Most of the ordering could be done remotely. The next day Ky flew the single-seat herself to Harbor Town where Bond Tailoring’s senior fitter checked her mother’s measurements and admitted that they’d been correct. Ky picked out ship boots, dock boots, formal and informal shoes for nonbusiness wear. Despite her mother’s complaints about her shape, she was close enough to stock measurements that only slight alterations would fit her for most things. The captain’s tunic, however, had to be custom-made.
“Still, that cuts a day off our estimate,” the fitter said. “Only four items. We’ll have them tomorrow evening.”
“What time?”
“Oh, you should plan on picking them up the next day,” the fitter said. “Just in case.”
Ky left the shop with her footwear, stopped by Amerson’s for some personal items her mother didn’t need to know about. If she was going to be off on her own alone, and not under military discipline, she could choose the lotions and scents she preferred, ignoring her mother’s ideas of appropriateness. Her crew would just have to put up with it. Then she walked back up the street to catch the shuttle to the airport. She was back home by lunch … or rather, back at the home airfield. She stopped by the office to tell her father when the clothes would be ready.
“Gracie’s on the warpath about you,” her father said.
“I know.”
“You might want to do your bookwork here today,” he said. He didn’t quite twinkle at her, but there was an edge of humor in his voice.
“Thank you,” she said. “Where’s an empty workstation?”
“San’s off checking yield in the young plantations; you can use his office. Don’t answer the phone.”
Ky dumped her shoes and boots in the corner of San’s office, and pulled up more of the data she needed on his station. Facts flowed into her mind: the history of the Glennys Jones, details of her last trip through maintenance, background information on the crew, details of the contract. She hardly moved until her father opened the door to tell her it was time for dinner.
“I’m not sure what Gracie’s got in mind for you, Kylara, but you probably should come back here tomorrow. Or just go out. You won’t have a chance to snorkle or ride again for a long time.”
“Would that be all right?” Ky asked.
“You’ve been working hard. I’m sure you can decide how much more work you need to do. Take the day if you feel like it.”
Ky dreaded the thought of dinner, but Aunt Gracie, her mother told her, had retired to her room with a headache. Ky thought about a late swim in the pool, but remembered in time that the guest room had a clear view of the pool, and sound carried over water. Instead, she rummaged in her closet and found her snorkling gear, then linked her implant to the home library’s marine database for an instant to download whatever she might need.
Early the next morning, she was down at the shore shortly after dawn, squinting into the light to check the buoys supporting the protective nets that kept out the larger marine predators. How long had it been since she had a day to herself, a day free to do whatever she wanted? She couldn’t remember—years, anyway. Every brief vacation from the Academy had been filled with duties—courtesy calls on this or that family member, dinners, parties, required shopping trips. Now the day stretched before her, empty as the beach itself.
Little waves slid meekly up onto the sand, leaving interlocking arcs of wet behind them; squirts of water revealed the hiding places of burrowing clams. Ky struggled into her wet suit, clipped on her safety beacon, put on gloves and flippers, and almost fell on her nose when she started toward the water and caught a flipper in the sand.
Once in the water, she moved slowly out to the first of the broad, knobbly coral heads, where she knew she’d find a flurry of brilliantly colored small fish. Her implant gave her the names. A black-tooth undulated into her view; she turned to face it. It retreated to deeper water, then dove into the sandy bottom, fluffing sand over itself. Her implant marked that location; she would be careful not to step on it.
She had set the timer for two hours; when the implant beeped, she stroked back to shallow water, then stood up. She felt heavier; she always hated coming out of the water once she was in. Her father had used that as a metaphor for growing up, leaving the easy support of a family and carrying her own weight, but she resented his lecture. Unless it meant you could drown in your support system, and this day she simply wanted to enjoy the beauty.
She looked again at the lagoon, and thought about the rest of the day. She could saddle a horse and ride out through the plantation, or … she could stay here. She queried her implant. Aunt Gracie was on the move. All the horses were in use. Half-annoyed and half-relieved, Ky waded back into the water and let herself rest on its buoyancy. She wasn’t hungry, and the suit had its own water supply system. When she tired of the water, she pulled herself back up to the beach, to the shade under the trees, scooped out a hollow in the sand, and took a nap. She woke to the turquoise and pink sky of evening, and stared a long time at the colors as they deepened before she turned her back on them to head for the house.
