Victory Conditions (47 page)

Stella paled again. “That is ridiculous! And unfair. I am not after Rafe; I do not want Rafe; if I didn’t think he was bad for you, dangerous for you, I wouldn’t care if the two of you spent the next twenty years in bed.”

“Which we will never have a chance to do, thanks to you!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stella said.

“Because of you, because you told him about…about Hal, tonight at the reception—the formal reception, in front of everyone in the universe—he buttonholed Hal and ripped him a new one—”

“What! Rafe?”

“Yes, Rafe. Publicly. So everyone knows the whole story now. I’m sure the entire fleet and the governments of at least four planets are having a nice juicy gossip about my first love affair and what they think is my second…”

“I can’t believe he would—”

“Believe it. He did. Made me the laughingstock of…of everyone. And it’s because of you, and your interference—”

“Ky, I’m sorry, but I never meant—”

“It doesn’t matter what you
meant.
What matters is that you’ve completely ruined my reputation and my authority—”

“Don’t be so melodramatic—”

“Don’t tell me what to be!”

Stella opened her mouth, then shut it. Ky could see the pulse beating in her throat. Good.

“Ky, I’m sorry,” Stella said then. “I did not mean to hurt you. I did not mean to embarrass you. When I read it, it was an accident—”

Ky huffed but said nothing.

“And yes, it was a time when I was annoyed with you, and yes, that may have colored my judgment. When I read it, I wanted to—I wanted to make it go away, so I didn’t tell you I had. And when Rafe came, and told me he was—was in love with you, I didn’t believe him—”

“Because little cousin Ky couldn’t possibly have someone in love with her,” Ky muttered.

“Oh, stop it!” Stella leaned forward. “Ky, I have an adolescent love-crazed girl living with me now, and I also remember what it was like. Of course you could have someone in love with you; of course you could love someone. But consider this: the last time I’d seen you, you didn’t show any signs of caring about Rafe. With his past, I didn’t believe he really cared about you, except as another of his conquests. I thought, if he knew that you’d had a bad experience, he’d go pester someone else, particularly in a political situation where showing interest in you would harm his interests.”

She paused; Ky said nothing. “And I did what I thought was best for you at the time, and…I had no idea he’d go off his rocker and make an embarrassing scene at your reception.” Another pause. “What exactly did he do?”

She said it again, slowly and distinctly. “He went and found Hal. I don’t know how he found him, but it is Rafe, after all. Somehow he found him, and—I didn’t hear it all, but knowing Rafe I imagine he introduced himself and started in slowly. I knew Rafe had come in—he’d passed through the receiving line—he looked better than he had on Cascadia Station, before—” He had looked like the old Rafe, fully alive, an edged weapon looking for blood; she had felt her pulse quicken. “—and the Premier wanted to talk to him. I said I’d go find him. I was trying to get away from a terminally boring district superintendent from someplace on Cascadia, who wanted to tell me all about the genealogy of trees or something.”

“There’s one at every business party,” Stella said, with feeling.

“So I spotted Rafe, but didn’t recognize Hal from behind, and got there just in time to hear Rafe quoting…one of the more scathing bits of Hal’s letter…”

“That
idiot
!” Stella said. “What was he thinking?”

“And by then people had seen me; I had to just go on, and I didn’t know—well, not for sure—that it was Hal until I saw his face. And there was Rafe, and Hal, and all those people staring to see what I’d do…” Suddenly, unexpectedly, it seemed funny. She felt the laughter bubbling up, uncontrollable as the rage had been, and struggled to hold it down. She was not ready for it to be funny; she had a right to be angry. But the laughter came anyway. “Oh, Stella. If you could have seen their faces—and probably mine—it was horrible—but it must have been funny, too—”

“What did you do?” Stella said.

