Elizabeth Moon - Vattas 3 - Engaging The Enemy

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ENGAGING THE ENEMY

By

Elizabeth Moon

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, the usual suspects from the fencing group were involved…they know about more than pointy

steel. The helpful veterinarians at Town & Country Veterinary Hospital graciously answered my

questions about canine fertility. Test readers for the early drafts included Karen Shull, David Watson,

Richard Moon, and those patient enough to listen to me read chunks on Thursday nights. For the later

refinements, I thank Shelly Shapiro for catching lots of fossils (remnants of earlier drafts) and reminding

me that not everyone wants to hear that much about fly fishing. Mistakes are all my own; don’t blame any

of these fine people.

By Elizabeth Moon

THE DEED OF PAKSENARRION

Sheepfarmer’s Daughter

Divided Allegiance

Oath of Gold

THE LEGACY OF GIRD

Surrender None

Liar’s Oath

PLANET PIRATES (with Anne McCaffrey)

Sassinak

Generation Warriors

Remnant Population*

THE SERRANO LEGACY

Hunting Party

Sporting Chance

Winning Colors

Once a Hero

Rules of Engagement

Change of Command

Against the Odds

The Speed of Dark*

VATTA’S WAR

Trading in Danger*

Marque and Reprisal*

Engaging the Enemy*

SHORT-FICTION COLLECTIONS

Lunar Activity

Phases

*Published by Ballantine Books

Chapter 1

In the afternoon sky, the sound of the approaching aircraft rose above the sea breeze, a steady

drone. Nothing to see…no, there it was, small to make that much noise…and then the sudden

flood of data from the implant: not an aircraft, no one aboard, a weapon homing on the airfield’s

navigational beacon. Visual data blanked, overloaded by heat and light, auditory data an

inchoate mass of noise, swiftly parsed into channels again, stored, analyzed: primary explosion,

structural damage, secondary explosion, quick flicker of building plans, primary visual restored…

Ky Vatta jerked awake, heart pounding, breath coming in great gasps. She wasn’t there, she was here,

in the dark captain’s cabin of Fair Kaleen, darkness pricked with the steady green telltales of major ship

functions. All she could hear beyond her own pulse beating in her ears were the normal sounds of a ship

in FTL flight. No explosions. No fires. No crashing bricks or shattering glass. No reverberative boom

echoing off the hills minutes later.

“Bedlight,” she said to the room, and a soft glow rose behind her, illuminating tangled sheets and her

shaking hands. She glared at her hands, willing them to stop. A deep breath. Another.

The chronometer informed her that it was mid-third-shift. She had been asleep two hours and fourteen

minutes this time. She went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror: she looked every bit as bad as

she felt. A shower might help. She had showered already; she had taken shower after shower, just as she

had worked out hour after hour in the ship’s gym, hoping to exhaust or relax herself into a full night’s

sleep.

She was the captain. She had to get over this.

This time she dialed the shower cold, and then, chilled, dressed quickly and headed out into the ship. She

could always call it a midshift inspection. Her eyes burned. Her stomach cramped, and she headed first

for the galley. Maybe hot soup…

In the galley, Rafe was ripping open one of the ration packs. “Our dutiful captain,” he said, without

looking up. “Midshift rounds again? Don’t you trust us?” His light ironic tone carried an acidic bite.

She did not need this. “It’s not that I don’t trust the crew. I’m still not sure of this ship.”

“Ah. As I’m sure you recall, I’m on third-shift duty right now, and this is my midshift meal. Do you want

something?”

She wanted sleep. Real sleep, uninterrupted by dreams or visions or whatever…“The first snack you

pick up,” she said.

He reached into the cabinet without looking and pulled something out. “Traditional Waskie Custard,” he

said, reading the label. “The picture is an odd shade of yellow—sure that’s what you want?”

“I’ll try it,” Ky said. He had put his own meal in the oven; now he handed her a small sealed container

and a spoon. She glanced at the garish label; it did look…unappetizing. Inside the seal was what looked

like a plain egg custard. Ky dug the spoon into it. It should be soothing.

“Excuse my mentioning it to the captain,” Rafe said, sitting across from her at the table. “But you look

like someone slugged you in both eyes about ten minutes ago. I promise to perform all my duties

impeccably if you’ll go back to bed and look human in the morning.”

Ky started to say something about duty, but she couldn’t get the words out. “I can’t sleep,” she said

instead.

“Ah. Reliving the fight? It must’ve been bad—”

That attempt at pop psych therapy almost made her laugh. Almost. “No,” she said. “I had my

post-manslaughter nightmare the second night. This is something else.”

