Victory Conditions (18 page)

In front of her, hanging in the air, miniature scan screens came up. Ky switched from one mode to another. She could enlarge any screen; she could combine screens. In the simulation, the familiar acceleration cones—orange for approaching, blue for receding—showed ships in motion. She hunted through control hierarchies and found how to mark ship icons as enemy, unknown, friend.

“How much of this can be controlled by my implant?” she asked.

“Probably all of it,” he said. “We just need to get your implant and this set of subroutines melded. Now—if you find the visual background confusing, try reducing the translucency.”

Ky thumbed the control again, and the canopy slowly darkened; the displays seemed brighter now, and she could still see Dowitch—she continued until the displays seemed to hang in space as vast as that between stars.

“Sound still good?” he asked.

“Fine,” Ky said. “I’ve never seen anything this elaborate—”

“The command chair’s based on what they use at Moray,” he said. “You’ve got direct feeds for communication—we’re still figuring out how to connect the onboard ansible, though. It’s easy in the other ships, but here we want to tie it in to the one on the bridge but have independent use optional.”

“Have you asked Toby?”

“Your cousin’s ward? No…I thought he was still supposed to be restricted.”

“I can spring him—and he knows everything about ansible hookups.”

“Fine…but for now let’s go over the safety features.” Dowitch explained the conditions under which the CCC would close automatically from the rest of the ship, and when the command seat would seal. Temperature, pressure, acceleration, atmosphere: some of those, Ky realized, would not be met unless
Vanguard
blew. She was not going to think about that.

Back out of the command seat’s enclosure, Ky called Stella and told her they needed someone—Toby, for preference—right away, to link the onboard ansible.

“And while I have you—what about ansibles for spares, and to take to Moray?”

“You’d have to clear that with Moscoe Defense,” Stella said. “We’re putting them in as fast as we can.” She started explaining more than Ky wanted to hear about the difficulties involved in tooling up for a completely new product and maintaining quality control as production scaled up through set points that required unit expansion. Ky tried to listen patiently, but finally interrupted.

“Bottom line, how many units can we have?”

“I just told you,” Stella said. “It depends on Moscoe Defense.”

At least there Ky dealt with someone who didn’t want to explain everything, who had answers.

“Ansible units for Moray?” he said. “Sure—that’s been dealt with at the policy level. Moray asked for a demo model but will purchase enough for their new-built ships, and pay in ships. It’s lucky your Slotter Key contingent are privateers; they have more cargo capacity. For safety, we’d prefer to ship no more than five per vessel.”

“You’re sending that many?” Ky asked. “What about technicians to install them?”

“Oh, there’s a manual now, standard format training materials. Anyone who can install a standard comunit can do it. We’re providing technical assistance as each is installed, and after that each ship’s communications specialist will be able to help install others at Moray. All you have to do is give the orders.”

After the struggle to keep her few ships supplied, this seemed unreal…surely it wouldn’t continue. The rest of supply—food, munitions, water, cultures for environmental chambers—went almost as smoothly, but only because, Ky suspected, her newly commissioned Supply Division used the same tactics as they had in their privateer days. Gordon Martin, on
Vanguard,
had counterparts on all the other privateer ships and on the Cascadian ships committed to their fleet. Martin had not wanted to command Supply; a Cascadian officer, Commander Michel Moscoe-Corian, held that post, and supplies poured onto the docks in what Ky considered astonishing profusion.

“How are we paying for all this?” she asked him one day.

“Paying?” he said. One of his bushy eyebrows rose, and a sly grin crooked the corner of his mouth. “Did you think you were supposed to pay for something?”

Ky grinned back. “Are you trying to give us a bad rep, Commander?”

“No, ma’am. Never that. But when Moscoe Defense tells me to be sure the ships are fully supplied—well, I’m just following orders, see? They didn’t give me a budget, exactly.”

“A free hand, then?” Ky asked.

“Not exactly,” he said. “More like—prove it’s necessary. Anything doubtful, get approval for. Now—just between you and me—I might not have the same definition of
doubtful
they do. And they know you’re not trained by them—and over half your ships aren’t ours, so we don’t necessarily know what they need.”

