Hunting Party

Chapter Eleven

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Ronnie said.

“Do you really want to spend another day bouncing around on that horse?” asked George. Of course he didn’t; that was the point. It had been bad enough before George got into the hunt, and worse afterwards. But sneaking off like this? George went on, “You look ridiculous—”

“I do not.” Ronnie glared at his friend. George had not fallen off in his first time in the field, and it had gone to his head. He seemed to think a successful maiden appearance made up for later runaways, buckings off, and an inability to keep up with the field on a slow day. “I ride better than you—”

“And not nearly so well as your aged aunt or that demon captain of hers. Honestly, I had no idea the Regs went in for horse riding; I thought they spent all their time polishing weapons and doing drills.”

Ronnie snorted. “They do love drills, don’t they? At least down here Captain Serrano can’t interrupt our sleep.”

“No. That’s the purview of your aunt, waking us up before daylight to gobble a disgusting breakfast and clamber onto great clumsy, smelly animals. . . .”

Ronnie felt a perverse desire to insist that it wasn’t that bad, but Bubbles had already started laughing.

“And you did look so funny, lamb, when you were stuck in that hedge, all red-faced and blubbering.” She patted him on the shoulder as she clambered past him. He could see by the dome-light that Raffa was trying to smother her giggles and shush Bubbles.

“Fine.” Ronnie slid the canopy forward; the others were still giggling and stowing their supplies in the lockers. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t agreed to this, but how could he back out now? He called up the preflight checklist on the display and started down it. The computer would have done everything, of course, but he was not as careless as his aunt thought.

“Come on, Ron,” George said. “Get this thing off the ground.”

“Preflight,” Ronnie said. George should know that—or was he so involved with Bubbles that he’d lost the rest of his wits? George heaved a dramatic sigh, which Ronnie ignored. He worked his way down the rest of the preflight list in silence; as usual, everything seemed to be in order. Ronnie inserted the cube and checked the readout: it had accepted his course programming, and calculated fuel consumption based on satellite weather information. “Refuel once,” he said. “Anyone care if it’s Bandon or Calloo?”

A ragged chorus, which sounded louder for Bandon; Ronnie entered that with the touchpad, cast a glance back to make sure all the loose items were stowed, and pressed the green button. The engines caught, and the computer took over the final preflight power checks. At least he knew what the readouts meant, though he could not, from this point on, override the computer’s decisions. Not much like a Royal trainer; these civilian models would fly themselves, given the chance. He laid his hands lightly on the yoke anyway, and punched for manual takeoff. He felt the yoke quiver, and the computer displayed his options. If he stayed within these margins, he could have control—and within those, he could control one axis. For a moment it amused him—for a human to be allowed to fly the machine, he had to fly like a machine.

It would be practice, and he had always enjoyed flying. He flicked his fingers over the yoke studs—power, directional focus, attitude—and the computer agreed that he knew what he was doing. He didn’t know if the others noticed, but he had manual control until he chose to relinquish it, when the craft was at 5,000 meters and on course to Bandon.

“It’s dark outside,” Raffaele commented as the craft leveled. “There’s nothing but—” She peered back. “Nothing but the House lights. . . .”

“We had to leave before daylight,” George pointed out. “Or Ronnie’s aunt would have stopped us.”

Ronnie tried to see past the reflections on the canopy. Nothing but darkness. . . . He flicked off the interior lights, and looked harder. Nothing ahead but darkness, nothing to either side but darkness. He’d never seen anything quite so black in his life.

“It’ll be dawn soon,” he said. “And the computer doesn’t need daylight.” As it came out of his mouth he realized that they knew that—he was comforting himself. Darkness hid his blush. Behind him, ostentatious yawns indicated that the others would pretend to sleep. Someone turned on one of the tiny reading lights, a soft glow in the rear of the cabin; Ronnie left the main cabin lights off.

He found that he kept looking to the right, hoping to see some glimmer of dawn. Just when he had given up hope, and convinced himself that he would have to endure flying down a black drainpipe forever, a sullen glow lit the horizon, more feeling than color. Soon he was sure of it; a dim redness blotched with black—clouds, he realized—and then a curious fuzzy quality to the outside. Still dark, still impenetrable, but somehow seeming larger than it had. As the light strengthened, he saw the sea beneath, oddly brighter than the sky. Away toward sunrise it stretched, and the clouds hung over it in dark columns, their tops flushed pink now with the coming light.

