Marque and Reprisal (32 page)

Delay, probably. If her crew started equivocating, delaying, he’d think they were up to something. If, on the other hand, they urged him to get with it, from the beginning…

She called Lee on the private circuit. “Tell him it’s got to be quick,” she said. “Tell him you’re worried that I’ll find out, rally the loyalists or blow the ship, and it’s got to be quick.” Then another thought struck her. “Tell him you’ll get my command implant.”

“You don’t have an implant.”

“He doesn’t know that. He asked what I had, if I could give him an update. I lied and said I had only the most basic, probationary one. But he won’t believe that; he wants to think I have an advanced one.”

“But you don’t… do you?”

“Not in me. That’s why he’ll find a view of me unconscious with my head laid open proof that it exists. It’s your safety lever, Lee. If he blows the ship, he loses a treasure—the information in a Vatta command implant. Bargain with him. Tell him you can deliver that, and the cargo, if he’ll let you and the crew go with the ship.”

“But—what about you?”

“It’ll only be for a short time, while you put the vid pickup on me to prove I’m captive and helpless.”

Stella shook her head. “It won’t do,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll be you—he doesn’t know what you look like—”

“He would have vid images from Lastway,” murmured Rafe. “If he suborned someone at MilMart, they could have taken plenty of shots.”

“A wig, makeup,” Stella said. “I’m good at impersonation; you know that. Likeliest thing, he’ll want a constant vid pickup, not just that one glimpse.”

“A bag over your head,” Ky said. “That’s even safer. But the close-up to show that the implant’s out… that has to be my head. No matter what you do with makeup, your cheekbones don’t look like mine.”

“What about the implants? You have two extra now, the one your father sent to Sabine, with Furman, and the command dataset one from… from him.”

“What’s yours, Stella?”

“Currently? Admin Level Two. Lots of data, no command functions.”

“The one Furman sent would give you command functions for this ship,” Ky said.

“I don’t want it,” Stella said. “Remember, I was never trained for shipboard duties. Without time to assimilate what’s in the database, I’d mess something up. Why don’t you give that one to Toby? And you really need to have the command dataset yourself.”

True, and she’d already thought of that. “There isn’t time,” she said. “If I can’t make a quick adjustment, I’d be unable to act when they board.”

“Rafe says it’s possible,” Stella said.

“And you believe him?” Ky said.

“It’s his life, too,” Stella said. “The best chance for us is for you to be augmented as much as possible, isn’t that right?”

It was. Her earlier objections to putting in the implant now seemed foolish. If she had done it on Lastway, or in the safety of FTL flight… they would have had time to cope with whatever problems occurred. Even if it left her completely incapable, Stella could have asked the mercs for assistance. But she’d left it until the last minute, hoping to wait out the whole six months, and now—

“All right,” she said, and turned to Rafe. “So… is it possible in the time we have left?”

“Possible to do, of course. Possible for you to regain full function… that’s less certain. Probably; you’re young, and the implant is presently set to a close genetic match. But it’s going to be rough to push the adaptation. Things your brain normally does while you sleep, you’ll have to do rapidly while awake. And you’d best do it now—you’ll need every minute of time to adapt.”

Time… time slipped away, the minutes disappearing far too fast. Ky prepared one of the mines MacRobert had sent her for its peculiar use and explained to Jim just what he should do when the time came. Martin would take command of the ship’s defensive response if she could not. They would have just that one chance to disable Osman’s ship, or part of it, one chance… she did not let herself dwell on the likelihood that they would all be dead in a few hours. They were not going to die; she was not going to let that happen.

The picture of Ky unconscious, with the implant out, they shot just before Rafe put the command implant in. “He’s going to want continuous feed,” Ky said. “He’s going to want to know it’s not a trick. So we give him continuous feed or what looks like continuous feed. Jiggly, a handheld remote brought in for the purpose. No vid pickups in the captain’s cabin; he’ll believe that. Show me with the implant out, with the implant in someone’s gloved hand, then someone putting a pillowcase over my head and tying me up. Then wobbly, panning briefly, before it steadies again on someone else tied up on my bunk. That’ll be Stella… are you sure, Stella?”