“I made this just for you,” Aunt Gracie said at breakfast the morning Ky was leaving. She handed over a gaily decorated sack. Ky almost dropped it when she took it; it must weigh, she thought, five or six kilos.
She looked in. There, swathed in bright-colored flowery wrapping paper, were the unmistakable shapes of three of Aunt Gracie’s special fruit-spice cakes. Aunt Gracie beamed at her.
“You’ll be gone a long time, and I always say that a taste of home is the best thing to cure homesickness …”
Aunt Gracie’s fruit-spice cakes were, without doubt, the densest mass of flavorless, tooth-breaking pseudofoodstuff in the galaxy. She produced them at intervals, for birthdays and holidays, and the family disposed of them discreetly as soon as she was out of sight. Even a sliver of Aunt Gracie’s product left Ky with a day or so of gastric uneasiness.
“Uh … thanks,” Ky said. She could always leave them under her bed as insect repellent blocks … she’d done that with the ones Aunt Gracie had given her each year to take to the Academy.
“I know how rushed it can be, when people leave on a long assignment,” Aunt Gracie went on. “So let’s just let Jeannine put them in the car for you right this minute …”
San made a sound; Ky looked at him, and his lips were folded tight but his eyes danced mischief.
“Thank you,” Ky said again. She handed the sack to the maid and resigned herself to dumping Aunt Gracie’s creations into some unsuspecting trash container on the way to her command. She was not going to spend five kilos of her personal baggage allowance on inedible crud.
She finished her juice, and made her escape—not without kissing that withered old cheek—to the car, where her father waited to drive her to the airfield.
“If you’re planning to dump it somewhere,” he said without reference, “don’t do it in sight of anyone who might, by any conceivable means, know anyone who knows us. Your aunt Gracie’s connections are legendary. The only reason she doesn’t know the whole truth about your resignation is that it’s a state secret. But she suspects, and she’ll worm it out of someone inside another week, I’m sure. I don’t want to have to deal with her if she finds out you’ve tossed her cakes in the trash; it was bad enough when she found out you’d been leaving them under your bed.”
“How did she find that out?” Ky asked.
“Bribed the staff, I shouldn’t doubt,” her father said sourly. “But look at it this way. Anything is a commodity to someone. In a very large universe, your aunt Gracie’s cannonballs may be someone else’s favorite underwear.”
Ky snorted, surprised into a laugh for the first time since her private disaster.
“Courage, Ky,” he said, as he stopped the car and leaned over to give her a kiss. “You’ve got what you need to start a good life. Go.”
Gaspard was waiting on the apron. “You look better,” he said, as he looked up from checking the oil. “So, what did the family do for you?”
“I’m taking Glennys Jones to the scrapyard,” Ky said. She took her duffel from old George and slung it into the baggage compartment. “It will keep me out of the public eye.” The boring start to a dull, boring career as a truck driver in space, she did not say. She looped the tie-downs around the two bags, and slammed the door shut, latching it carefully.
“And give you a chance to show your talents,” Gaspard said. He went on with the preflight check while she looked around, trying to fill her memory with the home she would not see for months, maybe years. Maybe ever again, space being what it was, and life being less certain than she’d thought the last time she left.
“Well … assuming I have any.” What talents did it take to captain an experienced crew on a boring one-way run? Now if she could figure out a way to avoid scrapping the ship and surprise the family with a great triumph of trading …
“Don’t fish, Ky; it doesn’t become you.”
“Right. And we shall hope I don’t exercise my talent for leaping in to help …”
“At least not until you’re a little more experienced,” Gaspard said. “Though you could help me, if you would, by agreeing to copilot on the way in. There’s some serious weather between us and the mainland.” She had seen the satellite images; a cold front nosing under the warm sea air and lifting clouds to towering heights.
“Of course.”
“Good, then. Let’s be going. That front’s going to toss us around some.”
Ky climbed into the copilot’s seat, and concentrated on her part of the checklist as they finished preflight and started the engines.
The first hour in the air, retracing her recent flight home, was almost pure sightseeing. The colors of the water, changing with depth, with the shadows of clouds … the reefs … the various islands. Puffy cumulus clouds arrayed in rows along the wind’s path, all white and innocent … but ahead, a line of taller clouds, their ramparts denser. Ky had no time to brood, as she helped Gaspard ease the plane through the front’s turbulence, and only the navigation instruments could have told where they were.
