Ky felt the rise in tension. “And what is that?” she asked.
He looked at her a moment, and then nodded. “All right. We had hoped to use your ship as a courier to the ISC, but since you have no FTL drive, we can’t. However, we need a place to stash some neutral civilians who might otherwise give us problems. Your ship is more than adequate for that task. The only problem is that some of them are older than you, and—at least in their own estimation—rank higher. We would prefer to have civilians under civilian command—saves us work, and prevents certain kinds of problems—but that will depend on you. We would, essentially, like to hire Vatta Transport to transport—temporarily and in this system—some passengers. For that service, we are prepared to pay standard per diem for an expected duration of that transport.” He glanced down at his desk display. “If our calculations are correct, that would come to something in the neighborhood of two hundred fifty thousand credits.”
Two hundred fifty thousand credits. That would repay the loan on Sabine Prime and finance the repairs to the FTL drive as well …
She tried not to smile. “You do realize we have limited quarters for additional personnel,” she said. “How many were you anticipating?”
“Your environmental system will handle a total of seventy, isn’t that correct?”
“Seventy! Yes, though that’s right at redline. Fifty-five’s the rated limit. But we don’t have the space—”
“You have cargo holds—aired up, I’m informed. We’d supply some amenities—pallets and blankets—”
“My cargo holds are stuffed full of cargo,” Ky said. “On contract to the Economic Development Bureau on Belinta.”
“They’d have to be emptied—or at least enough to accommodate fifty additional passengers. With your present crew that keeps you under the redline.”
“Just barely,” Ky said. “And we can’t just dump cargo—we have a contract. You understand contracts—” She could not believe she was arguing with a man who had her completely at his mercy, but Vatta stubbornness held her spine stiff.
“Indeed we do undertand contracts, Captain Vatta—it is in pursuit of our own contract obligations that we find ourselves in need of your ship. For which we are willing to pay reasonable fees. Do you understand necessity?”
She did. “Yes,” she said, admitting it. “But that cargo—”
“It’s your customer’s money,” Major Harris said. “Surely there’s insurance?”
“Actually, no,” Ky said. “They had an earlier shipment which was lost—by another carrier. Their insurance is not willing to pay on that, because the cargo completely disappeared. They hired me to bring them another, but insisted it be on spec.”
“So—it’s your money in your holds?”
“Yes.”
He stared at his desk display, lips folded under. When he looked up, Ky thought she saw the ghost of a smile in the crinkles by his eyes. “All right, Captain, here’s our best offer. We’ll have people help you net your cargo, and put a homer tag on it, so you can pick it up later. In fact, we’ll help you load it later. And we’ll pay the full per diem for those passengers. If you command. Otherwise, we’ll have to put a military crew aboard, intern your crew, and you—we’d just keep you here—until this is over, and where will your cargo be then?”
Trade and profit … “Very well,” Ky said. “I accept your offer.”
Now he did smile. “Captain Vatta, I predict you are destined to have an interesting life. We’ll have that contract ready in hardcopy in a minute or so, and then, if you’re ready, we’ll return you to your ship.”
“And thank you for not asking more details of our operation,” he said as he stood up. “It shows uncommon … discretion.”
“I’m trying to learn, Major,” Ky said, as demurely as she could.
He shook his head at her. “Slotter Key should have hung the other fellow out to dry, not you, Captain. They don’t know what they’re missing. Though your commanders might have had ulcers …” He reached out his hand and Ky shook it. “Now, let’s get over to Legal and get that contract signed and sealed, shall we?”
The ship’s legal offices consisted of a warren of little rooms and one large conference room with a big table. Here Ky and the major waited—she noticed that one armed guard still trailed them, but stayed outside the door here—until another officer came in.
“I hate these subordinate contracts,” he said as he came through the door. “Always a mess, always so many exclusionary clauses …”
“Senior Lieutenant Mason, this is Captain Vatta,” Major Harris said.
“Captain Vatta,” the man said, extending a damp hand to be shaken. “Now, I understand you’re from Slotter Key?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Signatories to the TriSystem revision of the Interstellar Uniform Commercial Code?”
“Yes,” Ky said.
“Well, that simplifies things. Now—do you want to read this yourself or shall I explain it?”