Ronnie had never flown along a coast at sunrise; he had not imagined the impossible combinations of green and blue and purple, the piles of pink and gold, which clouds and sea and sunrise make. He looked down on the dark land slowly coming out of the dark haze of night, the shoreline edged with ruffles of colorless surf that would soon be silver and blue. His quick memory for maps told him they were almost a third of the way to Bandon; the computer would soon change their course away from sunrise, across the narrowing belt of land and out across the ocean to that cluster of islands. He hoped it would not change before he could see the sun lift out of the sea.

“There’s nothing down there at all,” Raffaele said, in a voice that began sleepy and ended worried. “Where are we?”

“This is the Bottleneck,” Bubbles said, yawning. “Gorgeous morning, especially since I don’t have to climb on a horse. Don’t worry, Raffa, we can’t get lost. The computer on this thing has a direct line to the navsats. If we went down, someone would be there in no time.”

“But somebody must live somewhere,” Raffa grumbled.

“On up the coast a bit there’s a settlement of wildlife biologists,” Bubbles said. “They’re to keep the stuff we don’t want out of the Hunt grounds.”

The sun came up and glittered on the surf just as he had imagined, and a few minutes later the computer swung them left, away from the coast, and across the forested Bottleneck. Bubbles served breakfast, pastries and fruit and hot coffee she’d filched from the kitchen before they left. Ronnie stretched, enjoying the comfort of baggy trousers, loose shirt, and low, soft-sided boots after the confines of hunting attire. By the time they’d eaten, they’d crossed the other coast and were headed across a blue wrinkled ocean toward the islands. Ronnie had nothing to do, so he turned his seat around and listened to the girls speculate on when Bunny would send someone after them.

“I hope it’s not Aunt Cece,” Ronnie said.

“He wouldn’t send her; she’s a guest,” Bubbles said airily. “It’ll probably be some boring mid-level administrator.”

“We could just tell your father,” Raffa said. “Once we get there, that is.”

Bubbles wrinkled her nose. “You don’t know how he is. He’ll lecture me. I’ll get mad. We’ll argue. And then I’ll have to make up, or he will, and that takes time I could be enjoying with you.”

Ronnie put the landing system on automatic when he thought they were in range of Bandon. It would contact the field, and bring them in without his intervention, though he hoped the computer would allow him a “manual” landing. When the com beeped, and the field-authorization light turned red, he assumed that the field wanted a voice-contact; it seemed a reasonable way to keep out unwanted guests. “Any special code words?” he asked Bubbles. She shook her head.

“No—just give the flitter number. It’s on the family list.”

“Bandon field,” Ronnie said. “Permission to land and refuel, number 002413.”

“Permission denied.” The flat, almost metallic voice conveyed no interest in negotiation. Ronnie stared at the computer display. He had never heard of a civilian field refusing permission to land and refuel.

He repeated his original call, and added that they were low on fuel.

“Permission denied,” the voice said again.

“Override that,” Bubbles said from behind him. “Put in ‘Landsman 78342’ and see what happens. That’s Father’s personal code.”

Ronnie poked at the screen, and hit the orange override button, but the voice repeated the same statement with the same mechanical lack of expression.

“Can we make Calloo from here?” asked George.

“Just barely,” Ronnie said, with a glance at the fuel readout. “And I don’t see why we should. This is Bunny’s flitter, and Bubbles just gave us the internal authorization number. If it won’t accept it, something’s wrong.”

“We don’t want to land if something’s wrong,” George said. Then, “What could be wrong? What’s on this island, anyway?” He turned to Bubbles.

She frowned thoughtfully. “Well . . . the landing field, maintenance station, and the family’s lodge—no resident staff, though—”

“There’s a lodge here, too?” Ronnie asked. “Then why did you tell me to program for Whitewings?”

“We wanted to be out of everyone’s reach. This is too close—it’s the first place they’d look.”