“I’m sure,” Stella said. “I’m most expendable.”

She wasn’t. No Vatta was expendable. But neither were crew.

“Just be sure he doesn’t get me alive,” Stella said. “Me or my implant.”

“He’s not going to get you at all,” Ky said with more confidence than she felt. A few minutes later, they had arranged the setup as well as they could. Ky lay on her bunk and let Rafe slide the needle into her vein; her last thought as darkness took her was a quick prayer that she had guessed right about him.

She woke after what seemed only a moment, on the dining table in the rec area, feeling sick and disoriented. Rafe’s face and Quincy’s were close above her. “Ky…,” Quincy was saying. “Do you know who I am now?”

“Quincy Robins,” Ky said, struggling with her tongue, which felt clumsy. Her vision blurred, shimmered, and cleared again, this time with a foreground of text and icons: Quincy’s entire confidential personnel file, retrievable by focusing on the icons that brought up additional text. “You were married four times?”

“That answers my next question,” Quincy said. “Your implant’s working, at least.”

“Sorry,” Ky said, putting a hand to her head. “It’s… a little overwhelming. How long—?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Rafe said. Somewhat to her surprise, data on him also popped up, referencing his association with Stella and filled with query marks. “It took a bit longer than I’d planned; that is one complicated implant, and the adjustment routines are… tricky. How’s your vision?”

“Weird,” Ky said. Everything she looked at brought up a screen of data; she should be able to suppress that, but so far the usual damping controls didn’t seem to work. Had her father dealt with this visual complexity all the time? “How much time do we have?”

“Osman plans to grapple on in about three hours, he says.”

At the name, Osman’s data came up… even worse than Quincy had remembered. He had been sent for counseling, for mandatory psychiatric treatment, for mandatory control implantation… but he’d escaped then… he’d stolen, both by force and by embezzlement; he’d gambled, dishonestly; he’d tried to cheat shippers and his own ship alike. His approaches to sexual partners were abusive, threatening; his penchant for violence showed up early and never abated.

She’d been an idiot, just as Johannson said. She’d risked the remaining Vatta command structure, and only now did it occur to her that she might have sent Stella and Rafe aboard one of the escort ships, to safety, with the Vatta command implant, and risked only herself.

No time for self-recriminations, though. She felt around mentally, pushing every implant control she could find to see what happened. Dizziness… nausea… she was briefly aware of someone holding a bowl under her mouth… and then plunged again into the datastream. This was not how you were supposed to meld with a new implant, certainly not one of this complexity, but she had no time for that, either.

Finally her vision cleared. She looked at Quincy. No data screen blurred that worried old face. Rafe. Same there. Her head felt overstuffed; she wasn’t sure of her balance, but she had to function.

“What do you take,” she asked Rafe, “when you have to go on right away?”

“Coffee helps,” he said. “Here’s a mug. Unless you still want to spew.”

“No, my stomach’s fine now,” Ky said. She tried to sit up and the room lurched, turned pale yellow, then settled back to normality.

“You don’t look it,” he said, steadying her with one arm and holding the mug with the other hand.

“I pushed all the buttons,” Ky said. Upright again, she felt better but still strange. She held out her hands. The left one twitched in a slow rhythm. She willed it to be still, to no effect. Her right was steady. “Good thing I’m right-handed,” she said, and took the coffee. A few sips later, her vision had sharpened to extreme clarity and she could feel her blood vessels vibrating. “Enough,” she said to Rafe.

“The extra sensitivity wears off in about four hours,” he said.

Four hours they didn’t have. Ky opened her implant to the ship circuits and for the first time in months felt the direct connection to all functions that she thought she hadn’t missed.

“How’s Osman taking the video show?” she asked, then realized she didn’t have to ask. Her implant linked to the ship’s communications, and she had her own view of Osman’s face on half a screen while also receiving the vid feed he was getting on the other half. She shrank both to an unobtrusive level, listening in to Lee on the bridge.

“They’re still barricaded in the engine room,” Lee was saying. “I can’t get a feed down there; they’ve blocked the pickups.”

“That would be Quincy,” Osman said. “Well, we can handle her when we get aboard. Where’s the implant?”

