Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon Page B

going. That front’s going to toss us around some.”
    Ky climbed into the copilot’s seat, and concentrated on her part of the checklist as they finished preflight and started the engines.
    The first hour in the air, retracing her recent flight home, was almost pure sightseeing. The colors of the water, changing with depth, with the shadows of clouds… the reefs… the various islands. Puffy cumulus clouds arrayed in rows along the wind’s path, all white and innocent… but ahead, a line of taller clouds, their ramparts denser. Ky had no time to brood, as she helped Gaspard ease the plane through the front’s turbulence, and only the navigation instruments could have told where they were.
    The city lay under dense clouds spitting cold rain, just as it had been when she left. At least here there was little turbulence, and landing offered no problems. Gaspard turned onto the ramp that led to the private terminal, and then again to reach the Vatta hangars.
    “Good job, Ky,” he said, when he’d handed her down from the wing. “You’ll be fine with old
Glennys
. Shouldn’t wonder if you don’t start your own private fleet with her or something.”
    Ky started. Was she that predictable?
    “Have to start somewhere, after all,” he said cheerfully, and winked. Then he turned back to the mechanic who had come out to greet him.
    Her first task, she thought, was getting rid of Aunt Gracie’s cakes. She hadn’t asked Gaspard to let her toss them out into the sea—Gaspard might be her friend, but he might also be one of Aunt Gracie’s spies. At no point in the route from the airfield to the shuttle field was she alone and in reach of a disposal chute. The five kilos dragged at her arm. She had to carry them herself to have the chance to lose them… but a woman in a Vatta Transport captain’s uniform carrying a bright flower-patterned bag, obviously heavy, would be noticed and remembered. Blast Aunt Gracie!
    Vatta captains, she had been told, did not ride commercial shuttles to orbit. At least not here, where Vatta maintained its own small fleet of surface-to-orbit transport. As a captain, she had her own tiny compartment, outfitted as a workstation, with stowage for her duffel in the same compartment. She remembered her first trip alone to the orbital station, when she’d been thirteen and headed for three months as the lowest of apprentices on
Turbot
. She’d been crammed into crew seating with four other family apprentices (each going to a different ship) and fifteen regular crew, and she’d been stiff, as well as scared, by the time they arrived.
    This was much better. She spent the time reviewing crew information, committing faces and names to her implant’s perfect memory. At the Vatta orbital station, she debarked ahead of the rest, and caught the first tram outbound for the docks. She had given up on Aunt Gracie’s cakes for now; she turned them over to the Vatta handler along with the rest of her luggage. It would reappear in her cabin aboard. All she had in hand was the tidy little captain’s case, with its datalinks, command wand, and orders. She tried to sneak up on
Glennys
without being spotted, but Vatta security was far too good for that. She had an escort all the way from the Vatta gates to the boarding platform, and when she got there, Gary Tobai left off polishing the Vatta family seal on the rail and turned to her.
    “Well, if it isn’t the newest captain in Vatta Fleet.” He grinned at her, but Ky thought she detected a bite to his tone. “Mouth got you in trouble again, did it?”
    “All I said was…” Ky shut her mouth and shook her head at him. “If you know that much, you know I didn’t do anything wrong.”
    “Wrong? No. Wrong way to do something right, maybe. I thought you were supposed to be our white hope with the military.”
    “I thought so, too. So when I found something that needed to be fixed—”
    “You jumped in and fixed it. I understand that, but you could have