Engaging the Enemy (20 page)

“Mellie, this is Captain Vatta; Captain Vatta, Melanda Torrin.”

“Captain Vatta, what a pleasure.” The woman she'd seen onscreen now looked older, less exuberant. Black suit cut to show her figure, white blouse with a frill of lace at the throat, gold earrings, a thick mop of red-brown hair, shoulder length. And startling blue eyes.

“The pleasure is mine,” Ky said.

“Our laws require that we meet new account owners in person, and confirm identity. That is hard to do these days, with multiple ansible failures, but I believe we have Vatta family DNA samples on file. You would not object to a comparison?”

“Er…no.” She had not anticipated this. “But doesn't that take a long time?”

“For a reasonably close family resemblance, no. Let's see. Two years ago, a Captain Vatta came through: Josephine Iola Grace. Would you know how closely she might be related?”

“If she listed her father as Stavros, she's—she was—my first cousin. Her father and mine were brothers. She—they're—all dead.”

“I'm surprised to hear that. She was quite young,” the woman said.

“Her ship was blown up,” Ky said.

“You said all dead…do you mean your father?”

“Yes. Father, mother, brothers…and my uncle Stavros and much of his family. You had not heard?”

“I had not, no. I'm sorry, Captain Vatta. I did not mean to offend.”

“You didn't offend,” Ky said. “You didn't know.”

“Do you have no one, then?”

“Some survived,” Ky said. “Jo's sister Stella. Her mother, Stavros' wife, Helen. I don't know about her children.” She had never met Jo's children; they'd been born while she was in boarding school or the Academy.

“I shall hope they are safe,” the woman said.

“I, also,” Ky said. “But I don't know…the Slotter Key ansible is down.”

Grace looked out her window before dawn. She had no need to stand in front of it; she used the excellent optics she'd installed and scanned everything in view on that side of the house, methodically sweeping back and forth, working her way out from the crazy-paved walk below, past the strip of grass, the roses trained against the wall, the wall itself, keying to the angle she'd arranged to see its far side, where a striped cat crouched, tail twitching, about to leap on a rabbit nibbling berries a few yards along. Beyond, a stretch of rougher grass to the perimeter fence. Another rabbit, a pair of them, frisking. Courting. Mating. Well, they were rabbits. She wished the cat luck. Beyond the perimeter fence, the land rose in gentle waves to the hills and the road. A bulge of hill cut off any view down-valley to the east; the road curved around it.

Right about now…yes…the first traffic of the day, a truck whose engine had made the same squawk and growl when its driver shifted for the downgrade every morning since they'd come. It was too early for birds to show her if anyone lay hidden in the rock outcrop, now a dark blur on slightly lighter dark. Movement caught her eye. She scanned the top of the outcrop…small, alert but uninterested in the hollow below, ears cocked to something uphill. It stood and trailed its bushy tail over the rocks as it slid down on the riverside. Fox. What had alerted it?

The gentle
tonk-tonk-tonk
of sheepbells came to her ears, and now she saw, pouring off the road in a slow torrent, a flock of sheep. Two shepherds were with them, and four dogs. Sheep and dogs passed the rock outcrop; one of the dogs leapt up to the top and sniffed, tail wagging wildly, but jumped down and went on when a shepherd called it.

Without moving from her comfortable bed, Grace checked the other sides of the house. Nothing. Ponies up near the house end of the paddock, waiting for the children to run out and feed them. Their girl Caitlyn from the town on her bicycle, leaving a dark trace in the silvery dew as she rode on the footpath instead of the road.

Grace turned off her system and let herself doze as light brightened in the room. She had been up until almost four, interfering with the sleep of the wicked, making them nervous enough to call each other on what they believed were secure lines, and she knew were not. She had recordings; she had made copies; she had transmitted copies to various locations. She needed to think about what they'd said, make sense of it, make plans…but she was tired, and hated the years that had stolen her ability to stay up two nights running.

A cry woke her, completely alert in an instant. She was halfway across the room, bare feet slapping on the floor, weapon in hand, when she thought to grab the security system's master control and plug in her implant.