Lee looked stubborn. “I don’t want to tell you, not yet,” he said. “How do I know you won’t just kill us all?”

“You don’t,” Osman said. “But I won’t. I just want your captain, and Quincy, and the implant. I will take your cargo, since you offered it, but then you’re free to go. Or join us, if you wish.”

“Some do,” Lee said. “I haven’t decided, myself. I… it would be strange, not being Vatta…”

“You’d still be Vatta,” Osman almost purred. “I am Vatta, after all. The Vatta heir, in fact.”

“That’s true, I suppose…” Lee looked thoughtful. Ky began to think he’d missed his calling; he was as good an actor as he was a pilot.

“So why don’t you tell me where the implant is?”

“We put it in someone,” Lee said. “But I won’t tell you who. That way you won’t want to kill any of us… for a while.”

A shadow crossed Osman’s face, but then he smiled again. “Ingenious. I admire ingenuity.”

Ky grinned to herself. In that case, he should admire hers… about ten seconds before he died.

Her plan, such as it was, had too many failure points to satisfy her, but it was the only one she’d been able to devise and it was above all ingenious.

She pushed herself off the table and staggered; Rafe steadied her again. “Your coordination will return faster if you move around a lot,” he said. “But you’re going to fall into walls a few times.”

“Great,” Ky muttered. One leg felt longer than the other, then that reversed. Normally, a night’s sleep allowed a brain and an implant to work out peacefully what individual differences mattered here, but she didn’t have a night to sleep. She had a battle to fight. “Someone get me Mehar’s target bow,” she said. “If I can’t walk straight I have to at least shoot straight. And I need my pressure suit.” She took a couple of steps, feeling very unsteady, then sat in a chair and stood up again.

“Here, Captain.” That was Mehar herself; Ky quickly damped the data screen that matched her face and voice, and took the target bow with its blunted bolts. Mehar had already placed a pillow on a chair across the compartment. Quincy now held her pressure suit, unfastened and ready.

Ky took the bow and aimed at the pillow; the bolt thwacked into it. “Well, that’s something.” She stepped sideways, and nearly fell into the table. “And that’s something else…” Another shot, this one a foot wide.

“Dance it,” Rafe suggested.

“Dance—?”

He did something, she couldn’t see what, and music came from the speakers. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

Confused and still unsteady, Ky allowed herself to be held, and then he began to move to the music, dragging her along. “You do dance…?” he asked in her ear.

“Er… yes.” Like all the Vatta children, she’d been given dancing lessons in many styles; dance was, everyone agreed, a good preparation for space flight, teaching body awareness and control. But since… since the Academy junior ball, when she’d danced with Hal, she had not danced, or thought of dancing. Now the music and Rafe’s movements brought it back. Her body’s quarrel with the implant receded as melody and rhythm worked on older parts of her brain; she moved more and more smoothly with him. The tremor in her left hand ceased; she felt the warring components slide into harmony. More than that, she felt warm, alive, happy in a way she had not since…

“You dance well,” Rafe said in her ear. “So you’re not a cold fish after all…” Then, moving slightly away, “Is that better?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know—” She hoped her cheeks weren’t flushed with more than implant effects. This was not the time or the man.

“Bad experience,” he said. “Switched implants in the men’s room at an embassy ball, thought I could hide out pretending to be drunk for a few hours, but no such luck. Had to get up and dance—it would have started a war if I hadn’t—and just a few minutes later, I was fine. Mostly. Getting shut of that odious woman, though, that took a while.”

Ky moved around the room again, this time smoothly, and five blunts went into the pillow from various angles. “Time to suit up,” she said. In the suit’s privacy no one would notice what she was feeling, surely very dangerous feelings on the eve of battle. Rafe looked at her, a very knowing look that seemed to go straight to her core, and she looked back steadily, willing herself not to blush, not to react.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. He turned to his own suit and began to clamber into it.

The last moments before the curtain goes up… the last moments before the music starts… Ky looked at the stage she’d designed, the music she would start, as
Fair Kaleen
’s grapples reached them, as they were drawn closer to the other ship, as the transfer tube bulged out and adhered to the hull around their emergency exit hatch. All the arguments over: Martin still thought he should be where she was, but she had final responsibility. It was her job.