Ronnie looked out the canopy. Heavily wooded islands lay scattered in odd shapes across the sea. Bandon, the computer readout told him, was a half hour ahead. He could see its distinctive shape beyond the nearest island. Calloo, the northernmost of the chain, lay far to their right. “We ought to find out what’s wrong,” he said. “We’ll go on to Bandon and take a look.” They could still make Calloo, he thought, if they had to, and if they found out something important, Bunny might forgive their disappearance. With the vague notion that he was being careful, Ronnie let the flitter drop lower and skimmed just above the forest, following the contours with care, then made a low approach across the sea between that island and Bandon, edging past a smaller island not quite in his path between them. He did not look outside, concentrating instead on his instruments. If he dipped too low, the flitter’s automatic safety overrides would lower the plenum and convert it to an airboat. That could be most embarrassing.

George saw the danger first. “Look out!” he yelled. Ronnie looked back at him, wondering what kind of game they were playing back there; Raffa yelped, peering out the starboard side. Then he saw it, just before it struck, an odd shape trailing a line of orange smoke. The flitter jerked itself out of his control, bouncing up and sideways, and a good half of the readouts went red; something snarled angrily in its power section, a sound that spiralled up into a painful whine and then stopped abruptly.

Ronnie grabbed the controls back, felt the ominous mushiness, and went into the emergency landing sequence he had never expected to use once past his piloting exam. Would they make it to land? The airspeed readout, like all in that bank, was dead; the white beach and green trees ahead moved nearer too slowly. Behind him, no one spoke. George clambered forward, disturbing the flitter’s precarious balance, and dropped into the other forward seat.

“I think it was a signal rocket,” he said calmly, as if continuing a casual conversation. “All that red smoke . . .”

“She’s nose-heavy,” Ronnie grunted. “And the hydraulics are shot. Use that big foot on the floor, not your mouth.”

Whatever George did made no difference; the flitter sank toward the waves. “Brace up, you girls,” George said to the back seats; Raffa was the one who said, “Brace up yourself, Gee—we’re trying to get the raft out.”

Ronnie tried once more to pull the nose up, but the flitter shivered all over like a nervous dog. Flitters don’t stall, he remembered being told, but they crash all the same. It occurred to him that even if they made it to land, he might simply crash head-on into the lush forest. Could he maneuver at all? Altitude, then maneuver, he remembered. But he had no altitude. He tried; the flitter slewed sideways, but answered sluggishly. He could parallel the coastline and those trees. . . .

“George—there—those people—” Ronnie did not look; he had to keep the flitter in the air as long as he could. George leaned to see, then grunted, as if it were a marvel.

“Damn near naked,” he said. “But armed. . . . I think that’s the launcher he hit us with.”

Ronnie put all his strength into willing the flitter not to crash into a lump of trees nearer shore than the rest.

They were down, and not dead—at the moment, that was all he cared about. His hands ached; his ears rang; his whole body hurt. But they were alive, and out of the flitter—which now looked far too small to have held so many people and so much fear. Bubbles and Raffa, with far more gumption than he would have expected, had unloaded everything useful from the flitter. The survival raft and all its provisions, the scuffed but whole duffles.

“Never pays to buy cheap luggage,” George said, in the tone that had won him the nickname “Odious,” as he brushed the sand off his and hoisted it to his shoulder. “Come on, now, Ronnie—give the girls a hand, can’t you?”

Ronnie glared at him. He looked, the odious George, as he always did—fresh, creased, polished to a high gloss. Not a hair of his dark head ruffled, not a smudge. He looked like that on horseback, and even when he fell off he never looked rumpled or dirty. He looked like that on mornings after, and on hot afternoons on parade. It was unfair, and his brother officers had done all sorts of things to ruin that polish—but nothing worked. “Dip the odious George in shit,” some senior cadet had said their first year, “and not only wouldn’t it stink, it’d take a shine.”

Now, on the sandy beach after a flitter wreck, Ronnie thought he knew what he looked like. He said nothing, but picked up two of the remaining duffles, staggered a bit, then dropped them.

“What now?” asked George.

“The beacon,” Ronnie said, clambering onto the flitter. He wished he could remember how he’d gotten out of it. “We need to signal for a pickup, unless you plan to swim back to the mainland.”

