Trading in Danger Page 6

  Her parents had, with their usual practical approach, sent her a sizable letter of credit for Lastway. For clothes, her mother suggested; her father, who signed it last, said “For yourself.” Ky measured the amount against the upgrades the ship needed and came up very short. Still, it was a start. San had sent her a polished tik seed; it fit comfortably in the palm of her hand, its glossy surface a rich red-brown. She put it in her pocket, where she could touch it often; the letter of credit she put in the lockdown of her desk.

  “Captain?” Someone tapped at her door. “Need a time for castoff, Captain.”

  She had forgotten that very elementary detail. She was the one who had to say “Cast off at 1400” or whatever she chose. She opened the door to find Riel Amat, her senior pilot, waiting with a databoard. He looked a little older than the picture she had in the crew list.

  “We can be ready by 1320, ma’am, or anytime after,” he said. “Traffic Control says they’re expecting some congestion later, but should be clear until 1500. They’re asking for a time.”

  “Advice?”

  “Fourteen thirty would be about right, ma’am, with a little leeway each way . . .”

  “Fourteen thirty it is, then, Riel. Thanks. Anything else I need to be doing?”

  “There’s paperwork on the bridge, sign-offs and stuff. Crew’s all aboard, accounting’s cleared, they just need your signature.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He nodded and turned away. Kylara took a deep breath, glanced at herself in the mirror . . . the uniform did fit well, no doubt about it. Still the whole situation felt unreal. She, Kylara Vatta, was about to go into space as captain of her own—well, her family’s—ship. And she didn’t even know enough to set a departure time without asking her pilot. What was she thinking? And yet, she was the captain, and she was going. Excitement stirred; for the first time, the thought of her former classmates brought no pain. They would be sitting in class—or studying—and she was on her way into space. It hardly seemed a fit punishment.

  Quincy Robin, whose space-fresh skin belied her sixty-plus years of experience, met Ky in the starboard passage as she headed for the bridge. “I heard about you, youngster. Good work.”

  “Not everyone thinks so,” Ky said, hoping for a compliment.

  “What did you want, a ship and praise?” Quincy said. “They don’t give ships to people for doing bad work.”

  “Even old ones about to go to scrap?”

  “Someone has to take them,” Quincy said. “She’s not so bad. She was a good ship in her time. Did you know she pioneered the Foregone run? I wasn’t on her then, but a few years later I served on her when her class was the backbone of the Vatta fleet. Go anywhere, do anything—that was Glennys in her youth. And middle age, for that matter. It’s a shame she’s going to scrap.”

  “What would she need to pass inspection?”

  “Depends on whose inspection. She’s safe for this trip, in the hands of people with some sense. Her drives are good enough. Her attitude controls, though, really need to be replaced. The last three adjustments haven’t held more than a few months each. For Slotter Key registration, she’d need an upgraded environmental system. The one she’s got is safe, but not up to modern standards; the new regulations they passed last year will catch up with her. Her reserve tanks are five hundred liters short. Then her navigation system is out of spec for age. Thing is, it’s full of proprietary data and software that would be hard to transfer to a newer one.”

  “So what would it cost to bring her up?”

  Quincy pursed her lips. “You could probably do it for—oh—five to seven million. And out on a frontier world like Lastway, she’ll bring ten to eleven as scrap, and some idiot may try to keep her whole and run her even farther out in the Borderlands. I wouldn’t, not without some work.”

  Old Ferrangia Vatta had started with a beat-up tramp cargo ship when the Scattering suddenly pulled away the best ships and left the rest of human-occupied space in disarray. Miss Molly still belonged to the family, displayed in the Number One repair slot. Ky, along with her generation of school kids, had clambered through Miss Molly’s narrow passages and old-fashioned ladders, and listened to the story of those perilous first voyages.

