I’ve been in transit. What have you heard?”

“Two dozen rumors, nothing solid,” Traffic Control said. “But here—if you dock here, you may have problems getting out, and you will have to pay cash—Vatta credit’s down the tubes.”

“If I don’t dock here, I may run out of air,” Ky said. “So bring me in.”

“Your choice,” Traffic Control said. “There’s an eight-hundred-credit cash deposit on docking; Immigration Control will be there to collect it.”

“Thank you,” Ky said through clenched teeth. Then she called the crew together.

“What I know is all bad, but I’m sure we don’t know everything,” she said, then went on to describe the news. “It may be that all the other Vattas are dead. It may be that the news is all wrong and they’re all alive. But for our own safety, we have to assume that there is someone—apparently a lot of someones with plenty of resources—after Vatta.”

“You aren’t setting foot off this ship,” Quincy said.

“On the contrary, I must, to do what needs doing,” Ky said. “At any rate, it would do me no good to sit here and have my crew picked off one or two at a time. I can’t run this thing alone.

“But we are going to be careful. Those procedures that Martin developed, that we’ve been practicing—we are all going to adhere to them. No casual wandering around the station, no letting people wander into our dock space. We’re going to carry taggers; we’re going to put up extra security screening, the whole bit.”

“What do you think you have to do that requires you to go offship?” Quincy asked.

Ky looked at her, but Quincy didn’t back down. Not surprising. “To start with, I have to pay docking fees in advance, in cash. Vatta credit’s been frozen. I should have a private account here, but since we don’t know when the Belinta ansibles went out, I don’t know if the transfer I set up before we left actually went through. I need to exchange hard goods for cash, open an account, get us back into business. None of you can do that. In addition, I need a way to defend myself,” she said.

“You… are you talking about weapons? About arming the ship?”

“I’m not telling any of you all my thoughts,” Ky said. “Not even you, Quincy. Not because I don’t trust you—” Though she did not entirely trust the new crewmembers. “—but at this point the fewer people who know my plans, the fewer people can be forced to share them.”

Their expressions showed that none of them had considered that possibility yet.

“You think someone might—might grab one of us? Shake us down?” Mitt asked.

“It’s possible,” Ky said. “We have to think of things like that, Mitt. If they’ll attack corporate headquarters on Slotter Key, and kill family and crew on other stations, then a snatch isn’t the least likely thing to happen, if we’re unprepared. That’s why we’ll take precautions. Those of you with implants, make sure you keep your communications channels alive. Talk to the ship anytime you’re out… anything, everything.”

“You don’t have an implant,” Quincy said. “Isn’t it time to use that implant your father sent you?”

“It hasn’t been six months,” Ky said. “In the meantime, the first trip out is going to buy me the best nonimplant personal communicator on this station. I’ll wear it from then on, and when I go out I’ll have both crew and—depending on what I find out in the next couple of hours—hired security as well.”

“Captain, if Vatta Transport is really gone—really defunct—are you going to try to start it up again, or go independent?” Beeah asked.

“Beeah, I can’t answer that one now. I don’t know enough. We just fell into a war with these attacks. I don’t know who the enemy is, or why the attacks happened, or how strong the enemy is, or which of our forces are left. The main thing now is to survive, gather data, get someplace from which we can move, if a move is possible.”

“You ought to go back to Slotter Key,” Quincy said. “Your family needs you.”

“If I have a family,” Ky said. Images of horror flickered through her mind, and she shoved them away. “Attacks on headquarters, warehouses, processing plants, the private terminal, the family compound… where else would my family be? And it will do no good to go to Slotter Key and be cut off from ansible communication. What they need—if they live, if the whole corporation hasn’t been bankrupted—is someone out here doing trade and showing that Vatta ships still carry cargo safely.”

“But if we have no insurance, no one will ship with us.”

“Not the big shippers, no. But there are always people desperate to get cargo from here to there, and willing to assume the risk themselves.”

Quincy pursed her lips. “Vatta has never carried that kind of cargo.”

“Oh, yes, we have. Long ago, admittedly, but it’s in the family histories. Vatta wasn’t always completely pure and aboveboard—no one was, in the early days after the Rift. So what we’re going to do is trade and profit, along with skulking and hiding and being extremely careful.”

