Hunting Party

Chapter Seven

Heris could have believed the Sweet Delight knew it smelled sweeter—or perhaps it responded to the change in the attitude of its crew. Without the sour-faced pilot, and the inept moles, with the addition of two eager, hardworking newcomers, crew alliances shifted and solidified around a new axis. A healthier one, to Heris’s mind. They were not yet what she would call sharp, but they were trying, now. No one complained about the emergency drills. No one slouched around with the listless expression that had so worried her before. Perhaps it was only fear of losing their jobs, but she hoped it was something better.

It had been unfortunate that she’d hit the owner’s nephew. She knew that; she knew it was her fault from start to finish. She had let them leave the hatch to the bridge open. . . . On such a small ship, with a small crew, where the owner never ventured into the working compartments, it had seemed safe. She had not noticed when he came, and when he startled her she had silenced him in a way that might have been hazardous—would have been, with some people. She was ashamed of herself, even though they’d made it through a fairly tricky set of transition points safely.

She called Cecelia as soon as they were through, and explained. “It was my fault for not securing the bridge—”

“Never mind. He’s been insufferable this whole trip; his mother spoiled him rotten.”

“But I should have—”

Cecelia interrupted her again. “It’s not a problem, I assure you. If you want to feel chastened, schedule your first riding lesson today.”

Heris had to laugh at that. “All right. Two hours from now?”

“I’ll be there. Regular gymsuit will do for now.”

Heris finished the necessary documentation of jump point transition, completed a few more minor chores, and left the bridge to Mr. Gavin.

“This,” said Cecelia cheerfully, “is your practice mount.” Heris had expected something like a metal or plastic horse shape on some kind of spring arrangement, but the complicated machine in front of her looked nothing at all like a real horse. Except for the saddle—a traditional leather saddle—on a cylindrical section that might have been plastic, it could have been an industrial robot of some sort, with its jointed appendages, power cable connectors, sockets, and dangling wires with ominous little clips. Heris had seen something vaguely like it in one of the wilder bars on Durango. . . . Only that had been, she thought, a mechanical bucking bull.

The jointed extension in the front, Cecelia explained, acted as the horse’s neck and head, allowing the rider to use real reins. At the moment, the real reins were looped neatly from a hook on one side. “There are sensors in the head,” Cecelia said, “which record how much rein pressure you’re using, and feed back to the software. Yank the reins, and this thing will respond very much like a real horse. You’ll also get an audible tone, to let you know when your rein pressure is uneven.” The VR helmet rose from a cantilevered extension behind the saddle. “It’s set now at beginner level,” Cecelia said. “I’ll control pace and direction; you’ll just feel the gaits at first.” She stood near a waist-high control panel, which Heris noted had several sockets for plug-in modules as well as the usual array of touchplates.

Heris stared at the thing. She had not enjoyed the obligatory riding lessons at the Academy that much, and this looked like the perfect apparatus for making someone look stupid and clumsy. But a bet was a bet, and she owed Cecelia ten hours. The sooner she mounted, the sooner it would be over.

“You don’t have to use the VR helmet at first,” Cecelia said. “Why not just get on and off a few times, and let me start it walking?”

“Fine.” Heris tried to remember just how mounting went. Left foot in the stirrup, but her hands . . . ? On the real horse they’d been taught to grip the reins and put a hand on the neck in front of the saddle; here that would have meant on a pair of gray cylinders like slim pipes. She put both hands on the front of the saddle and hauled herself upward. The machine lurched sideways, with a faint hiss of hydraulics, and she slipped back to the deck.

“Sorry,” Cecelia said, trying to hide a grin. “I wasn’t ready to correct for that kind of mount. You need to be closer, and push off more strongly with your right leg. Straight up, then swing your leg over. If you hang off the side of a real horse like that, it’s likely to unbalance, reach out a leg, and step on you.”