“Did you ever consider privateering?” Ky asked.

“Me? My family would have had a fit,” he said. “And this way there’s no question about the legality of what I’m doing.”

Ky laughed. “It would be rude to suggest anything else, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, Admiral, it would. I’m glad you recognize that, because I would hate to see such a fine officer err in matters of professional courtesy.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ky said. “I’m supposed to meet a Major Anson in about an hour, something about personnel transfers—”

“Bobby Anson? You’ll like him. You need more crew, don’t you?”

“Yes.” She had been short of crew even before reaching Cascadia, where several more of the civilians on
Sharra’s Gift
and
Vanguard
had asked to leave. With need for a fleet staff and crew in the CCC, she’d had to ask Moscoe Defense to help.

“He’ll do you right. People are clamoring for a chance to be on your ship.”

“I want to talk to my mother,” Zori said to Stella during breakfast, the day after Ky’s visit. She had wakened with that thought foremost. Whatever her mother said to her, she herself had to try to make up for years of neglect.

“Are you sure?” Stella asked.

“Yes. What Ky said—it’s not all about me. I’m hurting her more by not seeing her.” Zori took a swallow of juice. “I didn’t think of that. Is she at our—the house?”

“No, she’s staying at Sprucewood; it’s in the directory.” Stella looked as if she wanted to say more but hesitated. Then she went on. “She’s been talking to her relatives, Zori, and she’s had some disappointments. She wanted to move back downplanet—”

“Where the family estate is,” Zori said, nodding. She looked at Toby. “I don’t want to—I don’t want to leave Toby.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about it,” Stella said. “She’ll tell you, I’m sure, but her family’s being difficult. Something about your father and the estates.” She glanced at the clock. “I’ve got to get to the office; feel free to invite her over here.”

Zori stared at the contact number a long time before calling.

“Zori, I don’t blame you.” Her mother wore a simple blue dress and no jewelry.

“I blame myself. I should have seen…I should have known…”

“And then he would have hurt you. Zori, you were a tiny child…it was better as it was.”

“I can’t believe that. You were hurt—”

“You don’t want to believe that. Zori, listen to me. This was not the worst life, and you can have a better one. Maybe with Toby, maybe with someone else. You deserve it.”

“And what about you? I should take care of you—”

“No.” Her mother shook her head. “I am an adult. It’s my job to take care of myself. I’ll be fine—”

“You won’t…what will you do?”

Her mother laughed, a genuine laugh. “For one thing, I won’t let you run my life…Zori, relax. Please. It’s true that my family are angry with me right now, and they don’t want me back home—back onplanet. But I still have some resources. I’ll get by, and you’ll finish school—”

“You should move in here,” Zori said. “Stella would let you—”

“No, you should move in with me,” her mother said. “Not because I want to keep you away from Toby—he is indeed a very nice boy, quite suitable—but because you and I are a family, all we have left of what we had. Yet we don’t know each other that well, and we need to.”

Zori thought about it. “Would we go back to the house?”

“No. Never. That life is over. I’ve had all your things moved into storage; we can rent an apartment—”

She didn’t want to move. She wanted to stay near Toby forever. She liked Stella. But it was hard, too, living in the same apartment and yet not ever doing any of the things they weren’t supposed to do. And Stella probably wanted her to move out…

“I won’t force you, Zori, but I think it would help you. And me.”

“I think so, too,” Zori said. She reached out, and her mother was there, holding her, both of them crying a little, but more in relief than pain.

Stella, at the office, stared at her comunit and bit her lip. Zori was talking to her mother. She, Stella, was not talking to her own mother. She had to. She knew she had to. The white-hot rage she’d felt when she’d first learned of her true parentage had long since died down to a sullen glow.

But that still left the dilemma. How honest could she be with a woman who had not been honest with her? She no longer wanted to hurt Helen, but healing the breach between them would require honesty from both of them. Could Helen stand that?

She checked the time zone for Vatta headquarters on Slotter Key. Early evening now. Helen might be out to dinner, or shopping or…home.

