Victory Conditions Read online

  “She’ll just have to buy something, then. This family is rich enough.”

  “I expect the accounts are frozen,” Stella said. “But thank you so much for your cooperation.” She ended the call, shaking her head. “Idiots.” With another call, she learned that her suspicion had been correct: all Louarri accounts were frozen, and it would take a court order to give Zori access to her own possessions. “Toby, go see if Zori’s awake; I need to talk to both of you.”

  Zori looked as if she’d been crying again, and her clothes were rumpled, but she had herself under control when she came into the kitchen.

  “I can fix you eggs,” Toby said, clearly eager to show off his new skill. Zori shuddered and refused, but accepted toast.

  “Your school assignments will be delivered here by midmorning,” Stella said. “But Zori, your computers and your clothes are all captive to a very zealous security officer. All your family accounts are frozen, so your current credit cube is useless for the time being. I’m sure the court will make one account available in a day or so, but in the meantime you need things. Where do you usually shop?”

  “Gibalta’s,” Zori said. “But—you mean there are people in our house?”

  Was she really that naïve? “Yes,” Stella said, as gently as she could. “You know your parents are in custody—”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, the authorities are looking for evidence. You weren’t involved in whatever your father was doing, but they can’t be sure.”

  “They won’t look in my journal, will they?” Zori’s glance slid over to Toby, and she blushed, then looked down.

  Young love, again. Stella felt like laughing and banging her head on the wall both, and neither would help. Her own mother had found her journal, all those years ago, with all the damning things she’d written about that boy. “I’m afraid they will,” she said, as gently as possible. “But Zori, they are looking for evidence…not…whatever you put in your journal.”

  “They’ll read it, though, won’t they?” Red to the ear-tips, Zori stared fixedly at toast on the plate.

  “Probably. But—” How to say tactfully that law enforcement had no doubt seen the same, and worse, and wouldn’t think worse of a teenage girl in love. Nothing would have salved her own adolescent pride; nothing, at this moment, would help Zori, except perhaps getting her mind on something else. “But the immediate problem is getting you some clean clothes, and for that we’ll use my credit cube—”

  “I couldn’t possibly,” Zori said. “You’re doing too much—” Tears trickled down her face.

  “You need clean clothes,” Stella said. And she herself needed to get to the office, and the greater universe had worse problems to deal with than this girl…she pushed her irritation down. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I have to get to work, but I’ll send my assistant, Gillian Astin, and she’ll help you order in what you need. There’s our security and Station Security outside; you are not to leave, either of you, for any reason. Contact me if anyone claiming to be official tries to get you to leave.” Toby opened his mouth. “No, Toby, don’t even ask. You are not coming to the lab today. Not until the authorities have some answers they don’t have yet.” They nodded, finally, and she left, all too aware that she was leaving two lovesick youngsters alone…but not for long.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  O nce at the office, Stella opened the databurst from the Ministry of Defense and started reading. Slotter Key’s government, in sending the privateers to Cascadia, had made a powerful argument that systems needed to cooperate to protect themselves—no one system had sufficient resources. Stella had not been privy to any of those negotiations, or the treaty that resulted. Now she read the dense paragraphs at skimming pace, wondering why she needed any of this information.

  Everything had gone smoothly, the briefing went on, until the Moscoe Confederation government had consulted with its old ally Nexus, inviting them to join this new alliance against a common enemy. Then InterStellar Communications raised a strong objection against Ky Vatta. Not that she was too young, or too inexperienced—something that would have been reasonable, Stella thought—but because she was a Vatta.

  Stella stared at that paragraph, read it twice. Her first impulse was to place an immediate ansible call to Rafe, and damn any concerns about the time of day where he was. Why would Rafe object to Ky Vatta commanding ships? But she had promised to call the Assistant Minister.

