Command Decision (3 page)

By the time Rafe came down to breakfast in his business persona, he had determined that the contact attempt had originated here on Nexus; his illicit and—he hoped—undetectable probes of the Nexus ansible had gotten him that far. The origination code for the call was not his father’s, and he didn’t recognize it. He would have to hack into the main database to find a name, and it might not be the right one. The call had relayed through a communications satellite then covering an area two time zones away; beyond that, he had been able to find one relay, a surface installation near a town named, with no originality at all, Pittville, presumably for the nearby pit mine.

He ate a moderate breakfast, explaining to his waiter, in his persona’s stuffy way, that something he’d eaten the day before had disagreed with him. After checking out, he went directly to the regional airport. Someone, he was sure, would be checking on Genson Ratanvi’s movements. Let them. Genson would be boringly predictable for a day or so at least.

While waiting for his flight, he used the databoards as any other business traveler might do. All bore the ISC logo and—here on ISC’s home planet—came with ads extolling ISC’s technological and marketing genius. Rafe spent a moment downloading the public information to his implant, then went on searching for food processing specialists’ current contact numbers at his next stop, and began calling them as he thought about the ISC listing.

Interesting…his father was listed as an ex officio member of the board, and Lew Parmina was now listed as CEO. Not surprising that he was the new CEO if something had happened to Rafe’s father, but that didn’t explain the empty house, the traps on communications, that call on his cranial ansible.

CHAPTER

TWO

Cascadia Station,
Moscoe Confederation

“Cousin Stella?” Toby’s voice and the skitter of his dog’s claws on the floor brought Stella Vatta out of another dismal reverie.

She glanced at the security escort, annoyed with herself for having missed the warning tone of the entry, and nodded to him. He nodded back and sketched a salute before leaving the apartment; she checked to make sure the exit warning came on. Then she forced a smile and turned to greet him. “Yes, Toby?”

“They moved me up another class,” he said as he came in. “The test results are in…and can I have a snack?”

“Of course,” Stella said, waving a hand toward the kitchen. “Go right ahead. But then I want you to clean up this mess—” Spread across the apartment’s living room were boxes of what Stella dismissed as “tech stuff,” whatever didn’t fit in Toby’s own small room. Stella had quit looking in there; the visual chaos gave her a headache.

“It’s not just a mess,” Toby said through a mouthful of sandwich. “It’s all organized—ouch!” He had stepped on something. Stella hoped it was as sharp as the little knob with a sharp prong that she had stepped on earlier.

“I’m tired of walking on it,” Stella said. “At least stack it all by the wall, can’t you?”

“It takes longer to find things,” he said.

Stella looked at him. If he had ever been impressed by her beauty—a weapon she’d wielded skillfully since childhood—he was over it now, and she recognized the tone as one she herself had used on her parents. But Toby was more malleable than she had been; after a moment, he flushed and mumbled “Sorry, Cousin Stella,” and—the other half of the sandwich in his mouth—began moving the boxes.

In the several tendays since Ky had gone off on her insane quest, as Stella thought of it, and Rafe had left for Nexus, she had had more than enough time to examine her life in light of the revelation about her parentage. Her real parentage. Biometric data proved she was Osman Vatta’s daughter, some stranger-mother’s daughter, not the daughter of Stavros and Helen Stamarkos Vatta, as she’d always believed. Her blonde hair, her violet eyes, her beauty came not from the Stamarkos family, but from…someone else. Someone she’d never known, probably would never know. Ky had said it didn’t make any difference, but she knew better.

She had tried to shake off the waves of anger, grief, and depression that washed over her several times a day, but except for Toby she was alone, absolutely alone, as she had never been before. How could she concentrate on trade, on finding cargo for the ship that had been Furman’s, when she felt so empty? She had forced herself to do the obvious things—hire security for herself and Toby and the Vatta dockspace, talk to Captain Orem of
Gary Tobai
about what security clearances new crew should have, but it was so hard to focus on all that. If only she’d had one other adult Vatta to talk to…Aunt Grace, for instance.

“You know,” Toby said, breaking into her reverie, “I really think I can make another one.”

“Another one what?” Stella asked.

“Ansible,” Toby said. “Like the one Captain—Cousin Ky left with you. Small enough to fit on a ship, I mean.”

“That’s—” She started to say “impossible,” then stopped. Toby had already modified the appliances that had come with the apartment—giving them more sophisticated control systems—and upgraded the apartment’s security system. She remembered Quincy and Rafe both mentioning the boy’s knack for technical subjects and tasks. An idea tickled her, the first positive one she’d had in a long time. “If you could make another one…a few of them…we could put them on Vatta ships—”

“That’s what I thought,” Toby said, grinning. He stopped where he was, a box of components in either hand. “If you could get reports from our ships right away, even in systems where the ansibles didn’t work, that would give us an edge—”

“Do you really think you can?” She could not imagine anyone cobbling together something that intricate in an apartment bedroom. “Don’t you need a special lab or something?”

“Not really,” Toby said, answering her second question first. “I’d love to have a lab of my own, but it’s mature tech, really; it’s not as finicky as it used to be.” That sounded like a quote from Quincy. “I’m really close now,” Toby went on. “Just another few days, I think. There’s this part I don’t understand…it seems like a backwards way of designing it, but there has to be a reason…”

“What made you think of copying one?” Stella asked. “Where did you learn—?”

“We need them,” Toby said. “Captain—Cousin Ky could use more. Every ship, really, could use one, except it’s not our design so we can’t sell it. Anyway, Rafe talked to me a lot, you know. He’s nice, even if he did scare me at first.”

Stella blinked at the notion of Rafe, with his many aliases and his unquestionably shady past, being labeled “nice” by anyone.

