Command Decision (26 page)

His father would live. They had promised him that. His core temperature had been dangerously low, but the outside temperature hadn’t been enough to cause serious frostbite. Rafe stared through the glass panel. His father lay still, IVs dripping into both arms, a warming blanket over his body and other tubes coming out from underneath. Rafe didn’t want to think about what had caused those marks on his hands, his feet, his face…his first hot rage had turned cold, colder than the glacier above Aurora Adventure Lodge.

“You shouldn’t try to rouse him yet,” Dr. Kinjon said, coming up beside Rafe. He was Rafe’s height and almost as plump as Rafe’s Cascadian persona. He glanced at Rafe’s face, took a step back, then turned away. “He’s sedated right now; his core temperature has stabilized, but with his other injuries and the drugs he had in his system, we felt mild sedation was a good idea. He was also dehydrated and clearly has been malnourished for some days.”

“But he’ll recover?”

“Yes. But it will take time.”

“Fully?”

“We’ll just have to see. The stresses…his age…there is the possibility that complete recovery will be prolonged, or…not entirely complete. When someone’s implant has been tampered with…the neuropsych specialist will be here tomorrow. When we know exactly how much damage the implant took—and possibly delivered—we’ll know more.”

His father had been intelligent—more than intelligent, brilliant in many ways. Intelligent, charming, commanding…and now he lay almost comatose, his body battered, his brain…Rafe shook his head sharply. “He has to recover. It’s important—”

“It’s always important,” Kinjon said.

Before he knew he had moved, Rafe had the doctor’s collar in his hands; the man’s face went white with the shock of that sudden attack. “You don’t understand,” Rafe said. “It’s not just him; it’s not just my father…he was snatched for a reason, and that reason affects not just Nexus but a thousand other systems. Someone’s trying to bring down ISC—do you have any idea what that means?”

“Gggghhh…”

“Sorry.” Rafe let up the pressure, but didn’t let go completely. “Do you know who he is?”

“A hostage that…that Gary rescued. That’s all I know; that’s all I’m
supposed
to know.”

“And you rightly assume rich and powerful, and you wonder that you haven’t heard anything, am I right?” The man nodded; Rafe went on. “That’s the CEO of ISC. He was abducted on the orders of the next in succession…who certainly has hooks in the government, judging by their complicity in this. What you may not know is that hundreds, at least, of ansibles are out of service, and ISC personnel are involved in that…I believe on the orders of the man who kidnapped my father. People are dying because my father is here”—he nodded toward the room—“and not in his office. If that man isn’t stopped, none of us is safe.”

“That still doesn’t give you the right to choke me,” Kinjon said.

Rafe let go. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve been…distraught.”

“I gathered.” To his surprise, Kinjon even chuckled. “Gary did warn me about you, but you just don’t look like the type. I’m sorry I upset you; we’ll be easing up on the sedation over the next twenty-four hours, and you should be able to talk to your father then.”

Rafe had been given a room in the staff wing of the clinic; the next day, when he went down to the hospital level, Alaro met him outside his father’s room. “Let’s go see what the neuropsych says about your father’s implant. He’s done an initial neural assessment. He’s in the lab.”

The neuropysch expert, introduced only as Tony, stared at the trace from Rafe’s father’s implant. “Mmm. Not liking this a bit.”

“What?”

“Well…they tried to probe the implant before they removed it. In lay terms, they ran too much power into it, trying to force it to work, and caused damage—and enough power that it heated up part of his brain.”

“And that means—”

“It means he has brain damage, possibly permanent but certainly something it’s going to take time to repair, and his implant cannot be replaced. Most people depend on an implant for a good part of their knowledge base: he can’t.”

“But you can install another one, can’t you?”