The city lay under dense clouds spitting cold rain, just as it had been when she left. At least here there was little turbulence, and landing offered no problems. Gaspard turned onto the ramp that led to the private terminal, and then again to reach the Vatta hangars.
“Good job, Ky,” he said, when he’d handed her down from the wing. “You’ll be fine with old Glennys. Shouldn’t wonder if you don’t start your own private fleet with her or something.”
Ky started. Was she that predictable?
“Have to start somewhere, after all,” he said cheerfully, and winked. Then he turned back to the mechanic who had come out to greet him.
Her first task, she thought, was getting rid of Aunt Gracie’s cakes. She hadn’t asked Gaspard to let her toss them out into the sea—Gaspard might be her friend, but he might also be one of Aunt Gracie’s spies. At no point in the route from the airfield to the shuttle field was she alone and in reach of a disposal chute. The five kilos dragged at her arm. She had to carry them herself to have the chance to lose them … but a woman in a Vatta Transport captain’s uniform carrying a bright flower patterned bag, obviously heavy, would be noticed and remembered. Blast Aunt Gracie!
Vatta captains, she had been told, did not ride commercial shuttles to orbit. At least not here, where Vatta maintained its own small fleet of surface-to-orbit transport. As a captain, she had her own tiny compartment, outfitted as a workstation, with stowage for her duffel in the same compartment. She remembered her first trip alone to the orbital station, when she’d been thirteen and headed for three months as the lowest of apprentices on Turbot. She’d been crammed into crew seating with four other family apprentices (each going to a different ship) and fifteen regular crew, and she’d been stiff, as well as scared, by the time they arrived.
This was much better. She spent the time reviewing crew information, committing faces and names to her implant’s perfect memory. At the Vatta orbital station, she debarked ahead of the rest, and caught the first tram outbound for the docks. She had given up on Aunt Gracie’s cakes for now; she turned them over to the Vatta handler along with the rest of her luggage. It would reappear in her cabin aboard. All she had in hand was the tidy little captain’s case, with its datalinks, command wand, and orders. She tried to sneak up on Glennys without being spotted, but Vatta security was far too good for that. She had an escort all the way from the Vatta gates to the boarding platform, and when she got there, Gary Tobai left off polishing the Vatta family seal on the rail and turned to her.
“Well, if it isn’t the newest captain in Vatta Fleet.” He grinned at her, but Ky thought she detected a bite to his tone. “Mouth got you in trouble again, did it?”
“All I said was …” Ky shut her mouth and shook her head at him. “If you know that much, you know I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Wrong? No. Wrong way to do something right, maybe. I thought you were supposed to be our white hope with the military.”
“I thought so, too. So when I found something that needed to be fixed—”
“You jumped in and fixed it. I understand that, but you could have anticipated it would cause trouble.”
“I was trying to avoid trouble.” Should she even explain how convoluted the right procedures were, and why she’d chosen to work through contacts the family had given her? No. He wanted to condescend, so he would, no matter what she said.
“You were not bred to avoid trouble,” Tobai said. “Your family takes it on, shakes it like a dog shaking a rat, and tosses it to one side.” His voice softened. “As you did, Captain.”
Captain. He had actually called her Captain. She pushed aside the rest of what he’d said. “So, now that I have a ship, what can you tell me about her?”
He scowled. “You haven’t looked at the listing?”
Ky closed her eyes and recited. “Glennys Jones, three hundred meters overall length, 200 meters beam, keel plate laid in Bramley’s yards eighty-seven years ago, refitted in ’04 and ’38, drives replaced in ’43 with expanded cruising range, fully loaded to one hundred seventy-nine days, or two hundred fifteen days empty and crewed. She has two main cargo holds, three auxiliary holds, and no autoloading capability. The largest container that will fit through the main cargo hatch is three meters by two point seven meters, and standard access now is three by four, which limits her pretty much to specialty cargo. She can’t take loose bulk cargo like grain, another limitation. She’s been used to haul perishables, but on her last trip the refrigerating system broke down, and Vatta had to pay the shipper for the goods as well as a penalty for nondelivery, and insurance didn’t cover it all. The company’s out seven hundred thousand credits. Repair of the refrigeration system would cost another five hundred thousand, so Ships decided to use her for base-supply runs and sell her for scrap when her inspection ran out.”
