Change of Command

Chapter Twenty

Esmay scowled at the message strip the clerk handed her. They’d had it all arranged, she thought. Why meet in a private room, and not in the restaurant? She scanned the lift tubes, looking for the right range. Thirty-seven to forty . . . odd. Most tubes served at least ten floors. She tapped the access button.

“Room and name, please?”

What was this? If Barin had been there, she’d have whacked him in the head, but he wasn’t. “3814,” she said instead. “Lieutenant Suiza.”

The lift tube access slid open, with the supporting grid glowing green for up. Esmay stepped in, and found herself in a mirrored cylinder that rose smoothly, with none of the exuberance of most lift tubes. Her ears popped once, then again. It was only thirty-eight floors—what was happening here?

She stepped out into a green-carpeted foyer, the walls striped in subtle shades of beige and cream. The pictures on the wall . . . she caught her breath at the bold geometric. Surely that was a reproduction—she stepped closer. No . . . the thick wedge of purple, that cast a shadow in every reproduction, cast a different shadow here, lit as it was by a pin spot on the opposite wall. Genuine Oskar Cramin. Then that might be a real Dessaline as well, its delicate traceries refusing to be overborne by the Cramin’s almost brutal vigor. Quietly, with the confidence of greatness, the little gray and gold and black Dessaline held its place.

She shook her head and looked around. Beyond the foyer, a short hall had but four doors opening off it, and one was labelled Service. Barin must have spent a fortune . . . 3814 was the middle door. She moved into its recognition cone, and waited.

The door opened, and she was face to face with . . . a middle-aged woman she’d never seen. Before she could begin to stammer an apology, the woman spoke.

“Lieutenant Suiza! How good to meet you—I’m Podjar Serrano, Barin’s mother.”

Barin’s mother. Panic seized her. She had been prepared for Barin, for a few stolen moments of privacy . . . a chance to talk before she met his mother.

“Come on in,” Podjar was saying. “We’re all dying to meet you.”

We? What we? We all? She could hear a low hum of voices, and wanted nothing more than to run away. Where was Barin? How could he lead her into this?

Podjar had her by the arm—Barin’s mother; she couldn’t just pull away—and led her inside, to a room that seemed as big as a planet right then.

“Here she is at last,” Podjar said to someone else, a short thickset man who had Barin’s grin but nothing of his grace. Brother? Father? Uncle? “This is Kerin, my husband,” Podjar said. Esmay hoped that meant he was Barin’s father, because otherwise she hadn’t a clue.

Farther into the room, her stunned wits began to register additional details. Not only was the room big, and arranged for entertaining, but it was comfortably full of people who all seemed to know each other. Barin’s family?

“Esmay!” Her heart leapt. That was Barin, and he would get her out of this, whatever it was. He came toward her, clearly gleeful and full of himself. She could have killed him, and hoped he understood steel behind her fixed smile.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t at the lift to meet you,” he said. “I had an urgent call—”

Esmay couldn’t bring herself to be polite and say it didn’t matter. “What is this?” she said instead.

Barin grimaced. “It got out of hand,” he said. “I wanted you to meet my parents, and they were coming through here on the way home. Then grandmother—” he waved; Esmay followed the gesture to see Admiral Vida Serrano at the far end of the room, surrounded by an earnest cluster of older people. “—Grandmother wanted to talk to you about something, and thought this would be a good opportunity. And then . . . they started precipitating, falling out of the sky . . .”

“Mmm.” Esmay could not say any of what she was thinking, not with his parents standing there smiling at her a little nervously. “Are we . . . going to have a chance to talk?” By ourselves she meant.

“I don’t know,” Barin said. “I hope so. But—” His gaze slid to his mother, who quirked an eyebrow.

“Barin, you know it’s important family business. We must confer.”

Great. The only leave she’d been able to wangle, in the current crises, and it looked as if she’d be spending it conferring with his family instead of hers.

“How was your trip, Esmay?” asked Barin’s father. He had lieutenant commander’s insignia, with a technical flash.

“Fine, though we lost a day at Karpat for unscheduled maintenance procedures.” She couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice.

