Victory Conditions

by Elizabeth Moon

  The ships Turek had left behind still seemed intent on attacking Platform Two.

  “Somebody’s gotten stubborn,” Ky said. “Or there’s something about that ansible platform that we don’t understand.”

  “Or it’s a trap…they’d like to lure you into showing the size of your whole force.”

  “That, too. Ransome, Yamini, see anything?”

  “It’s the platform closest to the primary mapped point, entry to the usual inbound lane. Fixed defenses along the lane—”

  “I’ll bet they want to mine the jump point,” the Moray liaison said. “They don’t want a functioning ansible there able to tell someone where the mines are.”

  “They may be laying mines now.”

  “Well, we don’t want them blowing that platform. There’s what—three or four thousand people on it?” She looked at the various readouts. “Angelhair, Greeneyes, Hawkwing, and Guidon, you need to get them away from that platform. If you run into mine drifts, call on Bluebells.” Her two minesweepers were far in reserve, but to save a platform she’d risk them.

  Platform Two was far enough from her observers that Ky had to depend on reports from the attack force; she would not get lightspeed reports for several hours. But Turek’s ships jumped out the instant her ships appeared on their screens; Angelhair had programmed to fire immediately out of jump, and those missiles sped away, part of the dangerous debris of a space battle. The other ships withheld fire, and quickly returned to their stations.

  “I was afraid they wouldn’t stay stupid,” Ky said. “And that bunch coordinated very well…I wonder if he left ships that all had ansibles.”

  “Twenty ships, six clusters, near Platform Three,” Yamini said.

  “Formation five,” Ky said. Turek had plenty of ships for a strong attack on each platform if he chose…and it was his habit to knock out ansible communication first. Why wasn’t he doing it that way? She watched scan from Cobani, the nearest observer ship to Platform Three; a ten-minute delay was better than hours, but still too long for planning.

  The enemy appeared suddenly on scan, along with flares from the platform’s defensive weaponry. Enemy weapons detonated on the platform’s shields. The clusters moved as one, but independent of other clusters. Then their formation five appeared, and scan data for the exchange went current.

  “Tobados Yards was so right, putting in all those extra screens,” Ky said. The Moray liaison grinned. On the old Vanguard, they’d lacked the capacity to display data from separate scan inputs, let alone integrate them with the right time delays.

  The ships exchanged fire, Turek’s force proving slightly less accurate, but all shields were flaring. The Platform Three ansible suddenly went off—possibly debris damage, possibly something else…but there were still people to protect.

  “Another attack group, Platform Four.” Ransome called that in. Ky sent her third formation after it, and looked at what she had left. She had lost only one ship so far, the privateer Lady Gina, but the smaller Moray ships, Rothes and Kyle, had taken damage. With the numerical advantage Turek had, the damage she’d inflicted so far merely nibbled at his force’s strength.

  “We’d better be very smart mosquitoes,” she said, unaware she’d spoken aloud until several people turned to look at her. “Dancing with the bear, people. It’ll take us awhile to suck him dry, so we’d better be really smart.”

  “Any idea when the Slotter Key contingent will arrive?”

  “Any time now would be good,” Ky said. “But no, I don’t know.” She looked at the chronometer. Hours had passed that felt like crowded minutes…she didn’t feel tired yet, but the time would come—and more for her force than Turek’s—when exhaustion would slow reflexes, perhaps fatally. Turek could send part of his force out far enough to be safe and rest them, and still keep hers busy trying to protect the critical targets.

  “Ansible contact from Cascadia, for the commanding officer. Does the admiral want it?”

  “I’ll take it,” Ky said. It was too late for the Moscoe government to send help; even if they were willing, by the time they arrived the battle would be over, one way or the other. She could, however, tell them what was going on.

  But instead of someone in Moscoe Defense, it was Stella’s voice. Ky had an instant to wonder how furious Stella would be, then her cousin said, “Ky—thanks for having Grace tell me about you. You need to know that Moray didn’t tell Moscoe about Turek’s target until after you’d confirmed it, and then they dithered a day or so—so there are Moscoe ships on the way, should be arriving anytime.”