Ky paused for breath. Tobai had been nodding approval, but when she paused he didn’t say anything. She went on. “So now she’s due for recertification, but she probably wouldn’t pass, and they’re shipping her off to Lastway. I know all that, all that’s in the listing. What I don’t know is what her other peculiarities are. Things not in the list. I’m sure you do, because you’ve probably crawled all over her with a microscanner.”
“You’re right about that,” Tobai said. “I’ve shipped on her five times in all, but not in the past seven years, so I had to renew my acquaintance with the lady.”
“This old—”
“Now don’t say that. It never does for the captain to badmouth the ship. Ships are sensitive.”
Ships were metal, ceramic, polymer machines; they had brains of a sort, but no feelings. Ky had been told that the first time she came aboard a ship. But however sensitive the ship wasn’t, Gary Tobai was, and she wanted him on her side.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Better not to say it at all, then,” he said. “Now—what you need to know is that we have to load the starboard main hold first, then the port auxiliary, starboard auxiliary, main port, and the third auxiliary, if we use it, last. We need at least a half point more mass to starboard, or she won’t stay in trim. That last engine refit did something screwy to the frame, though no one will admit it. There’s also a problem with the attitude jets, but all I have is hearsay. Quince could tell you more about that.”
“Dad says they’ve assembled a cargo for us—are you satisfied with it?”
“All done, including crew trading,” Tobai said. “How much are you reserving for crew shares?”
“A scrap run, one-way? What’s the usual split?”
“I’d recommend the third auxiliary hold. That’s 15 percent of the total. Limit it to luxuries, is what I told them. Retain 4 percent for captain’s space, and split the remaining 11 percent by seniority.”
“I’ve already bought in for 10 percent; should I donate the 4 percent?”
“No, crew would wonder what was going on if you didn’t claim it. We’re going to have trouble enough; your father had to pay a surcharge for a one-way trip since they can’t make a profit on the way back. Whether you fill it or not, reserve it. Your dad sent over some; he said you wouldn’t have time to deal, but I could add a few things …”
“Fine.” She could put Aunt Gracie’s miserable cakes in there and no one would ever know. “If you come across something that would be prime at Lastway, let me know. I’m up to my nose in chores, and we’re supposed to push for a quick departure.”
He grinned again. “That’s what I like to see: captains doing more than sitting in the captain’s chair.”
When she got to her cabin, she found a stack of packages: presents from her parents, from her brother San, from … she stared at the card that had come with a child’s kit for a military ship, a Dragon-class cruiser. MacRobert had sent her a present? She ripped open the envelope. In the same precise, blocky letters that had once informed her, in her first winter as a cadet, that she had two demerits for the state of her bunk, he offered best wishes. “If you ever need to let us know about something,” the message went on, “remember that dragons breathe fire. I will be most interested in your progress with this model.”
That was beyond odd; Ky stared at it a long moment before putting the model kit on the back of her closet shelf, on top of the note. She could not imagine what she would need to tell the space service, besides something rude and anatomically impossible. MacRobert’s rumored connection to covert operations ghosted through her mind—but that was cadet gossip, surely? And why would he pick a disgraced exile like her to work with even if it were true? She turned to the other presents.
Her parents had, with their usual practical approach, sent her a sizable letter of credit for Lastway. For clothes, her mother suggested; her father, who signed it last, said “For yourself.” Ky measured the amount against the upgrades the ship needed and came up very short. Still, it was a start. San had sent her a polished tik seed; it fit comfortably in the palm of her hand, its glossy surface a rich red-brown. She put it in her pocket, where she could touch it often; the letter of credit she put in the lockdown of her desk.
“Captain?” Someone tapped at her door. “Need a time for castoff, Captain.”
She had forgotten that very elementary detail. She was the one who had to say “Cast off at 1400” or whatever she chose. She opened the door to find Riel Amat, her senior pilot, waiting with a databoard. He looked a little older than the picture she had in the crew list.
“We can be ready by 1320, ma’am, or anytime after,” he said. “Traffic Control says they’re expecting some congestion later, but should be clear until 1500. They’re asking for a time.”
“Advice?”
“Fourteen thirty would be about right, ma’am, with a little leeway each way …”
“Fourteen thirty it is, then, Riel. Thanks. Anything else I need to be doing?”
