“Yes, Captain,” Toby said. He still looked scared, and no wonder, but his eyes also held a spark of interest beyond fear. “I’ll—I’ll try to help.”

“Toby, you’ve helped already. You’re going to make a fine captain someday.” If he lived. If any of them lived. If she had ships for him to captain. But that was her job.

Her father had once said that the easiest person to cheat was the person who expected to be cheated. She’d heard that repeatedly from others, as well, most recently from Osman himself. He would certainly expect tricks, but what tricks would he expect? That the mutiny was faked, that her crew would really resist? That she would find out? What would he consider clues that this was happening?

Delay, probably. If her crew started equivocating, delaying, he’d think they were up to something. If, on the other hand, they urged him to get with it, from the beginning…

She called Lee on the private circuit. “Tell him it’s got to be quick,” she said. “Tell him you’re worried that I’ll find out, rally the loyalists or blow the ship, and it’s got to be quick.” Then another thought struck her. “Tell him you’ll get my command implant.”

“You don’t have an implant.”

“He doesn’t know that. He asked what I had, if I could give him an update. I lied and said I had only the most basic, probationary one. But he won’t believe that; he wants to think I have an advanced one.”

“But you don’t… do you?”

“Not in me. That’s why he’ll find a view of me unconscious with my head laid open proof that it exists. It’s your safety lever, Lee. If he blows the ship, he loses a treasure—the information in a Vatta command implant. Bargain with him. Tell him you can deliver that, and the cargo, if he’ll let you and the crew go with the ship.”

“But—what about you?”

“It’ll only be for a short time, while you put the vid pickup on me to prove I’m captive and helpless.”

Stella shook her head. “It won’t do,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. I’ll be you—he doesn’t know what you look like—”

“He would have vid images from Lastway,” murmured Rafe. “If he suborned someone at MilMart, they could have taken plenty of shots.”

“A wig, makeup,” Stella said. “I’m good at impersonation; you know that. Likeliest thing, he’ll want a constant vid pickup, not just that one glimpse.”

“A bag over your head,” Ky said. “That’s even safer. But the close-up to show that the implant’s out… that has to be my head. No matter what you do with makeup, your cheekbones don’t look like mine.”

“What about the implants? You have two extra now, the one your father sent to Sabine, with Furman, and the command dataset one from… from him.”

“What’s yours, Stella?”

“Currently? Admin Level Two. Lots of data, no command functions.”

“The one Furman sent would give you command functions for this ship,” Ky said.

“I don’t want it,” Stella said. “Remember, I was never trained for shipboard duties. Without time to assimilate what’s in the database, I’d mess something up. Why don’t you give that one to Toby? And you really need to have the command dataset yourself.”

True, and she’d already thought of that. “There isn’t time,” she said. “If I can’t make a quick adjustment, I’d be unable to act when they board.”

“Rafe says it’s possible,” Stella said.

“And you believe him?” Ky said.

“It’s his life, too,” Stella said. “The best chance for us is for you to be augmented as much as possible, isn’t that right?”

It was. Her earlier objections to putting in the implant now seemed foolish. If she had done it on Lastway, or in the safety of FTL flight… they would have had time to cope with whatever problems occurred. Even if it left her completely incapable, Stella could have asked the mercs for assistance. But she’d left it until the last minute, hoping to wait out the whole six months, and now—

“All right,” she said, and turned to Rafe. “So… is it possible in the time we have left?”

“Possible to do, of course. Possible for you to regain full function… that’s less certain. Probably; you’re young, and the implant is presently set to a close genetic match. But it’s going to be rough to push the adaptation. Things your brain normally does while you sleep, you’ll have to do rapidly while awake. And you’d best do it now—you’ll need every minute of time to adapt.”

Time… time slipped away, the minutes disappearing far too fast. Ky prepared one of the mines MacRobert had sent her for its peculiar use and explained to Jim just what he should do when the time came. Martin would take command of the ship’s defensive response if she could not. They would have just that one chance to disable Osman’s ship, or part of it, one chance… she did not let herself dwell on the likelihood that they would all be dead in a few hours. They were not going to die; she was not going to let that happen.

The picture of Ky unconscious, with the implant out, they shot just before Rafe put the command implant in. “He’s going to want continuous feed,” Ky said. “He’s going to want to know it’s not a trick. So we give him continuous feed or what looks like continuous feed. Jiggly, a handheld remote brought in for the purpose. No vid pickups in the captain’s cabin; he’ll believe that. Show me with the implant out, with the implant in someone’s gloved hand, then someone putting a pillowcase over my head and tying me up. Then wobbly, panning briefly, before it steadies again on someone else tied up on my bunk. That’ll be Stella… are you sure, Stella?”

“I’m sure,” Stella said. “I’m most expendable.”

She wasn’t. No Vatta was expendable. But neither were crew.

“Just be sure he doesn’t get me alive,” Stella said. “Me or my implant.”

“He’s not going to get you at all,” Ky said with more confidence than she felt. A few minutes later, they had arranged the setup as well as they could. Ky lay on her bunk and let Rafe slide the needle into her vein; her last thought as darkness took her was a quick prayer that she had guessed right about him.

She woke after what seemed only a moment, on the dining table in the rec area, feeling sick and disoriented. Rafe’s face and Quincy’s were close above her. “Ky…,” Quincy was saying. “Do you know who I am now?”

“Quincy Robins,” Ky said, struggling with her tongue, which felt clumsy. Her vision blurred, shimmered, and cleared again, this time with a foreground of text and icons: Quincy’s entire confidential personnel file, retrievable by focusing on the icons that brought up additional text. “You were married four times?”

“That answers my next question,” Quincy said. “Your implant’s working, at least.”

“Sorry,” Ky said, putting a hand to her head. “It’s… a little overwhelming. How long—?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Rafe said. Somewhat to her surprise, data on him also popped up, referencing his association with Stella and filled with query marks. “It took a bit longer than I’d planned; that is one complicated implant, and the adjustment routines are… tricky. How’s your vision?”

“Weird,” Ky said. Everything she looked at brought up a screen of data; she should be able to suppress that, but so far the usual damping controls didn’t seem to work. Had her father dealt with this visual complexity all the time? “How much time do we have?”

“Osman plans to grapple on in about three hours, he says.”

At the name, Osman’s data came up… even worse than Quincy had remembered. He had been sent for counseling, for mandatory psychiatric treatment, for mandatory control implantation… but he’d escaped then… he’d stolen, both by force and by embezzlement; he’d gambled, dishonestly; he’d tried to cheat shippers and his own ship alike. His approaches to sexual partners were abusive, threatening; his penchant for violence showed up early and never abated.

She’d been an idiot, just as Johannson said. She’d risked the remaining Vatta command structure, and only now did it occur to her that she might have sent Stella and Rafe aboard one of the escort ships, to safety, with the Vatta command implant, and risked only herself.