“If you don’t mind my asking, Captain,” Master Sergeant Pitt said, “have you ever been in charge of a refugee situation?”
“No,” Ky said. Master Sergeant Pitt reminded her a lot of MacRobert, back at the Academy. “You have suggestions?”
“Yes, Captain, if you don’t mind—”
“Not at all,” Ky said. “Pretend I’m the greenest young officer you ever saw—what would you try to get me to do, without actually telling me?”
Pitt grinned. “It’s not my place to say, you know.”
“No, it’s your place to hint, insinuate, and invisibly lead.” Ky decided to come clean. “I don’t know if they told you, Master Sergeant Pitt, but I’m a flunk out from the Slotter Key space academy, and if I’d paid closer attention to Master Sergeant MacRobert’s hints, I wouldn’t have trusted the wrong person and been kicked out.”
“Ah—MacRobert is the fellow who gave you that warship kit?”
“Yes,” Ky said. She didn’t like thinking of strangers in her cabin going through her things, but of course they had, and no use being angry about it now.
“That explains a lot,” Pitt said. “All right, then, Captain, here’s what you need to do.” She listed actions, some of which Ky had already thought of—assigning teams for shift work to keep the place tidy, prepare meals, etc.—and some of which she hadn’t, like placing guards on the galley and crew storage. “Thing is,” Pitt said, “they’re going to be angry, and bored, and some of them—the captains of the other civ ships—are going to think they should be running this, not a baby-faced kid like you. You have to convince them otherwise. And you have to not let any pretty boy like that Skeldon get past your guard.”
Was everyone going to assume that she had trusted Skeldon too much? Probably. Probably Gary or Quincy had told Pitt about her fifth birthday party, too. And no time to brood about it now, or about the description of her as “baby-faced kid.”
“I don’t have an implant now,” she said to Pitt. “So I’d appreciate it if you’d send that list to Quincy. She’s the closest I’ve got to a master sergeant of my own.”
“They couldn’t save your implant? Sorry.”
“And they recommended I not have a new one fitted for six months, until any remaining neuro reshaping is definitely stable. But I didn’t have one in the Academy, so it’s not as bad as if I had depended on it for the last four years.”
“That’s good.” Pitt paused, then went on. “I could give you recommendations, based on my observations and reports I’ve gotten from buddies working with your future passengers, of who’s good for what.”
“Thanks. Any info you have I’ll take.” And do with what she would, but she figured Pitt understood that.
Then the passengers began to arrive. Unfortunately, to keep the cargo holds aired up meant that all the incoming passengers had to cycle through the escape vacuum lock and then be shunted down the maintenance passage and into the area prepared for them. The passengers, Ky was told, comprised the senior ship’s officers from all the civilian ships interdicted in the system: captains, first and second officers, communications personnel, and engineering firsts. The passenger ship Empress Rose, of the famous Imperial Spaceways, would serve the mercenaries as a courier—a choice that meant her passengers would be delayed as little as possible—but her captain would be interned on Glennys Jones.
All the passengers had been informed of the situation, and the mercenaries seemed confident that they would be reasonably cooperative, but Ky had her doubts. She didn’t intend to show any of them.
Instead, she wore her dress uniform, with cape, and stood at the turn from the escape passage to the maintenance passage, greeting each person who came aboard. Without an implant assist, she had no way to know which was which, so it was a spare “Good day, welcome aboard, that way please . . .” greeting, but it was a greeting, and she could tell from the expressions that her captain’s rings and cape had an effect.
When the passengers were aboard, the work party carried in the rations taken from the civilian ships. These stuffed the little galley and its storage, and filled half the rec area as well. She hoped it would be enough. Ten days, fifty additional people, three meals a day . . . one hundred fifty additional meals to prepare, in a galley meant for a crew of less than twenty.
But they were alive, unharmed, and with any luck would survive this and even be paid.
