Vicky Peterwald: Target

by Mike Shepherd

  “And once again,” Vicky said, “the hot potato drops into the Navy’s lap.”

  “Captain Balk informed the approaching transports that if they closed to within ten thousand klicks of the station, he would consider them pirates and a threat to the health and safety of St. Petersburg. As such, he would fire on them. And he charged up his lasers to make the point clear.”

  “Ho ho,” Mr. Smith laughed. “I bet that went over well.”

  “I have the report that the Security Chief filed with his employer. It was passed from them to the palace. The Emperor bounced it with no comment to the Navy for a formal reply.”

  “The good old bureaucratic runaround,” Vicky said. “This sounds like the perfect place for it. What did the Navy say?”

  “That they sincerely regretted the case of mistaken identification and were glad that the transports pulled away before any shots were fired. The Navy also now stations two battleships and Admiral von Mittleburg at High St. Petersburg station. There have been no further attempts to provide ‘security assistance’ to St. Petersburg.”

  “The Navy actually threatened to fire on one of the Empress’s family’s projects,” Vicky marveled. “Do you know where Captain Balk is at present, Computer?”

  “He has been promoted to rear admiral and has command of one of the battlecruiser divisions distributed around human space to show the flag and be ready to accept returning survivors from the Fleet of Discovery.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been interesting if we had been picked up by him?” Mr. Smith said.

  “Very,” Vicky said, then plopped down on her bed to think. “I wonder how close the Navy is to raising the flag of rebellion. Computer, search all files for references to rebellion or revolt against the Emperor. Eliminate all references to mob action or actions by people with little or no power base.”

  “That may take even your updated computer a while,” said Mr. Smith.

  “It doesn’t matter. Two people offered Admiral Gort money; one for my head, the other for my delectable body. One side wants me dead. The other side wants me as the figurehead for their own civil war with my dad. I don’t particularly like either option. However, I know who wants me dead. I don’t know who wants me waving their flag. I want to have a better idea of my options.”

  “Very well,” said Mr. Smith. “Let me set your computer to read to you during the night, and I’ll be leaving you.”

  “Leaving me?” Vicky said, with an arched eyebrow.

  “It’s been a busy day, full of surprises and changes,” Mr. Smith said as he stood. “Your computer needs time to process and so do you. As delightful as your company is, I think your head will rest better on your neck if you rest it a bit on your pillow.”

  “Why, sir, that’s the best rejection I’ve ever had,” Vicky said. But she had to admit she was exhausted, and she also was intrigued by this idea of her computer reading to her as she slept. There was no question she had given it a major assignment.

  Mr. Smith bowed his way out of the room, and Vicky stretched out on her new bunk. It was a bit harder than she’d gotten used to on the Wasp, but Wardhaven was notorious for the luxury of its warships. She was back home and would have to adjust to the Imperial Navy again.

  She slipped out of her shipsuit and took a hasty shower. She was delighted to find that the harness Mr. Smith had installed to allow her computer to speak to her was easy to hook back up after she washed her hair. Done, she wrapped a bath towel around herself and went to glance out at her day quarters.

  Kit was curled up on the couch, but she roused when Vicky opened her door. Kat had laid a pallet down in front of the doorway to the passageway. No doubt the Marines were on watch out there.

  With a nod to Kit, Vicky returned to her own bed. No one would be interrupting her sleep without finding themselves in one hell of a fight.

  She hardly yawned once before she was asleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  VICKY came awake to a cloud of memories swirling in her head. The computer must have sensed her awakening state because it was not talking to her. She lay in bed struggling to bring order out of chaos. Her sleeping mind had turned the information flow from the narrative of the reports into something so powerful, she almost felt like she’d been at the meetings described.

  However helpful the information might be, she’d have to struggle to remember what she’d actually been a part of and what she only dreamed she’d been part of.

  Nice. A Peterwald with a loose hold on reality. So what else is new?

