Victory Conditions Page 20

  “They’re covering Turek’s escape,” Ky said. “And we’re the only ones with a vector on him.”

  “You can’t go after him alone!” Yamini said. “Remember your structural damage—”

  “We’re the only ones with a chance. And we still need to knock out those other warships if we can.” The displays made that clear. She called the bridge. “Captain Pritang, we have a chance to stop Turek before he makes it to jump. We need to be in range for a max-power beam—if we can paint him for ten seconds, that should do it. Looks like we have a clear place to microjump.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hugh said. He sounded eager.

  Quickly, Ky told the unit commanders that Vanguard would be in pursuit of Turek, but to continue with their engagements.

  “We can come help,” Teddy Ransome said.

  The last thing she needed was Teddy’s lightly armed little ship getting in the way.

  “Stay where you are,” she said. “Everyone needs your observations.”

  “My stuff’s too lightlagged to be of use now,” Teddy said. On the scan, his ship had already begun moving on an intersecting course. “I can help you—”

  The idiot. The loose cannon. Other labels raced through Ky’s mind but she ignored them. If he got between her and her target, that would be his problem. “Stay out of range, and out of my line of fire,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am!” he said, as if he hadn’t already disobeyed one order.

  Hugh chose an initial microjump to bring Vanguard a half hour closer to Turek’s ship, then boosted with insystem drive. Minute by minute, Vanguard closed in. Ky watched the range diminish.

  “Target in range,” he said finally. “Forward batteries—”

  The missiles were away, but would that be enough? They were close enough now for the beam. Hugh would have to drop the forward shields for a sustained burn, but Turek was fleeing; he’d offered no attack. There’d been nothing on scan from his escorts, either, no sign of live munitions being dropped.

  “Beam?” Hugh asked.

  “Go ahead,” Ky said. “But watch the temperature on those mounts. Let’s not tear our own ship apart.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hugh said.

  Ky watched on her readouts as the beam stabbed out, pinned Turek’s ship—sparkling and then steadying on its shields. She began counting seconds…one, two, three, five…surely Turek’s shields would have to fail soon. Was that a flare—? But the beam readout surged upward suddenly. Had Hugh missed it? She started to speak—

  The canopy blanked, locking Ky into the command chair; her head snapped back, smacking into the back of the chair hard enough to stun her. Her body tugged against the restraints as the CCC’s gravity compensators took over from Vanguard’s. She felt the shove of acceleration again, and then again, before the gravity compensators caught up. Then something else hit her head and she felt nothing for a time.

  She woke from a dream of loud music in a strobe-lit nightclub. As she blinked, dazed and unsure what had happened, her HUD showed miniatures of the screens in the rest of the CCC—half of them blank after a flare of white. Red warning lights flashed on and off. She heard nothing but a ringing in her ears.

  “Helm!”

  No answer.

  “Lee? Hugh?”

  No answer. She toggled to ansible with a moment’s satisfaction at having insisted that she have one, checked that she was on their most secure channel.

  “Vanguard, Vatta here. Report!”

  “Admiral Vatta! You’re alive—!” She didn’t recognize the voice but her implant parsed it as Treebear’s Captain Moscoe. “How many others are with you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ky said. If they thought whatever had happened might have killed her, the ship must have been holed. “I get no answer from the bridge—”

  “Vanguard blew.” That was Pettygrew’s voice, and Bassoon’s icon, familiar. “You were using the beam—” She remembered that. “—and we think they’d left a mineburst the beam triggered.”

  She remembered now, seeing the readout for the beam climbing into the danger zone—she’d been about to tell Hugh to shut it off, but Turek’s ship had been so close…

  “We’ll send someone, now that we know which chunk of debris you are,” Pettygrew said. “How’s your life support?”

  “I’m fine,” Ky said. Chunk of debris? So…had anyone else survived? A wave of black misery swept over her—had she killed all her friends? “My chair canopy’s blanked, but I should have up to twenty hours. What about others?”