“Not anymore,” Alaro sighed. “Not with the brain damage. If we boost the signal enough to pass the damaged portion, we risk the same damage to something else. For now, we’re leaving the damaged implant in: it gives him some function he would not have otherwise. But it has to come out so we can start the repair of the brain itself, and at that point he will seem worse than he is now. How much worse, we won’t know until we take out the implant. Basically, he’s like a stroke patient, and in his case a serious stroke patient. Luckily, he chose to have his implant on the right side, so his language centers are relatively unaffected, but you’re looking at a long, slow, incomplete recovery.”

“But he can talk?”

“He can talk now, a few words at a time. He tires quickly; he’s still somewhat confused. It’s too early to test all his cognitive functions, and with the sedation he’s become disoriented. We’ve changed the setup of his room, which should help. I’ve tested his facial recognition: that’s intact, too. He recognized your face in a picture we showed him. So if you want to go in and talk—keeping it calm and not asking questions and not upsetting him—you can do that.”

Rafe entered his father’s room with what he hoped was a pleasant expression.

“Rafe…” His father’s face, with eyes open and focusing, looked more like his father, and yet unlike: for the first time, he was looking down on his father, and for the first time he had no fear, no anger, and no contempt, only a great sadness.

“Father—you’re looking better.”

“I can’t—I can’t sit up by myself.” His father’s voice sounded weak and querulous. “My left arm—”

“Father, don’t worry. You’ll get better.”

“Rafe, you have to know. It was Lew, Lew Parmina. He’s—I don’t know why, entirely, but he’s gone completely insane. That’s the only reason I can think of…he knew he would succeed me; I was going to retire in five years. He’s been my friend for years—I thought my friend—”

“Father, don’t wear yourself out—”

“But you have to know; you have to help me—”

“Help you how?”

“I told you, in my message—”

“I never got your message. I came back because I hadn’t heard from you in too long and I was worried.”

“You never got—” His father looked stricken. “But you came anyway…Rafe, I always knew you’d…but he said…but maybe…”

Rafe felt old memories, snatches of overheard conversations, sequences of events, coming together in his mind. “Father, was it Lew who first told you I was dangerous? Was he the one who recommended that therapist?”

His father’s gaze wavered again. “I—I can’t quite remember…I know later, when you were in trouble at that school, he was sympathetic. Said he knew it must be hard to be disappointed…and I was sure you’d come out of it, you’d been such a sweet child…”

Sweet? Rafe had no memory of being sweet, even before the home invasion. Polite, well mannered, that was expected. But sweet?

“You used to be so affectionate…when I came home you’d climb in my lap and butt your head against my chin…”

His father’s expression now was pleading; he clearly wanted Rafe to remember those times, but he didn’t. “Mmm,” he said, just to make a soothing sound.

“But Lew said it was rare for children who killed to change, that it was usually a sign of deep-seated personality disorders…he had references. The therapist agreed. He said I had to be realistic, be concerned for the welfare of ISC, both employees and those who depended on our services. Then when I was given the job of CEO, and you were…on remittance…” His father’s voice trailed off. He looked suddenly grayer.

“I’ll come back later,” Rafe said. “Just rest.”

The next morning, Dr. Alaro spoke to Rafe in the corridor. “I don’t know what you’re planning, and I don’t need to. But if it involves, for instance, transporting this patient and expecting him to…oh, to speak to a group about business, for instance, you had better do it within the next ten days. We can’t risk leaving the damaged implant in longer than that.”

“Can he survive travel so fast?”

“With the right supports, yes. He’s getting a little stronger each day. You can expect that his concentration will vary, however, and your visits should be short.”

“I think,” Rafe said, “that Lew has had something like this in mind from the beginning.”

“He couldn’t,” his father said. He had said it before. “It’s impossible—”

“They never traced the intruders that night,” Rafe said. “They never found who hired them, right?”

“Well…no…”

“Lew found that therapist for you, I would bet on it. The therapist and Lew chose the school you sent me to. I know for a fact that Lew set me up with girls when I went to college—”

“I didn’t know that!” his father said.

