Marque and Reprisal (28 page)

“Stopping at all is risking us. Doing anything but going back into jump is risking us.” He wiped his forehead, though he wasn’t sweating. “Look… you’re making the classic mistake that bold youngsters make. You overvalue your own resources and you don’t see all the problems. Did you ever read that old chestnut about the young officer trying to interdict a river crossing?”

“
The Defense of Duffer’s Drift,
” Ky said.

“Yes. The problem is, you don’t get do-overs, in dreams or otherwise. Maybe the farm family really is loyal—but you can’t take the chance. Maybe this ship really is your family’s, and everyone on her is loyal and honest—but you can’t take the chance.”

“Actually I can,” Ky said. “But I see that I can’t ask you to. So you carry on to the next jump point, and I’ll match courses and see what’s what.”

“You have lost your mind,” Johannson said. “We can’t let you do that; we’ve contracted to protect you.”

Ky choked back the
You can’t stop me
that came automatically and said instead, “Look. We want to unblock this ansible. We’ll just put Rafe on it, get that job done, and give this other ship a call, see what she does, all right?”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Maybe. But it was in my mission priorities.”

“I know that, but—” A deep sigh. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll support through the ansible repair. Then we’ll escort the convoy just outside the system and stand by in case of trouble. With an open ansible and only a few hours’ transit time, we should be close enough.”

“Fine,” Ky said.

When she called the crew together to tell them what was going on, Martin looked grave. “I have to say I agree with the mercs,” he said. “If you’ll take my advice—”

“Not if it means running away without finding out if a Vatta ship needs our help.”

“That wasn’t it. But have the defensive suite on, and keep the drives warm, even if you decide to match courses. Someone alert at the scans around the clock. And a plan for what to do if we’re attacked. Boarded.”

“A plan—”

“Who goes where and does what. That kind of thing.”

“Is this something you—”

“Ma’am, my expertise is in security, not full-out combat. I can suggest some things, but whether they’d work, I don’t know. And as for ship-to-ship combat, I can’t help you.”

“Get your suggestions in order, then,” Ky said. She had thought of a sudden attack, the ship being blown, but… boarded? Maybe she should still take Johannson’s advice and run for the jump point. But that left a Vatta ship here alone, a Vatta crew who might even, if they’d been in FTL space on a long jump, have no warning that they were in danger. “It’s going to take us several days to get closer to her.”

Martin nodded.

Fair Kaleen
had the Vatta blue-and-red logo on the hull, but she looked battered by years of space debris. No weapons showed on the defensive suite’s analysis screen. Her crew had given no sign that they were aware of other ships in the same system, which was sloppy at best. Ky pursed her lips. Ships of that class were brought in for cleaning and repair every two years, at which time the logo was freshly painted. Ordinary light shielding protected it for that interval.

“Stella?”

“Don’t look at me. I’m not ship crew.”

“Quincy, I’m going to transfer an external feed to your board,” Ky said. “What do you think?”

“
Fair Kaleen
… haven’t crossed paths with that one in decades,” Quincy said. “She’s one of ours, right enough, but I don’t know what route she’s on. Looks a bit battered; that logo should’ve been touched up before now.”

“Well,” Ky said, and sat motionless, trying to think things through.
Fair Kaleen
had been a Vatta ship, might be one now, should be one again, since Vatta needed every ship it could muster. If someone else had taken a Vatta ship—one of her ships, she caught herself thinking—she could take it back. “Let’s give her a call,” she said, and nodded to Lee.

Fair Kaleen
answered the hail with commendable promptness, and in moments her captain was online. Osman Vatta, his broadcast ID stated; stocky and dark, his black hair liberally salted with gray, he looked at Ky with an expression she could not quite interpret. “Whose are you?” he asked.

“Whose?”

“Whose kid. I’m sorry, you’re a captain, but to me, you’re a kid. I was just wondering whose.”

“Gerard’s,” Ky said. When he still looked blank, she added, “Gerard Avondetta Vatta…”

“Oh… old Moneybags Gerry.” He gave a harsh snort of laughter. “Gods, girl, you don’t look anything like Gerry. Luckily.”

Very few people, most of them now dead, had called her father
Gerry
. And she didn’t like his laugh.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, sobering. “I didn’t mean to make fun of him, but… he always was a bit stuffy. So, he sent you out to straighten out this mess, eh?”

“Mess?” Ky said. Something was very wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what.