  “We’ve got some suit beacons,” Pettygrew said. “No contacts so far, though.”

  Ky touched the control that should have opened her chair canopy if life support in the CCC had held. The canopy did not move. Neither, she found, did the chair rotate on its base, as it should. She could feel the faint vibration of the servomotors, but no movement occurred. Could she even clear the canopy? She found that control…the canopy cleared more slowly than usual and showed her the wreckage beyond, lit by the chair’s own emergency lights. Something had come through the armored bulkhead—the supposedly impregnable armored bulkhead—and severed one of the other chairs at what had been its occupant’s waist. Whatever it was—a jagged piece of something she could not identify—protruded from the bulkhead beyond. Another chair, its canopy closed and opaqued, tilted crazily to one side. Only one was upright, sealed. A suit of space armor, off to the left, moved slightly, like a weird insect found under a log.

  “Situation?” But even as she asked, several of the displays came back on. “Wait—I’m getting data. I’m seeing enemy icons about two light-hours outbound—is that right? And all our other ships are undamaged?”

  “Right, Commander. Vanguard’s the only one with significant damage.”

  “What do our scouts report?”

  “Clean sweep. No enemy chatter for the past hour—” Hour? How long had she been out of contact? Had she blacked out and not known it? “No gravitational anomalies that might be stealthed observers.”

  “Then we need to pick up survivors but be alert for a sudden return. If they realize they’ve blown Vanguard they might jump back in…”

  “Moray Defense is working on that, ma’am. They’ve sent crews to their remote installations, though it’ll be days yet. We need to get you to one of the stations first.”

  “No, I’m fine. Pick up any suit beacon first.” Ky stared at the monitors, forcing herself to think only of the situation outside. “Did they get any of the new ships?”

  “Yes. Nine of them. What we’re hearing from Moray is that agents had sabotaged the ships, allowing the enemy to gain control. All those crewed by riggers were lost—that happened before you were hit.”

  “Nine…that’s not so many, except that they’re new. Weapons mounted?”

  “Weapons aboard, not all mounted. Not fully loaded out, though.”

  Ky thought again, then made her dispositions. Cascadian contingent here, to do this, in case of trouble. Slotter Key contingent there, ditto. Ransome to transport someone to do ansible repair, if Moray didn’t have the resources.

  “Ransome’s gone, ma’am.”

  “Gone? Killed?”

  “No, ma’am…right after Vanguard blew, he torched up and went in pursuit of the enemy ships. Didn’t answer hails or anything. Went into FTL about the same time they did…er…zero point oh one seconds after they did. Moray Defense was asking if I thought he’d been a conspirator…”

  “No, he’s being a Romantic,” Ky said. If she could have laughed at anything, she’d have laughed at this idiocy: one little ship, chasing after Turek’s entire fleet. “What about Baskerville?”

  “He followed Ransome…two loose cannons…” Pettygrew had never liked Ransome. Pitt was looking at her now, and tapping her helmet cover.

  “Excuse me,” Ky said. “People are waking up; I’ll give you a report later.”

  “Admiral’s aboard,” Pettygrew reported. “Bassoon’s headed in.”

  Ky looked
around. The Bissonet ship, much smaller than Vanguard, nonetheless had a pure military feel that Vanguard had never quite achieved. It had its own tiny CCC off the bridge—hardly more than a closet, but packed with electronic gear. The crew saluted her and Pettygrew smartly. Nothing looked at all merchant-like.

  She felt shaky, which annoyed her; she had a blinding headache and ached in every muscle. The medics in Bassoon’s tiny sick bay insisted on putting her down for a few hours while they checked her over.

  “No bones broken, no internal bleeding, but Admiral, we strongly advise you take it easy, and you definitely need to be checked out in a real medical center when we get back to a station.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Ky said. She was not about to lie in bed while other people’s bodies—her crew’s bodies, her friends’ bodies—were scattered in a debris field and could not even be gathered for decent disposal and memorial. She struggled off the exam table and started dressing. “I need to speak to the captain.”

