Command Decision (2 page)

He knew every centimeter of the road, every bush, every tree, every place someone could hide, every surveillance device and its range and sensitivity. He was prepared to confuse, to fox the scans, to disable some completely if he must.

He was not prepared to find the place uninhabited and unprotected except by its fence and hedge…and one very obvious police guard at the gate. He got in unnoticed, which he expected, and into the house—the empty house, with only a few dim lights on and all surveillance gear disconnected. The furniture was still there, the gleaming tiles of the kitchen, the long polished floor of the grand salon, though the leaves of the ornamental tigis drooped and the soil beneath it was dry. Tall bookcases in the library still held their books, both modern and antique. The music room still held the priceless grand piano, the concert harp, the cabinets full of music scores and recordings. A pale irregular area perhaps one by two meters marked the floor, visible even in the dim light.

He could not resist going upstairs to his old room, telling himself he might find some useful clue on the second floor. He had suspected his parents would clear it, turn it into a guest room, but instead it seemed unchanged, a wrenching time capsule. A crude model of an ansible platform, a school project for which he had won an award when he was nine, still stood on a shelf, the faded ribbon beside it. Textbooks still jammed the low bookcase. Even his clothes—including the uniform of the hated boarding school—were still in the closet, carefully sealed in preservative packs.

For a moment, he leaned his head on the closet door frame, his breath coming fast and uneven. He could not have said, in that instant, if it was rage or pain that wrenched so powerfully. He had been prepared to have his life erased, removed utterly from his respectable family’s awareness, but they had kept…someone had kept…so much. Even—and tears burned his eyes—the fateful display sword that had saved his life and caused him so much grief.

He eased back downstairs and out of the house with his usual skill, while his emotions swirled…he had not known, he had not understood. What he had not understood, he could not say; he wanted desperately to see his father, talk to him. He forced that aside as he moved back across the property toward the road. Whatever had gone wrong, he must not be suspected or captured now.

Reentering the theater at the climax of the second act, he slipped unobtrusively into the men’s room, into the stall he had used, retrieved his costume and put it on over the skinsuit, and then—sticking a finger down his throat—vomited into the toilet, noisily. It was easier than he’d thought it would be, and his face was suitably pale when he looked in the mirror. He returned to his table at the intermission; a passing waitress asked him if he felt all right.

“Too much travel,” he said, smiling at her. “My stomach—it is delicate, I’m afraid.”

“Should I call someone?”

“No…I should be all right now. But tell me—is it possible to get a private car to the port area? I don’t know if I feel like riding the tram.”

“Of course, sir. Would you like me to arrange that now, or do you want to see the rest of the play? It’s quite good—”

“I will try to stay, but—”

“Just press this button, if you need me,” she said, reminding him of the call button on his table.

“Thank you,” he said.

Through the third act of the romantic comedy, he tried to think rather than feel. He had expected a chilly reconciliation or an angry rejection…not this blank nothingness of absence. Were they dead? Surely he would have heard…but he had not been at his last reported address; he had been in space, much of the time in FTL flight, utterly unreachable, for…more than half a standard year now. Perhaps they had died, and no one could find him. Yet…why then the odd response to his call? And if they weren’t dead, where were they?

He clapped with the rest when the show was over, and the waitress came over to check on him and tell him she had arranged a car. He thanked her; he had already left a generous tip. His watcher was outside on the steps, feigning interest in a poster advertising the show. Rafe leaned on one of the pillars until a car drew up and the driver asked for “Gen-son Ra-tan-vi?” with the accent on the wrong syllable in both names.

The watcher stared fixedly at the poster—better than whirling around, but not much, Rafe thought as he got into the car and gave the hotel name and address to the driver. He made no effort to lower his voice, and besides, the watcher could always check with the car hire company. The paunchy foreigner had indeed gone straight back to his hotel after being sick in the men’s room.

He lay a long time on the bed, wondering what to do next. The newsfeed in his room, its sound automatically muted this late at night, had nothing about his family, and only the blandest announcement that ISC was making good progress restoring ansible service. The talking head for that announcement was Lew Parmina, his father’s closest associate and expected successor. Rafe remembered the man—intelligent, sophisticated, affable—who had been his father’s messenger in the most difficult years when his father had virtually disowned him. Parmina had counseled patience, had promised to do what he could to mend the breach; he had sent friendly notes now and then with the remittance payments. He looked much the same, with the well-groomed gloss of the successful man of business.

Rafe turned off the newsfeed. He didn’t care about Parmina unless the man had something to do with his family’s disappearance. Which surely he did not: he was well up the ladder to the highest position in the most powerful monopoly in human space; what more could he want?

Where was his father—his mother—his family?
He felt as if a crevasse had opened up beside him and half his universe had disappeared into it, as if he teetered on the brink of some bottomless pit. He shivered and dragged the bedcovers over himself. It was like something Ky had said—tried to say—about her family’s death. He had been so sure he knew how she felt, what it was she had to cope with. An adult, someone who’d been out on her own…how bad could it be?

He had known nothing. As the shiver built into shudders, as he felt himself engulfed in a sorrow colder than death itself, he knew that she had felt this: the last of her family, as he might well be the last of his. Bereft, alone…and so much younger than he was, so much less experienced.

And she had gone on. He let himself hold to that, for the moment. That crazy idiot, that stiffly, stubbornly upright prig of a girl, who shared with him a guilty secret delight in killing: she had not collapsed under this sorrow. She had fought back. She had saved him—humiliating as that was—and Stella and Toby and her ship and her crew, and gone on being who she was.

