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  She heard a scream from the middle compartment, then the hatch between them flew open and Jen staggered in, grabbing at the back of the Commandant’s seat for balance. “Admiral—the Commandant’s aide! He’s dead!” She lost her grip on the seatback as the module lurched again and fell, her head banging the edge of the table.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SLOTTER KEY, PORT MAJOR, MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

  DAY 1

  Grace Lane Vatta, Rector of Defense, would rather have brought her niece Ky down from the station in a Vatta shuttle, but politics made that impossible. The returning hero must have a proper military escort. It was her department, after all, and she was bound—however unwillingly—by its traditions. Her job was hard enough already, as a civilian whose last military position had been as a clandestine fighter in what she thought of as a civil war but history books preferred to call an insurrection.

  At least she’d spoken to Ky when the Space Defense Force ship arrived insystem, and was reassured by her state of health. Clear-eyed, bronze skin glowing, black hair snugged tight in a short braid—she’d never seen Ky with that hairdo, and it showed off the sharp planes of her face. Not a girl anymore, but a woman to reckon with, a woman whose command presence Grace could feel through the screen.

  She was delighted. Both her great-nieces, Ky and her cousin Stella, had matured into women she could respect, women capable of restoring and protecting the family. They weren’t much alike, but that didn’t matter. She’d watched Stella rebuild a large part of Vatta’s trade network from a separate headquarters in the Moscoe Confederation or Confederacy or whatever they called it. Ky’s military genius had already thwarted the greatest threat to interstellar trade in Grace’s lifetime, and Ky would, Grace was sure, make space safe for tradeships into the future. Her own responsibility as Rector of Defense, the space within Slotter Key’s home system, would be easier with an interstellar fleet operating between systems.

  Ky would arrive in a few hours. Grace looked at the action items on her desk screens—scarcely time enough to clear everything before then. She checked briefly when Ky’s pinnace reached the station and when the Spaceforce shuttle undocked, and then settled to work again. The weather had turned foul before dawn; hailstones battered the reinforced windows of her office in between spurts of snow, and if she looked, she knew she’d see the mix whitening the lawn below. The shuttle would be delayed some hours to avoid the rough weather, but the forecast said a clear night would follow as the front pushed offshore and the storms went with it.

  She was deep in the intricacies of the proposed biennial budget request when her implant pinged. “Yes?”

  “MacRobert,” he said. “The shuttle’s had a problem.”

  Ice ran down her spine. “It’s…gone?” Always expect the worst, then anything else would be good news; she’d learned that early.

  “No. Emergency landing, a long way out in the Oklandan. They were trying to make the Pingat, but didn’t—”

  “Sabotage?”

  “Almost certainly, and internal at that. I’ve opened a case; I need your sign-off.”

  “You have it.” She punched a sequence of buttons on her desktop and pressed her thumb to the reader. MacRobert was the one person in the Defense Department she trusted absolutely, as he trusted her. Two old spooks, she thought as her door opened; she touched her tongue to the correct molar, signaling MacRobert to wait a moment. Olwen, her personal assistant, looked in, her face pale.

  “Rector, they’ve just reported a problem of some kind—a course change.”

  “Malfunction?”

  “Yes, Sera, but no details. They’re planning to land somewhere in the Pingat chain. I’ve notified Meteorology and the satellites, but…but the transponder went off.”

  A line of curses crackled through Grace’s mind; she used none of them. “We’ll have to change the schedule,” she said, her voice steady. “I’ll need the President’s staff first, then Port’s militia, Spaceforce Academy, finally Vatta headquarters. Set up the calls, please.”

  “Does this mean someone attacked us? Is it a war?” Olwen’s eyes were wide.

  “No, it’s not war. I expect the shuttle had engine trouble,” Grace said. The war rumor had started as soon as Ky’s flagship showed up in the system. “Get me that line to the President’s staff, please.” Olwen nodded and shut the door. Grace’s heart was racing. She wanted to charge out of her office, do something, but she must not. One thing at a time. She spoke to MacRobert. “I’m shutting down the airfield reception here; ping me when you know anything definite. I’ll be back with you when I can.”