“I’ll read it,” Ky said.
“Since you have no legal representation, I am bound to assist you in understanding anything that might be unclear—”
“Thank you,” Ky said, reaching for the sheaf of hardcopies. He released them with seeming reluctance, and she opened the folder. Familiar terms stared back at her. Consignor, consignee, liability for this and that … she read through, carefully, mindful of lessons learned in the family, that it’s the clause you skip over that destroys your profit when you don’t fulfill it. When she looked up, she said, “I don’t see anything about immunity in case of untoward circumstances not resulting from the negligence of Vatta Transport.”
“They’ll be on your ship, under your control,” the lawyer said. “What else—”
“Natural causes,” Ky said. “And it’s a war zone; I’m not going to have Vatta Transport held liable for stray shots, or capture by the other side.”
The lawyer gave the major a long look, and then said, “All right … we’ll change it. Won’t take a moment,” and reached for the papers. Ky handed back the one involving carrier liability and held onto the others. He glowered, but walked out with the one sheet.
“Lawyers,” Major Harris said. “They always try something—of course, that’s why we pay them.”
“True,” Ky said. “Our company legal staff’s the same.”
“They taught you well,” Major Harris said. “Though we don’t intend to have any accidents and blow you away …”
“Good,” Ky said. They sat in almost-companionable silence until the lawyer came back, with a new page fourteen that included the missing clause. Ky read it, inserted it, and nodded. “All right—I’m ready to sign.”
Major Harris signed for the Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation, and she signed for Vatta Transport, Ltd. The lawyer signed a line that specified the contract had been prepared in accordance with the Trisystem Universal Commercial Code. Then Major Harris stood up. “Let’s get you back to your ship,” he said. “Your passengers will start arriving in about six hours. I’m sending a working party and nets to help with your cargo.”
The trip back to Glennys Jones went swiftly. Ky and the members of the working party all wore pressure suits—there was still no way aboard except the little escape vacuum lock—and she sat webbed to the bulkhead in the back of one of the warship’s assault shuttles, lurching to and fro with the abrupt changes of acceleration required by a rapid transit.
Ky went first through the lock, with two others, and on the inside a guard in armor waved her on up the passage. She drew a long breath; her ship still smelled like her ship, like home. She came out of the passage to find another guard, this one not in armor. This was a lean woman with close-cropped gray hair and PITT stenciled on her uniform. “You can take your pressure suit off here,” the guard said. Ky stripped out of the suit, and the guard’s eyes widened. “Captain Vatta—you look great.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry—you probably don’t remember. I’m Master Sergeant Pitt, and I’m the one who knocked you down harder than I meant to.”
“That’s all right,” Ky said. “And by the way, thanks for calling in the medics.” She suspected that for all the fine phrases in the Mackensee advertising, standard operating procedure would have been to finish her off.
Pitt shook her head. “Right thing to do. Anyway, they said you were coming back today; I’m glad to see you looking so well.”
“How are my crew?” Ky asked.
“Fine. They’ve all been very sensible, and very worried about you.”
“We now have a contract with Mackensee,” Ky said. She pulled her copy out of her uniform jacket. “Have they told you?”
“Yup. We’re to help unload as many cargo holds as you say we need to, net and beacon the cargo, and then help you through loading passengers. It’s your ship, Captain. You tell us what we need to do, and we’ll do it. For my sins, I’m your liaison.”
“Right, then. First thing, I want to let the crew know I’m back, and functional. Next, we’ll get Mitt’s assessment of the environmental system, and Gary’s assessment of cargo—he’ll know the easiest and fastest way to unload stuff.”
“They’re waiting in the rec area,” Pitt said, nodding forward. “I’ll just stay here and organize the working party. They’ll need to stay in pressure suits.”
Ky went forward to the rec area. Her crew were scattered around the tables, consuming some meal—she realized she was not oriented to ship’s time and didn’t know which it was—and talking quietly. No guard stood over them. That much was good. She wondered what to say, but then Quincy looked up and saw her.
“Ky—Captain! How are you?”
“Fine,” Ky said. “I don’t have an implant, though. What I do have is a contract.”
