Элизабет Мун - Cold Welcome

She was deep in the intricacies of the proposed biennial budget request when her implant pinged. “Yes?”

“MacRobert,” he said. “The shuttle’s had a problem.”

Ice ran down her spine. “It’s… gone?” Always expect the worst, then anything else would be good news; she’d learned that early.

“No. Emergency landing, a long way out in the Oklandan. They were trying to make the Pingat, but didn’t—”

“Sabotage?”

“Almost certainly, and internal at that. I’ve opened a case; I need your sign-off.”

“You have it.” She punched a sequence of buttons on her desktop and pressed her thumb to the reader. MacRobert was the one person in the Defense Department she trusted absolutely, as he trusted her. Two old spooks, she thought as her door opened; she touched her tongue to the correct molar, signaling MacRobert to wait a moment. Olwen, her personal assistant, looked in, her face pale.

“Rector, they’ve just reported a problem of some kind—a course change.”

“Malfunction?”

“Yes, Sera, but no details. They’re planning to land somewhere in the Pingat chain. I’ve notified Meteorology and the satellites, but… but the transponder went off.”

A line of curses crackled through Grace’s mind; she used none of them. “We’ll have to change the schedule,” she said, her voice steady. “I’ll need the President’s staff first, then Port’s militia, Spaceforce Academy, finally Vatta headquarters. Set up the calls, please.”

“Does this mean someone attacked us? Is it a war?” Olwen’s eyes were wide.

“No, it’s not war. I expect the shuttle had engine trouble,” Grace said. The war rumor had started as soon as Ky’s flagship showed up in the system. “Get me that line to the President’s staff, please.” Olwen nodded and shut the door. Grace’s heart was racing. She wanted to charge out of her office, do something, but she must not. One thing at a time. She spoke to MacRobert. “I’m shutting down the airfield reception here; ping me when you know anything definite. I’ll be back with you when I can.”

“Got it,” he said, and the connection blanked.

The President’s staff received the news that the welcoming ceremonies would be delayed due to a shuttle problem with their usual mix of whiny complaint (“but it was arranged…”) and demands for information she didn’t have (“Well, when will the shuttle arrive, then?”). She declined to talk to the President on the grounds of other urgent duties, and made the next call to the special events coordinator already waiting at the shuttle landing field near the city.

“I heard something,” he said. “But is there no ETA?”

“Not yet,” Grace said. “They’re not landing here in any case, so the ceremony should be postponed indefinitely.”

Next, Spaceforce Academy. She did not want to imagine losing the Commandant, who had been such a stalwart ally in the difficult time after the attack on Vatta, who had lent her MacRobert as a liaison and seen, himself, to the treasonous President. Since she had become Rector, they had become almost friends—as much as the Commandant admitted having friends. She knew this attack might have been aimed at him as much as at Ky or Vatta.

His second in command, whose appointment they had both approved, answered the call at once. “You’ve heard,” Iskin Kvannis said.

“I’ve heard they had trouble and went down. Do you have the location yet?”

“They didn’t reach the Pingat airfield and they were below its sensor net. Ditched, is what we assume. No contact so far, but the survival gear could have been sabotaged as well as the shuttle.”

Kvannis was younger, blunter, than the Commandant; Grace appreciated the bluntness. “Survivable?” she asked.

“Depends,” he said. “It should have separated the passenger module, free-fallen to eighty-five hundred meters with a streamer chute, then come down more slowly with parachutes. I don’t know if you saw the demonstration video—”

“Yes, I did, before we approved the modification of more shuttles.”

“Well, this one should have had the full load of survival equipment: survival suits, rafts, supplies including advanced communications gear. But given the logical supposition that the shuttle drive and/or controls were sabotaged, so might the supplies have been. No way to know until we find… whatever we find. I’ve spoken to the safety officer here in Port Major; he says someone ticked the right boxes that everything had been inspected, but there would not have been another full inspection at the Station. Both survival suits and the rafts are fitted with transponders; we’ll hope Admiral Vatta used the one we customized for her.”

“Why didn’t she bring her own?”

“It didn’t have our transponder codes loaded. Her security people didn’t want our codes in her suit, and we wanted her to carry our codes in case of any mishap. Of course, she might have brought her own anyway, but her people approved the specs for ours and gave us her measurements.”

“Location codes. So you should be able to locate them?”

“If the suits weren’t compromised. Rector, the fact that we’ve had no contact—and it’s now over two hours since the transponder went off—we must assume that either the crash was fatal, or the communications capability of any rafts and suits was compromised, either by the crash—which would likely mean it was fatal—or by sabotage.”

Grace’s skullphone pinged before she had a chance to say what she thought about not being informed for over two hours. “Just a moment,” she said to Kvannis. “I’m getting info. Stay online.”

“Rector Vatta, this is Captain Pordre, Admiral Vatta’s flag captain. Are you aware—?”

“That the shuttle carrying Ky has gone down? Yes, Captain. Do you have new data?”

“We put a shuttle down as soon as hers made a radical course change and descent from the flight plan we’d been given. Our crew had eyes on it and we had contact with the admiral shortly before it descended into a heavy cloudbank, then we lost it. Our shuttle then circled just above that cloud layer; I wouldn’t let them go lower, since we were starting to have communications breakups as well.”

“You have a location?”

“Not precisely, though closer than you have probably. But Slotter Key’s air defense forces are hassling us now about having dropped a shuttle without a proper flight plan and pre-authorization. We tried to tell them where we think the shuttle went in, but I don’t think they’re listening.”

“I’ll take care of that. Send me all the data you’ve got; I’ll forward it to our Search and Rescue Service—” Grace went back to Kvannis. “I’ve got a location from Admiral Vatta’s flagship; they dropped a shuttle to keep an eye on ours when it went off-plan. Now I need to get AirDefense off their case and give SAR the location data. Talk to you later.”

“Yes, Rector. I’ll leave any new word with your staff.”

As Rector of Defense, Grace had oversight of all planetary defenses, but AirDefense and its emergency Armed Interdiction Unit had, until now, occupied the least of her time. It had shrunk, after the civil war in her youth, and had narrowly escaped elimination as unnecessary and expensive during budget cycles since. Slotter Key’s criminals preferred to use the sea-lanes and the complicated island geography for whatever they were up to. AirDefense had absorbed and expanded the Search and Rescue Service from the old Coastal Patrol, mostly in an effort to stay on the budget at all. Grace called Ilya Ramos, subrector for AirDefense, and asked for the name of the Region VII commander of AIU.

“You’d better talk to Admiral Hicks first,” Ramos said when she told him what had happened.