“You gave it to me,” Bubbles said. She looked worried. “You don’t remember?”

He didn’t remember. He crouched on the flitter’s canopy, suddenly aware that he was not functioning in some important way. He looked around, blinking. The sea, the sand, the trees: he remembered that. They’d crashed the flitter, and whoever owned it would be furious. Who had crashed the flitter? They weren’t designed to crash easily and he and George were both good pilots. He looked at the flitter itself, at the large hole in the engine section, the scorchmarks black on the outer skin. “What happened?” he said, knowing it was a stupid question, though it was all that occurred to him.

“Damnation!” George’s voice, closer. “He’s concussed; he doesn’t know what’s happened or—c’mon, ladies, we’ve got to get him away from here.”

He heard Raffa ask why, and Bubbles remind George that injured people shouldn’t be moved until medical personnel arrived, but someone stronger than Raffa or Bubbles pulled him off the flitter and slung him over a muscular shoulder. That completed his collapse; he spewed the breakfast he’d eaten down George’s legs and knew nothing more for a time he could not measure.

Ronnie awoke lying on his back with the sun prying his eyelids apart and someone beating his head with a collection of spoons. At least that’s what it felt like. He had no desire to move, though he would have appreciated quiet, darkness, and a cool wet cloth on his forehead. A sympathetic murmur would have been nice too. Instead the only voices he recognized sounded angry and frightened.

“If my father knew—” That had to be Bubbles, pulling off her best daughter-of-greatness act.

“And what makes you think he doesn’t?” asked a man’s voice, in a tone that meant Bubbles was making no impression at all. Or the wrong one.

An instant’s pause, then, “What do you mean, he knows?”

Laughter with no humor in it, the kind of thing Ronnie had heard only a few times in his life; it frightened him then, and now.

“I don’t suppose he knows his daughter’s involved, no.” The man’s voice had some familiar tone that Ronnie felt he should know but could not quite recognize. “But something like this, as big as it is, on his favorite resort world: how could he not know?”

“Something like what?” That was Raffaele, Ronnie thought. A girl who believed that the facts would explain themselves.

Another man’s voice, this one quite different. “Oh, I ’spect you know, little lady.” Every hair on Ronnie’s body rose at that “little lady.” He wanted to leap up and knock that voice into the sea, but he could not move. “It’s a hunter’s paradise, isn’t it? And your dad, or maybe it’s her dad, is a famous sportsman, isn’t he? And the whole point of sport is you give the prey a chance, eh? Isn’t it? That makes it a challenge, see?”

The reiterated questions struck Ronnie as false, theatrical, like something from a storycube. Certain dialects did that, he thought.

“Manhunting,” the first voice said. “As you very well know, since you came here for that purpose.” Ronnie tried to process that: manhunting? Manhunts were for escaped criminals, or lost children.

“But it can go two ways, see?” the second voice interrupted. “Hunting predators it can always go two ways, and men are the most dangerous. There was a story once—”

“Everyone knows the story, Sid; be quiet.” The command in that first voice finally made the connection for Ronnie. It sounded like Captain Serrano. It sounded like Captain Serrano the time she had ordered him off her bridge, or the time he had overheard her talking to Aunt Cece about battle. He struggled to open his eyes and found himself blinking up at a dark unsmiling face. “Well,” the man said. “And what have we here, young man? Who are you?”

“Ronald Vertigern Boniface Lucien Carruthers,” he heard himself say, as if in one of the practice sessions in the squad. “Royal Aero-Space Stellar Service.” He looked around, now that he could see, and there was the odious George, looking remarkably tidy with a gag stuffed in his mouth and an angry expression on the rest of his face. Bubbles looked almost as angry; he wondered if she was going to come out of her usual wild-blonde disguise for the occasion. And Raffa—whom he hoped would someday be his Raffaele—had no expression at all. He had never seen her like that, and he hoped he never would again.

The dark face above his did not smile. “Royal ASS, eh? And you probably think that means something here.”

Ronnie had heard that version of his service’s initials before; he ignored it now, as beneath the notice of a wounded officer. “And you?” he asked, as he wondered which of his limbs still worked. “I have not the honor—”

A snort of contempt, and a growl from others he had not yet noticed. “That’s the truth, little boy soldier—you have not the honor indeed. You don’t know what honor is.”