Heris tried again, this time successfully. She felt around with her right foot until she got the stirrup on. Cecelia came over and moved her feet slightly. “Weight on the balls of your feet, for now. We’re going to start with a simple all-around seat. And no reins for now, until you’ve got the seat right. Just clasp your wrists in front of you. Let me connect the other sensors . . .” This meant clipping a dozen dangling wires to Heris’s clothing; she felt she was being restrained by gnats. Cecelia retreated to the control column and touched something. The machine lurched; Heris wondered if she was about to be thrown off, but it settled down to a rhythmic roll and pitch. Her body remembered that it felt quite a bit like riding a real horse.

“It’s—strange,” she said. She might have to take riding lessons, but she didn’t have to refrain from comment.

“It’s expensive,” Cecelia said. “Most riding sims are limited to three gaits, one speed at each gait, and all you can do is go in a circle or straight. This one can keep me in shape.” Heris did not say what she thought this time: keeping one old woman in shape hardly suggested that the simulator had great powers. She didn’t have to refrain from comment, but she didn’t have to be rude, either.

“Let me try the helmet now,” she said instead. If her face was covered by that mass of instrumentation, no sudden expression could give her away.

“Go ahead,” Cecelia said. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

The helmet had all the usual attachments and adjustments; Heris got it on as the sim kept up its movement. As her eyes adapted to the new visual field, she saw in front of her a horse’s neck swinging slightly up and down, with two ears . . . and reins lying on that neck, and a long line from the horse’s head to someone standing in the center of a white-railed ring. “It doesn’t look like you,” she said. “Who’s the brown-haired man with his arm in a sling?”

“Sorry.” Cecelia’s voice in the helmet sounded masculine for a moment, then changed. “Someone I used to train with—is that better?” Now it was Cecelia, but a younger Cecelia—her hair flaming red-gold, her tall body dressed in sweater and riding breeches. She looked vibrant and happy and far more attractive than Heris had imagined her.

“Yes—it really does look like a horse.” Of course, the simulator for a cruiser really did look like a cruiser, and the simulator for a Station tug really did look like a Station tug. That’s what simulators were supposed to do, but maybe Cecelia didn’t know that.

“Like any horse,” Cecelia said, and into the helmet appeared a dizzying array of horse necks and ears: black, brown, white, gray, short, long, thick, thin, with and without manes. Heris blinked.

“I can see that.” But after all, how hard could it be to change colors and lengths of neck? It wasn’t like going from, say, the bridge of a flagship like Descant to the bridge of a tug, or a shuttle. All horses were basically alike, large smelly four-legged mammals that would carry you around if you had no better transportation. The visual settled back to the original neck and ears—light brownish yellow.

“Now—you’re going to reverse.” Heris expected to halt and back up, but reverse in this case meant making an egg-shaped turn and beginning to circle in the opposite direction, once more facing forward. Different terminology: she filed it away. Next time she would be properly braced for the turn, rather than the halt.

By the end of that first hour, she had walked virtual circles in both directions, halted, reversed, and even done enough trotting to make her thighs ache. She remembered this from her Academy days. There, too, they had walked and trotted back and forth until their legs hurt. It seemed pointless, but harmless, and it might even be good exercise. When she lifted off the helmet, Cecelia smiled up at her.

“And did you find it as bad as you expected?”

“No . . . but is that all there is?”

Cecelia’s grin might have warned her, she thought later. “Not at all—I go faster.”

“You . . . race?”

“Not racing. Eventing. Do you know what that is?”

Heris racked her memory, and came up with nothing. Event—had to be a sporting event of some kind, she presumed. But what?

“Would you like to see?” Cecelia asked.

“Yes. Of course.” Anything her employer cared about that much ought to be important to her.

She had not expected anything like the cube Cecelia showed her, and came up from it breathless. “You—did that? That was you on that yellow horse?”

“Chestnut. Yes. That was my last championship ride.”

“But those . . . those—obstacles?—were so big. And the horse was running so fast.”

Cecelia grinned at her, clearly delighted at her surprise. “I thought you didn’t understand. That’s what’s different about this simulator. You can do all that on it . . . well, all but falling in the actual water, or getting stepped on by the actual horse.”

“You mean I could learn to do that—to jump over things like that?”

“Probably not, but you could come close.” Cecelia extracted the first cube and fed in another. “This is what fox hunting is like—in fact, this is a cube I made three years ago.”

“You made—?”

