When the others left the bridge, Riel was still hunched stiffly over the pilot’s command board. Ky levered herself out of the captain’s seat, surprised at how stiff she was herself, and went across to him.
“Yes, Captain,” he said without looking up.
“Any navigation hazards in the next six hours?”
“Not at present, Captain. But if those warships jump in on us—”
“They know our course, and we’re doing what they told us to do. If they want to blow us away, they can, but they should be pursuing more reasonable tactical goals. Meanwhile, I need you rested for whatever happens later. Let Lee take over and you go get some sleep.”
“Captain, I was just coming on when we left—I was swing-shift watch—”
Ky felt annoyed with herself—she should have known that. Too much had happened too fast but that wasn’t any excuse.
“All right then … but consider that you’re first pilot, and we may need you worse later. At least consider going off at half watch.”
“All right.” He sat back for the first time, stretched his arms, and turned to look at her. “I never was in anything like this before, you know. I was in space force, yeah, but—that was in a military ship, and anyway we didn’t see any action.”
“Most people don’t,” Ky said, quickly replacing the thought Neither was I which would not be reassuring. “I’m just following doctrine …” Academy doctrine, taught in class—classes where instructors sometimes reminded cadets that theory wasn’t everything, that real wars had blown old theories into fragments before. And doctrine from the point of view of combatants, people who would have the big guns.”
“I’m glad we have you,” Lee said. “At least you have some military experience.” He glanced at Riel, an apologetic look meant to soften that near accusation. Riel didn’t react.
Ky felt as if someone had dropped a spaceship on her shoulders in normal G … which indeed someone had. She just managed not to say It wasn’t real military experience; education isn’t experience, another truth best left unsaid at the moment. Lee trusted her; that trust was good for him, and for his performance, which led to good for the ship and the rest of the crew.
It still felt like too much.
Except that below the pressure of that trust, below the worry, the concern that would become gut-churning anxiety if she let it, was something else. Something that led directly back to the Academy, to her first days there, to the string of cadet honors she’d earned, to the ambition she’d had to be not just an officer but a good officer, not just a ship commander, but a good—even an outstanding—ship commander.
Becoming captain of Glennys Jones had reawakened it to some degree, but the complexity of the business end—getting a contract, dealing with manufacturers and finance officers and so on—had blurred it, almost hidden it. Now it sprang up again, that little bright flame that had driven her to apply to the Academy in the first place. Danger ignited it—ignited her—the way nothing else could do.
Deep in her heart, she too was glad the Glennys Jones had her as captain. Despite her inexperience, she was convinced that no one else could commit any more deeply to her ship’s welfare. She would get them through this. She would save her ship. She would save her crew.
And somehow, despite all obstacles, she would deliver those blasted tractors and harrows and combines to Belinta.
She came back from that moment of euphoric dazzle to find Lee still looking at her as if he expected her to say something.
“We’ll do,” she said to him. “We’ll do.” She walked back to the command chair, trying to think what next, and realized that she was still in a pressure suit. So were they all. Pressure suits would not help them if the warships fired on them, and were uncomfortable and less efficient … She smiled back at Lee, who was still looking her way. “Time to get out of these things,” she said. She turned to the intercom. “Captain to crew—return pressure suits to storage, with routine maintenance checks.” Then to Lee, “If Riel’s sitting the desk, you’re the one to go rest. I’m going to be moving around the ship, Riel; I’m in contact if you need me.”
“Fine, Captain.” His voice now sounded relaxed; he was unsealing his suit.
She hoped she was right. At some level she knew she was. She went to her cabin, pulled off the pressure suit, and hung it in its locker, properly connected to its recharge connectors. All the readouts were normal, as they should be.
Now for a walk-through. Down the passage to the galley, where she found the new crew fixing meals for the rest of the ship. They wore their suits, but they had the sleeve cuffs undone, the gloves tabbed back; she could tell they’d already been at work here when she ordered suits stowed.
“What’s for dinner?” Ky asked, as if it were any ordinary day.