“Mmm. That’s typical.” Barin’s father nodded across the room. “Let me show you to your room.”

“My—”

“Of course you have your own room here. We may have descended in force, but we’re not entirely uncivilized. You have to stay somewhere.” Across the room, through another door, into another corridor . . . Esmay was by this time beyond astonishment when he showed her to a small suite, its sitting room wall showing a view of the station’s exterior. “This is yours—and I’m sure the staff are sending up your things.”

“I have only the carryon,” Esmay said.

“Well, then. Come out when you’re ready.” With a smile, he turned away and closed the door behind him. Esmay sank down onto one of the rose—and-cream-striped chairs. What she wanted to do was put her head in her hands and scream. That wouldn’t be productive, she was sure. But what was going on?

A tap on the door interrupted her uneasy thoughts. Her carryon? “Come in,” she said. The door opened, and Barin stood there looking sheepish.

“May I?” he asked. Esmay nodded; he entered, shutting the door behind him, and pulled her up from the chair. She stiffened for a moment, then relaxed against him.

“Your family—” she began.

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t my idea, but it is my family. They’re . . . headstrong.”

“And you aren’t?” She wasn’t ready to think it was funny; she wanted to indulge her annoyance—such justified annoyance—a little longer, but suddenly her sense of humor kicked in. She could just imagine Barin, having planned this quiet little retreat, being maneuvered by his powerful and numerous family. She stifled the giggle that tried to come out.

“Not headstrong enough,” Barin said, with a rueful grin. “I tried to tell them to let us alone, but you see how well I did.”

Esmay lost control of the giggle; she could feel it vibrating in her throat and then it was out.

“You aren’t angry?” he asked hopefully.

“Not at you, anyway,” Esmay said. “I suppose a quiet few days alone was too much to hope for.”

“I didn’t think so,” Barin said. “You would think the entire universe was playing tricks on us—”

“Ummm . . . I’ve read that lovers always put themselves in the center of everything.”

“I’d like to put us in the center of a bed, a long way from everywhere else,” Barin said, with a hint of a growl.

“We’ll get there,” Esmay said. Her arms tightened around him; he felt as good as ever, and she wanted to melt right into him until their bones chimed together.

Someone knocked on the door. “Barin, if you don’t let her get dressed, we’ll never get to dinner—” A female voice, one she hadn’t met yet.

“Oh, shut up,” muttered Barin in Esmay’s ear. “Why wasn’t I born an orphan?”

“It would have been too simple,” Esmay said. “Let me go—I want to change. And are we eating up here, or in public?” Not that the entire Serrano family wasn’t public enough.

“Here. It’s coming up.” He let go, went to the door, and opened it. There stood a woman in her thirties, about Esmay’s size, with the Serrano features.

“Esmay, I’m Dolcent. Barin—go away, I need to talk to her for a moment.”

“I hate you,” Barin said, but he left. Dolcent grinned.

“Listen—I gather you were expecting a quiet evening of entertainment and you have only one carryon. If I were in that situation, I’d have brought only the clothes I meant to wear, which weren’t exactly family-meeting ones . . . so may I offer you something?”

Annoyance returned, a wave of it—who did they think they were?—but then she remembered the contents of her carryon. Clothes for a casual day or so with her fiance, one nice dress to meet the parents . . . blast the woman, she was right.

“Thank you,” Esmay said, as graciously as she could while swallowing another lump of resentment.

“I wouldn’t like having to borrow clothes, but there are times—look—”

She had to admit that Dolcent’s offerings were better than anything she’d brought, and Dolcent’s blue tunic over her own casual slacks met both requirements. Esmay thanked her.

“Never mind. I’ll raid your wardrobe someday. If you make my little brother happy, that is.”

“Otherwise you’ll blow it up, eh?”

“Something like that,” Dolcent said. “Or if you call me Dolly . . . just a warning.” She grinned.

Dinner was less formal than she’d feared; the hotel staff brought in a buffet and left it, and people served themselves from it, sitting wherever they fancied. Esmay had a corner of a big puffy sofa with a table at her elbow, and Dolcent beside her, offering explanations. A man’s voice emerged from the general babble.