Her stomach knotted, then unknotted. She and her father’s implant were mostly in accord now, with no more balance problems, no sensory problems that she recognized. She hadn’t had time to familiarize herself with all the faculties, the way he had chosen to organize the proprietary information, but the ship command functions all worked. She shouldn’t, she hoped, need more than that. Foremost, already set up, were her links to her own ship’s functions, and those of
Fair Kaleen
. Osman would have made some changes, in the years he’d commanded the old ship, but buried deep in its command layers, in kernels hardened from the attack she planned, should be responses to her Vatta command dataset that he could not anticipate and counteract. If she could get there.

In her earbug, she heard Lee describing—breathlessly—the chaos on the ship. “We’ve got her safe in the captain’s cabin, you saw that, and it’s secure, but Quincy’s done something—”

“Never mind about that.” Osman’s voice sounded impatient. “We’ll send a team over to take care of it, whatever it is. But you’re sure the captain’s secure?”

“You can see that,” Lee said, sounding grumpy. “I just don’t want Quincy to disable the ship and have us stranded out here—that old woman’s crazy enough…”

Via the implant, Ky could tell that the other ship was broadside-on to its course, as were they: the safest close-maneuver configuration, since neither could fry the other with insystem drives if someone turned them on. This also meant that rotation about the long axis could impart angular momentum to objects shed from a hatch, right back down the course. She had a use for that, if she survived the next few minutes.

“Send someone down to open up,” Osman ordered Lee. “Or I’ll blow the hatch.”

“I am, I am,” Lee said hastily. “Jim, go unlock the door.”

“Why is it always me?” Jim said in a sulky tone for the camera, but in moments he jogged down the central corridor, winking at Ky as he came past her, pulling up the hood of his pressure suit.

“Right side,” Ky reminded him. He said nothing, but nodded. As he undogged the inner hatch, Lee spoke up suddenly. “Jim—look out—Quincy and that idiot Beeah are out of the cargo bay—”

“I’m on it,” Jim grunted. “Don’t worry—” He was now in the emergency air lock, working on the outer hatch. “Damn, this thing is stiff—” Ky assumed that Osman would have an optical link set to observe through the tiny safety window as well as monitoring transmissions.

“It’s always been a problem,” Lee said. “I told you—we had trouble with it at Sabine—but hurry up!”

“Send me some help,” Jim said, making a dramatic lunge at the hatch’s controls.

“Can’t—have to hold the bridge—can’t let them get to the—” Realistic sounds of gunfire cut him off.

“Damn it!” Jim snarled and lunged again as if frantic. This time he hit the controls, and the hatch opened halfway. He shoved, then flattened against the right side of the air lock as Ky cut the restraining line and the EMP mine, powered by every elastic lashdown cord on the ship, shot past his knees, through the twenty meters of transfer tube, and crashed into someone in a pressure suit, knocking him back into Osman’s air lock. The man had been holding a fat disk that Ky recognized—in that instant’s glimpse—as a limpet mine.

“Get that hatch closed!” she said to Jim, and raced to help him, mentally counting seconds. Damn, damn, damn, damn… outer hatch dogged… inner…

Whoomp
. Ky opened her mouth to comment.
WHOOMP!
Lights flickered, an alert signal buzzed. She peeked through the small emergency viewport in time to see a cloud of debris in her own ship’s exterior lights, and the abrupt disintegration of the transfer tube. Grapple lines flailed. Something rattled against the viewport; she ducked, then looked again. Pieces of space armor… trailing clouds that glowed red in the spotlights. Her gorge rose; she swallowed against it. A second and third burst of debris from
Fair Kaleen
’s air lock, then a steady stream… and the intership distance increased; the other ship began a slow rotation about her longitudinal axis. Ky realized with horror that the ship’s air was bleeding out, the automatic systems disabled by the dual explosion of two mines, not one—and one of them a hullbuster. If the air lock hadn’t already been open,
Fair Kaleen
would have had a hull breach.