  “Got it,” he said, and the connection blanked.

  The President’s staff received the news that the welcoming ceremonies would be delayed due to a shuttle problem with their usual mix of whiny complaint (“but it was arranged…”) and demands for information she didn’t have (“Well, when will the shuttle arrive, then?”). She declined to talk to the President on the grounds of other urgent duties, and made the next call to the special events coordinator already waiting at the shuttle landing field near the city.

  “I heard something,” he said. “But is there no ETA?”

  “Not yet,” Grace said. “They’re not landing here in any case, so the ceremony should be postponed indefinitely.”

  Next, Spaceforce Academy. She did not want to imagine losing the Commandant, who had been such a stalwart ally in the difficult time after the attack on Vatta, who had lent her MacRobert as a liaison and seen, himself, to the treasonous President. Since she had become Rector, they had become almost friends—as much as the Commandant admitted having friends. She knew this attack might have been aimed at him as much as at Ky or Vatta.

  His second in command, whose appointment they had both approved, answered the call at once. “You’ve heard,” Iskin Kvannis said.

  “I’ve heard they had trouble and went down. Do you have the location yet?”

  “They didn’t reach the Pingat airfield and they were below its sensor net. Ditched, is what we assume. No contact so far, but the survival gear could have been sabotaged as well as the shuttle.”

  Kvannis was younger, blunter, than the Commandant; Grace appreciated the bluntness. “Survivable?” she asked.

  “Depends,” he said. “It should have separated the passenger module, free-fallen to eighty-five hundred meters with a streamer chute, then come down more slowly with parachutes. I don’t know if you saw the demonstration video—”

  “Yes, I did, before we approved the modification of more shuttles.”

  “Well, this one should have had the full load of survival equipment: survival suits, rafts, supplies including advanced communications gear. But given the logical supposition that the shuttle drive and/or controls were sabotaged, so might the supplies have been. No way to know until we find…whatever we find. I’ve spoken to the safety officer here in Port Major; he says someone ticked the right boxes that everything had been inspected, but there would not have been another full inspection at the Station. Both survival suits and the rafts are fitted with transponders; we’ll hope Admiral Vatta used the one we customized for her.”

  “Why didn’t she bring her own?”

  “It didn’t have our transponder codes loaded. Her security people didn’t want our codes in her suit, and we wanted her to carry our codes in case of any mishap. Of course, she might have brought her own anyway, but her people approved the specs for ours and gave us her measurements.”

  “Location codes. So you should be able to locate them?”

  “If the suits weren’t compromised. Rector, the fact that we’ve had no contact—and it’s now over two hours since the transponder went off—we must assume that either the crash was fatal, or the communications capability of any rafts and suits was compromised, either by the crash—which would likely mean it was fatal—or by sabotage.”

  Grace’s skullphone pinged before she had a chance to say what she thought about not being informed for over two hours
. “Just a moment,” she said to Kvannis. “I’m getting info. Stay online.”

  “Rector Vatta, this is Captain Pordre, Admiral Vatta’s flag captain. Are you aware—?”

  “That the shuttle carrying Ky has gone down? Yes, Captain. Do you have new data?”

  “We put a shuttle down as soon as hers made a radical course change and descent from the flight plan we’d been given. Our crew had eyes on it and we had contact with the admiral shortly before it descended into a heavy cloudbank, then we lost it. Our shuttle then circled just above that cloud layer; I wouldn’t let them go lower, since we were starting to have communications breakups as well.”

  “You have a location?”

  “Not precisely, though closer than you have probably. But Slotter Key’s air defense forces are hassling us now about having dropped a shuttle without a proper flight plan and pre-authorization. We tried to tell them where we think the shuttle went in, but I don’t think they’re listening.”

