Change of Command

Chapter Four

Excet Colony 24 looked, from space, like a paradise, sapphire seas and emerald forests, tawny drylands and olive savannas, all spatched and streaked with white water-vapor clouds. It had been seeded two hundred years before with the usual package of invader species, and closely monitored thereafter. Originally, colonization had been planned for a century later, when the introduced ecosystem would be more stable, but oxygen levels had never fallen dangerously low; the original system here had already been oxy-carbon.

The colony spaceport, in contrast, was a dirty little dump, in Cecelia’s view. Her chartered yacht had its own shuttle, whose wide viewscreen gave a clear view of the mess. Discarded cargo containers lay scattered near either end of the runway. The single runway. The spaceport buildings were ugly piles, too much like the Patchcock port. The white plumes of cement factories, the lime kilns where limestone and shale were converted to cement for construction, lay gently on a background of rich green forest in the near distance.

Customs consisted of a harried young woman with a nearly impenetrable accent, whose only concern was whether the new arrivals had colony shares.

“I don’t need a colony share,” Cecelia said. “I’m not staying; I’m just here to visit—”

The young woman glared, took Cecelia’s IDs, and inserted them in a machine. After a moment, she turned to give Cecelia a long look.

“Yer not stain.”

“I’m not staying, no. I’m here to visit my nephew and his wife. Ronald Vandormer.”

“Aow! Rownnie! Whyntcha sai so?”

“I tried,” Cecelia said.

“He’s at th’ office, about naow,” the woman said. “Ya kin gover.” She pointed out the “office,” a two-story cube of concrete.

Like most colonies, this one had been given a head start by its investors: the spaceport town had a small grid of paved streets and a larger grid of gravelled ones. The first hundred or so buildings had been put up of substantial materials—in this case concrete blocks. Beyond that were rickety constructions that Cecelia could only call shacks—crudely built of raw timber. Cecelia noticed, as she walked along, the number of people who were carrying things by hand . . . the absence of hand trucks, let alone vehicles.

The two-story building had a low wall enclosing a courtyard to one side, where a group of men were working on some piece of machinery she didn’t understand. She started to speak up and ask them about Ronnie, when one of the faces in the group suddenly looked familiar. Ronnie? She blinked in the brilliant sunlight, and it still was . . . in face. The glossy young aristocrat, who had always been just one hair from a dandy—and that only because his friend George had been born with creases and a shine, as they said—stood there in tan workshirt and pants, with smears of mud or grease on both. She couldn’t even tell what color his boots had been. But it was Ronnie—as handsome as ever, or more so.

Before she could call out, he turned and went inside; the men went back to doing something with machinery and wood. She followed him inside, to a rough-walled room with a concrete floor, and found him jotting something down on a deskcomp.

“Ronnie—”

He looked up, then his eyes widened. “Aunt Cecelia!”

“I sent word,” Cecelia said.

“We never got it.” He shrugged. “It’s probably in the batch somewhere but everyone’s been too busy . . .” He looked out the window at the bustle in the courtyard.

“It looks like a lot of work,” Cecelia said, eyeing him. This was not a change she had ever expected to see in Ronnie. And why hadn’t he said anything about Bunny’s death? Or asked about Brun?

“It is. It’s not something I thought I’d ever be doing, to tell you the truth.”

“Who’s your colony governor?”

“Er . . . I am, now that Misktov ran off.”

“Ran off?”

“Yes . . . it’s easy enough. He stowed away on an outbound flight with most of our negotiable resources.”

“But—but that’s criminal.”

“So it is,” Ronnie said. “But I didn’t see any police force around to stop him, and we don’t have ansible access down here. No money, no communications.”

“Oh.” Perhaps he didn’t know about Bunny’s assassination. Cecelia took another look around the room. Not an office, exactly—she saw furniture she recognized from Raffa’s mother’s summer cottage. A dining room table covered with data cubes and books. A sofa piled with more books and sheets of plastic and paper that looked like construction drawings. Over everything, a layer of gritty gray dust and ash.

“But we’re doing well, considering,” Ronnie said, before she could organize her thoughts. “It’s just . . . there’s a lot I didn’t know. Don’t know yet. You know, Aunt Cecelia, no matter how many cubes you study, there’s always something . . .”

“For instance?”

