All solid, experienced, personnel who could probably make this trip with no captain at all. She would have to prove herself. She would have to make no mistakes. With that thought, she went back to the paperwork.
Undock and castoff went smoothly; Ky had nothing to do but sit in the captain’s couch and watch her experienced crew do what they had done so often before. The tug towed them out to regulation distance and stood by while Engineering powered up the main insystem drive and tested the backup. All functioned nominally. Glennys Jones set off on course with no fuss and no surprises.
And with no speed. Functional, efficient insystem drive though she had, it produced less than 80 percent of the acceleration of newer systems. It would be days, not hours, before they dared shift into hyper. Before anything disastrous was likely to happen.
During those days, Ky tried to adjust to her new reality. No fixed schedule, no rapid alternation of classes, physical training, study periods. The empty hours seemed endless. Ky read and reread the manuals for every ship system and followed her crew around asking questions until everyone was snappish. They had seemed so levelheaded before the journey; she worried about the possibility of contamination in the environmental system until, on the fourth day, she overheard Tobai explaining to Beeah Chok, engineering second, that it was just new-captain’s-disease, and they both laughed. She backed away, went to her cabin, and dosed herself with a soporific.
Ten hours later she awoke clearheaded and cheerful. Even Aunt Gracie’s cakes didn’t seem an insoluble problem. She could almost believe that someone, somewhere might find them palatable… or useful as doorstops or something. She tried not to think about her past, and found that not-thinking easier when surrounded by the worn fabric of old Glennys and the routine of a ship in passage. She set herself daily tasks—exercises both physical and mental.
Day by day she learned more about her crew, always uncomfortably aware that they were all older than she was, all more experienced. The youngest, Mehar Mehaar, had still spent several years on ships. How could they respect her, she wondered? How could they believe she was anything but a rich girl, captain only by the grace of wealth? She continued to study, pushing herself to disprove what she was sure they thought. At the end of each ship day, she wrote up her log, though it mostly consisted of one paragraph listing all systems as nominal. If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror—as one of her instructors had said—then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection.
Only now and again she wondered what her classmates were doing—what had happened to Mandy Rocher? what was Hal thinking? were the critical midterms coming up or just past?—and put it quickly out of mind. That was behind her; now she had a mission—a job, she corrected herself—and she could find some busywork to keep her mind occupied and those moments of reflection few and far between.
One of those mental occupations centered on the ship. Gaspard’s words kept picking at her. What if… what if she could make enough in trade to buy Glennys herself? And fix her up, and get her through an inspection, and own her own ship? Be an independent trader, like her ancestor.
Her father would have a cat. Her father would have a full-grown mountain cat sprouting green-feathered wings and a forked tail. Her orders were very specific. Transport the goods. Sell the ship. Bring the crew home commercial on the profit. She knew if she did that, she would be offered another position—maybe a better ship, maybe not—on another run, and in a few years she could be captain of one of Vatta’s showpieces. Her mother would keep looking for suitable husbands; she would in the end marry the scion of some other commercial family—someone from the energy field, perhaps, or even ’lope ranching. Not Hal, of course. Even if they ever met again, even if he still cared for her, he wouldn’t risk his career—she wouldn’t let him risk his career—marrying a woman who had been expelled from the Academy for a security breach. She would marry someone suitable for a rich commercial family, someone dull. She would leave ships, settle down, have a few children, work in the firm’s head office.
That put a chill down her back. The firm’s head office, across town from the Academy: plushly carpeted, paneled in solid wood of exquisite grain, with handwoven drapes, custom desks the size of her bed at home, and soft-spoken staff waiting hand and foot on the senior members of the family. As a senior member of the family—she saw herself twenty years on, a formidable matron in a watered-silk business suit, in an office like her uncle’s—she would interact with members of government, with the military. She imagined, so vividly that she broke out in a sweat, having to shake hands with one of her classmates—gods grant it wasn’t Sumi, who was probably working off a dozen black points for not being satisfied with someone’s explanation of where Ky had gone. Gods grant it wasn’t Hal. Whoever it was in uniform would know—would know she’d been expelled in disgrace—and in that handshake express either pity or ridicule or… something she didn’t want to face.
In the dark of her cabin one sleep-shift, she stared at the steady telltales: green, amber, orange, red, blue. If only they would blink, or change their pattern, anything to distract her. But they glowed on, tiny colored eyes in the dark, staring at her… she reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.
She was not going to take another soporific. She was not going to worry her crew. She looked around her cabin for something to do and saw MacRobert’s present. She hadn’t opened the box yet. Model-building had never been her passion, but it was something to fill the hours between—she looked at the chronometer and shuddered—now and breakfast.
Inside the box she found the expected jumble of pieces, and a much-folded paper with directions in four languages. She unfolded it, and found that someone had underlined some of the words in Balsish—yellow—and Visnuan—green. She turned it over. A few underlinings in Franco—orange—and fewer yet in Angla—red. What—oh. MacRobert’s storied past in covert ops. It must be some kind of puzzle, a test of her ability or something. She wasn’t in the mood for any such test, or any secret pact with the Service. She ignored the underlined words and took out something that looked as if it should be the keel plate spine, and checked its stamped number against the list on the paper. It was the keel plate spine. She laid it aside, and stirred the pieces with her finger, trying to spot the six portal struts that should—on this model—fit into the keel plate spine. She found five, but the sixth eluded her until she noticed the off-color piece she’d assumed was an exterior member because it was cream-colored, not gray.
By breakfast, she had the keel plate spine and the portal struts assembled. The directions didn’t explain why one portal strut was cream-colored, so she shrugged and put it in the number one slot. Possibly parts from different but similar sets had been mixed at the factory. Unless it was another part of Mac’s test—but she wasn’t in school now, and she didn’t have to take any stupid test. After breakfast, she borrowed a magnifier and pair of needle-nose pincers from Quincy Robin’s engineering shop and spent an hour peeling tiny warning labels off a strip and laying them carefully—right side up for the position of that part when the model was fully assembled—on the pieces that would, in real life, have such warning signs. Even with the magnifier, the Space Service logo was too small to read. By lunch she had all the labels on. She made a quick tour of the ship and went back to work assembling the interior structural members.