“There’s paperwork on the bridge, sign-offs and stuff. Crew’s all aboard, accounting’s cleared, they just need your signature.”
He nodded and turned away. Kylara took a deep breath, glanced at herself in the mirror … the uniform did fit well, no doubt about it. Still the whole situation felt unreal. She, Kylara Vatta, was about to go into space as captain of her own—well, her family’s—ship. And she didn’t even know enough to set a departure time without asking her pilot. What was she thinking? And yet, she was the captain, and she was going. Excitement stirred; for the first time, the thought of her former classmates brought no pain. They would be sitting in class—or studying—and she was on her way into space. It hardly seemed a fit punishment.
Quincy Robin, whose space-fresh skin belied her sixty-plus years of experience, met Ky in the starboard passage as she headed for the bridge. “I heard about you, youngster. Good work.”
“Not everyone thinks so,” Ky said, hoping for a compliment.
“What did you want, a ship and praise?” Quincy said. “They don’t give ships to people for doing bad work.”
“Even old ones about to go to scrap?”
“Someone has to take them,” Quincy said. “She’s not so bad. She was a good ship in her time. Did you know she pioneered the Foregone run? I wasn’t on her then, but a few years later I served on her when her class was the backbone of the Vatta fleet. Go anywhere, do anything—that was Glennys in her youth. And middle age, for that matter. It’s a shame she’s going to scrap.”
“What would she need to pass inspection?”
“Depends on whose inspection. She’s safe for this trip, in the hands of people with some sense. Her drives are good enough. Her attitude controls, though, really need to be replaced. The last three adjustments haven’t held more than a few months each. For Slotter Key registration, she’d need an upgraded environmental system. The one she’s got is safe, but not up to modern standards; the new regulations they passed last year will catch up with her. Her reserve tanks are five hundred liters short. Then her navigation system is out of spec for age. Thing is, it’s full of proprietary data and software that would be hard to transfer to a newer one.”
“So what would it cost to bring her up?”
Quincy pursed her lips. “You could probably do it for—oh—five to seven million. And out on a frontier world like Lastway, she’ll bring ten to eleven as scrap, and some idiot may try to keep her whole and run her even farther out in the Borderlands. I wouldn’t, not without some work.”
Old Ferrangia Vatta had started with a beat-up tramp cargo ship when the Scattering suddenly pulled away the best ships and left the rest of human-occupied space in disarray. Miss Molly still belonged to the family, displayed in the Number One repair slot. Ky, along with her generation of school kids, had clambered through Miss Molly’s narrow passages and old-fashioned ladders, and listened to the story of those perilous first voyages.
And now she had a ship of her own … bound for scrap or glory. It seemed an easy choice. Easy, tradition said, was also stupid. It wasn’t really her ship; it belonged, as its registration stated, to Vatta Transport, not Ky Vatta. Ky settled into the captain’s chair on the bridge, inserted her command wand, and started working on the many, many, many forms that captains had to sign off before a ship could be cleared for castoff.
Between these chores, she glanced at the bridge crew. Sheryl Donster, navigator. Seven years with Vatta Transport, formerly on Agnes Perry. She was heavyset, light-haired, and staring intently at a screen full of numbers; Ky had no idea what the numbers were. Ky wondered why her father had wasted a navigator’s time on a run like this. The routes had all been mapped; she had current data cubes that should send the ship on automatic from one mapped jump point to another. They wouldn’t need a navigator unless something went wrong.
Riel Amat, senior pilot and second in command. Eleven years with Vatta Transport, and before that a space service veteran. Lean, dark, clearly an Islander like her. Her implant told her he’d been born on Little Gumbo. Ky wondered what he thought of her, if he knew why she’d left the Academy. His expression gave nothing away.
The least experienced, pilot-junior Lee Quidlin, had only two years deepspace, as pilot-apprentice on Andrea Salar, but he’d been born on Slotter Key’s main orbital station and had been planetside only during senior school. He had a broad, friendly face under a shock of taffy-colored hair.
All solid, experienced, personnel who could probably make this trip with no captain at all. She would have to prove herself. She would have to make no mistakes. With that thought, she went back to the paperwork.
