“Thank you,” she said.

“Captain—environmental’s salvageable. The cultures are fine; the higher taxons are badly shaken up, but I think we can boost production in the next few days.”

“That’s good to hear,” Ky said. “Stores?”

“The ship’s supplied for a much bigger crew, Captain, and none of the supply lockers I’ve seen so far was damaged. We won’t have any problems for another three standard months at least; there are more lockers, but I’m not yet sure it’s safe to get into them.”

“Good,” Ky said. “So we’re good to go, then.” Mehar and Toby hadn’t said anything, but the drives boards were all green. Quincy, back on Gary Tobai, had said things about idiots who went off to strange ships with greenies for Engineering crew, but she was still recovering from her blast injuries, and Ky wasn’t about to put additional strain on her. Quincy had finally subsided when Ky pointed out that Stella, as a completely inexperienced captain, needed the best engineer on Gary Tobai.

The Mackensee boarders had already tested the communications, ignoring the box they didn’t recognize, which Ky knew was the ship-mounted ansible. Now she called up Johannson.

“We’re ready to go as soon as your people are back aboard your ship,” she said. “We’ll be rejoining the convoy after jump, correct?”

“Correct. If your navigator is at the board, I’ll transmit the coordinates—”

“Go ahead,” Ky said, nodding at Sheryl.

“We’re on our way,” the merc escort said. “See you somewhere else, and good luck with this thing.”

“We’ll be fine,” Ky said, with more confidence than she actually felt.

At last they were on the move. On Osman’s excellent military-grade scans, Gary Tobai boosted for jump ahead of them, crawling along at less than half the acceleration Fair Kaleen could offer. Ky was not about to go off and leave her first command, though. Behind them, the Mackensee ship loafed along, keeping watch behind, weapons live. Ky kept Kaleen’s locked down. In those hours, Ky’s implant explored the ship and her data banks, easily circumventing Osman’s security routines: at root, the ship was Vatta, purpose-built for Vatta, and her deepest levels of programming gave anyone with the Vatta command dataset complete access to anything added later. Ky was able to tell Martin exactly where physical traps were located, and how to disarm them.

The cargo holds with the weapons held ample munitions for them, Ky found. In fact, the modifications Osman had made to the ship cut down her cargo capacity to just over half again as much as Gary Tobai’s… she would be uneconomical as a pure trader without ripping out all the changes. But as a privateer… she was perfect, except that the universe knew her as a pirate. She needed a new name, a new ship chip, an identity unsullied by Osman’s years of criminal activity.

And what was in the other holds would easily pay for that new identity… the cream of a half dozen piracies, at least. Osman had kept all the compact, highly valuable prizes: luxury items such as jewelry, art, bioassays, implants—implants taken from “interesting” prisoners. Some had been downloaded into his own ship’s computer, and some awaited that treatment. He had reloaded salable data onto data cubes; a good part of his profit for the past dozen standard years had been from the sale of proprietary information gained from such implants, she found when she looked at his records. Pirate he might be, but he kept financial records like any other businessman. He also had a store of ship-mounted ansibles for sale to potential allies in the war against ISC.

Ky mused on this as Rafe went to work on the shipboard ansible console. Should she tell him about the others? No harm, probably.

“There’s about a dozen of these things in the hold,” she said conversationally. Rafe looked at her.

“Like this?”

“Yes. According to his internal records, he used to have more, but sold some. Do you need to know to whom?”

“I suppose I should,” Rafe said. “But that cat’s well out of the bag by now. I told them two years ago… but they wouldn’t listen.” He turned back to his work. “By the way, do you think Osman was the only reason Vatta was attacked? Was he just working out his grudge while helping his allies?”

“I’m not sure,” Ky said. “If they were looking to make an example of a shipping firm to put pressure on the others—which is what some of the other captains at Lastway thought—then Vatta is reasonably conspicuous and has supported ISC’s continuing monopoly in the past. Osman could have been a blessing to them, with his inside information and his personal interest in seeing Vatta suffer.”

“There are other systems that don’t like Slotter Key flags in general,” Rafe said. “I don’t suppose you know this, but Slotter Key runs privateers.”

Her own letter of marque seemed to be burning a hole in her uniform—she was very glad Rafe was looking at the console’s internal bits, and not at her. “I had heard something,” she said. “I wasn’t sure whether to believe it.”

“Oh, it’s true. Cheaper than enlarging their Spaceforce, I suppose. Privateers support themselves. From our end, we never knew Vatta to be involved in that, but this ship… your corporate headquarters disavowed it, but I did sometimes wonder.”

“You… knew about Osman before I did?” And you didn’t warn me? she wanted to add but didn’t.

“Not for sure,” Rafe said. “And if you were making rendezvous with the family privateer, I wanted to know more about it.” Now he did look over his shoulder at her. “Don’t look at me like that, Captain. It doesn’t violate our partnership—check the terms—and I warned you as soon as I knew for certain something was bent.”

Small comfort. She tried to think of something to say, but at that moment, Sheryl announced that they were entering countdown for endim transition.

“All stations, secure for FTL,” Ky said, instead of any of the lame comments she’d thought of. “Section seals locked.” Rafe got off the deck and strapped himself into one of the spare seats on the bridge, while the others acknowledged. Ky’s stomach knotted. How would the Kaleen handle transition with that crudely repaired air lock? At least, if it blew, only the passage behind it would lose air.

Fair Kaleenslipped through the transition as easily as Ky herself would have walked through a doorway… of course, a pirate would keep his ship perfectly tuned. After a brief hour and twelve minutes of FTL flight, during which Ky thought of all the things that might have gone wrong with Gary Tobai and then what might go wrong if any of them reentered normal space at the wrong relative vee, the ship dropped out as smoothly as she’d gone in. Ahead of them, Gary Tobai appeared as their scan cleared, and behind them the Mackensee ship dropped out still at the same interval.

“Brilliant job, Lee and Sheryl,” Ky said. She felt a wave of relief. There on longscan were the other Mackensee ship and the rest of the convoy. No unknown ships in the system. Here, the ansible wasn’t working, but Rafe would fix that. She reversed the compartment lockdown.

“Ten hours to rendezvous with convoy,” Johannson said.

Ten hours. She could not stay awake another ten hours. Who could?

“Toby, come to the bridge, please.” Toby of the inexhaustible energy. On their present course, with no changes to be made, he could surely keep watch while the rest of them recovered.

“Commander, most of my crew’s dead on their feet. I’m going to put us down, and leave one on watch.”

“Good idea. Call if you need anything.”

Toby, with Rascal bouncing at his heels, came onto the bridge. “Yes, Captain?”

“You have the bridge, Toby.” No need to ask if he was alert enough; his eyes sparkled with delight. “See, I told you you’d make captain someday.”