Ky choked back the first three things she wanted to say. So Stella was back to confiding in a man, and willing to confide in the handiest, even if he was a new hire. How handsome was this shipmaster, anyway? She’d assumed that Stella was over all that headlong romantic stuff, but now she saw the ill-fated first love, the spendthrift careless husband, Rafe, and this shipmaster as points on a very straight line indicating that Stella hadn’t changed at all.
“I look forward to your arrival,” she said instead. “Then maybe we can clear up this identity problem and have a nice long chat about Vatta business.” Without, she was determined, the intrusion of Stella’s new love interest. “If you’ll excuse me—”
“I’ll call again tomorrow,” Stella said. “I’m not going to wait sixteen days to talk to you. Who know what you’ll get up to in sixteen days? You might run off again.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ky said. “The ship’s locked down until the identity issue’s settled.”
“Good,” Stella said. “Then I see no reason to hurry to solve it. If you are stuck there, you’ll have to listen to reason.”
The contact blanked. Ky stared at the screen, puzzled and annoyed both. Stella was angry with her; that much was clear. She understood a little of that; she had left Stella to trail behind through several systems. If she’d been in Stella’s place, she’d have been annoyed, too. But surely Stella could understand that it had not been intentional. Stella was acting as if she, Ky, had turned into some kind of monster, even an enemy of Vatta, when all she’d done was try to make things safer.
Sighing, she swung her command chair around and met the monitor’s gaze. Leary’s neutral expression could not conceal the interest in her eyes.
“She recognized you,” Leary said.
“Yes,” Ky said. “That was Stella, as I’m sure you noticed.”
“Your cousin, I believe?” the monitor said.
“Yes. My father’s brother’s youngest daughter. Only living daughter now. It’s her older sister’s genetic material that Crown & Spears has on file.”
“She doesn’t look anything like you,” the monitor said.
“No,” Ky agreed. “She’s the beauty of our generation; she takes after her mother’s family more, and even there she’s remarkable. The Stamarkos family have more blondes, but her mother is dark—darker than Stella, anyway. One of her brothers had light hair. Some of her Stamarkos cousins are blond. I used to wish I could look like her; my mother was always telling me to watch how Stella dressed, how Stella stood and sat.”
The monitor cocked her head. “You really do seem to know her.”
“I should. We spent a lot of time together as children. She’s a few years older, but not that much.”
“You were in school together?”
“No. My uncle’s main residence was on the mainland, near the Stamarkos family’s; my father preferred to live on Corleigh—an island.”
“Then—”
“We were together on family vacations and outings,” Ky said. “Alternately on the mainland and on the island. She knew our house as well as I did; I knew their house. I even knew the gardener who—” She stopped abruptly. It wasn’t this woman’s business that Stella had become “idiot Stella” with that gardener. She became aware that Rafe and Hugh, as well as other bridge crew, were listening.
“The gardener who—” the monitor prompted.
Ky shrugged. “Old family stuff. The point is, we were in and out of each other’s homes as children and young people. Stella and I were sometimes rivals—she always won—and sometimes allies, especially when we’d have mock wars in the orchards between her father’s house and the Stamarkos house.” The memory made her grin; this story couldn’t hurt Stella’s reputation. “Stella was always so perfect and her mother was a stickler for neatness. One time the Stamarkos boys challenged us and we spent three days building a fort on our side of the orchard while they did the same on theirs. Then we had to capture their flag, and they had to capture ours.”
“How old were you?” Leary asked.
Ky thought back. “I must’ve been ten or so. Stella would’ve been twelve, thirteen, something like that. Usually she took along a change of clothes and washed her face in the canal before going home, but this time—” She broke off, chuckling.
“You can’t stop there,” Rafe said. “Are you telling me the immaculate Stella got mussed?”