“This whole thing with the banks,” Osman said. “Credit and all. I mean, he is chief high financial muckety-muck, so it makes sense that you being his daughter—”

He didn’t know. He didn’t know or he was a far better faker than she thought he was. “That’s the ansibles,” Ky said. “When ISC gets them back up—”

“Not what my fella back on Harmon told me. Said someone was going after Vatta, and our credit was shot.”

“Did your
fella
describe what
going after
meant?”

“Said someone had taken potshots at Vatta ships. Made me nervous, that did.”
Nervous
was not the word Ky would have chosen to describe his expression. Tense. Alert. But nervous?

She should tell him, but she was reluctant and didn’t understand why.

“Look, as you’re old Gerry’s kid—daughter, I mean—you can clear up the financial end, can’t you? Talk to the bankers and such? I have a load of cargo, good stuff, too—”

“Where was it bound? What route are you on?”

His gaze wavered. “Um… well, you know, I’m kind of independent. Experience… family connections…”

“Been a while since you came in for refit, hasn’t it?” Ky said, forcing sympathy into her tone.

“Oh, the ship’s fine. No problems there. It’s just… I can’t draw on company funds, they tell me, on account of whatever this mess is.”

Stranger and stranger. Not all Vatta captains were on fixed routes, but most of them were: profit lay in reliability. Senior captains vied for the most profitable routes, wanted the least variance in their schedules. And while this man looked like a Vatta, they weren’t the only family in the known universe with those features, that coloring. He had shown some knowledge of her family, but only what an outsider could have picked up from public sources. He had cargo… he could sell the cargo, set up a ship account… she’d done that.

Ky touched the control requesting an emergency interruption. Almost immediately, a red light flashed on her board, winking urgently.

She looked down, then back up at the com screen. “Excuse me, I’ve got a problem here—I’ll be right back.” She cut the connection, and opened the internal com. “Anyone get anything on this one?”

Stella spoke up. “The ship’s on a list from ten, fifteen years back as active, but on current lists as an adjunct.”

“Which is?”

“I’m not sure. It might be undercover work or something. I was on an adjunct payroll for a year or so. Osman… I’m fairly sure he must be Lazlo Vatta’s grandson, though there’s another Osman… how old do you think he is? Apparent age, or was that a disguise?”

“Voice analysis suggests sixties,” Rafe spoke up. “There’s that little burr—of course, he could be a heavy drinker or addicted to something that’s aged his voice.”

“That’d be Lazlo’s grandson. He’s not on the current captain list, Ky,” Stella said. “I can’t get into the old personnel stuff—it’s in the command dataset.”
The one you didn’t install
was unsaid but clearly communicated.

“A Vatta remittance man,” Rafe said in smug tone that made Ky want to hit him. “Skeleton in the Vatta cupboard.”

“So… why’s he in a Vatta ship?” Ky asked.

“Adjunct,” Rafe said. “They let him take a ship, but he’s not authorized refit, and I’ll bet he’s not authorized access to company funds, except his remittance. He sounds like a con man to me. He’s trying one on—he knows headquarters is down, he doesn’t know we have a command dataset.”

Martin said, “I don’t like the whole setup. He sounds too glib, and I find it hard to believe his crew didn’t pick us up on scan a long time ago. We haven’t tested the defensive suite against concealed weaponry; the mercs weren’t trying to hide theirs.”

“Quincy,” Ky said. The senior Engineering watch were all below, by Martin’s plan. When the old woman answered, she said, “Did you ever hear of an Osman Vatta? Related to old Lazlo?”

Quincy’s gasp was clearly audible. “That bastard? What’s he done now?”

“Well, he claims to be captain of
Fair Kaleen,
which right now is matching courses about a hundred klicks away. I gather you know something about him?”

“Rotten little devil,” Quincy said. “Smooth as an egg, and no morals at all. Fools you because he’s not overtly mean, but he doesn’t care for anything but himself and doesn’t see why anyone would.”

“Our defensive suite says he’s unarmed,” Ky said. “I don’t see he can do us any great harm—”

“Don’t bet on it,” Quincy said. “If he’s here and talking to you, then he sees a profit to himself in it. Figure that out and however slimy it seems… that’s what he’s up to.”

“Here in the middle of nowhere,” Ky mused. “What is he doing here anyway? Just randomly jumping from one unoccupied system to another? He’s a long way from any regular Vatta route.”