  “Why are you telling me, instead of Moscoe’s military?” Ky asked, only realizing once it was out of her mouth how ungracious that sounded.

  “Because I had to hear your voice for myself,” Stella said. “But don’t let me interrupt your day—” She sounded considerably annoyed.

  “Battle,” Ky said. “So far it’s more battle than day.”

  “You’re fighting now?” Stella said. “I thought you’d go in and wait for the others to show up—”

  “Nothing so civilized,” Ky said. “Turek was over eight hours ahead of us; we arrived in a mess and it’s not improving much. Any specifics on when those Moscoe ships might arrive? And what their IDs are?”

  “Er…no,” Stella said.

  “Then I’m afraid I have to go, Stella…we’re outnumbered more than three to one—”

  “Vatta forever!” Stella said before the connection broke. Ky snorted. Stella was the perfect CEO for the new Vatta—she couldn’t see beyond it.

  She put Stella out of mind; she had more immediate problems. Graphic displays kept her apprised of the weapons status of all her ships, individually and in the formations as a whole. She’d told her captains to fire only on ideal solutions, but given the reality of battle, hitting a target with every missile was impossible. Now 20 percent of her ships had expended 30 percent or more of their load. Half of those were privateers, which didn’t have the capacity of the military ships, but it was time to pull them back. Her transports, ten light-hours out, had additional munitions, but reloading in space, in combat conditions, defined highly risky. Especially if Turek figured out where ships that disappeared for a few hours were.

  “Termagant,” she said. “You’re running low. Take a break.” She could depend on Merced to make the transfer as fast as possible—the woman was almost as bold as Ransome had been, and that without a Romantic attitude.

  “We could fight a little longer—” Merced said, predictably.

  “I know that. But then you’d have to go, possibly right when you’re most needed. Go.”

  Next—the enemy could probably figure out where her spotters were—at least their distance from Nexus II, if not their exact location. Ky ordered them out, to see if they could find where Turek had taken the bulk of his fleet—it wasn’t showing up on her scan yet, and it had been an hour. Then she switched to one of the alternative plans she and her staff had come up with, in case of just this situation: if Turek repeatedly sent in multiple small-but-substantial attack groups to diverse targets.

  Contact with the insystem defense forces had been sporadic, handled captain-to-captain as ships came close enough for lightspeed communications. As the booster units were knocked out by debris and collision with ships or weapons, as the ansible platforms one by one went out of service, the possibility of organized communication and action faded.

  A twenty-ship contingent of Turek’s force appeared at low-orbital distance above Nexus II and launched a missile attack on the planet. “Light cruisers and above only,” Ky reminded her commanders as she ordered a pursuit. “Mass issues…if we take the heavies in, we can’t jump out at that distance. Heavies stay out at jump radius—” Vanguard II shifted this time, with six other Moray heavy cruisers, in the hope of pinning the enemy in the gravity well. Her smaller ships were pounding Turek’s but not breaching the shields with missiles. Ky ordered her ships to switch to beam weapons.

  ISC Headquarters<
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  With the first missile strikes, just after dawn, Rafe had everyone move down to the reinforced sub-basement parking area. It might not help, but it gave an illusion of safety, and a better space to work in. He had the pirates’ ansible out of its casing, and had been struggling with it for hours. He could listen to any all-ships transmissions or tune to individual ships using the list Zennarthos had downloaded. He could even understand some of the pirate jargon. But so far he had not been able to find or create a channel on which he could contact the system ansibles or the fleet from Moray.

  A tech who’d never worked on ansibles before had been able to give Ky secure channels on one of these things and he couldn’t do it—ridiculous. And Toby, a mere boy, had outsmarted ISC’s lockout from the system ansibles. He’d taught Toby—if the boy had extrapolated from what Rafe taught him, then Rafe, surely, should be able to figure it out.

