Trading in Danger (25 page)

Aspergia
’s Captain Jemin, by contrast, had a wild bush of bright red hair and conveyed suppressed energy. He was talking fast before he even got to the seat Ky pointed out to him. “This is such an unusual situation—unprecedented in my experience and I daresay in yours. I can hardly wait for the ansibles to get back up so I can check that out. Whatever the mercs said, they must have blown them—who else could? Although, there was that case, was it eight standards ago? The one at Hall’s Landing? Just agricultural chemicals, didn’t they say? And your cargo was something agricultural, wasn’t it?” He had a high, slightly breathy voice and spoke in a rapid monotone that conveyed urgency in every phrase. Bright gray eyes, an almost fixed stare.

“Tractors,” Ky said. She spoke slowly, deliberately, trying to calm the man. “Implements, not chemicals.” Were the man’s pupils a normal size, or was he on something? She didn’t know; she didn’t like having to consider that.

“Well, but we have to do something, don’t we? I mean, we’re all civilians, traders… There’s no reason for them to intern our ships, is there? Can’t you just run us up to jump and get us out of this system, someplace we can file a complaint?”

“The mercenaries have two warships,” Ky said. “This ship has no weapons… trying to outrun them would be a very bad idea.” He didn’t need to know their FTL drive was inoperable.

“Oh. Well, I can see that. Yes. All right, then, I suppose we’re just stuck here for ten days. Of course, I don’t mean to cause you any trouble, Captain Vatta, but really—that Kristoffson person—he’s constantly talking, whining, complaining. It gets on my nerves…”

Jemin was getting on
her
nerves. “I’m sure it’s a difficult time for all of you—for all of us, actually,” Ky said, striving for an even tone, as if soothing a nervous animal. “Captain Kristoffson is probably concerned about his passengers.”

Jemin laughed harshly. “That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about sleeping on the floor, and having no private room, and how the rest of us are so uncultured… and anyway there’s nothing to do…”

“I’m sorry,” Ky said. “Though there’s always Captain Paison’s calisthenics group.”

“Oh, him,” Jemin said. “He’s so… so hearty. I was just wondering if you had any entertainment cubes… something relaxing, maybe? I have my portable reader, but they rushed us so to leave the ship that I left behind my collection of cubes…”

Jemin needed relaxing, that was obvious, but she didn’t think her collection of technical data cubes relating to this ship and Slotter Key commercial law were what Jemin had in mind.

“Sorry,” Ky said. “I will ask my crew what they have, when we have time.” She pushed back from the table and stood; Jemin clambered up slowly.

“I just wanted to say… this is really very inconvenient,” Jemin said, and then shambled away down the passage.

Ky agreed completely.
Inconvenient
barely covered it. And now she had Kristoffson, an interview she could predict would be unpleasant.

Sure enough, he came in haughty and annoyed, and left in the same mood. In between, he managed to complain about everything. The food, the water, the limitation of showers, the lack of privacy, the lack of entertainment, the attitudes and behavior of the other passengers, on and on. Ky listened until he ran down.

“It’s a difficult situation for all of us…” she began.

“You can’t pretend it’s as bad for you,” Kristoffson said. “You at least have your own cabin—I suppose even on this tub the captain has some privacy…” He thumped the table with his fist. “It’s outrageous, that’s what it is. Ten days! What if the mercs just run off and leave us to the untender mercies of the ISC?”

“Why would they do that?” Ky asked.

“Because they don’t want to be held responsible for blowing the ansibles,” Kristoffson said promptly. “Look—if they go—you have to get us out of here—”

“It’s much safer to do as we’re told,” Ky said. “They have weapons; we don’t.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Kristoffson said, throwing up his hands. He stamped back to the passenger hold without saying more, but Ky could almost see the unspoken words hovering over his angry head.

Several days passed without incident: Kristoffson made no more complaints, though he glowered at Ky when she made her daily visit to the cargo holds to meet with the assembled captains. She wondered if Paison had spoken to him, or if he had decided for himself that complaining didn’t work. Paison always smiled pleasantly, as did Lucas; Opunts remained a polite but remote enigma; Jemin now drooped in dramatic boredom. Their various crewpersons stayed politely back while she was there, not interfering. The environmental system continued to hold within its design limits.