“A contract!” Quincy looked almost angry. “We thought you were dying—”
“Luckily not, though it was apparently a near thing. I’ve got my medical record with me, if anyone’s that curious. I’d just as soon not look—what they told me was scary enough.”
“But—what do you mean by a contract?”
“Mackensee has hired Vatta Transport to care for some neutral civilian passengers while we’re stuck here in this system. I know”—Ky held up her hand to forestall objections—“I know we don’t have cabin space or comfortable facilities. I know all that. We’re going to net our cargo and put it out with a beacon, to pick up later, and bed passengers in the cargo holds. Mitt, first thing, is our environmental system holding nominal in all ways?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Good, because we’ll be stressing it. They’re sending us fifty, and they’ll be here in about five hours. Gary, what’s the easiest hold to unload that will hold fifty people for some days—room for pallets and some exercise space?”
“Standard configuration … not stacking bunks, just pallets? And we don’t have that many pallets—”
“They’re coming, too. Wait—I’ll get Master Sergeant Pitt.” Pitt would know how much space to calculate, she was sure. Pitt did, and in minutes Gary had figured out the simplest way to unload cargo and take on passengers.
That was the last quick and simple action of a day that had started in sick bay and showed no signs of ending. The holds’ pumps sucked out the air, leaving them ready for opening the cargo hatches to vacuum. Then the unloading began, with Gary Tobai handing out labels to stick on each part of the load, and on each netful. When they had the holds empty, the nets stuffed with equipment, they had only an hour to prepare the holds for their passengers.
Close the big hatches, release the air in the tanks … airing up was one thing, but warming up quite another. The mercenaries’ work crew, laying out bedrolls on the decking, positioning the portable toilets, showers, sinks, left puffs of breath smoke behind them. No time to hook up the plumbing, though all the equipment was positioned where it would be most convenient to the ship’s existing lines. At least water wouldn’t be a problem, with their existing stores and recycling.
“If you don’t mind my asking, Captain,” Master Sergeant Pitt said, “have you ever been in charge of a refugee situation?”
“No,” Ky said. Master Sergeant Pitt reminded her a lot of MacRobert, back at the Academy. “You have suggestions?”
“Yes, Captain, if you don’t mind—”
“Not at all,” Ky said. “Pretend I’m the greenest young officer you ever saw—what would you try to get me to do, without actually telling me?”
Pitt grinned. “It’s not my place to say, you know.”
“No, it’s your place to hint, insinuate, and invisibly lead.” Ky decided to come clean. “I don’t know if they told you, Master Sergeant Pitt, but I’m a flunk out from the Slotter Key space academy, and if I’d paid closer attention to Master Sergeant MacRobert’s hints, I wouldn’t have trusted the wrong person and been kicked out.”
“Ah—MacRobert is the fellow who gave you that warship kit?”
“Yes,” Ky said. She didn’t like thinking of strangers in her cabin going through her things, but of course they had, and no use being angry about it now.
“That explains a lot,” Pitt said. “All right, then, Captain, here’s what you need to do.” She listed actions, some of which Ky had already thought of—assigning teams for shift work to keep the place tidy, prepare meals, etc.—and some of which she hadn’t, like placing guards on the galley and crew storage. “Thing is,” Pitt said, “they’re going to be angry, and bored, and some of them—the captains of the other civ ships—are going to think they should be running this, not a baby-faced kid like you. You have to convince them otherwise. And you have to not let any pretty boy like that Skeldon get past your guard.”
Was everyone going to assume that she had trusted Skeldon too much? Probably. Probably Gary or Quincy had told Pitt about her fifth birthday party, too. And no time to brood about it now, or about the description of her as “baby-faced kid.”
“I don’t have an implant now,” she said to Pitt. “So I’d appreciate it if you’d send that list to Quincy. She’s the closest I’ve got to a master sergeant of my own.”
“They couldn’t save your implant? Sorry.”
“And they recommended I not have a new one fitted for six months, until any remaining neuro reshaping is definitely stable. But I didn’t have one in the Academy, so it’s not as bad as if I had depended on it for the last four years.”
“That’s good.” Pitt paused, then went on. “I could give you recommendations, based on my observations and reports I’ve gotten from buddies working with your future passengers, of who’s good for what.”
“Thanks. Any info you have I’ll take.” And do with what she would, but she figured Pitt understood that.