She could not let Zori outdo her in courage. She opened a circuit to the system ansible and placed the call.

As the work on
Vanguard
neared completion, Ky’s days grew ever busier. She needed to be in at least three places at once; she wanted to get the ships that were spaceworthy into training, she had to be available for conferences with Moray and Moscoe government officials, and she was sure that the admiral’s presence would speed work on
Vanguard.
Argelos and Pettygrew, because they had been in combat using the shipboard ansibles, took over much of the training. Ky had daily reports, and logged in by ansible whenever she could, but she knew she needed experience in commanding from the CCC. Yet she could not spare the time to be ferried to and from the dockyard to sit in the command seat while the others worked on their assignments.

Finally,
Vanguard
came back to Cascadia. Ky moved her gear back aboard. Her formerly spacious quarters were now the size of the captain’s cabin on
Gary Tobai,
but she didn’t care about that. She wanted to run an exercise from the CCC as soon as possible. Though Turek had not sent another broadcast, she knew his next attack could not be far away.

“Those ships at Moray will be within days of completion by the time we can get there,” Ky said to her assembled captains, some on Cascadia Station and some attending by ansible. “We can’t afford more than two days of exercises; they’ll be intense. We can sleep in FTL.” A few groans, but no real resistance. In the presence of Cascadian ships and officers, the privateers had become competitive ship handlers, determined to show that privateers weren’t sloppy merchanters. She passed out the updated information she had on Moray’s own defense system, the basic tactics used, the contact codes they’d been given. Moray Defense used clusters: two maniples per cluster, a cluster per sector, scattered around the system and dependent on the system ansible for rapid communication. “Moscoe’s given us the entire Sector Twelve to play in; we’ll rendezvous there at 1800.”

“Today?” Coufal asked.

“Today,” Ky said. It was 1400. “Dismissed.”

She was as exhausted as the others when she finally gave the order to form up for jump to Moray System. But in those two days she had come to feel that the forty-six ships under her command were functioning as a fighting unit, even the transports. Moray’s last report before they entered FTL was that construction proceeded normally and no threat showed.

“A lot can happen in twenty days,” Hugh Pritang said.

“We’re as ready as we can be,” Ky said.

CHAPTER

TEN

Moray System, Tobados Yards: Military Division

Lozar Phittanji, Assembler Third on the second shift of number thirty dock, headed home at the end of the shift with nothing more on his mind than whether Jari, his wife, had brought home a fish for the betrothal feast. Though he would never rise above Assembler Third—as a devout Miznarii, he refused to consider a cranial implant, and more senior grades required implants—he had a comfortable life, especially now that ship orders were up.

Besides, he had that small but very welcome stipend from the Faithful, making the betrothal feast possible. And for nothing, really—for nothing but attaching a few tiny datadots to each ship he worked on.

“It is nothing harmful,” the Amadh of their local congregation had told him. “It will only tell Miznarii who have a little reader that the ship was partly built by Miznarii, that’s all. You can see for yourself.”

Lozar had taken the reader he was offered and passed it over the dot, and the message came up—the quotation from the Book that ordered the people to use their own brains and not partake of machinery, and the words “This vessel contains work made by the mind and hand of True Humans, the Faithful.”

So Lozar had attached many such dots to the ships he’d worked on without anyone noticing: one near the main hatch, one near the bridge. Yes, it was against the rules to attach any extraneous materials to the ship, but what harm could it do? Even if the infidels had readers and found the dots, even if they determined who had placed them, his conscience was clear.

“Hey, Lozar, wait up!” Lozar glanced back. Gerry and David, both on his shift but non-Miznarii, were almost jogging toward him. Though they were senior, thanks to their disgusting implants, he had come to consider them friends.

“Didn’t I hear you say your daughter’s betrothal dinner was tonight?” Gerry asked.

“Man, you can’t face something like that right after work. C’mon. We’ll stand you a round at the Rigger’s Friend. Least we can do.” David patted Lozar’s shoulder.