“Well, I used to be under contract with Yohsi Sports. They’d mount the sim-cam in my helmet, and I wore the wires as well. . . .”

Heris felt that she’d fallen into another layer of mystery. What, she wondered, was “wearing the wires” and what did it have to do with a sports network? But she was tired of asking questions that must sound stupid, so she simply nodded. This time the cube was not of Cecelia riding, but from the rider’s viewpoint. . . . She saw the green grass blur between the horse’s ears, saw a stone wall approaching far too fast . . . and then it was left behind, and another appeared. Little brown and black and white things were running ahead, yelping, and other horses and riders were all around.

“Those are the foxes you’re chasing?” she asked finally, as field and wall followed wall and field, apparently without end. There were variations, as some fields were grassy and others muddy, and some walls were taller or had ditches on one side, but it seemed fairly monotonous. Not nearly as interesting as the varied challenges of the cross-country. Cecelia choked, then laughed until she was breathless.

“Those are hounds! The fox is ahead of the dogs; the dogs find the scent and trail the fox, and the horses follow the hounds.” Then she quit laughing. “I’m sorry. It’s not fair, if you’ve never been exposed to it, but I thought everyone knew about foxes and hounds.”

“No,” Heris said, between gritted teeth. Some of us, she wanted to say, had better things to do with our time. Some of us were off fighting wars so that people like you could bounce around making entertainment cubes for each other. But that was not entirely fair and she knew it. It probably did take skill to ride like that, although what the use of that skill was, once you’d gained it, she still could not figure out.

“Here.” Cecelia handed her yet another cube. “This is the text of an old book on the subject, and since it’s one of the few left, you might want to look at it. Bunny’s designed his entire hunt around it, even though we know that it predates the twentieth century, Old Earth, and things must have changed afterwards.”

Heris looked at the cube file labelled “Surtees” with suspicion. Apparently she would be expected to watch it on her own time. Historical nonsense about horses struck her as even more useless than current nonsense about horses.

“And to be fair, I think it’s time I schedule my first lesson in shipboard knowledge, or whatever you want to call it. Do you have time for a student later today?”

Cecelia was, after all, her employer, and she was making an effort to share an enthusiasm. Heris thought of all the things she’d rather do, but nodded. “Of course. When would you like to start?”

“Well . . . after lunch?”

“Fine.” Food always came first. But then, it should.

“You could eat with me,” Cecelia said, “and give me a head start. I don’t even know what you want me to learn.”

Meals with the owner. Heris started to grumble internally, then remembered that she’d already had meals with the owner . . . and it hadn’t been that bad. “Thank you,” she said. “I am at your service.”

Heris had no equivalent of the riding simulator to help Cecelia, but she used the next best: the computer’s three-dimensional visuals.

“This is a very nice hull,” she said. Always start with the positive. “You’ve got a fair balance of capacity and speed—”

“But my captains always said it was a slow old barge, compared to other ships,” Cecelia said. “A luxury yacht can’t be expected to compete—”

“You and I both know your former captains had other reasons,” Heris said. “It may be a luxury yacht, but we use a very similar hull for—” She stopped herself in time from saying for what, exactly, and managed to finish. “For missions that require a fair turn of speed. And you’ve got the right power ratio for it; whoever designed this adaptation chose well. Now—let me highlight each system in color, and you can begin to learn how it works.”

Cecelia, Heris found, was an apt pupil. She had a surprising ability to grasp 3-D structures, and spotted several features Heris had meant to mention before she could bring them up.

“Yes—you do have waste space there; that’s a design compromise, but it’s not a bad one. Look at the alternatives. If you ran the coolant this way—see—you get this undesirable cluster of conduits here—”

“Oh . . . and that’s supposed to be at a constant temperature—”

“Yes. Now, let’s add the electricals.”

They both lost track of time, and Cecelia’s deskunit finally beeped with a reminder about dinner. She looked surprised. “I didn’t—this isn’t really dull at all. I could learn this.”

“So you could. I’m glad I didn’t bore you.” Heris stood, and stretched. She would need a hot bath, to get the kinks out this time. “I’ll be going—I’ve got some crew business to take care of.”

