Command Decision

by Elizabeth Moon

  Good news, then: that could put people to sleep. Stella seemed to be doing well, and Toby. She grinned, thinking of Toby and Rascal. Quincy had said Toby was ferociously bright; she remembered that he had helped install the defensive suite, and then had figured out that it was defective and how to fix it. Thinking of Toby brought up the memory of Rafe, and Rafe was definitely not a soporific thought. Her implant provided a crisper image of that rakehell face than memory could provide. Where was he now? Had he made it safely to his family? Had they rejected him again? Their last conversation—his story about what made him what he was, that attempted abduction, his defense of himself and his sister, the consequences—ran through her mind, word for word. What a thing to have in common with the man you…well, not loved. Were intrigued by, maybe. Felt more alive around, maybe.

  “Captain?”

  Sighing, Ky fumbled around the head of the bed for the com button. “Yes,” she said. “What is it?” She’d been lying in bed for three solid hours, the chronometer told her, and she hadn’t slept yet.

  “Signal that Bassoon relayed to us. ISC sent another message and said to disregard the previous ones.”

  “Did they say why?”

  “No. Just that.”

  “That’s odd,” Ky said. “A relief, but odd. I wonder what’s going on with them.” Suddenly she felt sleepy; she must have been more concerned about ISC’s possible intervention than she’d admitted to anyone, even herself. “Thanks for letting me know,” she said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  Next shift, she woke feeling much less anxious about the days until the Mackensee relief convoy arrived. If the pirates had been planning to move in after a successful attack, ambush the returning Mackensee convoy, either they had changed their minds or…she didn’t think they would attack now. Not that she planned to let down her guard.

  After breakfast, she visited Master Sergeant Pitt in the quarters assigned to the Mackensee refugees. “I’m going to visit the wounded; I thought you’d like to come along,” she said.

  “Thank you, Captain,” Pitt said.

  As they walked, Ky asked, “How are your people doing? Anything I should know?”

  “My best card player won some money off some of yours; if that’s a problem—”

  “No,” Ky said. “Unless they end up owning the ship.”

  “I don’t have much else for them to do, you see,” Pitt said. “If you have any lengthy chores—I’m sure there are things you don’t want our people to see or touch, but we’ve cleaned the spaces assigned to us beyond our own standards—not that they were dirty…”

  “We have a gym, you know,” Ky said. “There’s plenty of room for them to exercise; I wouldn’t want to expend our ammunition on the firing range, but you could use those facilities in rotation with my people.”

  “That would be a help, Captain,” Pitt said. “They’re good people, but just sitting around is not what they do best.”

  Ky paused and tapped into the ship’s internal com. “Hugh,” she said. “Would you check the schedule for the gym, and put the Mackensee troops on the rotation? Master Sergeant, how many would you want to send at a time?”

  “Half of them,” Pitt said.

  “Two groups,” Ky said to Hugh.

  “Will do,” he said. “Do you want me to contact you about this, or Master Sergeant Pitt?”

  “Me—she’s with me now; we’re going to visit their wounded.”

  “A few minutes, Captain,” Hugh said. “I’ll have a list of what machines are available and all that. Firing range, too?”

  “No, not that. But everything else.”

  In the sick bay, two of the wounded were now in bed, wired and tubed extensively. One was conscious, only lightly sedated. Ky let Pitt approach him while she spoke to the medical staff.

  “He’s in the best shape,” the surgeon reported. “He needs some tank time, and I expect they’ll want to revise some of the emergency repairs, but he’ll be out of bed in another twenty-four hours. The other one—” He glanced over at the bed where soft snores indicated the inhabitant was asleep. “—had some implant damage and he hasn’t come back to full consciousness. The medbox can sustain him, but we think he’s just aware enough to start physical therapy. The others—the chest injury’s in fast-heal mode; he’ll be in the box another three days, and of course he’s kept sedated there. The one with the pulped legs—we’ve been in contact with the Mackensee medical team on Metaire, and they want us to try to save as much as we can for direct tissue transfer after implanting limb-buds. We’re doing our best, but I’m concerned that one of the legs is developing anoxia. See here—” He put up a visual that meant nothing to Ky, bands of color on an outlined leg shape. “I’m going to tell Doctor Santino on Metaire this morning that I think amputation is necessary. He may want a transfer back to their facility, now that things have settled down. I presume that won’t be a problem?”

