“Monitoring transmissions?” Lee asked.
“Something like that,” Rafe said. He rotated his shoulders, stretched, and folded back up neatly, catlike.
Stella appeared at the bridge hatch with mugs of hot soup and a plate of ship biscuits. Ky sipped the thick broth, realizing as she felt alertness return just how much of her reserves she’d used. “I’ve already fed the others,” Stella said. “Toby asked me to defrost one of Aunt Gracie’s fruitcakes. He hasn’t ever had one.” She grinned.
“Some people like them,” Ky said.
“Boys that age will eat anything,” Stella said. “He’s on his third slice.”
“Stella carried that thing all the way from Slotter Key,” Rafe said. “I asked her why, and she wouldn’t tell me.”
“I had two of them,” Stella said. “The command implant was in one—”
“Is that where it was?” Rafe said, brows rising.
“And I have no idea what’s in the other,” Stella went on. “If anything. Aunt Gracie’s sense of humor at work.”
“We need to get the escape passage cleaned up,” Ky said. “And the air lock, and Osman’s body put somewhere.”
“Why not just space it?” Rafe asked.
“There will be formalities,” Ky said. “I’ll need documentation. Anyway, I don’t want to space it right now.” She didn’t want to move right now. What she wanted, suddenly, was a night’s sleep.
“Heat soup, slice cake, clean corridor, move a body,” Stella said in an odd tone of voice. “My, what my life has come to. Of course, I am still alive, and don’t think I’m not grateful, Ky. I was very, very glad not to have to play the captive princess close up. And glad you foiled Osman’s last ploy, however you did that.” She paused. Ky thought of giving a blow-by-blow, but decided against it. “But,” Stella resumed, when Ky said nothing, “when I thought of life as Vatta’s secret agent, it didn’t mean domestic chores. Though it has, as often as not, more’s the pity.”
“I’ll get some of the others on it,” Ky said. “I could use your advice on some of the things I’m finding in Dad’s implant.”
“Seriously?” Stella asked.
“Seriously. You’ve been home—well, in contact with home—the past four years and I haven’t. Just a second…” Ky called Environmental and, after making sure everything was functioning normally there, told Mitt to take over cleaning up the corridor. “It’s nasty—I’d suggest wearing suits. There’s a body in the air lock; put it in a sealed bag and into one of the cargo holds. We’ll move it over to the other ship if we can.”
“Do we have to… touch it?”
“The corpse? Yes—why? As far as I know, it’s not infected with anything. And you’ll have gloves on.”
“Well…” Mitt sounded less than eager.
“Why don’t you let me take care of Osman’s mortal coil,” Rafe said. “If you happen to have body bags.”
She didn’t. She’d hoped very much never to have a corpse on her ship again, but there he was, dead and in the way. “Not standard issue,” she said. “Can you improvise?”
“Sure. I’ll just go look for something… or we could wait for the mercs to show up. I’m sure they have body bags.”
Rafe went out; Ky told Mitt that Rafe would deal with the body, but might need a help finding the right container.
“Oh, we’ve got some supply sacks that might work,” Mitt said, sounding more cheerful already.
Ky thought privately that getting the passage clean would be worse than stuffing Osman’s corpse into a sack, but she wasn’t going to argue that. “Fine,” she said.
While the environmental techs worked on cleaning up the passage, she and Stella compared implant headings.
“I don’t have ship functions,” Stella said. “I told you that before. Mine’s optimized for financial analysis and contact information.”
“Who do you have at ISC?” Ky asked. “I’ve got about forty—everything from… uh… Mirellia Coston, executive assistant to the Slotter Key main rep—and her, too, of course—to Lew Parminer. I remember him; he came to Corleigh several times.”
“Forty? I have both of those but only a few more. Do you have Rilendo Varise, in Outside Contracts?”
“Yes. I wonder why Dad kept Louise Sims-Delont in this list—she’s just a file clerk.” Even as she said that, the implant unpacked the reasons and displayed them. Louise Sims-Delont had been too willing to look something up for him five years before, a willingness he interpreted as a possible security leak for the relationship between Vatta Transport, Ltd., and ISC.
What relationship, Ky wondered, and the implant suddenly flooded her awareness with a cascade of numbers, names, dates, reasons.
“What’s wrong, Ky?” Stella asked. Ky shook her head; she couldn’t answer, not now. Stella reached out, shook her arm. “Ky! Answer me!”
Had Stella known? “Too much information too fast,” Ky said. She took a long breath. “Uh… how much do you know about the relationship between Vatta and ISC?”
“Relationship? We depend on ISC’s communications, like all shippers. They’ve used us as general carriers—I don’t know what their total tonnage is, but I’d say we have a reasonably healthy fraction of their business, perhaps a dominant share on our main routes. Vatta’s always supported the monopoly—we didn’t want to risk fragmentation of services and uncontrolled charges. Several other major long-line transport companies have done the same.”
“Yes, and some have argued for open communications standards and competition. Pavrati, for instance.”
“Oh, Pavrati.” Stella wrinkled her nose.
“It’s more complicated,” Ky said. How much should she tell Stella? How much of their present problems related to the data on her implant, the implant that had been taken from her dying father? “This implant,” she said finally. “It’s… something we need to talk about at length, I think. In private. If we’re what’s left of Vatta—”
“There’s Aunt Gracie, or was when I left home.”
“Yes, well…” The compressed data under that heading was another problem. Ky had found it hard enough to reconcile her memory of the prickly, prudish Aunt-Gracie-of-the-Fruitcakes with what Stella had told her. The Gracie of the implant was several orders of magnitude less familiar. “You know she was almost tried for murder?”
“Gracie? Our Aunt Gracie?”
“Yes. They finally decided it was postcombat stress and hushed it up when the family put her in the spaghetti farm for a year.”
Stella’s eyes widened. “They thought about sending me to a clinic; Aunt Gracie said no, she’d take care of it—but if she… why did they listen to her?”
“Because she had more dirt on both our fathers than you could imagine,” Ky said. The internal memos recorded on this implant had more detail on that than she wanted. She wished Aunt Gracie had been there; she could’ve argued for her own father’s memory. He had always been so upright, so honest, so sensible; she could imagine he might have been a bit wild as a youngster, but not as… the word conniving slipped in and out of focus. Not her father. Not her father, dead after the attack on the Vattas. Or Stella’s, though she’d always wondered if Stella’s wildness came from her father rather than her socialite mother. “She was head of Vatta’s internal security—you know that, that’s the kind of work she had you doing. But she was also working with the Slotter Key government—well, part of it, anyway.”
“You don’t suppose she set it up—was working with Osman or something?”
“No,” Ky said, even though the same dire suspicion had flashed through her mind a minute before. The implant made it clear how deep Gracie’s dislike of Osman ran. “I’m sure she didn’t. But the fact is that all three of us now have to work together, if Vatta’s to come back… or just survive.”
“We have to survive,” Stella said. “There’s Toby…”
“Yes. Well…” Was this the time to admit to Stella the real reason she had resisted using the implant? No… no more than she could confess her disgusting joy in the act of killing. “We’ll need to spend considerable time, as I unlock various cubbies in this thing, figuring out what to do about what’s inside.” That sounded lame, but she did not want to get into the whole thing now. For one thing, she still felt limp. “And we don’t want to involve Rafe—there’s a lot of stuff about ISC.”