  “I’ll take care of that. Send me all the data you’ve got; I’ll forward it to our Search and Rescue Service—” Grace went back to Kvannis. “I’ve got a location from Admiral Vatta’s flagship; they dropped a shuttle to keep an eye on ours when it went off-plan. Now I need to get AirDefense off their case and give SAR the location data. Talk to you later.”

  “Yes, Rector. I’ll leave any new word with your staff.”

  As Rector of Defense, Grace had oversight of all planetary defenses, but AirDefense and its emergency Armed Interdiction Unit had, until now, occupied the least of her time. It had shrunk, after the civil war in her youth, and had narrowly escaped elimination as unnecessary and expensive during budget cycles since. Slotter Key’s criminals preferred to use the sea-lanes and the complicated island geography for whatever they were up to. AirDefense had absorbed and expanded the Search and Rescue Service from the old Coastal Patrol, mostly in an effort to stay on the budget at all. Grace called Ilya Ramos, subrector for AirDefense, and asked for the name of the Region VII commander of AIU.

  “You’d better talk to Admiral Hicks first,” Ramos said when she told him what had happened.

  “No time,” Grace said. “If they take potshots at the SDF shuttle, we’ll have even more problems. Besides, we need to find our shuttle and any survivors now, not hours from now.”

  “Commander Orniakos, then. Basil Orniakos; this is his direct line.”

  The link came through. Grace said, “Thank you, Ilya,” and hit the link. “This is Rector Vatta, Commander,” she said, when she heard Orniakos answer with his name. “I need an immediate cease-and-desist order on that pursuit of the SDF shuttle.”

  “You’re who? The Rector?” He sounded both grumpy and half asleep. She hadn’t thought to look up the time at his location; could it have been night there? “Why would the Rector contact me directly and not through my chain of command? Who are you, her secretary?”

  “I am Rector Vatta and I’m contacting you directly because the matter is too urgent—”

  “Prove it.” His tone was truculent, even defiant, rousing a responsive flare of white-hot anger. Not only had she not been told immediately about the shuttle’s problem, but now some boob less than half her age who had probably never seen combat was defying her.

  “I assure you,” Grace said, as she sent her official seal, image, and right-hand fingerprints to him, “you do not want to wait for your senior to be involved in this. It will not benefit his career or yours.” She knew this was not the right approach, but Ky was down, and if she was alive—

  “This is not the right way to contact me; I don’t take operational orders from you,” he said. “I don’t care what you—”

  “If you fire upon a Space Defense Force craft of any kind,” Grace said as rage whited out her vision for a moment, “I will see that you lose your commission, if they don’t simply blow you to pieces.” She pressed the button that ended that call and called MacRobert.

  “What d’you have?” he asked.

  “A likely location where they went down. And a base commander who needs to be relieved of command when I have a spare moment, which I don’t. A guy named Basil Orniakos—”

  “Regional commander, not base commander. Son and grandson of Academy graduates, ranked thirteenth in his class, switched from space duty to planetary due to his father becoming disabled…that Basil Orniakos?”

  “I suppose. I asked Ilya Ramos who was in charge of AirDefense in that sector—”

  “That would be Orniakos. And you contacted him yourself? You didn’t call Admiral Hicks first?”

  “Yes. He threatened Ky’s ship. It had launched a shuttle to shadow the one she was on when it seemed to be in trouble, and it had eyes on her until the shuttle went into thick clouds. They have the best location on the crash site. He wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Grace—Rector—I’ve tried to explain before—”

  “That I shouldn’t try to break into the chain of command. I know. I know that, Mac. But we don’t have a lot of time.”

  He said nothing. She could almost see the words forming in his mind: Time you’ve already wasted by alienating Orniakos. Then a sigh. “You need to give Air-Sea Rescue the location data you’ve got. It would be best to contact Admiral Sumia.”

  “Pingat Base is closer to the location—”

  “Admiral Sumia. Or I can do it for you. I know someone on that side.”

  “Fine. You do it. I’m just a mere civilian Rector.” She hated the edge frustration gave her voice; Mac didn’t deserve it. But she was full of rage, old and new rage both.