“I kept asking him, when he was fixing those broken ansibles, and finally he said he’d explain if I promised not to tell anyone else about the ansible repair stuff he taught me, because it was an ISC secret. I understood some of it on my own,” Toby went on. “I always thought it must be like FTL drives, but it’s not, really. Well, sort of, in the basic theory of n-dimensions, but not in the practical application, or space travel would be instantaneous, too.” He paused; he seemed to stare into the distance, and then he shook his head. “No…I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

“No rush,” Stella said, her head whirling. Her own abilities—assuming she had any—lay very far from the things Toby talked about. “You can stick to ansibles for a while, can’t you?”

“Oh, sure. I just need to figure out why there’s a lockout circuit, what it’s protecting the rest of it from.”

“Or what it’s protecting,” Stella said.

Toby looked thoughtful again. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I thought it must be something to protect the ansible…but that’s not necessarily—thanks, Cousin Stella.” He wandered off to his room, followed by Rascal, without picking up any more of the mess.

Stella sighed and went back to her work. Standard Vatta trade routes made interconnecting rings rather than emanating from a few hubs; a Vatta ship from the Orleans–Vishwa–Darien–Moscoe route should arrive insystem in the next few days. Ordinarily,
Katrine Lamont
’s captain—now Balthazar Orem, transferred from
Gary Tobai
because Stella knew him better—would have offloaded cargo consigned here, sequestered cargo that would be transferred directly to the incoming ship, acquired more cargo to take on from here, and left room for any cargo the incoming ship needed to transfer. But now, with trade down and Vatta’s reputation almost as ruined as its headquarters and coffers, nothing was that simple.

Still, there was always someone who wanted to ship something somewhere. Stella had put off hiring new crew for
Gary Tobai,
and
Katrine Lamont
was still undercrewed, but at least the ship was in perfect shape. Stella had sold off all the cargo that wasn’t consigned elsewhere—about 30 percent was, and of that, a little less than half would need to be shifted to
Marcus Selene,
the ship due in. The sale of cargo, plus the company share of profits from Toby’s dog’s breeding fees, had kept her balance on the right side of the ledger, and in another thirty-five days she would have access to the late Captain Furman’s accounts. And if Toby could actually build shipboard ansibles…maybe it was Osman’s genes, and not Stavros’, that presented her with an inkling of how profitable that could be, but maybe that didn’t matter. In her imagination, a new corporation rose from the ashes of the old: Vatta once more, trade and profit; for the first time it seemed real, herself in a proper office, giving orders. In the meantime, her business office was the dining room table in the apartment.

“Cousin Stella! I found it!” Toby burst out of his room a few days later, Rascal scampering around in him in frantic circles.

“What, Toby?” Stella had just been running the figures again.
Marcus Selene
had arrived insystem and was making its way in from the jump point. She might afford a real office within the next week.

“What it was protecting…that thing I told you about. Not the ansible—or not this ansible—it’s what keeps these from interfacing with system ansibles.” He grinned, eyes sparkling. For an instant, Stella saw a ghost of the depressed, scared boy she had found in protective custody at Allray. Whatever else she had done wrong in her life, however vicious her biological father had been, she had changed Toby’s life for the better. Then her brain caught up with his words.

“You mean they could interface—?”

“Yes. It’s quite simple, really. Rafe said they couldn’t, they were built so they couldn’t, but he didn’t tell me what they’d done. Maybe he didn’t know; he said he didn’t understand it all. Anyway, it’s this circuit here—” He pushed a printout of a circuit diagram at her; to Stella, it was all lines and symbols, as meaningless as straws in the wind. “If I leave that part out, and change this bit here”—he pointed at something on the diagram—“then it could.”

“That would be…very useful indeed,” Stella said. Her mind filled instantly with the possibilities for profit—a lot of profit—but surely ISC had all the relevant patents. How could they come up with something on their own, something ISC couldn’t interfere with, using Toby’s ideas? “Brilliant, Toby. And do you think you can build a working model?”

“I could do it faster if I didn’t have to go to school,” he said, eyeing her sidelong.

Stella laughed. “Not that, my boy. You’re going to school, and that’s final. Besides, you’ve been enjoying the company; you said so.”

“Well, yes. Some of the other kids are all right, especially since they moved me up a level. But I want to get this done. It would help us so much…and if ships went out with these, they could relay information from systems where the ansibles aren’t working, until ISC had time to fix them.”

“I can see that,” Stella said. “But you have to go to school anyway. You can work on this in your spare time.”

“Can I bring some friends over to help me?” Toby asked. “Some of them are really smart.”

“No,” Stella said; it came out harsher than she intended, and his expression changed. She tried to soften her tone. “Toby, right now this has to be a secret. You know the original technology belonged to ISC. We have to be sure it’s legal for us to do this, or—”

“It can’t be illegal to build one for ourselves—if we don’t sell it—”

“Yes, it could be illegal,” Stella said. “I have to find that out, and in the meantime don’t talk about it. Not to your friends, not to your teachers—”

“But I don’t see why,” Toby said, with all the persistence of enthusiasm. “If it’s just for us, why would they care?”

“Profit,” Stella said. “If they own the rights and we make one instead of buying theirs—”

“But they’re
not
selling them,” Toby pointed out. “It’s not costing them anything because they’re not selling them.”

“Just let me talk to someone who knows more about the law than either of us before you talk to anyone else,” Stella said. He frowned, but finally nodded. “And Toby—thanks for all your work. If you’ve really solved that problem, ISC may be paying
us
. In any event, you’re a real contributor to Vatta’s recovery.” A recovery that she now believed could happen, with or without the input of the Slotter Key Vattas.