Victory Conditions

by Elizabeth Moon

  “I don’t know…,” Ky said. Her stomach rumbled.

  “External storage preserves it, if you need it, but you shouldn’t access it for half a standard year, minimum. I kept mine five years, then dumped it. Knew I didn’t need it, wouldn’t want it. The wet-ware memory was enough to deal with, and I had dealt with it. I’ll be back…” Pitt left the room again.

  Ky felt shaky, as if the room itself were trembling. She put out her hand…no visible tremor at least. It was ridiculous. She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have energy for this…

  “Second course,” Pitt said. “Get this into you, but slower.”

  Ky was halfway through that plateful when she realized she had not taken any of the precautions against possible toxins that she had been advised to take until they caught the assassins. She stopped with the fork halfway to her mouth.

  “It’s all right,” Pitt said. “I checked it. But you see what I mean. You’re not fit, right now.”

  “I have to be fit,” Ky said grimly.

  “Yes. Which means you’re going to have to do something about it. No one can make you. Nobody in your force outranks you; you don’t have a proper medical assessment board set up yet; the Moray people are halfway between worship and stark panic. You’re the only one who can get yourself fit.”

  Ky thought about it, realizing even as she did that it was far too hard to think. If she tried developing a battle plan and commanding in battle as cloudy as she felt…

  “So…what do I do? What facilities do we—they—have?”

  Pitt just looked at her for a moment. “Here’s what I think would work to maintain your command’s confidence in you, and return you to full capacity as fast as possible. It’s based on what Mackensee uses, with available local resources…”

  “Which you’ve already researched.”

  “Yes,” Pitt said, with an expression that dared Ky to object. “Yes, I did, ma’am, and for a good reason. Staff should always be prepared with what the commander needs to know.”

  “Right,” Ky said. She took another bite of the food.

  “You tell your command—your captains, the senior Moray officers—that you’ve realized you’re having more sequelae from Vanguard’s blowup than you knew, and you want to get it worked on while they’re fitting out the new ships. You’ve got people qualified to supervise that, and until you hear from Cascadia if that girl’s been able to figure out where Turek’s headed, you can’t do much planning.” She paused. “Though you do need to build a new staff, same organization basically, and just a suggestion—include some Moray officers.”

  Ky’s head ached again, but less. Through the fog she could now perceive, all this made sense. “They’ll think I’m…”

  “Very wise,” Pitt said, before Ky could finish. “Look, ma’am, I know I’m way out of line, but I’m the only one who can talk to you this straight. What you do is go back to your quarters, shower again, put on a clean uniform—”

  Ky looked down at herself…she had just grabbed one without checking, she realized, and that was completely unprofessional.

  “—and come back here and tell them,” Pitt said. “Make your own dispositions, of course, but I’d recommend you include a Slotter Key officer and Captain Pettygrew in the team to ramrod the ship preparation alongside the Moray people. Cascadia, Moray, and Captain Argelos to organize a staff for you…”

  “How long?” Ky said.

  “You have forty-five minutes,” Pitt said. “And a clear path—your security’s waiting outside this entrance.” She gestured. “I’ll just clear up here and have everything ready for you.”

  Ky made it back to her quarters, showered, checked hair and teeth and all carefully, and made sure the uniform she put on was freshly cleaned. She felt better—almost better enough to think she could make it without taking a few days off for medical nonsense, but…but that had gotten her into such a state she didn’t even know she’d put on a soiled uniform. No. Hard as it was, she’d do it, whatever it took.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  T he men and women facing her in the conference room looked anxious as she came in. She recited what Pitt had suggested, almost word for word; their faces relaxed slightly.

  “I’ve been irritable,” Ky said, at the end. “My apologies to anyone I’ve bitten. A more thorough medical evaluation should take care of everything—you know they told me when I first came in that I shouldn’t check out so fast—”

  “Don’t worry,” Argelos said. “We’ll take care of everything, and if we need to hold departure awhile—”

  “I doubt that will be necessary,” Ky said, “as long as I do what I’m told.” She managed a grin. “I may be as stubborn as all the other Vattas, but I can follow orders…sometimes.” There was a chuckle in response that sounded almost natural. “Feel free to not tell me anything you’re doing—I’m sure you’ll be fine without me. For a while, anyway.”

  It was hard to turn away from the table, hard to make herself leave the room, but inside she felt a shift, a change of something indefinable that told her she was making the right decision.

  Moray’s medical staff had assembled a team, men and women in their version of hospital uniform; it was almost like walking into the conference she’d just left, except that no one looked scared of her.

  “I’ve been assigned to manage your treatment.” The speaker wore a green-and-cream-striped tunic; the cream stripes were narrower. “I’m Psych-Phyz Fumaro Adjan; these are Neuro-Phyz Milian Cortsin, Neuro-Psych Kember Tasani, Implant Tech Vasti Bak, and Incare Specialists Maran, Zlaznin, Vitsi…” Ky nodded, knowing her implant was picking up faces and names and could retrieve them when wanted.