From a little distance, he heard another mirthless chuckle. “Little peep plonks down in a flitter and bumps his poor little head, pukes out his guts, and thinks he has a right to say the H-word. . . .”

“Shut up, Kev. We don’t have time for your nonsense any more than his.” A jerk of the head indicated George. The dark eyes contemplated Ronnie. “But you—you’re going to give us the truth, Mister Ronald Vertigern Boniface Lucien Carruthers of the Royal Assholes. You didn’t learn to fly with that bunch of old ladies, boy: who are you really from?” Hard hands grabbed his ears and shook his head. He had thought it hurt before; now he knew it had merely been uncomfortable. He felt his eyes water, and hated the man for that. His stomach roiled, and he choked back another wave of nausea.

“I told you,” Bubbles said, before he could get any words out. “We’re from the Main Lodge; we wanted to get away from the fox hunting—”

“And try other game?” suggested another voice he could not see.

“And just play around,” Ronnie said. At the moment he didn’t care if he did die; his head might as well have a real axe in it as whatever was causing what he felt. He knew his voice sounded weak and querulous; he felt weak and querulous. “My aunt Cece—you wouldn’t know her—and that demon captain of hers wanted me to spend all day every day on a horse chasing some miserable little furry thing over fields of cold mud and fences designed to make horses fall down and dump their riders.” He took a breath; no one interrupted. “And we got tired of it,” he said, closing his eyes against the bright glare of the forest canopy. “We wanted to rest. We wanted to have fun. I asked Bubbles if there wasn’t some place on this miserable dirtball that wasn’t cold and muddy and full of horses, and she said let’s go to the islands.”

“Oblo?” The first voice seemed to be addressing someone else; Ronnie gave himself up to contemplation of his headache and the mystery of his stubbornly unhelpful arms and legs. He finally thought he felt something weighing him down, or tying him down, or something of that sort. External, not internal—he was sure he was wiggling his toes. For some reason, the discovery that he probably didn’t have a broken neck did not make him feel better.

“No weapons—not with them or on the flitter, ’cept a cateye. That’s standard survival gear on flitters, most worlds.” Oblo, if that was the speaker, had the same businesslike tone as the first voice. “Food and minor medical supplies in stuff they’d pulled out to take with them. All the IDs check out, as far as we can know without accessing a link. Flitter ID was still in the active comp, no sweat getting it out; it’s Lord Thornbuckle’s all right.”

“And the beacon?” asked the first voice.

“Back aboard, sir, same’s you said. Tough to make it look like it hadn’t ever been out, though. On the other hand, maybe they’ll accept all that cracked casing as why it doesn’t work. Did my best.”

“I’m sure you did, Oblo.”

Ronnie opened his eyes again, to find the dark face he remembered looking across him to someone else. “Why’d you put the beacon back?” he asked. “That’s stupid—we need rescue here.”

“You may need rescue,” the dark man said, “but we don’t need hunters tracking us by that thing.”

“You . . . shot us.” He was sure of it, though he saw no weapon that could have served.

“Yep. Thought you were the hunters, and we had a chance to drop you in the water. Not a bad job of work, the way you got that flitter to land.” The dark man hawked and spat juicily. “Wasted all the work on you, looks like now, and we’ve still got them to deal with. And’f they know about you, we’ve got even more trouble, if that’s possible.”

“Oh.” Ronnie could not think of anything to say, and looked at George—but George, gagged, could not argue for him.

“I’m sure my father doesn’t know,” Bubbles said, into the brief silence. Her blonde hair looked straggly, coming out of whatever she’d done to keep it in tousled curls. She raked it back with both hands, hooking it behind her ears, and started in again. “This is our special place, the kids’ place—even if he did something so horrible, he wouldn’t do it here.”

“Kids’ place?”

“We camped here, every summer until I was fifteen or so. Some of the younger cousins still do.” Ronnie let her voice lull him back to sleep; he didn’t like being awake any more.

