A security problem where it concerned the manual. Tell na Hallan to keep a piece of information to himself forever, and she honestly had every confidence he’d try. But this was the lad who’d fathered a tc’a by backing a lift-cart.
And, no, she wasn’t going to accept him in the crew. Maybe that was what made her mad: that they weren’t The Pride, but that given time to work together, their way, her way, they might have become their own unique entity, nothing complicating their lives, no family divisions and feuds, no favoritisms. No mate problems. No jealousies.
And now there wasn’t a chance for that to happen. Now she had to do something different, in the incorporation of aunt Py’s ideas, aunt Py’s personal notions, that there wasn’t time to take part of.
Maybe that was why the Hallan matter touched her off. Maybe it was watching things go to blazes and knowing that Hallan’s slips weren’t harmless, that while they were trying to keep his skin whole and interrupting their life and death business to do it, he had become first a vulnerability, and now an obstacle to shaping her crew into what she wanted.
That might be it. That might be why she wanted to kill him, because a part of her had been seeing all along that he was that kind of danger.
And with the ship utterly still, the loaders silent, and the only sound the air whispering out of the ducts in the medical station … she called in all of them but Hallan Meras.
“Come in,” she said to Tarras, who hovered at the door. “Sit down. —Chihin, don’t sit up. Don’t push it.”
Chihin muttered and stuffed a pillow under her head, one-handed. “Nothing said about not sitting up.”
“Orders,” she said. “Mine. Nice if someone obeyed them. Just a wistful thought, understand.”
There was general quiet. A respectful moment of general quiet. But it wasn’t blame she wanted to start with. “First,” she said, “the assassin made more mistakes. None of us are dead. The truck—“
“I’m sorry,” Fala said faintly.
“It did work,” Hilfy said. “It wasn’t a stupid thought. Nothing we did was a stupid thought. But the unhappy fact is that we didn’t win because we were good. He lost because he fouled up— ifhe lost. We don’t know that he didn’t accomplish what he wanted. He certainly made a lot of noise. And he’s made us have to assume from now on that we’re somebody’s enemy.” She had the thin manual printouts in her possession. She handed them out. “This is procedure from now on. Eat and drink it and sleep with it, but don’t talk about it, don’t joke about it. Na Hallan’s not to get this.
He’s not to know about it. No copies go off this ship, in any form.”
Fala was frowning. Chihin was trying to leaf through hers, one-handed, the booklet propped on her knee. Tiar and Tarras gave theirs a dubious look.
“A general change?”
She didn’t intend to tell them, she hadn’t intended to admit it. But she didn’t intend to claim it for a daughter either, and you didn’t just rip away everything an experienced crew knew and tell them do differently without saying why. “It’s The Pride’s ops manual. I’m not supposed to have it. You’re not supposed to know it exists. Read it. Follow it. We can talk about it. And maybe we can think of better ways. But we’ve got to live long enough. This fixes responsibilities, it talks about how many decimal places in the reports, it mandates when we do certain maintenance, it talks about some technical details that are just Py’s idea, but let’s don’t quibble about that for now. She’s a gods-be stickler for some details you’re going to call stupid and you’re going to find some procedures in there that were illegal even before the peace. But my word is, memorize this, understand it, don’t mention it in front of outsiders, and I pointedly include na Hallan: he’s not staying on this ship and he can’t take this to another crew. Questions?”
“Are we going to Kefk?” Tarras asked.
“Very possibly,” Hilfy said. “I don’t see anything else to do.”