Still she felt uneasy. If excessive trust had been her problem, now was the hour for suspicion. On the third day, she spoke to her senior crew.

“One thing—you all have implants, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“You know I don’t, anymore—the head injury was bad enough they had to extract mine and use it for a reconstruction matrix.” That sounded marginally better than “memory download.”

“So I’m limited in interface with ship systems to the earbug, and I can’t sleep with it in.”

“So you want us to be especially vigilant while you’re asleep?” Beeah said.

“Not just that. If Captain Paison is wrong, and Kristoffson isn’t just a blowhard, he has not only his engineering section head and number two, but his communications officer and a junior com tech. If he’s sneaky, he might think of suborning the internal communications so our sensors don’t actually tell us what’s really going on. My implant had special circuits for that—do yours?”

“Not mine…”Quincylooked thoughtful.

“Mine either,”Garysaid. “It must have been an override thing for captains only.”

“I was afraid of that,” Ky said. “And we don’t have a dedicated com tech aboard. What about our newest crew? Are any of them specialists in internal systems?”

“I’m afraid not,”Quincysaid.

Ky rubbed her head with both hands. “As I see it, we have two real weak spots. First, someone might steal the command wand: I
am
sleeping with that, and our passengers are locked in. So I don’t expect that. Second, someone could reprogram the system to answer a different code. This ship doesn’t have some of the internal security features of larger ones; configuring it for a last voyage with a small crew left us vulnerable to a situation no one anticipated.”

“Nor could have,”Quincysaid. “You can’t be faulted for that, Captain.”

“I’m not feeling guilty, Quince, just concerned. How do we ensure that no one can tinker with the system and take it over? We’ve got them physically separated… but almost all of them have implants and I don’t know how theirs operate, what their limits are.”

“Mmmph. I didn’t think of their implants being able to function with this ship.”

“Neither did I until I watched Paison direct his work party without saying a word aloud. I knew they had the implants—the bulge is visible—but the possibility of their being active here slipped by me.”

“Manual check of all systems, then. As continuous as we can make it… which isn’t very, Captain. I have only my five, plus me. Hospedin can help monitor drives, but I wouldn’t think he could do general engineering…”

“Right.”

“Couldn’t you put the internal system on voice recognition control, at least as a requirement for changing parameters?”

“I could, but then if something happens to me—and it already has—you’re in trouble. Besides, if they are up to something, how hard would it be for them to get a voice pattern off me? They may already have one.” Ky shook her head. “No, we need a better way to check the integrity of the system. If you think of anything let me know. Otherwise, keep very close watch. I don’t actually expect trouble this shift—if Kristoffson does something, I think it’ll be in the next day or so, not now. But I don’t want to be caught off guard.”

If only they had weapons, real weapons. She asked Mehar to show her how to shoot the pistol bow. “We’ll start the easy way,” Mehar said, piling pillows behind her practice target. “I used to shoot down in the cargo hold, but this will do. Here—”

It was absurdly easy; Mehar loaded the four-bolt reserve with the color-tipped practice bolts, put a bolt in the groove and pulled back the cocking lever before she handed it to Ky. “Point and click,” Mehar said. Ky pulled the trigger and the little bow went
thip
very quietly and across the compartment a bolt stood out of the target. Ky pulled the lever again, and shot again. That bolt buried itself in one of the pillows.

“No recoil,” Ky said. “I compensated for something that wasn’t there.”

“Again,” Mehar said. “Be sure the prod’s horizontal.”

Ky shot again, and again, and when she had shot all five bolts, she looked at the pattern. Nothing to be proud of, at that distance, but four of the bolts were in the target. Mehar pulled them out.

“I always load in the same color sequence,” Mehar said. “That way I can easily tell which one went where.”

“What’s the maximum range on this thing?” Ky asked.