Undock and castoff went smoothly; Ky had nothing to do but sit in the captain’s couch and watch her experienced crew do what they had done so often before. The tug towed them out to regulation distance and stood by while Engineering powered up the main insystem drive and tested the backup. All functioned nominally. Glennys Jones set off on course with no fuss and no surprises.
And with no speed. Functional, efficient insystem drive though she had, it produced less than 80 percent of the acceleration of newer systems. It would be days, not hours, before they dared shift into hyper. Before anything disastrous was likely to happen.
During those days, Ky tried to adjust to her new reality. No fixed schedule, no rapid alternation of classes, physical training, study periods. The empty hours seemed endless. Ky read and reread the manuals for every ship system and followed her crew around asking questions until everyone was snappish. They had seemed so levelheaded before the journey; she worried about the possibility of contamination in the environmental system until, on the fourth day, she overheard Tobai explaining to Beeah Chok, engineering second, that it was just new-captain’s-disease, and they both laughed. She backed away, went to her cabin, and dosed herself with a soporific.
Ten hours later she awoke clearheaded and cheerful. Even Aunt Gracie’s cakes didn’t seem an insoluble problem. She could almost believe that someone, somewhere might find them palatable … or useful as doorstops or something. She tried not to think about her past, and found that not-thinking easier when surrounded by the worn fabric of old Glennys and the routine of a ship in passage. She set herself daily tasks—exercises both physical and mental.
Day by day she learned more about her crew, always uncomfortably aware that they were all older than she was, all more experienced. The youngest, Mehar Mehaar, had still spent several years on ships. How could they respect her, she wondered? How could they believe she was anything but a rich girl, captain only by the grace of wealth? She continued to study, pushing herself to disprove what she was sure they thought. At the end of each ship day, she wrote up her log, though it mostly consisted of one paragraph listing all systems as nominal. If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror—as one of her instructors had said—then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection.
Only now and again she wondered what her classmates were doing—what had happened to Mandy Rocher? what was Hal thinking? were the critical midterms coming up or just past?—and put it quickly out of mind. That was behind her; now she had a mission—a job, she corrected herself—and she could find some busywork to keep her mind occupied and those moments of reflection few and far between.
One of those mental occupations centered on the ship. Gaspard’s words kept picking at her. What if … what if she could make enough in trade to buy Glennys herself? And fix her up, and get her through an inspection, and own her own ship? Be an independent trader, like her ancestor.
Her father would have a cat. Her father would have a full-grown mountain cat sprouting green-feathered wings and a forked tail. Her orders were very specific. Transport the goods. Sell the ship. Bring the crew home commercial on the profit. She knew if she did that, she would be offered another position—maybe a better ship, maybe not—on another run, and in a few years she could be captain of one of Vatta’s showpieces. Her mother would keep looking for suitable husbands; she would in the end marry the scion of some other commercial family—someone from the energy field, perhaps, or even ’lope ranching. Not Hal, of course. Even if they ever met again, even if he still cared for her, he wouldn’t risk his career—she wouldn’t let him risk his career—marrying a woman who had been expelled from the Academy for a security breach. She would marry someone suitable for a rich commercial family, someone dull. She would leave ships, settle down, have a few children, work in the firm’s head office.
That put a chill down her back. The firm’s head office, across town from the Academy: plushly carpeted, paneled in solid wood of exquisite grain, with handwoven drapes, custom desks the size of her bed at home, and soft-spoken staff waiting hand and foot on the senior members of the family. As a senior member of the family—she saw herself twenty years on, a formidable matron in a watered-silk business suit, in an office like her uncle’s—she would interact with members of government, with the military. She imagined, so vividly that she broke out in a sweat, having to shake hands with one of her classmates—gods grant it wasn’t Sumi, who was probably working off a dozen black points for not being satisfied with someone’s explanation of where Ky had gone. Gods grant it wasn’t Hal. Whoever it was in uniform would know—would know she’d been expelled in disgrace—and in that handshake express either pity or ridicule or … something she didn’t want to face.
In the dark of her cabin one sleep-shift, she stared at the steady telltales: green, amber, orange, red, blue. If only they would blink, or change their pattern, anything to distract her. But they glowed on, tiny colored eyes in the dark, staring at her … she reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.
She was not going to take another soporific. She was not going to worry her crew. She looked around her cabin for something to do and saw MacRobert’s present. She hadn’t opened the box yet. Modelbuilding had never been her passion, but it was something to fill the hours between—she looked at the chronometer and shuddered—now and breakfast.