“And I told him that technology wasn’t mature enough, but he’s determined—”

“Iones—a distant uncle. In material research; you just missed him when you were on Koskiusko,” Dolcent said. “He’s a terrible bore, but what he knows he really knows.”

Then a woman, close enough to see. “—and if she ever takes that tone to me again, I’ll rip the brass right off her—”

“And that’s Bindi—never mind her; she’s not as bad as she sounds.”

A shrimp came flying through the air with deadly accuracy, to bounce off Dolcent’s head. “Am I not, you miserable eavesdropper?”

Calmly, Dolcent picked up the shrimp and ate it. “No, you’re not. Nor am I an eavesdropper, when you’re talking loud enough to be heard three rooms away.”

Bindi shrugged and turned away.

“Is it always like this?” Esmay asked.

“Usually worse. But I’ll be accused of dire things if I try to explain Serrano family politics. You come from a large family yourself, right? You should know.”

“Ummm . . .” There was, after all, some of the same flavor in the interactions. The loud ones, staking out their space and their areas of power; the quiet ones in the corners, raising a sardonic eyebrow now and then. Bindi would be an Aunt Sanni; Barin’s mother, like her stepmother, seemed to be a quiet peacemaker.

Heris Serrano pulled up a chair to the other side of the end table, and sat down, and put her plate beside Esmay’s. Esmay had never thought of Commander Serrano wearing anything but a uniform, but . . . here she was in silvery-green patterned silk, a loose tunic over flowing slacks.

“Esmay—I don’t know if you remember me—”

“Yes, si—Commander—”

“Heris, please. This room’s so full of rank otherwise, we can hardly talk to each other. I don’t think I’ve seen you face to face to thank you for saving our skins at Xavier—and not just ours—”

“Heris, not during dinner—I know you’re going to talk tactics to her sometime, but not now.” Dolcent pointed with a crab leg, a gesture that would have been a deadly insult on Altiplano. “She’s going to be married; you could at least choose a more suitable topic.”

“And you’d talk clothes to her, ’Centa? Or flowers, or which way to fold the napkins at the reception?”

“Better than old battles during dinner.” Dolcent didn’t seem perturbed by Heris’s intensity; Esmay watched with interest.

“Picked out a wedding outfit yet, Esmay?” Heris asked, with too much sugar in her voice.

“No, s—Heris. Brun says she’s taking care of it.”

“Dear . . . me. How did that happen?”

“She just . . .” Esmay waved her hands helplessly. “She found out I had no ideas, and then the next thing I knew she was sending me fabric samples and talking about designers.”

“She is something, isn’t she?” Heris chuckled. “You should have seen her years back, when she was really wild. If you’re not careful, she’ll organize the whole wedding.”

Esmay was feeling reasonably relaxed and almost full when she saw Admiral Vida Serrano coming toward her, with an expression far less friendly than those around her. Like almost all the others, she wore civilian clothes, but that failed to disguise her nature. Esmay tried to get up, but the admiral waved her back.

“There’s something you must know,” Admiral Serrano said. “I haven’t told the others because it didn’t seem fair to tell them behind your back. It’s not widely known—in fact, it’s been safely buried for centuries. But since those idiots in Medical sent most of the flag officers off on indefinite inactive status, several of us decided to clean up the Serrano archives, and transfer them onto more modern data storage media.”

“Yes, sir?” She would call Heris by her first name if she insisted, but she wasn’t going to call the admiral anything but “sir,” whether or not she was in uniform.

“You know the official history of the Regular Space Service—how it is an amalgam of the private spacegoing militias of the founding Families?”

“Yes . . .”

“What you may not know is that despite the effort made to eradicate the memory of which Fleet family once served which Family, these realities still influence Fleet policy. Perhaps more than they should. The Serrano legacy—to the extent that we have one—consists in the peculiar fact of our origin.”

A long pause, during which Esmay tried to guess which of the great families had once had the Serranos as no-doubt-difficult bodyguards.

