Command Decision Read online

  He eased back downstairs and out of the house with his usual skill, while his emotions swirled…he had not known, he had not understood. What he had not understood, he could not say; he wanted desperately to see his father, talk to him. He forced that aside as he moved back across the property toward the road. Whatever had gone wrong, he must not be suspected or captured now.

  Reentering the theater at the climax of the second act, he slipped unobtrusively into the men’s room, into the stall he had used, retrieved his costume and put it on over the skinsuit, and then—sticking a finger down his throat—vomited into the toilet, noisily. It was easier than he’d thought it would be, and his face was suitably pale when he looked in the mirror. He returned to his table at the intermission; a passing waitress asked him if he felt all right.

  “Too much travel,” he said, smiling at her. “My stomach—it is delicate, I’m afraid.”

  “Should I call someone?”

  “No…I should be all right now. But tell me—is it possible to get a private car to the port area? I don’t know if I feel like riding the tram.”

  “Of course, sir. Would you like me to arrange that now, or do you want to see the rest of the play? It’s quite good—”

  “I will try to stay, but—”

  “Just press this button, if you need me,” she said, reminding him of the call button on his table.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Through the third act of the romantic comedy, he tried to think rather than feel. He had expected a chilly reconciliation or an angry rejection…not this blank nothingness of absence. Were they dead? Surely he would have heard…but he had not been at his last reported address; he had been in space, much of the time in FTL flight, utterly unreachable, for…more than half a standard year now. Perhaps they had died, and no one could find him. Yet…why then the odd response to his call? And if they weren’t dead, where were they?

  He clapped with the rest when the show was over, and the waitress came over to check on him and tell him she had arranged a car. He thanked her; he had already left a generous tip. His watcher was outside on the steps, feigning interest in a poster advertising the show. Rafe leaned on one of the pillars until a car drew up and the driver asked for “Gen-son Ra-tan-vi?” with the accent on the wrong syllable in both names.

  The watcher stared fixedly at the poster—better than whirling around, but not much, Rafe thought as he got into the car and gave the hotel name and address to the driver. He made no effort to lower his voice, and besides, the watcher could always check with the car hire company. The paunchy foreigner had indeed gone straight back to his hotel after being sick in the men’s room.

  He lay a long time on the bed, wondering what to do next. The newsfeed in his room, its sound automatically muted this late at night, had nothing about his family, and only the blandest announcement that ISC was making good progress restoring ansible service. The talking head for that announcement was Lew Parmina, his father’s closest associate and expected successor. Rafe remembered the man—intelligent, sophisticated, affable—who had been his father’s messenger in the most difficult years when his father had virtually disowned him. Parmina had counseled patience, had promised to do what he could to mend the breach; he had sent friendly notes now and then with the remittance payments. He looked much the same, with the well-groomed gloss of the successful man of business.

  Rafe turned off the newsfeed. He didn’t care about Parmina unless the man had something to do with his family’s disappearance. Which surely he did not: he was well up the ladder to the highest position in the most powerful monopoly in human space; what more could he want?

  Where was his father—his mother—his family? He felt as if a crevasse had opened up beside him and half his universe had disappeared into it, as if he teetered on the brink of some bottomless pit. He shivered and dragged the bedcovers over himself. It was like something Ky had said—tried to say—about her family’s death. He had been so sure he knew how she felt, what it was she had to cope with. An adult, someone who’d been out on her own…how bad could it be?

  He had known nothing. As the shiver built into shudders, as he felt himself engulfed in a sorrow colder than death itself, he knew that she had felt this: the last of her family, as he might well be the last of his. Bereft, alone…and so much younger than he was, so much less experienced.

  And she had gone on. He let himself hold to that, for the moment. That crazy idiot, that stiffly, stubbornly upright prig of a girl, who shared with him a guilty secret delight in killing: she had not collapsed under this sorrow. She had fought back. She had saved him—humiliating as that was—and Stella and Toby and her ship and her crew, and gone on being who she was.

  He was warm again, and able to breathe. She was probably dead by now, or soon would be, and because of that it was safe to admit what he felt. To himself, anyway. And what would she do, in his situation? He almost chuckled, imagining that dark, vivid face, those intense eyes. What he himself would do—would find a way to do—when he’d had some rest.

  What a team they could make, if they didn’t kill each other. If they didn’t each die before they met again. And on that thought, he fell asleep.

  The smell woke him. A chemical knife, it stabbed deep into his awareness; he was sitting bolt upright before he realized he was awake.

  That miserable implant. Ky. It must be Ky trying to use the cranial implant. He staggered into the bathroom—the only logical excuse for waking so suddenly if someone had breached his security.

  Only the alarm functioned without an external power source. He did not want to link himself into the room’s power outlets, and yet—he came out of the bathroom, checked his security devices, and burrowed into his luggage for the special cables. He had checked the quality of the line signal and was about to hook himself up when he had another thought.

  What if it wasn’t Ky?