“Time to go,” Pitt said finally. “We’ve unloaded all your supplies; your passengers are secured in the cargo holds. Someone should come behind us to secure the hatch.”
“Right,” Ky said. “Gary, if you’ll see to the hatch.”
“And thanks, Captain, for being sensible about this.”
Ky grinned. “Thanks for not killing me.” She watched the mercenary walk away, already fitting the helmet on her pressure suit. What would it have been like, to have someone like Pitt at her side year after year? For a moment, she allowed herself a last moment of grief for the lost opportunities . . . but the opportunities now before her were exciting enough.
She went forward to the bridge, where Riel was in the pilot’s chair as if he hadn’t moved since she left.
“I hope you’ve rotated shifts,” she said.
“Yes, Captain. Glad to have you back.”
“I’m glad to be back. And for our next adventure, let’s get through the next ten days or so with no such excitement, shall we?”
“I certainly hope so,” he said.
She sat in the command seat and flicked on the circuits. With the earbug in, she could access data almost as quickly as with the implant. A fast check of ship systems for herself—and Glennys Jones was fine, except for the FTL drive. Video from the cargo holds, where her passengers were standing around in clumps, showed talking and gesturing. When she listened in on the audio, most of the talk was angry. That wasn’t good.
She turned on the intercom. “This is Captain Vatta. Once again, welcome aboard the Glennys Jones.”
A tall man with silvery hair, in a captain’s uniform, turned around, glared at the nearest vid pickup and approached it. “I demand that you come down here and straighten this mess out. What did they mean, you had a contract with them?”
Thanks to the earbug’s link to the personnel files, she knew this was Captain Kristoffson of the Empress Rose.
“Captain Kristoffson, I will be speaking to you and the other captains shortly. As you must realize, we have a great deal of work to do to make this ship as comfortable and efficient as possible in the next few hours. Bear with us, please, as we get this done. We should have a meal for you all in about three hours—”
“This is outrageous! This is nothing but a cargo hold! It’s not even warm. You can’t seriously expect us to sleep on the cargo deck in these”—he glared around—”these disgusting bedroll things. I demand a stateroom. Captains of respectable ships do not sleep on the floor . . .”
Ky’s first impulse to share her cabin with the more senior captains had been quashed by Pitt’s advice, but it would not have survived this.
“Excuse me, Captain Kristoffson, but this is not the time to make complaints. I will consider your complaints later. At the moment, I need you and the other captains to organize the work parties needed to finish making your holds comfortable. I’m sure your personnel would be more comfortable commanded by familiar officers, so I’ve arranged a rota which permits shipmates to work together.”
“Work parties! Passengers don’t work, Vatta—of course, you don’t know about passenger ships—” Her temper rose at the contempt in his voice. She glanced at Riel, who made a rude gesture.
“I’m sure you’re aware that this is not a normal passenger service,” Ky said. “Things are difficult for us all . . .”
“Not for you, apparently,” he said. “You can loll in whatever passes for luxury on this tub—not that I expect it’s much—”
“Enough,” Ky said, in a voice borrowed from the Commandant. Somewhat to her surprise, it worked—Kri
stoffson blinked and looked stunned. “I have just returned from having surgery on the mercenary flagship—I was nearly killed when my ship was boarded, and I don’t see any scars on you, sir. Don’t push your luck.”
His mouth had dropped open; now it shut with a snap. “I—I—they didn’t say that—”
“No reason for them to. I’m lucky to be alive and so are you. Let’s keep it that way.”
“But I still think—”
“Captain, as you must realize, this ship is not large enough to give everyone the quarters they deserve, and it would be unfair to play favorites. The working crew will stay in the crew quarters, and the passengers will stay where they’re put. Is that clear?”
“Yes . . .” His eyes narrowed. “But I still intend to file a complaint. It must break some law for a neutral civilian to sign a contract with a mercenary company.”