“Our Family was destroyed,” the admiral said finally. “We were the spacegoing militia; we were, at the time of the political cataclysm that wiped out our employers, far away guarding their ships. After that, we could not go back—for obvious reasons—and when the Regular Space Service was organized some thirty T-years later, most of our family petitioned to be enrolled. We were considered, by some, safer . . . because we were unaligned.”

Esmay could think of nothing to say.

“This much is well-known, at least to most of the senior members of Fleet, and it’s been at the root of some resentment of the Serrano influence. Every generation or so, some smart aleck from another Fleet family tries to suggest that we were part of the rebellion against our Family, and then we have to respond. If we’re lucky, it’s handled at the senior level, but a couple of hundred years back, we and the Barringtons lost two jigs in a duel.”

Admiral Serrano cleared her throat. Esmay noticed that the room had grown quieter; the others had come nearer, and were listening.

“The Family we served was based on a single planet—many Families were, in those days. And that planet . . .” She paused again; and Esmay felt a chill down her back. It could not be. “That planet, Esmay, was Altiplano. Your world.”

She wanted to say Are you sure? but she knew that Admiral Serrano would not have said it if it hadn’t been verifiable.

“That much the Serranos know—we all know—and there were some who argued against you on those grounds. I didn’t; I felt that you’d make my grandson a fine partner, and I said so.”

There were murmurs from the others. Esmay looked at Barin, trying to read his face, but she couldn’t.

Vida Serrano went on. “There’s more, and I think I may be the first person to see this for centuries. I was down in the family archives, bored enough to look at a row of children’s books written by some very untalented ancestor, when I found it.” She held up a dingy brown book. “I don’t think it’s a children’s book; I think it’s someone’s private journal, or part of it. The conservators think it dates from the time of the events it describes, or closely after, and the pictures it had were pasted-in flatpics. The conservators couldn’t find anything in the vid archives corresponding, and with maximal image-boosting, this is the best we could get . . .”

She slipped a package of flatpics out of the book, and opened it. The images were still blurry, but Esmay caught her breath. Altiplano . . . she could not mistake that pair of mountain peaks. And the building—the old part of the Landsmen’s Guildhall, as shown in the oldest pictures she had seen in her history classes.

“You recognize it?” Vida asked Esmay.

“Yes . . . the mountains are the Dragon’s Teeth—” And below them, an ancient bunker . . . she didn’t want to think about that now. “And the building looks like the Landsmen’s Guildhall the way it was before they added onto it in my great-grandfather’s time.”

“I thought as much. Behind one of the flatpics, hidden by it, I found this.” She held up a piece of paper that didn’t look old enough. “This isn’t the original, of course—that’s back home, with the conservators humming over it. This is a copy. And, Esmay Suiza, it makes clear that your ancestors earned the enmity of mine, by rebelling against their patrons and slaughtering them all.”

“What?”

“Your ancestors led the rebellion, Esmay. They massacred the family we were sworn to protect.”

Esmay stared. “How can you know that? If no one survived—”

“Listen: Against these our oath is laid: the sons of Simon Escandon, and the sons of Barios Suiza and the sons of Mario Vicarios, for it is they who led the rebellions against our Patron. Against their sons, and their sons’ sons, to the most distant generation. May their Landbrides be barren, and their priests burn in hell, for they murdered their lawful lord and all his family, man and wife, father and mother, brother and sister, to the youngest suckling child. There is blood between their children and our children, until the stars die and the heavens fall. Signed: Miguel Serrano, Erenzia Serrano, Domingues Serrano.”

Silence held the room; Esmay could scarcely breathe, and cold pierced her. She glanced around; the faces that had been welcoming an hour before had closed against her, stone-hard, the dark eyes cold. All but Barin, who looked stunned, but not yet rejecting.

“I never heard this,” she said finally.

“I don’t suppose they would brag about it,” Vida said. “What story did you hear?”

Story. She was already sure that anything Esmay said would be a story, would be false. “In our history . . . there was a war, but also a plague, and a third of the population died of that, including the Founders.”

“Is that what you call the Family?”

“Yes . . . I suppose, though I never knew there was one great family. I’d always thought of them as many families.”

“You never heard the name Garcia-Macdonald?”

“No. Neither name.”