“Well . . . thank you. Tomorrow, then?”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Heris said, hoping that could be taken for both sessions, though she was not in fact looking forward to more riding. But fair was fair, and Cecelia was as diligent a pupil as she could wish.

After a few days, Heris found herself enjoying the riding instruction more than she’d expected. The soreness wore off; she had good natural balance, and a lot of experience with simulators. It was less monotonous than the usual exercise apparatus in the crew gym, or swimming against the current in the pool. And she could not have asked for a more attentive owner. Cecelia had her own way of thinking about the various systems, relating them more often to equestrian matters than Heris thought necessary, but if she could understand better that way, why not? At least she was learning, paying attention . . . and in the future that might save her life.

Still, Heris had not forgotten the need for emergency drills. She herself gave a training session to the house staff and a separate one to Cecelia. Cecelia suggested letting Bates hand out the assignments to the young people, and Heris agreed. She had managed to avoid young Ronnie successfully so far.

That first unannounced shipwide drill would have made a good comedy cube, Heris thought later. She had entered the specs into the main computer the night before, using an event function that kept the time from her as well. It should have been simple: a single small fire, in one of the fire-prone areas. But very little went as planned. The alarm went off at 0400, ship’s time. Heris, fairly sure what it was, nonetheless responded as she would to any emergency. Those crew members she thought of as the best arrived at their emergency stations within the time limit; the others straggled in late, in one case three minutes late. (“I was in the head,” mumbled the guilty party. “Havin’ a bit of a problem, I was.”)

Cecelia logged in within the limit, as did Bates and the cook (who, spotting the faked “fire,” promptly put an upturned garbage container on it: the right decision). Four of the young people sauntered in to their assigned stations late (but flustered) and two did not appear at all.

“They have to be somewhere,” Cecelia said, when Heris told her.

“Oh, they are. They’re in the number five storage bay, ignoring the whole thing.”

“But they can’t—who is it?”

“Ronnie and George,” Heris said, having no more patience with them. “Since you gave them their assignments, via Bates—”

“I’ll be glad to ream them out, but are you sure they heard the alarm in there?”

“All compartments have a bell. No, they’re hiding out, for purposes of their own. One thing I could do is put a scare into them. They think this is just a stupid drill . . . but they don’t know what the supposed emergency is. If I dump power in there . . . take off the AG, or lose a little pressure . . .”

“Do it,” Cecelia said. Red patches marred her cheeks again. Heris thought to herself that one of the advantages of darker skin was that blushes didn’t show. Much. “Do you have sensors in there?”

“Oh, yes.” Heris called up the compartment specs. “You have a pretty fair internal security system, probably to let your staff monitor offship loading . . . see?” There were Ronnie and George, looking stubborn, hunched over a hard copy of something. She did not wait to hear what they were saying, but her fingers flicked over the screen controls. The young men suddenly stopped talking, and stared at each other.

“She wouldn’t!” George said in a tinny voice.

“Why’s he sound like that?”

“Air pressure,” Heris said. “Their ears just popped, I’ll bet.” Her fingers moved again, and both of them looked pale and ill at ease. “You’d better go,” Heris said to Cecelia. “You want to be properly angry and upset, and you don’t want to know what happened to them . . . not until they tell you. I won’t hurt them.”

“I know that,” Cecelia said, but she left reluctantly.

“If you get into the computer, then you can pull drills on her,” George said. “She won’t know—” He lounged against a burlap sack marked “Fertile seeds: contains mercury: do not use for food.”

“Neither will we,” Ronnie said. “I don’t want to be up all night every night.”

“You don’t have to be. That’s the beauty of it. You just set them up, but cut our bells out of it.”

“She’ll know who did it,” Ronnie said. “I still think I should start with the internal monitors. She’s spending a lot of time with Aunt Cecelia now; she’s bound to say something I can use.” They had a hard copy of the communications board specs, left in an unsecured file from one of Cecelia’s training sessions. Getting into the secured files would be harder. Ronnie had the feeling that Captain damn-her-backbone Serrano would not leave her files unsecured.

“Yes, but what can she do? You’re the owner’s nephew—she can hardly throw you out in the void.”

