“Thing is, that commander hadn’t had experience with the onboard ansibles, the way the admiral had, and she couldn’t adjust her battle plans. The Ciudad ship left the group—” He glanced at Ky, but she didn’t yield; she had insisted that they not complicate the explanation with a personality and cultural conflict. “—and then returned to warn us that the other captain had been a traitor and that enemy ships were in the system, about to attack. He tried to intervene, delay them, and his ship was blown. The admiral and I had been arguing for a more open formation, but the Bissonet commander just didn’t trust the ansibles. So we were in tight when the enemy attacked, and only three ships made it out—one of the Bissonet ships chose to follow the admiral’s orders.”
“We were lucky,” Ky said. “Got off with minor damage. We had a full load-out of munitions, but that wasn’t the deciding factor. They expected us to do what their spy had watched us train for, only—I changed things.” She skipped over the fight at Gretna—not really a space battle—and the interval at Adelaide. “We picked up some more allies, Ransome’s Rangers—”
“Is that those fancy boys in all that gold and glitter?” Merced interrupted.
“Very competent ship handlers,” Ky said, ignoring the rudeness. “Invaluable in what came next. We came into a situation at an empty system, where a merc company—you’ve all heard of Mackensee, I assume—was holding a training exercise, and had been attacked by Turek’s force, which outnumbered them. We were able to break up their attack and then assist in the recovery of wounded. But a second battle occurred some days later, when an ISC fleet had arrived to deal with us for repairing the relay ansible in that system.”
“You fought an ISC fleet?” That with a tone of disbelief from Coufal’s military adviser, Major Steen.
“No,” Ky said. “Turek had come back with what he thought was enough ships to take our small force and the rest of the mercs. What he didn’t know was that the ISC force was due to arrive—”
“How’d you know that?”
“Later,” Ky said. “Suffice that I did. I also knew that a merc convoy was on its way to trade out training cadres. There was considerable confusion—the ISC commanders thought I was the enemy; the merc convoy knew better; Turek returned in force, using ships they’d gotten from Bissonet when they overran that system and they claimed to be something called Blueridge Defense. Luckily I’d been able to establish good communications with the mercs by placing one of my smaller ships—one of the Ransome’s Rangers—close to the merc ship and another as an observer and relay.” She had their full attention now, even troublemakers. “It was…interesting there for a bit.”
“We’ve been briefed on this onboard ansible thing,” Bocanegro’s adviser, Griffith, said. “I don’t understand how Turek ended up with some and we have some—and they aren’t what Vatta Enterprises is now selling, are they?”
“We still don’t know how Turek found out such things existed, though I believe there are people in ISC looking into that,” Ky said. “How we got them—found out about them at all—is that first ship I captured. There were a lot of them on it, along with other illicit cargo. I didn’t know what they were at first, and I certainly didn’t grasp their military significance until later. I didn’t know Turek had them—I didn’t even know who Turek was, or have any idea of the scope of the attacks he had made and was making.”
Griffith nodded. “I see that—so you think this ship was transporting them to Turek?”
“There’s evidence that Turek and this ship were working together, yes,” Ky said. She did not want to get into the tangled family mess that Osman Vatta represented. “Whether it was transporting them to Turek’s fleet from some manufacturing facility, or to Turek’s agents in various systems, we don’t know. I expect others were also involved. But the existence of onboard ansibles explains how Turek and the other pirate groups were able to coordinate their attacks and overcome planetary defense forces. We’ve always depended on lightspeed communications—and tactics in space required consideration of lightlag.”
“Does this mean we’re going to see instantaneous scan, real-time data, anytime soon?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” Ky said. “My concern is how to use the technology to advantage in combat.”
“Which brings up the point—just how different is it to fight with ansible communications among ships? That ought to improve control—” Major Steen again.
“It does,” Ky said. “I’ve been working on new tactical formations and moves, as has Turek’s force. What we’ve discovered is that he usually sends in more than one stealthed observer—small ships packed with scan and communications gear—positioned in different parts of the system he plans to attack. We have no post-battle analyses of his successful attacks, other than from Bissonet. There, he used his surveillance of System Defense training to determine when they would be lowest on munitions and fuel, least able to fight. He probably did the same in other systems, but we have no proof. Captain Ransome captured one of his observers in the Boxtop battle; it’s now part of this fleet.”
“What about security?”
“We’ve modified the ansibles we first captured. As it is now, we can listen in on Turek’s force—though we don’t know the language, or code, or whatever it is—and so far they’ve shown no indication they can listen in on our transmissions. But as with any ansible, these have both general and directed capability. When they’re talking with directed ship-to-ship, we can’t hear them. All we get are the general announcements, and possibly not all of those.”
Only three faces were still closed, showing resistance. Ky picked up the display controller and switched it on.
“Here’s a simulation of Boxtop, phase one,” she said. “This is taken from a combination of scan data from our ships, with some additional data Mackensee gave us, rendered in Poro-space, with Time Zero as our downjump. The blue icons are the Mackensee ships; red are Turek’s; green are ours. Notice these two in particular—” She made their icons blink. “These are the stealthed observers. Now, this is what we saw on scan at downjump—” On another display, she put that up. “If I hadn’t seen their attack formation before, I would not have expected it, because without real-time communication, those ships would shoot each other, not just the enemy.”