“Actually, no,” Ky said. “Most cargo firms sign transport contracts with mercenaries all the time. Section 234.6, Universal Commercial Code. If you were combatants or war matériel, that would be Section 234.7.” She thought of pointing out that he might well have had mercenary officers as passengers when they were on leave or undercover assignment, and thought better of it. Instead she went on, “I realize this has all been a grave inconvenience for you, but we’re all going to have to make the best of it.” She waited a moment for that to sink in, and then repeated. “Captains, please organize your ship’s personnel into working parties. We have been given basic information about the qualifications of passengers; in addition to the work parties dealing with food, sanitation, and maintenance, we may be requesting specific personnel to assist in ship systems areas where the very small existing crew is overloaded.”
Other captains visible in the pickup nodded, but Kristoffson still looked uncooperative. Too bad, Ky thought. She kept the video and audio monitors on, but cut off the intercom to the holds. Instead she called the galley.
“How’s the meal prep going?” she asked.
“We figured out how to keep all the frozen stuff that doesn’t fit in the freezer,” Gary said. He sounded tired; he probably had been up for three shifts running. “We turned the heat off in number three and put it in there. Quincy’s trying to cobble up a cooler for the perishables that won’t fit into storage, and the cooks are using up whatever won’t fit in either.”
“Good,” Ky said. “Questions?”
“Do we try to keep the food sources separate, and feed the different ships’ crews stuff off their own ships?”
“No—too complicated,” Ky said. “I don’t even know if they brought proportional amounts off the various ships.”
“There’s gold-eye raspberries off Empress Rose . . . I’ve never even tasted one . . .”
“Enough for everyone?”
“For one meal.”
“Serve ’em up,” Ky said. “If that captain brought ’em for his own special meals, he can just suffer through sharing.”
“Trouble?”
“He’d like to be,” Ky said. “He’s used to being in charge and he thinks being stuck in the cargo hold of a freighter is the worst that can happen.”
“You be careful,” Gary said, his brow furrowed. “We don’t have that fancy medical team to fix you up if anything goes wrong again.”
“I know,” Ky said. She rubbed her neck, which was beginning to hurt. It was probably just tension.
A few minutes later, Beeah brought trays up to the bridge: her tray had a large bowl of gold-eye raspberries, a jug of cream, and some sugar, as well as a hearty sandwich of thin-sliced meats and cheeses. “Gary said you sounded like you needed to eat. Riel, here’s yours, too.”
“I probably do,” Ky said. “I think my last meal was . . . I don’t even know.”
“The others will be ready on time, Gary says, but how are we going to get them down to the passengers?”
“That’s what the work parties are for,” Ky said, through a mouthful of sandwich. “What is this stuff, anyway? Tastes expensive.”
“From Balknas Brighteyes—they had trays of already-sliced meats in one of the coolers, so we thought better to eat them now. All kinds of stuff I didn’t even recognize, but tasty.”
“Mmm. Soon as I finish this, I’ll go down and meet with the captains, explain the rota I’ve been working on.” Ky gulped down another bite. “I’d better take someone with me, in case that idiot Kristoffson tries anything.”
“The Rose’s captain? What’s he done?”
“Acted like a spoiled brat at summer camp,” Riel answered around his own bite of sandwich. “All huffy and demanding and complaining.”
“Thinks I’ve done something wrong by taking a contract with the mercenaries,” Ky said. “Dad always said passenger carriers were snooty. So I’ll just take someone along . . . Mehar and her pistol bow, I think.”
The nine captains looked unhappy but said nothing at first as Ky handed out the work party rota. “Right now, only the toilets interface with our environmental system,” she said. “We need to get the showers and the sinks hooked up as well. I know your senior engineers are with you—so we’ll need to get their help to work with my engineering first, Quincy Robin. I understand your schedules were all synched with ours two days ago, is that right?”
They nodded.
