“You’re who? The Rector?” He sounded both grumpy and half asleep. She hadn’t thought to look up the time at his location; could it have been night there? “Why would the Rector contact me directly and not through my chain of command? Who are you, her secretary?”
“I am Rector Vatta and I’m contacting you directly because the matter is too urgent—”
“Prove it.” His tone was truculent, even defiant, rousing a responsive flare of white-hot anger. Not only had she not been told immediately about the shuttle’s problem, but now some boob less than half her age who had probably never seen combat was defying her.
“I assure you,” Grace said, as she sent her official seal, image, and right-hand fingerprints to him, “you do not want to wait for your senior to be involved in this. It will not benefit his career or yours.” She knew this was not the right approach, but Ky was down, and if she was alive—
“This is not the right way to contact me; I don’t take operational orders from you,” he said. “I don’t care what you—”
“If you fire upon a Space Defense Force craft of any kind,” Grace said as rage whited out her vision for a moment, “I will see that you lose your commission, if they don’t simply blow you to pieces.” She pressed the button that ended that call and called MacRobert.
“What d’you have?” he asked.
“A likely location where they went down. And a base commander who needs to be relieved of command when I have a spare moment, which I don’t. A guy named Basil Orniakos—”
“Regional commander, not base commander. Son and grandson of Academy graduates, ranked thirteenth in his class, switched from space duty to planetary due to his father becoming disabled… that Basil Orniakos?”
“I suppose. I asked Ilya Ramos who was in charge of AirDefense in that sector—”
“That would be Orniakos. And you contacted him yourself? You didn’t call Admiral Hicks first?”
“Yes. He threatened Ky’s ship. It had launched a shuttle to shadow the one she was on when it seemed to be in trouble, and it had eyes on her until the shuttle went into thick clouds. They have the best location on the crash site. He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Grace—Rector—I’ve tried to explain before—”
“That I shouldn’t try to break into the chain of command. I know. I know that, Mac. But we don’t have a lot of time.”
He said nothing. She could almost see the words forming in his mind: Time you’ve already wasted by alienating Orniakos. Then a sigh. “You need to give Air-Sea Rescue the location data you’ve got. It would be best to contact Admiral Sumia.”
“Pingat Base is closer to the location—”
“Admiral Sumia. Or I can do it for you. I know someone on that side.”
“Fine. You do it. I’m just a mere civilian Rector.” She hated the edge frustration gave her voice; Mac didn’t deserve it. But she was full of rage, old and new rage both.
“Just a moment until I’m at a secure desk,” Mac said. Then he said, “Ready now. My usual code.”
“Here goes,” Grace said. “Straight from Vanguard.”
“Got it,” Mac said, a moment later. “I’ll get hold of my contact right away. And Grace, be careful. If this is another deliberate attack on Vatta, you’re a major target. If it was aimed at the Commandant, or the Defense Department as a whole, you’re the Rector. Either way, take all precautions.”
“I’m always careful.”
“I’m always concerned.”
Grace sat back in her chair for a moment, not quite slumping. Ky gone. She had to think of it that way, face the likelihood that Ky had died in the crash, after all she had survived before, and that meant not only a great loss to the family but the frustration of the very plan that had brought Ky back to Slotter Key at all.
Unless she hadn’t died. Ky—who had come through so many perilous adventures—would not die easily if only she made it to the sea in one piece. Mostly one piece. With the experience of age, Grace tested the near-certainty of death against the splinter of hope that Ky lived. Which would she rather live with?
Hope, of course. She looked down at her left arm, now the same size as her right one but completely different to look at, with the skin she remembered from her distant youth—smooth, unmarked, so different from the uneven color and wrinkles of her right. She had been willing to lose that arm to save a child; she had fought to have a biological replacement grown in situ; she’d been told there was only a small chance it would live. And there it was—full-size, fully functional. She would believe Ky was alive.
Stella Vatta, acting head of Vatta Transport’s branch office in Cascadia, and soon to be CEO of the entire corporation, sat quietly in the car beside her mother, Helen Stamarkos Vatta, current CEO of Vatta Enterprises, as they drove to Vatta’s rebuilt headquarters in Port Major. Breakfast had been surprisingly pleasant, she thought, and with a little luck the rest of her visit would pass with no familial drama. Her mother looked older, to be sure, as expected in a woman who had lost three of her four children and her husband in the attack on Vatta several years before, but Stella sensed that her mother wanted a peaceful reunion as much as Stella did.
They had touched lightly on the family business during breakfast, each congratulating the other on what had been accomplished since that great upheaval. Now, as the car moved along familiar streets and neared the new headquarters building, Stella felt her skin tighten.
“Do you drive yourself every day?”
“Yes, but not the same route. Or the same car.” Her mother turned right for two blocks, then left. “We’ll go past the front, circle around. The entrance is in back, as before.”
Vatta’s new headquarters building, on the same site as the bombed-out former one, had a similar façade on State Street but a different footprint on the block as a whole. Stella eyed the new building, recognizing subtle differences from the old headquarters where she had been so often. As they entered the private access, she looked around the large open court.
“What’s this? The building’s not nearly as big.”
“Couldn’t afford it,” Helen said. “We’d lost too much, and the banks balked. Over on State, as you saw, it looks much the same. Here on Trade, it’s not as tall and only half as deep. Also, having had the basements mined, we’ve handled the underground portions differently.”
The car shuddered to a halt; Stella’s expression stiffened. “What—”
“It’s all right.” Helen touched the control panel, entering the codes. The car rolled forward a short distance and stopped. “We’re going to the belowground entrance,” Helen said. The car sank without any vibration. Stella stared as they passed through what looked like solid pavement, coming to rest in a well-lit space with uniformed guards.
“It’s an application of tractor beam technology,” Helen said. “Illegal onplanet, but it has many advantages. An intruder driving into that courtyard will fall into one of several holes.” She opened her door. “Don’t worry; this vehicle’s programmed to stop safely short of the entrance. We do have plans to fill in that space; the foundations are poured, but that can wait.”
Stella watched her mother’s progress through the building with a mixture of grief and trepidation. Most of her time in the old headquarters had been with her father—a few times with both her parents—and what she remembered overlaid the present building like a transparency. Only the wall-stripe in the passages, the familiar red and blue against cream walls, was the same.
“The public entrance—almost as large as before—and the executive offices need to look prosperous,” her mother said as they rode the lift up from one floor to the next. “So those offices are up high and they seem to have windows to the outside. But the apparent windows on the outside aren’t, and on the inside the blast-shielded rooms have viewscreens.”