She imagined the howling gale of decompression, terrifying in the darkness when their lights failed. Some compartments would be spared… those in pressure suits might survive for hours, even days… but depending on the damage done by the pair of mines, the ship might be helpless.

That wasn’t what she’d meant to do. In her mind, a tiny voice explained to a nonexistent parent that it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It was just supposed to mess up the command systems… she closed the inner hatch of the air lock and shook her head at Jim’s questions. She had to figure out what to do now. How long would
Fair Kaleen
’s systems be down before the automatic reset tried to restore functions? Would the loss of pressurization change that? How much damage had Osman’s own mine done? How many of his crew were dead, and how much resistance would she face if she tried to board? And was he himself dead—had he been in the air lock—or was he still aboard, fighting to regain control of his ship and come after her?

“What was that?” she heard someone yell.

“Them,” she said. Her implant displayed data on the debris still impacting their shields, a flowing mass of numbers—dimensions and presumed mass of particles, their velocities and vectors, hundreds, thousands of tiny impacts. She shut off that analysis as too confusing, checked on her own ship’s integrity and systems function, relieved to find that no serious damage had resulted. On her way to the bridge, she stopped by her cabin to let Stella know they had won the first round.

“Get this thing off my head,” Stella said; Ky helped her get out of the pillowcase, the bindings. She followed Ky to the bridge, where Lee had the controls.

“Can you snug us in against his ship?” Ky asked Lee. Stella, released from her role as a bound captive, leaned on the bulkhead.

“It’s rotating,” Lee said. “It’ll be a tricky maneuver. What’s the purpose?”

“For one thing, he’ll be blind to where we are, even if he gets his main scans back online—we’ll be too close. For another, even if he figures out where we are, attacking us will destroy his own ship. In the time it takes him to figure it out—if he does—we have the chance to get in and convert the ship’s systems. Or we can just keep clobbering them with successive EMP attacks. And his allies, those two warships, will certainly attack us if we’re separated from him, but possibly not if we’re attached.”

“You’re assuming Osman’s still alive and in control,” Stella said.

“I hope not, but for now—yes. It’s safer that way. At least we’re not still attached, and everyone in that transfer tube or air lock should be dead. Controls in all powered suits should be gone, too.”

“Unless he has mechanical overrides,” Martin said, arriving at that moment. “But you’re probably right. And I imagine anyone aboard is too busy trying to survive to try to get to us.” He grinned at Ky. “That was a brilliant idea after all, Captain. But how did you know they’d have a mine with them?”

“I didn’t,” Ky said. “I knew they’d try some trick to disable the crew here; I was actually thinking some kind of chemical weapon. Knock you all down alive, take all the implants—”

Stella shuddered. “That would have been horrible.”

“I can match us to his ship,” Lee said, “but it’ll take a while. I have to get his current vectors, and then match rotation.”

“Do we have enough power to stop the rotation if we’re attached?”

“I don’t know. We can slow it, probably. Why—oh. So we can hide from the other bad guys?”

“Yeah. If they shoot, I want that buffer between us.”

“Right. We leave our defensive suite up, though?”

“Absolutely,” Ky said. “Even if it’s not working perfectly, it’s all we have.”

She called Quincy to ask about progress in the repair. “Toby did it,” Quincy reported. “Better for him to be busy. Oh, and that dratted pup came up with the part he carried off before. Toby says it was defective to start with—it’s mislabeled. It would’ve failed when we turned the system on.”

“Toby is quite the little genius,” Ky said.

“He’s a good kid,” Quincy said defensively. Ky felt her own eyebrows go up.

“I never said he wasn’t—I think we’re lucky to have him—” And not her own sulky teenaged self, though maybe she wouldn’t have been as bad on another ship.

“Well… fine.” Quincy cleared her throat. “Are we… still expecting boarders?”

“No. Let me put this on all-ship—” Ky switched channels. “Status report, everyone. Osman tried to double-cross us, have someone carry a limpet mine aboard. We won the toss. Our mine detonated his, both of them in his air lock. His ship’s disabled, losing air out the open air lock, and some of his crew are… gone. We’re in pursuit now, trying to match courses and rotation; we still have his allies to worry about, but we have a couple of hours’ grace. Stay in your pressure suits, but you can open up and have something to eat.”

