“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I’ve been in transit. What have you heard?”

“Two dozen rumors, nothing solid,” Traffic Control said. “But here—if you dock here, you may have problems getting out, and you will have to pay cash—Vatta credit’s down the tubes.”

“If I don’t dock here, I may run out of air,” Ky said. “So bring me in.”

“Your choice,” Traffic Control said. “There’s an eight-hundred-credit cash deposit on docking; Immigration Control will be there to collect it.”

“Thank you,” Ky said through clenched teeth. Then she called the crew together.

“What I know is all bad, but I’m sure we don’t know everything,” she said, then went on to describe the news. “It may be that all the other Vattas are dead. It may be that the news is all wrong and they’re all alive. But for our own safety, we have to assume that there is someone—apparently a lot of someones with plenty of resources—after Vatta.”

“You aren’t setting foot off this ship,” Quincy said.

“On the contrary, I must, to do what needs doing,” Ky said. “At any rate, it would do me no good to sit here and have my crew picked off one or two at a time. I can’t run this thing alone.

“But we are going to be careful. Those procedures that Martin developed, that we’ve been practicing—we are all going to adhere to them. No casual wandering around the station, no letting people wander into our dock space. We’re going to carry taggers; we’re going to put up extra security screening, the whole bit.”

“What do you think you have to do that requires you to go offship?” Quincy asked.

Ky looked at her, but Quincy didn’t back down. Not surprising. “To start with, I have to pay docking fees in advance, in cash. Vatta credit’s been frozen. I should have a private account here, but since we don’t know when the Belinta ansibles went out, I don’t know if the transfer I set up before we left actually went through. I need to exchange hard goods for cash, open an account, get us back into business. None of you can do that. In addition, I need a way to defend myself,” she said.

“You… are you talking about weapons? About arming the ship?”

“I’m not telling any of you all my thoughts,” Ky said. “Not even you, Quincy. Not because I don’t trust you—” Though she did not entirely trust the new crewmembers. “—but at this point the fewer people who know my plans, the fewer people can be forced to share them.”

Their expressions showed that none of them had considered that possibility yet.

“You think someone might—might grab one of us? Shake us down?” Mitt asked.

“It’s possible,” Ky said. “We have to think of things like that, Mitt. If they’ll attack corporate headquarters on Slotter Key, and kill family and crew on other stations, then a snatch isn’t the least likely thing to happen, if we’re unprepared. That’s why we’ll take precautions. Those of you with implants, make sure you keep your communications channels alive. Talk to the ship anytime you’re out… anything, everything.”

“You don’t have an implant,” Quincy said. “Isn’t it time to use that implant your father sent you?”

“It hasn’t been six months,” Ky said. “In the meantime, the first trip out is going to buy me the best nonimplant personal communicator on this station. I’ll wear it from then on, and when I go out I’ll have both crew and—depending on what I find out in the next couple of hours—hired security as well.”

“Captain, if Vatta Transport is really gone—really defunct—are you going to try to start it up again, or go independent?” Beeah asked.

“Beeah, I can’t answer that one now. I don’t know enough. We just fell into a war with these attacks. I don’t know who the enemy is, or why the attacks happened, or how strong the enemy is, or which of our forces are left. The main thing now is to survive, gather data, get someplace from which we can move, if a move is possible.”

“You ought to go back to Slotter Key,” Quincy said. “Your family needs you.”

“If I have a family,” Ky said. Images of horror flickered through her mind, and she shoved them away. “Attacks on headquarters, warehouses, processing plants, the private terminal, the family compound… where else would my family be? And it will do no good to go to Slotter Key and be cut off from ansible communication. What they need—if they live, if the whole corporation hasn’t been bankrupted—is someone out here doing trade and showing that Vatta ships still carry cargo safely.”

“But if we have no insurance, no one will ship with us.”

“Not the big shippers, no. But there are always people desperate to get cargo from here to there, and willing to assume the risk themselves.”

Quincy pursed her lips. “Vatta has never carried that kind of cargo.”

“Oh, yes, we have. Long ago, admittedly, but it’s in the family histories. Vatta wasn’t always completely pure and aboveboard—no one was, in the early days after the Rift. So what we’re going to do is trade and profit, along with skulking and hiding and being extremely careful.”

“I don’t see how we can carry the Vatta colors and be careful both,” Mitt said. “I’m with Beeah—why not go independent now, change the ship’s registry?”

“We can’t—we’re already widely known as Vatta,” Ky said. “If it comes to that, we’ll have to do it somewhere else, some port that is even less law-abiding than Lastway.”

They stared at her in silence.

Ky spent the next two hours looking at the threat assessment she and Martin had made on the approach when she had nothing else to do. Too many question marks, too many things she could not know. The lessons from the Academy came back to her. No commander ever knew everything; the ones who thought they did were often in the worst trouble. Good commanders took what they did know and made good plans—and contingency plans—anyway.

She doodled on a blank page of her log. MISSION: what was her mission, anyway? She had no higher command, at the moment… surely the original mission, to sell the ship for scrap, was irrelevant at this point. Stay alive. Keep her crew alive. Keep her ship whole and functioning. Find out who was behind this. What were victory conditions?

As cadets, they’d been introduced to the concepts of tactics, strategy, grand strategy… but most of their time had gone into the things a junior officer might need to know. Strategy was for older, more senior, and hopefully wiser heads. Juniors succeeded insofar as they figured out ways to carry out the designs of their seniors.

Ky shook her head at that moment of nostalgia. Prepared or not, she was the person on the spot. She was senior now. It was all up to her. No use to whine that she wasn’t ready or didn’t know enough. Nobody was around to advise her.

Victory conditions: start with alive and free, all of them. Alive, free, with the ship. Alive, free, with the ship and crew and some prospect of making a living. And then doing something to save her remaining family members and if possible the family business. Revenge on whoever had done this would have to come later, much later, but survival itself depended on figuring out who it could be.

Paison’s allies were the obvious choice… and if true, that meant it was her fault. If she hadn’t killed Paison, they would not have attacked her family. But that made no sense. Why would pirates waste all that money and effort to attack her family when they had to know where she was? Why not just kill her?

Now was the time to find out who, and then how and why and the rest, while keeping herself and her crew alive and out of enemy hands. She looked at the locker in which she’d stowed the Vatta implant her father had sent her. It was still too soon, according to the Mackensee surgeon, to have an implant installed, but at this moment she would have liked access to the proprietary Vatta information. More important, though, was keeping it out of enemy hands—a security issue that hadn’t occurred to her until this moment.