“Captain!” That was Li, but they had all stiffened when she spoke. “Sorry, Captain, we just—”
“You’re busy, I know that. What are you giving us?”
“Er … quick and hot, Quincy said, so we’re using the fresh stuff and making a crunchy sorga”—a Slotter Key favorite, fresh vegetables chopped into a spicy sauce—“with chicken slivers and rice. Nothing fancy.”
“Sounds good,” Ky said.
“Ten minutes, Captain,” Li said.
“Want to thank you again for taking us out of Sabine,” Skeldon said. His expression, a mix of gratitude and admiration, made Ky uneasy.
“Skeldon,” Li said; he reddened and said no more. Li went on, “We are grateful, Captain Vatta. We didn’t know how bad it was going to get, of course, but to get not only a ride out, but with Vatta …”
What did she think Vatta could do for her, when they had no communications and no FTL drive? Why was Vatta that special to her?
“We’ll do,” Ky said again, as she had to Lee, and again it seemed to be the right thing to say.
She left the good smells and warmth of the galley and headed for the environmental workspace. There she found Mitt and Ted, out of their pressure suits, both busy with handcomps running simulations.
“Dinner in ten minutes,” Ky said as she came in.
“The sim’s coming along,” Mitt said. “Luckily we’d recharged everything when we came in. We were running light-crewed, so four extra isn’t putting any strain on the main cycles at all. But I don’t know how many days we can squeeze out of it yet.”
“Well, don’t forget to eat,” Ky said. “Whatever we’d save by not eating today isn’t worth it. Tomorrow we can starve if we have to, but those perishables won’t do us any good anywhere but inside us.”
Ted laughed, and even Mitt grinned at her. “All right. But I should eat here.”
“No,” Ky said. “You shouldn’t. The new ones have put some effort into this, and we’re all going to eat together like civilized folk, even if it is cramped. Your sim will run without you.”
“It might finish—”
“And so you’ll see it after supper, when you can’t interfere with dessert.”
“Dessert!” He looked shocked. “They aren’t wasting essential supplies on dessert, are they?”
“I have no idea,” Ky said. “But surely one dessert won’t unbalance everything? And if you think it does, we can always pull out my Aunt Grace’s fruitcake.”
“No, we should save that for emergencies,” Mitt said.
If this wasn’t an emergency, what was? Ky didn’t want to think of the emergency that would require them to survive on three of Aunt Gracie Lane’s fruitcakes.
“Less than ten minutes, now,” she said.
From environmental to engineering was a short walk and a single climb. Quincy and her juniors, also out of pressure suits, were poring over diagrams, schematics, holograms; a display board was covered with their lists.
“Dinner in seven minutes, troops,” Ky said, and then wondered where she’d gotten the “troops” from. But they looked up at her with such confidence that her heart turned over. “In the crew rec area,” she said, to forestall the same protest about leaving the area that she saw in Quincy’s eyes.
“It leaves sections uncovered,” Quincy said.
“You’re all linked in,” Ky said. “As I am. And seconds from active control boards. We eat together.” She glanced at the chronometer. “Less than seven minutes, and it smelled good. At least one of our newbies can cook.”
“All right,” Quincy said, with a quick shake of her head. “We’ll be there.”
Gary Tobai and his cargo crew didn’t argue at all, but headed for the crew rec area—by then it was five minutes to dinner, if the newbies had their timing right. And if they didn’t, a minute or two wouldn’t matter.
Ky followed the cargo crew up the passage, then went on as they peeled off into the loos. She went back through the galley, where the smell was even better than before.
“They’re starting to gather,” she said. “We’ll eat in the rec area. There’s just room. I’ll be back in a minute or two.”
Forward to her cabin—a quick touch to her hair again—and then to the bridge.
“Riel, you’re linked, right?”
“Of course, Captain.”
“Well, then—come to dinner. We can race each other to the bridge if we need to, but we all need to see one another’s faces right now.”
