“Yes, Captain! I’ll call right away if anything happens.”

“You do that,” Ky said, and clambered up, stiff in every muscle and joint. Martin had checked out enough of the crew quarters that they could each have a private cabin, though at the moment she was sure she could sleep on the deck in a pile with twenty others.

The captain’s cabin was half again as large as hers on Gary Tobai. Osman favored black and gray with red accents; the cabin had an odd smell, which she supposed was essence of Osman. Ky kicked herself for not having thought to have the ’fresher cycle on during those hours on the bridge. She pulled everything off the bed—she was not going to sleep on his sheets. In a locker, she found another set—synthsilk, in black, shiny and slippery. At least they didn’t smell like Osman. She threw the other bedclothes in the cleaning bin, turned the cabin ventilation to high, propped the hatch open, and was asleep before she thought to turn out the light.

She woke briefly once, as the light went off, then again when Toby’s voice announced that it was time, the time she’d said, but if she wanted to sleep longer everything was fine.

“I’m up,” she said. “I’ll shower.”

In Osman’s private bath—which deserved the name, having a tub as well as shower—she found the kind of mess she’d expected from the first, though most of it was due to the tumbling in zero-G. Smears of green and yellow and pink goo streaked the black marble walls and floor. She took one look and dialed the cleaner bots into action. While waiting for them to get the broken glass off the deck, she rummaged again through the lockers in his cabin. Clothes… he certainly liked black. And silk. Silk shirts, blousy silk pants. Shore rig: Vatta uniforms, including an old one worn thin. What must be costumes suitable for different worlds, various colors and styles. Underwear—it was a moment before she realized that the underwear could not all be his… it was a collection, male and female styles in various sizes, and all of it… she shuddered, and put the entire contents into the recycler. Maybe it would have been evidence, but she didn’t want to share space with it, even behind a closed door. In one drawer, she found other evidence of his proclivities: restraints, masks, items she almost understood and didn’t want to. She opened only one of the zippered leather cases; the array of tools horrified her, and she left the rest untouched.

She found clean towels, black but smelling of nothing but soap, just as the bots announced the bathroom was safe. Her implant informed her that the black marble wasn’t really marble, but a tunable crystal; Ky changed it to frosted white. Now she could feel clean… maybe. The shower worked as well as her own back on Gary Tobai, and she took extra time to comb her hair in front of Osman’s—her—mirror. That, too, was a tunable crystal; she changed the lower two-thirds to frosted white rather than reflective.

One by one her rested crew came back to the bridge or their stations.

“Could we redecorate the cabins?” Sheryl asked her.

“What, the gruesome murals bothered you?” Rafe asked.

“Rafe,” Ky said. Then, to Sheryl, “Of course. It’s our ship now. Osman’s cabin was pretty grim—were the others bad, too?”

“Let’s just say that Scovald’s famous mural of the invasion of Bettany does nothing for my dream life,” Sheryl said. “Not even when the previous occupant has added his own commentary and sketches to the original. And it smelled like that kind of person had been living in it.”

“Not nice people at all,” Rafe said. “I found what I thought was a simple one, plain walls with just a few pinups easy to ignore, but the instant I lay down on the bunk, the sound system came on. It left me in no doubt that whoever had that cabin was someone I do not want to know except over a weapon.” At Ky’s look he nodded. “Gone now. Flushed it. I figure you have enough on these people without that recording, and it was the only way to get it to shut up without dismantling the bunk. Which I was too tired to do.”

“I put some things in the recycler myself,” Ky said. “And I’m tempted to flush the bedding, too.”

“Oh yes,” Lee said. “In fact, I did. I’m not sure any cleaning cycle would take care of what was on those sheets.”

“Well, on our next long cycle with nothing much to do, we’ll get all that cleaned away. There’s plenty of crew space; we won’t be bored next transit.”

“I suppose disgust is better than boredom,” Sheryl said. “And it’s better than excitement, too,” she added. “I’ll get on it; there’s nothing for me to do before rendezvous. Unless you’re hungry and want a meal.”

Hands went up.

“I just hope I don’t find Selenki worms or something in the galley,” Sheryl said as she left the bridge.

Within the hour, she reappeared with trays; the smell of fresh-baked bread preceded her. “The galley’s fine,” she said. “And the supplies are… what I suppose pirates can afford. Prepacked from Escalion Catering, their gold-standard rations. I had to bake the bread, that was all. This is like that stuff the luxury liner had, remember?”

It seemed a lifetime ago that there’d been a fuss over gold-eye raspberries. “Yes,” Ky said, around a mouthful of warm fresh bread spread with something sweet and crunchy.

“I suppose we should share this with the others,” Lee said, smearing his bread with a different spread, this one a rich purple.

“Already done,” Sheryl said. “I called ’em. That silence you hear is people eating rather than talking.” She started on her own meal, and silence covered the bridge, too, for a few minutes.

“Better than Aunt Gracie’s fruitcake,” Ky said, when she came up for air. She had not realized how hungry she was. “We can save it for another emergency.”

“Which I hope doesn’t come too soon,” Lee said, stretching. “Ah… that’s good.”

As soon as they were close enough, Gloucester sent a pod to pick up Rafe so he could work on the system ansible. While he was gone, Johannson called Ky.

“We have another problem,” he said. “It’s your ISC agent, so called.”

“Rafe? What now?”

“We’ve been running analyses of events since we left Lastway. It looks to us that Mister Whoever-he-really-is has to be the one who set up that trap. We’re going to bring him back here when he’s done with this ansible, and have a look at his implant.”

“You can’t think that,” Ky said. “He’s been fixing ansibles—he led us to the ISC conspirators at Lastway.”

“It’s not unknown for conspirators to sacrifice some of their people for long-term gain,” Johannson said. “To gain your confidence, to gain ours—”

“And then he helped us survive the attack,” Ky said.

“You say… I’m not sure you’re competent to judge that, Captain Vatta. How else could Osman have known which system we’d be in? Nobody at Lastway knew that. How else could he have contacted his allies so easily? I believe Rafe is—or was—associated with ISC in some sensitive position, but the evidence is clear that he’s using some kind of clandestine communications device.”

“You can’t just invade his implant,” Ky said, all too aware that they could do just that. “He’s my crew; he’s under my protection.”

“I’m afraid we must disagree on that, Captain Vatta. Your safety, and the safety of others in the convoy, is our primary mission. We believe he compromises that safety. I appreciate your sense of honor where your crew are concerned, but we can’t risk it. We don’t intend to harm him; we’ll just check out his implant—”

Rafe would suicide first. Ky knew that, even though he’d never said it in so many words. He was not about to let anyone get access to his implant, or to that implant-mounted ansible. Yet she knew that telling Johannson that Rafe would suicide might convince him all the more that Rafe was one of the villains. After all, would an honest man commit suicide just to conceal the fact that he was honest?