“Rotten little devil,” Quincy said. “Smooth as an egg, and no morals at all. Fools you because he’s not overtly mean, but he doesn’t care for anything but himself and doesn’t see why anyone would.”

“Our defensive suite says he’s unarmed,” Ky said. “I don’t see he can do us any great harm—”

“Don’t bet on it,” Quincy said. “If he’s here and talking to you, then he sees a profit to himself in it. Figure that out and however slimy it seems… that’s what he’s up to.”

“Here in the middle of nowhere,” Ky mused. “What is he doing here anyway? Just randomly jumping from one unoccupied system to another? He’s a long way from any regular Vatta route.”

“Trouble,” Quincy said. “He’s trouble, through and through.”

“Quince—what did he do? Any specifics?”

“Well. I was only aboard a ship with him once. He’d gotten in a fairly serious scrape his apprentice voyage—gambling debts he tried to cover with the ship’s account. His father—Lazlo’s son, Benalj that would have been—hauled him home and supposedly straightened him out. He was in his twenties when I ran into him again. I was engineering second that voyage, pulled off my regular ship because their first was injured. He was third in command; I heard scuttlebutt that he was under some suspicion of having done something earlier in the trip. But he was a Vatta; the idea was to straighten him out. Well… among other things he liked pretty faces, didn’t matter what gender, and he was putting moves on an Engineering junior. I told him off for it, and he tried to bribe me.”

“Bribe you!” Ky could not imagine that.

“Oh, yes,” Quincy said. “I wasn’t a gray-haired great-granny back then. He didn’t fancy me, I don’t think, but he was willing to try, if it would shut me up. It didn’t. He tried to get me fired for insubordination; the captain wouldn’t hear of it, and I watched my back very carefully the rest of the voyage. Good thing, too, as there were several accidents that could’ve been fatal. His father died young.”

“So…” The knot in Ky’s stomach tightened. “It may not be an accident that he’s here, or that he wants to travel with us.”

“I don’t see how he could have figured out where we’d be,” Quincy said. “That much could be accidental…” She didn’t sound as if she believed it.

“Jump options from Lastway… how many were there?” Stella asked.

“It’s not that.” Ky’s mind raced, throwing up an image of their route since leaving Lastway. “If they have those shipboard ansibles Rafe mentioned, and they’ve tracked us by the restored ansible functions, then here is the next logical place for us to go. Another node in the web, a mostly uninhabited system with multiple jump points.”

“Couldn’t we intercept their communications?”

“No more than with any ansible,” Rafe said. “And thank you for sharing that little secret with everyone, Captain.”

“You undoubtedly have others I don’t even know,” Ky said. “And that one, if it’s operational, isn’t going to be secret for long. Once others realize that the only way for certain things to happen is ship-mounted instant communications, they’ll deduce its existence.”

“I suppose. I still think—”

“Think it later. The question is, what do we do now? If I refuse to talk to him again, he’ll know we know something’s wrong.”

“Wouldn’t you? He’ll expect you to have an implant. Surely that would tell you he’s not on the main list.”

“I guess he can’t tell I don’t…” A germ of an idea sprouted. She went back to the exterior com. “Sorry,” she said to Osman. “We’ve got this pet someone brought aboard, and it keeps getting into trouble.”

“A pet? You let your crew have pets?” The tone carried the implication that only young, inexperienced, sentimental captains allowed pets aboard.

“Special case,” Ky said. She could feel her neck getting hot. “But back to your problem… what do you understand is going on?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Frankly, I’ve been out on my own, pretty far out, not paying much attention to what’s going on back home. But it sounded like trouble, so I came back to see what I could do…”

To help or scavenge? That was the question. Quincy’s story was probably true, if this was the same man, but twenty years and more had tamed many a wild boy, her father always said. We don’t blame people for who they were, if they act well now, her mother had insisted. She wondered what Rafe would be like in twenty years and pushed that thought away.

“It’s pretty bad,” Ky said. “Hard to tell with the ansibles down, but it looks like someone has it in for Vatta.”

“Heard anything about your family?”

“They’re dead,” Ky said flatly.

A moment’s shocked stillness, then his face creased into a scowl. “That’s… that’s monstrous,” he said. “You poor kid—I mean, you’re not a kid, I can see that, but still. Poor old Gerry dead… how’d they get him? He wasn’t on a ship, was he?”

“No.” Ky felt again that reluctance to reveal details, at least yet. “I wasn’t there; I only heard they’d died. If the ansibles come back up—”

“I can’t believe it,” he said. His gaze was direct, his expression exactly what it should be. So why this reluctance? Just Quincy’s belief? That wasn’t fair. “Look,” he said with sudden determination, “I can help. Let me help. Either of us alone, we’re just a single ship, easy to ambush. But the two of us—I don’t mind telling you, I’ve rambled around in some pretty rough places. This old ship isn’t the worn-out hulk she looks like. We could help each other a lot. Family sticks together, eh? Blood thicker than water, all that.”

Sincerity flowed out of him like water out of a spring. Ky could not believe he was anything but a rogue coming around… except for the bitter memory of another sincere, pleading voice, Mandy Rocher and his problem that had become her disgrace.

“I can’t figure out why,” Ky said, talking just to keep the talk going, trying to think behind the chatter. “Why would someone—anyone—take after Vatta Transport? We’ve got a better record of service than, say, Pavrati.”

“Oh, lass. We’re rich, that’s why. The rich are always a target—”

“Not that rich,” Ky said. “I can imagine an envious minor shipping firm resenting us, but it would hardly have the resources to attack us so widely.”

“Well, no,” he said. “But this attack on the ansibles… Vatta’s always supported ISC’s monopoly on ansible services. Could be it’s our allies got us in trouble. Or it could be part of the humod base-stock controversy.”

“What?” Was this just a distraction, thrown out to make her lose track of his argument?

“There’s growing friction, you know, between the base-stock worlds that want to preserve what they call human nature, and the humods. From the base-stock point of view, we’re all humods because we have implants. Makes us mech deviants. I don’t suppose you’ve run into many base-stockers.”

“Only the Miznarii,” Ky said. “Back home.”

“Good grief, are they still around?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “I’d have thought they’d died out long ago; went in for natural childbirth, I thought it was. I meant places like Allgreen and Purity—they’re not on regular Vatta routes, but I’ve traded there. Took me for a criminal, they did, at first. No one has cranial implants, not even fertility mods. One of my old crew was a four-arm, genetic, and Immigration Control wouldn’t even let him off the ship at the station. You’d have thought he’d been able to spit sperm straight into their precious daughters—sorry, did that shock you?”

She had to do better with her face. “I’m shocked that anyone would refuse entry to someone just because they had four arms,” she said. Would he believe that?

“Oh, good,” he said. “I remember Gerry was something of a prude and I should have thought before saying anything, but I’m glad you’re old enough not to flinch at a little physical reality.” His laugh grated. Ky smiled, but followed him into this side topic as if really interested.