CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Slotter Key

The new Sub-Rector for Defense, Grace Lane Vatta, climbed out of the official car that had appeared for her precisely at six forty-two, marching up the five steps to the entrance of the Annex and through the tall door that was opened for her. Turn right, MacRobert had said, and go to the left-most security booth.

As if she had been doing it for years, she placed her right palm on the plate and looked into the scanner. The tiny flash hardly registered. A voice said, “Both hands on the plate…,” then trailed away; she turned and gave the sentry a frosty glance. He was already red-faced, staring at her arm-bud in its casing.

“Anything else?” Grace Lane Vatta asked.

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. His forehead glistened. “It’s just we’re supposed to…” He opened the little wicket and let her through. “Third elevator, ma’am. Fifth floor.”

She nodded without saying anything and walked through. She knew which elevator, which floor, which door. The other two elevators, she saw as she neared them, had plain metal doors. Hers had the Rectory seal on an outer grille. She slid her keycard through the slot; the grille swung out, blocking anyone else’s passage, and the doors opened. Inside, the elevator was carpeted, walls as well as the floor. The rear wall also displayed the Rectory seal.

Her shoes sank into the carpet—ridiculous, she thought, and the former occupant of her office deserved his demotion. Five floors up, the hall to her office was also carpeted. A uniformed guard—some militia unit, she didn’t yet know which—stood by her door. He saluted as she approached and flung open her door with a flourish.

“Sub-Rector Vatta!”

Through the open door, she saw five people lined up waiting. “Good morning,” she said, walking through, giving a slight nod to the guard at the door. The five before her, three women and two men, were staff inherited from the former Sub-Rector. From their expressions, the carefully blank faces shown to those in authority, they expected to be fired. Some of them, no doubt, would be. Some of them, no doubt, deserved to be. It was her responsibility to be sure that the second group and the first group were the same. All who survived the winnowing would be working for someone else; she didn’t want anyone contaminated by the former Sub-Rector on her own staff. MacRobert’s dossiers on them had not revealed useful clues.

“We’ll meet in the conference room,” she said now, turning to the left. The most junior, Esmaila Turnin, scrambled to get to the door before her and open it. Les Vaughn, the most senior, held the others back until she was through, then led them in as they arranged themselves around the polished tik-wood table. Grace took the end seat, settling into the blue leather. Too soft, and the chair sagged back as if expecting her to lounge in it as Selwin had done. Selwin wasn’t lounging now; the bastard was awaiting execution, and there was no chair in death row cells.

Her assistants stood behind their chairs, waiting. Grace let them wait a moment, then nodded. “Be seated. We have work to do.”

Vaughn had brought in a portfolio and started to open it. Grace held up her hand. “Just a moment. I have seen your dossiers, of course, but I would like to speak with each of you before we begin the day’s work.”

“Certainly,” Vaughn said. He opened his mouth to say more; Grace stopped that with a look.

“Your former boss is on death row,” Grace said. Their faces stiffened; that had not yet been released to the press. “You must realize that you, too, are being investigated thoroughly. Such a person—” She put an emphasis on person that denied everything but a genetic connection to humanity. “—such a person will not have worked alone. If you were assisting him in his treason, you will be exposed and tried, do not doubt it. If, on the other hand, you are innocent of any wrongdoing, you should have no concern for your employment.”

“Surely you don’t think—” That was Armand Politsier, at the far left end of the table. His face had an unhealthy sheen.

“I am not in charge of that investigation,” Grace said. “What I think is of no importance to you; what you—any of you—did is all that matters. I believe the new chief of security is quite able to find out without my assistance.” The new chief of security, now relieved, perhaps permanently, from his duties at Spaceforce Academy, was happy as a terrier down a rathole.

“Yes…ma’ am…,” Politsier said. Grace looked at him with distaste. Innocent or guilty—and she would wager a considerable sum on his guilt—he was not a man she would choose to work with.

“Today I will review the current items and my predecessor’s minutes on them. I am lunching with the Rector and the President at one; I will require a five-minute warning before it’s time to leave, if I become distracted.” She would not become distracted, but she could feign distraction and see what happened.

“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. “In here, or—”

“In my office,” Grace said. Rising from the deeply cushioned chair was awkward, but she made it up without lurching to one side, and the others scrambled out of their seats.

Her private office had windows on two sides, looking out on the perfectly groomed lawns and flowering trees of Government Place. Her desk placed her badly, her back to a window, but this was not a time to show fear of assassination.