“What could I do? I’m the Great Admiral Vatta; I’m not allowed to have vapors or girlish feelings. I was coolly polite to both of them and led Rafe back to the Premier. Then I had to be gracious and polite to fifty more people, when what I wanted to do was disembowel someone. Rafe. You. Anyone. I did glare at the district superintendent until he backed off.” She could not help the chuckle that escaped.

“You did better than I would have,” Stella said. “I would have killed him. Them. Both of them. At least.”

“You wouldn’t—” But now something heard and not registered caught up with her, something that had generated the bubble of humor. “Did you say—did you actually say—Rafe told you he was in love with me?”

“Yes. I didn’t believe him; if I had—”

“But he said it. You think that was why—”

“Oh, Ky, for pity’s sake! I get enough of this with Zori! Of
course
it was why. Of course he meant it. Now would you please either go stick a knife in him for embarrassing you, or go tell him you love him, and let me get on with this beastly audit?”

“But—what about you?”

“What
about
me? I’m buried in paperwork, that’s what about me. I would much rather have been at the reception, but I couldn’t spare the time.”

“And you don’t…you’re not…”

Stella looked ready to explode, but instead burst out laughing. “Ky, you and I are both idiots, but in different ways. Listen carefully, cousin. I do not want Rafe. I do not need Rafe. I don’t, I’ve realized, need any man. I think I may turn out rather like Aunt Grace—”

“Who has MacRobert.”

“Good for her. In her—I dare not say dotage; she’ll come through the ansible and whap me with a fruitcake—in her golden years, let’s say, she’s enjoying herself. But for much of her life she ran solo.”

Ky laughed again. She didn’t feel angry anymore, or not very. “What does your mother say?”

A long silence. Stella sighed. “We’ve talked. This thing with Zori—I realized I have to get over—”

Ky’s door chime binged. Startled, she looked at the clock, an antique-styled confection on the fake mantelpiece. Late. Later than late. More than halfway to morning. “Stella, I’ve got to go—I’ll call you later.” She closed the ansible down and spoke to the guard at the door. “Yes?”

“There’s a gentleman to see you, Admiral.”

“At this hour?”

“I told him—but you did say you had work to do; I thought you might be still up.”

Up, but not dressed. “Who is it?”

“Ser—Ser Dunbarger.”

Not again,
was her first thought. Wasn’t it enough that he’d ruined her reputation in front of everyone at the reception—now he was coming to her suite in the middle of the night? Her heart thundered, drowning out the prudent voice in her head.

“A moment,” she said. She raced to the bedroom, flung off the robe, snatched her uniform from the rack, and put it on. Snarling at her fingers as she fumbled for buttons. Cursing the day anyone invented formal footwear. Jabbing at the deskcomp’s controls to bring up an impressive screen full of obviously military data. Knowing the whole time that the snarling and cursing and complaining were covering up something else.

She opened the inner door, and signaled the guard to open the outer one.

Rafe was still in impeccable evening dress, holding a bouquet so large it almost hid his face. “In honor of your stellar performance this evening,” he said. One eyebrow lifted just a bit. “I had foolishly left it behind earlier—”

Drops of water sparkled on the shoulders of his jacket; his hair was shining not just with its natural gloss but with water.

“You’re wet,” she said.

“Well…I had to find a flower market. And it’s started raining…”

“You’d better come in and dry off—” Her voice was cool, contained. “I’m working on—” She waved toward the desk. He came past her.

“Where’s your guard—Gary?”

“Gone. He took the last shuttle up, to catch a ship back to Nexus tomorrow. Today, maybe. I’m not sure what time it is on the station. Do you have a vase? I’m sure the hotel—”

“That one, on the mantel.” She closed the inner door, fully aware of all implications.