“Maybe.” Ronnie stared at the specs, trying to remember all that stuff he had had in class. This little squiggle was supposed to mean something about the way that channel and this other channel interacted . . . wasn’t it? He put his thumb firmly on the line that came from Cecelia’s sitting room, and a finger on the one that came from the gym. He really needed a tap in both. If only Skunkcat had been along. . . . Scatty was the best for this sort of thing.

“Here’s the captain’s direct line to the bridge,” George said, trying to be helpful. George had good ideas, but always managed to get the wrong slant on them. Ronnie did not want to interfere with the captain’s communication to the bridge; he wanted them to know how ineffectual she was going to be once he figured out how to sabotage her.

Suddenly his ears popped, then popped again. He saw from George’s face that the same unsettling shudder was going through his stomach, too. George said something; he paid no attention. Lower air pressure . . . shifts in the artificial gravity . . . could it have been a real emergency? He was suddenly sweaty, and as suddenly cold, the sweat drying on him. No. It had taken too long. That bitch of a captain was doing something to him, doing it on purpose.

“Out!” he said, across the middle of something George was trying to say. “Before the pressure locks engage.”

But they had. He could not wrestle the hatch open against the safety locks; he would not call for help. His stomach protested, as another shift of AG squashed him, then released . . . and the air pressure dropped again, to another painful pop of his ears.

George looked green. “I . . . I’m going to—”

“Not in variable G—hold it, George.” There was nothing to use for a spew-bag. Every storage container in there—bags, boxes, tubes—had a lock-down seal on it. A surge of AG crushed him to the deck, then let up slowly. Air pressure returned; his ears popped just as many times on the way back to ship normal. His stomach tried to crawl out his mouth; George looked as bad as he felt, but had managed not to spew. He swallowed the vile taste in his mouth and rolled over onto his back. He had a sudden pounding headache.

Something banged on the closed hatch. “Anyone inside?”

George croaked, and the hatch opened. A crewman, someone Ronnie did not recognize, in full emergency gear. “My—you weren’t in here for the drill, were you?” Without awaiting the obvious answer, the man went on, “It’s not anyone’s assigned station—you’re lucky I found you. We’re doing a pressure check on all compartments—”

“Just get us out of here,” Ronnie said, staggering to his feet. “That miserable captain—”

“Wasn’t her fault,” the crewman said, as if surprised at his words. “It’s a computer-generated emergency; they all are, you know. Didn’t you get your handouts?”

“Yes,” George said. “We got our handouts. Thank you. Just let me pass, please.” He shoved past and shambled down the passage to the nearest toilet, where Ronnie could hear him being very thoroughly sick.

Ronnie himself hoped to sneak back to his own stateroom, but in the lounge he found a very angry Aunt Cecelia. She said all the things he expected, and didn’t want to hear, and he managed not to listen. She had said them all before, and so had others, and it was not really his fault anyway. It was that captain. That arrogant, stiff-necked, conniving bitch of a captain, and he was going to get even with her. If Aunt Cecelia didn’t want to see his face for two days, that was fine. He could eat in his room; he would be glad to eat in his room. All the more time to figure out how to do what he was going to do. Still, an attempt at patching things up never hurt. He did his best at a contrite apology, but she turned away, ignoring him. Ignoring him. No one ignored him.

By the time he reappeared in the dining room, several days later, to all appearances chastened and determined to be a good boy, Ronnie had figured it out. At least the beginning of it. It had been easy, using the specs he had, to get a tap into his aunt’s sitting room. And into the gym. He hadn’t yet dared try the captain’s cabin, but he was hearing a lot as it was. That fool captain actually liked his ridiculous aunt, he’d discovered. Enjoyed the riding lessons, enjoyed explaining to Cecelia how her ship worked, enjoyed the relaxed conversations in the evenings, when they explored each others’ backgrounds.

A lot of it bored him silly: talk about books he’d never read, and art he’d never seen, and music he avoided. (Opera! He had liked the opera singer’s body, and the competition with the prince, but not the music she sang onstage. It was hard to believe even someone like his aunt actually liked all that screeching.) No juicy gossip, no political arguments—it was almost like hearing an educational tape, the way they discussed the topics and deferred courteously to each other.

