“How bad is she hurt?” asked the old man. Tobai, she reminded herself. “Can’t I go see her?”
“We don’t know yet,” Cally said. “She’s unconscious, and my training is not to move unconscious victi—patients. Tell me about the medical facilities on this ship.”
“Well, we have a medbox for minor emergencies…” One medbox. Victor had thirty, a double-row down one side of surgery.
“No regen tanks? No trauma suite?”
“Er… no. We don’t—we didn’t—ever need them.” He swallowed, licked his lips. “Please—let me go see her…”
“Known her long?” Cally asked.
“Since she was little,” Tobai said. “First time she came aboard ship, with her dad, I was a second-shift cargo handler. Not on this ship, o’ course. She was maybe hip high on him then, trailing her older brother.”
“Good kid?” Cally asked. “Quiet type? Did everything right?” She figured yes, from the contained, controlled emotions the captain had shown.
“Ky?” That got a momentary grin out of him. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly, not the quiet part. Good, yes, but no sugar baby. Honest—sometimes too honest. That’s why—” His mouth snapped shut abruptly, as if he’d almost said something he meant not to.
“I want the medics to see her first,” Cally said, returning to his question. “Best not move her. Best wait a bit. Someone’s with her, monitoring vital signs. Just you sit tight.”
He nodded, mouth clamped on something he didn’t want her to know. And what could that be?
She sent Jeff to check the galley, where—as per orders—the weapons the crew had listed were laid out on the table. He popped the video to her helmet display. Two pistol bows… she hadn’t seen pistol bows in a long time… some knives, including the obvious kitchen cutlery. All that was by the book. The crew lockers were by the book—no hidden weapons, and only the personal effects you’d expect from experienced crew on a ship they didn’t expect to be on that long. Spare ship suits, a properly primed good quality pressure suit for each, shore clothes, entertainment cubes and disks and viewers and players. Someone was studying for a higher rating in spacedrives and had the study cubes; someone else had yarn and needles and a half-completed sweater. Little keepsakes, not worth much—they’d have the good stuff back home, somewhere in Vatta Transport storage if they had no permanent residence.
None of the crew were trouble but the one who’d died. That made sense.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” she said, as Gil reported the medics were coming through the lock. “You know your captain’s hurt—you know our medics are coming to work on her. As long as you do what you’re told, she’ll be fine. Cross us up, and she’ll die. Clear?”
They all nodded, looking solemn and worried, just as they should.
“Go back to your compartments and lie down on your bunks. If we need you to do something, you’ll be told. In fact—who’s on galley duty?” She knew that civ cargo ships rotated that, if they were too small to have a permanent crew.
“I am,” came a small voice to one side. Small dark-haired woman. Mehar Mehaar, engineering fifth. Someone raised a hand. Mitt Gossin, environmental section first. So they mixed sections on galley duty… interesting. Many ships rotated it by sections. And she wanted the section firsts available.
“Mehar,” she said; the woman startled to find that Cally knew her name. “Mr. Gossin, you’re a section first—you need to stay loose. Mehar, they’ll be sending over ration packs for the boarding party and medics, if the medics stay that long. All you have to do is heat them up. Jeff’s secured your weapons for the time being; you won’t need the kitchen knives. The rest of you, go to your bunks and lie down. We’ll keep you informed.”
They clambered up awkwardly and moved to the side just as the medics came through with their equipment. Cally had already pointed them to the captain’s cabin; they’d had time to replay the vid of the engagement. They didn’t need her crowding that small space. When they’d passed, she went on forward to the bridge.
There she found two more worried faces. “Is she all right?” asked the old woman sitting the comdesk. Quincy Robin, chief of engineering, almost as old as the ship.
“She’s alive,” Cally said. “The medics are with her now.”
“What happened?”
Cally explained briefly. Quincy’s color had come back during that, and now she snorted. “Idiot boys!”
Cally agreed with her but wasn’t going into that. “Understand you’re head of engineering.”
“Yes.”
“You reported no functional FTL drive. How did this ship get here with no functional FTL drive?”
“It failed us coming in,” Quincy said. “I swear I thought it had ten more jumps in it, at least, when we left Slotter Key. But there was a little wobble coming into Belinta, and then it was worse leaving Belinta, and the downjump to Sabine—well, the sealed unit went haywire, and we’ve got cavitation damage downstream…”
“Um.” So much for using this ship as a courier, which was what the Old Man had hoped for. Victor carried spare sealed units, but nothing that would fit on this tub.
“We were trying to arrange repairs at the station when you blew the ansibles—” Quincy glared at her. Cally realized that the old woman wasn’t scared. Was that good or not?
“What makes you think we blew the ansibles?” she asked.
“You have the big guns,” Quincy retorted. “Nobody else would blow ansibles.”
Civ thinking. People who have the weapons would use them, never mind why.
“We didn’t blow the ansibles,” Cally said. No reason not to tell them that. No reason not to start setting the record straight. “We don’t want trouble with ISC.”
“Then who did?”
“Don’t know. Not us, that’s all I know. So, your FTL’s out. What about your other systems?”
“Fine so far.” The old woman was still angry. Not scared a bit—well, the old were like that, if they weren’t scared of everything.
Ky woke slowly, as from deep sleep. It didn’t feel right. What didn’t feel right, she wasn’t sure at first. A smell… not the smell of her cabin. Astringent, even medical. She opened her eyes. Above her, too close, was a shiny curved surface; when she tried to move, her arms bumped into something firm and unyielding.
The curved surface lifted away from her face. Now she could see more—and nothing reassuring. Too far away, now, the overhead with rows of lights; too big, the compartment in which she lay enclosed in something uncomfortably like a coffin. Medbox, her mind told her.
She struggled to put facts together in a string that made sense. Medbox meant injury… She had been injured? When? Where? And this place she was in… what was it? Where? A face hung over her; she had never seen it before, that she was sure of, if nothing else.
Its expression was serious. The mouth opened.
“Do you know your name?”
Name. What you call yourself, that is your name. Ky fumbled around in a brain that felt like a basket of wool puffs, until a sharp angular fact prodded her inquiry. Name. Your name from him meant my name to me… My name is… “Kylara Vatta,” she said.
“Ah. And do you know where you are?”
She looked around as far as she could see over the rim of the medbox. For some reason it seemed more like a ship than a hospital onplanet. “I’m in a medbox,” she said. “On a ship? I don’t know for sure.”
“Do you know the date?”
She had no idea. The whole concept of date seemed slippery. “No…”
“No matter,” the man said. The knowledge that he was a man and not a woman had slid into her mind without her thinking about it. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
She didn’t remember anything, but she pushed at the gray fuzzballs. Past the screen of her mind ran the equations for calculating oxygen output from a Class III environmental system per square meter of reactive surface—so she recited that, and then the ones for calculating drift on downjump.
“Think of a person,” the man said.