“But Jari told me to come straight home—”

“Wives always do,” David said. “Bet you she doesn’t really expect it, though. Mine never did. You’re facing the in-laws, right? You need a little fortification. Jari doesn’t really want you around when she’s putting the final touches to the dinner. What time is it for, anyway?”

“Twenty hundred…later than usual because it’s formal…”

“Then you have plenty of time.” David hung an arm across Lozar’s shoulders. “And I promise, we’ll see you get home in time to change and all that.”

Despite David’s assurance, Lozar left the Rigger’s Friend so late that he had to take the shorter back way through a service corridor—not strictly legal—and Jari glared when he came in.

She was not nearly as annoyed as the substitute candy salesman at the cart parked in D-ring, Corridor 34—on the direct route between Lozar’s work site and his apartment, the route he took almost every night.

Paddy Kendelmann looked at the daily statistics with half a mind on his son’s school performance. He’d paid for the enhanced student module for the boy’s implant, but Paul still struggled with math, and the teacher talked about special testing and learning disabilities. Lisa had been furious, blaming the teacher and Paddy alternately. If only he’d been put in the other class; if only Paddy had bought that enhanced module the year before…

Now, that was odd. He pushed aside the problem of Paul’s math performance and squinted at the readout, where Dispatch had flagged certain entries. On a station this size, twenty deaths in a standard day, plus or minus three, was about right. Most were natural or accidental, the causes obvious: the very old, the sick, the accidents that will happen anytime serious construction work is going on, the occasional drunken brawl or domestic dispute ending in death-by-intent, though not nearly the level it used to be.

But the past twenty-four hours had produced twenty-nine deaths, a notable bump. And here were three unexplained deaths in previously healthy men of early middle age. Not accidents, not assaults, no real reason…all sudden deaths, dead before the medics could arrive and do anything. Heart failure. Heart failure, in men so young, men whose last medical checkup had been clean? Modern diagnostics didn’t miss things like that. No wonder Dispatch had flagged them for investigation.

And all worked in the yards. Coincidence? It had to be coincidence, didn’t it?

But five lines down he saw another. A woman’s sudden collapse in a public place, death too quick for medical intervention. How common was that? Forty-year-old women—she was, or had been, an accountant, Paddy noted, in the same firm one of the men had worked for—didn’t have sudden death from undiscovered heart disease. Not in this era. Not with mandatory health tests…

Lisa always said he had a streak of paranoia, and right now that streak was buzzing up and down his spinal cord, raising the hair on his neck. He initialed the autopsy requests, marked them URGENT, and sent them on. The dead Miznarii’s family would no doubt try to prevent the autopsy, but the law was on his side.

Could this be related to the alert they’d had three tendays before? He glanced at the master schedule. They’d been briefed that an attack might come when a frame of ships neared completion, and Frame Six was within days of completion…they were expecting the customer to arrive to take delivery.

He looked at the list again. The dead Miznarii had worked on Frame Six and Frame Five both, as assemblers. Another had worked only on Frame Five. But the other dead man had been a specialist in control systems, and he had worked on Frame Six.

Paddy pulled up the man’s record. Banamir Attanda, unmarried, no close relatives in Tobados Yards station. No obvious legal problems…but his financial records were peculiar. Everyone had had problems in the dearth of ship orders a few years past, but his balance had sunk faster than most…faster than some married men with children to support. It couldn’t be drugs, not with his performance reviews. Women? Or gambling? It had to be one of those, Paddy thought.

Surveillance videos in the local gambling hells showed Banamir’s face at table after table. The uneasy feeling intensified. Gamblers—serious gamblers—were easy to manipulate. They always thought they had a system, but gambling led to debts—often large ones—and too often debts led to embezzling.

Paddy shook his head as the files opened to show a familiar pattern. Embezzling…then blackmail.

The question was, what had Banamir Attanda used to pay his gambling debts?

Vanguard
dropped out of FTL flight at Moray System on schedule and in the approach vector Moray’s defense command had requested, a low-relative-velocity insertion at a high angle to the ecliptic, far out on the fringes of the system, four light-hours from the primary. Ky, in the new combat command center, stared at the duplicate scan displays. She felt isolated, her familiar bridge crew replaced by specialists, some borrowed from Cascadia, on duplicate scan stations. The only familiar face was Master Sergeant Pitt, who’d asked permission to observe here. Major Douglas had elected to observe from the bridge, at Hugh Pritang’s invitation.