The paddock. One pony down, legs thrashing. Justin, Jo's elder child, sprawled in the grass. Helen running. The other pony standing stiff, head thrown up, ears pricked, with Shar, the younger child, clinging to its mane.

They weren't supposed to ride until after breakfast. It
was
after breakfast; she'd overslept and Helen hadn't woken her. She threw the scans to full power. There. A glint in the briars. No time to get downstairs, outside—

She was across the second-story bridge to the far side of the house, out on the balcony, peering through the exuberant flowering vine and its equally exuberant bees, when the assassin stood up to get a better shot at the other pony or its rider. Or at Helen, who was ignoring the obvious danger and running straight for the fallen child. Ignoring the bees, ignoring Helen's yells and the second pony's sudden bolt, Grace focused her whole attention on drilling a hole through the assassin.

He fell. Grace scanned the area again for any other threat. No. A lone assassin? Stupid of them, and she wasn't sure she believed it. Movement in a neighboring field caught her eye. A rabbit, streaking away from where it had been quietly nibbling grass. Her gaze tracked the streak back, back, to another tangle of briars. There—her vision aided by highly illicit processors in her implant—she detected heat radiation. And there, aided again by other highly illicit bioelectronics, she directed her next shot.

Helen had reached Justin, thrown herself over him as a protective blanket. For all the good that would do, Grace thought.
Stay down, Helen,
she wanted to yell. The second pony had slowed from its wild bolt; the child still hugged its neck, unhurt, mouth a round O, eyes wide. The pony flicked its ears back and forth, then suddenly lowered its head to snatch grass; the child slithered off, unbalanced by that move. Unhurt, apparently; Shar threw a leg over the pony's neck and tugged at its mane, trying the trick they'd taught the pony two weeks before, to raise its head and lift a child rider to its back.

Grace didn't want to leave the window, where she had the best view…but she had to. Downstairs, she heard voices, exclamations, the scurry of feet. She was still wearing her night clothes, the close-fitting black garment with pad-protected elbows and knees in which she'd climbed out of her own window at midnight and back into it at four in the morning. When she went downstairs, Caitlyn saw her and gasped, fist to her mouth. Grace thought of what Caitlyn was seeing—a slim black figure holding a very nasty-looking weapon. One of
them.

“It's all right, Caitlyn. It's just me—”

“But…but…Miss Grace—”

“Caitlyn, go in the kitchen and stay there.”

“The police—”

“Don't call them. I will or Helen will.”

“The doctor?”

“One of us will call if a doctor's needed. Stay in the kitchen until you're called, can you do that?” A nod from Caitlyn, still paler than she should have been.

Grace moved to the back of the house. The garden, from above, had an obvious plan, but from the ground presented too many obstructions and distractions. She wanted to hurry; she might be needed now. But hurry brought her too predictably to walks and open spaces easy to range. They—if any such were still out there—would expect the hurry, the predictable direct approach through the main aisle in this garden, wide enough for a small tractor and its implements. Grace chose a slower route, but not much slower for someone who had prepared carefully, for whom the straight lines of apparently solid walls and hedges had gaps ready for use by those who knew them. She knew them all.

Now she came to the paddock, where the injured pony still made those unhorselike sounds but more quietly. One leg was gone, ending in a mangled stump still spurting blood. The other legs kicked less vigorously. She should kill the pony humanely, but she had humans to check on.

“Helen,” Grace said, just loud enough above the pony's groans. “How bad is it?”

“Not hurt,” Helen said. “Just stunned. Shar?”

Stunned could kill, as they both knew. “Shar's fine,” Grace said. Down the paddock, Shar was back astride the second pony, kicking hard, but the pony didn't want to approach.

“Are they coming?” Helen asked.

“Not those two,” Grace said. “I'll get Shar.”

“I meant the police,” Helen said.

“Not for a while,” Grace said. “Not until after we call them, so don't.”

“Don't call—?”

“No.” She walked up to the first pony, whose glazing eyes barely turned to see her, squatted down, and aimed carefully at the crossing of the X made by lines from right ear to left eye and left ear to right eye. “Sorry,” she said to the pony, and fired. The pony jerked and then went limp.

