Marque and Reprisal (27 page)

“Successful delivery at Belinta: it must’ve been posted just as I arrived, because trouble started shortly after that. I got a ping from my ship about trouble, and was on an ansible uplink to Vatta headquarters when I lost the connection. That’s when things got really interesting, because a team of assassins came into the Captains’ Guild—”

“You didn’t tell me this before!” Stella said, wide-eyed.

“And we’ve had how much time to chat?” Ky said. “Anyway… it’ll be in my log, the universal date. Let me check.” She pulled out the notebook. “Here—”

“You keep a paper log?”

“Yeah. Anyway, it’s… 13.34.75. What’s the date on that message?”

“It’s 13.32.75. Where would you have been then?”

Ky paged back. “Unloading cargo, Belinta Station. After that I went downplanet hunting cargo; we were headed for Leonora but had another several cubic meters of space. I was trying to come up with enough to finance a refit of the ship; she’d been destined for scrap, originally, but the hull is sound and I thought maybe I could save it.”

“I don’t have a paper log,” Stella went on. “It’s in my implant.” She tapped her head. “Universal time, also 13.34. Odd, really. Even with ansible transmission, how did they set up almost simultaneous attacks light-years apart? Unless they used all local talent… ship schedules just aren’t that precise.”

“We had a course on interstellar terrorism,” Ky said. “A large enough organization, with enough financial support, and enough lead time… and we don’t know how many planned attacks didn’t go off on schedule, because the ansibles went down.”

“Did all ansible traffic at Belinta go down when you were cut off?”

“No. At least, no one said anything. The Slotter Key consul on Belinta told me the Slotter Key ansibles were down, but when we left, Belinta’s seemed to be working fine. It was such a low-traffic system I’m not sure anyone would’ve noticed.”

“Did you call out on it?”

“No, I didn’t. I figured the bad guys knew exactly where we were, and we should get into space, go somewhere else, try to outflank them.”

“I still can’t figure out
why
anyone would want to do it,” Stella said. “Okay, attack the monopoly, I can see that, but why disrupt all communications? Why not just display the ability and bargain from there?”

“If we knew that, we might know why Vatta was chosen as another target,” Ky said. “Did those ISC couriers tell you that ISC ships were being hit?”

“No—but then they didn’t tell me much. Not even the route we were taking.”

“Which suggests to me they were worried about attack,” Ky said. “I hope Rafe can pry more information out of the local ansible before we clear space. Something about all this just doesn’t make sense. Why Vatta? We’re—we were—important on Slotter Key, and we’re a major shipper, but we’re not the only major shipper, and Pavrati hasn’t been hit that we know of.”

“But we are, after the Sabine thing, known as a friend of ISC,” Stella said. “Even before that, corporately, we’ve supported them in discussions with other shippers. And our unarmed ships travel on scheduled routes, making them easier to find than ISC couriers, which don’t.”

“Point.” Ky rubbed her face. “So if I hadn’t been so prominent at Sabine… if I hadn’t been so obviously in tight with ISC… maybe none of this would have happened.”

Stella touched her arm. “Ky, I don’t think it’s your fault. No one back home even hinted it was your fault.”

“They didn’t have time, did they?” Ky said.

“A few could have, but they didn’t. You can’t blame yourself…”

“Oh, yes, I can,” Ky said. “I certainly can—and I do, in part. I know it’s not all my fault, but I didn’t make things better. Hindsight’s no good if you don’t use it.”

“I just don’t want you taking all the responsibility—”

“Not all. Just some. A mistake I don’t intend to make again.” Though how she was to avoid it, she had no idea. Wars are won by those who make the fewest mistakes, one of her instructors had insisted.

Stella looked at her with an odd expression. “Ky… is that coming out of your military training, or have you really changed that much?”

“Changed?”

“Well… I don’t want to insult you or anything, but back when you were a kid—before you went off to the Academy—I thought of you as kind of a dreamy, impractical sort. You’d come out of it to do something hopelessly romantic, like champion some natural-born loser… we were always hearing about your lost pups.”

Ky felt her neck getting hot. “Hard to lose a family identity even when it doesn’t fit,” she said. “You should know about that.”

Stella’s face hardened. “True enough. But you were different.”

“Was I?” Ky turned away. “They even had me convinced that I was too softhearted and softheaded. If everyone tells you… what did they tell you, Stella, that led you to that first mess?”

