Trading in Danger

“We can’t do anything about the passengers,” he said. “Not until the ship shows up. But we can reassure Belinta that they will get their cargo, though it may be somewhat delayed.”

“Send someone to pick it up in space or reorder?”

“Let’s look at the routings… wait a second—” He had come to the last part of Mackensee’s message to ISC about the ship and its captain. “They say she no longer has a Vatta implant—what can that mean?”

Stavros shook his head. “How would they know, unless—” He looked at Gerry. “They removed it themselves. She must have been their prisoner.”

He would not faint. He would not panic. It would do no good, and she was—she had been—alive, and might still need him. “Routings,” he said, in a voice that sounded nothing like his own.

Together, they called up the present positions and routings of all the Vatta ships within two jumps of Sabine system. Nothing that would work easily, nothing that wouldn’t break other commitments. Katrine Lamont was closest.

“We’ll do it,” Stavros said. “I’ll get in touch with Furman—he knows her, I think. Wasn’t he captain when she was on that apprentice trip?”

“I think so,” Gerard said. He looked at the schedules. “If I ship today on a fast courier, I can send her a replacement implant, and that stack of mail waiting for her; Furman can pick that up at—where’s he going to be? Delian II? Tight, but he can wait for it. We’d still want to confirm that Sabine’s stable before we send him in.”

“There’s a piece missing,” Sawvert said. The beacon’s capsule lay open, its components spread on the deck.

“He must have taken it,” Corson said. “Paison must have taken it out so he could put it in later.”

“Or destroyed it,” Ky said. “We know he destroyed part of the insystem drive control linkage.”

“It’s small,” Sawvert said. “He could just stick it in his pocket—it’s about like this”—she pointed at another piece, a slender cylinder about a finger long—”a number five inducer.”

“You’re sure it’s missing…”

“Yes, Captain, I’m sure.”

“And I am, too,” Corson said. “Everything else looks fine—there’s no sign of anything wrong but the missing part.”

Something about the shape tickled Ky’s memory. She had seen that shape before, but not in the beacon… she’d never looked inside the beacon case. Where had it been…?

“Did you… er… search the bodies after you… shot them?” Sawvert asked.

“No.” She had had other priorities, like getting the ship back under control and the rest of the hostages safely locked into the cargo holds again.

“It might be still… in his clothes…” Corson looked sick at this suggestion. Ky felt the same way.

“There’s a problem,” she said. “We don’t have the bodies.”

“You—spaced them?”

“I had cargo holds full of you folks, some of you hostile, and a ship to get under control, and no spare space anywhere,” Ky said, trying not to sound defensive. “I couldn’t just stick them in the cooler with the rations.”

“Maybe he dropped it somewhere,” Sawvert said. “Or maybe he gave it to someone who doesn’t realize what it is.”

“Maybe,” Ky said. She felt certain that it was in one of Paison’s pockets, and the dead pirate was mocking her still.

But that wasn’t where she’d seen something like that part. Where was it?

“What kind of marks would it have on it?” she asked.

“Marks?”

“Any way to identify it? Stripes or something?” She waved at the disassembled beacon. Some of those parts had color-coding stripes, or numbers.

“Sure,” Sawvert and Corson said together. They glanced at each other, and Sawvert went on. “It depends on the manufacturer, but basically it’ll have a number and a stripe, probably purple. You don’t have a parts store that might have it, do you?”

“No… but I know I’ve seen that shape aboard,” Ky said. She frowned; something was tugging her toward her cabin, a memory too vague to be recognizable. It couldn’t hurt to follow the hunch… “I’ll be back,” she said.

In her cabin, she stood still, trying not to think, not to interfere with whatever memory was trying to find its way to the surface. Nothing showed on the surface but the stains from the cleanup after the… the death. No handy part lay in the middle of the floor, or her bunk, or her desk. The shelves to either side of her desk held only the cube reader and one rack of cubes. The desk drawer had her captain’s log and its stylus. She pulled open the locker under her bunk, where the brightly wrapped fruitcakes had been stowed. One remained; she hoped they wouldn’t have to cut into that one. So far no one had dared complain about the flavor, but Ky still preferred to donate her share to others. No way Paison could have accidentally dropped the part here, but what if he’d hidden it, or had someone hide it, for him? Wouldn’t he have chosen the captain’s cabin?

It still didn’t make sense, the timing of it. He had not had time to disable the beacon and hide a part in her cabin; she knew that. She had been in her cabin when they discovered the beacon wasn’t working; she had confronted him too soon after that.

But something was here… she knew it. She started with the lockers over her bunk, where she found that things were not quite as she remembered. Of course. The mercs would have searched the cabin and simply shoved things back in, and she’d been too busy since to come in and reorganize. Entertainment and study cubes, clothes folded not quite as neatly as she’d left them. Behind them was a box, somewhat bent. The model… the spaceship model. She remembered now having shoved it to the back herself.

Ky pulled the box out—it rattled. When she opened it, a folded note was on top of broken parts. Sorry, the note said. Needle got it. This is most of the pieces. The needle-round had not reduced the model to its component parts, quite. Some of the assembly was still there. Ky laid the pieces on her bunk, wondering where the round had hit—obvious when she laid them in order—and there it was.

No purple stripe, but molded into the gray cylindrical shape which the assembly directions had told her was a missile was “I–5–239684.” The other “missiles” were beige.

Cold chills ran up and down her back. The meaning of MacRobert’s cryptic little note suddenly seemed clear. He had, for whatever reason, given her parts to a beacon of some kind and she had been too stupid to recognize them…

She grabbed the whole box and raced back down the passage to where Corson and Sawvert were slumped against the bulkhead, contemplating the guts of the beacon.

“Is this one?” she asked, holding out the little cylinder.

Sawvert looked up. “Looks like it—let me see—” She took it, turned it, peered at the inscription. “Yup, that’s it. Where’d you find it?”

“In a model kit,” Ky said. She put the box down. “Either of you know what the rest of this stuff is?”

“Model kit!” Sawvert leaned over the box. “That’s nothing—nor that—but this—and this—and that bit there—all that’s the makings of a small pin-beacon. A shouter.” She pushed the parts around with her finger. “I don’t know if you’ve got all of it—are there any more pieces?”

“There were, but it was in the way when the mercs shot up my cabin.”

“I didn’t know about that,” Sawvert said.

“You weren’t aboard then,” Ky said. “Someone we’d picked up off the docks at Prime—someone from home—went crazy and tried to fight with the mercs. They shot him.” The less said about that, the better. “So—anything more we can use to fix this beacon?”

“Let’s just see what this piece does—if it works, the beacon should work. If it doesn’t, we have some more bits to try, at least.”

Reassembling the beacon took another two hours, but even before they closed the case, Lee reported from the bridge that their passive scan showed the beacon on.

“Only problem is, it’s not our ID,” he said.