A moment’s silence, then a cheer from somewhere back down the passage. “Does this mean I don’t get to shoot anyone?” Rafe asked.

“Not at the moment.”

“Too bad. What are your next plans, Captain?”

“I’m working on them,” Ky said. “I didn’t expect what did happen.”

“Don’t admit that,” Rafe said. “I was admiring your prescience. I expected treachery, but not that he’d mine our ship before he got you and the implant.”

“He wanted the mine in place,” Ky said. “That was easy to figure. He could have set it off later. But I failed to consider that both mines might detonate together in his ship… and I should have.”

“Ma’am, with your permission I’ll go remove the booby traps I set up before someone bumps them.”

“Of course, Martin,” Ky said.

“I’d have thought the EMP from one would’ve turned off his,” Stella said. “Don’t all mines have electronic controls?”

“Yes,” Ky said. “But the limpets like his are also pressure-sensitive—it’s what keeps you from prying them off your ship if you find them before they go off. I got just a glimpse, but it looked like ours hit the limpet square on, with enough force to knock the man carrying it back into the air lock… and then it was just the usual few seconds’ delay.”

“Well, food sounds good to me,” Stella said. “I’ll be in the galley if you need me.”

“We have a problem,” Lee said. “Their ship’s moving more irregularly… I can still match it, but until something smooths out their motion, our artificial gravity’s going to be hard put to cope with the irregularities.”

“Try it,” Ky said. “I’ll let everyone know to expect some problems.”

Minutes crawled by. Ejecta from the other ship’s air lock flashed against their defensive screen, but nothing penetrated. The scans showed the other ship’s complex motion. The air lock was forward of the ship’s center of mass, so its effect as a maneuvering reaction engine had created an erratic rotation rather than a smooth roll about the center axis. Lee edged
Gary Tobai
in slowly, using the nav computer to model and then match that eccentricity.

“If we aren’t matched exactly, their greater mass could give us a fatal whap,” he said. “The least relative motion’s close to their center of mass… that’s where we should grapple. Nearscan’s accurate enough, but there’s too much data with all that junk she’s spewing.”

“You think it’s too dangerous?” Ky asked.

“Dangerous, yes. Too dangerous… compared to what, I’d have to say.”

“I don’t want to lose that ship,” Ky said. “If it keeps losing atmosphere and tumbling, it could be ruined… or Osman might find a way to get it back in operation.” If only she’d had a trained boarding team… the military could do it; if she’d had a squad of Slotter Key marines… but nobody on her ship—except her, and she could not leave the ship—could go out there, board a tumbling ship, and deal with whatever was inside. If the sturdy traditional Vatta systems reset themselves—and they might—Osman could regain control, and then… then things would be far worse.

And time was ticking away. The enemy warships would be in range in a few minutes.

She had the other mine. She had the skills herself… or she had had them, what was now a year and a half ago, standard. Her scores on EVA maneuvers had always been clears, no faults.

On maneuvers she had practiced repeatedly, in the zero-g gyms. Standard maneuvers, in standardized conditions. This was… this was nonstandard.

A dull clank reverberated up the main passage. From the hull? Something had made it through the screens?

“Helmets!” Ky said, before analysis had begun to catch up with instinct. She’d forgotten, she’d turned the exterior analysis module off. “The hatch—” She was moving now, down the passage, boosting the implant feeds, grabbing for pickups as she went.

Air lock in use, the implant told her. Outer hatch open, inner hatch shut… “Shut outer hatch,” she said, to the implant.

UNABLE TO COMPLY. PHYSICAL BLOCK OF OUTER HATCH, came up on her display.

Jim had closed it. She knew she had secured both hatches. But emergency hatches could be opened from either side—

A blinding flash of insight: not all those hurtling bodies out of Osman’s air lock had been casualties. His crew
was
trained in boarding techniques, and she had not sent anyone outside to be sure their hull was clean… idiot that she was, with that misplaced sympathy for the crew she’d assumed was dead or dying. After a moment, her heart steadied again, and she felt an icy calm.