Marque and Reprisal (26 page)

“Thanks. It’ll depend on how scared the remaining traders are about attacks in dock.”

Ky made it to the bridge before Rafe was through talking to their liaison. He looked grim; Lt. Commander Johannson looked satisfied.

“We’d like to have your… agent… aboard for this,” Johannson said. “As he has ISC authorization.”

“Rafe?” Ky said, looking at him.

Rafe grimaced. “My value, to you and ISC both, is at least partly in my being known only as a ne’er-do-well. If I’m part of the hit—”

“I didn’t mean part of the team,” Johannson said. “In fact we’d rather not have you; we have enough unknowns in the equation already. But aboard ship here, in direct communication, ensuring that our people got the right… mmm… evidence.”

“Then only a shipload of your people would know who I am,” Rafe said. “And how many is that?”

“Do you really think—” Johannson began, then stopped. “All right. I see your point. Even if they don’t know your name, information could be stripped from them. Disguise?”

Rafe gave Ky a strange look. “Could I pass as Vatta, Captain?”

“The only Vattas declared aboard are me, Stella, and Toby,” Ky said. “You’d have to have been… oh… hiding out on Allway, or something. Maybe a Vatta ne’er-do-well? Old Uncle Jonas, ditched from the family for… I don’t know…”

“Being a ne’er-do-well,” Rafe said. “It doesn’t have to be specific, whether I got the second upstairs maid pregnant with twins or embezzled to cover my gambling debts. Years ago and no one knew it; I’d been erased from the family tree. Of course that doesn’t explain how I know what I know.”

“Bad boys don’t explain,” Ky said.

Rafe shook his head. “You are entirely too knowing for a young sprig of Vatta virtue, Captain. I begin to think you’ve spent some time in the back alleys of the universe yourself.”

“So… is that the story?” Johannson said, clearly impatient with their badinage.

“All right. I’ll use the same cover name,” Rafe said. “I was suddenly recalled to a sense of family duty when the Vatta ship blew up at Allway—or Stella seduced me, whichever is more believable—and Captain Vatta here put my nefarious skills to good use.”

“Coming aboard may be a problem,” Ky said. “You know—well, maybe you don’t—but we don’t have a standard passenger lock, only the emergency.” At least the hatch would work smoothly now.

“We’ll send a pod,” Johannson said. “Do you need a suit as well?”

“I have a suit,” Rafe said. “I might just mention how much I hate wearing it.”

“You might get yourself into it and start checking it out,” Ky said.

“Give some women command and they go… all right, I’m going.”

Ky turned to the vidscreen. “Any progress on the convoy specs, Commander?”

“Yes: we can handle four ships, including yours. I’ll transmit the list of those we think acceptable, ranked by our preference, which of course need not be yours. And there’s a red list, of ships we would not accept.”

“Fine. I’ll start contacting captains at once.”

Captain Solein Harper of
My Bess
looked just as forbidding as the first time Ky had talked to him, but at least he didn’t cut off the contact the moment he saw her face.

“You’ve probably heard we’ve hired Mackensee for our next voyage,” she said.

“I heard,” he said. “Two warships to a trader is pretty hefty protection, I’d think.”

“So it is,” Ky said. “Would you be interested in convoy space?”

“Convoy?”

“Mackensee assures me that they can protect four ships in fairly close convoy.”

“Where are you headed?” He wouldn’t have asked that much if he hadn’t wanted to come, she knew.

“Haven’t decided yet,” Ky said. “Where were you bound?”

“Nowhere until I can be sure of communications, but I’m eating up profit sitting here.”

“Communications here will improve shortly,” Ky said, hoping she was right. “If you’re interested, a convoy share will be one-quarter the escort cost, minus the Vatta basic contract. Ten thousand.”

“Ten thousand! What, you think I haul platinum or something? Eight.”

“Nine,” Ky said. “For you.”

“Done,” he said. He would have gone to ten, she knew, if she’d pushed. But nine was a big help, and his goodwill might be a bigger one. “In Vatta accounts here?”

“On safe arrival,” Ky said.

“Ah.” His face relaxed; now he looked tough but not vicious. “That’s honorably done, Captain Vatta. You’ll want another one or two, will you?”

“You have someone to recommend?”

“Polly Tendel—independent, fairly new, broke off from Dillon four years ago. Seems a decent sort, kind of rough around the edges.”