Ky glared at him for interrupting. “She always got mussed; she just cleaned up before showing up in front of her mother. This time we carried the fight into the part of the orchard that hadn’t been picked—which was forbidden. We just forgot; we were all throwing clods and overripe fruit off the ground, a running battle. Well, suddenly we were in among the pickers, and one of her brothers bumped into a ladder and a picker almost fell. The orchard foreman was furious and chased us out, all the way back to the house. There was Stella, her hair in strings and full of dirt and fruit pulp, her clothes spattered with purple, red, yellow. Just like the rest of us, but it was Stella, after all. I thought Aunt Helen was going to explode. Uncle Stav just laughed, but then he made us all apologize to the foreman. The Stamarkos cousins were sent home and I heard later they were put on house arrest for two days. We were, too, and put to work as well. Within ten days, they had a new fence around the orchards and we had to walk a half mile to get to the Stamarkos cousins and play in open fields.”
“If indeed you are the Kylara Vatta of her childhood, and she the Stella Vatta of yours, she should remember that story, don’t you think?” Leary asked.
“Yes,” Ky said. She knew Stella remembered it, but there were differences. Stella had blamed her, Ky, for urging her to play in the orchard even though she was really too old for such games. Ky had known better; even then, at twelve or thirteen, Stella liked to sneak off and try to meet one of the pickers she had a crush on. Ky had been torn between a desire to defend herself from Stella’s accusation by telling all she knew, and the promise she’d given Stella to keep her secrets. She had resented Stella’s unfair accusation then, flinging back at her the little bracelet Stella had given her at the start of vacation and storming off to an attic to sulk. It had worried her later: if she had told Aunt Helen then about Stella’s flirtations, would that have prevented the far more serious affair with the gardener?
“I will suggest to the stationmaster that he ask her,” the monitor said.
Ky wondered, for the first time in years, what had happened to the bracelet.
_______
Stella bit her lip as she stared at the blank screen. Ky could be just as irritating as ever. Once she made up her mind she was impossible to reason with. She glanced over at Orem.
“What do you think?”
“She’s very…determined, your cousin,” he said.
“You don’t think she’s right, do you?”
“Ma’am, it’s not for me to say. We’ve discussed this before. If this Gammis Turek fellow has indeed taken over a whole system at Bissonet, that argues for a lot of resources. It will take a lot of resources to fight him off. It wasn’t very tactful of her to talk to other captains back at Sallyon without talking to their government first, though.”
Stella seized on that word. “She’s not tactful,” she said. “Ky never has been. She got angry with me one time when she was nine or ten, something like that. I’d blamed her for getting me in trouble—and probably not entirely fairly—but she threw back at me a gift I’d given her, called me a liar, and wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the summer, which luckily was almost over. I tried to apologize but she stayed in a huff.” She had also, Stella thought with a guilty twinge, kept Stella’s secrets faithfully, angry as she was.
“Hot-tempered, then?”
“Yes. Impatient, impetuous, and very sure she’s right.”
“What are you going to do now?” he asked. His calm tone soothed her taut nerves; clearly he thought she knew or would think of something to control her wild cousin.
“I’m going to call C
aptain Furman,” she said. She was sure Ky would consider that disloyal, but as long as Ky wasn’t putting Vatta first, she was the disloyal one and Stella alone was faithful to the family. Recalling Ky to her family duty was her family duty, and it didn’t matter that she’d be talking to someone Ky loathed.
Stella had never actually met Captain Furman; her implant had a summary of his personnel file and his image. His narrow face stared out at her coldly, thin lips folded tight. No one, she reminded herself, looked their best in an official identification portrait, but he didn’t meet her standards of handsome.
When she placed the call, his communications tech, a round-faced woman about Stella’s age, answered. “Captain Vatta? Which Captain Vatta?”
“I’m Stella Vatta,” she said. “Stavros Vatta’s daughter. I need to speak to Captain Furman.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the comtech said. “He’s eating now.”
Stella felt a trickle of anger. That was not the way to speak to the daughter of Vatta’s former CEO, even if the CEO was dead. “And I’m acting CEO of Vatta Transport,” she said. The woman’s eyes widened. “I’m certain that Captain Furman will want to speak to me. Now.”
