"Moon, Elizabeth - Vatta 2 - Marque And Reprisal V5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

By the time the island’s town-based emergency evacuation system arrived, one of the survivors had already died. Gerard struggled to talk to the officials who arrived with the rescue squad. His ears still rang; he could barely stand, and they were asking him why the attack came, as if he knew. As if it were his fault. Why didn’t the fire/rescue service respond? Why were they housed in the office building anyway? Why had they put the reserve fuel storage underneath? Why, why, why?
His implant offered no answers, either. Who had done this? How had they done it? More aircraft arrived, full of law enforcement investigators, some he knew and some he’d never seen before. Someone brought a scorched chair, blown from the office, for him to sit in. Aircraft departed, taking away his injured employees. The afternoon passed; the hill’s shadow stretched across the airfield. Someone looked him over, advised hospitalization; he refused. His mind felt numb, smoke-blurred, but he could not leave, not yet.
Then the parrot-squawk of a voice he knew penetrated the blur. “Get him out of here, you idiots. He’s a target.” The voice came nearer. “Gerry—Gerry look at me. Focus.”
She looked no less dotty than she had looked for the past twenty—thirty—years, her graying hair unruly in the late-afternoon breeze, her print silk dress, her strings of beads and jangling bracelets, but her eyes were bright.
“Gracie,” he mumbled.
“You look horrible,” she said. “Gerry, get up.”
“I don’t know if I—” But he was on his feet, supported again by someone’s shoulder under his arm, following the quick clatter of Gracie’s incongruous high heels across the tarmac. Pain stabbed his side with every step. “I can’t leave,” he said to her back. “Myris—San—the others—”
“They’re dead,” she said over her shoulder. “You’re alive. You need to stay that way. We need you, Gerry.”
A cold chill ran down his spine that had nothing to do with his injuries. “Stavros?”
“Later.” And to his helpers: “Get him in, get that oxygen hooked up.”
He felt himself heaved up into the plane; pain so great he almost passed out turned his whole left side to white heat. He panted in his seat, let his eyes sag shut as he felt the cool flow of oxygen under his nose.
“Breathe,” he heard Gracie say. “And keep breathing, damn it.” He felt the craft vibrate under him, engines starting, the bumping of taxiing for takeoff sending knifelike flashes of pain through his side, his shoulder, and then the lurch as they took off.
“Where?” he asked, that one word exhausting him.
“Someplace safe, I hope,” Gracie said. He heard her sigh, a little grunt as she shifted in her own seat. “If there is such a place. We thought the headquarters bunker level . . .”
“Not?” he asked.
“Just lie still, Gerry. Nothing to do now but live till we land.”
“Don’t let them . . . ,” he managed. Then some salty fluid filled his mouth; he choked, swallowed, and nearly heaved it up.
“Damn,” Gracie said again, more quietly. He felt the oxygen mask pulled aside, and something soft wiped the corner of his mouth.
“Get the implant,” he said. His mind cleared briefly. Oxygen would do that. His implant, Stavros’ implant. Whoever had done this must not get the master database. “Gracie . . . take implant. Command database.”
“I know, dear,” she said. Dear? Gracie had called him dear? The same Grace who had once told him, when they were both much younger, that he would be on his deathbed before she would praise him?
“’M hurt,” he said, loathing the weakness and confusion in his voice.
“You are,” Gracie said. “We’ll try to get a doctor to you, once we’re safe. Not a hospital, so don’t exhaust yourself explaining.” She sighed again. “Gerry, Stavros is dead. Headquarters was hit; the bunkers didn’t hold. Someone knew enough about them.” He heard a high-pitched noise, something like metal on metal. “Someone wants to destroy Vatta, Gerry. You have to hang on.”
No doubt in her voice. He could do what she said, until she doubted. He breathed in spite of the pain, in spite of the weakness that crept up from his legs, the dark cloud that tried to cover him.
Questions remained. Who? Why? How?

