Command Decision

by Elizabeth Moon

  The underground garage held three trucks, the van, and several smaller vehicles; it had room for more. Sid drove the van off the lift, parked beside the trucks, and sent the lift back to the surface.

  “Come on,” he said to Rafe. “You come with me.”

  Rafe climbed out. “Do I need my stuff?”

  “Might as well. Don’t worry about the rest; someone else will unload it.”

  Rafe grabbed his own duffel and the blue one his present costume had come in, and followed Sid’s directions through two massive doors and down a corridor; Sid stayed behind him, which Rafe understood all too well.

  “In there,” Sid said finally. Rafe opened that door, hoping it was not a cell in which he’d be locked for the next few days. Instead, it was a control center, banks of displays curving around a central space furnished with a round table and four swivel chairs. “Your stuff can go in the corner there,” Sid said. “Have you eaten?”

  “No,” Rafe said.

  “I’ll call the kitchen,” Sid said. “Pick a chair. Your headset’s number two. The op schedule’s on the table—the blue folder.”

  Rafe dropped the duffels in a corner and tried out all four chairs, just to annoy Sid, who didn’t seem to care. He picked one that felt just that bit better than the others—it would matter after hours in it. Sid, meanwhile, had called for “two meals” on what appeared to be an ordinary household intercom. Rafe picked up the blue folder. Now, at last, he’d know how Gary had organized the op. His brows went up almost immediately…it started as what he’d have done on his own, but quickly went beyond that. He didn’t know it all; he hadn’t done this kind of work himself…

  Someone knocked on the door; Rafe didn’t look up, but he heard Sid move across the room, open the door, and mutter something. A tray landed in front of him on the table. “Here,” Sid said. “Eat up. It’s going to be a long ride. We’ve got twenty minutes to eat and whatever.”

  Rafe peeled back an opaque film and found a pile of sliced meat, a fresh salad, and a stack of some kind of cookie. His stomach growled; now he was hungry. Sid ate, too, shoveling in slices of meat as if it were his last meal. “I hope protein doesn’t make you sleepy,” he said finally. “My metabolism loves it.”

  “I’m fine,” Rafe said. He felt completely awake, fully alive, as he always did before something started.

  “Toilet’s in there,” Sid said, jerking his head at the room’s only other door. “No other exit, and I wouldn’t try breaking through the ceiling if I were you.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of it,” Rafe said.

  The displays showed, singly and in combination, the locations of surveillance satellites, the location of aircraft, trains on the railway, and other “items of interest.” Rafe found himself looking at a live infrared image of Aurora Adventure Lodge from a high-altitude drone: advanced software had already presented an outline of every room, with labels so far as were known, and the little blobs that represented heat were easily located. The chimney in the main lodge emitted a bright white spot with wavery pattern of colors around it.

  “Your temps are on the side panel,” Sid said. He wore a headset with two different mike attachments, now both pushed aside. “Can you keep an eye on the HAWATS as well?”

  “HAWATS…” Rafe looked at the other screens.

  “High-altitude weather satellite. Second screen on your right. At its current settings, it’s not a problem even though it’ll be scanning the area in about a half hour, but if someone tweaks its controls, it can change its parameters, and we need to know if that happens. Watch for a blue flashing light on the bottom of that screen, and if you see it, let me know and read off the numbers that will display.”

  “Can do,” Rafe said. “There’s a small heat source leaving cabin eight and heading south…”

  “Probably a guard taking a pee,” Sid said. “Let me see—” He rolled his chair over and looked at Rafe’s screen. “I’ll tell the guys.”

  “It’s hotter than the other single blobs,” Rafe said. “Someone took their jacket off?”

  “Could be.” Sid pulled one of the mikes forward. “Airtrans flight twenty-one, be advised there’s a wild animal detected south of the runway…”

  “Airtrans?” Rafe asked.

  “Just in case,” Sid said. “It’s a charter cargo outfit.”

  Gary came into the command center a few minutes later. “Sid?”

  “Fine, boss. He hasn’t tried anything.”