“I don’t see how we can carry the Vatta colors and be careful both,” Mitt said. “I’m with Beeah—why not go independent now, change the ship’s registry?”

“We can’t—we’re already widely known as Vatta,” Ky said. “If it comes to that, we’ll have to do it somewhere else, some port that is even less law-abiding than Lastway.”

They stared at her in silence.

Ky spent the next two hours looking at the threat assessment she and Martin had made on the approach when she had nothing else to do. Too many question marks, too many things she could not know. The lessons from the Academy came back to her. No commander ever knew everything; the ones who thought they did were often in the worst trouble. Good commanders took what they did know and made good plans—and contingency plans—anyway.

She doodled on a blank page of her log. MISSION: what was her mission, anyway? She had no higher command, at the moment… surely the original mission, to sell the ship for scrap, was irrelevant at this point. Stay alive. Keep her crew alive. Keep her ship whole and functioning. Find out who was behind this. What were victory conditions?

As cadets, they’d been introduced to the concepts of tactics, strategy, grand strategy… but most of their time had gone into the things a junior officer might need to know. Strategy was for older, more senior, and hopefully wiser heads. Juniors succeeded insofar as they figured out ways to carry out the designs of their seniors.

Ky shook her head at that moment of nostalgia. Prepared or not, she was the person on the spot. She was senior now. It was all up to her. No use to whine that she wasn’t ready or didn’t know enough. Nobody was around to advise her.

Victory conditions: start with alive and free, all of them. Alive, free, with the ship. Alive, free, with the ship and crew and some prospect of making a living. And then doing something to save her remaining family members and if possible the family business. Revenge on whoever had done this would have to come later, much later, but survival itself depended on figuring out who it could be.

Paison’s allies were the obvious choice… and if true, that meant it was her fault. If she hadn’t killed Paison, they would not have attacked her family. But that made no sense. Why would pirates waste all that money and effort to attack her family when they had to know where she was? Why not just kill her?

Now was the time to find out who, and then how and why and the rest, while keeping herself and her crew alive and out of enemy hands. She looked at the locker in which she’d stowed the Vatta implant her father had sent her. It was still too soon, according to the Mackensee surgeon, to have an implant installed, but at this moment she would have liked access to the proprietary Vatta information. More important, though, was keeping it out of enemy hands—a security issue that hadn’t occurred to her until this moment.

When the crew reassembled, she asked for their ideas, their threat assessments. It occurred to her, as they ran down their lists, that they were doing much better than they would have before the Sabine mess. Still, Jim seemed to have a talent for thinking up ways someone might do them damage… his list was longer than anyone else’s.

Ky looked at him, when they’d all finished. “Where did you get those ideas?” she asked. He looked worried. “I’m not angry. I just wonder what else you were doing besides fixing ship engines.”

“I’m not doin’ it here,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t do anything to this ship, Captain.”

“I’m glad to know it—and glad you’re on our side.” She looked at Alene. “First, I’m going to see if the legal firm I contacted has any final word on that Leonora cargo, then we’ll list our cargo on the Exchange boards. Martin will concentrate on security issues, so you’ll have to run Cargo on your own.”

“Prices are volatile, Captain,” Alene said. “How long d’you think it’ll be before we get clearance?”

“Less than an hour after we dock, I’m hoping. Certainly by end of shift. As soon as we start selling, we start resupply. Environmental, insystem fuel, general supplies. Now: can we offload to the secure dock area without outside help?”

Alene shook her head. “I don’t think so. The Leonora cargo’s all palleted, too heavy to shift without a loader. We could rent a loader, I suppose… I’ve handled one. But who else?”

“I can,” Jim said. “At least… I’ve used one once.” With Jim, Ky thought, that could mean he’d seen someone else use one once, or he’d driven one off a dock into the water, or—possibly—he had actually driven one without incident.

“How long will it take with one loader, to clear the holds?”

“If some of the others will help with shifting and positioning, we can have the Leonora pallets off in a shift. The rest… you know our difficulties, Captain. Several days.”