Rafe unwrapped the paper around the stems, not looking at her; she watched his hands as he flicked the paper loose at last and eased the stems into the vase. “I was an idiot,” he said, still not looking at her, pushing the flowers this way and that in the vase. A blue one flopped over sideways, and he prodded it upright. “Gary told me…I should have known—”

“That making it clear to all the world I’d been dumped by a third-rate coward wasn’t the way to enhance my reputation? Yes, you should have—and if you think you’ve improved it by showing up at my suite in the middle of the night—”

But now he was looking at her, the look she remembered; her voice disappeared to somewhere south of her navel. Head slightly cocked, eyebrow raised high, corner of his mouth twitching a little. “You didn’t have that uniform on five minutes ago.”

“I certainly did!” Ky said.

“Did not. You were undressed…probably in that robe I can just see half on the bed in the other room—”

She should have shut the door. She’d meant to shut the door.

“And the way I can tell, before you ask, is the buttons. Admiral Vatta never in her life buttoned her tunic crooked. So either Admiral Vatta wasn’t wearing that uniform five minutes ago or…you are someone else. Maybe not the Admiral Vatta I embarrassed over there across the street, but—”

Ky glanced down at her tunic. He was right, damn him. It was crooked. If the guard had seen—and guards always saw everything—he, too, would know she had not been at work, still dressed.

“I was talking to Stella,” she said. He flinched. “She told me how you knew. The pair of you—I was—am—furious with you both.”

“Yes,” he said. “I understand that. I’m sorry. Truly.”

“And back before I left for Moray—the way you were then—”

He closed his eyes a moment; his mouth thinned. Then he gave her a challenging look. “I think your not letting me know you were alive, after Moray, was as bad.”

For a moment she glared back, the anger rising again. But it was no use. All the old clichés ran through her mind: in for a penny, in for a pound; might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. She moved to the desk and shut down the deskcomp, then went to the suite’s bar, crouching to look into the cooler.

“What’s this—?” Rafe began. But she had found what she was looking for, and stood up again, holding a pair of limes.

“You showed me once,” she said, “the way you peel a lime.”

His face shifted from confusion to disbelief to delight. A rakish, wicked delight. “So I did.”

“Perhaps,” she said, as coolly as she could, “you would like to show me again…”

“You might be more comfortable with the demonstration if that tunic were buttoned properly…”

“Or,” Ky said, “if it were not buttoned at all.” She opened the top button. “Peel me a lime, Rafe.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

S
ub-lieutenant Hal Coughlin was awake when Master Sergeant Pitt arrived, staring up at the ceiling with his one mostly open eye. Pitt tapped on the door; he barely glanced at her and stared up again.

“Want to talk to you,” she said. “You may not remember me, and anyway we didn’t get a chance for introductions. I’m Master Sergeant Cally Pitt, Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation, and we’re interested in you.”

“Huwh?”

“How? As a possible recruit. We do take people who are…how shall I say…not happy in their current organization, if we think they have potential…”

“You ought to be recruiting
her,
” he said, his voice blurred by the injuries and repairs.

“Oh, I tried,” Pitt said. “Tried for quite a while, more than once. Ky Vatta had better things to do, I think was what it came down to. You, on the other hand, don’t.”

He appeared to ruminate on that for a few moments, then asked, “How do you know I’m any good?”

Pitt ticked off points on her fingers. “You were an honor graduate of your Academy. That means you’re not stupid. You’ve had good to excellent fitness reports since. That means you’re not obviously lazy, dishonest, or incompetent. Until recent events, your CO thought highly of you and considered you promising.”

“She doesn’t now,” he said.

“Well…no. Not just because of what you’re alleged to have done, but also because you’ve become a public relations nightmare and you’ve created a discipline problem in your own fleet.” Pitt thought it amusing that the man who had dumped Ky Vatta for being a public relations nightmare was now himself a public relations nightmare. She doubted he appreciated the irony. “There’s always been a place for men and women who needed a change of identity for perfectly legitimate reasons—people like you. We can solve your fleet’s problem, and your problem.”

Within a day, former Slotter Key sub-lieutenant Hal Coughlin had resigned his commission with the full consent of his commander, and had been moved aboard a Mackensee ship to continue medical treatment.