“Well . . . the cement plants are working all right, and we’ve got plenty of sand and gravel, so we’re fine for unreinforced construction. But my cubes said unreinforced concrete is dangerous . . .”

“What does your colony engineering team say?”

“Engineering team? We haven’t one. I know, the prospectus says we do, but we don’t. Aunt Cece, ninety percent of our population are low-level workers . . . which makes sense . . . but these people are low-level workers in a high-level system. They’re used to a more advanced infrastructure. They know how to do their work in a world where everything’s already set up, not how to work from scratch. The farmers know how to grow crops in big fields, but they don’t know how to level them. The plumbers know how to connect pipes in standard modular buildings, but they don’t know how to set up a plumbing system from scratch. That’s what the engineering team is supposed to do, make the connection between standard designs and standard practices, and the conditions we have locally. But we don’t have one.”

“If it’s that bad, why don’t you leave?”

Ronnie looked stubborn. “We don’t want to leave, Aunt Cecelia; we want to make it work. We sank all our money in it—even the wedding presents—”

“Even your reserves?”

He flushed. “Not at first, but when Misktov ran off we had to do something. We could’ve bought ourselves out and run home like silly children, but . . . the colony needed help. So we blew the last on enough to keep the rest alive while we worked it out.”

This was a very different Ronnie from the spoiled boy she’d known. Not a hint of petulance or whine anywhere in his voice or manner—he’d been dumped into trouble, and he was going to handle it.

“How’s Raffa?” she asked.

“She’s fine . . . tired, though.” Ronnie grinned, but his eyes were worried. “She’s trying to get a school started, but it’s hard—the parents say they’re too busy, they need the children at home.”

“Don’t these colony groups include trained teachers?”

“On paper, yes.” Ronnie grimaced. “There’s a lot I didn’t know, in the old days. I thought every standard colony dropped with prefab housing, the five-year-contract engineering team, the education and medical backups that are on the contract.”

“And they don’t?”

“No—at least, right before Misktov ran off, while we still had the credit for it, I made some inquiries and found that many colonies are shorted. But they’re stuck on some planet, mostly uneducated people who haven’t a clue who to contact in the Colonial Office . . . no one ever knows. Even me—I sent messages out, but never got any back. We haven’t heard from our families in over a year, though we’ve scraped up enough to piggyback messages to them three times.”

“Um. Well, Ronnie, I may have added to your burdens, but—”

“Cecelia!” Raffa came through the door like a burst of spring breeze. “I’m so glad to see you! The only thing about this is that I miss my friends sometimes!”

The girl—no, young woman—looked healthy enough, and genuinely glad to see her. Cecelia braced herself for what she must do.

“Raffaele, Ronnie . . . have you heard about Bunny?”

“Bunny? No—what’s wrong?”

“He was assassinated several months ago, supposedly by allies of the men executed after Brun’s capture—”

“Wait—Brun was captured? By whom? Is she all right?”

How long had they been out of contact? Cecelia could hardly believe they didn’t know. She gave them a quick review of what had happened, ending with, “So you see, when I started thinking of a good home for the babies, I thought of you—I was sure you could find a home for them.”

“Brun’s babies?”

Now she’d done it. “Yes.”

“Of course I want them,” Raffa said, almost fiercely. Then with a glance at Ronnie. “We do, don’t we, Ron?”

“Of course,” Ronnie said, but he sounded tired again. “I don’t exactly know how, but we’ll manage.”

“I’ve brought along nursemaids, including one with two children of her own who wants to stay. And some money Miranda sent, for their education later.”

“If it’s enough to hire a teacher,” Raffa said, “we can start that school . . .”

Cecelia had no idea if it was enough, but she would pry the necessary out of Raffa and Ronnie’s parents if she had to. She would also, she thought, find out why incoming messages, including hers, weren’t getting through.

“Where are the babies?” Raffa said, looking around.

“Still in the shuttle,” Cecelia said. “I doubt I’d ever have gotten them past that . . . that person in the terminal.”

“Oh, Ganner . . . she was Misktov’s girlfriend, and he left her here, marooned her. She thought she was going to be the governor’s lady, and lord it over everyone, but here she is. She hates everybody.”

