“Yes,” Ky said, and clamped her teeth on justifications. She didn’t need his approval anyway: it had worked.

“And his lock was disabled by the combination of your EMP mine and his limpet—”

“Yes.”

“Interesting.” She knew that interesting wasn’t as mild as it sounded. “We’ll be sending a pinnace with a boarding party to… uh… Fair Kaleen. You might want to back off another thousand klicks or so, just in case. Can you?”

“Oh, yes,” Ky said. She glanced at her pilot. “Lee, back us out.”

“Glad to,” he said.

Ky followed that exploration by relay. The Mackensee boarding party found that the main-entry air lock was too damaged to function, and the entry passage was still open to space. However, inner compartment seals had shut when the ship systems reset. They rigged a temporary air lock and convinced the ship to let them in. Inside, they found sixteen dead—seven in space armor, dead because their suit systems had gone down, the rest not even in pressure suits, victims of decompression. As they worked their way from compartment to compartment, they found a few survivors in those compartments that had been aired up. Some were injured, some not; all were taken prisoner, even the three in a storeroom off the galley, who claimed to be prisoners of the crew.

In the midst, Martin appeared on the bridge. “The medbox says I’m cured,” he said. “Sorry I dropped like that, Captain.”

“You weren’t the only one,” Ky said. “I’m glad it didn’t scramble your brains permanently.”

“Why didn’t you just have Lee shut the ship system down?”

“Osman had a limpet mine inside the ship,” Ky said. “This was the only way I could think of to knock out its systems.”

“Oh.” Martin gave her an odd look. “You take the big jumps, don’t you, ma’am? And I suppose you killed Osman?”

“Yes,” Ky said.

“Very thoroughly,” Rafe put in.

“Martin, we’re going to be taking over the other ship,” Ky said, before Rafe could get started on that. “We need a prize crew—you’ll be on that, of course, since that ship may have security issues the rest of us wouldn’t recognize.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Martin said, looking more alert by the moment. “They’ll have traps in her and such, same as I set here against boarders.”

“Exactly. I can provide your implant with a layout of the ship as she was built and in use originally. We need a boarding plan as well, and if you have recommendations on crew.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on it.”

Johannson called Ky again when his personnel were sure they had cleared the ship to explain what he intended to do with those found. “We can sort ’em out later,” Johannson said. “I’m not having strangers running around loose on this ship… they don’t claim to be Vattas, anyway.”

The engineers with the boarding party began to stabilize the ship’s tumbling once they reached the bridge. Systems had reset correctly; it was simply a matter of giving the correct commands. In a few hours, Johannson informed Ky that the ship was ready to receive a prize crew.

“She’s down on reserve air, as you’d expect. Cargo holds are still aired up; our engineers recommend pumping that air into the crew space once you’ve done something about that air lock. The ship inventory lists useful spares. Here—” A block of data came across; Ky’s implant sorted it and displayed it for her.

“If we use your temporary airlock, we should be able to get to Section B-Four and put that replacement in,” Ky said. “Are Kaleen’s repair bots functional?”

“Some of them appear to be. You want us to run systems checks on them?”

“Yes. No sense risking lives if the bots can do some of the vacuum work.”

The Mackensee pinnace transported the survivors from Fair Kaleen to Gloucester while the repair bots started work on installation of a new air lock. Ky itched to get over there and see what her command implant could pull up from the ship’s computers, but she had no way to transfer. Yet. She had to organize a prize crew, anyway. Johannson had made it clear that providing such a crew did not fall within their contractual obligations, and he was not minded to widen them. Minimally—if they did nothing but transport the ship to the next port—the ship would need a commander, pilot, navigator, someone in Environmental, someone in Engineering.

“We need a Vatta commanding both ships,” Ky said finally, to Stella and Toby. “Toby, you know more about ships, but Stella’s old enough that station managers might accept her, even though she has no papers.”

“Captain, why don’t you go aboard the Kaleen?” Toby said. “This ship’s simpler. If you left Stella here, and a few of the old hands, she wouldn’t have any problems with her.”

“It’s… an idea,” Ky said. “But think of the trouble I got into by leaving this ship even briefly.”

“This is different,” Toby said. “That ship—nobody here knows her; she needs more crew and more expertise. You should take her.”

“I agree,” Stella said. “If you’ll let me load some of the ship systems stuff into my implant, I’m sure I’ll be able to do what I must.”

“I suppose.” Already Ky knew this would work. She ran it all as a fast sim in the implant. Yes, it was the best solution. Now to choose who would stay and who would go. She needed Lee and Sheryl with her: they could set up a tape for Gary Tobai’s crew to follow. Martin, of course. That meant Alene had to stay on here; she would be responsible for cargo. Environmental, she had to have someone from there, and an engineer. Mitt and Mehar, she decided. Rafe, for his expertise with nonstandard ansibles.

By the time the pinnace came back toward Gary Tobai, she and her prize crew were suited up and ready to leave. On scan, the pinnace edged closer and closer.

Then came another call from Johannson. “My people say there’s a limpet mine on your outer hatch.”

“Oh… yes.” She had forgotten about that. “That’s the one Osman tried to blow up the ship with.”

“Facing out… is it armed to repel boarders?”

“No,” Ky said. “That just seemed a good place to store it.”

“To store your enemy’s mine… any particular reason why you didn’t just give it a good shove out the hatch?”

“I didn’t want to hit the Kaleen with it,” Ky said. “Besides… a mine is a terrible thing to waste.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Along silence, during which Johannson turned dull red and appeared to be having trouble breathing. Then a harsh bark of laughter. “Captain Vatta, you—you are indeed—interesting. We’ll send the pinnace to ferry you and your prize crew aboard.”

Fair Kaleen, up close, looked even more battered than in the external vid pictures. The damage Osman’s limpet had done to the air lock, for instance. That was going to be expensive to fix properly—the implant gave estimates. The repair bots had welded a replacement in, roughly, but it was not the kind of work Ky wanted on any ship she owned for the long haul. Once into the crew quarters, she found not the squalor she had expected from an outlaw’s ship, but a tidy, workmanlike arrangement, marred only by stains from the recent conflict. The bridge, easily three times as large as Gary Tobai’s, resembled that of the ship she had apprenticed on, but with the addition of an extra row of boards.

“Weapons,” her merc escort pointed out. “He’s taken out part of two cargo holds to mount them. We haven’t checked them all out, but I wouldn’t hit those red buttons unless you want to kill something. We didn’t inventory the munitions, either, but the hold hatches had warning labels on them. We’ve checked out the bridge for booby traps and have discussed the rest of the ship with your security command.” He glanced at Martin, who nodded.

Ky looked at the control boards. Well, she had always wanted to command a warship. This thing could almost be a pocket cruiser, if the holds were full of missiles instead of cargo… no question at all that Osman had been a pirate. Which might help when a court adjudicated possession: whatever they thought of privateers, courts always thought poorly of pirates.