Once they were safely aboard
Ashford,
Lieutenant Colonel Parker nodded to Pitt. “Good job, Master Sergeant. This should do us good with Slotter Key, and our intel people should learn a lot. A triple win. How’re you coming along with that fellow in their Defense Department? MacRobert, isn’t it?”

Pitt shook her head. “He’s as tough as I am or tougher, sir. Years of experience in spycraft, is my assessment, and not about to let out anything he doesn’t want to. And no, sir, before you ask, I can’t get him drunk.”

“Just maintain a friendly contact, then. You know what we’re after—”

“Yes, sir.” Pitt knew she hadn’t a chance of getting useful information out of MacRobert, but she was enjoying the time she spent with him. Still…he called the Slotter Key Rector of Defense “Grace.” However much she enjoyed the time, he was not for her.

Master Sergeant MacRobert (ret.) appeared on Admiral Vatta’s list of morning appointments with a tiny question mark beside his name. Ky deleted the question mark. Of course she wanted to meet with MacRobert again. She had seen him from a distance, and they had nodded at each other in recognition, but this would be a chance to find out about the situation back home. Including whether MacRobert and Grace Vatta were more than co-workers.

Ky finished up the list of commendations for the Nexus commanders involved in the final battle, handed that to the Nexus Defense Department courier, and stretched before telling her secretary (seconded from Cascadia’s Defense Ministry) that she was ready for MacRobert.

“Admiral Vatta,” he said. “It’s been awhile.”

“It has that,” she said. “And I wasn’t an admiral. Sit down, Master Sergeant. You’ve come with messages from the Rector, I imagine?”

“Your Aunt Grace, yes. Some from her as Rector and some from her as your aunt. Which would you like first?”

“Official business first,” Ky said. She felt uncommonly good this morning.

“For hand delivery only,” MacRobert said, pulling a packet out of his inner pocket. “The Rector’s report to you on some pertinent bits of recent history.”

“That’s official?” Ky asked, taking the packet.

“It is now that she’s in the government,” MacRobert said. “Official, but not public. And I’m to answer any of your questions and make myself available until you’re satisfied.”

“My first question is, just exactly what was in that ship-model thing you gave me right before I left Slotter Key?”

“Oh, that. Well…it could have been the Slotter Key version of what your cousin’s now manufacturing…if it had worked. We were trying to build a miniaturized ansible or semi-ansible. More of a booster unit, actually. And there were some access codes I thought you might find handy—whatever happened to it?”

“Cannibalized for parts for the ship’s own communications,” Ky said, “when the mutineers had control of the ship for a time.”

“Ah. Well, that’s probably for the best.”

“I do know Aunt Grace lost an arm, and that the old government fell. I presume those were related?”

“Yes. The whole story’s in those data cubes, but basically Grace figured out early on—before the government imposed sanctions against Vattas—that someone high up had been bought out. Blackmailed, it turns out. I don’t know how much you knew about her position in Vatta Transport—”

“Not much,” Ky said.

“Nobody was supposed to, except your father and Stella’s. She headed corporate security—including threat assessment—and she knew the only way the plot against your family could have gotten past her was with government support.”

“But why?” Ky asked.

“We think that was your infamous relative Osman, but given that he’s dead I doubt we’ll ever know the whole story. Grace said he had a serious grudge against your father and Stella’s because they were the ones who got him expelled from the family.”

Grace.
The man who had been a stickler for military courtesy as long as she’d known him called the Rector of Defense just plain Grace? And, as she looked at him, he was almost grinning at her, reading her reaction to that as he had once read cadets’ faces.

“So,” Ky said, yanking her mind firmly away from any consideration of Aunt Grace and MacRobert in the same situation as herself and Rafe, “what about the government connection?”