Then the passengers began to arrive. Unfortunately, to keep the cargo holds aired up meant that all the incoming passengers had to cycle through the escape vacuum lock and then be shunted down the maintenance passage and into the area prepared for them. The passengers, Ky was told, comprised the senior ship’s officers from all the civilian ships interdicted in the system: captains, first and second officers, communications personnel, and engineering firsts. The passenger ship Empress Rose, of the famous Imperial Spaceways, would serve the mercenaries as a courier—a choice that meant her passengers would be delayed as little as possible—but her captain would be interned on Glennys Jones.
All the passengers had been informed of the situation, and the mercenaries seemed confident that they would be reasonably cooperative, but Ky had her doubts. She didn’t intend to show any of them.
Instead, she wore her dress uniform, with cape, and stood at the turn from the escape passage to the maintenance passage, greeting each person who came aboard. Without an implant assist, she had no way to know which was which, so it was a spare “Good day, welcome aboard, that way please …” greeting, but it was a greeting, and she could tell from the expressions that her captain’s rings and cape had an effect.
When the passengers were aboard, the work party carried in the rations taken from the civilian ships. These stuffed the little galley and its storage, and filled half the rec area as well. She hoped it would be enough. Ten days, fifty additional people, three meals a day … one hundred fifty additional meals to prepare, in a galley meant for a crew of less than twenty.
But they were alive, unharmed, and with any luck would survive this and even be paid.
“Time to go,” Pitt said finally. “We’ve unloaded all your supplies; your passengers are secured in the cargo holds. Someone should come behind us to secure the hatch.”
“Right,” Ky said. “Gary, if you’ll see to the hatch.”
“And thanks, Captain, for being sensible about this.”
Ky grinned. “Thanks for not killing me.” She watched the mercenary walk away, already fitting the helmet on her pressure suit. What would it have been like, to have someone like Pitt at her side year after year? For a moment, she allowed herself a last moment of grief for the lost opportunities … but the opportunities now before her were exciting enough.
She went forward to the bridge, where Riel was in the pilot’s chair as if he hadn’t moved since she left.
“I hope you’ve rotated shifts,” she said.
“Yes, Captain. Glad to have you back.”
“I’m glad to be back. And for our next adventure, let’s get through the next ten days or so with no such excitement, shall we?”
“I certainly hope so,” he said.
She sat in the command seat and flicked on the circuits. With the earbug in, she could access data almost as quickly as with the implant. A fast check of ship systems for herself—and Glennys Jones was fine, except for the FTL drive. Video from the cargo holds, where her passengers were standing around in clumps, showed talking and gesturing. When she listened in on the audio, most of the talk was angry. That wasn’t good.
She turned on the intercom. “This is Captain Vatta. Once again, welcome aboard the Glennys Jones.”
A tall man with silvery hair, in a captain’s uniform, turned around, glared at the nearest vid pickup and approached it. “I demand that you come down here and straighten this mess out. What did they mean, you had a contract with them?”
Thanks to the earbug’s link to the personnel files, she knew this was Captain Kristoffson of the Empress Rose.
“Captain Kristoffson, I will be speaking to you and the other captains shortly. As you must realize, we have a great deal of work to do to make this ship as comfortable and efficient as possible in the next few hours. Bear with us, please, as we get this done. We should have a meal for you all in about three hours—”
“This is outrageous! This is nothing but a cargo hold! It’s not even warm. You can’t seriously expect us to sleep on the cargo deck in these”—he glared around—“these disgusting bedroll things. I demand a stateroom. Captains of respectable ships do not sleep on the floor …”
Ky’s first impulse to share her cabin with the more senior captains had been quashed by Pitt’s advice, but it would not have survived this.
“Excuse me, Captain Kristoffson, but this is not the time to make complaints. I will consider your complaints later. At the moment, I need you and the other captains to organize the work parties needed to finish making your holds comfortable. I’m sure your personnel would be more comfortable commanded by familiar officers, so I’ve arranged a rota which permits shipmates to work together.”
“Work parties! Passengers don’t work, Vatta—of course, you don’t know about passenger ships—” Her temper rose at the contempt in his voice. She glanced at Riel, who made a rude gesture.