  And now she had a ship of her own . . . bound for scrap or glory. It seemed an easy choice. Easy, tradition said, was also stupid. It wasn’t really her ship; it belonged, as its registration stated, to Vatta Transport, not Ky Vatta. Ky settled into the captain’s chair on the bridge, inserted her command wand, and started working on the many, many, many forms that captains had to sign off before a ship could be cleared for castoff.

  Between these chores, she glanced at the bridge crew. Sheryl Donster, navigator. Seven years with Vatta Transport, formerly on Agnes Perry. She was heavyset, light-haired, and staring intently at a screen full of numbers; Ky had no idea what the numbers were. Ky wondered why her father had wasted a navigator’s time on a run like this. The routes had all been mapped; she had current data cubes that should send the ship on automatic from one mapped jump point to another. They wouldn’t need a navigator unless something went wrong.

  Riel Amat, senior pilot and second in command. Eleven years with Vatta Transport, and before that a space service veteran. Lean, dark, clearly an Islander like her. Her implant told her he’d been born on Little Gumbo. Ky wondered what he thought of her, if he knew why she’d left the Academy. His expression gave nothing away.

  The least experienced, pilot-junior Lee Quidlin, had only two years deepspace, as pilot-apprentice on Andrea Salar, but he’d been born on Slotter Key’s main orbital station and had been planetside only during senior school. He had a broad, friendly face under a shock of taffy-colored hair.

  All solid, experienced, personnel who could probably make this trip with no captain at all. She would have to prove herself. She would have to make no mistakes. With that thought, she went back to the paperwork.

  Undock and castoff went smoothly; Ky had nothing to do but sit in the captain’s couch and watch her experienced crew do what they had done so often before. The tug towed them out to regulation distance and stood by while Engineering powered up the main insystem drive and tested the backup. All functioned nominally. Glennys Jones set off on course with no fuss and no surprises.

  And with no speed. Functional, efficient insystem drive though she had, it produced less than 80 percent of the acceleration of newer systems. It would be days, not hours, before they dared shift into hyper. Before anything disastrous was likely to happen.

  During those days, Ky tried to adjust to her new reality. No fixed schedule, no rapid alternation of classes, physical training, study periods. The empty hours seemed endless. Ky read and reread the manuals for every ship system and followed her crew around asking questions until everyone was snappish. They had seemed so levelheaded before the journey; she worried about the possibility of contamination in the environmental system until, on the fourth day, she overheard Tobai explaining to Beeah Chok, engineering second, that it was just new-captain’s-disease, and they both laughed. She backed away, went to her cabin, and dosed herself with a soporific.

  Ten hours later she awoke clearheaded and cheerful. Even Aunt Gracie’s cakes didn’t seem an insoluble problem. She could almost believe that someone, somewhere might find them palatable . . . or useful as doorstops or something. She tried not to think about her past, and found that not-thinking easier when surrounded by the worn fabric of old Glennys and the routine of a ship in passage. She set herself daily tasks—exercises both physical and mental.

  Day by day she learned more about her crew, always uncomfortably aware that they were all older than she was, all more experienced. The youngest, Mehar Mehaar, had still spent several years on ships. How could they respect her, she wondered? How could they believe she was anything but a rich girl, captain only by the grace of wealth? She continued to study, pushing herself to disprove what she was sure they thought. At the end of each ship day, she wrote u
p her log, though it mostly consisted of one paragraph listing all systems as nominal. If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror—as one of her instructors had said—then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection.

  Only now and again she wondered what her classmates were doing—what had happened to Mandy Rocher? what was Hal thinking? were the critical midterms coming up or just past?—and put it quickly out of mind. That was behind her; now she had a mission—a job, she corrected herself—and she could find some busywork to keep her mind occupied and those moments of reflection few and far between.

  One of those mental occupations centered on the ship. Gaspard’s words kept picking at her. What if . . . what if she could make enough in trade to buy Glennys herself? And fix her up, and get her through an inspection, and own her own ship? Be an independent trader, like her ancestor.

