Command Decision (22 page)

“So Ky decided to work for Stella,” Grace said. “That surprises me.”

“She isn’t listed as captain of any of those ships,” MacRobert said, amusement shading his voice. “However, the newsfeeds mention a Ky Vatta who is apparently recruiting for an interstellar military force, who’s on a ship called
Vanguard
that used to belong to—you won’t believe this—one Osman Vatta. One of our other privateers is with her—”

“Ky took Osman?” Grace felt her heart stutter and then go on. “Osman Vatta?”

“It says she’s on a ship that used to be his. Who is Osman Vatta?”

“The worst piece of slime my family ever had to deal with,” Grace said. She could hear the loathing in her voice. “If she’s got his ship, she had to kill him to get it.” She didn’t want to imagine the circumstances that had brought Ky and Osman together, but someday she would have to hear how Ky had bested him. Osman! After all these years, that bastard was finally dead. Surely he was finally dead.

“The news said she claimed the ship was hers by right, that it had been stolen—is that true?”

“Oh, yes,” Grace said, remembering those days all too clearly. “The family threw him out, disinherited him. He snatched a ship, one of the new ones, just commissioned. Killed three people getting away, and that’s not a tithe of what that man did in his time. And his children—” She stopped just in time. Even MacRobert didn’t need to know about Osman’s bastard children and what became of them. Of the ones they could find. She hoped that secret would never come out.

“There are rumors, out of the Moscoe Confederation. Apparently one of your captains challenged Ky’s identity on the grounds she was really Osman’s daughter.” MacRobert looked at Grace.

“Ky? Good gracious no. I was there when she was born. She took after her father—after Gerry as he was in his youth—much more than her mother.”

“Oh, well, newsfeeds always get things half wrong,” MacRobert murmured. “You wouldn’t have known of a Captain Furman, would you?”

“Furman? Stick-in-the-mud, dull as lukewarm dishwater. He made a play for…who was it, someone’s daughter in the family, and she wasn’t about to marry him, especially after he threw up on a carnival ride. When Ky went off on her apprentice voyage, he was her captain; they did not get along. No one really expected they would. Was he the one who challenged her identity? She hadn’t changed that much, to my eyes.”

“Apparently. He was executed by the Moscoe authorities on grounds of ‘intractible rudeness in a court of law.’”

“I wonder what got into him,” Grace said. “He was always polite, unctuously so, the times I met him. Made my skin crawl.” She shrugged. “Well. I do need to get in touch with Stella, at least, and find out what she’s up to.”

“As soon as we allow transmissions, whoever’s out there will know the ansible’s up, and ISC will know someone else worked on it,” MacRobert said. “On my end, we’d like to snoop a little longer, and Spaceforce would like time to rearrange the system defense.”

“How long is ‘a little longer’?” Grace asked. “Not just for me, but all the others who depend on interstellar trade.”

“Three days,” MacRobert said.

“I suppose I can wait that long,” Grace said. “Though knowing my nieces, they can probably manage to get into trouble between now and then.”

“I suspect Ky is making trouble for someone else,” MacRobert said.

Power flowing through the circuitry of the main ansible created, as power does, a magnetic field…and though the ansible’s automatic signal of availability did not come on, that magnetic field attracted a small, unimportant magnet on the ansible platform’s outer surface, making another connection, this one visual, completing a pattern that before had seemed to have a gap, a missing paint chip. Far away, the detector planted by ISC on a small chunk of “space debris” matched pattern to pattern every six hours. It had not been noticed by those who did the physical damage, and those who created the software problem knew of its existence, but not its location: such detectors were installed in systems where the platforms had no resident crews.

On its next cycle, it noted the completion of the pattern, stored that information, and attempted to communicate with the ansible. When that proved unsuccessful, it launched a tiny messenger drone preprogrammed to reach ISC’s regional headquarters and inform ISC that an ansible out of service was now receiving power but not operating normally.

Spaceforce detected the drone on routine review of the day’s surveillance; it had been too small to trigger an alarm at launch, and by the time it was discovered, it had long since gone into FTL flight.

Grace initiated the ansible call to Stella as soon as she’d figured out the temporal differential between Slotter Key and Stella’s reported location on Cascadia. If the idiot girl had moved, it would serve her right to be wakened in the middle of the—

“Vatta Transport,” said a pleasant female voice, not Stella’s. “How may we help you?”

“Grace Vatta for Stella Vatta,” Grace said. “This is an ansible call.”

“Just a moment,” said the same voice.

Then Stella spoke. “I’ve got it, Gillian, thank you. Aunt Grace? How lovely to hear from you. I didn’t realize the Slotter Key ansible was back up.”

“Just now, dear,” Grace said. “Of course I had to call you first and tell you the good news.”

“Yes?”

“We laid the cornerstone of the new building. There’ve been some changes in government.”

“I should hope so,” Stella said. “You should know—I’ve opened an office here. Well, you heard—”

“Yes. An excellent idea, especially since you had communications, I gather.”

“Ky said I should. Aunt Grace, there’s something—I don’t think you know. About me.”

Grace squeezed her eyes shut a moment. Had Stella found out? And how? With Osman safely dead, according to report, there should have been no way…

“There’s almost nothing about you I don’t know,” she said. “If you’re speaking of the past, that is. Everything in our…um…heritage was part of my brief.”