“I’m sure you’re aware that this is not a normal passenger service,” Ky said. “Things are difficult for us all …”
“Not for you, apparently,” he said. “You can loll in whatever passes for luxury on this tub—not that I expect it’s much—”
“Enough,” Ky said, in a voice borrowed from the Commandant. Somewhat to her surprise, it worked—Kristoffson blinked and looked stunned. “I have just returned from having surgery on the mercenary flagship—I was nearly killed when my ship was boarded, and I don’t see any scars on you, sir. Don’t push your luck.”
His mouth had dropped open; now it shut with a snap. “I—I—they didn’t say that—”
“No reason for them to. I’m lucky to be alive and so are you. Let’s keep it that way.”
“But I still think—”
“Captain, as you must realize, this ship is not large enough to give everyone the quarters they deserve, and it would be unfair to play favorites. The working crew will stay in the crew quarters, and the passengers will stay where they’re put. Is that clear?”
“Yes …” His eyes narrowed. “But I still intend to file a complaint. It must break some law for a neutral civilian to sign a contract with a mercenary company.”
“Actually, no,” Ky said. “Most cargo firms sign transport contracts with mercenaries all the time. Section 234.6, Universal Commercial Code. If you were combatants or war matériel, that would be Section 234.7.” She thought of pointing out that he might well have had mercenary officers as passengers when they were on leave or undercover assignment, and thought better of it. Instead she went on, “I realize this has all been a grave inconvenience for you, but we’re all going to have to make the best of it.” She waited a moment for that to sink in, and then repeated. “Captains, please organize your ship’s personnel into working parties. We have been given basic information about the qualifications of passengers; in addition to the work parties dealing with food, sanitation, and maintenance, we may be requesting specific personnel to assist in ship systems areas where the very small existing crew is overloaded.”
Other captains visible in the pickup nodded, but Kristoffson still looked uncooperative. Too bad, Ky thought. She kept the video and audio monitors on, but cut off the intercom to the holds. Instead she called the galley.
“How’s the meal prep going?” she asked.
“We figured out how to keep all the frozen stuff that doesn’t fit in the freezer,” Gary said. He sounded tired; he probably had been up for three shifts running. “We turned the heat off in number three and put it in there. Quincy’s trying to cobble up a cooler for the perishables that won’t fit into storage, and the cooks are using up whatever won’t fit in either.”
“Good,” Ky said. “Questions?”
“Do we try to keep the food sources separate, and feed the different ships’ crews stuff off their own ships?”
“No—too complicated,” Ky said. “I don’t even know if they brought proportional amounts off the various ships.”
“There’s gold-eye raspberries off Empress Rose … I’ve never even tasted one …”
“Enough for everyone?”
“For one meal.”
“Serve ’em up,” Ky said. “If that captain brought ’em for his own special meals, he can just suffer through sharing.”
“Trouble?”
“He’d like to be,” Ky said. “He’s used to being in charge and he thinks being stuck in the cargo hold of a freighter is the worst that can happen.”
“You be careful,” Gary said, his brow furrowed. “We don’t have that fancy medical team to fix you up if anything goes wrong again.”
“I know,” Ky said. She rubbed her neck, which was beginning to hurt. It was probably just tension.
A few minutes later, Beeah brought trays up to the bridge: her tray had a large bowl of gold-eye raspberries, a jug of cream, and some sugar, as well as a hearty sandwich of thin-sliced meats and cheeses. “Gary said you sounded like you needed to eat. Riel, here’s yours, too.”
“I probably do,” Ky said. “I think my last meal was … I don’t even know.”
“The others will be ready on time, Gary says, but how are we going to get them down to the passengers?”
“That’s what the work parties are for,” Ky said, through a mouthful of sandwich. “What is this stuff, anyway? Tastes expensive.”
“From Balknas Brighteyes—they had trays of already-sliced meats in one of the coolers, so we thought better to eat them now. All kinds of stuff I didn’t even recognize, but tasty.”
“Mmm. Soon as I finish this, I’ll go down and meet with the captains, explain the rota I’ve been working on.” Ky gulped down another bite. “I’d better take someone with me, in case that idiot Kristoffson tries anything.”
“The Rose’s captain? What’s he done?”