Other bits, though, fascinated him. His aunt’s analysis of the workings of the family businesses. . . . His own father hadn’t made it that clear. Captain Serrano’s version of her resignation from the Fleet, which his aunt teased out of her with surprising delicacy. . . . He had never imagined that someone in the Regular Space Services would dare to disobey an order; they were all such stiff-necked prigs. It didn’t make sense; she should have known she would lose her ship, one way or the other. He could almost feel guilty listening—he would not have expected to hear that woman so upset, or for that reason—but he loved the sense of power it gave him. She could be shaken from her calm, controlled persona; she was not invincible. He would start with something simple, he decided. Something that might be an accident, that would be hard to trace back to him.

Heris used the reins when she rode now, and the soft tones in her earphones let her know how she managed the tension, even before the simulator responded by swinging one way or the other. If the tones matched, the rein tension was equal; a higher tone meant more tension. She had discovered, as Cecelia gradually enabled the simulator’s sensors, just how sluggish that first “mount” had been. Cecelia had shown her a cube of herself at that first lesson, and she was ready to laugh at the novice who couldn’t even keep her position for a single circuit. On this program, that novice would have been bucked off already. Heris listened to Cecelia’s voice, coaching her in the next maneuver, and tried to respond. The brown neck and ears in front of her changed position; she felt the movement in her seat and the lessening tension of the reins in her hand. The simulator lunged; this time Heris was ready, and controlled that with a leg and hand . . . and . . . they were cantering. She liked cantering. Circling. Straight. Circling again. Today she would “jump” for the first time; she was eager, sure she was ready.

A small white fence appeared ahead of her. “Keep your leg on him,” Cecelia’s voice reminded her. She squeezed, and the fence moved toward her faster. Then the horse’s back rose beneath her, and fell again, and she grabbed—and got a handful of metal tubing. The illusion went blank; the simulator beneath her was once more an inert hunk of metal and plastic.

“Not bad,” Cecelia said. “You grabbed for the right thing, at least. I had one student who reached for the helmet. And you didn’t fall all the way off.”

Heris blinked and took a deep breath. “Umm. A real horse wouldn’t stop and let me get my breath, would it?”

“No. You can grab for mane like that and stay on, usually, but you were pretty high out of the saddle. I think you need more time in the two-point. Let’s go.”

The rest of that session, and the next, Heris spent practicing the position she should have taken over the jump. Then she put on the helmet to find the ring full of jumps. “Nothing big,” Cecelia said cheerfully. “But if you see more than one, you can’t get fixated on it. Now—pick up a trot.”

She came out of that lesson a convert to riding. “It’s like a boat,” she tried to tell Cecelia. “Bouncing over the waves, only in a boat you’re in it, and this way you’re surrounding it. Not really like sailing, more like white-water kayaking.” Cecelia looked blank. “You never did any?”

“No, just the little bit of sailing I told you about.”

“But it’s the same thing.” Heris ran her hands through her hair, not caring if it stood up in peaks. “You’re swooping along between obstacles, only they’re rocks making standing waves, not fences.”

“If you say so. I always thought of it as music, myself. A choral or orchestral work, where if everything goes well it sounds lovely, and if you get out of time you crash.”

“Anyway,” Heris said, “I like it. I don’t want to quit when my ten hours are up—that is, if you’ll let me—”

Cecelia chuckled wickedly. “Your ten hours were up last session. Do you think I’d let a potential convert quit before she got hooked? I thought you’d come around. Just wait until you can jump a real course—small, but a real one.”

“And you—don’t tell me you don’t like knowing more about your ship,” Heris said.

“That’s true.” Cecelia rubbed her nose. “I know you think I’m crazy to liken it to stable management, but that’s how it makes sense to me.”

“Whatever works,” Heris said. She would have said more, but Ronnie and the other young people came into the gym.

“Is the pool available, Aunt Cecelia?” He asked politely enough, but his expression showed what he thought of two older women exercising. He did not look at Heris at all.

“Yes—for about an hour,” Cecelia said. “But you ought to get in some riding time, Ronnie.”