  “Good. Rafe, if you’ve followed the plan, we’re on page eleven now, line four. Two minutes from drop. No signs of trouble so far. That outlier you spotted—still there?”

  Rafe looked. “There, but cooler…cooler than the other outside heat sources.”

  “Let me see.” Gary moved in close to Rafe’s screen and hit some controls. A plot appeared on the screen instead of the image he had been seeing. A curved line, dropping from left to right, with dots not quite on it, but parallel. “That’s…interesting.”

  “What?” Rafe said.

  “The plot is how fast an unprotected human body will chill to infrared detection at the air temperature on site. The dots tell me that someone is out there without adequate clothing. And whoever it is isn’t moving very fast.” He looked again. “Not at all in the last twenty minutes. That’s not likely to be a guard. Rafe, you don’t have any fancy communications method the rest of us don’t know about, do you? Did you reach one of your family and tell them to get outside?”

  “No,” Rafe said. “I haven’t tried to contact them—not since that first night I told you about, anyway. But do you really think one of them got out?”

  “Barring your intervention, if I were guessing, I’d guess one of them was allowed to escape, to raise false hopes, and they’ll reel him or her in shortly. Let whoever it is get really cold, hypothermic, confused, and then—”

  Rafe repressed a shudder. On his screen, now back to its original form, a string of tiny dots like sugar grains appeared, then disappeared.

  Gary turned away, talking now into his mike. “Confirm drop-one. Confirm drop-two.” To Rafe he said. “Did you get that on IR?”

  “Yup,” Rafe said. “Didn’t last long, though.”

  “Not supposed to. They’ve all got a heat patch on for drop, then it’s off. Our drone picks it up; a satellite would have to be damned lucky.”

  “I’ve got Red One,” Sid said. Gary nodded. Rafe felt his dinner turn to a solid lump in his stomach. He looked along the bank of screens. The weather satellite, HAWATS, had not deviated from its path, and no blue light flashed. But on the next screen, which Sid had told him nothing about, four icons suddenly appeared: two orange triangles and two red squares.

  “Gary,” he said. “What’s that?”

  Gary glanced where Rafe pointed and huffed out his breath. “Well, well, well…someone wants to join the party. That’s someone setting out from the regional emergency response headquarters—someone must’ve called an alarm. Rafe, widen your field…is there a forest fire or something?”

  Rafe moved the controls. Now he could see the heat emissions from those vehicles, but no heat source between them and Aurora. “Nothing I can see. They’re moving a fair clip—they have to be aircraft—”

  “They are. You have identification routines—”

  Rafe found the right controls and the IDs came up—each craft’s registration number first, and then its type.

  “Personnel carriers, two of them, and two ground attack—”

  “Thirty more seconds and we’d have had their com cut off,” Gary said. Sid, Rafe noticed, was muttering into both of his mikes, presumably letting the teams know what was coming. “Well, it’s always something. Let’s see now.” He pulled up a third chair and moved to the console at the end. “Baker tango: four buns in the oven.”

  Now Rafe saw more emissions on his screen, this coming in from the southwest. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak Sid said, “Those’re ours. Look at your other plot—they’re
green squares. Gary—we’ve got their com.”

  “I need Aurora’s ID code,” Gary said. “It’s not the one that’s in the record…Rafe, do you have a clue what a code starting with BTR might be?”

  “Secure ansible access,” Rafe said. “It’s an ISC sequence; it’ll be eighteen digits and letters, changed at least daily by a random generator. What time is it?”

  “Two minutes to midnight,” Gary said. “Why?”

  “It’ll roll over at midnight. Change your time signature and transmit any eighteen digits and letters; if you’re questioned, point out that the system just changed it…”

  “Gotcha.” Gary did that, then began talking into his mike. “Poppyseed, this is Aurora guardhouse…we goofed…yes…perimeter malfunction, just like you said it probably was.”

  Rafe switched channels so he could hear both sides.

  “Ice bear?” asked a masculine voice.