Gracie Lane Vatta forced herself to ignore the medical team working on Gerard, forced herself to concentrate instead on the attack, on the methods and the meanings. Unmanned drones; the airfield’s security system had produced identifiable visual and internal data scans. Military weapons, and not a type used by Slotter Key’s own planetary forces, or so they insisted. Satellite scans had revealed the origin: Bone Island, an uninhabited, barren, rocky volcanic spur 430 kilometers east of Corleigh. Someone was—or had been—on Bone Island long enough to launch the drones. One of her contacts in the government was even now going back through scans from the previous days, to see when and how they had arrived. And—though she doubted this was possible—to find out who they were.
At corporate headquarters, the attack had been different, but equally devastating. Up from the utility tunnels below the city . . . boreholes to the foundations of Vatta headquarters, boreholes around the outside of the bunkers, bunkers reinforced to withstand earthquake, storm, even attack from atop and collapse of the building atop them.
But not explosives applied directly to the bunkers, to the sides, to the floors. It would have taken, at shortest estimate, weeks to bore those holes, place those charges.
Until this, she’d thought the worst threats to Vatta were the growing menace of pirates on the tradeways and possibly an assassination attempt against Gerard’s daughter Ky in retaliation for her actions in the Sabine conflict. She had just completed a report on piracy, which she’d planned to present to Gerard and Stavros sometime in the coming week. She had, weeks ago, alerted all senior staff to the increased possibility of assassination attempts. An attack of this magnitude had not even occurred to her, and she was furious with herself for not seeing it coming.
The aircraft they were in, escorted by Slotter Key military aircraft that did not make her feel as safe as she would wish, flew not to the capital but to her private residence near Corleigh Town. She had balanced the greater protection the government already provided to the capital with the vulnerability of several hours over open water . . . with the ease of tracking aircraft from space . . . with Gerard’s condition.
Who had done this? Why? And why do it this way, an open declaration of war not only against Vatta, but also against Slotter Key? What was the message here? Would there be more attacks, and when, and where?
Her implant, customized for her work, laid out for her the information so far obtained, in the usual matrix. What resources were implied by the choice of weapons, the choice of launch site. What conditions were necessary for the attack to succeed, what were the pinch points in the execution where it might have been frustrated. Which known enemies of Vatta or Slotter Key had such resources.
Working through the usual routine of analysis held off, for the time being, the shock she knew was hovering just overhead. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. These things didn’t happen in real life, to ordinary people. She knew better. She had seen war before; she knew its terrible thirst for death, for the destruction of beauty.
By the time the plane landed, she knew this attack could not have occurred without help from somewhere in the Slotter Key government. Her anger spread from herself and the attackers to that as-yet-unnamed traitor. Someone had kept Spaceforce from reporting a shuttle dropping from a ship in orbit, or someone had deep-sixed the report. Someone had kept the satellite surveillance from reporting that installation on Bone Island. Someone—someone here, within her reach—had connived at the attack, had wanted to destroy her family, her life.
Gracie Lane Vatta smiled to herself, a smile that old enemies, now long dead, would have remembered. The enemy had won the initiative. The enemy had caused great damage. No doubt the enemy was dancing or laughing or in some other way enjoying the triumph. But Gracie Lane Vatta would wipe that smile off the enemy’s face, stop that dance in its tracks, stuff the laugh back down the enemy’s throat. She could not do it all by herself, and her resources at present were limited. But at least the traitor or traitors on Slotter Key . . . those she could reach and those she would take care of, whatever else happened.


CHAPTER
TWO
The voice in Gammis Turek’s earbug said what he expected to hear: “—unexpected attack on our citizens. Outrageous. Can’t be tolerated—”
But they would tolerate it. They would do nothing effective, while pouring out torrents of words, because they knew what he knew, that they could do nothing. Their fancy Spaceforce, so shiny and proud, could do nothing because they had no way to operate outside their own system. Their privateers, so hated and feared, could do nothing because they had no command structure. Slotter Key had dealt with the rest of the sector in its own way: arrogantly. A combination of cheeseparing caution—using privateers for outsystem operations cost less than funding a real space navy—and exuberant flouting of the rules, such as they were, that governed such uses. No other planetary system would come to their aid just because one of their richest corporations had suffered a terrorist attack.
Time for turnabout. Time for reversals. Time for Slotter Key to realize that, just like Vatta Transport, it didn’t have any recourse. It might be only a side issue in a greater war, but it was a side issue that gave considerable satisfaction to some of its allies. He didn’t doubt that in five or six years, the Slotter Key Spaceforce could be a force to reckon with, but it wasn’t now, and now was all that mattered.
“You listen to me,” he growled at the voice; it stopped in midword. “You will do nothing. The time has changed, and Vatta serves us well as a warning to others. Stay away from them. Give them nothing. Anyone near Vatta will fall in the same catastrophe.”
“But they’re our—”
“They’ve supported you and your party, of course we know that. They think you owe them something. Well, it won’t be the first promise you’ve ever broken.” Gammis had a list, in case it should become useful.
“But—”
“If you move against us,” Gammis said, “we will destroy not just Vatta, but Slotter Key, as well. We have the ships. We have the weapons. Ask your Spaceforce—go ahead. They’ll tell you. We have many allies who would enjoy seeing your presidential palace a smoking hole just like Vatta headquarters, who would be delighted if your people died of plagues or starvation.” He paused; the jittering voice in his ear said nothing. He let his voice soften. “And there is, of course, something positive to be gained by freeing yourself of Vatta’s trade domination. If Vatta takes the fall, trade will not be interdicted . . . it’s just that someone else will profit from their tik plantations . . .”
Silence continued. Gammis counted seconds. They would take the bait, but how long would they think about it?
“Vatta,” the voice said, this time calmly, “has done nothing to deserve this. If you had attacked privateers—”
“Hitting the innocent is a more effective warning,” Gammis said. Not that Vatta was entirely innocent. They had stupidly supported InterStellar Communications all these years; they had reported suspicious ships and persons . . . and besides, it was one of their own who betrayed them, who urged that they be made an example. In the longer plan, in the greater scheme of things, that one would surely fall since he could not be trusted, but in the meantime he was useful, worth doing a favor for. “You will do nothing,” Gammis said again. “If you want your government to stand.”