“You could tell me,” he said, his voice softening to a purr. When she didn’t respond, he sat up and said,

“With the matter of the internal ansibles, you have enough on me that I wouldn’t dare reveal any secrets

of yours.”

Maybe it was safe to talk to him; he had been ready to commit suicide rather than let outsiders know he

had unknown technology, a personal instantaneous communicator, implanted in his head. “It’s

not…it’s…I’m not sure what it is.” Ky tented her hands above the custard, which was not as soothing as

she’d hoped. Something in the texture almost sickened her. “I think…somehow…I’m seeing what

happened back home.”

“What…the attack?”

“Yes. I know it’s impossible; I don’t even know if Dad’s implant recorded any of it, and I haven’t tried

to access those dates anyway. But I keep dreaming it, or…or something.”

“A high-level implant could record it all,” Rafe said. “If your father wanted a record, something for a

court. Are you sure it’s not bleeding over? I mean, if he put an Urgent-to-transmit command on it—”

“It couldn’t override my priorities, could it? Everything’s user-defined…”

“True, but this implant’s had two users. It may not know you aren’t your father.”

“That’s…” Ridiculous, she had been going to say, but maybe it wasn’t. She’d had the implant inserted in

an emergency, with no time then for adjustment of implant and brain. She’d gone directly into combat,

and then the direct connection to Rafe’s implant had made changes in hers, changes that essentially

reconfigured it into some kind of cranial ansible. That might have damaged or changed control functions.

And she’d never had someone else’s implant before. Why, she wondered now, hadn’t Aunt Grace

downloaded the data into a new one? Unless it couldn’t be done. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said

instead. “What do you know about transferred implants?”

“Not much,” Rafe said. “I know it’s possible to use one; I don’t know how much residual control might

be involved. That one was your father’s command implant, right? I’d expect it to have special features.”

“It probably does,” Ky said. “It certainly does now, after linking with yours.” She looked at the cup of

custard and pushed it away. “I suppose I’d better look into that.”

“If you don’t want to go insane from lack of sleep and nightmares, that would be a yes,” Rafe said,

pulling his own mealpak from the microwave. “Real food wouldn’t hurt, either. How about some noodles

and chicken? I can make myself another.”

It smelled good. Ky nodded; Rafe pushed the tray across to her, picked up her container of uneaten

custard and sniffed at it, then wrinkled his nose and dropped it in the recycler. He pulled out another

mealpak and put that in the microwave before sitting down again. Ky took a bite of noodle and sauce; it

went down easily.

“See if the implant has a sleep cycle enabler,” Rafe said. “They don’t put those in kids’ implants, but the

high-end adult ones often do, along with a timer. It should be in the personal adjustment menu

somewhere.”

Ky queried her implant and found it: sleep enhancement mode, maximum duration eight hours, monitored

and “regulated” brain-wave activity and damped sensory input. Users were instructed not to use this

function more than five sleep cycles in a row without medical advice…

An Urgent tag came up: “Authorized user request: review sealed files.” Ky scrolled mentally to check the

priorities of sleep enhancement versus Urgent Message, dropped the priority of the message to allow

sleep enhancement to override it, and set a condition for waking. Then she finished her noodles and

chicken.

“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “Tell first shift I may be late.”

Initiating sleep enhancement mode was like walking off a cliff into oblivion. She woke feeling rested for

the first time since before she’d put the implant in…languid, comfortable. After a shower and change, she

went up to the bridge.

“Good rest, Captain?” Lee asked.

“Very good,” Ky said. “But I’m going to need to spend a lot of time today exploring data stored in this

implant. I suspect it’s going to be very intense. So if there’s anything you know you need for this shift, tell

me now.”

“We’re doing fine,” Lee said. “All systems green—this is a lovely ship, despite the way she’s been used.

Whatever else Osman was up to, he maintained the ship systems perfectly.”

“Call if you need me,” Ky said. “I’ll be in my cabin.”

She puttered around briefly, stripping the bed and sending the linens through the ’fresher cycle, reluctant

to face what was coming. When she realized that, she sat down at her desk and activated the secured

files.

In the afternoon sky, the sound of the approaching aircraft rose above the sea breeze, a steady

drone… but this time she was awake, and viewed the audiovisual data as an outsider, not a participant.

Her father’s emotions did not flood her awareness; she recognized the silhouettes of the two craft before

the implant matched them.

Still, the violence of the explosions was shocking. Her breath came fast. Deliberately, Ky slowed the

replay, returning again and again to the same image: were they aircraft with missiles or bombs, or were

they the weapons? That hardware could be either. They had come in low and fast; the implant did not

record—her father had not thought to look for—the telltale evidence that might tell her which they were.

