“Like I said, we could protect you. You were attacked, right?”

“Yes, but as you can see I’m fine,” Ky said.

“Yes, but if you had guards, it wouldn’t have happened. And you were nearly killed, they said.”

“Who?”

“The Garda.” He reddened suddenly. “The… uh… Garda have an arrangement with Mackensee. Long-standing understanding.”

“I see,” Ky said. “So you know what they know?”

“Some, anyway. Master Sergeant Dolan does.”

Ky felt a strong desire to talk to Master Sergeant Dolan instead of Lieutenant Mason, but she was sure Dolan couldn’t negotiate contracts.

“So can we make a deal?” Mason asked.

“Patience, Lieutenant,” Ky said. She felt years older than this young man. “I have to assess my needs, and you have to tell me what your rates are. Whatever you’ve heard, merchanters aren’t made of money, and we don’t have unlimited funds. Aren’t you people usually hired by whole planets?”

“Yes, but you’re not getting an entire expeditionary force… you’re just getting us.”

“Suppose you present a formal proposal, Lieutenant, with estimates of the cost to us, and I’ll go over it with my financial officer and see if we can come to an agreement. I have no objection in principle to hiring Mackensee for a job of work, but I’m not going to give verbal agreement to an open-ended contract with no details specified. Surely you have a good clerk NCO who can draw up a sample…”

“Oh. Of course. Yes, ma’am, I do. Perhaps Master Sergeant Roth… he’d know. Can he… uh… just ping your implant?”

“I don’t have an implant,” Ky said. “Why not have Roth work something up, get your approval on it, and bring it over to discuss?”

“Yes, ma’am, I can do that.” He seemed much cheerier with a definite plan in mind, but then most people were. Ky would be much happier when she had a definite plan in mind. “Can we do this… uh… soon?” he went on.

Curiosity and amusement pushed her past tact. “Just how short of funds are you, Lieutenant?” Ky asked.

He reddened and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. “I—they—they just cut us off short, like that, and I know the ship captains have been after me to do something, but what could I do? I was trying to do the captain’s work and the major’s work and I didn’t know where anything was, and Dolan and Roth kept looking at me like I was a five-year-old and finally Dolan said why not ask you—actually he said that two days ago, but I thought maybe if I just talked to the bank—we’ve always had a good credit rating, and maybe a message would come through from home…”

Twit, Ky thought. It surprised her that Mackensee had ever taken this one in, but maybe he had unexpected talents elsewhere… somewhere.

“I asked,” Ky said again, this time with a little edge to it, “how short you are. Are your people going to have food for the next meal, for instance?”

“Uh… maybe.”

Ky rolled mental eyes, and equally mental dice, and came to a decision she wasn’t ready to share yet. “Send me your Master Sergeant Roth,” she said, as if Lieutenant Mason were her subordinate. “Do it quickly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And can I say anything to the troops?”

Idiot.” No,” she said. “Not now. Get Roth over here.”

“I’ll call him from dockside,” Lieutenant Mason said. She sent him away looking much happier, and looked at Martin.

“He must have got in trouble for stealing candy from babies,” Martin said. “He doesn’t have enough gumption for anything else.”

“Is he really that bad?” Ky asked. “I kept wanting to smack him, but—”

“Not officer material,” Martin said. “Not in my books. Mercs may have different standards.”

“Slotter Key has no dim-witted officers?”

“Well, no… I mean, yes, they do, a few. I suppose he might have slipped by for some other reason.”

“So, what do you think about his proposal?”

“If they’re messed up enough that they’re about to give the troops nail soup, they may not be any help.”

“They were better at Sabine,” Ky said.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the one young fool.”

Ky called for Stella.

“You’re looking lively,” Stella said. “What’s going on with those soldiers on the dock? Did the station finally come to its senses and give us official guard?”

“No. That’s Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation. The people I contracted with at Sabine, after they invaded the system, and the people whose surgeons extracted my implant.”

“The ones who nearly killed you.”

“That was my own crewman,” Ky said. “I don’t blame Mackensee for that, though I wish I knew how much data they pulled from my implant. It was only the Vatta basic, not the full dataset, but still. Anyway. Through a series of mishaps, their local leadership is down to one very junior lieutenant, who was supposed to escort their payroll here… and is now in command. And overwhelmed and underfunded.”

“He has the payroll—”

“But the banks have shut them down on credit, and the payroll intended for twenty doesn’t last long when you’re trying to support almost a hundred. He wants us to contract with them for protection, so that we can feed his hungry men and women.”

“Protection…”

“Thing is, Stella, I thought about trying to work something with Mackensee before. They have the expertise, the weapons, the trained personnel. We could use them.”

“Can we afford them?”

“Exactly what I need to know. Stella, I’m assigning you as financial officer, as well as G-2. You know what you brought into this. I’ll tell you what we’ve got—” She called up the figures from the trading they’d done and the remains of Aunt Gracie’s fruitcake diamonds. “We need to provision this ship, and decide what upgrades we can afford with and without hiring the Mackensee group. I’ll be talking to one of their senior NCOs shortly, someone with more sense than that lieutenant. Give me some numbers.”

“Right,” Stella said. “I can do that. Fifteen minutes… you had the list of upgrades already loaded, right?”

“Right.”

Rafe came back before Master Sergeant Roth arrived.

“Did you know the dockside area is full of big, noisy, obvious soldiers?” he asked Ky.

“Yes, of course,” Ky said.

“I hope you don’t think they’re better protection,” Rafe said. “They didn’t notice me coming until I was close enough to lob any sort of weapon—”

“I wasn’t counting on them for protection from sneaks,” Ky said. “And I’d told them you were coming. What did you find out?”

“The local ISC rep is crooked as a corkscrew,” Rafe said with relish. “The ansible is open all right—to him and whoever he’s in contact with, but he’s blocking all incoming and outgoing messages at will. He’s got a probe into what are supposed to be unbreakable automatic systems. I can’t tell yet if the next jump-point ansibles from here are really down, or if he’s programmed this one to think they’re down. That would take me several days. There are at least five in the deal on this end, though: the director, all three technical heads—one per shift—and a weasel in the records section. That one tried to convince me faked records were real, and of course I believed him—to his face.”

“Won’t they suspect something if you’re trying to bribe the records… er… weasel?”

“How’d you know—well, yes. They’ll know I want information. From the look on his face, he’s been taking bribes from everyone onstation who wants to know what’s going on. The shoes he’s wearing, the jewelry… he’s rolling in more money than someone at his level ever makes. But with everyone asking, another one asking is just another source of money—he doesn’t suspect who or what I am.” He cocked his head. “Aren’t you going to tell me about the soldiers?”

“There’s nothing to tell yet.” Ky sighed as he continued to look at her attentively. “No, I’m not going to tell you. When there is something to tell you, then I will.”