  Here, of all places, someone knew that he had a cranial ansible. His father knew. The technicians who had built and installed it knew. They were supposed to have been told that it had failed, that it was both useless and dangerous, and all their notes and so on were supposed to have been destroyed, but what if not?

  What if whatever had happened to his family had let the enemies know not only that he had a cranial ansible, but also how to contact him?

  He would be immobilized, nearly helpless, as long as he was hooked in.

  But if he didn’t hook in…

  The hotel room had not been designed to be impenetrable, but he did the best he could, as silently as possible, with the chair and the ottoman. Then he arranged the cables, took a deep breath, and activated the ansible.

  It was not quite like using an ordinary skullphone. Ordinary skullphones didn’t smell like gas leaks, skunks, rancid butter, wet dog. The smell associated with being called changed to the one associated with a connection being made. Then a faint sound he associated with an open line, nothing more.

  Somewhere, someone’s telltales should have gone from standby to connected. Someone had placed the call…someone should be speaking. Rafe said nothing. Ansible-to-ansible was not the same as implant-to-implant; he could not strip data from someone’s implant this way even if they had the same setup he did. Which he hoped no one but Ky Vatta did.

  His only safety lay in patience—waiting out whomever had called.

  Seconds passed. Minutes. A trickle of sweat ran down his back. If it had been someone friendly on the other end, they’d have spoken by now. Ky, certainly. His father, if nothing was wrong with him. Anyone else—would be trying to trace the signal? Would be planning to send some devastating blast right into his brain? At least he knew—hoped he knew—that wouldn’t work. The safety interlocks prevented any excessive power surges. Nor should they have been able to trace his location from the ansible’s response. But no one who wouldn’t speak to him should have been able to initiate the call.

  Finally he heard, dimly, voices talking. Not talking to him, but talking some
where in the pickup range of whatever unit they were using. He boosted the sensitivity, shunting the input to storage for later analysis.

  “…the light’s green. It has to be connected.”

  “…not in the index. A private ansible? Would he have had a private off-list ansible?”

  “…knows? ’Sposed to be the son’s private number, but nobody’s there—”

  “It’s connected.”

  “Could be in automatic mode. If it’s designed for relays or something.”

  Three voices, Rafe decided. Too far from the pickup to tell much about them, at least without signal analysis.

  Then, loudly, “Hey! Answer me!” Male voice, not above middle age, used to having its orders followed.

  Rafe said nothing.

  “Got to be on auto,” the same voice said, this time in a normal tone. “I don’t hear a thing.”

  “So he lied to us. Not his son’s number—”

  “Or his son has it on auto but with no pickup message.”

  “We should leave him a message,” a more distant voice said.

  “Not until we know where he is,” the closest voice said.

  The connection closed with a snap; Rafe sat a long moment without moving before he unplugged the cable and re-coiled it into its place in his bag.

  Two and two in this case made a very unsavory four. The most likely he to have told them the number was his father. He would not have given that number except at great need, probably under duress. That and the trap on the house number, the immediate tail put on what should have passed as an innocent businessman, the empty house…all that suggested an organization with enormous resources, if not the government itself, operating with the government’s consent if not approval. Remembering what Ky and Stella had told him about the attacks on Vatta on Slotter Key, he wondered if the pirates had somehow intimidated the Nexus government into letting them kidnap the head of ISC. Or if they had infiltrated some group within ISC.

  Not likely, he decided. The men had not sounded like expert ISC communications technicians; they’d used none of the jargon peculiar to the trade. That meant they might not be able to trace the ansible relay beyond Nexus and thus could not find him. On the other hand, they might have a skilled technician in their organization, or even captive.

  Either way, Genson Ratanvi and his food processing needed to disappear in a way that would not alert anyone to anything. He would have to leave the planet, or appear to, on his way back to Cascadia. It was almost dawn…an energetic businessman with a digestive upset might well be up and making calls, hoping to find a place on a ship home. Then again—he’d been here only a day. Would he give up so easily? No. Nexus had other cities, other suppliers. Surely the man would travel around, unhappy stomach and all.

  Rafe logged on to the hotel’s travel information site and soon had an itinerary that gave him a reason to be in every major city over the next four weeks. He declined the hotel’s booking agency and made the reservations himself, choosing to change carriers here and there. With excellent communications links, Nexus travelers were spontaneous in their schedules; no one would notice particularly if someone on a scheduled ferry or flight didn’t show up, especially if the passenger called in.

  By the time Rafe came down to breakfast in his business persona, he had determined that the contact attempt had originated here on Nexus; his illicit and—he hoped—undetectable probes of the Nexus ansible had gotten him that far. The origination code for the call was not his father’s, and he didn’t recognize it. He would have to hack into the main database to find a name, and it might not be the right one. The call had relayed through a communications satellite then covering an area two time zones away; beyond that, he had been able to find one relay, a surface installation near a town named, with no originality at all, Pittville, presumably for the nearby pit mine.

  He ate a moderate breakfast, explaining to his waiter, in his persona’s stuffy way, that something he’d eaten the day before had disagreed with him. After checking out, he went directly to the regional airport. Someone, he was sure, would be checking on Genson Ratanvi’s movements. Let them. Genson would be boringly predictable for a day or so at least.

