Aspergia’s Captain Jemin, by contrast, had a wild bush of bright red hair and conveyed suppressed energy. He was talking fast before he even got to the seat Ky pointed out to him. “This is such an unusual situation—unprecedented in my experience and I daresay in yours. I can hardly wait for the ansibles to get back up so I can check that out. Whatever the mercs said, they must have blown them—who else could? Although, there was that case, was it eight standards ago? The one at Hall’s Landing? Just agricultural chemicals, didn’t they say? And your cargo was something agricultural, wasn’t it?” He had a high, slightly breathy voice and spoke in a rapid monotone that conveyed urgency in every phrase. Bright gray eyes, an almost fixed stare.
“Tractors,” Ky said. She spoke slowly, deliberately, trying to calm the man. “Implements, not chemicals.” Were the man’s pupils a normal size, or was he on something? She didn’t know; she didn’t like having to consider that.
“Well, but we have to do something, don’t we? I mean, we’re all civilians, traders… There’s no reason for them to intern our ships, is there? Can’t you just run us up to jump and get us out of this system, someplace we can file a complaint?”
“The mercenaries have two warships,” Ky said. “This ship has no weapons… trying to outrun them would be a very bad idea.” He didn’t need to know their FTL drive was inoperable.
“Oh. Well, I can see that. Yes. All right, then, I suppose we’re just stuck here for ten days. Of course, I don’t mean to cause you any trouble, Captain Vatta, but really—that Kristoffson person—he’s constantly talking, whining, complaining. It gets on my nerves…”
Jemin was getting on her nerves. “I’m sure it’s a difficult time for all of you—for all of us, actually,” Ky said, striving for an even tone, as if soothing a nervous animal. “Captain Kristoffson is probably concerned about his passengers.”
Jemin laughed harshly. “That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about sleeping on the floor, and having no private room, and how the rest of us are so uncultured… and anyway there’s nothing to do…”
“I’m sorry,” Ky said. “Though there’s always Captain Paison’s calisthenics group.”
“Oh, him,” Jemin said. “He’s so… so hearty. I was just wondering if you had any entertainment cubes… something relaxing, maybe? I have my portable reader, but they rushed us so to leave the ship that I left behind my collection of cubes…”
Jemin needed relaxing, that was obvious, but she didn’t think her collection of technical data cubes relating to this ship and Slotter Key commercial law were what Jemin had in mind.
“Sorry,” Ky said. “I will ask my crew what they have, when we have time.” She pushed back from the table and stood; Jemin clambered up slowly.
“I just wanted to say… this is really very inconvenient,” Jemin said, and then shambled away down the passage.
Ky agreed completely. Inconvenient barely covered it. And now she had Kristoffson, an interview she could predict would be unpleasant.
Sure enough, he came in haughty and annoyed, and left in the same mood. In between, he managed to complain about everything. The food, the water, the limitation of showers, the lack of privacy, the lack of entertainment, the attitudes and behavior of the other passengers, on and on. Ky listened until he ran down.
“It’s a difficult situation for all of us…” she began.
“You can’t pretend it’s as bad for you,” Kristoffson said. “You at least have your own cabin—I suppose even on this tub the captain has some privacy…” He thumped the table with his fist. “It’s outrageous, that’s what it is. Ten days! What if the mercs just run off and leave us to the untender mercies of the ISC?”
“Why would they do that?” Ky asked.
“Because they don’t want to be held responsible for blowing the ansibles,” Kristoffson said promptly. “Look—if they go—you have to get us out of here—”
“It’s much safer to do as we’re told,” Ky said. “They have weapons; we don’t.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Kristoffson said, throwing up his hands. He stamped back to the passenger hold without saying more, but Ky could almost see the unspoken words hovering over his angry head.
Chapter Fourteen
Several days passed without incident: Kristoffson made no more complaints, though he glowered at Ky when she made her daily visit to the cargo holds to meet with the assembled captains. She wondered if Paison had spoken to him, or if he had decided for himself that complaining didn’t work. Paison always smiled pleasantly, as did Lucas; Opunts remained a polite but remote enigma; Jemin now drooped in dramatic boredom. Their various crewpersons stayed politely back while she was there, not interfering. The environmental system continued to hold within its design limits.
Still she felt uneasy. If excessive trust had been her problem, now was the hour for suspicion. On the third day, she spoke to her senior crew.
“One thing—you all have implants, right?”
“Yes, why?”
“You know I don’t, anymore—the head injury was bad enough they had to extract mine and use it for a reconstruction matrix.” That sounded marginally better than “memory download.”
“So I’m limited in interface with ship systems to the earbug, and I can’t sleep with it in.”
“So you want us to be especially vigilant while you’re asleep?” Beeah said.
“Not just that. If Captain Paison is wrong, and Kristoffson isn’t just a blowhard, he has not only his engineering section head and number two, but his communications officer and a junior com tech. If he’s sneaky, he might think of suborning the internal communications so our sensors don’t actually tell us what’s really going on. My implant had special circuits for that—do yours?”
“Not mine…”Quincylooked thoughtful.
“Mine either,”Garysaid. “It must have been an override thing for captains only.”
“I was afraid of that,” Ky said. “And we don’t have a dedicated com tech aboard. What about our newest crew? Are any of them specialists in internal systems?”
“I’m afraid not,”Quincysaid.
Ky rubbed her head with both hands. “As I see it, we have two real weak spots. First, someone might steal the command wand: I am sleeping with that, and our passengers are locked in. So I don’t expect that. Second, someone could reprogram the system to answer a different code. This ship doesn’t have some of the internal security features of larger ones; configuring it for a last voyage with a small crew left us vulnerable to a situation no one anticipated.”
“Nor could have,”Quincysaid. “You can’t be faulted for that, Captain.”
“I’m not feeling guilty, Quince, just concerned. How do we ensure that no one can tinker with the system and take it over? We’ve got them physically separated… but almost all of them have implants and I don’t know how theirs operate, what their limits are.”
“Mmmph. I didn’t think of their implants being able to function with this ship.”
“Neither did I until I watched Paison direct his work party without saying a word aloud. I knew they had the implants—the bulge is visible—but the possibility of their being active here slipped by me.”
“Manual check of all systems, then. As continuous as we can make it… which isn’t very, Captain. I have only my five, plus me. Hospedin can help monitor drives, but I wouldn’t think he could do general engineering…”
“Right.”
“Couldn’t you put the internal system on voice recognition control, at least as a requirement for changing parameters?”
“I could, but then if something happens to me—and it already has—you’re in trouble. Besides, if they are up to something, how hard would it be for them to get a voice pattern off me? They may already have one.” Ky shook her head. “No, we need a better way to check the integrity of the system. If you think of anything let me know. Otherwise, keep very close watch. I don’t actually expect trouble this shift—if Kristoffson does something, I think it’ll be in the next day or so, not now. But I don’t want to be caught off guard.”