  “I know the system ansible’s still down,” she said to Pettygrew a few minutes later. “But it occurred to me that if Turek saw my ship blow, he might think I was dead. And that might be good for us. So please inform the other ships that no one is to mention my being alive on any transmission outside this system. I’ll tell the Moray government as well—”

  In the three standard days it took to reach Tobados Yards station, Ky learned more about Pettygrew and his crew than she had in the long months before. He was married and had three children—if they were still alive back on Bissonet. Over half his crew were from the same district, Valrhona Hills, and most were also married.

  “We try not to think about it,” he said, when Ky asked how he was dealing with the possibility that his crew’s families, as well as his own, were dead or under control of the enemy. “We know you lost your whole family and you’re staying focused on the task at hand. If you—pardon the implication that you might be expected to be less able, but you are younger—if you can get past that, we can. We must. Our families’ only hope is our victory—our return to free them, if they are alive.”

  “If we knew his total force, we could guess if he’ll have to pull people off Bissonet to take Nexus.”

  “If he takes every ship there, destroys the shuttles and the ansible, the downside population won’t be able to do anything. All the shipyards are up in space. He could pull his occupying force, if he left one, and it wouldn’t help.”

  When they arrived at the Tobados Yards station, Moray’s senior military commander had already set up meetings with shipyard and military personnel, and Tobados itself had already decided (perhaps with help from the Moray government) that the best use of its remaining heavy cruisers would be under Ky’s command.

  “I have too much on my plate to spend time lounging around a clinic,” Ky said. She had accepted an initial evaluation to satisfy Pettygrew, but she was not going to check in. “Yes, I have a headache. Yes, I’m sore. I’ll get over it. We have a war to fight; we’ve got to stop Turek.” This was her first conference with her captains since the battle. “Much more critical than my very minor injuries is recognizing your very important actions—you saved not just some warships from Turek’s control, but these people from certain death. And you proved that a multisource force can fight together and be effective.”

  “With the right commander,” Argelos muttered. Others nodded, even Merced.

  “Most of you had never fought with me before—or with each other—or with onboard ansibles—and yet in a short time you were able to learn how to do it and remember it in the stress of combat. Every one of you—” She made eye contact with each one in person for those at Tobados or on screen for those on patrol, and named them, one by one. “Each of you played an essential part in this victory, and I commend you all.”

  “But he ran,” Merced said. “He took his ships away; it wasn’t a complete victory.”

  The collective sigh from the others made it clear that Merced had been saying the same thing before. Vassli, Merced’s military adviser on Termagant, looked particularly pained. Ky chuckled. “Captain Merced, driving the enemy to retreat is usually considered victory. But you’re right, one rout does not make a victory. It will be victory when we have destroyed Turek’s fleet, and killed Turek—and that will come. You will have plenty of fighting in your future, Captain Merced.”

  “As long as you don’t stop now and think the job’s done,” Merced said.

  “Turek killed my entire family,” Ky said. “I’m not likely to stop now.”

  Merced subsided, and Ky led the discussion where she intended, to the next steps to be taken.

  Teddy Ransome suspected that Admiral Vatta would not have approved of what he was doing. But that gallant officer had surely died with her ship, and he was not going to let her death go un-avenged.

  It was risky in the extreme to tuck little Glorious into the tail of the formation Turek led. Everyone knew it was impossible to tail ships in FTL space. Undetermined location and all that. But…but, he told himself, no one had ever tried it the way he was trying it. He knew the science was vague, even vaguer in that science had never been his favorite subject. But he could do nothing more for Admiral Vatta in Moray System, and if he could avenge her—it was worth any risk. Moreover, the discovery that his comtech could tune their shipboard ansible with that of a pirate vessel suggested to him that the space-folding of ansible physics and the indeterminate space of FTL might have something in common. Was it enough? He would find out.