  Only a matter of microjumping a couple of light-hours and then easing into position near enough for Metaire’s shuttles to make the transfer quickly…but that wasn’t the medical team’s problem. The communications lag might be. “You know we’ve moved away from Metaire,” she said. “Will his condition be stable long enough for them to reply, or do we need to reposition the ship now?”

  “I need an answer within an hour,” the surgeon said. “Or it may be too late to do anything but amputate.”

  “We’ll move the ship, then,” Ky said. She turned to Pitt. “We’re going to move closer to Metaire,” she said. “Our surgeon needs to talk to your surgeons about some of your people. You can stay here if you like; I need to get to the bridge.”

  The precision microjump was no problem, with all the practice Ky had insisted on, and Ky reassured Metaire the moment they reappeared nearby that the move was not in response to an enemy threat. When she explained the circumstances, one of Metaire’s surgeons and his medical team boarded a shuttle; as Ky had Vanguard ease toward Metaire, the shuttle approached.

  Ky went down to the lock to meet them, wondering if there were any way a shuttle bay could be retrofitted to Vanguard’s hull. This business of having to transfer personnel by tube made it obvious that Vanguard was just a converted cargo ship. The big cargo bay hatches would admit a shuttle…but that’s where her missile batteries and missile storage were. What she needed was a purpose-built warship, designed from the start for war. What she really needed was a government or two to fund such a purchase.

  “We want to evaluate him ourselves,” the surgeon said after Ky greeted them.

  “Of course,” she said, leading the way to sick bay. “This is Doctor Moshalla—” The doctors eyed each other a moment, then dove into medical jargon where Ky could not follow. She returned to the bridge and checked in with the other ships.

  “We haven’t found any other stealthed ships,” Ransome reported. “We’re fairly sure there aren’t any, as I’ve had one of our people monitoring the channels the pirates used, and they’ve been silent.”

  “Excellent,” Ky said. “Though that doesn’t prove no one’s here, it does indicate that if someone is, whatever they know isn’t going to the enemy.” Or that they knew the enemy was somewhere in FTL flight, on the way. “Keep monitoring, just in case. You have a crew aboard that stealthed ship you boarded, right?”

  “Yes, I do, but if you could give us a relief crew—it’s pretty unpleasant over there, they say. A bit of a hovel, actually. They cleaned it up as best they could, but it’s not up to the standards of my ships.”

  Ky considered. Mackensee were the ones with spare people, but she didn’t want to give them possession of a ship she felt entitled to. But if she let Pitt’s people do some of the work aboard Vanguard, she could send a prize crew to…whatever its name was. She’d want to have Pettygrew’s tech Lattin along, too, to modify the ansible and see what kinds of scan the pirates had been using.

  “We’re about to do a medical transfer,” she said. “When that’s done, I’ll come out and put my
people aboard her with thanks for your efforts in the meantime.”

  “That’s fine, Captain Vatta. We’re honored to be associated with you, and we will keep the ship secure until you arrive.”

  Before she could contact Pettygrew to ask for the loan of Dozi Lattin, a message came up from sick bay that the surgeons had decided to transfer two of the Mackensee casualties back to Metaire. Preparing them for transport took over an hour; Ky called Pettygrew and Argelos both, and each agreed to lend her one or two people. Argelos recommended his Slotter Key military adviser for temporary captain.

  “Will he do what I tell him?” Ky asked. She had still not met the man who had been so negative about her in the beginning.

  “Oh, yes,” Argelos said. “He’s admitted he misjudged you, based on biased reports after you…left the Academy. He was there only one term before being yanked away to be an adviser to privateers. His name’s Yamini.”