“Ah. I’ve no doubt the rebels destroyed all evidence. There was nothing to show against them when Altiplano joined the Familias Regnant three hundred years later. All we could do was watch—and we did not then know which of the people on Altiplano had been involved. By then the Regular Space Service had formed around us.”

“Was that the family? Garcia-Macdonald?”

“Yes. A family Serranos had served beside as far back as the wet-navy days of Old Earth. Tell me about this war, as you heard it.”

“The Lifehearts and the Old Believers,” Esmay said, dredging up what she remembered of those childhood lessons. “Um . . . the Founders wanted to bring in more colonists, free-birthers and Tamidians, to work the mines and develop the land. There had been a charter—a compact, they called it—promising to settle Altiplano only with those acceptable to those already in place. The Old Believers objected to the number of Tamidians the Founders wanted to import—they knew that they’d be outnumbered in two or three generations because of the free-birth policies. And the Lifehearts wanted development to proceed with due regard for the underlying ecosystem. But the Founders wanted a quick profit—they brought in shiploads of Tamidians, and the Tamidians brought diseases alien to the Altiplanans—diseases they were immune to, genetically.”

It came back to her now—the accusations and counteraccusations. Infant mortality soared among the Altiplanans, as the diseases spread into an unprotected population; they would be outnumbered in decades, not generations. The Tamidians had mocked their beliefs, throwing down shrines and trampling the icons into dust. The Founders had moved people off the open land, herding them into cities, where they sickened faster. Her great-grandmother had told her about the Death Year, when no Altiplanan baby had survived a week past birth, and about the Landbride who had called a curse on the unbelievers, at the cost of her own soul.

“For Landbrides do not curse: they bless. But she was taken from her land, and her children had died, and she escaped from the city to the mountains, and there with blood and spit and the hair of her head she made a gieeim, and offered her soul to the land if it would destroy the invaders.

“I don’t know what she actually did,” Esmay said. “My great-grandmother never told me, if she even knew. In her view, the hubris of the Founders angered God and brought a just punishment upon them. But a plague came out of the mountains and the plains, and up from the sea, and in the first year the Tamidians died as our children had died, spewing blood and rotting as they fell. It was said that they begged the Founders to let them leave, but the Founders brought in more, until the cities stank of death, and the Founders themselves sickened.”

“A bio-weapon?” someone said, behind the admiral.

Esmay shook her head. “No—at least, nothing I know of, and Altiplanans do not use bio-weapons today. But when the Altiplanans wanted to leave the cities, and go back to the land, the Founders denied them, and then there was war . . . but not to massacre them all, only to get back to the land from which they had been driven.”

“That’s not the report we have,” Admiral Serrano said. “That’s not what this says.” She fluttered the paper.

“It’s all I know,” Esmay said. “Are you sure your report is reliable?”

“Why wouldn’t it be? A servant . . . someone . . . escapes—”

“How? To what?”

“Atmospheric shuttle, to the orbital station. Unfortunately, he carried the disease with him, and it infected the station crew. Only three of them lived, but they passed it on . . .”

“I don’t believe it!” Barin reached for Esmay’s hand. “How can you believe a little scrap of paper stuck in a child’s book—”

“Not a child’s book—”

“Whatever kind of book. How can you believe that the real, secret truth was lost so long, and only comes to light just in time to keep me from marrying Esmay?”

Voices rose in an angry gabble, but Barin shouted over them. “I don’t care! I do not care that she’s from Altiplano. I do not care that this—this scrap of paper says her family were murderers hundreds of years ago. Are all Serranos saints? I love her, and I admire her and I’m going to marry her, if I have to leave the family to do it!”

“Barin, no!” Esmay grabbed for his other hand. “Wait—we have to find out—”

“I already know what I need to know,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I love you, and you are faithful and true and brave—and you love me. That is what matters, not what happened then.”

“There was an oath sworn . . .” Vida said.

Barin rounded on her, and this time Esmay could see the family likeness as if stamped in living bronze. “And are all oaths worthy? That’s not what you told me, Grandmother, when I swore to keep Misi’s secrets. There are oaths and oaths, you said, and it’s a wise soul that swears rightly, which is why we swear few.”