Ky glanced at the Mackensee list. Tendel was there, though not in the first five. “All right. You want to contact her?”

“I can… same terms?”

“Yes.”

A half hour later, Ky had the rest of the convoy lined up: Harper’s
My Bess,
Tendel’s
Lacewing,
and Sindarin Gold’s
Beauty of Bel
. All the ships had passed muster with Mackensee, and—according to the transmissions from the station—all were in the process of clearing for departure. As the contract specified, Mackensee had control of the convoy, and thus the rendezvous point. Ky let them handle it. She spoke to Rafe before he transferred to the
Gloucester,
then tried not to hover over her engineering crew as they finished installing the new defensive suite. She could not resist loading the installation manual to her own workstation, where she could follow their progress without interfering.

She caught herself yawning, and remembered that many hours ago she had been wishing for time to take a nap before the Mackensee officers came aboard. Had she really been awake that long? Another jaw-cracking yawn, and she decided that
awake
might not be the right term. She called down to Engineering.

“What now?” Quincy asked.

“Sorry,” Ky said. “Just letting you know I’ll be in my cabin, hopefully asleep. You need a break, too.”

“I had one, and it’s about time you did. I’ll put anything new on your board.”

Stella, when Ky came into her cabin, said the same thing. “And someone will call you if they need you; you know that.”

“Yes, Cousin,” Ky said. She should shower… but she was on the bed, asleep, before that thought ended.

When the call came, she’d had almost five hours of sleep. It was Rafe, on the Mackensee ship.

“I’m going to have to go with them,” he said. “I can’t… explain how certain things work, and how to secure the evidence needed without compromising my other oaths.” He grimaced. “Not as part of the… er… main team, but in a separate group. These people don’t trust me, which I suppose is natural, so they won’t let me go to the local office alone.”

“If it’s necessary,” Ky said.

“Oh, it’s necessary.” Rafe glanced aside; though only his face appeared on the screen, Ky was sure he was conveying the presence of an auditor.

“Well, then…” Ky couldn’t think what to say.
Be careful
seemed both unnecessary and insulting.

“I believe Lieutenant Commander Johannson wants to speak to you,” Rafe said, turning away.

“Captain Vatta,” Johannson said, coming into pickup range. “The other ships in the convoy are now beyond primary danger range, headed for rendezvous. Your representative has convinced us there is sufficient reason for the actions planned. I must now formally ask if your orders concerning ISC personnel remain?”

“Yes,” Ky said.

“All right; just checking. We’re scheduled to start the operation within the hour, with the transfer of your representative and certain other personnel.”

“What’s the plan?” Ky asked.

“You mean in detail?”

“Yes,” Ky said.

Johannson frowned. “It’s need-to-know, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t think you should be too concerned—”

“We studied this in the Academy,” Ky said. “I’m just curious to know how you’d go about it.”

He looked askance, eyebrows high. “You studied how to set up a take-out?”

“Yes. It was part of special ops, level two.”

“Slotter Key must be an interesting place,” he said. “Suppose you tell me how you’d set it up, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

Ky thought back to Colonel Aspin’s lecture. “You can do it with a minimal team, if you have to,” she said. “Sniper and spotter. Better is a half squad, and better yet a squad. Squad leader commands the squad, but the spotter ranks the sniper. Ideally, you’ve got plenty of intel about the area. You have routes in and out planned. You are hot on com, half the squad spread, covering the routes, the other half in reserve.”

“Hmmm. So… what do you know of the station manager’s routine?”

“Not much. I know the ISC offices are on Hub Three, and I’d presume the manager’s would be the most secure…” Rafe knew. They knew Rafe knew; they had Rafe aboard with them.

“Almost. Quite central, anyway. He lives on the same hub, two sectors away. Travels any of five routes, all distinct, and has staggered random times for arrival and departure. Once he’s past the first intersection, he can be almost anywhere.”

“Tagger? We were told to tag if possible.”

“Tags are traceable. We prefer CAID—you know what that is?”

Ky did. It was considered the latest and best method of remote identification. “So you’d have a plan, and internal line of travel, from each of his known alternate routes, plus a way of detecting if he’s off track and getting someone to him. Here, you’d probably use your people who were stationed here in the recruiting and consultancy positions. They know things about the station that aren’t in the public specs, I’d bet.”