Stella’s eyes widened in shock, then she looked thoughtful. “I suppose… everyone always made a big thing out of how pretty I was. Jo was the smart one, Benji and Tak were the strong athletic ones, and I was…
Oh look at Stella, isn’t she adorable
and
Good grief, Stefan, you’ll have to use a cannon to keep the boys off her.
I couldn’t outscore Jo—she’s—she was—brilliant, and I never wanted to outsweat Benji and Tak.” She paused. “So… are you telling me you aren’t softhearted and an easy mark for stray pups? When we have a literal stray pup on this very ship?”

Ky snorted. “Puddles isn’t
my
fault. Oh, I suppose I could’ve let the locals kill the beast, but they annoyed me.”

“You saved the dog to spite the Garda?” Stella said, brows arched.

“More or less, yes. And it might prove useful yet. The vet’s assistant said this breed makes good watchdogs.”

“I suppose, if you have foot-tall assassins, it might be of some use,” Stella said. “But otherwise?”

Was this the time to confess to a family member her self-discovery at the moment of killing Paison? No. Stella would be spooked, and she needed Stella’s support…” I’m not just an idealistic nice girl,” Ky said. Her voice sounded rough to her own ears. “Any more than you’re just a sexy pushover for handsome men.”

“Thank you for that,” Stella said, in a voice that could have been expressing either anger or amusement. “So we’re both renegades, are we? The surviving senior family members, barring Aunt Gracie, who is a renegade in her own way?”

“I suspect,” Ky said, her good humor restored, “that Vattas have always harbored a fair number of renegades. Do we even know how our great-great-great-grandfather obtained his first ship?”

“I do,” said Stella. “It’s in my secured files. And I’m afraid you’re right—he was not entirely respectable.” She shrugged.

“Was he a privateer?” Ky asked.

“Privateer? Maybe. Definitely a raider of some kind, at least for a while. Why?”

“Remember that letter of marque? I was thinking maybe it runs in the family.”

“But you didn’t ask for it; you aren’t using it.”

“Yet,” Ky said, as she got up to leave. Stella stared.

Down in Engineering, Ky found Quincy hunched over a screen, reading through the installation instructions again. Toby sat on the deck, with Puddles upside down in his lap; the pup looked ridiculous, kicking one stubby leg as the boy stroked his belly. Jim, across the compartment, leaned on an upright, scowling.

“How’s it going?” Ky asked.

“It would be going fine if that idiot dog hadn’t eaten a corner out of one of the cartons so we didn’t have all the connectors… we spent hours hunting and we’re still missing one. I think I can cobble something together. I hope.” Quincy gave the pup a poisonous look; Toby hunched over it protectively.

“You aren’t going to space it, are you, Captain?” Toby asked.

“No, of course not,” Ky said. “But we probably need to confine it somehow out of the way.”

“Not in a shipping carton,” Quincy said. “It eats them. And then throws up.”

“I told you—” Jim began, but Quincy silenced him with a gesture.

“Jim thinks if we give the pup the run of the ship, it will learn where everything is and be less trouble,” she said. “I think it would be disastrous. As with that carton. I can just imagine us arriving someplace—wherever we’re going—and finding that our salable cargo has been converted into dog messes.”

“Dogs can be… er… trained, can’t they?” Ky asked. Her family had never kept dogs. Cats, horses, birds, and some of the small arboreal creatures, mingas, but not dogs. She’d had friends with dogs, and those dogs didn’t seem to be much trouble. They made their messes outside. Of course, here
outside
was a hostile environment. “Didn’t we pick up some supplies from the vet?”

“And a book on training,” Jim said, nodding. “They can be trained to use a box or something. But it takes time.”

“You’ve trained a dog?” Ky asked.

“Not myself, but I’ve watched an uncle.”

Ky was about to say
It’s your dog; you found it
when she glanced again at Toby. The look he gave her said more than words. “Toby,” she said instead. “You’re caught up on your classwork, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Quincy, how many hours a day do you need Toby’s help?”

Quincy pursed her lips. “Right now? Not at all, really… systems are all green, and the rest of this setup is software alignment. Why?”

“Because I need him to do something else. Toby, that pup’s your responsibility: I want you to keep it out of trouble, train it, take care of him. I know Jim found it—” She glanced at Jim. “—but, Toby, you’ve had a dog before, and Jim has other duties. If you need help, ask for it, but primarily I want this to be your job. Is that fair?”

His face lit from within for the first time since he’d come aboard. “Yes, Captain! I—I’ll make sure he’s not in the way.”

