“No! No, please! I—I can do things. I’ll—I can work for you. That’s all I wanted, was a chance—”

“You mean you wanted to be crew?”

“Yes… anything to get off Belinta. I can do a lot of things, really I can.”

“Like what?” Martin asked.

“Well, I… I can build things. You know, like sheds and fences and that.” Mitt gave a choked laugh; Ky fought down her own laughter. “And I can take care of critters, y’know. Carry feed and clean up…” His voice trailed away as he looked around the cargo hold and its obvious lack of wooden sheds, fences, or livestock. “I thought… I heard… ships grow their own food, right, and that means crops and things and I know how to plant and hoe and—”

“Large ships,” Mitt said. “Large ships grow some of their food in hydroponic gardens. We grow algae in tanks. We don’t use hoes.”

“But this ship is big… I saw it on the vidscreen. It’s… it’s lots bigger than our house back home; it had room in it for all those tractors and things.” He looked around at the cargo hold. “I mean, look at it. It’s huge.”

“I’m afraid—” Ky began, but he interrupted.

“Please, lady! Please let me work. I’ll work hard, I promise.”

“That’s the captain,” Martin said, with emphasis. “You say ma’am to her.”

“Please… ma’am…”

Why did it always happen to her? She could just hear what Quincy would say. But Martin’s gaze was direct, steadying.

“If there’s no evidence he was trying to sabotage the ship, I have no reason to space him,” Ky said. “That’ll be your responsibility, Martin—find out. Meanwhile, we’ll confine him—” And where would they confine him? And could he do anything at all useful, or would he be just another mouth to feed?

“I’ll take care of him, ma’am,” Martin said. “Find out what he’s done, what he can do, give him something useful to do.” He reached over and unhooked the cargo ties, then pulled the prisoner to his feet. “Now you listen to me, boy. The captain’s said you live—for now. But you’re under my orders, understand?”

“I—” The prisoner looked at Ky. “Don’t let him hurt me! I’ll do anything you say.”

“What I say is, do what he tells you. And Martin—the ship comes first.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ky turned away, prepared to ignore whatever Martin did, but his stentorian roar almost made her jump. “Stand up straight, you!” She clamped her jaw on a giggle. She had jumped when MacRobert first roared at their cadet class. She knew within a centimeter what that young man was going to be feeling in the next few hours, and for the first time since she had left, memory of the Academy lightened her heart instead of saddening her.

By third shift, Ky felt that the ship was running smoothly. With the help of the rest of the crew, Martin had finished searching the ship to his satisfaction and was sure that no more stowaways were aboard; nor was there any explosive device. The young man had spent hours scrubbing the decks and finally, after a modest meal, had been locked into a closet with a mattress, pillow, and blanket.

“He’ll be a challenge,” Martin reported, with the satisfied tone of someone for whom a challenge was welcome. “Not born on Belinta, but his family moved there when he was a toddler. Poor colonists, out on the frontier. I know the type, ma’am. Brogglers, we call ’em back home, the kind that live off trapping and frog sticking and the like. Thing is, they can make passable workers if you polish ’em up. He can shoot, he tells me. We’ll see about that later.”

“If it saves me scrubbing things,” Alene said, propping her elbows on the table, “I’m all for him.”

“Oh, he’ll scrub,” Martin said. “It’s about all he can do, at this point. Little enough education, and I doubt he paid much attention to the schooling available.”

“We’ll do something about that,” Ky said. “If he’s going to be in my crew, he’s got to be certified.” She looked around at the others who’d gathered in the rec area. “I know—there’s all kinds of trouble going on. But precisely because of that, we need qualified people aboard, not just pot scrubbers. I want him educated at least to basic spacecrew level.”

“We can try,” Quincy said.

“With all the expertise on this ship, we can do more than try,” Ky said.

The passage out began smoothly enough. Gordon Martin kept their intruder busy two shifts of the day, with four hours of schooling worked in. Martin seemed to get along well with the rest of the crew, too. The other men joined him for physical training; Ky, who maintained her own training program, found that the women were joining her—not all of them at each session, but even Sheryl, who had claimed to hate exercise, was now using the machines every other day. Ky shared piloting watch-and-watch with Lee. She worried about every blip on the scans, half convinced that marauders were lurking, ready to take out the ship. Each one turned out to be harmless: the Pavrati ship edging in toward Belinta Station, the Belinta ore haulers and service vehicles.

At closest approach, four days out, Gary Tobai and the Pavrati ship passed each other. Ky made a courtesy call to the other ship.

“You might as well skip Leonora,” the Pavrati captain told her. “They’re not letting anyone in. We were coming in from Darttin, headed this way, and they chased us right back out as soon as we’d cleared jump.”

“What—why?”

“Some kind of communications problem, and they’re convinced something like Sabine will happen to them if they let outsiders into the system.”

“They didn’t say what?”

“They didn’t say anything but Go away and tell everyone else to leave us alone. System closed indefinitely, they said. That was three weeks back; we were set up wrong for a direct vector here and had to use an intermediate jump point. They have some hot defensive ships, let me tell you, and acted like they’d just as soon blow us as let us go. But go if you want to—I’m just giving a friendly warning.”

“Thanks,” Ky said. “I appreciate it. Belinta’s still open, as far as I know, but if you’re headed for Slotter Key you may run into trouble. Ansibles down, apparently.”

The Pavrati captain muttered something Ky was just as glad she couldn’t hear. “Damn pirates,” he said then. “Or whoever’s doing this. It’ll be the ruin of trade. We need supplies; I was going to restock at Leonora, but I guess we’ll be satisfied with Belinta cabbage.”

When she’d signed off, Ky said, “Sheryl—make our course for Lastway. Let me know how fast we can make it, too.”

“This is a fine mess,” Gerard Avondetta Vatta said. He hurt all over and he looked as bad as he felt—he could see that in the faces around him, and he had no time to deal with his pain or his grief at the many losses. Or to worry about his youngest child, who had just survived a nearly disastrous first voyage. He had to think of the future, what could be salvaged from the bleak reality of loss.

“It is a disgrace.” Gracie Lane Vatta, inimitable and invincible, sat bolt upright in her seat. “I cannot imagine what the government is thinking of, to let such things happen.”

A question Gerard didn’t want to consider yet was just how much the government had been involved. Or part of the government. Or what the disasters still falling on Vatta heads meant to the part of the government he had thought he influenced.

“How’s the roll call going?” he asked his brother’s widow, Helen Stamarkos Vatta. He liked Helen; he respected her abilities, but he could still hardly believe that Stavros was gone, that he would never have that steadying hand on his arm again.

“Two hundred nineteen responses,” Helen said. The dark rings around her eyes were the only sign of grief; those, and the mourning band she wore around her hair. She had lost her husband, her elder daughter, a son. “We know of thirty-seven deaths.”