A silence that seemed to stretch as long as the light-years. “You knew,” Stella said. Anger edged her voice.

“Not that I thought it mattered,” Grace said. “A few shared shreds of genetic material—”

“So I got to find out in open court,” Stella said. Her voice had gone cold. “In front of everyone.”

Grace had not imagined that; she wanted to know how, but this was a time to listen. “That must have been a shock,” she said.

Stella gave a sound that might have started as a laugh. “A shock, yes. You could call it that. All my life I knew who I was, Stella-second-daughter-of-Helen-and-Stavros-Vatta. Blonde because Mother’s relatives were blonde. Now I’m Osman Vatta’s bastard.”

“No,” Grace said. “You’re Stella Vatta. The Stella Vatta whom everyone has always known…Helen thinks of you as her daughter—”

“Her adopted daughter.”

“Her daughter. And so did Stavros. Everything you know about your past is real except for that one thing—where the genes came from.”

“And you think that doesn’t matter?”

“Not as much as most people think, though your beauty probably came from your biological mother…I must admit, however, that the young Osman was a handsome beast. I mean both those words literally.”

“I can’t believe—dammit, Aunt Grace—”

“Stella, I’m sorry. It was a horrible way to find out. I did mention to your parents years ago that they might consider telling you about the adoption. But they were concerned to give you a solid background, as much security as they could.”

“Because they were afraid Osman’s traits would come out in me. And they did.”

“Nonsense.” Grace put all the force she could into that. “Your fling with the gardener and all the rest of it had nothing to do with Osman. Do you know how many young people, boys and girls both, living in privilege, do something that stupid? And they aren’t all Osman’s bastards. Osman was cruel; you were just young and stupid.”

“Well, that’s a comfort.” Stella’s voice was shaky, but underneath the shakiness Grace heard relief.

“It should be. Stella, you aren’t cruel. He is. Was. And I really want to know how that happened.”

“No, you don’t,” Stella said. “It was horrible.”

“I’d expect it to be. Osman wouldn’t go peacefully. Ky did it?”

“Yes. It’s a long story—and I’d better start at the beginning.” Stella launched into it, starting with her discovery of Toby Vatta in protective custody, traveling to Lastway where she’d found Ky, the military escort, Ky’s insistence on answering an apparent distress call from a Vatta ship.

“She’s an idiot,” Grace said. “Didn’t she realize it could be a trap?”

“Yes—and the Mackensee escort warned her as well. But she had her mind made up.” Stella continued with the threats, Ky’s response, what had happened, in all the detail she could muster.

Grace found herself wanting to grab both younger women and bash their heads together. Ky should’ve known better; Stella should have…but then, in the end, she had taken Osman’s ship and he was dead, and that was the right outcome even if the means had been…incredibly risky.

“She was covered with blood,” Stella said then. “It smelled—I don’t want to remember that smell. Or the look in her eyes.”

“The look?”

“Ever seen a hawk mantling over its prey, Aunt Grace? Ky was trying to hide it, but she was…excited. Happy. She’d
enjoyed
killing Osman.”

Grace was not surprised, but how to explain this to Stella? “It shocked you,” she said.

“I know, it’s terrible,” Stella said. “I can’t bring myself to talk to her about it…it’s why I thought she might be Osman’s by-blow when Furman said she was.”

“And then you found out—how, by the way?”

“There was…tissue…from Osman, on the ship. Genetic analysis said I was very closely related to him, and that he could not have been her father…and that Ky and I could not be first cousins.”

“Where is Ky now? Is she still on his ship?”

“Yes, but she’s re-registered it as the
Vanguard
. I talked to her only yesterday; she’s somewhere way across space, a system called Adelaide.”

“Have you located other Vatta ships? And what happened with Furman?”

“He’s dead.”

“I know that, but why? What did he do?”

“Among other things, he lied to Vatta for years, Aunt Grace. He was running some kind of scam—we still haven’t got it all worked out—and Ky and I both suspect he was somehow connected to Osman.”

“Furman? He was lukewarm dishwater when I knew him. The only spark of emotional intensity he ever had—and I’m not sure it was real—was falling in love with that girl. I can’t imagine Osman bothering with him any more than she did.”

“We think it was her turning him down that drove him to it. But there’s evidence of a long-standing plan to sabotage the family, all the while acting as one of our senior captains. He had secret accounts under false names all over the place; he was transporting unlisted cargo. I’ll forward what we know to you. I’ve been too busy to follow up on most of it.”

Grace felt stupid. She’d never liked Furman, but she’d never suspected him of anything that bad. He was so efficient, she’d always been told. Always at the top of the list for on-time deliveries, with very low customer complaints. But now he was dead; whatever she’d missed was over and done with.

“So what do you want me to do now, Aunt Grace?” Stella asked. “I’ve organized an office here, and for the purposes of doing business we’ve called this Vatta’s headquarters—nobody could contact Slotter Key—”

“You did the right thing, Stella,” Grace said. “And I suppose you’re acting CEO?”

“Well…yes. Ky and I traded back and forth for a while, but she said I’d be better at it, and she wanted to take direct action against those responsible.”

“Eventually, you’ll need to come back here—when the new building’s finished—but for now I think you’re quite right to establish a headquarters where we still have ships. You’ve shown more initiative than the family remaining here…” Should she tell Stella now, or wait for another call, a less emotional call?

“Who’s going to be the new
real
CEO?” Stella asked.