“Except handsome men,” Raffa said, with a touch of asperity. “Lady Cecelia, you should see how she fawns on Ronnie. I know he’s not susceptible, but it’s a little disgusting sometimes.”

“It’s handy when I want something,” Ronnie said. “Come on, let’s get those babies out of the shuttle. If I have babies crawling all over me, I’ll bet Ganner finds me less attractive.”

By the time she left again, Cecelia knew that more was wrong with Excet-24 than one scoundrelly governor and a missing engineering team. She’d never paid much attention to colony worlds—why choose to live uncomfortably if you didn’t have to?—or colonial policy, but surely it hadn’t been intended to work like this. The nursemaids had been understandably wide-eyed at the conditions on the planet, and Cecelia had had some difficulty persuading them to stay until she returned.

“I’ll find out why messages aren’t getting through,” she promised Ronnie. “And find you some of the experts you need. You’ve done wonderfully—” She didn’t really believe that, but the young couple had tried, and weren’t whining, and that counted for a lot in her private grade-book. “It’ll be a few months, you understand—”

“That’s what they all say,” Ronnie said, but with no sting in it.

All the way to Sirialis, Miranda had planned what to do. If she tried to call on her family’s expertise, Harlis might find out, and would certainly do his best to stop her. She had to assume he’d figure it out; she had to assume she had only a limited lead before he found some way of separating her from the data she needed to explore.

Bunny had teased her, at first, when she insisted on having her own archives, separate from the family, in machines not physically connected to anything but a solar power supply. Paranoia, he’d said, ran in the Meager family line. She pressed her lips together tightly, remembering that laugh, and her scornful reply . . . she had been so young, so sure of herself.

And so right. Not for nothing had her family been in information technology for centuries. She had insisted; Bunny had given in; her personal and very complete archives lay not at the big house—though she kept a blind copy there, as a decoy—but in a remote hunting lodge. Every hunting season—and in between, if they were in residence—she added another set of records, stripping the current logs.

It would have been easier if she could have had Kevil’s help, but she could do it herself, given enough time. That was the trick, finding enough time.

The staff at Sirialis met her with the sympathy and respect she’d expected. Harlis might have local spies and supporters, but they wouldn’t show themselves yet. She spent the first few days as anyone would expect, taking sympathy calls and answering what questions she could about the future of their world.

The big house felt empty, even with all the servants in it . . . knowing Bunny would never come down those stairs, never wander out of that library, never sit at the head of the long table. She missed him almost as much in the stables and kennels; although she had ridden to hounds every season, foxhunting had never been her favorite sport; she had done it because Bunny enjoyed it so, and enjoyed her company.

That first evening, alone in the big room she had once shared, her mind wandered back to Cecelia’s visit. Where had she taken the twins? She had seemed to know exactly where she was going . . . well, that was Cecelia, and always had been, though it usually involved a horse.

But before the twins, what was it she’d said? About Bunny’s killers, about some plot—Miranda struggled to remember, past the confusion of the last weeks, the urgency of her concern about the estate, and the travel-induced headache. Finally she shrugged, and gave up for the night.

The name didn’t come to her until she was at the hunting lodge far north of the main house, where the snow still lay deep on the shadowed sides of the mountains. She’d made copies of all the critical data—astonishing herself with the number of cubes it took to hold it all—and then packed it neatly into her carryall for the flight back. It was too late that day—she didn’t want to risk a night flight, as tired as she was—so she’d heated up one of the frozen lumps of soup, and settled in by the fireplace with a mug of soup and another of cocoa. She felt—not smug, exactly, but pleased with herself. She had the backups, which she could work on at the main house, and her surveillance link showed no ships in the system. That meant Harlis could not possibly get there in time to discover her hiding place.

Her mind wandered off to the twins again, and from there to Cecelia, and then—as if a cube were playing—her memory handed her the first part of their conversation. Not the NewTex Militia—well, she’d been doubtful of that herself, though they were certainly capable of killing and maiming. But . . . Pedar Orregiemos?

Cecelia hadn’t mentioned it, and perhaps didn’t know it, but Pedar had once wanted to marry her. She hadn’t loved him; he was older than Bunny, and fussy pomposity had never attracted her—but he’d been convinced she married Bunny just for his money. He’d even said so, one afternoon in the rose garden. She hadn’t quite smacked his face, but she’d been tempted.