Behind her desk was another lushly padded leather chair, this one even more tippy than the one in the conference room. Had Selwin spent all his time reclined and snoozing, perhaps with his feet on this desk with its leather-padded edge? The desk was still arranged as he had left it, functions laid out for the use of both hands. She would have to reprogram it…but first, she found the icon for the chair. Indeed, it was set to FULL RELAX; she tapped the panel until it read FULL UPRIGHT and leaned back cautiously. It held still.

By the time she had the desktop reset, collapsing functions so all could be accessed by her right hand, Vaughn was tapping at her door. He delivered a stack of hardcopy. “The most current items are on top, Sub-Rector,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how far back—”

“I’m not, either,” Grace said. “Selwin appears to have been taking bribes from someone at least two years ago—so I’ve been informed.” Not least by Selwin himself, sweating and shaking in the combined grip of the interrogation drugs and his own fear. But her office staff did not need to know how she knew. “I don’t have time to review all that at the moment; the Rector tells me we have other, more immediate crises. But I must know what Selwin was doing in the past half year.”

“These cover only the past four weeks,” Vaughn said.

“I’ll get started, then,” Grace said. “Hold any calls; I’ll check with you before lunch.” She glanced at the top memo.

“Should I bring water or…or anything?” Vaughn asked.

“No, I’m fine,” Grace said, not lifting her gaze from the papers. “I’ll call if I need anything.”

She could imagine what he thought as he quietly shut the door behind him: Silly old woman, appointed here because the new President knew he had to placate the Vatta family. Probably didn’t have a clue. Her reputation was decades behind her, unless he’d accessed certain files. She trusted MacRobert to find out if he had done that, in which case…well, to work.

By midday, she had cleared the first stack of paperwork and asked for the next. Selwin might have been up to mischief earlier, but the most recent actions seemed to be more about setting up lunch, dinner, and weekend dates with various friends in the department or in other branches of government. Any wrongdoing would have taken place at those meetings—and the surveillance of those meetings was someone else’s to analyze.

At quarter to one, she came out into the reception area. Vaughn looked up from his desk and stood immediately. A door was open to another room beyond, where Grace could see two women at desks. The third, she supposed, was taking an early lunch or off on an errand somewhere.

“Sub-Rector…I didn’t know whether to interrupt you, but Security took Armand…uh, Armand Politsier…away a few minutes ago. To help with their inquiries, they said.”

She would have to install her own equipment, somehow; she would have liked to watch that. “That’s…most unfortunate for him,” she said. “One hopes he has not done anything rash.”

Vaughn looked worried, as well he might, but nothing in his face or bearing suggested he felt guilty. Hard to imagine the senior assistant not being aware of Selwin’s corruption, but perhaps he felt no guilt because he approved. “I don’t know of anything, Sub-Rector,” he said. “Would you like me to call down and see if your car is waiting?”

It was only a ten- or fifteen-minute walk, but protocol—and MacRobert—insisted that she be transported by official car. Grace bared her teeth in a formal smile. “Thank you,” she said. “That will be…appropriate. I am not sure how long I will be with the Rector and the President, and I have a medical appointment to follow; I will continue working on the same files when I return.”

“Yes, Sub-Rector,” Vaughn said.

Grace switched her mind from office problems to the possibility of assassination on the way through the building, evaluating each component of her journey in those terms and deciding how to respond. When a junior clerk—a mere child, she seemed, all pink cheeks and bright eyes and a fluff of dark hair—flinched away from her in the lower corridor, Grace almost laughed.

Much more fun to be perceived as dangerous than as a dotty old woman. More dangerous, too, but that was part of the fun.

Nonetheless, as she climbed the pinkish steps of the presidential palace, she schooled herself back into the identity that had served her so well the past few decades. Elderly, surely infirm with that missing arm, perhaps a little set in her ways…she was almost giggling by the time she had passed through the various security checkpoints between the entrance and the small dining room where the new President and the Rector of Defense waited for her.

At one glance, she knew they had already disagreed about something. The Rector gave her a look thick with suspicion; the President came forward to greet her.

“Grace—I’m so glad you accepted the appointment. I believe you’re just what we need in this difficult time.”

“I’m honored,” she said. Was her appointment the problem? She had been told the Rector was neutral about it, but the tension in the room didn’t feel neutral.

“Let’s eat first,” the President suggested, waving Grace forward. Erran Kostanyan, she reminded herself. Ten years her junior, he had bowed politely over her hand at any number of official functions, including the dedication of the new Vatta headquarters. Colorless and boring, some said. A good administrator, others said. What mattered now was the perception that Kostanyan had stood aside from political wrangling for decades. Grace wondered. People did not rise to the top of the cream pitcher without intent.