  “No, not an ice bear, just one of my guys who didn’t turn in time, hit the perimeter, and didn’t want to admit it. We owe you fuel allowance; I’m really sorry about this.”

  “It happens,” the same voice said. “Want us to do a flyover just to be sure he was telling the truth this time?”

  “We don’t want to pay for that much fuel, Poppyseed. I’ve got guys out there now patching the wires. You can if you want to, but I’ve logged the time of this call.”

  “Whatever you say. Poppyseed out.”

  The icons turned and headed back east.

  “Cooperative fellows,” Gary said. “Wonder if they’ll stay cooperative or if…yup, someone decided to tag a little extra flight time.”

  One of the ground assault craft had slowed, and now, dropping to near ground level, turned back toward Aurora.

  “Perimeter’s clear,” Sid reported. “Blue’s on it; Blue Three is looking for the outside blip; we’re not getting any thermal from ground level. Red’s going in.”

  Rafe felt cold.

  “Laggard’s getting reamed by his boss,” Gary said. “He says he wants to check something he saw…he’s flying awfully low and there are large rocks out there…”

  “Go ahead,” Gary said. Moments later, a thermal bloom lit Rafe’s screen.

  “What was that?” Rafe said. “Did you have stuff on the ground?”

  Sid laughed, unpleasantly. “Don’t need it.”

  “But did you—”

  “World’s full of rocks for idiots to bash themselves on if their onboard scan freezes up,” Sid said. “He should have followed orders.”

  “They’re coming back,” Gary said. “Couldn’t miss that flash. But they’re convinced it was pilot error. They’re coming to pick up pieces, not look for black hats. The other assault plane’s going in; they’ve sent for medical. Handy, if we need more than we think.”

  “Red’s in,” Sid said. “Resistance…neutralized. Two females found locked into cabin eight…transmitting images. Rafe, are these the right people?”

  Rafe stared at the screen…he hadn’t seen any of them in years, but that was clearly his mother, despite the bruises and black eye. The other…might be his sister. Must be her. “Yes,” he said, trying to hold his voice steady. “Mother and sister. The baby?”

  “No baby,” Sid said. “And no male. Blue team’s looking but they haven’t found him. The whole place is secure now.”

  “Can I talk to M—to my mother?”

  “Not yet,” Gary said. “We’re not done yet. I don’t want to risk it.”

  “Weather’s deteriorating,” Sid reported. “Rafe, give me a readout on the HAWATS.”

  “Temperature’s dropping below freezing, frozen precip—sleet changing to snow, flurries at first and steady within an hour, accumulation to sixteen centimeters by morning…”

  “We’ve got to find that outlier or he’s dead,” Gary said. He spoke into his mike. “Blue Leader, you’ve got weather moving in; we want you all out of there before it closes down…find that outlier or we’ll have to leave whoever it is…”

  “No!” Rafe said, half rising. He froze then: Sid, without moving from his place, had pulled a weapon and had it centered on his forehead.

  “Sit down,” Gary said. “Malcolm’s not going to leave him if he can find him, but I’m not going to risk the team having to stay there, in case this mess is run by someone with enough clout to call in heavy stuff on a fixed location.”

  Rafe’s heart hammered in his chest; he sat down. “I just—”

  “Sid, put it away. He’s not going to do anything.”

  Sid shrugged and slid the weapon into its holster. “Blue’s still looking. He’s not where he was, and it’s a mess of boulders, lots of hollows and things.”

  Rafe sat rigidly.

  “Patch Rafe to Blue’s channel, too, Sid,” Gary said. “Rafe, if that’s your father, do you have any idea where he’d go? Would he be trying to hide? Would he try to disguise a thermal signature?”

  “You said he’s hypothermic, by the earlier scan,” Rafe said.

  “Yeah, but before that. Would he have had a strategy? Did he have any cold-weather or high-altitude experience? We need to narrow the search parameters.”