  “We understand the urgency,” Adjan said. “And the need for you to reach your usual level of performance…but we understand you have no baseline data…”

  “Baseline data? I’m not sure what you need. It’s possible that something could be obtained from Slotter Key. Medical records, is that what you mean?”

  “A baseline brainscan with and without implant would be helpful. Information about your implant—how long you’ve had it, any upgrades—”

  “I can tell you that,” Ky said. “Though ship time isn’t always accurate with a lot of jumps, as we’ve had in combat.”

  “You can explain that later,” Adjan said. “Right now, if you can get us some baseline medical information, that would be very helpful. I assume your home world was advanced enough to do regular childhood exams including biochemistry?”

  “I had to go to the clinic every year, but I don’t know all they did,” Ky said. Now that she thought about it, where were her medical records? Had they been at the house—and lost in the explosion—or had they been at the clinic?

  “We’ll need to do our own examinations for present data, of course. But briefly, can you tell us your own understanding of your situation?”

  “I thought you’d know,” Ky said. Irritation edged her voice; she heard that and fought it down.

  “It’s always helpful to know what you think the problem is,” Adjan said, almost primly. “Your degree of insight is an indicator.” She did not say of what.

  “Well…I’m not sleeping well. I have bad dreams. I’m irritable and I’m not thinking as well as I should.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I…can’t stop thinking about them. The ones who died.” The ones she’d killed, with her incompetence. The ones she’d killed, on purpose.

  Adjan nodded. “Well, then, we’d best get to work. Maran will take you to get changed, and then to the lab for the necessary medical implants.”

  “Medical implants?”

  “Yes, of course. We’ll want continuous monitoring of too many variables to use external monitors or periodic sampling of tissue and blood.”

  “You won’t feel a thing,” Maran said. He was a chunky, cheerful fellow who reminded Ky all too much of Lee, who had died with Vanguard.

  An hour later, Adjan reap
peared, along with Cortsin, Tasani, and Bak. “We have a group working on your biochemistry results,” Adjan said. “Slotter Key Spaceforce Academy is sending us your medical data from your time there; luckily that includes a scan without implant. Now for the interview and history.”

  Ky answered questions about her childhood health to the best of her memory. More data might be buried in the family section of the implant, but she still did not want to go there. What difference could it make, anyway?

  “Do you consider yourself a humod?” Adjan asked next.

  “A humod? No,” Ky said. “Why would I? I mean, there are anti-humods who may think I am, but I’m not.” She wiggled her hands. “Two hands, ten fingers, no sensory enhancements—”

  “Um. Technically, brain implants—even as far back as the first cochlear implants for those with hearing loss—made permanent intentional modifications to the human brain that are medically considered to be modifications in a different way than external hearing aids or corrective lenses or mechanical prostheses.”

  “That…seems extreme,” Ky said.

  “Your implant can put you to sleep, can it not?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And wake you at a specified time? And it augments your memories, and expands your effective retrieval space?”

  “Yes—”

  “And allows you to interface directly with other electronic and neuronic equipment, such as your ship’s controls, right?”

  “Yes…but…I didn’t realize that was what a humod was. I thought it meant direct modification of the body—like a tentacle in place of a hand, a chemical sensory module or something. Something changed in the genes.”

  “Implants are so common that most people don’t think of them as an actual modification. But in fact, you were modded in infancy, and it’s likely your parents chose a genetic enhancement to make implant use easier, if they did not carry those mods themselves.”

  “I never knew that…”

  “That’s why I need to know about your implant history. You started with a childhood model, I’m sure.”

  Ky nodded. She’d had several implant changes before leaving for the Academy without one.

  “You had no problems with adjustments?” Adjan asked.

  “Not until the last time—it was so rushed, you see, and it was my father’s—”

  “Wait—you’re telling me that after traumatic brain injury and emergency brain surgery, your next implant was someone else’s? Uncalibrated?”

  “It was a long time after,” Ky said. “And the implant was my father’s…”

  “Why?”

  Ky explained, though she did not mention that her Aunt Grace had baked the implant into a fruitcake to smuggle it off Slotter Key. “I wouldn’t have put it in right then,” Ky said, “but I needed direct access to the ship’s sensors and the Vatta command set for the other ship—”

  He looked at her with a curious expression. “You put in the implant your father had when he died—presumably your aunt had…um…cleared some things out.”

  “Not that I know of,” Ky said. “Why should she?”

  “It’s a wonder you lasted as long as you did,” he said. “What happened when you put it in?”

  “The usual—I was dizzy, staggered around a bit more than usual. I didn’t have time to sleep overnight with it, so the adjustment was a bit difficult, but then things were happening…”

  She went on with the story. She hadn’t ever had time to put the whole thing in order before, from her disgrace at the Academy through the capture of her ship, the mutiny, the loss of her family, the attacks at Lastway, loss of credit, Stella and Toby, Rafe, Osman’s death and her decision to take over Vanguard…and on and on.

  “It’s all been a bit crowded,” she said finally, coming to the recent battle and the loss of her ship. She felt drained.