Lunch had been laid out on a buffet along one side: sliced meats, shellfish on a bed of ice, dark and light breads, fruit. Two attendants stood by to pour tea or coffee or water; Grace noticed that no alcoholic beverage was on the buffet, or offered. That was a difference from the former Administration.

For the duration of the meal, custom prevented discussing business. The Rector asked the President how his daughter was liking her university courses, and the conversation stayed on families—good news only—until the attendants removed the plates, laid out desserts on the buffet, and withdrew.

“Donald and I have had several chats since I took office,” the President said to Grace. “So now I’d like your opinion. What do you see as our priorities in defense?”

MacRobert had told her this President came to the point quickly; Grace had been thinking about this for days.

“We must have ansible service,” she said. “It’s not just the isolation from the rest of human space, though that’s hurting us economically as well as militarily. It’s also a matter of communications within Spaceforce in our own system.”

“We need an ISC technical crew to work on the ansibles,” the President said. “Without their permission, and their skills—”

“Skills are replicable,” Grace said. “I’m sure we have technical brains in government somewhere who could get an ansible up and running.”

“But ISC—no one else is allowed to touch their precious ansibles.”

“We can’t ask their permission, but by the same token they can’t tell us no,” Grace said. “I don’t know why they haven’t sent a repair crew, but the fact is, our security and our economy depend on communications. We can’t be held hostage like this. What if another attack comes? Without ansible service, we’re limited to lightspeed communications in our system, and our space fleets are hours out of touch with the planet.”

“But you know what they do to systems that touch their ansibles or their personnel,” the Rector said. “We can’t risk an ISC invasion—”

“I don’t see that as likely,” Grace said. “They must be suffering some kind of widespread emergency, or they’d have repaired our ansible before now. After all, one of their ships left here to find out what had happened very shortly after our ansible failed. If it were only a local problem, they could have contacted their headquarters by ansible as soon as they reached the next system…and they’ve had time to go all the way to Nexus II and come back. That argues for some widespread trouble—perhaps much like ours. We must have communication; the only way to get it is to find out what’s wrong with the ansible and repair it.”

“We could send out our own scouts,” the President said.

“We could, if we wanted to weaken local defenses,” the Rector said. “If I weren’t concerned about ISC’s response, I’d back the Sub-Rector’s suggestion—”

“We’ve been without ansible service for almost a year,” Grace said. “We have a legitimate complaint against ISC, for that matter.”

“Well, if you’re willing to take responsibility—” the Rector began.

“She can’t, Donald,” the President said. “Responsibility goes up; authority goes down. If I let her do it, it’s on my head.”

Grace looked at him, surprised. He had a reputation for honesty, but her long experience in undercover work gave her little reason to trust anyone in power. He looked back, lips pressed tight. Then he shrugged.

“You’re right, Grace,” he said. “The economy’s foundering without good communications for our outsystem trade—and even our insystem trade. We have financial assets out of system that we can’t use because we have no financial ansible. Our defense is compromised when we can’t get immediate response from our outlier platforms and ships. I didn’t expect…” He shook his head, clearly changing direction. “I’ll authorize an attempt to repair the ansibles, both financial and general communications, with the proviso that we advise ISC as soon as they’re online, direct to their headquarters, what we did and why. Acceptable?”

“Acceptable,” Grace said.

“I’ll draft the order this afternoon; you have my verbal consent to start the operation.”

The Rector looked sour but said nothing. “Donald,” the President said. “You know we need your expertise, but things have changed. If you can’t work with us, I’ll accept your resignation.”

“I—” The Rector’s round face had reddened; Grace looked at him and it paled again. So. Would the President recognize what that meant? Would it matter to him? “I may find,” the Rector said, “that the strains of the past few weeks have told on my heart. In that case—”

“In that case I would not presume to place more burdens on you,” the President said. “Perhaps you should check with your physicians and let me know—”

“Yes. I’ll do that.” And with a vicious glance at Grace, the Rector pushed away from the table and left the room.

“Dear me,” Grace said, and bent to sip her tea.

“That’s going to cause trouble,” the President said. “I think perhaps you should return to the Annex.”

“By all means,” Grace said. She wanted time alone to analyze what had just happened…and she would have time, if she went straight to the Annex now, to dig into different files and see if she could determine why the Rector had chosen to leave. Had he intended this from the beginning?

She had an appointment that afternoon with her rehab team, an appointment she had rescheduled three times already. Her arm-bud’s sustaining capsule needed its fluids changed, her doctors insisted. She left the Annex shortly after three, arriving at the clinic by three thirty, and found her doctor pacing the floor.

