“You were wise to take my advice,” he said without preamble. “You see how fortunately it turned out.”

“What I see is a big mess,” the voice replied. It did not sound nearly so cowed and compliant as he expected. Gammis scowled.

“It is not your mess,” he said. “It is Vatta’s mess, and they are now helpless to cause us—me or you—any problems.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” the voice said.

Cowards. Timid sheep. Gammis chuckled indulgently. “Their senior officers are all dead. Their headquarters is destroyed. Some of their largest and most profitable ships. They cannot get insurance; their accounts are frozen. What is the problem, then?”

“You missed one.”

“Missed one? I don’t think so. My intelligence reports that their CEO and CFO are both dead, and the entire second level of vice presidents—”

“You missed the old lady. She knows someone got to the government—”

Gammis laughed aloud this time. “Everyone knows someone got to the government. What of it? And what old lady? We have no profiles on old ladies—they can complain all they like.”

“She called me.”

“Oh, for—grow a spine, man. An old lady, some old dowager Vatta, without strength of arms or resources… she can whine all she wants. She is toothless.” Gammis closed the connection, shaking his head at the timidity of grounder politicians.

Chapter Five

During the passage to Lastway, the crew seemed to adjust to the new situation and crewmembers, though not without some friction.

“He’s so… so military,” Quincy said to Ky some three days into the passage. “Everything spit and polish, all the time.” Ky didn’t have to ask for a name: Gordon Martin, of course. “I think he’s too hard on that boy,” Quincy continued. That boy being Jim Hakusar, who claimed to be twenty-three. “Yesterday he had him down on his hands and knees for hours, scrubbing, just because he had forgotten to shower.”

“It won’t hurt him,” Ky said. “Are you getting soft on Jim?”

“Not soft, no. I agree he needs training. But Martin—”

“He is military, Quincy, just out. It’s been his career. You can’t expect him to change overnight, and frankly I’m more comfortable having him in charge of Jim than if I had to supervise him.” Ky stretched. “Is he bothering you any other way? Martin, I mean?”

Quincy shook her head. “Not really. He doesn’t want us to use his given name—that’s kind of odd, we’re all used to first names—but he’s not ordering the rest of us around or anything.”

“Do you think Jim will ever make a spacer? Is he doing well in his studies?”

“Maybe, and not really. Martin thinks he’s not applying himself; I’m beginning to wonder if he has one of those learning things. I was asking him about his schooling and it didn’t sound like the Belinta primaries had any of the corrective software we use.”

“Do we have any of that kind of thing aboard?” The crew had a library for continuing education.

“I’ll look,” Quincy said. “Sorry—I hadn’t thought to check that out.”

“If we do, see if it’ll help him,” Ky said. “I saw those original test scores—he’s about as far down the scale as you can go. If he’s going to be with us, he needs to be more than a drudge.”

Alene had accepted Martin as the new cargomaster—she’d already told Ky she didn’t really want the job herself—but she, too, found him rigid at times. “He wants a full inspection every day,” she said. “Gary never did that, and he had years of experience.”

“He might do it now, under these circumstances,” Ky said. “Martin’s got the background in security as well as supply; he wants to keep us safe.”

“I’m all for safe,” Alene said. “And I don’t mind the extra work, really. With Jim doing most of the scut work, there’s little enough for a cargo second to do en route. It’s just… his manner, I guess.”

“Is he rude?”

“No. But I can see him stopping himself from ordering me around the way he does Jim.”

“Give him time,” Ky said. “At least he’s trying to stop himself.”

As for the stowaway, Ky had little to do with him. She noticed that his shaggy hair had changed to a short bristle, and his face was always smooth, his slouching posture more upright, his expression less foolish and more alert. He always seemed to be busy; the galley and toilets gleamed, the decks were always swept. Every five days, she asked Martin for a progress report, and learned that “the recruit” was making progress, albeit slowly.

“It’d go faster in a real basic training course,” Martin said. He sat upright, as always, and Ky found herself resisting the urge to sit at attention herself. “Here on the ship, with no other recruits to measure himself against, he can fool himself, think he’s working as hard as he can. You remember that yourself, I expect, from your Academy days.”

“Indeed yes,” Ky said. Competition, as well as the staff, had fueled much of her hard work.

“And I do realize we’re civilians, not military. It’s just that boys like this need the discipline, or they’ll never give up their evasions. They always have excuses; they always have tricks to avoid the work. They’re not bad, exactly, but they’re thick-skinned as well as thickheaded. That learning software your chief engineer found is helping, though.”

“If you can make a decent, competent spacer out of him, that will satisfy me,” Ky said. “Just don’t break anything we need later.”

Martin laughed. “I’ll take care of him. Without breakage, I promise you. Another thing, though.” No laughter now; his expression hardened again. “We need to consider security issues for when we dock somewhere. I’ve been through the procedures manual you’ve got, and it’s totally inadequate. We’re lucky we didn’t have an entire crew of stowaways and a kiloton of weaponry aboard. This thing of trusting local police—”

“I’m sure you already have ideas on that,” Ky said. “Do you have them ready to present?”

“As a matter of fact—” He brought out several large sheets of hardcopy. “I could put this on a cube, if you want, but sometimes it’s easier to see in this format. We can cobble together some of our existing equipment for part of it, but we’re going to need better sensors, and many more of them.”

Ky looked at the diagrams. “You’re talking military-grade coverage, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “From the little we know, things are coming unstuck in several places, and we may come out of FTL in a war zone. Civvie stuff to ward off the casual sneak thief just won’t do. Now, I’ve looked into the cargo manifests—that stuff we can’t deliver to Leonora includes components we could turn into the basic net I’m talking about.”

“We can’t breach cargo seals,” Ky said. “It’s against policy, not to mention law.”

He grimaced. “Policy… is for the last war but one, ma’am. Leonora won’t let us deliver, didn’t you say? So their cargo’s forfeit, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly,” Ky said. “In something like this, it would go before a magistrate to determine whether we could sell the cargo and put the money in escrow for the original consignors, or whether we could sell the cargo and keep the profit. Nothing in the law as I understand it allows us to break the seals and use the cargo for our own purposes.”

“We’re not going to be hauled away to jail if we’re in pieces because someone got to the ship,” Martin said.

“True, but—how much can you do without using the Leonora cargo?”

“Depends on what resources you authorize from engineering stores.”

“Let’s look at this again,” Ky said, leaning over the diagram. “Hm. Motion sensors, infrared—”

“Ma’am, I know you have some military training, but how much was specific to security concerns?”

“Not much,” Ky said. “I couldn’t help noticing how different it was, when we were taken to training venues, but we didn’t have it in class. That was coming later, once we were commissioned, they said.”