  “Ummm. Any one of those things would be enough to give most people a significant problem. We have a lot to deal with. Let’s start with the implant. You’ll need to delete all the files pertaining to your parents’ death. You can download to external media, if you wish, but I don’t want you accessing them for a minimum of a standard year. They’re well into your own neurology by now—”

  Ky had expected that, but not the next.

  “Now—as this was your father’s implant, it will have information stored on you—things he valued for some reason. Could be school records, images made of you at different ages, anything. Have you been accessing those files?”

  “No.” She had deliberately not done that.

  “Good. I want you to delete all the family-connected things—anything not needed for your work. I assume you’ll want to keep Vatta business-specific information, but everything else needs to come out. Again, to external storage, but not for immediate access. I’ll want to review it—”

  “But it’s personal—”

  “Yes, and he’s dead.” Adjan sighed. “Look—it’s not ideal to do a rush job on this kind of problem. It’s possible that he stored things like educational assessments, test scores, even biodata, in that family file structure. If you try to find it for us, you’ll get tangled in it—you’ll be wondering why he saved that image of you and not another, or what he meant by keeping some scrawl you wrote at the age of three, or you’ll start looking at images of your siblings who died—and as you pointed out, there’s some urgency. We need all the information we can get on your pre-morbid condition, but we don’t need you complicating matters. So I need access, once you have the files external.”

  Though she knew it was not true, she felt that the implant was emptier, lighter, when she had deleted those files. She’d been tempted to go below directory level and sample the files she’d never explored…even to revisit, painful though it was, the last day of her father’s life. She forced herself to go on, unload the files in huge chunks…and now someone else had those memories, those images and words and feelings.

  “Now we’re going to normalize your hormones,” the next doctor said. He started an IV and also plugged something into her implant’s external jack. “They’ve sent me your genetic profile; we don’t have reference data for Slotter Key, but some of your ancestors probably came from Seahallow, which supplied a lot of colonists to Slotter Key a few centuries ago. Let’s see…” Ky fell asleep, waking a few minutes later as he murmured on. “…an interesting response. Let’s see now…” She felt as if she were floating in the warm sea, the sea near her home. Then something tingled in her veins and she was awake and alert, but calm. “How’s that, then?”

  “Uh…that feels wonderful,” Ky said.

  “A tick less, I think” he said. The alertness receded; the calmness remained. “Your stress hormones were way off norm. Not unexpected, but you’d adapted. You’re going to sleep long and heavy for several days, and when you wake up you may feel thickheaded. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got to reverse the adaptation. Ordinarily we’d do that over several weeks, but in the interest of getting you back to service…” He murmured on, but Ky slid back into sleep.

  She woke with a mild headache and the feeling that she had slept too long. When she turned her head something tugged slightly; a voice spoke out of dimness. “If you’ll hold still a moment, I’ll get that off your head…” Ky held still; hands touched her hair and whatever it was lifted off, leaving a sweaty patch behind. “And now a little light…” Light revealed a hospital room and the pleasant broad face of a woman in a green smock. “I’m Annie; let me help you up. You need to walk around a bit.”

  Dizzy at first, Ky soon steadied enough to make it into the hospital bathroom for a shower and hair-wash and so on. By then she was hungry, and after a meal came sessions with one specialist after another, a nap, another meal…and finally bed, where again she slept at once and heavily. That set the pattern for the next several days.

  At the next medical conference, Ky felt much better. Well enough, in fact, to leave. Her team had a different opinion.

  “We’ve stabilized
your biochemistry,” the chief neurologist said. “But we’re concerned about residual damage from that brain injury you suffered at Sabine. The surgeons did an excellent repair, considering the conditions, but our scans show several areas that could be improved. Besides, we haven’t yet dealt with the retraining you need. The two together will take another five days, but your fleet tells us the ships won’t be ready to depart for at least seven.”

  “You’re sure I really need this?”

  “The retraining, definitely. We could excise the memories that led to the trauma, but that might impair your judgment the other way. Retraining will help you modulate those memories, control their intensity.”

  Ky agreed, and underwent a treatment that involved having short-lived nannites inserted into her brain, where they removed excess scar tissue from the surgery at Sabine and from a childhood concussion, then several days of adjustment trials to her implant controls and biofeedback work that was supposed to optimize both physiological and bionic response to stressors. Every day she felt a bit more clearheaded, until finally the team dismissed her.

  “Here are the copies of material sequestered from you implant,” Adjan said. “They belong to you; they are from your implant. But I caution you that under no circumstances should you review this material for at least one standard year. Ordinarily we would ask you to deposit it with a trusted relative who would then lock it away—the temptation to snoop has caused more than one patient distress and required re-treatment. This is not possible for you, as you have no relatives here.”

  “I could get a lockbox at Crown & Spears and leave it there,” Ky said. “With instructions to destroy it if I’m killed. Would that do?”

  “That would be very wise,” Adjan said.

  “I’ll arrange it, then, and let you messenger the cubes over. Then you won’t have to worry that my insatiable curiosity will undo your work…” She grinned at them all.