Ky put a tagger on the best of the early images and told the implant to find any similar images after the

explosions, but apparently her father had not looked for the aircraft again, nor had he tapped into the

airfield’s scan data after that first moment.

Back to the beginning. The implant didn’t tell her what her father was thinking that afternoon, but it held

his planned itinerary—a flight from Corleigh back to the mainland—and his planned schedule—a meeting

with senior management at Vatta headquarters, the agenda including the quarterly financial reports, dinner

with his brother and his brother’s wife, the next two days a series of meetings with the Slotter Key Tik

Growers’ Association, the Slotter Key Agricultural Commission, the Slotter Key Shipping Advisory

Commission. An address to the graduating class of Nandinia School of Business—Ky ignored the link to

the text. All routine: he normally spent at least six days out of ten on the mainland; her mother preferred

Corleigh’s gentler climate except during the main social season.

His flight plan had been properly filed well in advance; anyone could have known when he would be at

the little private airfield, and yet no explosion occurred there.

She noted that oddity and went back to the visual record itself.

The local offices exploded; debris rained from the sky. Another explosion; the visual output darkened.

Along the margins, a row of red numbers appeared, giving her father’s vital signs. She tried to steady her

breathing—was this when he died?

But no. The visual record returned, as someone pulled debris off him. She recognized the faces: old

George, their pilot Gaspard, someone she had seen around the office…Marin Sanlin, the implant told

her. Her father looked toward the house, now a tower of flame and smoke…

Even seeing it, she could not quite believe it. Surely the comfortable sprawling house with its tall windows

to catch the sea breeze, its cool tile floors, had not really gone so fast, so completely. Some walls still

stood, as fire raged inside, consuming everything from her past…the long, polished dining room table, the

library with its shelves of data cubes and old books, the paintings, the family rooms…

The pool, its surface crusted with debris, shards of wood and ash, and then the horror of her mother’s

face…

Ky terminated the playback, squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them again to the bland blank screen of

the desk display. Her mother. Beautiful, intelligent, graceful, infuriating to a daughter who had never felt

as beautiful, as intelligent, as graceful…she had been annoyed so often, rebellious so often, resistant so

often to her mother’s advice, and now…now she could never tell her mother how much she admired and

loved the woman who had given her birth.

Ky pushed away from the desk. It was real; it had really happened; her mother was really dead…no

mistaking that…and she would have to find a way to cope, but not right this moment.

Instead, she headed for the ship’s gym. Osman had not run a slack ship, and Fair Kaleen had a superb

facility for keeping a crew of pirates battle-ready, from the usual run of exercise machines to an onboard

firing range. She would work some of this off and counter the effect of all those premium-grade rations at

the same time.

Gordon Martin was there before her. She paused a moment, watching him do a gymnastics sequence,

rolls and flips. He came upright facing the hatch and nodded to her. “ ’Morning, Captain.”

“Do you feel like sparring with me?” Ky asked.

His brows raised. “Of course, Captain, but—you seem upset.”

She didn’t want to explain; she just wanted to hit something. Somebody. “Exercise will help,” she said.

“You need to stretch first,” he said. Ky nodded, and went through preliminary stretches as fast as she

thought she could get away with. Then they squared off on the gymnastics mats. Ky forced herself to

start slowly, with the basics; Gordon matched her. They had trained in the same system and they had

sparred enough before to have a feel for each other’s styles. She was sweaty and sore when they quit,

but she felt somewhat better for it.

_______

Going back to the implant’s replay was hard. She wanted to skip ahead, but she knew she must not. Her

mother’s face—distorted by bruises, smeared with wet ash, all too obviously dead—was relieved only

by the life signs readouts along the edge of the visual field. Her father had looked at her mother a long

time before someone took her body away, as his own condition worsened. Blood pressure dropping,

core temperature, arterial oxygen…the implant cut functions not in use, finally managing only the

recording she now watched and heard. She saw her aunt Grace through her father’s eyes, saw the fierce

old woman not as the dotty, fussy prima donna she’d always seemed. Aunt Grace, in that hour, could

have been any battlefield commander in a crisis. Any good one.

The implant shut down while her father was being evacuated, apparently because his condition had

deteriorated to the point that the implant could no longer get enough energy to record. There was another

Urgent file, of a family meeting—Ky could not tell where or when—and then the implant shut down

again.

Stella’d said that her father had told Aunt Grace to take his implant. Had Grace accessed these files,

marked them for urgent retrieval? Or had her father done that? She found it easier to ponder that than to

think about the images she’d seen.