“I’m sure you’ll take care of him,” Ky said. She felt a pang of guilt. The boy had been through horrendous stresses, and she’d spent how much time making sure he was doing all right? Next to none. “I hope he turns out to be a good little watchdog for our dock area, on stations where dogs are allowed. Be sure to keep me informed how he’s coming along.”

“Captain, could I change his name?”

“His name?”

“Puddles just isn’t… a good name for him.”

“What would you name him?”

Toby glanced at Quincy. “How about Rascal?”

“Sounds good to me,” Ky said. “Now get Rascal out from under Quincy’s feet so she can get on with her work.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The boy scrambled up, all ungainly legs it seemed, and headed for his cabin with Rascal—now awake and wiggling wildly—in his grip.

When he was out of sight, Quincy cocked her head at Ky. “That was well done, Captain. Annoying as I find that animal, he’ll be good for Toby.”

“And you won’t be distracted while finishing the installation,” Ky said.

“I certainly hope not,” Quincy said.

The convoy moved out on a slow arc. No incoming ships had been detected for days, but Mackensee had still advised a careful approach to the jump points. “If there’s trouble, that’s where it will be,” Johannson said. “Ships going for a jump point are usually at max delta vee; they can’t maneuver, and they offer an easy shot. What you want to do is go in slow, in formation, looking tough and preserving your ability to maneuver.” Behind them, another ship left Lastway, but on a vector that gave no concern; it looked to be headed for a different jump point.

Stella, working through the accumulated messages, found that the Lastway ISC manager had been holding up Vatta messages there—or some Vatta messages at least—since the last scheduled Vatta departure, some eight standard months before.

“If any Vatta ship had come through, they’d have been told there was nothing pending,” Stella told Ky. They were working in Ky’s cabin, and the remnants of a hasty meal were stacked on the end of the worktable. “You should have had all this when you arrived. Most of it’s not that important: updates on prices, margins, that kind of thing. The five-day bulletins I’ve put into the database for pattern analysis. Nothing’s shown up yet. I can’t figure out what good it would do to keep a Vatta ship at Lastway out of the Vatta loop, though. When were you originally supposed to arrive at Lastway? Did you have scheduled deliveries?”

“No, nothing with a late penalty, but we did have a tentative schedule. Let me see…” Ky called it up. “That’s interesting—we were originally scheduled to reach Lastway a day or so before the attacks on Vatta started.”

“So you’d have been there, incommunicado, rather than on a live ansible hookup to Slotter Key. Easy meat—no warning. I wonder if they specifically sucked off Vatta messages at the other stations where Vatta was hit?”

“Still doesn’t tell us why Vatta was a target,” Ky said.

“No, but it’s clear the plot was laid before you even went to Sabine,” Stella pointed out. “Then they had to rush assassins to Belinta, or find local talent, before you got back.” She sat back. “What would you have done, Ky, if you’d come out in Belinta local space and been told of the attacks? Would you have docked at Belinta?”

“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I never thought of that… I might have docked at their station, to complete delivery, but I wouldn’t have gone onplanet.”

“They must have been frantic,” Stella said. “Scrambling to adjust to your movements, knowing that you were the most dangerous Vatta to leave alive…”

“Me?” Ky had not considered she might be considered a special threat.

“You. Of course. Not just your military training, and your relationship to your father, but what you’d shown you could do at Sabine. Now… I would wager some of Aunt Grace’s diamonds that you are well above their threat recognition level.”

Ky felt a surge of satisfaction. “I hope so,” she said. “Let them worry.” It was ridiculous, in a way. She still had only the one small, slow, unarmed ship; Mackensee would desert her as soon as they had instructions from their headquarters; the other traders in the convoy were her putative allies only so long as they had Mackensee protection. Even so, imagining an enemy being afraid of her felt good.

“And now that you’re officially a privateer, that’s even more reason for them to worry.”

Ky looked at Stella, startled. “I’m not really. You know that.”

“Remember what the mercs told you?” Stella’s perfect brows arched. “Possession of the letter, whether you use it or not, constitutes presumption of intent.”

“But our enemies won’t know about that,” Ky said. “Will they? And I don’t see that it makes much difference. For all the license the letter gives me to cause mayhem, there’s not much mayhem I can cause with this ship. I’m sure they know about this ship.” She pushed aside the existence of those mines in the cargo holds. “For now, I’m just a trader captain; I’m not ready to hunt anyone down.”

“You’re a trader with two hired warships,” Stella pointed out. “That takes you out of the
just-a-trader
class right there. You had your mercs go in and kill some crooked ISC employees, and even though that was done with ISC authorization via Rafe, it was still done by your orders.”