  Her father would have a cat. Her father would have a full-grown mountain cat sprouting green-feathered wings and a forked tail. Her orders were very specific. Transport the goods. Sell the ship. Bring the crew home commercial on the profit. She knew if she did that, she would be offered another position—maybe a better ship, maybe not—on another run, and in a few years she could be captain of one of Vatta’s showpieces. Her mother would keep looking for suitable husbands; she would in the end marry the scion of some other commercial family—someone from the energy field, perhaps, or even ’lope ranching. Not Hal, of course. Even if they ever met again, even if he still cared for her, he wouldn’t risk his career—she wouldn’t let him risk his career—marrying a woman who had been expelled from the Academy for a security breach. She would marry someone suitable for a rich commercial family, someone dull. She would leave ships, settle down, have a few children, work in the firm’s head office.

  That put a chill down her back. The firm’s head office, across town from the Academy: plushly carpeted, paneled in solid wood of exquisite grain, with handwoven drapes, custom desks the size of her bed at home, and soft-spoken staff waiting hand and foot on the senior members of the family. As a senior member of the family—she saw herself twenty years on, a formidable matron in a watered-silk business suit, in an office like her uncle’s—she would interact with members of government, with the military. She imagined, so vividly that she broke out in a sweat, having to shake hands with one of her classmates—gods grant it wasn’t Sumi, who was probably working off a dozen black points for not being satisfied with someone’s explanation of where Ky had gone. Gods grant it wasn’t Hal. Whoever it was in uniform would know—would know she’d been expelled in disgrace—and in that handshake express either pity or ridicule or . . . something she didn’t want to face.

  In the dark of her cabin one sleep-shift, she stared at the steady telltales: green, amber, orange, red, blue. If only they would blink, or change their pattern, anything to distract her. But they glowed on, tiny colored eyes in the dark, staring at her . . . she reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.

  She was not going to take another soporific. She was not going to worry her crew. She looked around her cabin for something to do and saw MacRobert’s present. She hadn’t opened the box yet. Model-building had never been her passion, but it was something to fill the hours between—she looked at the chronometer and shuddered—now and breakfast.

  Inside the box she found the expected jumble of pieces, and a much-folded paper with directions in four languages. She unfolded it, and found that someone had underlined some of the words in Balsish—yellow—and Visnuan—green. She turned it over. A few underlinings in Franco—orange—and fewer yet in Angla—red. What—oh. MacRobert’s storied past in covert ops. It must be some kind of puzzle, a test of her ability or something. She wasn’t in the mood for any such test, or any secret pact with the Service. She ignored the underlined words and took out something that looked as if it should be the keel plate spine, and checked its stamped number against the list on the paper. It was the keel plate spine. She laid it aside, and stirred the pieces with her finger, trying to spot the six portal struts that should—on this model—fit into the keel plate spine. She found five, but the sixth eluded her until she noticed the off-color piece she’d assumed was an exterior member because it was cream-colored, not gray.

  By breakfast, she had the keel plate spine and the portal struts assembled. The directions didn’t explain why one portal strut was cream-colored, so she shrugged and put it in the number one slot. Possibly parts from different but similar sets had been mixed at the factory. Unless it was another part of Mac’s test—but she wasn’t in school now, and she didn’t have to take any stupid test. After breakfast, she borrowed a magnifier and pair of needle-nose pincers from Quincy Robin’s engineering shop and spent an hour peeling tiny warning labels off a strip and laying them carefully—right side up for the position of that part when the model was fully assembled—on the pieces that would, in real life, have such warning signs. Even with the magnifier, the Space Service logo was too small to read. By lunch she had all the labels on. She made a quick tour of the ship and went back to work assembling the interior structural members.

  She slept that night without medication or early waking. When the lights came on for mainshift, she stared at the model taking shape on her desk and decided to ration herself to one hour a day. She wanted it to last. She toyed with the idea of buying other models, keeping one always in reserve.

