“If you hear—”

“I will let you know. Should I contact you and Vatta, or just you?”

“Either is fine. Now, about that bond…”

From her tone, no wiggle room there at all. And whatever profit they’d thought they’d have out of their employer, posting that large a bond would knock it back to a bad idea and a contract they should never have signed. That he should never have signed. “I have to get Sig to sign off on this, you know,” he said. “Let me just contact him…” Though of course he would agree. No one could afford to have the ISC as an enemy.

Undoing the damage the mutineers had done proved more difficult than Ky had hoped. She dared not trust any of the passengers to help. Some of them might still want to mutiny, no matter what they said. She had no specialist with expertise in reconfirming an AI’s original command set.

“It’s an old system, though,” Beeah Chok said.

“Don’t I know it.” Ky stared at the panel she’d just pulled. “But that doesn’t make it better.”

“It might. Do you have the system manual anywhere but in the system?”

“I had one in my implant.” If the mercenaries had returned it… but they hadn’t. “And there may be one in the command console.” Ky clambered up. “I suppose you want me to look.”

“Yes, Captain. It’s just possible that the system could be taken down and restarted, if we had the manual.”

Ky felt a chill stab of terror. “Nobody takes down ships’ AI while they’re operational, Beeah. That’d take down life support as well.”

“Not necessarily.” Beeah laid a diagram on Ky’s desk; she tried to make sense of its many interlaced lines. Finally she shook her head.

“I can’t see it, Beeah. If you’re absolutely sure that you can do it without taking down life support—”

“Well… eighty-five percent sure.”

“Not enough percents. What if you can’t get it back up? We don’t have suits for all those people, and the suit air supply’s limited anyway.”

Beeah muttered something she couldn’t hear, but thought she understood.

“They’re our—my—responsibility, like it or not. I’ll space them in a heartbeat if they endanger the ship or crew again, Beeah, but I’m not going to risk them on a chance like this.”

“Well… that’s all we have, Captain. We can attack the control sections one at a time, but it’ll take time. A lot of time; we may be out of fuel before we can shut the drive off.”

“It’s a chance we have to take,” Ky said. “Protect the environmental system above all.” She fought back a yawn. They were all exhausted, emotionally and physically, pushing themselves.

She could just sit there and let them drift farther and farther away from their expected location until they starved, or she could do something—anything—to fix the situation. Dumping the passengers still appealed, as a way of easing her frustration, but she knew she wouldn’t do that. What were the options, with both the drive and the ship beacon out of order, with ship systems responding only erratically to her crew’s instructions? She called a crew meeting.

“Here’s what’s happening,” she told her crew. “We haven’t yet regained control of the drive, so we’re still accelerating to someplace we don’t want to be. The ship’s ID beacon seems to be nonfunctioning as well. So not only can we not get back, but no one can find us without very good active longscan. And the only people in the system with very good active longscan are somewhere else. The good news is that the environmental system is still working, so we have air to breathe and water to drink. The food supply, though, at our present rate of usage, will run out in five days. Rationing can do something about that, but not enough to give us a lot of leeway, and we have no idea when someone may find us. Our own scan is still working, but it’s not that great, as you all know. It’s very likely that ISC or someone else will come into the system before we starve, but they won’t know we’re here if our beacon isn’t up. So beacon repair has to be a priority.”

“I don’t know anything about beacons,” Quincy said. “They’re another sealed system; users aren’t supposed to tinker with them.”

“Well, Paison did, and unless we can figure out how to undo what he did, we’re about as visible as coal dust at midnight.”

“There are two com engineers among the passengers,” Beeah said.

“I hope we don’t have to trust them,” Ky said. “Because so far the passengers have been nothing but trouble.” They knew that, but she needed to say it.

“Why did he disable the beacon, anyway?” Quincy asked. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

“To hide us from the mercs,” Riel said. “He wanted to get away, right?”

“But he’d been told they were already headed outsystem,” Ky said. “He must’ve had some other reason.”

“It doesn’t matter why he did it,” Quincy said. “What matters is we can’t undo it.”

“We haven’t undone it yet,” Ky said. “I’m going to talk to the passengers, and tell them why they’re not getting lunch. Mitt, figure out what you need to do to cope with stretching our survival time… with less outside caloric input.”

“They’re going to complain.”

Ky’s patience snapped. “If they complain, I will space them. Damn it, without them we could last another twenty days, easy.” She turned to Alene, who had scarcely spoken since Gary died. “What’s the minimum for survival? We’ll need to cut ourselves down a third, probably, but we’ll cut them to the minimum. And then tell me what that gains us.”

While Alene worked on that, Ky went to talk to the passengers. On the intercom; she wasn’t risking anything this time.

“You need to know what the situation is,” she said. “Paison disabled the insystem drive controls, so we have not been able to gain control of the drive and retrace our course. Paison also disabled the ID beacon, so the ship is now invisible to most scans. Your… leader”—she allowed the anger she felt to seep into her tone—”ensured that you, as well as we, would go hurtling off to the far reaches of the system and that no rescue vessel was likely to find us. My crew are attempting to fix that, but as most of you know ID beacons are sealed systems not intended to be manipulated by the user. Unlike Paison and his assistant, my crew has no experience in such illegal activities. That means that our original supply of foodstuffs will not suffice us even if a rescue ship were to show up, so I am instituting survival rules now. My crew goes on reduced rations; you go on minimal rations. I will still try to get you all out of this alive, but believe me that at this point, if any one of you fails to cooperate fully, or attempts to contravene my orders, that person will be spaced. No excuses. Now, Captains Lucas and Opunts, you will come to the number one cargo personnel lock, where my crew will pass you through to confer with me.”

She didn’t wait to hear their reaction but went back to the galley, where Alene was working on the rations.

“Forty seven of them, thirteen of us. That’s sixty. But the rations loaded were for sixty-five, so we have sixty-five times five which is three hundred twenty-five day-rations providing a minimum of two thousand four hundred kcal per day, which is seven hundred eighty thousand kcal total… How long do you estimate we’ll have to live off this, Captain?”

Damned if I know was the real answer, but not a useful one. “At least ten days… twenty if we can eke it out that far.”

Alene fiddled with the handcomp. “Well, at ten days that’s thirteen hundred kcal per day, which is just above basal metabolism. People will lose a little weight, but not much. Twenty is six hundred fifty kcal per day, which is seriously low. Crew won’t be able to work well like that. Now if you put thirteen people at one thousand two hundred, as low as you’d want to go and expect alertness to stay up, that’s fifteen thousand six hundred per day, and forty-seven people at six hundred, that could give us seventeen days. Crew efficiency shouldn’t drop much, but the passengers will be just barely making it.”