“Good,” she said. “That means the meal we’re about to have is second-shift main meal, and—”
“I expect that you will reserve rations from the Empress Rose for Empress Rose personnel,” Kristoffson said. The other captains gave him a look.
“That isn’t possible,” Ky said. “We have limited storage space for perishables. Although we’ve allocated additional cargo space for frozen rations, we’ve combined all the rest in order of use.”
“But our rations are gourmet quality!” Kristoffson said.
“You were planning to feast on fancy stuff and champagne while the rest of us ate sardines and crackers?” That was Captain Lucas, of the Balknas Line cargo ship Balknas Brighteyes. “I hate to disappoint you, but the rations we sent aboard were not so bad that we need your red ripe strawberries or whatever it was.”
“Gold-eye raspberries,” muttered Kristoffson, now red in the face.
Lucas shrugged. “Good enough, but I prefer summerberries from Winterfast, lightly dusted with cinnamon.”
The two men were both looking puffy about the neck, and Ky could have laughed.
“Actually I prefer to find out what Captain Vatta needs from us to make this as comfortable as possible,” said another man—Captain Paison, she saw from the list. A good ten centimeters shorter than Captain Kristoffson, stocky, dark hair graying at the temples, and enough weathering on his skin to show that he didn’t spend all his time aboard ship. His ship, the Marie, was about the size of most Vatta transports. “If we haggle too long over kitchen affairs, Captain Vatta—who actually has a ship to command—might just decide to go back to work and ignore us.” He winked at Ky.
“But it’s—,” Kristoffson started. Paison held up his hand and Kristoffson was quiet.
“Captain Vatta, my two engineering staff are at your disposal. Perhaps after eating? I’m sure you’d like to get all the plumbing hooked up as soon as possible.”
“Yes, I would,” Ky said. “You’ll all be more comfortable when you have shower facilities and somewhere to wash up your things. As you know, this is a small ship, and this many personnel aboard puts us at the limit of our environmental system. Unfortunately, this means we must ration water use, especially in the first few shifts, to be sure that nothing unbalances the tanks.”
“But there are shower units,” another captain said.
“Yes, and I assure you I will be as generous as possible with the water allowance. The calculations our engineering staff made support a maximum of three fairly short showers per hour, which works out to one per twenty-four-hour day per person. However, for the first day, as the system adjusts to more throughput, I’m asking you to hold that to one shower per hour down
here. My crew is also restricting use.”
“What about cooking and eating?” Paison asked.
“We’ll be flash-cleaning cooking and eating utensils, to conserve water and pressure on the environmental system,” Ky said. “Since we’re not under boost, we’ve trailed a Peterton line and that will provide enough extra power to cover it.”
“We were told to bring tableware,” Kristoffson said. “We were not told it had to be flash-proof.”
Ky was ready to let Kristoffson eat off the deck with his fingers, but she held onto her temper. “I’m sure your company can make a claim against Mackensee for whatever damage is done to your tableware, Captain Kristoffson. My main concern is that everyone on this ship have sufficient food, water, and air to survive until this is over.”
The others nodded, as if they agreed this made sense. Kristoffson looked around for support and found none.
“Now,” Ky said. “The meal’s almost ready, in the galley, but we need people to carry it down here. I’ve assigned that duty first to Marie . . . so, Captain Paison, could you assemble your work team, please? I’ll take them back to the galley with me.”
He nodded.
“The rest of you, please speak to your engineering personnel and let them know that after the meal they’ll be assisting Quincy Robin in hooking up the rest of the plumbing.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Paison’s work party, like Paison himself, seemed sensible and willing; they and Ky’s crew managed to get all fifty meals to the passengers in one trip. Predictably, Kristoffson was furious that the golden-eye raspberries were being shared with everyone. Lucas wasn’t thrilled with the discovery that his ship’s expensive deli cuts were being shared, but it was clear he didn’t want to look like Kristoffson, so he claimed he’d told Ky that, of course, all his ship’s rations should be shared.