“Trouble,” Quincy said. “He’s trouble, through and through.”

“Quince—what did he do? Any specifics?”

“Well. I was only aboard a ship with him once. He’d gotten in a fairly serious scrape his apprentice voyage—gambling debts he tried to cover with the ship’s account. His father—Lazlo’s son, Benalj that would have been—hauled him home and supposedly straightened him out. He was in his twenties when I ran into him again. I was engineering second that voyage, pulled off my regular ship because their first was injured. He was third in command; I heard scuttlebutt that he was under some suspicion of having done something earlier in the trip. But he was a Vatta; the idea was to straighten him out. Well… among other things he liked pretty faces, didn’t matter what gender, and he was putting moves on an Engineering junior. I told him off for it, and he tried to bribe me.”

“Bribe
you
!” Ky could not imagine that.

“Oh, yes,” Quincy said. “I wasn’t a gray-haired great-granny back then. He didn’t fancy me, I don’t think, but he was willing to try, if it would shut me up. It didn’t. He tried to get me fired for insubordination; the captain wouldn’t hear of it, and I watched my back very carefully the rest of the voyage. Good thing, too, as there were several accidents that could’ve been fatal. His father died young.”

“So…” The knot in Ky’s stomach tightened. “It may not be an accident that he’s here, or that he wants to travel with us.”

“I don’t see how he could have figured out where we’d be,” Quincy said. “That much could be accidental…” She didn’t sound as if she believed it.

“Jump options from Lastway… how many were there?” Stella asked.

“It’s not that.” Ky’s mind raced, throwing up an image of their route since leaving Lastway. “If they have those shipboard ansibles Rafe mentioned, and they’ve tracked us by the restored ansible functions, then
here
is the next logical place for us to go. Another node in the web, a mostly uninhabited system with multiple jump points.”

“Couldn’t we intercept their communications?”

“No more than with any ansible,” Rafe said. “And thank you for sharing that little secret with everyone, Captain.”

“You undoubtedly have others I don’t even know,” Ky said. “And that one, if it’s operational, isn’t going to be secret for long. Once others realize that the only way for certain things to happen is ship-mounted instant communications, they’ll deduce its existence.”

“I suppose. I still think—”

“Think it later. The question is, what do we do now? If I refuse to talk to him again, he’ll know we know something’s wrong.”

“Wouldn’t you? He’ll expect you to have an implant. Surely that would tell you he’s not on the main list.”

“I guess he can’t tell I don’t…” A germ of an idea sprouted. She went back to the exterior com. “Sorry,” she said to Osman. “We’ve got this pet someone brought aboard, and it keeps getting into trouble.”

“A pet? You let your crew have pets?” The tone carried the implication that only young, inexperienced, sentimental captains allowed pets aboard.

“Special case,” Ky said. She could feel her neck getting hot. “But back to your problem… what do you understand is going on?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Frankly, I’ve been out on my own, pretty far out, not paying much attention to what’s going on back home. But it sounded like trouble, so I came back to see what I could do…”

To help or scavenge? That was the question. Quincy’s story was probably true, if this was the same man, but twenty years and more had tamed many a wild boy, her father always said. We don’t blame people for who they were, if they act well now, her mother had insisted. She wondered what Rafe would be like in twenty years and pushed that thought away.

“It’s pretty bad,” Ky said. “Hard to tell with the ansibles down, but it looks like someone has it in for Vatta.”

“Heard anything about your family?”

“They’re dead,” Ky said flatly.

A moment’s shocked stillness, then his face creased into a scowl. “That’s… that’s monstrous,” he said. “You poor kid—I mean, you’re not a kid, I can see that, but still. Poor old Gerry dead… how’d they get him? He wasn’t on a ship, was he?”

“No.” Ky felt again that reluctance to reveal details, at least yet. “I wasn’t there; I only heard they’d died. If the ansibles come back up—”

“I can’t believe it,” he said. His gaze was direct, his expression exactly what it should be. So why this reluctance? Just Quincy’s belief? That wasn’t fair. “Look,” he said with sudden determination, “I can help. Let me help. Either of us alone, we’re just a single ship, easy to ambush. But the two of us—I don’t mind telling you, I’ve rambled around in some pretty rough places. This old ship isn’t the worn-out hulk she looks like. We could help each other a lot. Family sticks together, eh? Blood thicker than water, all that.”