  Ten days later, when Glennys wallowed uneasily into endim translation, Ky watched the strain gauges and wondered how the ship had passed its last inspection. She didn’t miss the tension in Quincy’s expression. Shipping out as a junior on one of the newer transports, she’d never had to worry about the ship’s fabric coming apart, but now . . . Maybe it was her chance at glory, and maybe it was her chance to die. Her crew seemed mostly calm about the noises and the vibration, though Lee had turned the color of bad cheese. Ky hoped she didn’t match him.

  Once through translation, Quincy shrugged and shook her head. “I didn’t expect that much wobble,” she said. “Still, it ought to be good for the number of translations we have scheduled, plus a few more.”

  Glennys settled back to being an old but not unsound ship. The telltales that should be green were all green; the ambers were amber; the few reds—indicating emergency systems on live standby—were red.

  Over the next few days she checked in with her crew every few hours, but spent the rest of the time running cost/benefit analyses. She wouldn’t actually do it, she told herself. She couldn’t do it. It was impossible in every way. But . . . it couldn’t possibly hurt to figure out what it would take, just as an exercise. Better than imagining herself in an office in Port, entertaining her classmates in uniform. Better than finishing the model too soon and having nothing to do with her hands.

  Pharmaceutical components to Belinta, 31 percent of estimated cargo value. Time-limited, with a penalty for late delivery or nondelivery, and a bonus for—a time so short that Glennys couldn’t have done it in her youth. No bonus, then. Price prearranged, profit guaranteed and nonnegotiable. That wouldn’t do it, though it put them well on the way to the tickets home from Lastway. What then? The bales of fabric scraps—old clothes, actually—for Leonora? The raw zeer nuts, the crates of modular components for Lastway? Her own crate of luxury goods, the hand-blown crystal bowls and vases, the bolts of silk brocade?

  The numbers didn’t add up. If they were very, very lucky, they might—possibly—make enough to equal what the ship would bring for scrap. They could not possibly make enough to equal that plus the cost of renovations to meet inspection standards.

  Ky called up the inspection standards for the third time. Nobody cared if their holds were inconvenient, though some trade stations would charge a premium for space to ships that could not use automated freight handling systems. But the environmental system, drives, navigation and communications systems . . . those had to pass. While there were sections of space in which no on
e bothered with inspections—or rescuing those whose ships weren’t sound—she didn’t want to go there.

  She doodled on a spare pad. What would it take, really? What was she willing to give up? Or—since she was now in the business of trade and profit—what was she willing to trade?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Customs at Belinta, their first port of call, should not have been a problem. Ky shifted from one foot to the other, and struggled not to point out that every single item on the delivery manifest—raw materials for pharmaceuticals—had been preordered. The Customs Inspector was an unmodified human, but she had seen a Mobie and a pair of Indas on the way to this office, and she wanted to see what other humods were in the system. Finally the Customs Inspector looked up from the readout and glared at her as if she had sprouted horns.

  “The thing is, we see more than enough of you Slotter Key hotshots,” he said. “Always trying to convince us our tariffs aren’t reasonable—I’ll bet you wouldn’t like it if we did that.”

  Ky refrained from pointing out that Belinta couldn’t reciprocate whatever injury they felt they suffered; they didn’t have the bottoms to haul their own freight anywhere outsystem. Vatta Transport didn’t need more enemies.

  “We have only approved cargo,” she said, in what she hoped was a voice sufficiently pleasant to avoid offense. “Aside from what’s in personal stowage, which is all locked down.”

  The Customs Inspector looked at the list again. “Preordered pharmaceutical precursors—that gives us value-added—and tik extract. All right. What about agricultural machinery?”

  “Not on manifest,” Ky said promptly, wondering what they had against agricultural machinery. “Is that—do people try to smuggle in ag machinery?”

  “No, no. We’re looking for it. It was supposed to arrive last year; we hoped you’d have it, since you’re from Slotter Key.”

  “A Vatta ship?” Ky asked. Surely someone would have told her if a Vatta ship had gone missing on this run.