  As her mind ordered the information, she began to realize why Admiral Gort had been hesitant to identify the second party in the bidding war for cute little her. It really was not something solid. Likely, it wasn’t even constant.

  Some people, businesses, associations had been heard to say one thing. Then at another time, they’d say another. If Vicky didn’t know that someone had produced a serious bribe, not just for Admiral Gort but likely for at least seven other battlecruiser division commanders, she wouldn’t be at all sure there was a counterconspiracy to her stepmother’s family.

  The money was there, therefore the conspiracy must be there. Which raised the question, did dear old, no young, Stepmom know about the bribe or were they in the dark about it all?

  Which explained why Admiral Gort was reluctant to take her to bed. Even if he didn’t want to kill her for Stepmom and her vultures, he might have to do the deed to keep the conspiracy a secret.

  The admiral was right—the more she knew, the more danger she was to people whose lives wouldn’t be worth a wooden farthing if they were found out.

  Vicky, girl, you’d better practice keeping your mouth shut.

  She dressed quickly, this time in a standard green Greenfeld shipsuit and entered her day cabin. Kit and Kat were already waiting for her, alert as ever. Mr. Smith and the two Navy men arrived only a few seconds behind her.

  “The admiral has requested your and Mr. Smith’s presence at breakfast in his wardroom,” Kit told them.

  Vicky raised an eyebrow to Mr. Smith, but the look he returned her was bland to the point of artlessness.

  How could a man so obvious guilty of every crime in the book look so innocent?

  She led him back into the passageway. As she expected, Marines were on duty at both his and her doors, and another pair looked alertly from the first turn in the passage.

  Kris turned left and after a few paces stopped at the door marked ADMIRAL’S WARDROOM. She knocked and was immediately told to enter.

  Admiral Gort was alone and already seated at a linen-covered table set with silverware for three. He waved at a sideboard, where silver trays proved to have scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and several other offerings of fruit and rolls.

  Vicky served herself sparingly. Mr. Smith laid on a heaping plate as if he hadn’t eaten in a month. Well, rations had been thin for much of the last month on the Wasp.

  The admiral remarked on Mr. Smith’s loaded plate and received the explanation Vicky had supposed.

  “Was it that bad on the way back?” the admiral asked, buttering a roll.

  “We were down to survival biscuits in the end,” Vicky admitted. “It was reaction mass we were most worried about. Corvettes like the Wasp were never intended to make close passes to gas planets and collect their own reaction mass. We did it once and just about tore the ship apart. We jumped into an Iteeche system with just enough fuel left to slow down and make orbit.”

  “How did you make it back the rest of the way?” the admiral asked.

  “Somehow, Kris Longknife and her Magnificent Nelly, Kris’s sidekicks and Nelly’s kids managed to take three shuttles and make a refueling pass.”

  “Three shuttles flying in close formation in those hurricane winds while holding a balloot between them?” The admiral was incredulous.

  “They lost one of the shuttles,” Vicky said, reaching for a knife to butter her own roll.

  “Amazing,” the admiral said. “Almost as amazing
as what I was told early this morning.”

  Vicky paused, waiting for the admiral to go on when he chose to. Had he found out something about the bomb that nearly killed her? If so, he seemed in no hurry to tell her.

  Vicky had been instructed that lieutenants had no right to demand answers from admirals. Vicky wondered if Admiral Krätz had intended that to extend to what almost killed them.

  Admirals did as admirals wished to do.

  “Yes,” the admiral said, going on lightly, “the chief from intelligence was in here as I was shaving. It seems that when your computer was attached to our system, you downloaded much more than we had planned for you to take.”

  That was a totally unexpected turn; Vicky took two breaths while she tried to follow this new twist to her fate.

  “And what does the chief say I took, sir?” Vicky finally said, trying to dodge rather than lie to this man who had the power of life and death over her.

  “That is the strangest part of it. He has no idea. Only the files that he had intended to upload to you show that they have been accessed. Among the other databases, there is no sign that they have been touched.”

  “Then are you sure I accessed them?” Vicky said.