“Depends if you want to puncture something or just kiss it. And of course what gravity you’re working in. For target shooting, twenty meters is about the limit. Outdoors, you can treat it like artillery—point it up in the air—and get somewhat more distance, but no accuracy. Pistol bows don’t have a lot of draw weight, so they can’t give much velocity.”

“What I want to do is look dangerous,” Ky said. She hoped looking dangerous would be enough. She had reloaded, and now aimed and fired again, as fast as she could throw the cocking lever. “How was that?”

“Pretty good. I might be a hair faster but not much. The best you can hope for with this one is a shot every couple of seconds. You can see why they aren’t military weapons for anything but very specialized uses. Slow rate of fire and lousy penetration.” Mehar grinned as Ky loaded and shot again. “You have a knack for this, Captain.”

“Target practice with pistols,” Ky said. “This is more sensitive to tilt, though.”

“Yes. At short ranges there’s more loft than with most firearms—that’s due to the slower speed of the bolt—so if you tilt it, it really goes off to the side. Some of us use an offset grip to help out on that, because the natural thing is to hold the hand slightly tilted. The long crossbows are easier to keep level because of the longer stock.”

Ky looked at the weapon in her hand. “They just don’t look very dangerous,” Ky said. “And what we need is the appearance of danger, more than the danger itself.”

“I dunno,” Mehar said. “A lot of people associate these with spy stories, where they’re usually carried by the bad guys and the bolts are always tipped with something poisonous or corrosive.” She pulled out another pack of bolts. “And these can kill, at close range. I use the marker-tips for shipboard practice, but I have the competition bolts with me.”

Ky looked at the short, stout bolts and touched the conical steel tips. “Sharp enough. What will it go through?”

“Not military armor, of course. I’ve never tried it on law-enforcement vests, so I don’t know—rumor says it depends on whether they use the kind that sense impact velocity or not. But it goes right through clothes. And of course skin.”

“Wish it looked nastier,” Ky said. “My feeling is, these are too slow and we have too few of them to fight off an actual mutiny, but if we can startle or cow the instigators—”

“Well, I do have a pack of broadpoints.” Mehar dug deeper into her kit. “Here.” She handed over the pack of bolts tipped with what looked to Ky like archaeological exhibits—jagged, many-pointed.

“These look dangerous, all right,” Ky said. She touched the points lightly. “Did you ever
use
those, Mehar?”

“Used to do a little pot-hunting back home.” Mehar shook her head. “Thing is, Captain, none of this has the stopping power of firearms, but pain has a stopping power of its own. Less, when someone’s really engaged in a fight, but if they’re still standing there making threats…”

“I hope we don’t have to use them.”

Nonetheless, she practiced until—down the longest length of a passage afforded—she could group the five marker bolts in the innermost ring of the target. It would have been fun to have something like this back on Corleigh when she was a kid, instead of the toy longbows that invariably got caught in the undergrowth of the tik plantations where she and her brothers had played. She could have sneaked up on them, left colored dots on their jackets.

She pulled her mind back to the present. This was not a game. If she had to use the weapon, it would be for real. She hoped the presence of the mercenary ships—that obvious threat—would keep her passengers from trying anything.

Ky glared at the scan screens. For tactical situations, she’d been taught, the basic scans were almost useless because of long and varying scan delays.
Glennys Jones
didn’t mount any of the equipment that would have let her keep track of where the warships were in anything approaching real time, nor did the ship have the advanced AI to integrate all the data and present a combined plot. It was reasonably good at noticing when things changed, and excellent in the things any cargo ship needed, such as micromillimeter accuracy when docking.

How, she wondered, had the early space travelers ever managed to get from one planet to another in the same system?

Sometime ago—she wasn’t even sure how long—one of the warships had been near Secundus and now (if her antiquated system had identified it correctly) it was near Prime. The other one was a long way away from either.

“I’ll bet it
was
an ISC probe,” she heard Lee say. He and Zelda had been arguing over the temporary appearance of something small and distant, which Ky herself would ordinarily have considered a system glitch. She had seen it only on the recording, where it looked too small to be any kind of ship.