  His ship had gone into jump on the heels of Turek’s fleet, and they had been in FTL space for six days now. Not a long jump, as jumps go, but he might be jumping in the wrong direction, for all he knew.

  His mind replayed the death of Vanguard over and over. It was one thing for his friends to die, as Dennis had done. He knew this was the death they had wanted to die. But Ky Vatta was—had been—different. He suspected she did not believe everything he said, thinking him the soppier sort of Romantic, but she had been the one true thing, the one ideal woman—beautiful and exotic and brilliant and brave—and he had seen himself protecting her, fighting alongside her, finally winning her regard and—in the rosiest of his visions—joining him in partnership forever.

  And now she was dead. Blown apart, not even fragments to rejoin and mourn in a funeral service, to be laid in a proper mausoleum where he could come with wreaths and mourning scrolls, and water the stone with his tears.

  Just dead. Worse, he had not protected her. He had not been between her and danger; she had outstripped his honor and taken danger on herself, and if this made her even more a hero, even more his soul mate, it was too late.

  He would make up for it as much as he could. Turek would die by his hand.

  After the meeting with her captains—only the first of many, she assured them—Ky met with local officials of Tobados Yards and the station government.

  “Right before the alarm,” Kendelmann, the station’s security chief, said, “we had some anomalous deaths way outside the statistical norms. All were healthy professionals working for subcontractors at the shipyard. No prior health flags on their records, completely unexpected. But when we looked, they’d all had opportunities to do something, get in at least second-degree contact with the ships in production. We dug deeper, turned up some interesting details: gambling debts, embezzlement, scandals of one kind or another. Aside from that idiot Lozar, whose friends are sure he was duped by his religious leader, they were all blackmailable, every one of them. If they were killed to prevent their talking later—”

  “Then someone higher up in Turek’s organization is still here.”

  “Yes. We halted all civilian traffic as well as blocking ansible access. But we don’t know who—we haven’t found anything else. It’s difficult here. Moray’s older than you younger worlds, closer to the Central Alliance. We get people from all over, and always have. With travel and trade down, our economy tanked, but I don’t know why anyone would think pirates were t
he right answer.”

  “Hungry people will listen to any promise of food,” Ky said. “They were promised business, profit. You had new contracts for ships enough to restart your economy…that would make a lot of people happy.”

  “We need to find their agent,” he said, scowling. “Or agents.”

  “If they’re using Turek’s private language,” Ky said, “I can help with that. We have a lot of transmissions, a lot of text, and at least partial translation. I think you should monitor the ansible traffic out of here, as well as look for one of the small portable ansibles we use on our ships. Turek has them, too, as we told your government before we left Cascadia. Someone here might have one.”

  “So…someone here might have told him that you’re alive?”

  “If they had such an ansible, yes. Even if not, they’ll probably pass a coded message through the system ansible. Thing is, if they use one of the pirates’ ansibles, they can communicate only with Turek’s people—so any rumors of my death will have come through his network, his agents.”

  “We haven’t opened ansible service for private communication yet,” he said. “We’ve said we’re still working on damage repair.”

  “I’d keep it that way,” Ky said. “In the meantime, if you want, I’ll bring you a file of code phrases to watch for. I won’t ping it to you—I don’t know how secure your communications are.”

  For an instant, he looked offended, then he shook his head. “Too long a peace, too little suspicion,” he said. “I was acting like a police chief, dealing with ordinary crime, when I should—”

  Ky shook her head. “Don’t start that. Guilt’s a luxury sometimes. You know more about the station and its people than anyone else—we need you.”

  He stared, then laughed. “I can see how someone your age got to be a fleet commander. Sorry. Yes, of course. Please let me see just as much of that as you think I need to keep an eye out. Meanwhile, since there very well may be one of Turek’s people here, I assume you’re taking precautions yourself?”