“So what did you do?” Captain Coufal asked.
“This.” Ky changed displays on the second area. “Because we had onboard ansibles, we could spread out, come in on different vectors.” She ran through the rest of the sequence, using the simulation to indicate weapons vectors, integrating scan data from all the ships. “Now, this is what we all need to be able to do. I know that some of your ships have only limited microjump capability and that all of them may have problems resulting from conversion to armed traders.”
“What kind of problems?” Captain Popelka asked.
“Structural. Those of you with beam weapons may have fatigue in the support members resulting from excess heat dissipation and inadequate coolant capacity. I’ll need a complete combat history for each ship—how many engagements, what load of weapons. For missile attacks, the ratio of firing between missile batteries. For beam weapons, total time of fire.”
“I never heard of that before—” Captain Merced said, scowling.
“I hadn’t, either. But Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation, which started its existence with conversions similar to ours, discovered the problem with its first ships, and warned me about mine. Tradeships just aren’t built to handle the additional stresses of sustained or repeated combat. When they did the engineering analysis, sure enough there were signs of stress in the mounts for the beam. Cascadia doesn’t have the capacity to check all your ships at once, and we dare not have so many out of commission, so you’ll need to help with a complete review of maintenance and repair, plus those details I just asked for, on your ship’s combat exposure. If you did live-fire exercises, include those as combat. Also any damage taken, with details on repair history. From that w
e’ll prioritize use of the facilities here for evaluation and—if time allows—repair.”
“Can structural strain be repaired?” Coufal asked.
“It’s possible to make temporary repairs,” Ky said. “But bringing these ships up to full equivalency with purpose-built military vessels would require complete rebuilding and would take a minimum of a year.”
“And we can’t wait that long,” Coufal said. “That’s obvious. So you want us to go into battle with ships that might fall apart, against military-grade ships? Isn’t that—” He paused.
Merced jumped in. “Stupid,” she said. “That’s what it is, stupid. Why didn’t the Rector send real warships, if that’s what’s needed?”
“The two of you,” Ky said, “with your rate of pirate capture, have probably got the most hours of weapons-use on your ships. I will certainly understand if you feel it’s too risky to take part in this venture.” Merced smiled and sat back, armed folded. Coufal looked watchful. “However, if you choose not to join, then your letters of marque will be rescinded, and your ships and yourselves will be held here until I deem it safe to let you travel again.”
Merced came upright, fists clenched. “You can’t do that! You’ve no right!”
“On the contrary, I have authorization from the Slotter Key Defense Department, from which your letters of marque were issued. The Moscoe Confederation government is unwilling to allow armed but unaligned vessels to operate in its space in a time of war.”
“Those—” Merced began.
Ky made a sharp gesture. “Silence!” Merced stopped, mouth open.
“This is Cascadia,” Ky said, glancing around the table. “Some of you, as new visitors here, may wonder if the Cascadians really enforce their strict laws of courtesy. I can assure you they do. A former Vatta Transport captain was executed here for culpable rudeness to an official. While I have no intention of enforcing the laws to their fullest when we are not in public, you should know that Cascadia has superb surveillance, and this compartment was supplied by the Cascadian government. Open contempt for the government will not be tolerated. It might get you killed, but—worse than that—it will imperil our mission.”
“But you’re saying we have to join you or be stuck here, with no ship and no income,” Cannelos said.
“That is unfortunately the situation,” Ky said. “It’s not a situation I manufactured. I didn’t ask the Rector to reassign you; we weren’t in contact when she did it. Like you, I think Slotter Key Spaceforce would have been the more appropriate choice.” The military advisers looked thoughtful; none of them spoke. The captains, their expressions ranging from barely suppressed fury to apparent resignation, also said nothing. Ky went on. “In order to brief you at all, I had to reveal the existence of not only onboard ansibles, but also the modification that made our communications secure. So far as we know, the pirates still don’t know about that—and thus those of you who do, and are not bound by the oath the rest of you will be asked to take, must not be free to chatter about it.”
“I don’t chatter!” Merced said.
“Captain, tell me why I should believe you. Or trust you.”
Merced glowered a moment, glanced from side to side at her fellow privateers, and—getting no encouragement—finally shook her head. “I suppose…I suppose you have no reason to, other than my…my record.”
“Your record,” Ky said, “emphasized that I would find you troublesome. I won’t quote it—”
To her surprise, Merced laughed. “Oh, go ahead. I wager everyone who knows me could come close without even looking at it. Stubborn?” Ky nodded. “Thought so. Defiant, resists advice, reckless, combative?”
Ky could not resist her own chuckle. “Pretty much. ‘Quarrelsome, disrespectful, hypersensitive, argumentative, reckless.’”
“You know I was kicked out of Spaceforce Academy in my second year thirty-one years ago,” Merced said. “Unable to maintain military courtesy under pressure, they said. I decked a senior cadet.”
“And you surely know I was kicked out,” Ky said.
