And most important, what would happen if Cosmos jumped into the system and started working on replacement ansibles?
Jed forwarded his conclusions to the Cosmos captain and back to headquarters. Then he downloaded all the data ISC had on the Sabine system and started looking for a sneaky way in.
Master Sergeant Cally Ray Pitt, twenty-eight-year Mackensee veteran and fire team leader for the boarding party assigned to Glennys Jones, had loaded the trader’s crew stats into her implant. As always, the most dangerous time came first, when they had to depend on a civilian ship captain to be smart and steady. Most were. A few weren’t, a few panicked right at the moment of boarding and tried something stupid, and although Mackensee personnel were willing to blow away difficult neutral civilians, it was bad for business. So she always hoped that civilians would behave like good little civs, not get in the way, follow orders.
Glennys Jones, on exterior inspection, looked like the old tub she was… an antiquated and inefficient design, decked out in the colors of a famous and very respectable trading firm. Cally had seen Vatta ships before, rotund well-kept ships with neatly uniformed crew guarding the docking access. Not as good as military, by a light-year or so, but certainly a quality organization, as civ organizations went. So why were Vatta keeping this old scow, and why was it captained by a Vatta family member?
A very very young Vatta family member, in fact.
She watched the young Vatta captain carefully. The crew stats had told her age—which she’d assumed was a mistake until she saw the woman’s face. A young face, a young person’s racing but steady heartbeat, a young person’s lung capacity—her suit picked up the woman’s vital signs easily, as it would have detected the residual effects of longevity treatment. The woman was actually that young, and a captain of a seriously deficient little ship.
And not nearly scared enough. What did she know, that she wasn’t panicking? She should be terrified by the proximity of large, threatening, armed and armored soldiers, faceless—Cally knew the woman couldn’t see through the visor. She was scared, but she wasn’t panicked.
Cally tried to push her, teasing her about her age. The woman didn’t budge, emotionally. That said something. Few young civs had that kind of emotional discipline.
“Cally—talk to me—what’s happening?” That was Sid, back on Victor. They’d have a recorder running; she had the little eyeblink on her helmet; they’d see what she saw and hear what she heard. But Sid wanted her analysis as well, at least when nothing was—thankfully—happening.
“The captain’s young and there’s something—she’s not reacting like I expected.”
“Trouble?”
“None yet. She’s done everything I told her to, but—I dunno.”
“Bad feeling?”
“Not really. Just don’t understand something about her.”
“Go on, then. We’re on the ticker.”
They were on the ticker indeed. Some idiot—possibly their employers and possibly someone else—had blown both ansibles in this system, and ISC would be crawling all over this place sometime soon. Nobody wanted trouble with ISC. Gods grant they didn’t blame Mackensee…
They really, truly needed to let ISC know they hadn’t done it. They really, truly needed to know who had long-range missiles like that and the will to use them and how many were left. Meanwhile, she was stuck in the narrow emergency evacuation passage of a ship older than her own grandmother, real time, following a captain who looked like a schoolgirl in Mama’s uniform, and if there was anything on this ship worth confiscating, she’d be very much surprised. With a schoolgirl captain, a girl whose every expression, every movement, communicated habitual honesty, if they said they had a holdful of tractors and cultivators and combines, they probably had exactly that.
She did not believe, however, that their FTL drive’s sealed unit was really totally blown. Not unless this fresh-faced schoolgirl was the family disgrace, and they’d sent her off in a derelict hoping it would come apart somewhere in jumpspace and rid them of a problem. She shook her head mentally—shaking her head inside the suit would create problems she didn’t want—at the memory of that face. First off, Vatta Transport didn’t have that kind of reputation. She’d shared drinks with some Vatta crew when they were on the same station, nothing going on. Vatta would fire incompetents, sure. Any company would. Vatta kids who weren’t good on ships were put to work onplanet. That was typical, too. They weren’t going to risk their profit margin by letting the bad eggs handle ships. But Vatta took care of its own. They wouldn’t send a whole crew off to die, just to rid themselves of a disgrace.
Besides—how could a nice girl like that be the family black sheep? Cally had long experience of family disgraces male and female; at least two thirds of the applicants for Mackensee were family disgraces. Sex, intoxicant addiction, dishonesty, theft, legal problems… This Vatta girl didn’t fit the profile. What it looked like, given the crew profile, was exactly what the girl had said. Supposed to be a milk run—new captain, experienced crew, see how she does, get all the new-captain jitters out of her, meanwhile not wasting an experienced captain’s time taking this wreck to the junkyard. Next time out she’d have a real ship, probably do a good job with it, for a civ.
Her bad luck at war caught up with her. But—given no problems—she’d be out of this in a month or so, heart whole and unscarred. Mackensee had no quarrel with Vatta Transport. Mackensee wanted no quarrel with Vatta Transport. Mackensee wanted no quarrel with anyone, just a straight contract and good credit.
And if there were problems, she would die, that nice girl, that daughter of the family with the experienced crew and the old tub of a ship. Cally thought of her own daughters, all but one safely far away on a world at peace, with steady jobs, and that one safely dead, victim of random violence while Cally’d been off on a mission.
There was always that possibility, for parents and for children, and Cally was mindful of it, as someone who had survived the years from recruit to master sergeant must be.
Chapter Eleven
Ahead of her, the captain’s trim back moved through the escape access hatch into the ship’s regular passage—blessedly wider—and then toward the rec area where the crew had been told to assemble.
“Tell ’em to sit down on the deck, hands on knees,” Cally said.
The Vatta captain’s voice didn’t shake as she gave the order, even though her biostats were still showing elevated P & R—pulse and respiration. As Cally came into the rec room, the suit’s chemsniffer picked up aromatics it labeled fear—a lot of them, from a lot of people. She was doing a quick count, coming up one short, when the captain said, “Where’s Skeldon?”
Cally’s suit picked up the name, displayed a visual and a note from the crew manifest. Caleb Skeldon, age twenty-four Standard, sex male, height 197 cm, handsome as a storycube hero… definitely possible trouble. The suit labeled him threat.
“He was here a second ago,” an older man said. Gary Tobai, the suit matched face to crew manifest. Age seventy-four, sex male, loadmaster, expression worried, no chemscent of aggression. Not a threat. “I turned around, when you said sit down—he was right behind me…”
The captain’s chemscent shifted from fear to anger; the suit’s analysis shifted her icon from no threat to possible threat. “Blast it all—what’s he think he’s doing.” She raised her voice. “Skeldon—get back in here and sit down.”
No answer. Cally boosted the suit’s sensors. Down the passage, to port—in some compartment—breath sounds and something rasping on cloth. It would be below the captain’s hearing, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know. She could have set this up. Or it could be a young idiot.