For an instant, Esmay thought Vida would scream her reply, but her voice, when she spoke, was soft.

“Then we must find the truth of this matter, Grandson—whether the story as we know it, or as the Suizas know it, is the truth. For if we know at last the names of those who killed our patrons, I see no possibility of peace between us.”

“We have an oath to the Familias,” Heris Serrano said. “As you keep telling the other Fleet families, when they remember who were their patrons. Would you have Serranos unravel Fleet, and possibly the Familias as well, to seek vengeance for ancient wrongs?”

Silence, an uneasy silence in which Esmay could almost hear the unspoken arguments based on rank, active service, combat experience. Barin broke it.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m sticking by Esmay no matter what you say.”

“The question is, will she stick by you, or will she turn traitor like her ancestors?” That was not Vida, but a male Serrano at the rear of the crush.

“Nonsense,” Heris said. “The question is, does she love him?”

That set off another uproar, in which Love is nothing but hormones! clashed with Love is more than just hormones! and a dozen other comments Esmay had heard before. Through that, the shrill pipe of a communications alarm cut like a knife; the noise level dropped.

Someone across the suite picked up the com, and absolute silence spread from that focus toward the group still muttering softly about love and betrayal and honor. Heads turned; people moved away, looking in that direction.

Finally Esmay could see. A Serrano she hadn’t met yet stood, one hand up for silence, listening, his face more gray than brown with some shock. He put the comunit down, finally, with exaggerated care.

“Mutiny. There’s been a mutiny, on Copper Mountain, and the mutineers have ten ships already.”

“What?”

“All leaves cancelled, all personnel return to their ships at once—” His eyes sought Vida Serrano’s. “They’re calling the inactive flags back, sir; you’re to take the fastest possible route to Headquarters.”

“Who?” Heris called. “Did you get anything on who started it?”

“Bonar Tighe was the first ship, Heris, but they took the Copper Mountain orbital station with convicts from Stack Three, and the commander there was named Bacarion.”

“Bacarion.” Heris thought a long moment. “Lepescu’s staff—one of his staff officers. It’s that bunch again, our own little Bloodhorde. And you know how Lepescu’s crowd feels about Serranos.”

Barin pulled Esmay to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. “It’s always something,” he murmured. “But I do love you, and I will marry you, and nothing—not Grandmother, or history, or mutinies, or anything—is going to stop me.”

She hugged him back, oblivious for a long, long delicious moment, vaguely aware of people moving in the room, of doors opening and closing. Finally someone coughed loudly.

“You’ve made your point, both of you,” Vida Serrano said. “But right now, you’d better get in uniform and get going.”

Esmay lifted her head from Barin’s shoulder and saw nothing but uniforms now, Serranos with carisacks and rollerbags, one after another emerging from the side rooms and heading for the door to the lift tubes.

“I do love him,” she said, right into Vida’s face. “And I’m not a traitor, and I won’t hurt him.”

Vida sighed. “There’s a lot more at stake than the happiness of you two,” she said. “But for what it’s worth, I hope it works out for you.”

Barin turned into his own room, and Esmay went back to hers, stripping quickly out of the borrowed clothes and putting on the creased uniform she’d been wearing—not even time to have it pressed. She looked at Dolcent’s clothes, considered leaving them on the bed, and then remembered having seen her, in uniform, leaving with two others. She stuffed them into her own luggage—maybe she’d run into Dolcent on a ship out of here—smoothed her wayward hair, and went out to find Barin waiting for her. In the hall, the last eight of the Serrano family were clustered at the lift tubes, waiting.

“I will never again complain about having to come to a boring family reunion,” said one, a woman who looked to be in her forties. She gave Esmay a sidelong look. “First we find out that what had seemed to be an ordinary inspection of a potential spouse is almost the lynching of an old enemy, and then there’s a mutiny.” Nervous chuckles from half the others. “Is it you, my dear, or the conjunction of Heris and Vida? Those two are certainly lightning rods.”

“Lightning and rod, I would say today.” That was a bookish-looking young man. “Sparks were definitely flying.”

