If only they had weapons, real weapons. She asked Mehar to show her how to shoot the pistol bow. “We’ll start the easy way,” Mehar said, piling pillows behind her practice target. “I used to shoot down in the cargo hold, but this will do. Here—”

It was absurdly easy; Mehar loaded the four-bolt reserve with the color-tipped practice bolts, put a bolt in the groove and pulled back the cocking lever before she handed it to Ky. “Point and click,” Mehar said. Ky pulled the trigger and the little bow went thip very quietly and across the compartment a bolt stood out of the target. Ky pulled the lever again, and shot again. That bolt buried itself in one of the pillows.

“No recoil,” Ky said. “I compensated for something that wasn’t there.”

“Again,” Mehar said. “Be sure the prod’s horizontal.”

Ky shot again, and again, and when she had shot all five bolts, she looked at the pattern. Nothing to be proud of, at that distance, but four of the bolts were in the target. Mehar pulled them out.

“I always load in the same color sequence,” Mehar said. “That way I can easily tell which one went where.”

“What’s the maximum range on this thing?” Ky asked.

“Depends if you want to puncture something or just kiss it. And of course what gravity you’re working in. For target shooting, twenty meters is about the limit. Outdoors, you can treat it like artillery—point it up in the air—and get somewhat more distance, but no accuracy. Pistol bows don’t have a lot of draw weight, so they can’t give much velocity.”

“What I want to do is look dangerous,” Ky said. She hoped looking dangerous would be enough. She had reloaded, and now aimed and fired again, as fast as she could throw the cocking lever. “How was that?”

“Pretty good. I might be a hair faster but not much. The best you can hope for with this one is a shot every couple of seconds. You can see why they aren’t military weapons for anything but very specialized uses. Slow rate of fire and lousy penetration.” Mehar grinned as Ky loaded and shot again. “You have a knack for this, Captain.”

“Target practice with pistols,” Ky said. “This is more sensitive to tilt, though.”

“Yes. At short ranges there’s more loft than with most firearms—that’s due to the slower speed of the bolt—so if you tilt it, it really goes off to the side. Some of us use an offset grip to help out on that, because the natural thing is to hold the hand slightly tilted. The long crossbows are easier to keep level because of the longer stock.”

Ky looked at the weapon in her hand. “They just don’t look very dangerous,” Ky said. “And what we need is the appearance of danger, more than the danger itself.”

“I dunno,” Mehar said. “A lot of people associate these with spy stories, where they’re usually carried by the bad guys and the bolts are always tipped with something poisonous or corrosive.” She pulled out another pack of bolts. “And these can kill, at close range. I use the marker-tips for shipboard practice, but I have the competition bolts with me.”

Ky looked at the short, stout bolts and touched the conical steel tips. “Sharp enough. What will it go through?”

“Not military armor, of course. I’ve never tried it on law-enforcement vests, so I don’t know—rumor says it depends on whether they use the kind that sense impact velocity or not. But it goes right through clothes. And of course skin.”

“Wish it looked nastier,” Ky said. “My feeling is, these are too slow and we have too few of them to fight off an actual mutiny, but if we can startle or cow the instigators—”

“Well, I do have a pack of broadpoints.” Mehar dug deeper into her kit. “Here.” She handed over the pack of bolts tipped with what looked to Ky like archaeological exhibits—jagged, many-pointed.

“These look dangerous, all right,” Ky said. She touched the points lightly. “Did you ever use those, Mehar?”

“Used to do a little pot-hunting back home.” Mehar shook her head. “Thing is, Captain, none of this has the stopping power of firearms, but pain has a stopping power of its own. Less, when someone’s really engaged in a fight, but if they’re still standing there making threats…”

“I hope we don’t have to use them.”

Nonetheless, she practiced until—down the longest length of a passage afforded—she could group the five marker bolts in the innermost ring of the target. It would have been fun to have something like this back on Corleigh when she was a kid, instead of the toy longbows that invariably got caught in the undergrowth of the tik plantations where she and her brothers had played. She could have sneaked up on them, left colored dots on their jackets.

She pulled her mind back to the present. This was not a game. If she had to use the weapon, it would be for real. She hoped the presence of the mercenary ships—that obvious threat—would keep her passengers from trying anything.

Ky glared at the scan screens. For tactical situations, she’d been taught, the basic scans were almost useless because of long and varying scan delays. Glennys Jones didn’t mount any of the equipment that would have let her keep track of where the warships were in anything approaching real time, nor did the ship have the advanced AI to integrate all the data and present a combined plot. It was reasonably good at noticing when things changed, and excellent in the things any cargo ship needed, such as micromillimeter accuracy when docking.

How, she wondered, had the early space travelers ever managed to get from one planet to another in the same system?

Sometime ago—she wasn’t even sure how long—one of the warships had been near Secundus and now (if her antiquated system had identified it correctly) it was near Prime. The other one was a long way away from either.

“I’ll bet it was an ISC probe,” she heard Lee say. He and Zelda had been arguing over the temporary appearance of something small and distant, which Ky herself would ordinarily have considered a system glitch. She had seen it only on the recording, where it looked too small to be any kind of ship.

On the fourth day, she had another message from the mercenaries.

“Captain Vatta, we’re leaving the system for a few days. The situation is complex; we need to communicate with the ISC about the ansible destruction. We expect to be back in ample time to pick up the passengers on day ten—”

“Leaving—” Ky’s stomach clenched. She had trusted them… she had depended on them, on the threat of their weaponry.

“Yes. Just continue as you are; we will inform Vatta Transport and your passengers’ parent companies of your safety via ISC contacts once we’re in a system with functional ansibles. You’re not having any problems, are you? Everyone behaving? Environmental system coping?”

“So far.” Should she tell them about her concerns? Or would that be seen as immature, weak, panicky?

“Good. We expect to be back in just a few days, as I said…”

A faint hissing interrupted; she knew what that meant. The warships were outbound fast, possibly already microjumping toward safe long-jump parameters. And expectations, in deep space travel, still outran performance… they might be back, or they might not, if they—and she—were unlucky.

Still… they were in a relatively safe situation. If the mercs did not return, she could get her ship back to Sabine Prime, or close enough for Sabine’s emergency service ships to come remove the passengers.

So… why did she feel as if someone had just poured a jug of ice water down her spine?

Less than an hour later, Captain Lucas called her from the passengers’ quarters. “We want to talk to you,” he said. “All us captains.”

The ice-water trickle turned to a torrent. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

“We know the mercs have left. Now’s our chance to get back to our ships, get on our way. You can take us back…”

“No,” Ky said.