  “Do not play with me, Lieutenant,” Admiral Gort said, his voice now cold as steel.

  Mr. Smith, who had been busy buttering a biscuit, paused in his knife work to cough. “Excuse me for interrupting, but may I point out that the young woman in question did not download extra files.”

  The admiral’s scowl was of biblical proportions as he turned to his breakfast partner. “Humor me. If she did not download them, who did?”

  “What did, sir?” the mercenary said, correcting the admiral with care. “What downloaded the extra files?”

  Vicky would not have thought that the admiral’s scowl could get deeper, but it did. “What?” he demanded.

  “Yes, sir. What. An inanimate object is a what. Computers are a what, unless you’re Kris Longknife, and exactly what Nelly is, is very much open to discussion.”

  “You are not saying that Her Grace here has a computer as troublesome as that Longknife woman’s?” said the admiral, now frowning.

  “No. No. Vicky’s computer is very much a what, as is mine. Very capable, but much better controlled than that Nelly creature.”

  “Then the lieutenant here had her computer access more than she was authorized.”

  Mr. Smith shook his head. “I seriously doubt it, sir. I only upgraded her computer yesterday while we were waiting for you. Her Grace still has a lot to learn about what her computer can do now.”

  “So you instructed it to do the extra downloading,” the admiral growled. Life or death clearly rode on the answer to his accusation.

  You couldn’t tell it from the mercenary’s response. “Hardly, sir. I was in no position to instruct the computer to do anything, sir. Remember, she went into your intel holy of holies. I was left at the dinner table.”

  The admiral was left gnawing his lip, clearly puzzled. “Instruct me, if you will, wizard,” he said slowly. “How did you, she, or this inanimate object of a computer pull off what you seem, by at least half of the available reports, to have done?”

  “I assure you, sir, if I had been instructing the computer on this particular bit of larceny, you would have gotten no reports of its acquiring more than you wanted,” Mr. Smith said, confidently.

  The admiral’s scowl was making a reprise. Mr. Smith noticed and hurried on.

  “My computer upgraded the Grand Duchess’s computer. It was a rush job. It reorganized her self-organizing matrix and passed certain subroutines over to her machine while it was doing that.”

  “So you knew that when I allowed her to get a certain, limited set of data, that her machine would suck up everything in sight.” The admiral was sounding very much like a prosecutor in a state case. A state capital case.

  “Actually, no sir,” Mr. Smith said, quite diffidently. “As I said, it was a hasty upgrade, and I didn’t have a chance to check exactly what went along with it.”

  If Mr. Smith was lying, as Vicky strongly suspected, he was doing it most sincerely. He had her fooled.

  The admiral leaned back in his chair, with not at all an air of acceptance. A long moment passed before he said, “Let us allow, for the moment, that I should not have the both of you taken out and hanged for treason. Let us allow, for the moment, that the computer hanging around the Grand Duchess’s neck should instead be hanging from the gallows. Then, can either of you tell me what I would be hanging the computer for?”

  Vicky was about to confess what she’d been learning all night, but Mr. Smith was talking before she could open her mouth.

  “Before we stipulate to your charges, good man, could I take a moment to persuade you to a different perspective?”

  “You may try,” had a definite suggestion that he would be wasting his time.

  Mr. Smith seemed unfazed by the admiral’s dubiousness, and went right on in the face of rejection. “One could say that the accused computer, rather than performing an act of treason, has given you clear evidence of the vulnerability of your systems. Indeed, the utter transparency of your best security to the casual passerby. As I pointed out, with just a bit of hands-on tweaking, I could have assured that you were none the wiser to our accessing your most cherished secrets.”

  “Wardhaven’s superior technology,” said the admiral, dryly.

  “Actually, sir, this capability just demonstrated is quite available to users in Greenfeld if they know the right place to shop.”

  That clearly knocked the admiral back on his heels. It was a long minute before he spoke again, and it was to Vicky.