  He’d have asked the local technicians to help except he’d sent the entire ansible repair and maintenance section out to the ansible platforms. He stared at the uncommunicative guts of the ansible and wished he could express his feelings and smash it to atoms. It seemed emblematic of his life…promises not kept, hopes not fulfilled, great effort that ended in great anguish.

  Emil had been monitoring ansible activity until this last wave, when the last two communications satellites within range died. The irony of being the head of the greatest communications network in the history of humankind—and yet unable to call his family a mere thousand miles away, let alone get a line offplanet—was not lost on Rafe, but he was in no mood to laugh, even bitterly.

  “That’s the end of it,” he said, sitting cross-legged beside the ansible. “We existed because we delivered what we promised—communication anywhere, instantly.”

  “All the platforms may not be down,” Penny said.

  “They don’t do us any good if we can’t communicate with them,” Rafe said.

  “It’ll be easier to rebuild if we don’t have to start from scratch,” Penny said.

  Rafe blinked. She had slept for a few hours while he continued to work on the ansible, and now sounded far more hopeful than he felt.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “You might try to sleep,” she said. “You’ve been up most of the last week.”

  Rafe looked around the area. Over half the people there were asleep, huddled under emergency blankets. Penny had snatched pillows and blankets from the visitor’s quarters where she’d first stayed; now she pushed an armful at Rafe. “All right,” he said. “But I don’t think I can actually sleep.”

  He woke to a vile stench and a movement of the floor beneath him, as if someone had picked up and dropped the whole building…he never could tell, then or later, which had come first. The overhead lights flickered, then steadied again. Penny had her hand on his shoulder.

  “How long have I—”

  “Three hours.”

  His eyes still burned, but he felt more awake. “What’s that awful smell?”

  “What smell?”

  “You don’t—oh.” The cranial ansible. Had the concussion that shook the building shaken his head, made it come on? It couldn’t be anyone calling…Parmina had gotten the code from his father, but Parmina was dead. Only Ky, and she was dead, too.

  The stench intensified. What if Ky wasn’t dead? But where were his cables? He hadn’t had them for days…he remembered then that he’d pulled them from his pocket and dropped them in the bottom left drawer of his desk, thinking them useless.

  “I have to go upstairs,” he said.

  “You can’t—what if it’s not there—if there are more explosions?”

  The building shuddered again. “I need a power cable,” he said. “For an implant jack.”

  She stared at him. “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you. I just do.”

  “Is something wrong with your implant?”

  “No. I just need an external power source.” The smell was nauseating now. He scrabbled in the tool and supply kits he’d brought down to use on the ansible…there. It wasn’t the custom one, but it should do. Ansible-compatible power supply jack…but the other end was meant for a low-voltage battery, none of which were in the toolbox. A transformer, then—a universal adapter to mate the noncompliant plugs and sockets—and now to find an outlet. “Penny, don’t let anyone disturb me for a bit. I’m going to be fairly incoherent.”

  He tested the output of the transformer first, dialed it down to the correct voltage, and hooked up the lines. Just as he plugged it into his socket, he wondered if this was really such a good idea. Penny stared at him, unspeaking but clearly worried.

  Ky was there. Like coming out of dark into light, out of storm into peace…the voice he had never thought to hear again. “Rafe! You’re alive!” She even sounded happy about that.

  “I’m definitely alive. What’s going on?” That was a stupid question, slipping out before he could frame it better.

  “We’re outnumbered,” Ky said. “We can’t stop all the attacks. Which ansible platform’s the most critical?”

  “Are any of them still up?”

  “Three are, but one of them’s up and down. Only one is gone completely, Six. If we can only save one, which—”

  “Pick the easiest,” Rafe said. “They’re all fully redundant. Do the attacks on the platforms stop if the ansible goes down?”

  “Yes, though I don’t know if that’s just until they knock them all out.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Rafe said. “They said—Moray said—you were dead.”

  “Yes, well…it was supposed to give Turek false confidence and delay his attack on you. Unfortunately, with over three hundred ships, he has reason for plenty of confidence. You have a captured pirate ansible down there, don’t you?”

