Free Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon Page A

ship to his satisfaction and was sure that no more stowaways were aboard; nor was there any explosive device. The young man had spent hours scrubbing the decks and finally, after a modest meal, had been locked into a closet with a mattress, pillow, and blanket.
    “He’ll be a challenge,” Martin reported, with the satisfied tone of someone for whom a challenge was welcome. “Not born on Belinta, but his family moved there when he was a toddler. Poor colonists, out on the frontier. I know the type, ma’am. Brogglers, we call ’em back home, the kind that live off trapping and frog sticking and the like. Thing is, they can make passable workers if you polish ’em up. He can shoot, he tells me. We’ll see about that later.”
    “If it saves me scrubbing things,” Alene said, propping her elbows on the table, “I’m all for him.”
    “Oh, he’ll scrub,” Martin said. “It’s about all he can do, at this point. Little enough education, and I doubt he paid much attention to the schooling available.”
    “We’ll do something about that,” Ky said. “If he’s going to be in my crew, he’s got to be certified.” She looked around at the others who’d gathered in the rec area. “I know—there’s all kinds of trouble going on. But precisely because of that, we need qualified people aboard, not just pot scrubbers. I want him educated at least to basic spacecrew level.”
    “We can try,” Quincy said.
    “With all the expertise on this ship, we can do more than try,” Ky said.
     
    The passage out began smoothly enough. Gordon Martin kept their intruder busy two shifts of the day, with four hours of schooling worked in. Martin seemed to get along well with the rest of the crew, too. The other men joined him for physical training; Ky, who maintained her own training program, found that the women were joining her—not all of them at each session, but even Sheryl, who had claimed to hate exercise, was now using the machines every other day. Ky shared piloting watch-and-watch with Lee. She worried about every blip on the scans, half convinced that marauders were lurking, ready to take out the ship. Each one turned out to be harmless: the Pavrati ship edging in toward Belinta Station, the Belinta ore haulers and service vehicles.
    At closest approach, four days out,
Gary Tobai
and the Pavrati ship passed each other. Ky made a courtesy call to the other ship.
    “You might as well skip Leonora,” the Pavrati captain told her. “They’re not letting anyone in. We were coming in from Darttin, headed this way, and they chased us right back out as soon as we’d cleared jump.”
    “What—why?”
    “Some kind of communications problem, and they’re convinced something like Sabine will happen to them if they let outsiders into the system.”
    “They didn’t say what?”
    “They didn’t say anything but
Go away and tell everyone else to leave us alone.
System closed indefinitely, they said. That was three weeks back; we were set up wrong for a direct vector here and had to use an intermediate jump point. They have some hot defensive ships, let me tell you, and acted like they’d just as soon blow us as let us go. But go if you want to—I’m just giving a friendly warning.”
    “Thanks,” Ky said. “I appreciate it. Belinta’s still open, as far as I know, but if you’re headed for Slotter Key you may run into trouble. Ansibles down, apparently.”
    The Pavrati captain muttered something Ky was just as glad she couldn’t hear. “Damn pirates,” he said then. “Or whoever’s doing this. It’ll be the ruin of trade. We need supplies; I was going to restock at Leonora, but I guess we’ll be satisfied with Belinta cabbage.”
    When she’d signed off, Ky said, “Sheryl—make our course for Lastway. Let me know how fast we can make it, too.”
     
    “This is a fine mess,” Gerard Avondetta Vatta said. He hurt all over and he looked as bad as he felt—he could see that in the faces around him, and