“They do,” Johannson said, without elaborating further.

“Now you need some kind of disturbance,” Ky said. “Something to cover the moments around the hit, give the sniper time to break down the weapon and move out of the range of concern. Lots of ways to do that, but there’s another place your local staff could help. Bet they’ve made friends with people onstation.”

“You do have the main elements,” he said. “But I still see no reason for you to know the specific details. One of the rules you haven’t quoted at me yet is, there’s no such thing as secure communications.”

“You’re right,” Ky said. She didn’t want him to be right. She wanted to see it all, learn it, but in this instance
learning
could be followed by
dying
. Though she was paying for them to take the risk, that didn’t justify making it bigger. She left it there, not asking how big a team would go with Rafe to secure evidence and get the ansible working properly again.

Hours crawled by. She didn’t know when to start worrying, when to stop worrying. They were still in close enough to pick up some near-com chatter, but Ky could make little out of it. Ship to ship, the convoy reported in as they cleared local traffic control. Ky, on her own bridge, waited for what she could not really anticipate… except trouble. Going back to sleep was not an option. Instead, she munched on food she barely tasted, and tried to concentrate on the operating manual for the defensive suite.

Finally the READY light on her Mackensee-installed secure com winked; Ky keyed in access. “Got ’im,” was the terse response. “Clean, employee’s agent reports ansible hookups restored, and backfiles accessed. Estimates less than fifteen minutes to open ansible contacts and file dumping.”

“If anyone else has a working ansible,” Ky said. “The backfiles should be interesting, though.”

“We already have someone working on ours,” Johannson said.

Lee turned to her. “Captain, the Lastway ansible reports eight blocks of stored messages for Vatta personnel… haul or wipe?”

“Haul ’em all,” Ky said. “Somewhere in there might be a clue to what exactly is going on.”

Ship chatter rose around them as the Lastway ISC operation opened the equivalent of vast ears and tongue and began responding to everyone. Evidently Vatta messages hadn’t been the only ones sequestered.

“Hailing Vatta ship
Gary Tobai,
“came from Tendel on
Lacewing
. “What happened to the ansible? We’ve got a mass of backfile messages.”

“Seems to be working better,” Ky said. “That’s all I know. We picked up eight blocks ourselves.”

“Coincidence bothers me, Captain Vatta.” Tendel’s narrow scarred face tightened. “I prefer no coincidences.”

“Seems a good one, to me,” Ky said. “We leave, things get better. Might mean less trouble ahead.”

“And maybe I don’t need convoy protection.”

“Maybe not. But you signed a contract.”

“So I did. Well, people always said trading with a Vatta you had to watch your credit balance. I wonder if this is happening everywhere or just here?”

“Time will tell,” Ky said.

Ten minutes. Twenty. Ky forced herself not to pace back and forth.

The secure line blinked again. She picked it up. “Yes?”

“Team’s out safely, including your man. Genius with the com stuff, our fellas say. Everyone’s on course; the squad’ll be picked up by our courier.”

Ky went to tell Stella that Rafe was safe. She took along the eight blocks of back messages; some were sure to be proprietary information, and she couldn’t ask anyone else on the ship to go through them.

“How are they sorted?” Stella asked.

“By date, I think,” Ky said. “I haven’t really looked yet, but isn’t that how backfiles are usually organized?”

“We can hope,” Stella said. “Have a spare reader?”

“Use this one,” Ky said, nodding to her desk. “We can isolate it from the rest of the ship.”

“Oh. Of course.” Stella loaded the first cube. “Mmm. I haven’t done the dating conversions yet, but I think this is from before the trouble started, which would mean the ISC manager here was fiddling with Vatta data in preparation… let me see…” She pointed to the screen. “Just the kind of routine notice Vatta HQ sends—sent—every five days to all ports. Corporate news update: no hint of trouble.”

Ky looked at the bulletin, its format familiar to her for years, the linked VT in blue and red, the summary of tons shipped, percent on-time deliveries, percent expedited-shipment bonuses earned, lists of retirements, promotions, new assignments. Her own name leapt out at her: the change in ship name from
Glynnis Jones
to
Gary Tobai
as the result of “uncontrolled conditions,” the successful delivery to Belinta, and her promotion from contingent captain to list captain. Had it been her status as contingent captain that had convinced Furman he could order her around in the Sabine mess?