“But leaving the bridge—”
“The log’s running, Riel. If something goes wrong, it’s my neck and not yours. It’s not a suggestion.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“And get the rest of the way out of that suit,” Ky said. “You might as well be comfortable for dinner.”
A line from an ancient text, many thousands of years old, came to her; they had studied Old World military history one term. The Spartans, the night before the Persians attacked the pass, had eaten well.
“Yes, Captain.” He stood up, stripped off the pressure suit, and put it away, meticulously checking every readout and connection. Ky didn’t hurry him; she used the time to check her implant’s linkage to every compartment for the fiftieth time, and look again at the longscan display. The warships had moved, of course—they would not sit there to be targets in case Sabine Prime had weapons they didn’t know about. A sprinkling of Prime’s little cutters lit up the screen in no particular formation that Ky could recognize; most were coasting. The afterglow of the ansible explosions had changed shape and color as the debris spread and cooled.
“Ready, Captain,” Riel said finally. Ky queried their mutual linkage—live and clear.
“Fine, then,” Ky said, and led the way off the bridge. That was unorthodox; that was, if anyone complained, illegal. Someone was supposed to be on the bridge at all times. Linkages could fail. But the most important linkage was human, heart-to-heart, and for that they needed one another. Ky stopped by her cabin just long enough to pick up the little candlepair her mother had insisted on including. Supposedly it had been patterned after one from Old World, a pair of candleholders in a single-footed stand.
The rec area tables had been shoved together, and someone had found or improvised an actual tablecloth and set the rather uneven-looking table with Glennys Jones’ best china—the familiar red-and-blue-lined Vatta pattern, with a little red sailing vessel in the center and the ship’s name underneath. Ky set the candlepair in the center. Of course no one lit open flames on a ship, but the safelights set on medium flicker were lovely enough.
Her crew crowded around the tables. Those who had found seats stood up; Ky looked at each face, and tried to think of something to say. Before the silence became too awkward, she said, “We can’t let it get cold; it smells too good,” and sat down. There was a surprised chuckle, and the others also sat.
“What are we going to do about—,” began Beeah Chok, through a mouthful of sorga.
Ky held up her hand. “No business at dinner. Not this dinner anyway. Our new crewmembers have cooked us a good one, and I want to enjoy it. So when they’ve had a chance to eat a little, we can get to know them better.”
“Seth has a wicked sense of humor,” Mitt said. “I can tell you that much.”
Ky nodded, and worked her way through the excellent sorga—realizing that she had completely missed whatever meal should have preceded it, in her dash to get off the planet and then off the station. The others ate more slowly, and the talk picked up around her.
Seth was explaining that his sense of humor had come from his grandfather Jandrai, not his grandfather Garlan. Lucin Li countered with a story about her grandfather Li, a custom knifemaker.
“Chanhodri Li?” asked Gary Tobai.
“Yes,” Lucin said. “You’ve heard of him?”
“I have one of his knives. Fine piece of work. Inherited it from my dad, who got it from your grandfather. Small universe, eh?”
“May I see it?” Lucin asked.
“The knife? Sure.” Gary fished in his pocket and brought it out. Ky looked at it—a small black-handled folding knife. It looked smoothed by time, well-cared for, but nothing unusual.
Lucin peered at it. “Ah … this was in his second series of blades. See—this little mark here? He wasn’t entirely satisfied with the first series—exchanged them for these when he found the owners. Did your father show you the second blade? It doesn’t look as if you’d used it in a long time.”
“Second blade …,” Gary said. “There’s no second blade … is there?”
“Kind of a trick,” Lucin said. She did something Ky couldn’t see and another blade slid sideways out of the handle. “Grandfather was trapped in a collapsed building once—big sea storm, over on Westering. In the debris he couldn’t get his big folding knife out of his pocket—he couldn’t get his arm to move back enough to pull it out. He had a small screwdriver, and finally made a hole in his pocket so he could push the knife out forward, bit by bit. When he started making knives after that, he always had what he called the escape blade. Lot of people never noticed it.”
“Isn’t that … illegal?” Gary asked.