“She knows that.” Another speculative look at Esmay that made her face heat up. One of the tubes opened, and they crowded in, descending so fast that Esmay felt her stomach hovering near the back of her throat.

The hotel lobby swarmed with a crowded mass of men and women in R.S.S. uniforms, some struggling at the counters, trying to check out, and others crowding to the exits. “Don’t worry about registration,” the man who had spoken said. “I’ll take care of it—we were last out, and that’s my job.”

“Cousin Andy,” Barin said, in Esmay’s ear. “Administration. Let’s go.”

The crush continued on the slidewalks and trams to the Fleet gate of the station. Every newsvid display had the story, with serious-faced commentators talking, while scenes of Copper Mountain played in the background. Esmay didn’t stop to listen, but there was a clump of people near every display.

More and more people in uniform got on at every stop. Not only Serranos had been here, and Esmay wondered how they were all going to get where they were going. At the Fleet gate, she found out.

As the long line snaked through the security gate, they were divided into crew and transients: crew members of docked ships went directly to their ships, and transients were divided by speciality and rank. Within a couple of hours, Esmay and Barin both had new orders cut, sending them out on a civilian liner to join a battle group forming for Copper Mountain. They walked back down the concourse, and found eighteen other Fleet personnel in the waiting lounge for the Cecily Marie. Thirteen more appeared before they boarded, and a knot of angry civilian passengers were by then complaining bitterly to the gate agent.

“Welcome aboard, please take your seats, you’ll be shown your cabins later—” The steward looked tense, as well he might. Thirty-three last-minute military passengers, a mutiny in Fleet, who knew what else? Esmay and Barin sat down together in the observation lounge, and she wondered if he felt as peculiar as she did. Probably not. She had come off this very ship not six hours before, and now she was back on it.

The senior Fleet officer aboard was Commander Deparre, who quickly organized the others as if the ship were Fleet and not civilian. Esmay had had a brief fantasy of spending the time with Barin—the time they had still not had, the time she had been longing for since before Brun’s rescue. But Commander Deparre wanted to impress upon them the seriousness of the situation, and be sure they grasped the importance of upholding Fleet’s reputation among the civilians of Familias Regnant.

The civilians aboard Cecily Marie, Esmay thought, were more alarmed than reassured by the way Commander Deparre controlled his little group. If they had been mutineers plotting to take over this very ship, they could not have been more ominous—always together as a group, always apart from the others. Commander Deparre, however, seemed to relish this opportunity for leadership: he was, it turned out, normally in charge of payroll processing at Sector Four HQ. He assigned Esmay responsibility for the female personnel—she was actually the senior female officer—and insisted that they should be protected from intrusion by posting a watch outside their quarters at night.

“But sir—”

“We cannot have the slightest whisper of irregularity, Lieutenant,” he said firmly. Behind him, Barin rolled his eyes expressively, but Esmay felt more ready to scream than laugh. The maidens whose virtue she was supposed to guard were, all but one bright-eyed young pivot-major, older than she was, and two of the seven were senior NCOs who had been travelling with their husbands. This made no difference to Commander Deparre, who insisted that it would be “unseemly” for them to share cabins with their husbands. Why, exactly, he would not explain, and Esmay could not understand.

At least these older women understood that the vagaries of officers like Deparre should not be blamed on their subordinates, and that argument was futile. More difficult were the sergeant and corporal who had spotted civilian men they fancied, and wheedled endlessly for a chance to chat with them.

She and Barin were separated even at meals, because the commander felt that the women should dine at a different table. They could chat—cautiously—in the half-hour twice daily that Commander Deparre felt necessary for the officers to sustain their professional associations and exclusivity from the enlisted, who had the same half-hours to chat without an officer present. Lucky enlisted, Esmay thought, because they at least didn’t have to have Deparre around, while she did . . . and the commander felt it his duty to have a little chat with each of “his” officers at least once a day.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Barin said. “Even this voyage has to end sometime . . .” It hadn’t been that many days, but it felt like years.

“With our luck, we’ll end up on the same ship as Commander Deparre for the rest of our careers.”

“No . . . he’ll go back to his accounting, I’m sure.”

“I hope so.”