  While waiting for his flight, he used the databoards as any other business traveler might do. All bore the ISC logo and—here on ISC’s home planet—came with ads extolling ISC’s technological and marketing genius. Rafe spent a moment downloading the public information to his implant, then went on searching for food processing specialists’ current contact numbers at his next stop, and began calling them as he thought about the ISC listing.

  Interesting…his father was listed as an ex officio member of the board, and Lew Parmina was now listed as CEO. Not surprising that he was the new CEO if something had happened to Rafe’s father, but that didn’t explain the empty house, the traps on communications, that call on his cranial ansible.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Cascadia Station,

  Moscoe Confederation

  “Cousin Stella?” Toby’s voice and the skitter of his dog’s claws on the floor brought Stella Vatta out of another dismal reverie.

  She glanced at the security escort, annoyed with herself for having missed the warning tone of the entry, and nodded to him. He nodded back and sketched a salute before leaving the apartment; she checked to make sure the exit warning came on. Then she forced a smile and turned to greet him. “Yes, Toby?”

  “They moved me up another class,” he said as he came in. “The test results are in…and can I have a snack?”

  “Of course,” Stella said, waving a hand toward the kitchen. “Go right ahead. But then I want you to clean up this mess—” Spread across the apartment’s living room were boxes of what Stella dismissed as “tech stuff,” whatever didn’t fit in Toby’s own small room. Stella had quit looking in there; the visual chaos gave her a headache.

  “It’s not just a mess,” Toby said through a mouthful of sandwich. “It’s all organized—ouch!” He had stepped on something. Stella hoped it was as sharp as the little knob with a sharp prong that she had stepped on earlier.

  “I’m tired of walking on it,” Stella said. “At least stack it all by the wall, can’t you?”

  “It takes longer to find things,” he said.

  Stella looked at him. If he had ever been impressed by her beauty—a weapon she’d wielded skillfully since childhood—he was over it now, and she recognized the tone as one she herself had used on her parents. But Toby was more malleable than she had been; after a moment, he flushed and mumbled “Sorry, Cousin Stella,” and—the other half of the sandwich in his mouth—began moving the boxes.

  In the several tendays since Ky had gone off on her insane quest, as Stella thought of it, and Rafe had left for Nexus, she had had more than enough time to examine her life in light of the revelation about her parentage. Her real parentage. Biometric data proved she was Osman Vatta’s daughter, some stranger-mother’s daughter, not the daughter of Stavros and Helen Stamarkos Vatta, as she’d always believed. Her blonde hair, her violet eyes, her beauty came not from the Stamarkos family, but from…someone else. Someone she’d never known, probably would never know. Ky had said it didn’t make any difference, but she knew better.

  She had tried to shake off the waves of anger, grief, and depression that washed over her several times a day, but except for Toby she was alone, absolutely alone, as she had never been before. How could she concentrate on trade, on finding cargo for the ship that had been Furman’s, when she felt so empty? She had forced herself to do the obvious things—hire security for herself and Toby and the Vatta dockspace, talk to Captain Orem of Gary Tobai about what security clearances new crew should have, but it was so hard to focus on all that. If only she’d had one other adult Vatta to talk to…Aunt Grace, for instance.

  “You know,” Toby said, breaking into her reverie, “I really think I can make another one.”

  “Another one what?” Stella asked.

  “
Ansible,” Toby said. “Like the one Captain—Cousin Ky left with you. Small enough to fit on a ship, I mean.”

  “That’s—” She started to say “impossible,” then stopped. Toby had already modified the appliances that had come with the apartment—giving them more sophisticated control systems—and upgraded the apartment’s security system. She remembered Quincy and Rafe both mentioning the boy’s knack for technical subjects and tasks. An idea tickled her, the first positive one she’d had in a long time. “If you could make another one…a few of them…we could put them on Vatta ships—”

  “That’s what I thought,” Toby said, grinning. He stopped where he was, a box of components in either hand. “If you could get reports from our ships right away, even in systems where the ansibles didn’t work, that would give us an edge—”

  “Do you really think you can?” She could not imagine anyone cobbling together something that intricate in an apartment bedroom. “Don’t you need a special lab or something?”

  “Not really,” Toby said, answering her second question first. “I’d love to have a lab of my own, but it’s mature tech, really; it’s not as finicky as it used to be.” That sounded like a quote from Quincy. “I’m really close now,” Toby went on. “Just another few days, I think. There’s this part I don’t understand…it seems like a backwards way of designing it, but there has to be a reason…”

  “What made you think of copying one?” Stella asked. “Where did you learn—?”

  “We need them,” Toby said. “Captain—Cousin Ky could use more. Every ship, really, could use one, except it’s not our design so we can’t sell it. Anyway, Rafe talked to me a lot, you know. He’s nice, even if he did scare me at first.”

  Stella blinked at the notion of Rafe, with his many aliases and his unquestionably shady past, being labeled “nice” by anyone.