“That we did uncover. All governments have some level of corruption—power attracts those who want it, and if there’s been a completely honest government in the history of humankind, no history book’s ever mentioned it. So it was no surprise to find some shady stuff going on in Slotter Key—bribes offered and taken, evasions of tax laws and rules, and so on. And like all large societies, we had our organized crime, and it had its contacts with interstellar criminals. The former President had a choice, as he saw it, between exposure and prosecution for the illegalities of his time in office, or letting the Vatta family be attacked. For the tiny bit it’s worth, I don’t think he had any idea how big the attack would be, or what Turek’s real goals were.”

“And Aunt Grace—?”

He grinned openly now. “She managed to infiltrate all sorts of places the government thought were impregnable, including the President’s private quarters. She had taps left over from the Cape Girond Rebellion, and she’d never stopped keeping them updated. She had agents of her own, non-Vatta people she’d used to acquire information on Vatta’s competitors.”

“How did you get involved?” Ky asked.

“We—Spaceforce that is—knew someone in government must have been complicit because of the form of attack on your family’s Corleigh compound. The only way to land the kind of weapons used, and then clear away the evidence, was a shuttle landing—a shuttle landing that managed to go unrecorded. Someone in the government had to tell someone in Spaceforce when to shut off the satellite surveillance and fake the continuity of its data. With the attack coming so soon after the incident that got you in trouble…well, I saw connections. Grace worked out the way we could communicate unobtrusively—”

“Which was?”

“Fly-fishing. We met on a river—she’d moved Helen and Jo’s children to a country place, and I’d rented a cabin a few kilometers away. She was planning on doing it all herself, but after she lost her arm when assassins tried for the children—”

Ky blinked. “Slow down. Tell me the whole thing.”

MacRobert began with the layout of the country house and grounds, the security Grace had designed and planted around it, and the circumstances that had led up to that morning.

“We were going to meet on the river that afternoon; I’d started fishing early, as I usually did on our meeting days, checking both banks upstream and down for intruders or surveillance gear. I didn’t see or hear anything unusual until the first shot—it was far enough out in the country that the assassins didn’t bother with silencers. I went up the slope from the river as fast as I could without being obvious, and came out of the scrub just in time to see Grace shot. With the assassin between me and Grace and the child, I didn’t risk a shot—I just stabbed him with my fish-gutting knife.”

“So if she was minus an arm, I’m guessing she didn’t kill the President—did you?”

“He killed himself,” MacRobert said. “When Grace let me access her network of agents, their data plus what we in Spaceforce had been able to compile was enough to bring down the government. The Commandant, I believe, visited the President and at some point the President decided that it would be preferable to end his own life rather than face the kind of charges he would have faced.” MacRobert paused, then went on. “By the way, the Commandant sent his personal congratulations to you. He always thought a lot of you, and said to tell you he’s not surprised at your successes.”

“I have been,” Ky said.

“You Vattas are remarkable,” MacRobert continued. “Your enemies wanted you destroyed, but those of you not actually killed just would not give up.”

“Speaking of those not actually killed,” Ky said, “we learned yesterday that Toby’s parents are still alive on Elmendorf. Their ansible’s been down, but they’re fine. They want him to come home and finish school. With that dog, of course. Stella says he’s a nice boy but it’ll be a relief to have a place to herself again. A teenage boy and a dog are really not her idea of interior décor.”

“Isn’t he smitten with that girl whose father was—”

“One of Turek’s agents, yes. Nice girl,” Ky said. She still wasn’t sure what she’d said that helped Zori. “Toby’s parents are helping her and her mother relocate to Elmendorf—apparently the mother’s not welcome here with her own family due to the scandal. I expect those two, if they stick together, will end up running the manufacturing end someday.”

MacRobert nodded. “Nothing will surprise me about your family, after the last few years.”

It was not their first night together, but it might be their last. Any night might be their last and they made the most of this one. Still, the approach of separation led to talk of the future.

“How do you define when the war is over?” Rafe asked. “Vatta’s won, but what about you?”

“How do you define when your job is done at ISC?”