“I was afraid you’d reschedule again,” he said. “And that would not have been good for your arm.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Grace said.

“It won’t hurt until it’s too late,” he said. He nodded to one of the technicians, who inserted a fine needle through the cap and drew off a sample of fluid. In the analyzer, the fluid produced a series of colored blips, meaningless to Grace.

“Just as I thought,” the doctor said. “Electrolytes are borderline. We’ll start with a flush. Lie down here.”

The flush itself was not unpleasant. Fluid ran out as other fluid ran in; it felt a little cool. The arm-bud looked as if it had grown a couple of centimeters; the doctor confirmed this.

“It’s growing normally, but you must make every scheduled visit,” he said. “As growth accelerates, there’s less margin for error in the chemical milieu. If you want to have a functional arm—”

“Of course I do.”

“Then you must cooperate, however busy your schedule. Remember, this is not normal embryonic and fetal development; not only is it a graft onto an adult body, it’s being pushed to develop faster, in a less natural environment.”

That would serve as a metaphor for her nieces, Grace thought as she was driven back to the Annex. Grafted onto adult responsibilities and pushed to develop faster in a less natural environment. She hoped they were doing as well as her arm-bud.

When she finally got home that night, she found MacRobert waiting for her. He had said he might drop by, but wasn’t sure; she was slightly alarmed at how glad she was to see him.

“I thought you might be tired,” he said. “How does soup and hot bread sound?”

“Excellent.” Grace slipped out of her shoes. “I’m going to go get comfortable.”

“It’ll be ready when you are,” MacRobert promised.

Grace came back to find steaming bowls of soup on the table, and hot bread wrapped in a towel. Custom or no custom, she could not resist telling him about her day, including the meeting with the Rector and President.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Grace said at the end. She bit off the end of a warm roll.

“Of course you do,” MacRobert said. “You’ve been giving orders for ages.”

“Not that,” Grace said. “It’s finding out who knows what without doing it my way, the back-door way. I need to find reliable communications technicians who might be able to repair the ansibles, and I don’t even know whom to ask.”

“You asked me,” MacRobert said, smiling. “That’s a good start.”

“That’s another thing,” Grace said. “This business of coming to you first. I haven’t been dependent on a single source of information for…years. It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just habit.”

“And a very good habit,” MacRobert said, nodding. “Just as my telling you you’re an extraordinary woman is not flattery. We both know it’s true. And we both know that this particular setup is stressful for you…just not as stressful as being shut out. You’re not comfortable working out of cover—and neither am I, for that matter. I hadn’t realized quite how much I depended on being the invisible—in my own way—senior NCO at the Academy, pulling strings from behind the scenes. You were behind two layers—well, three, if I count the visual one of acting the batty old lady, which you do so well. How many people in Vatta knew?”

“Two. They’re both dead.” Grace pushed away the rage she still felt at the former President and his minions, and wished she still believed in an afterlife where an angry deity would torment them for eternity.

“Fortunately, you’re not,” MacRobert said. “And we’re both having to cope with coming out into the open where people know who we are, what our jobs are. But not everything.”

“Not everything?” Grace said. “When there are people all around, all the time, watching everything I do and no doubt logging it?”

“Not everything.” He grinned at her. “An old spook like me isn’t going to open up all the files, and neither are you. All we have to do is act the part.”

Grace felt her muscles loosening. “So you don’t expect—”

“—you to be totally dependent on me? No, of course not. In this case, though, I do have what you need—I know where the best techs are in Spaceforce, and they’re almost certainly the best for this particular job. You won’t know that one of Spaceforce’s clandestine activities was trying to devise an ansible small enough to be carried aboard ship. We suspected that ISC had them—it explained their quick response to threats against the system—and we wanted them. We had a breakthrough shortly before your niece’s little difficulty, and I actually sent her some components, just to see what she’d do. She’s quite good at tech, when she puts her mind to it.”

“Ansibles aboard ships?” Grace wasn’t that interested in Ky’s former technical ability, but the implications of shipborne ansibles were obvious. “Do you think the ships that attacked us—that disrupted ansible service—had those?”

“Might have, but they definitely weren’t ISC. It’s possible that someone else was on the same track. And you’re right, we have to get ours back up.”

“And on our ships,” Grace said. “If your research went that far.” The concept unfolded in her mind, opening out more and more, revealing infinite possibilities. “And trade—ships could always stay in touch with headquarters, even if they were in systems without ansibles. Do they work in FTL flight?”