  The name meant nothing to Ky. “I’d still like to meet him—at least see his face on the screen.”

  “Of course,” Argelos said. “Bistaf, come over here. Captain Vatta wants to talk to you face-to-face.”

  The face on the screen was only vaguely familiar. Ky’s father’s implant had no catalog of Spaceforce Academy’s faculty; she finally remembered that he had been a new tactics instructor her last term. No wonder he’d had a negative view of her. “I’m Major Yamini,” he said. “You won’t remember me—I didn’t have you in class.”

  “You taught junior tactics, didn’t you?” Ky asked. “You were in the catalog…”

  “Yes. I need to apologize for my attitude, Captain Vatta. When Captain Argelos first told me you were trying to get an organization of privateers together, I thought—well, I thought you were as wild and irresponsible as they’d said when you were asked to resign.”

  “My question now is whether you feel able to follow my orders, if you are chosen to captain the stealthed ship we found,” Ky said.

  “Absolutely, Captain Vatta. I have no qualms at all now. And I do have skills you might find useful: that ship’s computer may well contain information about the pirates’ tactical capacity. I know that so far we have seen them use only fairly simple—but effective—attacks, but if they have something else in their arsenal, I might be able to find and analyze it.”

  “Very well,” Ky said. She was glad not to have to give up any of her own bridge personnel except a pilot. “When we’ve completed this medical transfer, Vanguard will jump to your position; we’ll pick you up. Then we’ll go get Lattin, Pettygrew’s talented communications tech, and the environmental tech he’s offered me, and we’ll take you all out to the ship. I expect to be making your transfer within the hour; I look forward to meeting you in person.”

  “And I you, Captain Vatta,” he said.

  Ky went on to set up the transfer time with Captain Pettygrew; he offered instead to jump out to the stealthed ship and transfer Lattin directly.

  “I worry about clustering our ships like that,” Ky said. “But if you want to do it now, that’s a good idea. Just be sure to tell Ransome that you’re coming in, so he can alert his skeleton crew.”

  “I’ll do that,” Pettygrew said. “Then you want me back on station, I presume?”

  “Yes,” Ky said. “I know nothing seems to be happening, but that’s when things do.”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Aboard Vanguard

  Even with precision microjumps and the shipboard ansibles, it took the rest of that day to complete all the transfers and get everyone back on station. But Lattin reported that the enemy prize had a complete suite of advanced scan, passive, active, longscan, and nearscan. “Everything you could want,” she said. “All wavelengths—I’d say they spent a fortune on it, except that it’s clearly stolen from somewhere. There’s a lot of physical damage to what were probably the serial numbers.”

  “What about the ship herself?” Ky asked.

  “They did something screwy to the beacon,” Lattin said. “Of course it’s damped—all stealth tech does that—but I don’t believe the current ID as it shows in the onboard is correct. There’s a…it’s kind of technical—”

  “Never mind,” Ky said. “But you think it’s not the real ID?”

  “No. But I can’t tell if it’s a stolen ship chip or one they programmed themselves. Most beacon readers won’t pick up what I’m talking about, but you really should have it re-registered with a new chip somewhere.”

  “I intend to,” Ky said. “Can you tell if the rest of the AI is reliable?”

  “I’m running checks on it now, Captain Vatta. Captain…er…Yamini…he asked the same thing. He said he wanted to be sure the ship didn’t do something weird on its own. Oh—do you want me to check the stealth function?”

  “Not at present,” Ky said. “It’s working now; let’s leave it alone. Just get that ansible rigged to our frequencies so we can use it without the pirates finding out.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Lattin said.

  Ky looked at the arrangement of the ships in the system plot again before she went back to her cabin. The stealthed ship had moved, on her orders, and now was far from where the pirates had stationed it—and where they would presumably expect to find it if they invaded. No single attack, however lucky, could take out all her ships at once. Metaire was still in danger, but Ky had persuaded Colonel Kalin to keep the shields up constantly.