“I’ll get enough riding at Bunny’s,” Ronnie said. It was not quite sulky. “We’ll leave you the practice time. . . . Are you enjoying yourself, Captain?”

It was the first time he’d actually spoken to her since the incident on the bridge. His expression was so carefully neutral it could have been either courtesy or insult. “Yes, I am,” she said, pleasantly. “Lady Cecelia is an excellent teacher.”

“I’m sure.” He would have been very handsome, Heris thought, if he’d learned to limit that curl of lip to moments of passion. His voice sharpened. “It’s too bad you’ll have to let your newfound expertise wither in Hospitality Bay . . . although I understand they have donkey rides along the beach.”

Heris would not have answered so childish an insult, but Cecelia did. “On the contrary, Ronnie, I’m taking Captain Serrano with me; she’s going to be quite adequate by the time we arrive.” Her cheeks flamed, her hair seemed to stand on end. Heris blinked; that was the first she’d heard of this plan.

“You’re taking—her—but she—she’s just a—” Ronnie looked from one to the other, then to his friends.

“If you’ll excuse me, Lady Cecelia,” said Heris, giving her employer a covert twinkle, “I have urgent business on the bridge—remember?”

“Oh. Yes, of course,” Cecelia dismissed her with a wave, and turned back to her nephew; Heris used the gym’s other entrance. It was not all a fake, though she had no desire to watch aunt and nephew sparring—she had in fact scheduled another emergency drill for the crew only, and needed to change. She and the crew would all be wearing full sensor attachments, so that she could analyze the drill in detail later on. She had allowed herself fifteen minutes, originally, but Ronnie’s interruption had cost her a couple.

In her cabin, she ripped off her sweaty riding clothes, spent a minute in the ’fresher, and dressed in her uniform with practiced speed. Anyone who couldn’t bathe and dress for inspection in eleven minutes would never have survived Academy training. She picked up the sensor patches and placed them on head, shoulders, hands, chest and back of waist, and feet. The recording command unit slipped into her pocket. Three minutes. She picked up the last of her personal emergency gear with one eye on the chronometer’s readout. Breather-mask, detox, command wand for hatchlocks, command wands for systems controls . . . the little plastic or foil packets that she had learned to use so long ago, that never left her except in the ’fresher, where she kept them stuck to a wall in their waterproof pouch.

Now. She left her quarters and moved without haste toward the bridge, turning on the recording command unit. Sometime in the next two minutes, something would go wrong—without triggering any alarm on the family side, unless the lockout patch failed. Her skin felt tight. Riding an electronic virtual horse was good exercise, but this was the real thrill: waiting for trouble you knew was coming.

Whatever it was, the crew had just noticed something wrong on the displays when she came onto the bridge at precisely the hour she had set.

“Don’t know what that is—” the ranking mole said. “But we’d better find out; cut it off the circulation—”

“Captain on the bridge,” said Holloway, with evident relief. “Captain, there’s something in environmental—”

Inadequate, even so soon; she switched the command screen to environmental and almost grinned. Pure happenstance, but she’d seen something like this before. She didn’t say that; she said, “Isolate that compartment.” The mole’s hands flickered across his console.

“Captain—the fan blower’s stuck on.”

Not quite the same problem. She hoped it was mostly virtual; the actual compound stank abominably, and would penetrate any porous material. The mole had the sense to cut out the electrical line supplying the blower. Heris said, “Good job,” and then the blower cut back in. Something prickled the back of her neck as she watched Gavin override the mole’s commands and cut power to the entire section. Having the fan blower stuck on was within the parameters she’d given the computer. Having it come back on after its normal electrical connection was cut pushed the parameters as she remembered them. Had she been imprecise? Could she have forgotten to close a command line somewhere in the problem set? The fan stopped. She listened to Gavin give reasonable orders for clearing the contaminant, based on its presumed identity. Then—and she was not surprised—the fan came back on. Gavin turned to her with an expression between disgust and worry.

“I’ve got it,” she said. From her console, her command set blocked the computer’s own, briefly, as she isolated and locked out all executing logic loaded in the past seventy-two hours. That would undo some things that would have to be redone, but it should safely contain the problem. And that second startup took it well beyond the parameters she’d set; someone had interfered. Interfered with her ship, on her drill. . . . Rage filled her, along with the exultation that conflict always brought. This was an enemy she could fight. She knew exactly whom to blame for this one, and he had been ordered off her bridge only sixty-three hours before.