“Acted like a spoiled brat at summer camp,” Riel answered around his own bite of sandwich. “All huffy and demanding and complaining.”
“Thinks I’ve done something wrong by taking a contract with the mercenaries,” Ky said. “Dad always said passenger carriers were snooty. So I’ll just take someone along … Mehar and her pistol bow, I think.”
The nine captains looked unhappy but said nothing at first as Ky handed out the work party rota. “Right now, only the toilets interface with our environmental system,” she said. “We need to get the showers and the sinks hooked up as well. I know your senior engineers are with you—so we’ll need to get their help to work with my engineering first, Quincy Robin. I understand your schedules were all synched with ours two days ago, is that right?”
They nodded.
“Good,” she said. “That means the meal we’re about to have is second-shift main meal, and—”
“I expect that you will reserve rations from the Empress Rose for Empress Rose personnel,” Kristoffson said. The other captains gave him a look.
“That isn’t possible,” Ky said. “We have limited storage space for perishables. Although we’ve allocated additional cargo space for frozen rations, we’ve combined all the rest in order of use.”
“But our rations are gourmet quality!” Kristoffson said.
“You were planning to feast on fancy stuff and champagne while the rest of us ate sardines and crackers?” That was Captain Lucas, of the Balknas Line cargo ship Balknas Brighteyes. “I hate to disappoint you, but the rations we sent aboard were not so bad that we need your red ripe strawberries or whatever it was.”
“Gold-eye raspberries,” muttered Kristoffson, now red in the face.
Lucas shrugged. “Good enough, but I prefer summerberries from Winterfast, lightly dusted with cinnamon.”
The two men were both looking puffy about the neck, and Ky could have laughed.
“Actually I prefer to find out what Captain Vatta needs from us to make this as comfortable as possible,” said another man—Captain Paison, she saw from the list. A good ten centimeters shorter than Captain Kristoffson, stocky, dark hair graying at the temples, and enough weathering on his skin to show that he didn’t spend all his time aboard ship. His ship, the Marie, was about the size of most Vatta transports. “If we haggle too long over kitchen affairs, Captain Vatta—who actually has a ship to command—might just decide to go back to work and ignore us.” He winked at Ky.
“But it’s—,” Kristoffson started. Paison held up his hand and Kristoffson was quiet.
“Captain Vatta, my two engineering staff are at your disposal. Perhaps after eating? I’m sure you’d like to get all the plumbing hooked up as soon as possible.”
“Yes, I would,” Ky said. “You’ll all be more comfortable when you have shower facilities and somewhere to wash up your things. As you know, this is a small ship, and this many personnel aboard puts us at the limit of our environmental system. Unfortunately, this means we must ration water use, especially in the first few shifts, to be sure that nothing unbalances the tanks.”
“But there are shower units,” another captain said.
“Yes, and I assure you I will be as generous as possible with the water allowance. The calculations our engineering staff made support a maximum of three fairly short showers per hour, which works out to one per twenty-four-hour day per person. However, for the first day, as the system adjusts to more throughput, I’m asking you to hold that to one shower per hour down here. My crew is also restricting use.”
“What about cooking and eating?” Paison asked.
“We’ll be flash-cleaning cooking and eating utensils, to conserve water and pressure on the environmental system,” Ky said. “Since we’re not under boost, we’ve trailed a Peterton line and that will provide enough extra power to cover it.”
“We were told to bring tableware,” Kristoffson said. “We were not told it had to be flash-proof.”
Ky was ready to let Kristoffson eat off the deck with his fingers, but she held onto her temper. “I’m sure your company can make a claim against Mackensee for whatever damage is done to your tableware, Captain Kristoffson. My main concern is that everyone on this ship have sufficient food, water, and air to survive until this is over.”
The others nodded, as if they agreed this made sense. Kristoffson looked around for support and found none.
“Now,” Ky said. “The meal’s almost ready, in the galley, but we need people to carry it down here. I’ve assigned that duty first to Marie … so, Captain Paison, could you assemble your work team, please? I’ll take them back to the galley with me.”
He nodded.
“The rest of you, please speak to your engineering personnel and let them know that after the meal they’ll be assisting Quincy Robin in hooking up the rest of the plumbing.”