“Oh…oh…yes. Mmm…I’ll send someone.” She turned away from the screen and muttered something Stella couldn’t quite hear.
“And while you’re at it,” Stella said, “do you have any Vatta family members aboard?”
“Ummm…I don’t think so…” The woman was obviously upset, but surely she’d know the names of crewmembers. The Katrine was big, but most of that size was cargo capacity; her crew numbers shouldn’t be over forty, and probably less than that.
Stella queried her implant quickly. Yes, the usual crew for this size ship was thirty-four to thirty-eight. “Would you check, please,” she said, making it more order than request.
“Yes…er…Captain Vatta.” She saw the woman look down as if scanning a reader. “Er…no, Captain Vatta, we have no Vatta family members aboard at this time.”
That was unfortunate. She had hoped for additional allies to put pressure on Ky. It was a little odd, too, since most Vatta ships did have Vatta family members. Not all were captains; they might be found in almost any of the ship departments, though perhaps with a preponderance in Cargo. She queried her implant again. While she did not have the full command set that Ky had received from her father, she had loaded the most current list of family members and their ship assignments. Odd indeed. Maynard Vatta and Baslin Vatta should have been on this ship.
She opened her mouth to ask the communications tech when the tech’s face was abruptly replaced by that of Captain Furman. A very angry Captain Furman.
“Whatever you’re playing at, it won’t work, young woman!” he said, looking down at something below screen level. “And trying to intimidate my crew won’t work, either. As soon as I dock, your entire fabrication will come apart!” He looked up, then, and the angry flush blanched to a sickly pale. “You’re not—they said Captain Vatta—”
“I’m Stella Vatta,” Stella said. “I did tell your comtech that. Who did you think it was?”
He took a long breath; normal color seeped back into his face. “Stella…not Chairman Vatta’s daughter? I didn’t know you were ship-qualified.”
He had not answered her question, but she would pursue that later. “Yes, Captain Furman, I’m Stavros Vatta’s daughter, and presently acting CEO of Vatta Transport.” She watched that sink in; his expression hardened, sour as a plateful of pickles. “Now, whom were you ranting at?”
He took a visible deep breath. “There’s a renegade docked at the station, pretending to be a Vatta family member,” he said. “If you are who you say you are, you know about Osman Vatta—”
“Yes,” Stella said. “My father and uncle threw him out of the family decades ago; he stole a ship—”
“Quite. And turned pirate. That very ship is now docked at Cascadia Station. There’s a woman who claims to be Kylara Vatta—I suppose she’d be your cousin, if she were alive—but is almost certainly one of Osman’s by-blows. I don’t know where Osman is, but when the authorities take her into custody I’m sure they will find out.”
“Osman’s…by-blows?”
“The man was notorious,” Furman said, his upper lip curling a little. Despite her plan to get his cooperation in talking sense into Ky, Stella found herself disliking him already. “He was a sexual predator who left illegitimate children everywhere he went.”
“And you know this how?” Stella asked silkily.
“I was supposed to look for the…er…orphans and bring them back to your father, if I found any. There was some kind of scheme to adopt them into Vatta families. Waste of my time, but I do my duty no matter how ridiculous it is. And that was the second most ridiculous thing I ever had to do for Vatta Transport.”
“Did you find any?” Stella asked.
“No. I know some were found, but not by me. Wasted time checking orphanages, foster homes—”
She was not surprised he had found none. Would anyone want to turn over a child to this sour, rigid person even with the promise of a better home far away?
“What was the most ridiculous thing?” Stella asked.
His face darkened again. “Sending me to Sabine to rescue Kylara Vatta. Not only was there no need, but the…she…refused to let me help. I was perfectly willing to take her and her crew aboard and sell the ship for scrap—but away she went, disobedient as always, and then of course she died.” He said that in a tone that bordered on satisfaction.
An icy chill ran down Stella’s back; she struggled not to show her sudden unease. “What makes you sure she died? That this person is an imposter?” Her voice had gone up a tone; she took a long breath.