The fan had stopped for good, this time, and she went on with the drill, noting that the crew had responded well even to this more complicated problem.

The question was whether to tell Cecelia. She liked Cecelia, she’d decided, and it wasn’t her fault that she had a bratty nephew or even that she’d been stuck with him for this trip. If she could contain Ronnie without bothering Cecelia . . . but on the other hand, she was the owner, and the owner had a right to know what was going on. If it had been an admiral’s nephew, she’d have known what to do (not that any admiral’s nephew would have gotten so far with mischief still unchecked).

But the first thing to do was find out how he did it, and when.

“Sirkin, you’re cross-training in computer systems. I want you to crawl through every trickle in the past . . . oh . . . sixty hours or so, and identify every input.” Sirkin blinked, but did not look daunted. The young, Heris thought to herself, believed in miracles.

“Anything in particular, Captain?”

“I entered a problem set for the drill yesterday. What just happened was not within parameters. . . . Someone skunked them. I want to know when, from what terminal, and the details of the hook. Can do?”

“Yes—I think so.” Sirkin scowled, in concentration not anger. “Was it that—that young idiot who got himself caught in the storage compartment?”

Heris glanced around; the entire crew was listening. “It might have been,” she said. “But when you find out suppose you tell me, not the whole world.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ronnie threw himself back in the heavily padded teal chair in his stateroom and stretched luxuriously. George, in the purple chair, looked ready to burst with curiosity.

“So?”

“So . . .” Ronnie tried to preserve the facade of cool sophistication, but the expression on George’s face made him laugh. “All right. I did it, and did it right. You should have seen them, trying to turn off a fan that wouldn’t turn off.”

“A fan.” George was not impressed, and since he’d been decanted looking cool and contained, he could do that look better than Ronnie. The only thing, Ronnie maintained, which he did better.

“Let me explain,” Ronnie said, taking a superior tone. That came easily. “The little captain had scheduled another emergency drill, this one for the crew alone. I’d already put my hook into the system—remember?—and had a line out for just this sort of thing. I reeled it in and rewrote it—actually, all I had to do was put a loop in it—and sent it on its way.”

“So the fan kept turning back on,” George said. “And they couldn’t stop it. . . .” A slow grin spread across his face. “How unlike you—it’s so gentle. . . .”

“Well,” Ronnie said, examining his fingernails, “except for the stink bomb.”

“Stink bomb?”

“Didn’t I mention? The little captain had put three scenarios in the computer; it would generate one of them, using her parameters. I sort of . . . mixed two. One was a contamination drill . . . and it wasn’t that hard to change a canister which would have released colored smoke for one releasing stinks.” Ronnie smirked, satisfied with the look on George’s face as well as his own brilliance. “The little captain was most upset.”

“When she figures it out . . .” George went from gleeful to worried in that phrase.

“She’ll never figure it out. She’ll think it’s her own problem set—even if she calls it up, she’ll see that loop. Everyone makes mistakes that way sometimes.”

“But that canister?”

“George, I am not stupid. I spent an entire day repainting the drill canisters so they have the wrong color codes. All of them. She’ll assume it’s something left over from the previous captain—like that great mysterious whatever that held us up at Takomin Roads. That’s the first thing I did, right after we decided to scrag her. She can look for prints or whatever as much as she likes: she picked that canister up herself, and put it where it went off.” Ronnie stretched again. Sometimes he could hardly believe himself just how brilliant he was. “Besides—she thinks I’m a callow foolish youth—that’s what Aunt Cecelia keeps telling her—and she won’t believe a spoiled young idiot—my dear aunt’s favorite terms—could fish in her stream and catch anything.” As George continued to look doubtful, Ronnie leaned forward and tried earnestness. If George got nervy, his next intervention would be much harder. “We’re safe, I promise you. She can’t twig. She can’t possibly twig, and if she even thinks of it, Aunt Cecelia’s blather will unconvince her.”