Put that way, the raid on the ISC office did sound like the sort of thing privateers were reputed to do.

“Legally, I’m not sure,” Stella went on. “If you hold this commission from Slotter Key, does that mean that anyone contracting with you—for military services anyway—is actually working for Slotter Key?”

Ky stared at her. “That can’t be right.” Dim memories of military law classes cluttered her mind. But they had never studied the legal ramifications of letters of marque, she was sure. “It’s not exactly a commission, anyway. They’re not paying me anything, and they’re not giving me specific orders. I can just trade if I want to…”

“But you don’t want to,” Stella said. “You want to protect and help family members, and you want to find out who attacked us, and you want to take them out. That’s what you said.”

“Yes…”

“I see conflicts of interest, Ky. Mind you, I’m completely in favor of rebuilding Vatta as a trading empire. Locating, helping, protecting our remaining family. Destruction to our enemies, all that. But when I consider this thing—” She nodded at the folder. “—I see problems you may not have considered. You have to decide whether you’re fighting for Vatta or Slotter Key, for instance.”

“Both,” Ky said. “The ISC thing affects both, surely.”

“It does now,” Stella agreed. “In the long run, though, those are two different interests, and you need to know which has priority. So do I.”

“You?”

“I am carrying your father’s implant, remember? The Vatta command dataset. If you consider the recovery of Vatta your first priority, then you are the right person to take possession of it. But if you rank Slotter Key’s interests above Vatta? Then I’m not sure.”

“I suppose you’re glad now that I haven’t put it in,” Ky said, astonishment and confusion putting an edge on her voice.

“Yes,” Stella said calmly. She sat back, folding her arms. “Until I knew about the letter of marque, I had no doubts. Now I do. My interest is entirely family, I assure you. I still believe, like Aunt Gracie, that you are the one person who can help Vatta survive, if it can be done at all. It will take all your ability, though, Ky. If Vatta is not your top priority, we’re doomed.”

“I saw this letter as giving me a better chance to save Vatta,” Ky said slowly. “Not a conflict of interest at all.”

“A tool?”

“Yes. I’ve always thought the interests of Vatta and Slotter Key ran together. Whatever I needed to do to help Vatta would in some way help Slotter Key.” Even as she said it, she realized how naïve it sounded. Certainly the government of Slotter Key had decided that its interests were separate from Vatta’s.

“For now, that may work,” Stella said. “Someday, though, those interests will be in conflict. You need to decide now which has priority, before you have to make that decision in a crisis.”

Quincy’s call to announce that the defensive suite installation was complete came as welcome interruption.

“You managed it without Toby’s help,” Ky said, half joking. Quincy didn’t laugh.

“The boy’s very smart,” she said. “Good with his hands, too. He was helping—it was that dratted dog. But yes, we’ve got it in. Whether or not it works…”

“I’ll tell our escort, and then we’ll test it,” Ky said. She called the bridge and had Lee contact Johannson.

“He says go ahead,” Lee said a few minutes later. “They’ll observe with their scans and let us know if it looks right from the outside.”

“Do the honors, Quincy,” Ky said. Quincy started the initiation sequence, and the defensive suite’s control board lit up, segment after segment showing green telltales.

“This over here is the active shield function,” Quincy said, pointing. “And this is the electronic countermeasures, here.”

“They say the shields are up and look good,” Lee reported from the bridge. “No gaps spotted, but they want me to roll her once to be sure they’ve scanned the entire hull.”

“Go ahead,” Ky said. “Can they tell anything about the ECM stuff?”

Another pause, then Lee said, “No, they say not without launching something at us, and they’d rather not.”

“I feel the same way,” Ky said. “We’ll have to take that part on trust, then. How about power consumption, Quincy?”

“Right on target,” Quincy said. “Our insystem has plenty of reserve power; it’s speed we can’t get out of her.”

“Good job, Quincy,” Ky said. “You and your crew should take a couple of shifts off, except for the usual.”

“Thanks, Captain, we’ll do that. This is a new one for me. Now, can I tell Martin to restow the cargo?”

“Yes—or rather, I’ll speak to him. I think we should keep access open to as much of this as possible, for repair in case of damage.”

“I thought the whole point of this was to prevent any damage,” Quincy said. “You aren’t planning to get into a space battle, are you?”

“Not if I can help it,” Ky said. “But dangerous times… it’s just a precaution.”