On the fourth day, she had another message from the mercenaries.

“Captain Vatta, we’re leaving the system for a few days. The situation is complex; we need to communicate with the ISC about the ansible destruction. We expect to be back in ample time to pick up the passengers on day ten—”

“Leaving—” Ky’s stomach clenched. She had trusted them… she had depended on them, on the threat of their weaponry.

“Yes. Just continue as you are; we will inform Vatta Transport and your passengers’ parent companies of your safety via ISC contacts once we’re in a system with functional ansibles. You’re not having any problems, are you? Everyone behaving? Environmental system coping?”

“So far.” Should she tell them about her concerns? Or would that be seen as immature, weak, panicky?

“Good. We expect to be back in just a few days, as I said…”

A faint hissing interrupted; she knew what that meant. The warships were outbound fast, possibly already microjumping toward safe long-jump parameters. And expectations, in deep space travel, still outran performance… they might be back, or they might not, if they—and she—were unlucky.

Still… they were in a relatively safe situation. If the mercs did not return, she could get her ship back to Sabine Prime, or close enough for Sabine’s emergency service ships to come remove the passengers.

So… why did she feel as if someone had just poured a jug of ice water down her spine?

Less than an hour later, Captain Lucas called her from the passengers’ quarters. “We want to talk to you,” he said. “All us captains.”

The ice-water trickle turned to a torrent. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

“We know the mercs have left. Now’s our chance to get back to our ships, get on our way. You can take us back…”

“No,” Ky said.

“You didn’t know they’d left?”

“I knew,” she said. “They’re coming back.”

“I doubt it,” Lucas said. “They’ve probably stripped the cargo off our ships and made off with it, damned pirates that they are.”

“They’re coming back,” Ky said. She wished she was entirely sure.

“You don’t know that!” Kristoffson interrupted. “You can’t possibly be sure! You have an obligation to take care of us—moral and legal, under the Code. They aren’t here; they don’t have a gun pointed at you; you have no excuse for holding us against our will.”

That might be true, technically, but Ky was not going to give in to Kristoffson. “You’re passengers in a time of war,” she said. “It’s your duty—”

“Oh, stuff some figs!” Lucas said. In the corner of the screen, Paison’s mouth quirked. “It’s not a war if one of the armies runs away…”

“And just how did you know the mercenaries had left?” Ky asked.

They looked at each other first, then back at the vid pickup. “It’s our… er… implants,” said Jemin. He was not the one Ky expected to answer. Kristoffson glared at him, but Jemin didn’t wilt. “We could pick up signals…”

If they could pick up scan signals, or communications signals, on their implants… they might be able to contact ships without her knowledge. Ky shivered, and hoped it hadn’t shown.

“I can’t get you out of the system,” she said firmly. “Our FTL drive isn’t working. As for returning you to your ships, I don’t have enough fuel for the insystem drive to do that.” She did have enough to get them to Prime, but that did not fulfill her contract. Nor was Prime safe.

Their voices clashed: disbelief, anger, determination to override her. Ky tapped the mike, and they quieted. “Believe it or not, as you choose,” she said. “But the fact is, I’m not jumping you out of this system because I can’t. And I’m not wasting what insystem fuel I have running around trying to take you all back to your ships. We’re just going to ride this out for the next five or six days until the mercs come back.”

“You’re scared,” Kristoffson said. His voice dripped scorn. “You’re just too young, and too scared, to understand that this is our one opportunity… Whatever happens now, Vatta, it’s your fault.”

The vid clicked off, from their end. Ky stared at the blank screen thoughtfully, then called Gary Tobai and explained the situation. “I don’t know the range and capabilities of their implants,” she said finally. “But we must—somehow—secure the ship’s control systems.”

“Right,” he said. He sounded tired and grim both. “Quincy’s got all the engineering personnel on six-on, six-off; we’re doing our best, but—you know, from inside those cargo holds, they don’t have far to go to access the linkages with hardware, and that doesn’t even address wireless attacks from their implants.”