“I thought it was with your approval, since he was your assistant. He gave me money; he gave me names and numbers. When he sent me money later—my remittance—he used to tell me how disappointed you were, and then give me contacts to…elements I found surprising.”

“But he was always so nice…”

“To you, I’m sure he was. You were his ladder, to be kicked away when he thought he had his hands firmly on the top of the tree.” Rafe shook his head. “And I didn’t see it. I was too hurt, too angry, and mostly I was not here. Which I’m sure was his intent.”

His father’s gaze had sharpened, almost to the intensity Rafe remembered. “I think…you may be right. I can’t quite…this blasted implant thing. There’s information in there that would help me think clearly about it but I can’t…it’s not working right. I need a new one.”

“You can’t,” Rafe said. “Not yet, anyway. When they’ve done the neural repairs to your…head…”

“My brain,” his father said with surprising energy. “I know…I can’t think. That’s why I need your help. And you’re as sharp as ever—it didn’t take you long to find Lew’s trail in our lives. You’re going to have to take over—”

“Take over?” Panic swallowed him; Rafe struggled to stay calm. “You can’t mean take over ISC?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. We can’t let Lew have it. I don’t know all he’s planned, but what they did taunt me with, while I was hostage, was bad enough. He’s determined to maintain the monopoly and he’s working with some kind of military leader, someone named Gammis Turek. The ansible outages—”

“—are his fault. And I know something about Gammis Turek—”

“You’ve met him?”

“No. But a bad guy we—uh, more on that later—ran into over in Sector Five had a suicide circuit implanted to keep him from revealing the name. And supposedly it was Turek’s people who attacked Bissonet and took over its system government. I suspect something similar almost happened at Slotter Key.”

“Lew has friends on Slotter Key,” his father said. “The Vatta family—Vatta Transport, Ltd. You must know their ships.”

“They’re mostly dead,” Rafe said. “I’ve been traveling with a couple of them.”

“Probably his spies,” his father said. “Fed you any number of lies.”

“I don’t think so,” Rafe said. “I’ve known Stella for years, and it wasn’t through Lew. Her cousin Kylara—very much the straight arrow, Ky.”

“I thought Lew was,” his father said. “Right now I wouldn’t trust anyone Lew called a friend. The Slotter Key ansible’s still down, isn’t it?”

“As far as I know, yes.” No use trying to explain how he was sure that Stella and Ky weren’t lying about their families—or that Vatta had been an innocent dupe, not complicit.

“So you can’t check what they told you. But that’s another problem for another day. Right now, Rafe, you simply must get to the Board and convince them of Lew’s perfidy. You can’t let him take over. At the least, your life and ours will be in danger.”

“But—I don’t know anything about running a corporation—let alone one as vast as ISC.” Even as he said it, he knew that wasn’t quite true. He’d had his own businesses; he understood how business worked. He had grown up in ISC, he had done work for them. “And I can’t—why would you trust me? Why would they?”

“Because,” his father said, “if I was that wrong about Lew, then I assume I was that wrong about you, too. If I think of the little boy you were, all that intelligence and fire and sweetness—yes, sweetness, don’t flinch like that—the way you never did a single underhanded thing other than the usual ‘She broke it’ when a dish dropped, and that was only the once, then I see the potential in the man to be as intelligent, capable, honest as you were then.”

Tears sprang to Rafe’s eyes; he blinked them back. “I’m not that little boy anymore, Father.”

“No, and a good thing you’re not, or we’d all be dead,” his father said. “You’ve had a hard life; you’ve learned hard lessons, harder than some of mine. It will take someone like you; I’m sure Lew has collaborators on the Board and elsewhere in ISC. I want you to find a secure way to reach the next board meeting—what’s the date?”

Rafe told him. “But, Father—I’m just not cut out to be an executive—”

“Nonsense. You’re my son. You’re also the only weapon I’ve got. You have to do this, Rafe. Or millions—probably billions—of people will die, and more will be ruined, because of Lew and his allies.”