Martin and Alene had spent the time it took to install the defensive suite working out the most efficient way to restow the cargo. Ky looked at their figures, and agreed with Martin that the “odor barrier” crates should be readily accessible. She hoped they’d never need those mines, but if they did she wanted them easy to find and use.

Rafe returned to the ship shortly before the transition into FTL flight. Ky and Johannson had agreed that they should first check on an automated ansible in the next system over. The convoy captains accepted the course without comment, except to point out that there was no profit where there could be no trade. Mackensee personnel locked in the jump coordinates in the nav computers of all ships—someone could change it, but that would both break the contract and alert them that the ship was probably part of the conspiracy. Jump insertion went smoothly; they had planned a 13.2-hour jump to the neighborhood of the nearest automated ansible platform.

“I suppose you want me to check out the ansible itself?” Rafe asked. Ky nodded. “And how are you going to explain that one to the ship crews?”

“Your expertise in communications,” Ky said. “They know about some of that already.”

“Yes, but… last time it was just a simple file switch, or close enough they believed it was. This time, I have to get in there and muck with the hardware and the software. All of it proprietary, and how would even a renegade Vatta know that?”

“I’m sure you can come up with something,” Ky said.

He gave her a dark look, then shook his head. “You really are a piece of work, Ky—Captain. You should have been born into a pirate family, not a nice staid bunch of law-abiding traders.”

“As staid as the Dunbargers?” Ky asked.

“A hit, a palpable hit. All right, let’s see. After being booted out of the bosom of your family—our family—I managed to sucker ISC into hiring me for a time, then quit in disgust because they expected me to keep regular hours.” His face settled into a sullen expression that went perfectly with not wanting to work regular hours. “How’s that?”

“That works,” Ky said.

Within hours, that ansible’s message bins were unblocked, and contact restored with Lastway and other working ansibles.

“An easy fix,” Rafe said when he came back aboard. “Just as I said before, it’s a form of sabotage that’s quick, requires no special equipment, and is easy to reverse. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make impossible, so if the raiders come back, they can undo my fix quickly.”

“Would ISC reimburse you for fixing this, if they knew about it?” Ky asked.

“You want a bonus?”

“I’m thinking of the others in the convoy,” Ky said. “If there’s some profit in stopping to fix ansibles, they’ll be more willing to do more of them.”

“Ah. There might be, but I can’t promise. And calling from here would reveal where we are, which I’d consider a danger.”

“Raiders could follow us by the restoration of access, couldn’t they?”

“Yes… but we might be an ordinary ISC repair crew, too.”

Ky discussed their next destination with her Mackensee liaison. “We’d prefer to clear ansibles between Lastway and our home base,” Johannson said. “Of course, that’s subject to your priorities as long as we’re working for you, but there are several automated ansibles along the way, and some excellent market worlds for the others.”

“Let’s talk to them all,” Ky said. In conference, the other captains agreed.

In the next system, they found not only an automated and nonfunctional ansible, but also a civilian ship whose beacon carried the familiar Vatta tag, moving slowly along far from the ansible, as if transferring between jump points.

“She’s a Vatta ship,” Ky said. “We can’t ignore a Vatta ship.”

“Her beacon says she’s a Vatta ship,” Johannson said. “We could say we were, oh, Fitch’s Rangers… would that make us Fitch’s Rangers?”

“You have a database of ship registries,” Ky said. “What does her beacon ID say?”

“It agrees with the call signal, but that’s just common sense. That doesn’t mean she’s a Vatta ship, or commanded by a legitimate family member. What does your implant—oh, that’s right, you don’t have one.” This time the disapproval in his voice was clear.

“I’ll check with Stella,” Ky said. “She probably has the complete list.”

“She’d better. You hired us to protect you and the others in this convoy. All my instincts say that there’s something wrong here… it’s the classic pirate trick…”

“It’s one ship and she doesn’t scan armed,” Ky said. “You have two armed vessels…”

“Captain Vatta, you may have
almost
graduated from a military academy, and I will grant that you performed well under pressure at Sabine, but you do not know diddly-squat about threat analysis in real life. What if that ship is mined? What if that ship is stuffed with biologicals that could kill us all? I do not have a full hazmat team aboard, and I do not want to die—or see my people die—because I walked into a trap.”

Ky bit back the angry retort she wanted to make. “I appreciate your concern,” she said instead. “I have no intention of asking your people to risk themselves. But as you recall, contacting and aiding other Vatta family members is high on my priority list. I’ll go myself.”