  “Just a moment until I’m at a secure desk,” Mac said. Then he said, “Ready now. My usual code.”

  “Here goes,” Grace said. “Straight from Vanguard.”

  “Got it,” Mac said, a moment later. “I’ll get hold of my contact right away. And Grace, be careful. If this is another deliberate attack on Vatta, you’re a major target. If it was aimed at the Commandant, or the Defense Department as a whole, you’re the Rector. Either way, take all precautions.”

  “I’m always careful.”

  “I’m always concerned.”

  Grace sat back in her chair for a moment, not quite slumping. Ky gone. She had to think of it that way, face the likelihood that Ky had died in the crash, after all she had survived before, and that meant not only a great loss to the family but the frustration of the very plan that had brought Ky back to Slotter Key at all.

  Unless she hadn’t died. Ky—who had come through so many perilous adventures—would not die easily if only she made it to the sea in one piece. Mostly one piece. With the experience of age, Grace tested the near-certainty of death against the splinter of hope that Ky lived. Which would she rather live with?

  Hope, of course. She looked down at her left arm, now the same size as her right one but completely different to look at, with the skin she remembered from her distant youth—smooth, unmarked, so different from the uneven color and wrinkles of her right. She had been willing to lose that arm to save a child; she had fought to have a biological replacement grown in situ; she’d been told there was only a small chance it would live. And there it was—full-size, fully functional. She would believe Ky was alive.

  —

  Stella Vatta, acting head of Vatta Transport’s branch office in Cascadia, and soon to be CEO of the entire corporation, sat quietly in the car beside her mother, Helen Stamarkos Vatta, current CEO of Vatta Enterprises, as they drove to Vatta’s rebuilt headquarters in Port Major. Breakfast had been surprisingly pleasant, she thought, and with a little luck the rest of her visit would pass with no familial drama. Her mother looked older, to be sure, as expected in a woman who had lost three of her four children and her husband in the attack on Vatta several years before, but Stella sensed that her mother wanted a peaceful reunion as much as Stella did.

  They had touched lightly on the family business during breakfast, each congratulating the other on what had been accomplished since that great upheaval. Now, as the c
ar moved along familiar streets and neared the new headquarters building, Stella felt her skin tighten.

  “Do you drive yourself every day?”

  “Yes, but not the same route. Or the same car.” Her mother turned right for two blocks, then left. “We’ll go past the front, circle around. The entrance is in back, as before.”

  Vatta’s new headquarters building, on the same site as the bombed-out former one, had a similar façade on State Street but a different footprint on the block as a whole. Stella eyed the new building, recognizing subtle differences from the old headquarters where she had been so often. As they entered the private access, she looked around the large open court.

  “What’s this? The building’s not nearly as big.”

  “Couldn’t afford it,” Helen said. “We’d lost too much, and the banks balked. Over on State, as you saw, it looks much the same. Here on Trade, it’s not as tall and only half as deep. Also, having had the basements mined, we’ve handled the underground portions differently.”

  The car shuddered to a halt; Stella’s expression stiffened. “What—”

  “It’s all right.” Helen touched the control panel, entering the codes. The car rolled forward a short distance and stopped. “We’re going to the belowground entrance,” Helen said. The car sank without any vibration. Stella stared as they passed through what looked like solid pavement, coming to rest in a well-lit space with uniformed guards.

  “It’s an application of tractor beam technology,” Helen said. “Illegal onplanet, but it has many advantages. An intruder driving into that courtyard will fall into one of several holes.” She opened her door. “Don’t worry; this vehicle’s programmed to stop safely short of the entrance. We do have plans to fill in that space; the foundations are poured, but that can wait.”

  Stella watched her mother’s progress through the building with a mixture of grief and trepidation. Most of her time in the old headquarters had been with her father—a few times with both her parents—and what she remembered overlaid the present building like a transparency. Only the wall-stripe in the passages, the familiar red and blue against cream walls, was the same.