“But you were in the Honor Squad. You were the goody-two-shoes kind; I heard about you. Vatta’s daughter, straight arrow—”
Ky leaned forward. “You can always spend the rest of this war in custody here, which will be no fun at all—”
Merced did not flinch. “I can’t be a straight arrow. I can’t be a butt-kisser. I can fight like blazes—anyone, anywhere, anytime—but I can’t just sit back and be given stupid orders by a—” She stopped again.
Ky pulled out her Rossi-Smith and laid it on the table in front of her. Utter stillness in the room; eyes shifted from her to Merced and back. She pushed up one sleeve, showing the sheath of one of her knives. “If you feel it necessary, Captain Merced,” she said, “we can adjourn for an hour to the gym assigned to our crews, and you can find out just how straight-arrow I am these days. This—” She touched the Rossi-Smith with her index finger. “—is my personal firearm. I won’t notch a bloodbeast-tusk grip, but I assure you it’s been blooded more than once. And this—” She touched the sheath. “—is just one of my personal knives. I gutted a man twice my weight with the big one, fighting hand-to-hand in zero gravity, to save my ship. So if my being too innocent worries you, get over it. One on one—” Ky looked Merced up and down. “—you wouldn’t stand a chance.” She had no doubt of that. The older woman was fit, and no doubt had won her share of brawls, but Ky had seen enough to know Merced lacked the training she herself had.
Ky—and she was sure everyone else—saw the realization come slowly to Merced’s expression that Ky was as formidable as she claimed. “It might be…fun…to find out,” Merced said. “But you said we had a war to fight.”
“We do,” Ky said. “Do you want in on the fight?”
“I suppose—” And then, as Ky continued to stare her down, Merced nodded. “All right, yes. I do. And I’ll try to be good—”
“No,” Ky said, correcting her. “I need your best performance, and your record says that comes not from being good in the traditional sense, but from being the wild card.”
Merced’s face lit up again. “I don’t have to stay in pokey formations?”
“Sometimes, but not always. When we get to specific battle plans, I’ll tell you about it. But now—” Ky looked around the table again, collecting everyone’s attention. This time it wasn’t hard. “—I need to know, from all of you, whether you can commit fully to this. It’s not like privateering. We intend to fight, and we must fight as a coordinated force.”
“I’m in,” Merced said before anyone else could. The others all nodded, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and not a few glances at the pistol as Ky picked it up, spun it for emphasis, and reholstered it.
After that long day, Ky headed back to Vanguard to see how Hugh was coming along in preparing the ship to go to refitting and acquire its modular CCC. She knew she would have to move to quarters on Cascadia Station—and Stella’s guest room was already full—but not tonight. She was tired but excited at the same time. At last there would be a joint force, and—she grinned to herself at the thought—she had handled the Slotter Key privateers, even Merced.
“Isn’t that Rafe Dunbarger?” Hera Gannett, Ky’s escort, spoke suddenly.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
R afe in a perfectly tailored business suit still looked like Rafe, but without the familiar edge. Was it just his clothes? He also looked older, and tired, and in some subtle way defeated. His smile, though, when he met her eyes, was much the same. Her heart raced.
Ky nodded to him, trying to damp the excitement she felt. “Rafe,” she said. She choked back the At last that would have been natural, along with the very unmilitary desire to grin like a fool. After all, she’d told a roomful of dignitaries that she had no feelings for him. She must not be seen by anyone, even her bodyguard and his, making the opposite obvious.
“Ky. I’m glad to see you,” he said. No mockery in the tone at all; he mi
ght have spoken to a casual acquaintance as calmly. She felt her heart lurch in her chest. Did he feel nothing? Was she being a silly schoolgirl?
“You are—?” Changed? No longer interested? Someone else entirely wearing Rafe’s face?
“Well,” he said. “Quite well. And you?” Still that tentative, gentle tone, as if she might shatter.
“I’m fine,” Ky said, slightly annoyed. He should know her better than that. What kind of game was he playing? “And your family?”
His eyes sagged shut briefly; his smile now seemed forced. “They’re much better. My father’s recovery is still progressing, albeit slowly. Penny—my sister—is working for the company now.”
They might have been distant acquaintances, politely reintroducing themselves. Ky felt a surge of impatience. Couldn’t they get beyond that? “So…you’re here for the conference?”
“Yes. ISC and the Nexus government are, as I’m sure you’ve been told, closely related. Nexus has depended on our—the ISC’s—fleet for a long time, and they are not pleased to find out it’s not very good. And as Stella may have told you, one of our subsidiaries here holds a license to manufacture the new ansibles on Cascadia. So my presence was considered necessary.” He said nothing more. The awkward moment lengthened; the obvious bodyguard at his side stared at Ky and then murmured something to Rafe, who startled. “Oh—sorry—Ky, I want you to meet Gary. He was instrumental in rescuing my family.”
Gary looked like a very hard case indeed. Ky could feel Hera Gannett’s alertness like a radiant heater. The man smiled suddenly, a remarkably open smile for someone so obviously dangerous. “Gary Marrin,” he said. “Rafe knew me a long time back. I have—had—a private security company; now I’m working mostly for him, something I would never have expected.”
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