She spent the next hour exploring the implant’s capacity, though a short period wasn’t enough to access

all the organization in detail. A command-level implant held far more, had many more functions, than the

one she’d used before she entered the Academy.

The new ansible function she’d acquired in external link contact with Rafe was enclosed in its own kernel

and now carried the ISC logo. She would have to ask Rafe about that, but not at the moment.

Ship-related functions were actually much broader than she’d realized; she could even override any of

her crew at the controls, if she wanted. Though Fair Kaleen had not been updated for decades, longer

than she’d been alive, the old Vatta command datasets deep in the ship’s AI had served Osman well and

he had never bothered to delete them. Her implant had already interacted with the AI to bring it up to

current Vatta standards. In the financial hierarchy, she had access to all her father’s knowledge as of the

time of the attack, everything from who held which insurance policies on what to the interstellar potential

of the tik trade. Much of that was beyond her; she’d never cared much about the investment end. She’d

study it later, or find someone who already understood it. Stella, maybe.

“Captain…do you want something to eat?” That was Toby, tapping gently on her door.

“Yes, thank you.” She stood up stiffly, feeling the exercise she’d done that morning. She should eat. She

should sleep. The implant informed her that she’d been working six hours—six hours? What with the

earlier session, exercise, and the second session, she’d skipped one meal already.

Fair Kaleen’s mess had seating for twenty. Ky’s crew clustered at one end of the long table. The last

meal of first shift was the first meal for third shift, so all but Mitt, on bridge watch, were there. Ky sat

between Alene and Lee.

“I’ve got the inventory for all the aired-up compartments done,” Gordon said. “I know what the ship’s

AI says are in the unaired compartments, but I don’t know if it’s right.”

“Do we have anything clearly identifiable as legally owned?” Ky asked.

“Most of it’s unmarked or in ordinary shipping containers, but without bills of lading. Osman didn’t keep

a record of the ships he stole from—at least not one I’ve found yet.”

Her father’s implant had a section on laws relating to privateering. The privateer took possession of an

enemy ship and its contents, and profited by selling off cargo. Open containers were presumed to belong

to the ship that carried them, and went to the privateer without question, but sealed containers with bills

of lading were supposed to be sequestered and put in the control of a court-appointed assessor at the

next port. If they proved to be genuine shipments, then they were shipped on to the original consignee,

but with a reward judgment payable to the privateer for “stolen goods recovery.” Sealed containers

without proper bills of lading could be tricky. Technically they should go through adjudication, but

privateers opened sealed but unlabeled containers to convert them to private use.

She accessed the ship’s AI and downloaded the current inventory. Even richer than she’d thought at first.

But what could she do with it? Wealth could not bring the dead to life. Even if she rebuilt the house on

Corleigh, her father and mother would not live in it…her uncle would never sit at the head of the table in

the Vatta Enterprises boardroom.

She wanted to go back, back before all this, back home, back to the room she knew so well—had

known so well—back to a place where every step she took, every voice she heard, was familiar.

And that would never happen.

She forced herself back to the present. “Was Osman’s version of the inventory accurate, when you

checked it as far as you could?”

“Yes. I was surprised, but I suppose he never expected anyone would have access to this ship’s data.”

“Then I’m going to assume whatever’s in the unaired compartments is the same as the list. It’s not as if

we needed all that.” Which was silly, she knew as she said it. They needed much more if she was going

to restore just the physical side of Vatta, let alone strike back at their attackers.

After the meal, she settled into her cabin to consider what next. A year ago—was it really that

long?—she had been a happy, ambitious fourth-year cadet in the Slotter Key Spaceforce Academy,

looking forward to a career as a Spaceforce officer and a relationship with her fellow cadet Hal. Since

then she had been kicked out of the Academy and dumped by the man she loved. Her subsequent career

as a trader in the family business—which she had expected to be boring—had been marked by war,

mutiny, attempted assassinations, and finally the capture—from a rogue Vatta—of this very ship. Her

family and its thriving interstellar business had been almost destroyed. Her own government had sent her

a clandestine letter of marque, authorizing her to act as a privateer on its behalf, shortly before refusing to

defend or support her family when some enemy attacked. Now she was supposed to save what was left

of the family and business, with no allies and too few assets.

Too many changes too fast. She focused her attention on the ship again, checking system by system via

her cranial implant. All systems nominal, and her senses told her everything felt, smelled, sounded normal

as well. She had no excuse to avoid the larger issues. What was she going to do next? Where would the

next attack come from?

Not while they were in FTL flight, at least. She activated the sleep cycle enabler for the second time, and

woke eight hours later, this time clearheaded enough to realize that the first sleep hadn’t been enough.