  Once in her cabin, she fell asleep almost at once, only to wake in the middle of that shift to a terrible stench that almost made her gag. “Light!” she said; the bedlamp came on. She looked at the bed, half expecting to see a piece of spoiled fruit, but nothing…the inside of her head seemed to tingle and itch, the smell was so strong.

  Her implant popped up a message: CONTACT Y/N?

  Implant. Implanted ansible. Rafe…he’d said he wouldn’t ever use it, but who else could it be? A quick fumble through that folder in the implant and she knew what she should do. But not before securing the ship.

  “Hugh,” she said, when she had him on the intercom. “I need you to meet me in my office.”

  “What’s up, Captain?”

  “I can’t discuss it. I’ll be there momentarily.”

  By the time Hugh arrived, she was dressed and had splashed cold water on her face. Hugh looked worried, unsurprisingly. “Are you sick, Captain? Has anyone…done anything?”

  “I’m not sick. But I will be…unavailable for a time, and you needed to know that. I can’t explain it…not now, anyway. You will need to take over until I am…back. I’ll let you know. I’m sorry, that’s all I can say, and I need to hurry—”

  “Are you going to try to change implants or something? You really should have medical assis—”

  “It’s not that. I can’t say. I could have done this without telling you but that wouldn’t have been right…”

  “All right, Captain. I won’t press you further, but…I get the strong feeling someone should know what’s going on.” With that he left.

  Ky secured the door, retrieved the power cables Rafe had given her, and followed the implant’s directions. She did not like the idea of plugging into the ship’s power supply—it took an effort of will to make herself close the connection.

  And he was there, as if he were standing beside her. The stench faded, replaced by a smell rather like wet leaves. As before, the urgency of his transmission felt like a shout inside her head.

  “Ky! Are you there? Answer me!”

  “Not so loud!”

  “Sorry. You do have volume control…”

  She found that and brought the volume down to a manageable level. “I thought you said you wouldn’t ever use this thing,” she said.

  “Except in a dire emergency,” he said. “Which this may well be. Are you alone?”

  “Yes. Hugh’s in command; I told him—”

  “About the ansible?” Rafe’s voice sharpened.

  “No. That he was in charge and I was unavailable; he’s p
uzzled but coping. What is it?”

  “A long and miserable story, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to listen to quite a bit of it.”

  “The story of your life,” Ky murmured.

  “Something like that, yes,” Rafe said. “I’ll try to keep it as short as I can. When I got to Nexus, I found that my family was missing, and someone had a great interest in anyone who inquired about them. It took me an unfortunate length of time to figure out what had happened, find them, and arrange a hostage rescue.”

  “Hostage!”

  “Yes. My parents and my remaining sister had been abducted; her husband had been killed. My delay in reaching them…resulted in the loss of my sister’s baby. Killed by the abductors in front of her and my parents.”

  Ky could think of nothing to say. After a moment, Rafe went on.

  “My father was badly injured; he suffered neurological damage and is in rehab. He wanted me to take over as CEO of ISC; the Board agreed, though some of them probably wish they hadn’t. You need to know that the person who instigated the abduction of my family was Lew Parmina—I believe you knew him.”

  “Lew—but he came to visit us. My father brought him home; he liked him—”

  “So did my father, to his cost. I don’t know whether he was involved in what happened to your family, but I know what he did to mine. Unfortunately, my father got it into his head that Parmina’s friendship with your family made your family suspect. He has drawn a line from Osman Vatta’s possession of shipboard ansibles, through your insistence on using them, your aunt’s repair of the Slotter Key ansible—”

  “She didn’t—”

  “Our sources say she authorized it; that’s enough for him. And then there’s Stella’s pursuit—now successful—of patent rights to the improved version of shipboard ansibles. He’s convinced himself that Vattas were involved in Parmina’s treachery. I’m hoping that as his recovery proceeds, he’ll think more clearly and understand you had nothing to do with it, but right now—he is a problem, and the people in ISC who were his people are a problem. More immediately, there’s an ISC fleet—fourteen ships—headed for the system you’re in, with intent to kill or capture you.”