  Nexus II

  Rafe Dunbarger stared down the boardroom table, meeting each pair of eyes. Mostly hostile eyes, now, faces scowling back at him. He had only four solid allies on the Board, and even those were not entirely happy with him. They understood the reasons for his insistence that Nexus’ alliance with the Moscoe Confederation should be expanded to include Slotter Key—or said they did—but they had a fixed aversion to anyone named Vatta that he had not been able to budge.

  “You have to see,” Perris Vantha said, “that since the government agrees with us, the evidence is all on our side.”

  “It isn’t evidence,” Rafe said, trying to keep his tone even. “It’s coincidence. Post hoc is not propter hoc, not in logic nor in law.”

  “Everything that’s gone wrong started with a Vatta,” Vantha said, as if she had not heard. She was a replacement for Termanian, a woman whose prior experience had been on the board of a large nonprofit. So many people had been eliminated because of possible connections to Lew Parmina, and at least she hadn’t had that. But she also didn’t have, he had discovered, the keen intelligence he would have expected. She was connected socially to his family. That turned out to be almost as big a problem as Parmina.

  “That’s not entirely true,” Vaclav Box said. But his quick glance at Rafe was worried.

  “It is,” she said. “And it’s not recent—it started years ago, with Parmina linking up with Vatta executives on Slotter Key. The same branch of the family who sent their daughter off to a military academy—” Scorn edged her voice. Vantha’s own daughters were active in charity work, when they weren’t parading around in fashionable clothes posing for the media.

  “And how does that figure into this?” Rafe asked.

  “Clearly they were planning a military takeover,” she said. That got some puzzled looks even from those on her side. She sighed dramatically. “Look—they already have a pirate captain, Osman Vatta. Now they train up a military leader, supposedly legitimate. They fake an attack on the family, an excuse for this person to act out her training, and the next thing anyone hears she’s commanding an armed ship and gathering allies. And—worst of all—she’s got some rogue technician with her who’s repairing ansibles without authorization.”

  “She didn’t have a rogue technician,” Rafe said. “She had me. I repaired them.”

  Perris’ mouth opened and closed before finally snapping shut, but the argument wasn’t over. Anton Bolton took it up.

  “Osman Vatta somehow stole the prototype for the shipboard ansible,” he said. “That’s established, right?”

  “Right,” Rafe said. He had conceded that before. Osman was a thief; he stole things. Every family probably had one.

  “And he manufactured more or had them made, and supplied them to Turek.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Lew Parmina was in league with Turek, which means he was in league with Osman Vatta, really—” Bolton had spread out one pudgy hand to tick off his points on his fingers. Rafe suppressed the desire to break the fingers.

  “Only if you think the leak of technology from here went from Parmina to Vatta to Turek, rather than directly,” Rafe said. They had not been able to determine, from the data in Parmina’s implant, exactly what Parmina had done with the units, whether he had already been in contact with Turek or Osman Vatta then, or only later.

  Bolton ignored that and plunged on. “And then this daughter of Lew Parmina’s friend, Stella Vatta, steals our technology and starts manufacturing and selling these things on the open market
—”

  “She didn’t steal it,” Rafe said. “We never patented it. Parmina stole the actual machines and abducted some technicians, after the decision was made—” By the Board of Directors, some involved in that decision still sitting here glaring at him.

  “Probably because Parmina, on Vatta’s advice, told your father it wasn’t necessary. That’s what a merchant spacer would want, isn’t it? Shipboard ansibles? To be free of ansible charges?”

  “And besides,” Perris added. “For all we know, this Gammis Turek is really a Vatta and hiding it to protect the family. We don’t have any proof he’s not.”

  They had mush for brains. They were so determined to damn the entire Vatta family…“Every ship in space would like that,” Rafe said. “The decision not to patent or market them came, as you know, from the Board of Directors, on advice from my father—”

  “Who was being pressured by Lew Parmina, who had Vatta friends,” Bolton said, ignoring Rafe’s facts in favor of his own prejudice. He threw himself back in his chair as if he’d proved something.

