Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon Page B

ship?”
    “I’m not telling any of you all my thoughts,” Ky said. “Not even you, Quincy. Not because I don’t trust you—” Though she did not entirely trust the new crewmembers. “—but at this point the fewer people who know my plans, the fewer people can be forced to share them.”
    Their expressions showed that none of them had considered that possibility yet.
    “You think someone might—might grab one of us? Shake us down?” Mitt asked.
    “It’s possible,” Ky said. “We have to think of things like that, Mitt. If they’ll attack corporate headquarters on Slotter Key, and kill family and crew on other stations, then a snatch isn’t the least likely thing to happen, if we’re unprepared. That’s why we’ll take precautions. Those of you with implants, make sure you keep your communications channels alive. Talk to the ship anytime you’re out… anything, everything.”
    “You don’t have an implant,” Quincy said. “Isn’t it time to use that implant your father sent you?”
    “It hasn’t been six months,” Ky said. “In the meantime, the first trip out is going to buy me the best nonimplant personal communicator on this station. I’ll wear it from then on, and when I go out I’ll have both crew and—depending on what I find out in the next couple of hours—hired security as well.”
    “Captain, if Vatta Transport is really gone—really defunct—are you going to try to start it up again, or go independent?” Beeah asked.
    “Beeah, I can’t answer that one now. I don’t know enough. We just fell into a war with these attacks. I don’t know who the enemy is, or why the attacks happened, or how strong the enemy is, or which of our forces are left. The main thing now is to survive, gather data, get someplace from which we can move, if a move is possible.”
    “You ought to go back to Slotter Key,” Quincy said. “Your family needs you.”
    “If I have a family,” Ky said. Images of horror flickered through her mind, and she shoved them away. “Attacks on headquarters, warehouses, processing plants, the private terminal, the family compound… where else would my family be? And it will do no good to go to Slotter Key and be cut off from ansible communication. What they need—if they live, if the whole corporation hasn’t been bankrupted—is someone out here doing trade and showing that Vatta ships still carry cargo safely.”
    “But if we have no insurance, no one will ship with us.”
    “Not the big shippers, no. But there are always people desperate to get cargo from here to there, and willing to assume the risk themselves.”
    Quincy pursed her lips. “Vatta has never carried that kind of cargo.”
    “Oh, yes, we have. Long ago, admittedly, but it’s in the family histories. Vatta wasn’t always completely pure and aboveboard—no one was, in the early days after the Rift. So what we’re going to do is trade and profit, along with skulking and hiding and being extremely careful.”
    “I don’t see how we can carry the Vatta colors and be careful both,” Mitt said. “I’m with Beeah—why not go independent now, change the ship’s registry?”
    “We can’t—we’re already widely known as Vatta,” Ky said. “If it comes to that, we’ll have to do it somewhere else, some port that is even less law-abiding than Lastway.”
    They stared at her in silence.
     
    Ky spent the next two hours looking at the threat assessment she and Martin had made on the approach when she had nothing else to do. Too many question marks, too many things she could not know. The lessons from the Academy came back to her. No commander ever knew everything; the ones who thought they did were often in the worst trouble. Good commanders took what they did know and made good plans—and contingency plans—anyway.
    She doodled on a blank page of her log. MISSION: what was her mission, anyway? She had no higher command, at the moment… surely the original mission, to sell the ship for