Lucin peered at it. “Ah… this was in his second series of blades. See—this little mark here? He wasn’t entirely satisfied with the first series—exchanged them for these when he found the owners. Did your father show you the second blade? It doesn’t look as if you’d used it in a long time.”

“Second blade…”Garysaid. “There’s no second blade… is there?”

“Kind of a trick,” Lucin said. She did something Ky couldn’t see and another blade slid sideways out of the handle. “Grandfather was trapped in a collapsed building once—big sea storm, over on Westering. In the debris he couldn’t get his big folding knife out of his pocket—he couldn’t get his arm to move back enough to pull it out. He had a small screwdriver, and finally made a hole in his pocket so he could push the knife out forward, bit by bit. When he started making knives after that, he always had what he called the escape blade.Lotof people never noticed it.”

“Isn’t that… illegal?”Garyasked.

“Some places, yes. That’s why it wasn’t ever advertised, and why it’s not metallic. He didn’t think the laws should prevent someone saving his life. And a screwdriver, he said, was a damn poor way to cut through heavy cloth. Here—” She handed it back toGary. “Feel this ridge? Run your thumb along it the way you want the blade to go.”

Garyran the little black blade in and out several times. “Huh. I sure didn’t know that was there. My dad… well, this came to me after his accident, so if he knew, he never had a chance to tell me.”

Ky, feeling much better now that she’d eaten, joined the conversation. “So… what about you, Paro? Where are you from, what’s your family like?”

Paro Hospedin grinned. “Westerling family, like Lucin’s. Shellfish farming, back in colonial days. Then shellfish processing, but we were bought out by Gramlin fifty years or so ago. Our side of the family moved into transportation—nothing to scare Vatta Transport, mostly ground routes from Westerling back east. I caught the spaceship bug early on, wanted to work on the ships themselves, see new worlds, all that. My father said I had to get an education first, and pushed me into the technical end.”

“Good for him,”Quincysaid. “It’s easier to get it in one lump than piecemeal, while you’re working.”

“Agreed. I wasn’t sure I wanted drives, but he said I had a good mind for it, and there’d always be ships that needed me.”

“As long as someone has a general background, too,”Quincysaid. Beeah and Mehar rolled their eyes.Quincyscowled at them. “It’s important,” she said. “You young people always want to specialize in the high-paying fields, but if you don’t have the background, you’re out of luck if the ship’s expert in the blogowitz generator gets a knock on the head and you have to deal with it.”

“What’s a blogowitz generator?” asked Caleb Skeldon.

“She made it up,” Mehar said. “It’s imaginary, what she calls a teaching tool.”

Caleb still looked confused. Beeah patted him on the shoulder. “Never mind,Cal, this is an old engineering argument. Probably as old as engineering. They have it in medicine, too.”

“Just trying to understand the ship,”Calsaid, applying himself to his rice and chicken.

“It’s fine,Cal. They can confuse me sometimes,” Ky said. That wasn’t strictly true, butCallooked like someone who needed a kind word right then. He wasn’t just handsome; he had the lost-puppy look that made her want to protect him. Danger signals pinged in Ky’s head.

“So,Cal, tell us about yourself.” From the look on Mehar’s face, she had the same impulse as Ky and it was safer for her. Ky mentally detached herself from the lost puppy and handed him over.

“EastbayCity,”Calsaid. “My family’s nothing special, just ordinary working folks. Ma works in the hospital, fluids tech, and my dad’s an accountant… that’s how I got into inventory control, through accounting. Accounting was boring. Inventory control, at least there’s something going on. I always wanted to go into space anyway. I guess it was playing Harmon the Hero games when I was a kid. I know there’s not really any Evil Overlord, but…” He chuckled and pushed his rice around.

“I used to play that,” Seth said. “Customized my copy so Harmon had my face and whoever I was mad at that week was the Evil Overlord. Got caught at school once playing it in class, and of course it was Professor Jesperson, and of course it was his face as Evil Overlord.”

“What did he do?” Ky asked.

“Laughed. It was worse than getting angry. I felt like an idiot.” Seth shook his head. “Then the headmaster came in and asked what was going on, and Professor Jesperson erased the set and said he’d just found an illicit game-player and erased it. I never did completely understand that man, but once I didn’t have the game-player, I managed to get top marks in that class.”

“My best friend and I modified our desk paks so we could chat in class,” Mehar said. “Nobody thought it was possible, so they didn’t check them out every time. We’d have gotten away with it all term if another class hadn’t used our room… Two kids started fiddling with the controls and, of course, they couldn’t keep a secret when they found out.”

Everyone had finished eating now. They all seemed relaxed, as she’d hoped. Ky caught Lucin Li’s eye. “Better clear up now,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way…”

“Yes, Captain,” Lucin said. The others all rose, some stacking plates and others picking up the serving dishes. Ky picked up the candlepair and switched it off.

“With the captain’s permission,” Riel said, “I’d really like to get back to the bridge.”

“Certainly,” Ky said. “We stretched the regs; we don’t want them to snap.”

He grinned, as she’d hoped, and headed upship to the bridge.

“Now,” she said to her section firsts. “About that schedule…”

“It’s all ready, Captain,”Garysaid.

“And I have the preliminary environmental report,” Mitt said.

“Good. Anything critical I need to see right away? I’m overtime myself; I’m turning in for six hours unless someone needs me.”

“No,” Mitt said. “Like I said before dinner, we’re in good shape. I have a couple of alternative models, but everything’s stable. Report’s on file.”

“Same here,” Gary said.

“Good,” Ky said. “We’ll all think clearer after some sleep.”

Back in her cabin, Ky stripped off her clothes—not too stinky—and put them into the ’fresher while she took a full shower. She ran through the calming exercises of Saphiric Cyclans as she dried her hair, laid out a fresh uniform, and fell into bed only to remember that she hadn’t written a log entry since she got aboard.

There was, of course, the recorded log, and Lee would have written up a pilot’s log, but tradition and training said a captain never slept without updating the log in actual writing.

At least she could do that wrapped in a soft robe and not in a uniform. Ky pulled out the logbook—still so new, most of its pages empty—and her stylus. She piled pillows behind her and started on the day’s events. When she’d finished a terse report, she looked at it a long moment before closing the logbook. If… if something happened, and that logbook were the only surviving evidence, would a reader understand it? Would he see choices she had not seen, better courses of action?

She could see nothing but one bad option after another.

She slipped the logbook and stylus into its drawer, and then turned out the light. Maybe a good night’s sleep would give her the wits to find a way out of this.

She woke up to the sounds of a ship on insystem drive, nothing more nor less. The ship was alive—air moving through the vents, liquids moving through pipes—she heard a distant gulp that she knew from experience was the galley drain. She stretched, feeling the mild stiffness of muscles held too tense the day before. But rested. She sat up, looked at the chronometer, and muttered a soft oath. She should have known they’d let her sleep too long. Into uniform, teeth clean, hair brushed smooth.