  “And now,” Rafe said, “you’re going to point out that it was a Vatta on Slotter Key who turned that ansible back on, right? And that Ky Vatta was present when our ships were chewed up at Boxtop?”

  “Your father says—” Bolton stopped, glanced sideways. Rafe said nothing. It was no more than he’d expected; many of these people had known his father for years, and they would pay attention to his opinions even now. They’d said they didn’t want him back as CEO; they’d said they wanted Rafe instead, but old habits died hard. “Your father says it has to be Vattas. They’re trouble, that’s all they are. Hiding it for years, appearing respectable, just like Parmina, but actually plotting to destroy our monopoly, ruin us…”

  “We’ve already lost billions in income,” Vantha said. “Billions. Our fleet’s useless, you say. Well, it is now, after that Vatta woman ruined it at Boxtop—”

  “She didn’t ruin it. She didn’t fire a shot at it. Did you even look at our own commander’s post-battle analysis?”

  “It wouldn’t have been there if she hadn’t made an unauthorized ansible repair,” Elise Dameron said. “You have to admit that.”

  He had to get new Board members, people with more brains and fewer social connections. He had no idea how to do that.

  “It comes down to this,” Bolton said. “You don’t have the votes, if you push us to it. You haven’t done that badly as CEO; you’ve rooted out a lot of the bad here, in our own ranks. I understand, if the others don’t, that the origins of this are not your fault. But now you have to choose: follow that Vatta girl like a besotted adolescent and lose your position, or stay and understand that there can be no alliance with a rogue family, not in a crisis like this.”

  Rafe opened his mouth to tell them what they could do with their antiquated, outmoded, obsolete, creaking-at-all-joints corporation…the very thought of getting back out into what he now thought of as the real world, the place he belonged, was like a gust of clean mountain air in a stale, overheated room. But. But there were his parents. What would they do, without him to run interference? And Penny. She was better, but not yet ready for total independence. And he knew, just as they knew, that he was better at his job than any of them, or anyone they could find.

  He had duties. Responsibilities. Things he could accomplish that no one else could, because no one else would understand how important they were and have the determination to carry them through. Nexus had to stay in the alliance or—if the pirates came—the whole planet could be taken over and the pirates could end up in control of everything—all the systems, all the worlds, all the people ISC had once served.

  Aboard Vanguard, in FTL Flight

  “One minute to transition.” Ky could feel the tension on Vanguard’s bridge as they neared their second jump-point transition. As the chronometer ticked down, she watched the screens. Weapons hot. Shields full on. Insystem drive on and synched to the microjump controller, already programmed for the first jump.

  Scan flickered then came alive, roiled with downjump turbulence; before it cleared, they had microjumped a half second. Scan blanked, came alive again, steadied.

  “Hostiles—” That was Teddy Ransome, first out, reporting; he gave the coordinates.

  She had changed the pattern of the post-downjump dispersion jump…and now saw that indeed the hostiles were positioned to attack the initial emergence pattern or the dispersal she’d used at the first jump point. Her skin felt tight. If they hadn’t spotted that pursuer—if she hadn’t changed the pattern—they’d be caught in the maelstrom that now filled space where they weren’t. Twenty enemy ships were insystem, at least.

  “Jump now!” she said. No time to strip the local ansible of any further news. So they might come out at Cascadia a bit ragged; better that than not at all.

  “That was interesting,” Major Douglas commented when they were safely back in FTL. “They certainly knew where we were going and what route. I think my organization will be very interested in the speed and accuracy with which Turek learned all that.”

  “I hope they haven’t hit Cascadia by the time we get there,” Ky said. “And using twenty of his ships just to block a jump point—”

  “He’s getting frantic,” Hugh said.

  “Do you think he’s heard about the Slotter Key privateers coming to Cascadia?” Douglas said.

  “He’d have to,” Martin said. “Your Aunt Grace may have sent the orders as secretly as she could, but there’s no way the crews of thirty-odd privateers would all keep their mouths shut about sudden orders from home. It’s not like they’re regular military.”