Inside the box she found the expected jumble of pieces, and a much-folded paper with directions in four languages. She unfolded it, and found that someone had underlined some of the words in Balsish—yellow—and Visnuan—green. She turned it over. A few underlinings in Franco—orange—and fewer yet in Angla—red. What—oh. MacRobert’s storied past in covert ops. It must be some kind of puzzle, a test of her ability or something. She wasn’t in the mood for any such test, or any secret pact with the Service. She ignored the underlined words and took out something that looked as if it should be the keel plate spine, and checked its stamped number against the list on the paper. It was the keel plate spine. She laid it aside, and stirred the pieces with her finger, trying to spot the six portal struts that should—on this model—fit into the keel plate spine. She found five, but the sixth eluded her until she noticed the off-color piece she’d assumed was an exterior member because it was cream-colored, not gray.
By breakfast, she had the keel plate spine and the portal struts assembled. The directions didn’t explain why one portal strut was cream-colored, so she shrugged and put it in the number one slot. Possibly parts from different but similar sets had been mixed at the factory. Unless it was another part of Mac’s test—but she wasn’t in school now, and she didn’t have to take any stupid test. After breakfast, she borrowed a magnifier and pair of needle-nose pincers from Quincy Robin’s engineering shop and spent an hour peeling tiny warning labels off a strip and laying them carefully—right side up for the position of that part when the model was fully assembled—on the pieces that would, in real life, have such warning signs. Even with the magnifier, the Space Service logo was too small to read. By lunch she had all the labels on. She made a quick tour of the ship and went back to work assembling the interior structural members.
She slept that night without medication or early waking. When the lights came on for mainshift, she stared at the model taking shape on her desk and decided to ration herself to one hour a day. She wanted it to last. She toyed with the idea of buying other models, keeping one always in reserve.
Ten days later, when Glennys wallowed uneasily into endim translation, Ky watched the strain gauges and wondered how the ship had passed its last inspection. She didn’t miss the tension in Quincy’s expression. Shipping out as a junior on one of the newer transports, she’d never had to worry about the ship’s fabric coming apart, but now … Maybe it was her chance at glory, and maybe it was her chance to die. Her crew seemed mostly calm about the noises and the vibration, though Lee had turned the color of bad cheese. Ky hoped she didn’t match him.
Once through translation, Quincy shrugged and shook her head. “I didn’t expect that much wobble,” she said. “Still, it ought to be good for the number of translations we have scheduled, plus a few more.”
Glennys settled back to being an old but not unsound ship. The telltales that should be green were all green; the ambers were amber; the few reds—indicating emergency systems on live standby—were red.
Over the next few days she checked in with her crew every few hours, but spent the rest of the time running cost/benefit analyses. She wouldn’t actually do it, she told herself. She couldn’t do it. It was impossible in every way. But … it couldn’t possibly hurt to figure out what it would take, just as an exercise. Better than imagining herself in an office in Port, entertaining her classmates in uniform. Better than finishing the model too soon and having nothing to do with her hands.
Pharmaceutical components to Belinta, 31 percent of estimated cargo value. Time-limited, with a penalty for late delivery or nondelivery, and a bonus for—a time so short that Glennys couldn’t have done it in her youth. No bonus, then. Price prearranged, profit guaranteed and nonnegotiable. That wouldn’t do it, though it put them well on the way to the tickets home from Lastway. What then? The bales of fabric scraps—old clothes, actually—for Leonora? The raw zeer nuts, the crates of modular components for Lastway? Her own crate of luxury goods, the hand-blown crystal bowls and vases, the bolts of silk brocade?
The numbers didn’t add up. If they were very, very lucky, they might—possibly—make enough to equal what the ship would bring for scrap. They could not possibly make enough to equal that plus the cost of renovations to meet inspection standards.
Ky called up the inspection standards for the third time. Nobody cared if their holds were inconvenient, though some trade stations would charge a premium for space to ships that could not use automated freight handling systems. But the environmental system, drives, navigation and communications systems … those had to pass. While there were sections of space in which no one bothered with inspections—or rescuing those whose ships weren’t sound—she didn’t want to go there.
She doodled on a spare pad. What would it take, really? What was she willing to give up? Or—since she was now in the business of trade and profit—what was she willing to trade?