Marque and Reprisal Read Free

dogs made her gullible, of course, and yet it did not quite satisfy him. She was a naturally generous person, yes, but he had noticed a streak of hardness in her that boded well for her survival in the cutthroat world of interstellar shipping. When she came back, it might be time to tell her a few things not in the basic Vatta database her implant contained.
    The Miznarii… were they part of the resurgence of anti-humod feeling some of the Vatta captains had reported? They were certainly foundational purists who refused even the most common enhancements and modifications, such as cranial implants, but he hadn’t heard they bothered with offplanet politics. Besides, Ky had little exposure to humods; she could hardly be a target for anti-humod bias.
    Then there was InterStellar Communications. Vatta had supported ISC all along, and he fully appreciated what ISC had done for Ky at Sabine, but he wondered if its judgment matched its power. He’d tried to say something about that to Lew Parminer, the last time Lew visited, but Lew had shrugged off his concerns. “We pay our researchers enough to keep them quiet,” he’d said. “No muzzling the ox that treads the grain, you know.”
    Still… there were other sources of wealth in the galaxy. Some who would be willing to pay almost any price for the secrets of ISC’s labs. Some already funding research, he was sure, trying to duplicate the secrets of ISC’s technology, or trying to advance it. The attack on the ansible platforms at Sabine had been crude, but to Gerard’s mind clearly a test. How strong was ISC, and how fast could it respond?
    The pirates, too… the information from Sabine was disturbing. An alliance of pirates? Of their agents in legitimate firms? And how did that work? Vatta had thousands of employees on dozens of ships, more dozens of support offices. Was one of them a traitor, feeding information to pirates? So far, the pirates had concentrated on smaller shippers, driving several out of business. According to the Captains’ Guild figures—if they were accurate—the largest shippers hadn’t been hit. But that wouldn’t last, he was sure. They would run out of easy targets, and move on to take other prey. The great merchant companies, Vatta among them, had never persuaded the planetary governments that their trade served to combine and create a true interstellar space force capable of policing the spaceways. ISC had the resources, but refused to use them for anything but maintaining its own assets.
    Gerard pinged his implant to remind him to call Gracie Lane when he got to the city. Vatta’s spy service, Stavros called her, though her title on the books was special assistant to the chairman.
    “Expecting company?” the pilot asked suddenly.
    “What?” Gerard turned; his pilot was staring into the limpid afternoon sky.
    “My implant says the airfield’s scans have picked up two unidentified aircraft. Coming in from the east.”
    From the great ocean? That made no sense. The regular inter-island passenger plane for the mainland had already been and gone, and anyway they didn’t overfly this end of the island. East of Corleigh, the next inhabited island chain was the Merrill Archipelago, and its air traffic avoided the fifteen-hundred-kilometer gap, flying south to the Rim Reef, then back west along it. Between Merrill and here were only a few uninhabited chunks of rock, recently emerged and sometimes temporary volcanic peaks.
    His implant, not linked to the private airfield’s minimal scans, fought its way through the safety lockouts, but by the time he had access to the airfield scans, he could see the two tiny dots rapidly growing larger and hear their thin whine.
    “Gaspard, do you have any idea—” he began; then his implant squealed a warning relayed from the airfield scans. Weapons. Those little flying things had weapons—he whirled, started to run toward the office building beyond the airfield.
    “No! Sir, get down!” Gerard paid