  “Your Grace, you were involved with Kris Longknife during the situation on St. Petersburg.” Vicky allowed that she had been. “The Longknife woman and her computer accessed our financial data with impunity.” Vicky allowed that Kris had indeed done that. “So the Wardhaven computer systems are far ahead of our own.”

  “Yes and no,” Vicky replied.

  “How can it be both?” the admiral demanded. It was clear this morning was not going to his liking, so Vicky hurried to explain.

  “Yes, Kris and her Nelly seemed able to stroll through our data banks with ease. However, Kris also admitted that she’d run into jamming of data links and other problems when dealing with certain factions from Greenfeld. I was left with the clear impression that our standard systems are vulnerable to Wardhaven technology, as my upgraded computer seemed to have demonstrated. However, some people have superior systems. Exactly who, even Kris does not know, but it scares both her and her Nelly.”

  “Right, right, you mentioned that in your report to your father, the Emperor. I should have remembered that,” the admiral said. “I had assumed that the Navy’s security systems were not as vulnerable as the civil ones, but it appears that I am wrong.”

  “It may well be,” Mr. Smith said, “that the vulnerabilities in your system are not a bug but an intended feature included by the developers.”

  The admiral’s scowl was back. “I would hate to think that,” he muttered.

  A deadly silence gathered around the admiral. Vicky glanced at her cold breakfast and decided she wasn’t hungry. Mr. Smith must have arrived at the same conclusion; his meal remained untouched.

  The admiral apparently arrived at a decision and leaned forward in his chair. “Let us allow, for the moment, that the Grand Duchess’s computer has done Greenfeld a service, and that it should continue to hang around her lovely neck rather than from a gallows. That still does not answer my first question. What, Your Grace, do you now know that it was not intended for you to know?”

  Vicky glanced at Mr. Smith. He was intently studying his eggs and bacon. Clearly, she was on her own. She took a deep breath, and began.

  “I see that my granting a city charter to Sevastopol has borne good fruit, and that the Navy is taking full advantage of St. Petersburg’s recovered economic production. I also found
it interesting that Admiral Balk saw fit to threaten to fire on the forces of my stepmother, and the Navy chose to promote him. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes, Ronny Balk is a friend of mine, and glad I was not to have had that hot potato dropped in my lap. He and his battlecruisers were sent to the least likely place for you to show up, and his bribe was noticeably smaller than mine.”

  “My stepmom’s family bribed him? That must have gone down hard.”

  “No doubt, but Navy intel failed to get a mouse into the discussion that led to the sudden largesse that fell upon us lucky ones. I see you spent your time well last night,” he said, casting a knowing eye at Mr. Smith.

  “I went to bed early,” Vicky said, pointedly. “It had been a rough day, you may have noticed, and I was tired. I had also instructed my computer to do a search of the database for certain information and read them to me in my sleep, a trick Mr. Smith said it could do.”

  “And did it find what you wanted?” asked the admiral.

  “I asked it to identify the conspiracy in my dad’s Empire. The one other than my stepmother and her family’s.”

  “And did you find it?” had much more than just alarm in it.

  “Yes and no, sir.”

  “Lieutenant, I would warn you not to become overly fond of that answer. Senior officers do not care for it from their juniors.”

  Vicky allowed herself a smile. A very small one. “Yes, sir. I already had a strong impression from you that you felt that way. However, I can think of no other way to answer your question.”

  She paused for a second to order her thoughts, well aware that what she said next might well decide for the admiral whether she arrived alive or dead. “There is no question, from the intel available to the Navy, that there is much dissatisfaction with my father’s, the Emperor’s, reign. Or more correctly, the reign of the Emperor and Empress. The Empress and her uncles and brothers, to be more precise.”

  “Delicately put,” the admiral muttered.

  “However, mutterings about the current condition in our beloved Greenfeld do not constitute a conspiracy, at least not yet. Dearest Stepmom may be moving to adjust the laws more to her liking. Still, from what was shown to me in the database, there is no way that I could name a party or parties involved in a concerted effort to overthrow my dad’s throne.”