Pedar? Could it be? She couldn’t imagine him doing it himself, except perhaps with a smallsword—he had been quite a fencer in his day, and probably kept it up. And Cecelia might have misunderstood. What could be the reason? What could Pedar gain from killing Bunny, or having him killed?

She did not realize, until the handle snapped off the cocoa mug, just how agitated she was. Luckily the cocoa had cooled; she wiped up the mess, put the broken bits in the trash she’d take back to the main house, and tried to quiet the racing of her heart.

Pedar was, after all, a Rejuvenant—not merely someone who had had rejuvenations, as she and Bunny had had, but someone who felt threatened by those who hadn’t. She remembered six—no, seven, at least—eight years ago, an argument about Rejuvenants and Ageists at one of Kemtre’s parties, when Pedar had insisted very loudly that it would end in bloodshed. They will kill us out of envy, or we will kill them in self-defense, he’d said, and then some other men had hustled him away and sobered him up.

Would he have had Bunny killed for that? Was he one of a group who would have done it? And who else?

She tried to turn off these thoughts—she needed rest; she had a long flight the next morning, and a lot of work to do after it—but she lay long awake, tossing, her stomach roiled with anger.

The next day, back in the main house, she walked past the glass cases of antique weapons as she had done so often before, and paused. Bunny had fenced only because it was an expected social skill, keeping her company in the salle as she kept him company in the hunting field. But he had had a strange passion for old weapons, both blades and firearms.

It was a mixed collection, though displayed with all the organization possible: long blades in this case, short blades in that one, short-barrelled firearms here, long-barrelled ones there, glass-topped floor cabinets with helmets and breastplates and mailed gloves.

Miranda stopped in front of the wall-hung case of swords. The broadest blades below—the single broadsword, the two sabers, one straight and one curved slightly. Two schlagers, a rapier, five epees, four foils—the latter displayed in pairs, angled and opposing, their tips crossed.

On a whim, Miranda opened the case and took down the broadsword, turning its blade to the light to see the dappled pattern of refolded and beaten steel layers. When she rapped it with her knuckles, it rang a little, and its edge was still sharp enough to cut.

She wished she knew its history. Bunny had suspected it of being an ancient reproduction from the early space era, not a genuine prespace relic. But when they’d done a forensic scan on it, there’d been human blood in the runes incising the blade. Only a trace, and the scans weren’t able to date it closer than a couple of hundred years, but . . . she’d always wondered.

The sabers were easier to date. One of them had been a presentation sword made for one of Bunny’s ancestors as a fiftieth wedding anniversary present, with a dated inscription. It had never been used for anything but ceremony—carried upright in processions, or laid along the top of the coffin at funerals. The other had been an officer’s saber—also ceremonial, she assumed, inherited over the blanket from a family she’d never heard of, some two hundred years before.

The schlagers at least were old—one was certainly 20th Century old reckoning—but while she had drilled with such blades, they hadn’t ever warmed her interest. The rapier, so seemingly similar, did. This one, with a graceful swept hilt, balanced easily when she lifted it out, and swung it around.

She put it back almost guiltily. What was she thinking? Nothing, she told herself. Nothing at all. She closed the case and locked it. These were priceless antiques, not toys; if she wanted to practice, the salle held modern weapons and equipment far better suited for her sport.

And she had no time. She headed back to the big square office that had been Bunny’s estate office, and was now her workplace as she tried to figure out just what Harlis had done.

Luci Suiza had expected the furor over her cousin Esmay’s engagement to an outlander to dispel interest in her own plans, but somehow the discussion at the dinner table spilled over onto her. She had a mouthful of corn soup when Papa Stefan opened with a volley of complaints about the quarterly accounts.

“—And that ridiculous expense for equipment we don’t need, to develop a foreign market we’ve done very well without for centuries. We’re not that sort of people, is what I say. Luci! You can’t tell me this was all Esmaya’s idea!”

Luci swallowed quickly, burning her throat on the soup, but managed not to choke. “No, Papa Stefan. But we were talking about the future of her herd, and I had researched—”

“Researched!” Papa Stefan in full huff would interrupt even generals; unmarried girls didn’t have a chance. “You don’t know what research is. You were seduced by all those outlander magazines you read. If my mother were still alive—”

Luci found that she had inherited the gene for interruption, surprising herself. “She’s not. Esmay’s the Landbride, and she approves. The outlanders need our stocks’ genetic input, and we need theirs.”

