The Mackensee pinnace transported the survivors from Fair Kaleen to Gloucester while the repair bots started work on installation of a new air lock. Ky itched to get over there and see what her command implant could pull up from the ship’s computers, but she had no way to transfer. Yet. She had to organize a prize crew, anyway. Johannson had made it clear that providing such a crew did not fall within their contractual obligations, and he was not minded to widen them. Minimally—if they did nothing but transport the ship to the next port—the ship would need a commander, pilot, navigator, someone in Environmental, someone in Engineering.
“We need a Vatta commanding both ships,” Ky said finally, to Stella and Toby. “Toby, you know more about ships, but Stella’s old enough that station managers might accept her, even though she has no papers.”
“Captain, why don’t you go aboard the Kaleen?” Toby said. “This ship’s simpler. If you left Stella here, and a few of the old hands, she wouldn’t have any problems with her.”
“It’s… an idea,” Ky said. “But think of the trouble I got into by leaving this ship even briefly.”
“This is different,” Toby said. “That ship—nobody here knows her; she needs more crew and more expertise. You should take her.”
“I agree,” Stella said. “If you’ll let me load some of the ship systems stuff into my implant, I’m sure I’ll be able to do what I must.”
“I suppose.” Already Ky knew this would work. She ran it all as a fast sim in the implant. Yes, it was the best solution. Now to choose who would stay and who would go. She needed Lee and Sheryl with her: they could set up a tape for Gary Tobai’s crew to follow. Martin, of course. That meant Alene had to stay on here; she would be responsible for cargo. Environmental, she had to have someone from there, and an engineer. Mitt and Mehar, she decided. Rafe, for his expertise with nonstandard ansibles.
By the time the pinnace came back toward Gary Tobai, she and her prize crew were suited up and ready to leave. On scan, the pinnace edged closer and closer.
Then came another call from Johannson. “My people say there’s a limpet mine on your outer hatch.”
“Oh… yes.” She had forgotten about that. “That’s the one Osman tried to blow up the ship with.”
“Facing out… is it armed to repel boarders?”
“No,” Ky said. “That just seemed a good place to store it.”
“To store your enemy’s mine… any particular reason why you didn’t just give it a good shove out the hatch?”
“I didn’t want to hit the Kaleen with it,” Ky said. “Besides… a mine is a terrible thing to waste.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Along silence, during which Johannson turned dull red and appeared to be having trouble breathing. Then a harsh bark of laughter. “Captain Vatta, you—you are indeed—interesting. We’ll send the pinnace to ferry you and your prize crew aboard.”
Fair Kaleen, up close, looked even more battered than in the external vid pictures. The damage Osman’s limpet had done to the air lock, for instance. That was going to be expensive to fix properly—the implant gave estimates. The repair bots had welded a replacement in, roughly, but it was not the kind of work Ky wanted on any ship she owned for the long haul. Once into the crew quarters, she found not the squalor she had expected from an outlaw’s ship, but a tidy, workmanlike arrangement, marred only by stains from the recent conflict. The bridge, easily three times as large as Gary Tobai’s, resembled that of the ship she had apprenticed on, but with the addition of an extra row of boards.
“Weapons,” her merc escort pointed out. “He’s taken out part of two cargo holds to mount them. We haven’t checked them all out, but I wouldn’t hit those red buttons unless you want to kill something. We didn’t inventory the munitions, either, but the hold hatches had warning labels on them. We’ve checked out the bridge for booby traps and have discussed the rest of the ship with your security command.” He glanced at Martin, who nodded.
Ky looked at the control boards. Well, she had always wanted to command a warship. This thing could almost be a pocket cruiser, if the holds were full of missiles instead of cargo… no question at all that Osman had been a pirate. Which might help when a court adjudicated possession: whatever they thought of privateers, courts always thought poorly of pirates.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Captain—environmental’s salvageable. The cultures are fine; the higher taxons are badly shaken up, but I think we can boost production in the next few days.”
“That’s good to hear,” Ky said. “Stores?”
“The ship’s supplied for a much bigger crew, Captain, and none of the supply lockers I’ve seen so far was damaged. We won’t have any problems for another three standard months at least; there are more lockers, but I’m not yet sure it’s safe to get into them.”
“Good,” Ky said. “So we’re good to go, then.” Mehar and Toby hadn’t said anything, but the drives boards were all green. Quincy, back on Gary Tobai, had said things about idiots who went off to strange ships with greenies for Engineering crew, but she was still recovering from her blast injuries, and Ky wasn’t about to put additional strain on her. Quincy had finally subsided when Ky pointed out that Stella, as a completely inexperienced captain, needed the best engineer on Gary Tobai.
The Mackensee boarders had already tested the communications, ignoring the box they didn’t recognize, which Ky knew was the ship-mounted ansible. Now she called up Johannson.
“We’re ready to go as soon as your people are back aboard your ship,” she said. “We’ll be rejoining the convoy after jump, correct?”
“Correct. If your navigator is at the board, I’ll transmit the coordinates—”
“Go ahead,” Ky said, nodding at Sheryl.
“We’re on our way,” the merc escort said. “See you somewhere else, and good luck with this thing.”
“We’ll be fine,” Ky said, with more confidence than she actually felt.
At last they were on the move. On Osman’s excellent military-grade scans, Gary Tobai boosted for jump ahead of them, crawling along at less than half the acceleration Fair Kaleen could offer. Ky was not about to go off and leave her first command, though. Behind them, the Mackensee ship loafed along, keeping watch behind, weapons live. Ky kept Kaleen’s locked down. In those hours, Ky’s implant explored the ship and her data banks, easily circumventing Osman’s security routines: at root, the ship was Vatta, purpose-built for Vatta, and her deepest levels of programming gave anyone with the Vatta command dataset complete access to anything added later. Ky was able to tell Martin exactly where physical traps were located, and how to disarm them.
The cargo holds with the weapons held ample munitions for them, Ky found. In fact, the modifications Osman had made to the ship cut down her cargo capacity to just over half again as much as Gary Tobai’s… she would be uneconomical as a pure trader without ripping out all the changes. But as a privateer… she was perfect, except that the universe knew her as a pirate. She needed a new name, a new ship chip, an identity unsullied by Osman’s years of criminal activity.
And what was in the other holds would easily pay for that new identity… the cream of a half dozen piracies, at least. Osman had kept all the compact, highly valuable prizes: luxury items such as jewelry, art, bioassays, implants—implants taken from “interesting” prisoners. Some had been downloaded into his own ship’s computer, and some awaited that treatment. He had reloaded salable data onto data cubes; a good part of his profit for the past dozen standard years had been from the sale of proprietary information gained from such implants, she found when she looked at his records. Pirate he might be, but he kept financial records like any other businessman. He also had a store of ship-mounted ansibles for sale to potential allies in the war against ISC.