As scans cleared from downjump turbulence, ship icons appeared, most—with wide uncertainty bars—clustered near the fourth planet and its shipyards. Until they had more information, all the icons were neutral yellow. Behind
Vanguard,
more and more of Ky’s fleet dropped out, their two stealthed observation ships tucked neatly between larger vessels. Each ship reported in, and a broad vee of green icons built behind her. They had kept excellent formation; Ky transmitted congratulations to all of them by shipboard ansible, then turned to the communications officer.

“Report our arrival to Cascadia.”

He shook his head. “We’re not getting an ansible signal, Admiral.”

Ky looked at him. “No system ansible at all?”

“Nothing. I’ve pinged it…we wouldn’t get a reply to that within a couple of hours if the booster tech is down, but I’m thinking it’s something else. I can use the shipboard—”

“First IDs coming up,” one of the scan techs reported. “Uh-oh. Blueridge is a red-tag, right?”

“They beat us to it,” Ky said. “Use our onboard ansible; report that to Cascadia.” That leisurely visit with the Mackensee commanders, that trip back to Cascadia, the time necessary to transfer ansibles from
Vanguard
to the other privateers, to install the CCC in
Vanguard,
all had given the enemy time to strike its logical target. They’d warned Moray, but a few tendays wasn’t time enough to develop a plan against a massive invasion, especially when the enemy had onboard ansibles.

“If they have the ships—” someone muttered.

“All right…steady on. We need to know more before we charge in.” Across the screen, icons flared to red. Some remained yellow. Those could be neutrals, or natives, or enemy not yet identified. The new military-grade battle analysis computer, a gift from Cascadia, should give them better real-time data on the flow of battle…including the location and identification of outlying ships, presented in a 3-D holographic display. Ky wasn’t sure she trusted it; the unit had been purpose-built to work with onboard ansible data as well as conventional scan data, and they’d had so little time to test it—

“Anomaly here,” the scan tech pointed. “Mass consistent with small ship. Could be stealthed observer.”

“Probably is,” Ky said. “What’re we picking up on communications channels?”

“We’ve got just one ansible tuned to the pirates’ channel set. A lot of chatter, can’t understand it. Lightspeed com will be old—”

Lightspeed would be, most likely, Moray’s own defense services. “Capture all we can, put someone on it for history.” History might tell her how this had happened. She’d warned Moray Defense, before her fleet left Cascadia, to be alert for attacks; they’d said they were prepared, but they had refused to release most of their plans until she arrived. Prudent, but now another complication. She could not coordinate with them without knowing specifics.

She glanced at Yamini and Douglas, tiny icons on her command chair display. “Recommendations?” They had insisted on preparing two battle plans for a similar situation: arriving to find the pirates either already in possession of the yards, or just arrived in the system.

“More data,” Yamini said.

“I’d say plan C-one, in ten minutes, to collect a little more data,” Douglas said.

“Two hours,” Yamini said. “We’ll have a better picture—”

“In two hours, it could be over,” Douglas said. “I interpret the present ship positions as indicating combat ongoing for at least four hours. Already, microjumping into position puts us at risk of weapons tracks. As well, if they have stealthed observers, as we think, the pirates now know where we are; if we sit here—”

Ky nodded. Space congested rapidly as a battle progressed, filling with the lethal detritus that included ordnance, fragments of blown ships and other structures…

“C-one, but twenty minutes,” she said. “Preceded by a two-light-minute dispersal jump…” If any of the pirate ships weren’t fully engaged in the battle, if Turek had a reserve, she needed to get her force into unpredictable motion quickly. It would make recombination more difficult, but not beyond her captains’ abilities. The real problem—the one no one mentioned as the ships jumped on her order—was the possibility of jumping into the path of weapons fired hours before. “And we need to let Moray know who we are, even if they don’t get the word for hours.”