  The abrupt change of topic caught him off guard. “Er…yes. But I can’t use it; I can’t get it onto whatever channel you use, and I don’t know your access codes.”

  “I’m squirting you a conversion set, including codes; when you have it up and running, use that to communicate with us. We’re having problems coordinating with your people.”

  “Jaime Driskill? That’s our commander.”

  “On an ISC ship or one with a Nexus System beacon?”

  “ISC. Raging Torrent, I think it is. I grabbed the best ships we had left, put him in charge, and we upgraded as much as we could in the time we had. But we have no shipboard ansibles and depend on booster units.”

  “Well, most of your fleet’s pretty well destroyed, as at Boxtop—”

  “Most of them were uncrewed, on AI control. Decoys we hoped Turek would spend munitions on.”

  “And he did. Just not enough. I’m guessing Driskill’s commanding those ships over by Nexus I?”

  “Right.”

  “What I’d like to do is pair his ships with ours—we could use more firepower, and he needs the communications. But so far he hasn’t agreed. If you get that pirate ansible working, we can relay you through that to him, and maybe he’ll listen to you.”

  “Dammit, I told him to cooperate—”

  “Well, fix that ansible and you can tell him again. I can’t court-martial him for failure to obey orders when he doesn’t think I’m his commander,” Ky said.

  “I’ll do that,” Rafe said. “Anything else?”

  “I’m glad you’re alive,” Ky said.

  “Likewise,” Rafe said. His throat closed on everything else he wanted to say, and before he could get it out, Ky had closed her end of the connection, and he had another set of smells to deal with. He closed the internal switch and opened his eyes to find Penny sitting right in front of him, Gary behind her shielding him from the view of others. “What—did I twitch?”

  “You were talking to yourself,” Penny said. “And I’m thinking that’s a kind of skullphone, only it’s not just a skullphone.”

  “It’s something that doesn’t exist,” Rafe said. “And we never
mention it.”

  Penny’s brows went up. “I’ve seen you, remember? And heard you? And in addition to that, why are you suddenly happy?”

  “Happy?” He tried to scowl, but couldn’t. Ky was alive. They might both be dead soon but right now, this moment, she was alive and he had heard her voice.

  “Happy,” Penny said. “You know something good, and you’re refusing to share. That’s not very cooperative.”

  “I can’t discuss it now,” Rafe said. “But I know how to fix that ansible, and I need to do it now.”

  Penny gave him a dirty look as he unplugged and coiled all the cables and moved back to the ansible. He shook his head when he looked at it. “I should’ve seen this last night. I was just too tired.” The new information in his implant enhanced his moves, but he could see it for himself. This—this here—reverse this—add this—and it would have three times the channels. He plugged it in again, entered the access codes Ky had given him, unfolded the viewscreen, and made his first call.

  Not Ky, but a broad-faced young woman seated at a console—the video pickup also included objects behind her, including an enclosed egg-shaped object with someone inside—Ky? He couldn’t see it clearly.

  “New node,” the young woman said. “This is Nexus II planet-side ISC?”

  “Yes,” Rafe said. “I’m Rafe Dunbarger.”

  Ky watched Rafe’s image on screen through the canopy of her chair. Still alive and much more the Rafe she remembered so clearly from those early days—but it was not the time for reunions.

  “Downjump turbulence, something big, relayed from Prufrock. Coordinates: plus forty-seven point three, sixty-two point four. No tags yet.”

  “Number?”

  “Unsure.”

  “New ansible node! Identifying as Slotter Key Spaceforce, Admiral Padhjan, commanding, for Admiral Vatta.”

  “Here,” Ky said. Then, “Admiral Padhjan, this is Kylara Vatta, Space Defense Force.”

  The man facing her in the familiar uniform of Slotter Key Spaceforce looked every centimeter an admiral; he might have come off a publicity brochure. He also looked angry. “My orders are to place this force under your command, Admiral Vatta. What is the situation, and what are your orders?”