“You interrupted me!” Papa Stefan did not quite roar, but he looked as if he might.

“You interrupted me first,” Luci said. She heard the shocked mutters of her parents, but ignored them in the excitement of attack. “And the genetic equipment was my idea, and is my responsibility, and I did check with the Landbride, who approved the expenses, which she thoroughly understood.”

“Not like a Landbride at all,” Papa Stefan growled. “A Landbride should conserve resources, not waste them on crackpot schemes—”

“Like the Barley River irrigation project?” That was Sanni, who could never resist a dig about Papa Stefan’s one big mistake. As a young man, he’d been convinced that irrigation of dry coastal land with water from the Barley would be practical and profitable. His mother, then only newly Landbride, had allowed him enough money to unbalance the estancia budget for a decade.

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Papa Stefan said.

“It’s not,” Luci said. “My idea is on schedule and on budget, and in fact it’s costing us less than the Landbride approved, because I got support from other breeders.”

“Which is another thing,” Papa Stefan said, ignoring the part about on budget and on schedule. “You went outside the family to bring in outsiders—”

“Our allies for generations,” Luci said. “After all, I’m marrying Phil—” It had slipped out, not at the moment she’d planned.

“Philip? Philip who?”

“Philip Vicarios,” Sanni said quietly; her quick glance admonished Luci. Papa Stefan stared a moment, then turned to look at Casimir and Berthold.

“She’s marrying a Vicarios?”

Luci had not really doubted what Esmay told her, but now a chill sank through her as she saw, in their faces, additional confirmation.

Berthold shrugged. “She has Esmay’s approval, I understand.”

“And you, Casi?”

Casimir nodded. “The family is our ally. Paul is my friend—”

“Does she know—?”

“Children, you may be excused,” Sanni interrupted. The younger cousins, eyes already wide, scrambled away from the table with only the briefest duck of the head to the elders. Luci’s younger brother gave her a look that meant she would be ambushed later and expected to Tell All. When the door closed behind them all, Luci spoke into the silence.

“I know. Esmaya told me. She said it didn’t matter, that she held no grudge against the family, and if Philip was kind—”

“Kind! Marriage is not about kindness!” Papa Stefan had turned an ugly red.

“It is,” Sanni said. “Not that you would know—”

“Quiet!” Casimir rarely interrupted at these family fights, but this time he did, with all the power of command built over years of active service. “Too much is at stake here to rehash old battles or waste energy and patience yelling at each other. As the Landbride’s Trustee, I know that she did in fact approve Luci’s desire to marry Philip Vicarios. She did in fact approve Luci’s expenditure of equipment to allow us to export genestock, and her reasons were sound enough to convince me, and the other Trustees, that this was a good idea. This is not, after all, the real issue. The real issue is, the Landbride wants to marry an outlander, and continue to live offplanet, and the other landholders would like to use this as an excuse to reduce our influence in the Guild. I see no chance of changing Esmay’s mind—for all the reasons we know about—so I suggest we turn our attention to minimizing the damage to the Suiza Family, and quit inflicting more on ourselves.”

Luci had not expected her uncle Casimir to be so sensible. To her surprise, Papa Stefan went back to his meal, stabbing the sliced cattlelope as if it were an enemy, but silent. Sanni sipped the rest of her soup in thoughtful silence; Berthold helped himself to a pile of potatoes in red sauce, and began eating steadily. Casimir looked at Luci.

“Have you any more bombshells to drop, Luci?”

“No, Uncle.”

“Did Esmaya mention anything to you about passing on the Landbride duties?”

Luci felt herself going hot. “She did . . . in a way . . . but—”

“She spoke of you.” It was not a question. Casimir tented his hands and looked over them at her. “Did you agree?”

“I told her it was too soon,” Luci said. “I’m only—”

“The age that two Landbrides were invested, in the old days. A year older, in fact, than Silvia.” Luci had never heard of Silvia, though she had, like all the children, memorized a hundred years of Landbrides Suiza. “It may be that having her designate you Landbride-to-be would help—that plus your marriage to a Vicarios would prove that the Suizas were not involved in interstellar politics.”