No time for self-recriminations, though. She felt around mentally, pushing every implant control she could find to see what happened. Dizziness… nausea… she was briefly aware of someone holding a bowl under her mouth… and then plunged again into the datastream. This was not how you were supposed to meld with a new implant, certainly not one of this complexity, but she had no time for that, either.

Finally her vision cleared. She looked at Quincy. No data screen blurred that worried old face. Rafe. Same there. Her head felt overstuffed; she wasn’t sure of her balance, but she had to function.

“What do you take,” she asked Rafe, “when you have to go on right away?”

“Coffee helps,” he said. “Here’s a mug. Unless you still want to spew.”

“No, my stomach’s fine now,” Ky said. She tried to sit up and the room lurched, turned pale yellow, then settled back to normality.

“You don’t look it,” he said, steadying her with one arm and holding the mug with the other hand.

“I pushed all the buttons,” Ky said. Upright again, she felt better but still strange. She held out her hands. The left one twitched in a slow rhythm. She willed it to be still, to no effect. Her right was steady. “Good thing I’m right-handed,” she said, and took the coffee. A few sips later, her vision had sharpened to extreme clarity and she could feel her blood vessels vibrating. “Enough,” she said to Rafe.

“The extra sensitivity wears off in about four hours,” he said.

Four hours they didn’t have. Ky opened her implant to the ship circuits and for the first time in months felt the direct connection to all functions that she thought she hadn’t missed.

“How’s Osman taking the video show?” she asked, then realized she didn’t have to ask. Her implant linked to the ship’s communications, and she had her own view of Osman’s face on half a screen while also receiving the vid feed he was getting on the other half. She shrank both to an unobtrusive level, listening in to Lee on the bridge.

“They’re still barricaded in the engine room,” Lee was saying. “I can’t get a feed down there; they’ve blocked the pickups.”

“That would be Quincy,” Osman said. “Well, we can handle her when we get aboard. Where’s the implant?”

Lee looked stubborn. “I don’t want to tell you, not yet,” he said. “How do I know you won’t just kill us all?”

“You don’t,” Osman said. “But I won’t. I just want your captain, and Quincy, and the implant. I will take your cargo, since you offered it, but then you’re free to go. Or join us, if you wish.”

“Some do,” Lee said. “I haven’t decided, myself. I… it would be strange, not being Vatta…”

“You’d still be Vatta,” Osman almost purred. “I am Vatta, after all. The Vatta heir, in fact.”

“That’s true, I suppose…” Lee looked thoughtful. Ky began to think he’d missed his calling; he was as good an actor as he was a pilot.

“So why don’t you tell me where the implant is?”

“We put it in someone,” Lee said. “But I won’t tell you who. That way you won’t want to kill any of us… for a while.”

A shadow crossed Osman’s face, but then he smiled again. “Ingenious. I admire ingenuity.”

Ky grinned to herself. In that case, he should admire hers… about ten seconds before he died.

Her plan, such as it was, had too many failure points to satisfy her, but it was the only one she’d been able to devise and it was above all ingenious.

She pushed herself off the table and staggered; Rafe steadied her again. “Your coordination will return faster if you move around a lot,” he said. “But you’re going to fall into walls a few times.”

“Great,” Ky muttered. One leg felt longer than the other, then that reversed. Normally, a night’s sleep allowed a brain and an implant to work out peacefully what individual differences mattered here, but she didn’t have a night to sleep. She had a battle to fight. “Someone get me Mehar’s target bow,” she said. “If I can’t walk straight I have to at least shoot straight. And I need my pressure suit.” She took a couple of steps, feeling very unsteady, then sat in a chair and stood up again.

“Here, Captain.” That was Mehar herself; Ky quickly damped the data screen that matched her face and voice, and took the target bow with its blunted bolts. Mehar had already placed a pillow on a chair across the compartment. Quincy now held her pressure suit, unfastened and ready.

Ky took the bow and aimed at the pillow; the bolt thwacked into it. “Well, that’s something.” She stepped sideways, and nearly fell into the table. “And that’s something else…” Another shot, this one a foot wide.

“Dance it,” Rafe suggested.

“Dance—?”

He did something, she couldn’t see what, and music came from the speakers. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

Confused and still unsteady, Ky allowed herself to be held, and then he began to move to the music, dragging her along. “You do dance…?” he asked in her ear.

“Er… yes.” Like all the Vatta children, she’d been given dancing lessons in many styles; dance was, everyone agreed, a good preparation for space flight, teaching body awareness and control. But since… since the Academy junior ball, when she’d danced with Hal, she had not danced, or thought of dancing. Now the music and Rafe’s movements brought it back. Her body’s quarrel with the implant receded as melody and rhythm worked on older parts of her brain; she moved more and more smoothly with him. The tremor in her left hand ceased; she felt the warring components slide into harmony. More than that, she felt warm, alive, happy in a way she had not since…

“You dance well,” Rafe said in her ear. “So you’re not a cold fish after all…” Then, moving slightly away, “Is that better?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know—” She hoped her cheeks weren’t flushed with more than implant effects. This was not the time or the man.

“Bad experience,” he said. “Switched implants in the men’s room at an embassy ball, thought I could hide out pretending to be drunk for a few hours, but no such luck. Had to get up and dance—it would have started a war if I hadn’t—and just a few minutes later, I was fine. Mostly. Getting shut of that odious woman, though, that took a while.”

Ky moved around the room again, this time smoothly, and five blunts went into the pillow from various angles. “Time to suit up,” she said. In the suit’s privacy no one would notice what she was feeling, surely very dangerous feelings on the eve of battle. Rafe looked at her, a very knowing look that seemed to go straight to her core, and she looked back steadily, willing herself not to blush, not to react.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. He turned to his own suit and began to clamber into it.

Chapter Twenty

The last moments before the curtain goes up… the last moments before the music starts… Ky looked at the stage she’d designed, the music she would start, as Fair Kaleen’s grapples reached them, as they were drawn closer to the other ship, as the transfer tube bulged out and adhered to the hull around their emergency exit hatch. All the arguments over: Martin still thought he should be where she was, but she had final responsibility. It was her job.

Her stomach knotted, then unknotted. She and her father’s implant were mostly in accord now, with no more balance problems, no sensory problems that she recognized. She hadn’t had time to familiarize herself with all the faculties, the way he had chosen to organize the proprietary information, but the ship command functions all worked. She shouldn’t, she hoped, need more than that. Foremost, already set up, were her links to her own ship’s functions, and those of Fair Kaleen. Osman would have made some changes, in the years he’d commanded the old ship, but buried deep in its command layers, in kernels hardened from the attack she planned, should be responses to her Vatta command dataset that he could not anticipate and counteract. If she could get there.