“Not that we know of,” MacRobert said. “Nothing works in FTL flight; theory says the ship’s in a sort of enclosed kernel. Nothing gets in; nothing gets out.”

“Too bad,” Grace said. “That could be really handy. But how long do you think it’ll take to get the system ansibles up? Assuming we find someone who can do it?”

“Days to weeks. We have to get someone there, physically, and then it depends on what’s wrong.”

“All right,” Grace said. “Now for the big question.”

“Yes?”

“If the Rector resigns, and the President offers it to me, should I take it?”

“You? In charge of the entire Defense Department? The batty old lady, the auntie who makes fruitcakes stuffed with diamonds?”

Grace felt herself flushing; she wanted to kick him, but he was too far away. He grinned at her.

“Our enemies should be very, very afraid,” he said.

“You didn’t really answer me,” Grace said.

“Grace, I’d have to be crazy to tell you what to do. You’ll make whatever decision seems right to you at the time. And it will be.”

Eleven days later, MacRobert stopped by her office with the news.

“They’re back up,” MacRobert said. “It was software after all. The apparent physical damage was all surface stuff, for show.”

“ISC’s own people sabotaged it?” Stella had gone off with an ISC courier; at the time, she’d thought that was the safest way to get Stella offplanet, but now…

“I don’t think so. I think they’d have done a better job of making it look like the main damage. This was mostly to impress flybys, I think, and our people also think it was done from space. Impossible to date it, at this point, but I’d hazard a guess it was the same mission that took out your people on Corleigh. The software end was much more sophisticated, and I’d bet that it did come from somewhere within ISC, a long time before failure. At any rate, our people have both ansibles back up, but not yet patched into the local networks or transmitting readiness. Yes, they managed to block the automatic alert function. We wanted to test the waters, as it were. See what’s happening before we broadcast anything.”

“You know the President wanted immediate notification of ISC,” Grace said.

“He would,” MacRobert said. “But this is safer; ISC isn’t our enemy.” He smiled at her, the smile covering all that had happened in the intervening days. The former Rector, citing reasons of health, had resigned. Grace, with only three days’ experience as Sub-Rector, had been named Acting Rector.

“Go on,” Grace said. He knew what she most wanted to know, and she was determined not to ask.

“You’ll be interested to know that Vatta Transport lists a new headquarters, in the Moscoe Confederation—”

“The idiot tree people!” Grace said. “I was there once—”

“S. Vatta, CEO, the listing says. They’re running four ships: Katrine Lamont, Gary Tobai, Marcus Selene, and Mary Alice.”

“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.

“You’re doing the job; as far as my shares are concerned, you are.” There: now how would she take it?

“Me?” Stella’s voice squeaked, then steadied. “You can’t be serious. I’m too young; I don’t have the experience—”

“You’re getting the experience. How many ships are reporting to you now?”

“Uh…four. No, five. Galloway came in yesterday.”

“And you’ve reestablished contact with insurers?”

“Yes. The rates have gone up, but I’ve insisted ours be no higher than others. However, two big companies have ceased operations.”

“That’s understandable. The ships are carrying cargo?”

“Yes. Overall, trade is down, but we’re finding routes that work.”

“How many employees do you have?”

“Besides security, just two in the office right now—the budget’s still really tight.”

Grace grinned to herself. Stella, for all her glamour, had always been a tightwad.

“Part of that’s the need to help Ky…I never realized how much even one missile cost. And she has more crew on one ship than three tradeships—”

Then again, Stella had definitely learned about the right priorities, if she was funding Ky’s war. She was going to be a good CEO. “You remember that meeting right afterward? Just before Gerry died? No one was making sense—”

“You were. And we were all in shock—”

“And too many of them still are. I hadn’t realized the extent to which the Vattas with initiative and brains went off in ships, while the ones who stayed here—not the ones who went and came back, but the others—were timid and fog-headed.”

“Not Mother!” Stella said, sounding shocked.

“Helen’s completely engaged in taking care of Jo’s children; she’s told me she wants nothing to do with the business. No, that’s not being timid or fog-headed, but it’s also no help. What I’m getting at is that nobody here has taken over—”

“But you,” Stella said. “You have. And you’re older. You should be CEO, at least for the transition.”

“I have other work now,” Grace said. “And I don’t mean my work for Vatta. I’m in the government.” She almost hoped someone would intercept that message. Let the bad guys ponder the fact that a Vatta was not only alive and thriving, but had power. “You’re doing a good job, Stella. I don’t know anyone who could have done as well, let alone better. Count on me to back your decisions, if anyone has the gall to criticize.”