He was warm again, and able to breathe. She was probably dead by now, or soon would be, and because of that it was safe to admit what he felt. To himself, anyway. And what would she do, in his situation? He almost chuckled, imagining that dark, vivid face, those intense eyes. What he himself would do—would find a way to do—when he’d had some rest.

What a team they could make, if they didn’t kill each other. If they didn’t each die before they met again. And on that thought, he fell asleep.

The smell woke him. A chemical knife, it stabbed deep into his awareness; he was sitting bolt upright before he realized he was awake.

That miserable implant. Ky. It must be Ky trying to use the cranial implant. He staggered into the bathroom—the only logical excuse for waking so suddenly if someone had breached his security.

Only the alarm functioned without an external power source. He did not want to link himself into the room’s power outlets, and yet—he came out of the bathroom, checked his security devices, and burrowed into his luggage for the special cables. He had checked the quality of the line signal and was about to hook himself up when he had another thought.

What if it wasn’t Ky?

Here, of all places, someone knew that he had a cranial ansible. His father knew. The technicians who had built and installed it knew. They were supposed to have been told that it had failed, that it was both useless and dangerous, and all their notes and so on were supposed to have been destroyed, but what if not?

What if whatever had happened to his family had let the enemies know not only that he had a cranial ansible, but also how to contact him?

He would be immobilized, nearly helpless, as long as he was hooked in.

But if he didn’t hook in…

The hotel room had not been designed to be impenetrable, but he did the best he could, as silently as possible, with the chair and the ottoman. Then he arranged the cables, took a deep breath, and activated the ansible.

It was not quite like using an ordinary skullphone. Ordinary skullphones didn’t smell like gas leaks, skunks, rancid butter, wet dog. The smell associated with being called changed to the one associated with a connection being made. Then a faint sound he associated with an open line, nothing more.

Somewhere, someone’s telltales should have gone from standby to connected. Someone had placed the call…someone should be speaking. Rafe said nothing. Ansible-to-ansible was not the same as implant-to-implant; he could not strip data from someone’s implant this way even if they had the same setup he did. Which he hoped no one but Ky Vatta did.

His only safety lay in patience—waiting out whomever had called.

Seconds passed. Minutes. A trickle of sweat ran down his back. If it had been someone friendly on the other end, they’d have spoken by now. Ky, certainly. His father, if nothing was wrong with him. Anyone else—would be trying to trace the signal? Would be planning to send some devastating blast right into his brain? At least he knew—hoped he knew—that wouldn’t work. The safety interlocks prevented any excessive power surges. Nor should they have been able to trace his location from the ansible’s response. But no one who wouldn’t speak to him should have been able to initiate the call.

Finally he heard, dimly, voices talking. Not talking to him, but talking somewhere in the pickup range of whatever unit they were using. He boosted the sensitivity, shunting the input to storage for later analysis.

“…the light’s green. It has to be connected.”

“…not in the index. A private ansible? Would he have had a private off-list ansible?”

“…knows? ’Sposed to be the son’s private number, but nobody’s there—”

“It’s connected.”

“Could be in automatic mode. If it’s designed for relays or something.”

Three voices, Rafe decided. Too far from the pickup to tell much about them, at least without signal analysis.

Then, loudly, “Hey! Answer me!” Male voice, not above middle age, used to having its orders followed.

Rafe said nothing.

“Got to be on auto,” the same voice said, this time in a normal tone. “I don’t hear a thing.”

“So he lied to us. Not his son’s number—”

“Or his son has it on auto but with no pickup message.”

“We should leave him a message,” a more distant voice said.

“Not until we know where he is,” the closest voice said.

The connection closed with a snap; Rafe sat a long moment without moving before he unplugged the cable and re-coiled it into its place in his bag.

Two and two in this case made a very unsavory four. The most likely
he
to have told them the number was his father. He would not have given that number except at great need, probably under duress. That and the trap on the house number, the immediate tail put on what should have passed as an innocent businessman, the empty house…all that suggested an organization with enormous resources, if not the government itself, operating with the government’s consent if not approval. Remembering what Ky and Stella had told him about the attacks on Vatta on Slotter Key, he wondered if the pirates had somehow intimidated the Nexus government into letting them kidnap the head of ISC. Or if they had infiltrated some group within ISC.

Not likely, he decided. The men had not sounded like expert ISC communications technicians; they’d used none of the jargon peculiar to the trade. That meant they might not be able to trace the ansible relay beyond Nexus and thus could not find him. On the other hand, they might have a skilled technician in their organization, or even captive.

Either way, Genson Ratanvi and his food processing needed to disappear in a way that would not alert anyone to anything. He would have to leave the planet, or appear to, on his way back to Cascadia. It was almost dawn…an energetic businessman with a digestive upset might well be up and making calls, hoping to find a place on a ship home. Then again—he’d been here only a day. Would he give up so easily? No. Nexus had other cities, other suppliers. Surely the man would travel around, unhappy stomach and all.

Rafe logged on to the hotel’s travel information site and soon had an itinerary that gave him a reason to be in every major city over the next four weeks. He declined the hotel’s booking agency and made the reservations himself, choosing to change carriers here and there. With excellent communications links, Nexus travelers were spontaneous in their schedules; no one would notice particularly if someone on a scheduled ferry or flight didn’t show up, especially if the passenger called in.