“Some places, yes. That’s why it wasn’t ever advertised, and why it’s not metallic. He didn’t think the laws should prevent someone saving his life. And a screwdriver, he said, was a damn poor way to cut through heavy cloth. Here—” She handed it back to Gary. “Feel this ridge? Run your thumb along it the way you want the blade to go.”
Gary ran the little black blade in and out several times. “Huh. I sure didn’t know that was there. My dad … well, this came to me after his accident, so if he knew, he never had a chance to tell me.”
Ky, feeling much better now that she’d eaten, joined the conversation. “So … what about you, Paro? Where are you from, what’s your family like?”
Paro Hospedin grinned. “Westerling family, like Lucin’s. Shellfish farming, back in colonial days. Then shellfish processing, but we were bought out by Gramlin fifty years or so ago. Our side of the family moved into transportation—nothing to scare Vatta Transport, mostly ground routes from Westerling back east. I caught the spaceship bug early on, wanted to work on the ships themselves, see new worlds, all that. My father said I had to get an education first, and pushed me into the technical end.”
“Good for him,” Quincy said. “It’s easier to get it in one lump than piecemeal, while you’re working.”
“Agreed. I wasn’t sure I wanted drives, but he said I had a good mind for it, and there’d always be ships that needed me.”
“As long as someone has a general background, too,” Quincy said. Beeah and Mehar rolled their eyes. Quincy scowled at them. “It’s important,” she said. “You young people always want to specialize in the high-paying fields, but if you don’t have the background, you’re out of luck if the ship’s expert in the blogowitz generator gets a knock on the head and you have to deal with it.”
“What’s a blogowitz generator?” asked Caleb Skeldon.
“She made it up,” Mehar said. “It’s imaginary, what she calls a teaching tool.”
Caleb still looked confused. Beeah patted him on the shoulder. “Never mind, Cal, this is an old engineering argument. Probably as old as engineering. They have it in medicine, too.”
“Just trying to understand the ship,” Cal said, applying himself to his rice and chicken.
“It’s fine, Cal. They can confuse me sometimes,” Ky said. That wasn’t strictly true, but Cal looked like someone who needed a kind word right then. He wasn’t just handsome; he had the lost-puppy look that made her want to protect him. Danger signals pinged in Ky’s head.
“So, Cal, tell us about yourself.” From the look on Mehar’s face, she had the same impulse as Ky and it was safer for her. Ky mentally detached herself from the lost puppy and handed him over.
“Eastbay City,” Cal said. “My family’s nothing special, just ordinary working folks. Ma works in the hospital, fluids tech, and my dad’s an accountant … that’s how I got into inventory control, through accounting. Accounting was boring. Inventory control, at least there’s something going on. I always wanted to go into space anyway. I guess it was playing Harmon the Hero games when I was a kid. I know there’s not really any Evil Overlord, but …” He chuckled and pushed his rice around.
“I used to play that,” Seth said. “Customized my copy so Harmon had my face and whoever I was mad at that week was the Evil Overlord. Got caught at school once playing it in class, and of course it was Professor Jesperson, and of course it was his face as Evil Overlord.”
“What did he do?” Ky asked.
“Laughed. It was worse than getting angry. I felt like an idiot.” Seth shook his head. “Then the headmaster came in and asked what was going on, and Professor Jesperson erased the set and said he’d just found an illicit game-player and erased it. I never did completely understand that man, but once I didn’t have the game-player, I managed to get top marks in that class.”
“My best friend and I modified our desk paks so we could chat in class,” Mehar said. “Nobody thought it was possible, so they didn’t check them out every time. We’d have gotten away with it all term if another class hadn’t used our room … Two kids started fiddling with the controls and, of course, they couldn’t keep a secret when they found out.”
Everyone had finished eating now. They all seemed relaxed, as she’d hoped. Ky caught Lucin Li’s eye. “Better clear up now,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way …”
“Yes, Captain,” Lucin said. The others all rose, some stacking plates and others picking up the serving dishes. Ky picked up the candlepair and switched it off.
