“Oh, I agree,” Stella said. “But he’ll probably keep trying to worm it out of you. That peeling-a-lime thing—” She sounded annoyed.
Ky laughed. “I’m not susceptible to his type,” she said. “Or any type, at present,” she added, more soberly. She pushed away the memory of that brief, crazy dance with Rafe. That was postimplant befuddlement, nothing more.
“Dad told me you were involved with a very nice young man at the Academy,” Stella said. “It’s too bad—but maybe you can get together when this is over—”
“No!” Ky lowered her voice after that emphatic negative. “No. That’s over and done with.”
“Well… there will be others.”
Not until this was over. Not until she understood more of herself. Not until she found a man who would not be horrified at what she really was… and would she want a man who would not be horrified? She was horrified.
“Besides,” she said, hoping to distract Stella. “He’s yours, isn’t he?”
Stella flushed but shook her head. “Come on, Ky, he’s not a commodity to be possessed. Besides… he wouldn’t be mine, in that sense, even if he were.”
“You said you were attracted…”
“Yes, attracted. But now, at this moment, we’re busy with something else. I’m not controlled by my hormones, you know, whatever my reputation in the family.”
“Sorry,” Ky said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Good. He’s… interesting, yes. Skilled. But I don’t know if he’ll ever be… someone to partner with, long term. I was worried that you might fall for him and get hurt, when all he wanted was your trust.”
“Never walk in on women discussing men,” Rafe said, doing just that. “Stella, Stella… I don’t know whether to be flattered by your interest—no one analyzes so minutely someone they care nothing for—or appalled at its erroneous conclusions.”
“Stop that,” Ky said, as Stella flushed again. “I don’t give a flip what your relational strengths and weaknesses are; your timing is atrocious.”
“My timing is impeccable, as always,” Rafe said, settling against the bulkhead. “I come bringing peace to your soul, Captain: Osman’s corpse is safely stowed for the moment, but retrievable when your mercs show up with proper body bags. Stella, did you know your baby cousin was a very thorough killer?”
“I’m sure she would do whatever was necessary in an emergency,” Stella said.
“I’m sure that his other wounds would have killed him without that stab through the throat to the brain,” Rafe said. His gaze, deceptively mild, had settled on Ky; she felt the heat rise in her own cheeks. “That’s not just a military cut direct, so to speak. That’s more, isn’t it, Captain?”
“Fatal, I’d say,” Ky said, trying for an offhand tone. “After all, I thought he was dead the first time, when their ship security was breached. It seemed a good idea to make sure.”
Rafe shrugged. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
She was glad to have that conversation interrupted by a call from the Mackensee ship. It was close enough to use conventional communications. “I see what you mean about the Kaleen tumbling,” her liaison said. “Do you think there are any live crew aboard?”
“I don’t know,” Ky said. “I haven’t tried hailing her since the running lights came back on.”
“Better tell me what happened,” Johannson said.
Ky explained briefly, starting with Osman Vatta’s relationship to the family and continuing through the full sequence that had ended with his death. Johannson’s professional expression wavered several times, but he didn’t interrupt. She was glad of that; she could imagine his comments on her idiocy in letting those boarders through the lock.
“So… you fired an EMP mine inside your own ship to scramble his mine’s electronics?” was all he said at the end.
“Yes,” Ky said, and clamped her teeth on justifications. She didn’t need his approval anyway: it had worked.
“And his lock was disabled by the combination of your EMP mine and his limpet—”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.” She knew that interesting wasn’t as mild as it sounded. “We’ll be sending a pinnace with a boarding party to… uh… Fair Kaleen. You might want to back off another thousand klicks or so, just in case. Can you?”
“Oh, yes,” Ky said. She glanced at her pilot. “Lee, back us out.”
“Glad to,” he said.
Ky followed that exploration by relay. The Mackensee boarding party found that the main-entry air lock was too damaged to function, and the entry passage was still open to space. However, inner compartment seals had shut when the ship systems reset. They rigged a temporary air lock and convinced the ship to let them in. Inside, they found sixteen dead—seven in space armor, dead because their suit systems had gone down, the rest not even in pressure suits, victims of decompression. As they worked their way from compartment to compartment, they found a few survivors in those compartments that had been aired up. Some were injured, some not; all were taken prisoner, even the three in a storeroom off the galley, who claimed to be prisoners of the crew.
In the midst, Martin appeared on the bridge. “The medbox says I’m cured,” he said. “Sorry I dropped like that, Captain.”
“You weren’t the only one,” Ky said. “I’m glad it didn’t scramble your brains permanently.”
“Why didn’t you just have Lee shut the ship system down?”
“Osman had a limpet mine inside the ship,” Ky said. “This was the only way I could think of to knock out its systems.”
“Oh.” Martin gave her an odd look. “You take the big jumps, don’t you, ma’am? And I suppose you killed Osman?”
“Yes,” Ky said.
“Very thoroughly,” Rafe put in.
“Martin, we’re going to be taking over the other ship,” Ky said, before Rafe could get started on that. “We need a prize crew—you’ll be on that, of course, since that ship may have security issues the rest of us wouldn’t recognize.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Martin said, looking more alert by the moment. “They’ll have traps in her and such, same as I set here against boarders.”
“Exactly. I can provide your implant with a layout of the ship as she was built and in use originally. We need a boarding plan as well, and if you have recommendations on crew.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on it.”
Johannson called Ky again when his personnel were sure they had cleared the ship to explain what he intended to do with those found. “We can sort ’em out later,” Johannson said. “I’m not having strangers running around loose on this ship… they don’t claim to be Vattas, anyway.”
The engineers with the boarding party began to stabilize the ship’s tumbling once they reached the bridge. Systems had reset correctly; it was simply a matter of giving the correct commands. In a few hours, Johannson informed Ky that the ship was ready to receive a prize crew.
“She’s down on reserve air, as you’d expect. Cargo holds are still aired up; our engineers recommend pumping that air into the crew space once you’ve done something about that air lock. The ship inventory lists useful spares. Here—” A block of data came across; Ky’s implant sorted it and displayed it for her.
“If we use your temporary airlock, we should be able to get to Section B-Four and put that replacement in,” Ky said. “Are Kaleen’s repair bots functional?”
“Some of them appear to be. You want us to run systems checks on them?”
“Yes. No sense risking lives if the bots can do some of the vacuum work.”