“What did you do?” Helen asked.

“Gave it peace,” Grace said. “Get Justin inside, if you can. I'll get Shar.” She walked down the paddock, itchy with tension, an easy target, to the far corner where the second pony was grazing in quick, nervous snatches. Shar, sitting bolt upright on the pony's back, stared at Grace as if she were a stranger. Perhaps the child didn't recognize her. She herself felt more at home than she had in decades, the carefully constructed veneer of slightly batty and prudish old lady falling away to reveal the same familiar interior Grace, a Grace perfectly at home in black climbing suit with a weapon in hand.

“Easy now, Buttercup,” she said to the pony. And to the child, “Shar, your mother wants you. It's time to go in.”

“He won't
go,
” Shar said. She looked so much like Jo at that age that Grace almost choked.

“He's scared,” Grace said. “You sound a little scared, too.”

“What happened to Rosy?” Shar asked. “Did you shoot Rosy?”

“Rosy broke a leg. It was a bad break. It couldn't be fixed. Come down, now.” She started to reach for Shar, but the pony sidestepped and she had only one hand, the other being still occupied with her weapon. Shar had tilted toward her, and now slid too far off balance, falling to the ground just as something slammed into Grace's left arm, whirling her around as if in a dance. She fell, furious with herself, knowing instantly what it was and that there had been more than two. The pony bolted again, the quick thuds of its flight scarcely faster than the rhythm of her heart.

She was on the ground. Shar, facedown and head-up, stared at her. “Stay down,” she said to Shar. “Stay flat—put your head right down and be quiet and hold still no matter what.” Waves of pain washed over her, nausea racked her. She turned her head and saw, without surprise, that her arm was lying folded up all wrong, in a widening pool of blood. “Damn,” she muttered.

“Bad word,” Shar said. “Gramma says…”

“Quiet,” Grace said. “You be the baby possum, like in the story.” She had to do something about the bleeding or she would be dead, like the daddy possum in the story. But that would mean letting go of her weapon, something she was sure the assassin would like to see.

She heard a crackling in the brambles beyond the paddock fence, footsteps, and willed herself to stay conscious until she could shoot the scumsucker in the gut…there was the dark shape, in a suit similar to her own, but with a hood and mask. She struggled to bring her weapon to bear…and then the figure staggered, fell facedown, and behind it was someone she recognized too slowly as MacRobert, bloody fish-gutting knife in hand.

“You—” she said.

“You're having an interesting morning,” he said. He moved up beside her, grabbed her left arm, and shoved what felt like a spear into the bone. She knew it was his thumb on the artery, but that's not what it felt like.

“I got two of them,” she said, and wondered why she was justifying herself to him.

“Good,” he said. “Because I don't think I could sneak up on any more that way. May I take your weapon if I need it?”

“Go ahead,” she said, relaxing her grip.

“I heard their shots, but no answering fire,” he said. “Took me a while to make it from the river—”

“Glad you did,” Grace said. Her vision was going; she was peering down a dark tunnel at a small bright image.

“Stay with me now,” he said. She felt his hand at her mouth, a tiny hard something on her tongue that tasted bitter. “Bite that.”

She bit. She had tasted it before, and military-grade stimtabs hadn't changed that much. The tunnel shortened, then disappeared; she saw very clearly, with little bright halos around everything.

“You may lose this arm.”

“I thought so,” Grace said.

“Aunt Grace…” That in a near-whisper, from Shar.

“This is a friend, Shar,” Grace said. Or maybe not, but she could not at the moment cope with the possibility that he was one of them.

“Can I get up?”

“Not yet,” MacRobert answered for her. “Just lie quiet, and let me help your aunt Grace.”

He had placed a tourniquet now, doing it one-handed with a deftness that indicated he'd done it before. Grace thought of offering to replace his thumb with her right hand for arterial pressure, then—as another wave of nausea hit her—decided to just lie there and let him work.

The stimtab and her own biochemistry finally reached equilibrium about the time he had the tourniquet tightened and started to straighten her arm out. She rolled her head to see.