“With the captain’s permission,” Riel said, “I’d really like to get back to the bridge.”
“Certainly,” Ky said. “We stretched the regs; we don’t want them to snap.”
He grinned, as she’d hoped, and headed upship to the bridge.
“Now,” she said to her section firsts. “About that schedule …”
“It’s all ready, Captain,” Gary said.
“And I have the preliminary environmental report,” Mitt said.
“Good. Anything critical I need to see right away? I’m overtime myself; I’m turning in for six hours unless someone needs me.”
“No,” Mitt said. “Like I said before dinner, we’re in good shape. I have a couple of alternative models, but everything’s stable. Report’s on file.”
“Same here,” Gary said.
“Good,” Ky said. “We’ll all think clearer after some sleep.”
Back in her cabin, Ky stripped off her clothes—not too stinky—and put them into the ’fresher while she took a full shower. She ran through the calming exercises of Saphiric Cyclans as she dried her hair, laid out a fresh uniform, and fell into bed only to remember that she hadn’t written a log entry since she got aboard.
There was, of course, the recorded log, and Lee would have written up a pilot’s log, but tradition and training said a captain never slept without updating the log in actual writing.
At least she could do that wrapped in a soft robe and not in a uniform. Ky pulled out the logbook—still so new, most of its pages empty—and her stylus. She piled pillows behind her and started on the day’s events. When she’d finished a terse report, she looked at it a long moment before closing the logbook. If … if something happened, and that logbook were the only surviving evidence, would a reader understand it? Would he see choices she had not seen, better courses of action?
She could see nothing but one bad option after another.
She slipped the logbook and stylus into its drawer, and then turned out the light. Maybe a good night’s sleep would give her the wits to find a way out of this.
She woke up to the sounds of a ship on insystem drive, nothing more nor less. The ship was alive—air moving through the vents, liquids moving through pipes—she heard a distant gulp that she knew from experience was the galley drain. She stretched, feeling the mild stiffness of muscles held too tense the day before. But rested. She sat up, looked at the chronometer, and muttered a soft oath. She should have known they’d let her sleep too long. Into uniform, teeth clean, hair brushed smooth.
She came out into the passage feeling wide-awake and hungry again. In the galley, Cal Skeldon was wiping up the sink; she nodded to him as she checked her implant. Riel was off-duty; Lee was sitting the board. Alertly—he noticed the tick at his implant and answered at once.
“Nothing new, Captain.”
“Can I fix you something, Captain?” Cal asked. That ingratiating smile again; Ky shook her head.
“I’ll just get some cereal,” she said. Before she could reach for a bowl, he had handed her one, along with a packet of breakfast grains.
“Thanks,” she said, turning away to open the cooler. She found a packet of berries and added them to the bowl, then took out the cream jug. He was still there, clearly ready to do anything she asked. She poured the cream onto the berries and grains, and handed him the cream jug.
“I have to get to the bridge,” she said.
“Of course, Captain,” he said, eyes bright. She would have a talk with Mehar, she decided; this had gone far enough. She took her breakfast up to the bridge. Lee looked up.
“Were you ever planning to wake Sleeping Beauty?” Ky asked. “Or were you waiting for a prince?”
“Gary and Quincy said to let you have at least eight hours,” Lee said. “Was that wrong?”
“No. I just didn’t plan to sleep that long.” Ky sat down in the captain’s seat and turned on the intercom. “Captain’s on the bridge. Section firsts, if you’re finished with that assignment, come on up.” She took a spoonful of berries and cream and grain. “Where are we, Lee? Anything to worry about?”
“No, Captain.” The plot came up on Ky’s desk. “We’re not going to hit anything in this system. Not anything mapped, anyway. The warships have moved in on Sabine Prime; there’s been an engagement of some kind with Prime’s space force, such as it is. They haven’t blown the station yet, though we’re far enough out it could have happened and we wouldn’t have heard.”
“Any sign of ISC?”