“She made herself a target,” he said. “I suspect the attacks on Vatta were revenge for what she did at Sabine—did you know she actually killed two men? Herself? And got a valuable Vatta employee killed in the process? And she was in an old, slow, unarmed ship, and now this person claiming to be Kylara Vatta shows up in a fast armed merchanter that I know belonged to a renegade, Osman. How likely is that? There’s a superficial resemblance, I’ll admit—they’re both young women, dark-haired, rather dusky—” He hitched his chin up and down, as if to show off his own pink complexion and pale eyes. “—but there’s no way Kylara Vatta could have defeated Osman and captured his ship. She was only a—a—provisional captain, after all.”
Warning bells clamored in Stella’s mind. If only she weren’t in Ky’s old ship, something Furman hadn’t seemed to notice yet, but he would. She wanted to let him think she believed him, that Ky was dead, that the person now aboard Osman’s ship wasn’t Ky, because every instinct told her Furman knew more than he should—no successful trader could be as stupid as he sounded. But before he figured it out, before he became suspicious of her, she had to tell him.
“Captain Furman,” she said, putting all her charm into her voice, “I appreciate your concern, but I must tell you that I’m convinced my cousin is alive…I don’t believe you can have noticed the ship I’m in—”
“Er…what?”
“It was Ky’s ship, the one she renamed for Gary Tobai. She asked me to take it over for her when she transferred to Osman’s ship.”
He did pale a shade. “What! Impossible.”
“True, though. Look at the Traffic Control ID codes if you don’t believe me.”
He glanced down, then stared at her a moment, jaw hanging, before he spoke. “But where did you—are you in league with her? Are you another of Osman’s bastards?”
Stella snorted. “Hardly, Captain Furman. You should know better than that. Surely you’ve seen pictures of me. This is not a face easy to fake.”
Now he flushed. “Er…no. I don’t suppose it is, but…but I don’t understand.”
Was he entirely witless? Stella felt a flush of sympathy for Ky, and then stuffed it away. “Ky is not dead, Captain Furman. We met on Lastway Station, where she h
ad taken this ship, and traveled together. We…er…ran into Osman…”
“Where?” Now his brows contracted, his gaze intent.
“I have no idea,” Stella said. “I suppose it’s in the log somewhere, but I haven’t looked it up.” She did not want to tell him the whole story, especially not here and now. “Ky did end up with his ship, and that is Ky docked at Cascadia Station.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“You think I wouldn’t know my own cousin?”
“You hadn’t seen her in some time, had you? Small changes—I mean—how do you know the person you met at Lastway really was your cousin?”
“It seemed the reasonable explanation,” Stella said. “She was in the right ship…”
“Yes, but—” He scowled, then brightened. “Suppose she had been killed wherever she was going when she left Sabine, and someone had taken the ship, someone who looked like her at least a little, and then that someone fooled you, and the meeting with Osman’s ship was planned. I’ll wager you never saw Osman, now, did you?”
A man welded to a pet theory, Stella thought, could bend the raw iron of facts into very fantastical shapes. “Well, no,” Stella said. Not alive and in person, anyway. “I suppose,” she said, to see how much rope he would take, “it could have happened that way. But it certainly seems like Ky.”
“I mean, you have little ship experience, isn’t that true?”
It had been true, but she had now amassed almost a half year of ship time and she’d paid attention. Still, let him think what he would. “Yes,” she said. “This is my first experience of real ship duty.”
“I can help you,” he said. His voice acquired a fruity false sweetness. “I can protect you from this imposter. I’m willing to do that, but I’m not willing to pretend that this person is really a legitimate heir to Vatta.”
“I see,” Stella said. She did not think it would be wise to ask him where the two Vatta family members were who should have been on his ship. Family instincts were ringing alarm bells.
“As far as I know,” he went on, “I’m the only surviving senior captain, and if you’re trying to reconstitute Vatta Transport, you need me.”