“Here’s what we’ll do, then. First Martin will supervise setting up our security net. Meanwhile I’ll arrange loader rental, and as soon as we’re cleared for it, we’ll start unloading those pallets. I’d like to minimize exposure of personnel to possible… problems. The fewer outsiders who come aboard, and the less time anyone spends onstation, the safer we’ll be.”

On final approach, Lastway Station looked like what it was: a vast and complicated construction that had grown far beyond its original design to accommodate the needs of its local and transient populations. Below it, the planet’s cloud-wrapped surface was invisible. Two centuries earlier, terraforming had begun on a moderately appropriate base; the information packet supplied by the station to all incoming ships described in detail the processes that continued, but Ky was far less interested in the details of biogeochemical processes than in the price of refreshment cultures for the environmental system and what she could hope to get for the cargo originally consigned to Leonora.

As Lee eased the ship nearer and nearer to the docking booms, Ky reviewed the current list of ships docked, their origins and destinations. Another had been waved off from Leonora, and she learned that the onstation legal services had already certified its cargo as undeliverable, available for resale. At least she didn’t have to fight that battle on her own. She called Martin and told him that he could scavenge freely in the Leonora cargo.

“Thanks, ma’am,” he said. “As it happens, those containers were right handy… won’t take much time at all…” The suspicion crossed her mind that he had already taken what he wanted from them, but there was no reason to push the issue. None of the ships on station now seemed like a pirate ready to blow her ship away, but she hadn’t spotted Paison as a problem until too late. She had to assume that danger lurked here, everywhere.

Her own ship’s needs ranged as usual from must-haves like refreshment cultures for the environmental tanks; to very desirable, like better longscan; to wishful thinking, like an insystem drive that would move them faster than a snail on a hot rock. At least she hadn’t spent all her money on Belinta.

Lee docked neatly, and the station crew hooked up the support umbilicals. Ky found several small chores to do until she realized she was anxious about opening the hatch, then made herself go down to cargo hold 1 and do it. Martin materialized from one of the cargo hatches, and stood in front of her as the hatch opened.

Lastway Immigration Control—one unarmed and six armed—were waiting at dockside, by their expressions none too patiently. The one without weapons had two forearms on one arm, and a wrist tentacle on the back of the other wrist. Ky managed not to blink in surprise; that was a humod form she hadn’t seen before. “Eight hundred, cash or trade goods to be valued by an independent assessor,” said the humod. The tentacle uncurled elegantly, and the input connectors glinted.

“Trade goods,” Ky said. She handed the tentacle one of Aunt Gracie’s diamonds.

“Submitted for assessment,” the humod said. The tentacle transferred the diamond to that hand, then removed a sealable pouch from a pocket, plucked up the diamond again, and inserted it, then sealed the pouch. “You will want a receipt.”

“I will want an assessor here, at dockside,” Ky said.

“You think Lastway Immigration Control is dishonest?” That with a ferocious scowl.

“I think diamonds are too easy to misplace or confuse with other diamonds,” Ky said.

“I will call.” Silent moments, as the humod communicated by interface; then it nodded sharply. “Yes. One expert in assessing crystals comes.”

“Are you from here?” Ky asked.

Again the humod scowled. “Why ask that?”

“No insult intended, but your accent is not the same as what I heard from Traffic Control—I merely wished to know which accent is native here, to adjust my interpretation to that norm.”

Its face cleared. “Ah. You have old tech implant, yes? Mine adjust by self.” On input maybe, but the output wasn’t. “From Vastig, I am, eight years agone taking ship away from sad family. You know Vastig?”

“No,” Ky admitted.

“But such ships come there, Vatta Transport. Many ships Vatta has—or had. Someone likes Vatta not.”

“True enough,” Ky said. “And I don’t know why—do you?”

“Not I. Others make guesses, only guesses. On Vastig we do not make guesses. We say the truth. But here comes one to assess…”

Ky looked around to see a man in a dressy business suit; as he came closer, she began to wonder if he, too, were a humod. One eye appeared to have a magnifier built into it, the rim sunken into the skin. When he opened his mouth to speak, his tongue was dark and heavily furred.