“Do it,” Cecelia said. Red patches marred her cheeks again. Heris thought to herself that one of the advantages of darker skin was that blushes didn’t show. Much. “Do you have sensors in there?”
“Oh, yes.” Heris called up the compartment specs. “You have a pretty fair internal security system, probably to let your staff monitor offship loading . . . see?” There were Ronnie and George, looking stubborn, hunched over a hard copy of something. She did not wait to hear what they were saying, but her fingers flicked over the screen controls. The young men suddenly stopped talking, and stared at each other.
“She wouldn’t!” George said in a tinny voice.
“Why’s he sound like that?”
“Air pressure,” Heris said. “Their ears just popped, I’ll bet.” Her fingers moved again, and both of them looked pale and ill at ease. “You’d better go,” Heris said to Cecelia. “You want to be properly angry and upset, and you don’t want to know what happened to them . . . not until they tell you. I won’t hurt them.”
“I know that,” Cecelia said, but she left reluctantly.
“If you get into the computer, then you can pull drills on her,” George said. “She won’t know—” He lounged against a burlap sack marked “Fertile seeds: contains mercury: do not use for food.”
“Neither will we,” Ronnie said. “I don’t want to be up all night every night.”
“You don’t have to be. That’s the beauty of it. You just set them up, but cut our bells out of it.”
“She’ll know who did it,” Ronnie said. “I still think I should start with the internal monitors. She’s spending a lot of time with Aunt Cecelia now; she’s bound to say something I can use.” They had a hard copy of the communications board specs, left in an unsecured file from one of Cecelia’s training sessions. Getting into the secured files would be harder. Ronnie had the feeling that Captain damn-her-backbone Serrano would not leave her files unsecured.
“Yes, but what can she do? You’re the owner’s nephew—she can hardly throw you out in the void.”
“Maybe.” Ronnie stared at the specs, trying to remember all that stuff he had had in class. This little squiggle was supposed to mean something about the way that channel and this other channel interacted . . . wasn’t it? He put his thumb firmly on the line that came from Cecelia’s sitting room, and a finger on the one that came from the gym. He really needed a tap in both. If only Skunkcat had been along. . . . Scatty was the best for this sort of thing.
“Here’s the captain’s direct line to the bridge,” George said, trying to be helpful. George had good ideas, but always managed to get the wrong slant on them. Ronnie did not want to interfere with the captain’s communication to the bridge; he wanted them to know how ineffectual she was going to be once he figured out how to sabotage her.
Suddenly his ears popped, then popped again. He saw from George’s face that the same unsettling shudder was going through his stomach, too. George said something; he paid no attention. Lower air pressure . . . shifts in the artificial gravity . . . could it have been a real emergency? He was suddenly sweaty, and as suddenly cold, the sweat drying on him. No. It had taken too long. That bitch of a captain was doing something to him, doing it on purpose.
“Out!” he said, across the middle of something George was trying to say. “Before the pressure locks engage.”
But they had. He could not wrestle the hatch open against the safety locks; he would not call for help. His stomach protested, as another shift of AG squashed him, then released . . . and the air pressure dropped again, to another painful pop of his ears.
George looked green. “I . . . I’m going to—”
“Not in variable G—hold it, George.” There was nothing to use for a spew-bag. Every storage container in there—bags, boxes, tubes—had a lock-down seal on it. A surge of AG crushed him to the deck, then let up slowly. Air pressure returned; his ears popped just as many times on the way back to ship normal. His stomach tried to crawl out his mouth; George looked as bad as he felt, but had managed not to spew. He swallowed the vile taste in his mouth and rolled over onto his back. He had a sudden pounding headache.
Something banged on the closed hatch. “Anyone inside?”
George croaked, and the hatch opened. A crewman, someone Ronnie did not recognize, in full emergency gear. “My—you weren’t in here for the drill, were you?” Without awaiting the obvious answer, the man went on, “It’s not anyone’s assigned station—you’re lucky I found you. We’re doing a pressure check on all compartments—”
“Just get us out of here,” Ronnie said, staggering to his feet. “That miserable captain—”
“Wasn’t her fault,” the crewman said, as if surprised at his words. “It’s a computer-generated emergency; they all are, you know. Didn’t you get your handouts?”
“Yes,” George said. “We got our handouts. Thank you. Just let me pass, please.” He shoved past and shambled down the passage to the nearest toilet, where Ronnie could hear him being very thoroughly sick.
Ronnie himself hoped to sneak back to his own stateroom, but in the lounge he found a very angry Aunt Cecelia. She said all the things he expected, and didn’t want to hear, and he managed not to listen. She had said them all before, and so had others, and it was not really his fault anyway. It was that captain. That arrogant, stiff-necked, conniving bitch of a captain, and he was going to get even with her. If Aunt Cecelia didn’t want to see his face for two days, that was fine. He could eat in his room; he would be glad to eat in his room. All the more time to figure out how to do what he was going to do. Still, an attempt at patching things up never hurt. He did his best at a contrite apology, but she turned away, ignoring him. Ignoring him. No one ignored him.
By the time he reappeared in the dining room, several days later, to all appearances chastened and determined to be a good boy, Ronnie had figured it out. At least the beginning of it. It had been easy, using the specs he had, to get a tap into his aunt’s sitting room. And into the gym. He hadn’t yet dared try the captain’s cabin, but he was hearing a lot as it was. That fool captain actually liked his ridiculous aunt, he’d discovered. Enjoyed the riding lessons, enjoyed explaining to Cecelia how her ship worked, enjoyed the relaxed conversations in the evenings, when they explored each others’ backgrounds.
A lot of it bored him silly: talk about books he’d never read, and art he’d never seen, and music he avoided. (Opera! He had liked the opera singer’s body, and the competition with the prince, but not the music she sang onstage. It was hard to believe even someone like his aunt actually liked all that screeching.) No juicy gossip, no political arguments—it was almost like hearing an educational tape, the way they discussed the topics and deferred courteously to each other.
Other bits, though, fascinated him. His aunt’s analysis of the workings of the family businesses. . . . His own father hadn’t made it that clear. Captain Serrano’s version of her resignation from the Fleet, which his aunt teased out of her with surprising delicacy. . . . He had never imagined that someone in the Regular Space Services would dare to disobey an order; they were all such stiff-necked prigs. It didn’t make sense; she should have known she would lose her ship, one way or the other. He could almost feel guilty listening—he would not have expected to hear that woman so upset, or for that reason—but he loved the sense of power it gave him. She could be shaken from her calm, controlled persona; she was not invincible. He would start with something simple, he decided. Something that might be an accident, that would be hard to trace back to him.