“Jim!” Ky could imagine Quincy trying to push Jim aside and shut him up.

“I just don’t get it. We could’ve been halfway to somewhere else by now—”

Ky’s temper boiled over. “You could be all the way to somewhere else in about two minutes… there’s an air lock.” Silence, complete, throughout the ship.

“’M sorry,” Jim muttered finally.

“Good,” Ky said. “Whether I made a mistake or not by talking to Osman will be clear in a day or so. In the meantime, we can increase our chances of survival by anticipating the bad guys and thinking of ways to make their task harder.”

“We could put out a message on the ansible,” Rafe said. “We’ve cleared several along our back route… it will go somewhere, even if it isn’t picked up for a while. All stations, all recipients. Tell them about dear old Uncle Osman… or Cousin Osman, or whatever he is.”

“Good idea,” Ky said. “You draft the message, then let me see it before you send it.”

“Do we have any ship weapons?” Rafe asked.

“Not offensive weapons. Or rather, we have the popgun equivalent that all the ships carry now. It wouldn’t penetrate his ship.”

“He may or may not know that.”

“He’s boosting,” Lee said. “But he’s not going to keep up with us.”

“He wants a safe distance,” Ky said, thinking aloud. “He’s got the power to overtake us, but he won’t. His scan trace will point to us but keep him out of trouble.” Which meant he was expecting help, though she didn’t say that.

“He thinks,” Rafe said. Ky glanced at him. His expression was feral.

“Aren’t you supposed to be drafting that letter?”

“I have; I’ve forwarded it to your desk.”

Ky managed not to snarl. Of course, he had an implant. He could do that while she was limited to indirect input. If only she’d been near a real clinic where they could test and see if it was safe to put an implant in, she could have had the basic module. “Don’t be smug,” she said. “You and your implant.” She opened the file on her desk. The letter looked perfectly straightforward; she hoped it was. She opened a query link to the system ansible… almost two minutes to contact.

“You’re close to that six months you mentioned,” Rafe said. “You could put one in now.”

“No med tech,” Ky said, watching the winking light that indicated the message was en route to the ansible. She wasn’t about to wait for confirmation that the ansible was ready to receive.

“True, but it’s possible to put them in without. I have. Changing implants is sometimes very useful.”

“Risky.”

“Not really. You can get a headache, and you can be disoriented for a few hours. I try to do it overnight—lie down, pull one, and insert the other. You do have to know sterile technique.”

“Which I don’t,” Ky said. “So I’ll wait, thank you.”

“I do know sterile technique,” Rafe said. “If it would improve our chances of survival, I’d be glad to help.”

He would be glad to get his hands on the Vatta command database, however briefly. She could only deal with one trickster at a time, and Osman was the immediate threat. “I think not,” Ky said. “It can’t make this ship faster or add weaponry. For plain maneuver, the brain I have will work just fine.” She hoped. A command implant would give her faster control of ship systems; it might even work with Fair Kaleen’s systems…

“Glad to hear it,” Rafe said. “Is there any other assistance I can offer?”

“Don’t know yet,” Ky said. “I’ll let you know if I think of something.” She turned to Lee. “Do you know the nearest mapped jump point?”

“It’s the one the mercs went to. There’s another, a half point farther.”

“So… the mercs should get here first. Maybe.”

“If the bad ones didn’t use an unmapped point. If they were just offscan, they could do a short jump in and be here in a few hours. We have enhanced scan, but the range is still well under system radius.”

“Any idea what vector they might use?”

“No, why?”

“Diversions,” Ky said. “The one thing that even defensive shields have trouble with is random mass.”

Rafe snorted. “What, you’re going to throw out some cargo?”

“You might call it that,” Ky said. “If you consider mines cargo.”

“Mines?”

“You’re familiar with the concept?” She could not keep all the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Yes. I just didn’t know you had any, and you said you didn’t have weapons.”

“Didn’t have offensive weapons. I have some mines. Not many, and maybe not enough. We’ll see.”

“When will you drop them?”

“When I see the whites of their eyes,” Ky said. At his expression, she had to laugh. “When I know what vector they’re coming in on,” she said. “Or if Cousin Osman gives us any trouble in the meantime. I hate to waste a Vatta hull—”

“You surely don’t think you can get it back!”

“If I can, I intend to,” Ky said. “Vatta Transport needs hulls. We’ve lost several that I know of, not to mention the capital investment in our headquarters. We make money by trade; it takes hulls to haul cargo. So—Cousin Osman’s hull belongs, by rights, to Vatta. To me, if it comes to that.”

Rafe stared. “You’re either crazy or brilliant, I’m not sure which.”

“Neither am I,” Ky said. “Time will tell.”

“You seem amazingly calm about this. Are you scared at all?”

Ky wondered if there was any way to explain, and decided it was a lost cause. “Not excessively,” she said instead.

Fair Kaleen had increased her boost. On the ship-to-ship, a light blinked. Osman wanted to talk again. Ky didn’t. Anyone with a shipboard ansible had to be part of the conspiracy.

“There they are,” Lee and Rafe said together. On the enhanced longscan, two tiny dots. Ky reached over and flicked a button. Both turned red. She spared a moment of thankfulness that the defensive suite’s designer had included a remote weapons detection function, and that she’d opted for the more expensive version.

“Weapons hot,” Ky said. “They must be expecting trouble.”

“Or a quick easy kill,” Rafe said. “Do you want me to plot their course, so Lee can concentrate on piloting?”

“You know how?” It didn’t surprise her. Interstellar navigation, in its simplest form, was a matter of looking up tables of figures and inserting them in the navigational computer. And having Rafe on navigation would be better than Sheryl—competent though she was, Sheryl was better off not on the bridge right now.

“Yes.” Rafe grinned. “I can still surprise you, too, Captain. Anyway, if you have a way to use those mines, I want you to be free of all distraction while you do it.”

The enemy ships—she presumed they were enemy, since they had not contacted her—had emerged from jump at high velocity, and were braking only slightly. Ky interpreted this to mean that they were getting data on her directly, and instantly, from Osman on Fair Kaleen. She looked at their own trace. The old ship could not accelerate any faster, and she had to conserve fuel for maneuvering.

“Lee, cut her back. We want to look like innocents heading for the jump point. I’m going to have a little chat with Osman and see what he tells me.”

When she clicked the com back on, she started talking as soon as Osman’s face appeared, with the wavery edge characteristic of diverging signal sources.

“Well, Cousin, are you coming?” Ky asked. “I have the feeling it’s not healthy to stay in one place too long.”

“Who would hang around in a deserted system like this?”

So he was going to try to keep her ignorant… surely he had noticed trouble on the scans. “Looks like a fine quiet place for raiders or pirates to me, Cousin,” she said cheerily. “Surely they have rendezvous points far from heavily traveled routes.”

“How would anyone know we were here?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Blind luck maybe. Wait—” She pretended to look away. “Imagine that. I have two blips on my screen… what do you have?”