“No downjump markers that I can detect. If they’ve come in, they’ve come in with something small, distant, and careful. I wouldn’t know yet if they just arrived across the system, of course.”
Scan-lag was such a pain. It was possible to link ansibles to scan and get an almost-instantaneous scan of an entire system, but that took the ansibles off-line for other uses. Aside from that, they were limited to lightspeed or less. Ky finished her berries and grain, setting the bowl aside just as Gary, Mitt, and Quincy appeared.
“I hope you’re all as rested as I am,” Ky said. “What have you got for me? Mitt, you first.”
“Current consumption, we’re good for eighty-seven days. Gary spent all the government letter of credit on supplies, is why it looks so good. Our system’s designed for straight recycling of atmosphere and water; there’s no design capability for onboard food generation.”
“We could modify some of the equipment,” Quincy put in. “But we don’t have seed stock. We’d have to figure out a way to purify and prepare the basic cultures.”
“I can’t really recommend that,” Mitt said. “Unless it’s that or starvation.”
“We’ll hope it’s not,” Ky said. “You, Quincy?”
“Well, the ship’s in pretty good shape, aside from the problems we knew about already. Nothing’s leaking. Nothing’s coming apart under this acceleration. On the other hand, we have to consider insystem drive fuel consumption. Since we can’t jump out of this system with no FTL drive, we need to be able to get back where we came from in order to get that replacement sealed unit.”
“Fuel consumption so far?”
“Seven percent. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it all depends how long this goes on.”
“Gary?”
“Load’s all secure. I’ve been collecting the skills list, like you asked me to. Hand-painting flat-pics seems like a useless sort of thing to mention, but—”
“We don’t know what might be useful,” Ky said. “Let me see here … flower painting, yes. Surf fishing with rod and reel. Once achieved a perfect score in Bzzx—what is that?”
“A gameplayer classic. The one where you shoot little biting things that try to eat your garden plants.”
“Mmm … and designing and hand-sewing festival costumes.” She couldn’t think of anything more boring, herself. And that was Mitt, of all people. “Pistol-bow competition? What’s that?”
“That’s—you know what a crossbow is, right?”
“Ancient weapon, now used in sports. Sure, my brothers had one. They never would let me play with it, and it disappeared about the time Hanar moved out. He used to shoot fish with it, and sometimes rabbits.”
“Pistol bows are much smaller. I asked Mehar about it; she says they even proposed them to Vatta main office as a shipboard security weapon. They won’t penetrate hulls or bulkheads, and they don’t have any combustibles, so they’re legal on most stations. She says they look scary to dockside thieves and they had much less trouble on Palatine when the outside watch carried them.”
“That makes sense. So we have a pistol-bow expert—how many pistol bows do we have?” For a moment she imagined the glorious defense of the ship, her crew with pistol bows against—real riot-control weapons that could rip holes in the ship. Not a good idea.
“Only the two Mehar has—her own personal practice and competition bows.”
Just as well, then. She wouldn’t be tempted. Still, if Mehar could hit something with a pistol bow, she might be good with other weapons. If they happened to find any. She went on with the list. Two who could knit, and one who could crochet. One who could blow glass. Five cross-trained in another ship discipline than that on their primary papers.
Nothing that immediately sparked an idea for how to get out of this mess. Nobody claimed to know how to fashion an ansible out of yarn and some extra carrots, which is what they had most of.
“Well,” she said when she came to the end of the list and found her three section firsts looking at her as if they expected she’d come up with a complete answer. “That’s all very interesting, but I think the next step is to see if the Mackensee folks want to talk to us. I’d like to quit using fuel to go somewhere we don’t want to go, for instance. We’re well out of their way, unless they plan to blow up Sabine Prime itself.”
“Do you think they’ll answer?” asked Gary. “If they’re busy fighting—” “Won’t know until we try,” Ky said. “If they’re too busy they won’t answer, or they’ll tell us to be quiet. I’m going to suggest that we need to reserve fuel for maneuvering. Chances are they don’t know we’ve got this much left.”