“Yes. I wonder why Dad kept Louise Sims-Delont in this list—she’s just a file clerk.” Even as she said that, the implant unpacked the reasons and displayed them. Louise Sims-Delont had been too willing to look something up for him five years before, a willingness he interpreted as a possible security leak for the relationship between Vatta Transport, Ltd., and ISC.

What relationship, Ky wondered, and the implant suddenly flooded her awareness with a cascade of numbers, names, dates, reasons.

“What’s wrong, Ky?” Stella asked. Ky shook her head; she couldn’t answer, not now. Stella reached out, shook her arm. “Ky! Answer me!”

Had Stella known? “Too much information too fast,” Ky said. She took a long breath. “Uh… how much do you know about the relationship between Vatta and ISC?”

“Relationship? We depend on ISC’s communications, like all shippers. They’ve used us as general carriers—I don’t know what their total tonnage is, but I’d say we have a reasonably healthy fraction of their business, perhaps a dominant share on our main routes. Vatta’s always supported the monopoly—we didn’t want to risk fragmentation of services and uncontrolled charges. Several other major long-line transport companies have done the same.”

“Yes, and some have argued for open communications standards and competition. Pavrati, for instance.”

“Oh, Pavrati.” Stella wrinkled her nose.

“It’s more complicated,” Ky said. How much should she tell Stella? How much of their present problems related to the data on her implant, the implant that had been taken from her dying father? “This implant,” she said finally. “It’s… something we need to talk about at length, I think. In private. If we’re what’s left of Vatta—”

“There’s Aunt Gracie, or was when I left home.”

“Yes, well…” The compressed data under that heading was another problem. Ky had found it hard enough to reconcile her memory of the prickly, prudish Aunt-Gracie-of-the-Fruitcakes with what Stella had told her. The Gracie of the implant was several orders of magnitude less familiar. “You know she was almost tried for murder?”

“Gracie? Our Aunt Gracie?”

“Yes. They finally decided it was postcombat stress and hushed it up when the family put her in the spaghetti farm for a year.”

Stella’s eyes widened. “They thought about sending me to a clinic; Aunt Gracie said no, she’d take care of it—but if she… why did they listen to her?”

“Because she had more dirt on both our fathers than you could imagine,” Ky said. The internal memos recorded on this implant had more detail on that than she wanted. She wished Aunt Gracie had been there; she could’ve argued for her own father’s memory. He had always been so upright, so honest, so sensible; she could imagine he might have been a bit wild as a youngster, but not as… the word conniving slipped in and out of focus. Not her father. Not her father, dead after the attack on the Vattas. Or Stella’s, though she’d always wondered if Stella’s wildness came from her father rather than her socialite mother. “She was head of Vatta’s internal security—you know that, that’s the kind of work she had you doing. But she was also working with the Slotter Key government—well, part of it, anyway.”

“You don’t suppose she set it up—was working with Osman or something?”

“No,” Ky said, even though the same dire suspicion had flashed through her mind a minute before. The implant made it clear how deep Gracie’s dislike of Osman ran. “I’m sure she didn’t. But the fact is that all three of us now have to work together, if Vatta’s to come back… or just survive.”

“We have to survive,” Stella said. “There’s Toby…”

“Yes. Well…” Was this the time to admit to Stella the real reason she had resisted using the implant? No… no more than she could confess her disgusting joy in the act of killing. “We’ll need to spend considerable time, as I unlock various cubbies in this thing, figuring out what to do about what’s inside.” That sounded lame, but she did not want to get into the whole thing now. For one thing, she still felt limp. “And we don’t want to involve Rafe—there’s a lot of stuff about ISC.”

“Oh, I agree,” Stella said. “But he’ll probably keep trying to worm it out of you. That peeling-a-lime thing—” She sounded annoyed.

Ky laughed. “I’m not susceptible to his type,” she said. “Or any type, at present,” she added, more soberly. She pushed away the memory of that brief, crazy dance with Rafe. That was postimplant befuddlement, nothing more.

“Dad told me you were involved with a very nice young man at the Academy,” Stella said. “It’s too bad—but maybe you can get together when this is over—”

“No!” Ky lowered her voice after that emphatic negative. “No. That’s over and done with.”

“Well… there will be others.”

Not until this was over. Not until she understood more of herself. Not until she found a man who would not be horrified at what she really was… and would she want a man who would not be horrified? She was horrified.

“Besides,” she said, hoping to distract Stella. “He’s yours, isn’t he?”

Stella flushed but shook her head. “Come on, Ky, he’s not a commodity to be possessed. Besides… he wouldn’t be mine, in that sense, even if he were.”

“You said you were attracted…”

“Yes, attracted. But now, at this moment, we’re busy with something else. I’m not controlled by my hormones, you know, whatever my reputation in the family.”

“Sorry,” Ky said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Good. He’s… interesting, yes. Skilled. But I don’t know if he’ll ever be… someone to partner with, long term. I was worried that you might fall for him and get hurt, when all he wanted was your trust.”

“Never walk in on women discussing men,” Rafe said, doing just that. “Stella, Stella… I don’t know whether to be flattered by your interest—no one analyzes so minutely someone they care nothing for—or appalled at its erroneous conclusions.”

“Stop that,” Ky said, as Stella flushed again. “I don’t give a flip what your relational strengths and weaknesses are; your timing is atrocious.”

“My timing is impeccable, as always,” Rafe said, settling against the bulkhead. “I come bringing peace to your soul, Captain: Osman’s corpse is safely stowed for the moment, but retrievable when your mercs show up with proper body bags. Stella, did you know your baby cousin was a very thorough killer?”

“I’m sure she would do whatever was necessary in an emergency,” Stella said.

“I’m sure that his other wounds would have killed him without that stab through the throat to the brain,” Rafe said. His gaze, deceptively mild, had settled on Ky; she felt the heat rise in her own cheeks. “That’s not just a military cut direct, so to speak. That’s more, isn’t it, Captain?”

“Fatal, I’d say,” Ky said, trying for an offhand tone. “After all, I thought he was dead the first time, when their ship security was breached. It seemed a good idea to make sure.”

Rafe shrugged. “Whatever you say, Captain.”

She was glad to have that conversation interrupted by a call from the Mackensee ship. It was close enough to use conventional communications. “I see what you mean about the Kaleen tumbling,” her liaison said. “Do you think there are any live crew aboard?”

“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I haven’t tried hailing her since the running lights came back on.”

“Better tell me what happened,” Johannson said.

Ky explained briefly, starting with Osman Vatta’s relationship to the family and continuing through the full sequence that had ended with his death. Johannson’s professional expression wavered several times, but he didn’t interrupt. She was glad of that; she could imagine his comments on her idiocy in letting those boarders through the lock.

“So… you fired an EMP mine inside your own ship to scramble his mine’s electronics?” was all he said at the end.