Now she felt solid out to the edges again. Ready to work. She considered another workout in the gym,

but decided instead to work on what she least wanted to do, methodically go through Osman’s cargo list

and assign her best guess at the value, item by item. Some of it was easier than she expected, thanks to

her father’s implant. Some was nearly impossible—who could say what someone would pay for

prohibited technology most people didn’t know existed?

Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she had been up for two hours without eating. In the galley, she

ignored the enticing Premium Gold Breakfast Pak—she felt bloated with all the good food they’d been

enjoying—and settled for a protein bar and mug of juice. Someone had left a sticky mug and bowl in the

sink; she rinsed it automatically as she considered an array of options. She had two ships now: Gary

Tobai, old and slow, and this one, larger, faster, and—most usefully—very well armed. The nucleus of a

fleet, albeit a very small fleet. If she was going to command a fleet, she needed a staff. Before that, she

needed a full crew of capable personnel on each ship…and before that, she needed to know how much

money she had to hire the capable personnel and supply the ships…

“’Morning, Captain.” Gordon Martin reached past her for a bowl and poured a modest serving of dry

flakes into it. He looked, as always, like the veteran soldier he had been before he joined her crew. “I’ve

finished the security survey; Osman’s bad boys didn’t have time to put in many traps. All disarmed.”

“That’s good,” Ky said.

“Do you object to my doing some practice on the firing range today?” he asked. “I’ve checked the

reinforcement of the target frames; it’s plenty safe for what I’m using.”

“That’s fine,” she said. She should get in some practice time, too. “Martin, I wanted to talk to you about

command structure, now that I have two ships—”

“Think you can keep this one?” he asked, pouring milk onto his flakes.

“I’m going to keep this one,” Ky said. “It’s a Vatta ship. I’m restoring it to its proper ownership.”

“Well, then. You’re talking tables of organization?”

One did not say I guess so to older veterans, which was Martin’s identity no matter what the papers

said. “Yes,” Ky said instead. “Simple, but something that can scale up.”

“Based on Vatta tradition, or…” His voice trailed off; he eyed her as he munched on the flakes.

Ky shook her head. “Until we take care of whoever’s been attacking Vattas, the old protocols aren’t any

good. Sure, we need our tradeships back at work hauling cargo and making money, but we can’t count

on that until we aren’t being blown up, shot at, and all the rest. I’m thinking small fleet. I have two ships

now. I’m reasonably sure that not all Vatta ships have been destroyed; as we find them, we can bring

them into the plan.”

“We. Meaning you?”

“We meaning me, my cousin Stella, and you, Martin. And the rest of the crews.”

“But with you in command.” No doubt in his voice at all.

“Yes,” Ky said. “I am the only Vatta I know of with the right training.”

“Yeah. I see that…” He ate two more spoonfuls, then put the spoon down. “See here, Captain, you have

to understand: my background is supply and security. The security duties grew out of supply and

inventory control. I’ve been in a ship in combat, in the Slotter Key System, but I don’t know as much as

you need about weapons and tactical things.”

“What about that organization stuff?” Ky asked.

Another spoonful of flakes as he looked thoughtful. Then he nodded again. “I do understand a lot of that.

If you’re asking me.”

“Martin, the thing that’s bothered me since I first took command of Gary Tobai, back when she was the

Glennys Jones, is the lack of a clear chain of command on civilian traders. Sure, the captain’s the boss,

but who’s next? On the smaller ships, it’s a muddle. Muddles in war get people killed.”

“So what is it you want me to do?”

“Take over training new crew into capable combat-ready crews. Find me some weapons specialists—if

you don’t know the weaponry, I’ll bet you know personnel and can spot the good ones. Help me get this

ship organized and ready.”

He was nodding along with her words. “Yes, ma’am, I can certainly do that. And I can spend this transit

with my head in a cube reader learning the manuals on this ship’s weapons, too. I just never had the

chance before.”

“I know I need a second in command, an exec. I wondered if you—”

He was shaking his head now. “No, ma’am. I’m not the right person for that. I might’ve made a good

senior NCO if I’d kept my nose clean, might even have made a good sergeant major, but I’m a

hands-on, feet-in-the-dirt person. The air gets too thin for me in officer country.”

“For now, anyway,” Ky said. “You might surprise yourself later. So—what do you think of the other

personnel aboard?”

“Your pilot’s good,” he said. “He should shape up with a bit more training—I don’t suppose you’d tell

them all to get in the gym every day for some physical training?”

Elizabeth Moon - Vattas 3 - Engaging The Enemy

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