  Rafe tried to remember. “He did go hunting—I don’t remember exactly where, but it was in the fall or winter. Not trophy hunting, really—or, he never brought trophies home. It was more to spend time with his peers, I think. Uh…we used to go for hikes when I was a little boy—I do remember being caught out in a storm with him once and he said get on the downwind side of some rocks, hunker down…”

  “What was the wind direction when you first spotted that outlier?”

  “Um…southeast…”

  “So he’ll have gone to the west side—also more cover from the lights, if he was trying to get farther away—and now he’s on the drift-exposed side.”

  “Blue, look on at the west side of boulders, any hollows—”

  “How big is your father?” asked a voice in Rafe’s earbug.

  “About a centimeter shorter than me,” Rafe said. “That makes him…one meter eight, maybe?”

  “Close enough. He’d curl up?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafe said. “I think—”

  “Wait—” A confused noise, then. “We found someone—dammit! He’s really cold. Stiff. Not responding.”

  “Is he—?”

  Gary turned. “The rule with hypothermia: they’re not dead until they’re warm and dead. Our people know how to handle it.”

  “Here’s the video,” Sid said. “Is that your father?”

  The gaunt, gray, battered face, stiff as a corpse’s, looked nothing like his father except for the familiar scar above his right eyebrow.

  “Yes,” Rafe said. He could not say more.

  “First team’s airborne with two females,” Sid said. “Original course is not feasible; they’ll go the alternate route…”

  “Close to that fire—”

  “Second team’s loading…second team’s away.”

  “Where are they going?” Rafe asked. “I want to be there when—”

  “Security first,” Gary said. “Pay attention to your station.”

  His station. Rafe dragged his mind back to the assignments he’d been given. The HAWATS satellite moved serenely on its orbit: no flashing blue lights, no sign that it was doing anything but tracking the winter storm moving across the landscape below. No other unidentified blips on the other screen.

  He, Gary, and Sid kept watch; Gary and Sid both muttered into their mikes occasionally, but Rafe had no live circuits. He wanted to argue, but he knew it would do no good. A half hour later, Gary took his earbug out.

  “Current status. The bad boys will be here for interrogation in a couple of hours. Your family have been transferred to long-range transport—a mobile medical facility that will be damned near impossible for whoever did this to locate. You have a choice. You can stay here with me and observe the interrogation, or Sid will take you to a transfer point; you’ll meet your family in a se
cure location.”

  Much as he wanted to get his hands on those who had held and tormented his family, his first priority had to be their safety—and letting them know he was here and ready to do anything that had to be done.

  “I’ll go to my family, then,” he said. “Where—”

  “Rafe, I’m sorry; I can’t tell you. This whole op has had some parameters neither of us knew about.”

  For a moment, his gut knotted into an icy ball. Was Gary betraying him?

  “You don’t expect a clandestine snatch to have a connection to the regional militia…if you’re thinking this started with something internal to ISC, I’d be looking very far up the chain of command. Very far.” Gary cocked his head. “You have any ideas yet?”

  “There’s a senior VP who’s now listed as acting CEO,” Rafe said. “I’d have to look at him, though it’s hard to believe—”

  “Lewis H. Parmina,” Gary said.

  “You know him?”

  “I know of him. It’s my business to know something about people at that level—”

  “So you would have researched my father—”

  “Of course. And before you get your back up, I asked you all those questions because I needed to know what you knew. And to double-check my data.” He paused; Rafe said nothing. Gary went on. “Parmina, now…very interesting fellow. You know he was adopted?”

  “Adopted? No.”

  “Yes. His official public bio mentions it; he’s proud of rising from humble origins, apparently. I’ve found another source with more details. He was one of a group of children found alive on a derelict spaceship—he was very young, barely more than a toddler, like most of the others. There were no adults on the ship; the presumption was that they’d been taken by slavers who didn’t want to bother with the children. It was an ISC repair ship that found them; since the ship’s AI was ruined, and its beacon nonstandard, the children were put up for adoption through the company’s own internal site. The Parminas both worked for ISC; they took Lew and a girl. The girl died young; the Parminas died when Lew was in university.”