  “He knows more about us than we know about him,” Ky said. “Our allies are leaking information like sieves.” She sighed. “At least this is the short end of the trip.”

  Vanguard, Moscoe Confederation Space

  “That’s different,” Hugh Pritang said as scan cleared from a slow insertion into Moscoe Confederation space. “They’ve ramped up their defenses.” He had already signaled their communications board to reply to the system’s automated arrival challenge.

  “As they should,” Ky said. Her stomach knotted; now that she was here, face-to-face with the moment she both wanted and feared, it was hard to stay calm. “There they are—!” Slotter Key ship IDs, close to Cascadia Station…they must have arrived days ago, for scan to show them on downjump.

  “Those your command, Admiral?” Major Douglas had come up beside her.

  “Some of them, anyway,” Ky said, counting them up. Thirty-five. And she had seven already, if she counted Dryas the supply ship. Forty-two…that certainly sounded fleet-like. She took a deep breath. Time to go to work in earnest.

  “Incoming calls via internal ansible from Stella Vatta and external from Traffic Control with an overlay from Moscoe Confederation Defense Department,” the communications tech said.

  “Hugh, you handle the external; I’ll take Stella’s.”

  Stella, on screen, looked tired. “Ky, we’ve got translations of pirate transmissions for you—”

  “That’s wonderful!”

  “Yes, except it turns out Toby’s girlfriend’s father was one of Turek’s men. Toby’s fine now, but he was abducted briefly; the girl’s parents were taken into custody, and I have Zori at the apartment with me.”

  “You?”

  “It was a shock to me, too,” Stella said. “You recall the speed of legal action here? Well, Zori’s father’s been executed already, and her mother is still in custody. Protective, this time. There’ve been assassination attempts against her.”

  “And you?”

  Stella laughed, with an edge to it. “I’m hard to kill,” she said. “So, it turns out, is Toby. Now: you need to know that Vatta products are in high demand—you did bring all of them with you, didn’t you?”

  “All but one,” Ky said. “I left one with Mackensee, so we can have direct contact with them.”

  “And I’m sure you know the S
lotter Key privateers are here, being outfitted with theirs, and eager to meet you. They brought along some personal messages from Aunt Grace for both of us—”

  “No fruitcakes?” Ky asked, grinning.

  “Not fruitcakes,” Stella said. She wasn’t smiling. “But you will need to pick them up in person.”

  “I won’t have much time,” she said, hoping Stella would understand.

  “Of course,” Stella said. “You have important meetings—and so do I. There’s a sort of summit going on here—Nexus, ISC, Moscoe Confederation, Slotter Key. Vatta Enterprises is in it because of our product. And because of you. There’s a problem—”

  “Excuse me,” Hugh said. “Captain, Traffic Control has given us a priority route in and we have our docking assignment. And the Defense Minister needs to speak with you urgently.”

  “Stella, the Defense Minister’s calling me on standard ansible—I should go.”

  “Call me later,” Stella said. “I’ll send you the transcript of those pirate transmissions in the meantime.”

  Ky moved over to take the call from the Defense Minister, a thin dark man who didn’t seem to fit what she thought of as the Cascadian type. He wore an immaculately tailored dark suit with a broad green ribbon across his chest. “Polmar Gorikan, Minister of Defense,” he said. “As soon as you’ve got a docking schedule, Admiral, we’d like to set up a meeting to discuss our strategy; we have representatives here from the governments of Nexus and Slotter Key as well as our own, and Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation tells me that you have aboard a liaison officer from them—he will represent them at this meeting—”

  “We have a docking assignment, but no ETA yet,” Ky said. A representative from Slotter Key? Surely Stella would’ve mentioned if Aunt Grace herself had come.

  “As soon as possible after your arrival,” Gorikan said. His gaze moved across her. “And…er…perhaps a dress uniform?”