When he awoke again, the first thing he heard was George’s voice. Poor idiots he thought lazily. You should have left him gagged. Then he realized what he’d thought, and woke up the rest of the way, ashamed of himself. He was no longer tied (if he had been tied; he found his memory wobbly on that and other points) and when he tried to sit up, someone’s arm came behind him, lifting his shoulders. Even under the forest canopy, he could tell that some hours had passed; the bits of sun poking through came at a different angle. Someone had cleaned his face; he couldn’t smell the vomit anymore, and was grateful. Without a word, a brown hand came from behind him and offered a flask of water. He took it and drank.

They were all there: Bubbles, Raffa, and George, and the faces he remembered from that nightmarish time when he’d been flat on his back. Now, right side up, he recognized the hostile expressions as exhaustion, fear, uncertainty. He saw only eight or nine, but noises in the thick undergrowth suggested at least as many more.

“The point is, Petris,” George was saying, “that Ronnie and I are both commissioned officers of the Royal . . .” His voice trailed away as the snickers began, and he turned red.

“Son,” the dark man said, “the point really is that we know how to fight a war and you don’t. You’d get us killed; you damn near got yourself and your girls killed. I don’t care how many glittery stripes and pretty decorations you’ve got on your dress uniform, nor how bright your boots shine; you don’t know one useful thing about staying alive in this mess, and I do.”

George looked around for support, and caught Ronnie’s eye. “Good—you’re awake now. Tell him—we’re officers; we should be in charge.”

In charge? In charge of what? The dark man—Petris?—had said something about a manhunt, but he didn’t want to hunt anyone. He wanted to wait until he could think straight, and then fly back to the mainland. His mind gave a little jerk, like a toy train jumping to another track. They were being hunted, that was it, the men on the island. They were trying to fight back, to hunt the hunters. And George thought he and Ronnie should organize that? Ridiculous. Ronnie shrugged. “He’s right, George. We’re worse than the girls—they at least know what they don’t know. We keep thinking we do know.” He hardly knew what he was saying, over a dull pounding in his head, but that made the best sense he could. “You’re—Petris, sir? I agree with you.”

The dark man gave Ronnie the first friendly look he’d had. “Maybe that knock on the head put your brain right side up after all. Oblo, give this lad a ration bar.” The same dark hand that had passed him the water flask held out a greasy, gritty bar that Ronnie recognized as part of the flitter’s emergency supplies. He took it and nibbled the end. His body craved the salt/sweet flavor.

“Ronnie, you can’t let that—that person ignore your seniority.”

Ronnie grinned, and his head hardly hurt at all. “I’m not letting him ignore my seniority; I’m ignoring it. Remember what old Top Jenkins said about tooty young cadets?”

“We aren’t cadets any more.” George was still bristling; for the first time, Ronnie saw his father in him, the courtroom bully. “We’re officers.”

“We’re prisoners, if you want to be precise,” Ronnie said. “Come on, George . . . look at it this way. It’s an adventure.” Petris scowled, but George finally grinned. Ronnie tried to explain to Petris. “It’s a saying we have. . . . We started in boarding school together . . . and George would think these things up, or Buttons would, or Dill, and the rest of us would say how crazy it was, and how much trouble we’d get in, and whoever began it would say, ‘It’s an adventure.’”

George chuckled. “I remember who started it—Arthur whatsisname, remember? Had that streak of pale blue hair he claimed he’d inherited? Got us into some frightful row, and when we were called up said, ‘look at it this way, boys—it’s an adventure.’ And we all went in sniggering like fools and got twice as much punishment as usual.”

“I can see why,” Petris said, with emphasis that stopped the chuckle in Ronnie’s throat. “This is not an adventure. This is a war. The difference is that between whatever punishment you got, and death. Go in sniggering, as you put it, here—play the fool here—and you will be dead. Not charmingly, tidily, prettily dead, either.” His gaze encompassed George, who still looked entirely too dapper for the circumstances.

“I know that,” George said irritably.

“Then act like it.” Petris turned back to Ronnie. “And you, young man, if you’re finally getting sense, get enough to live through this and grow up.” He glanced sideways at the girls, but said nothing to them directly. Did he think women were nonentities? He must not have known Captain Heris.

He didn’t realize he’d said the name aloud until the other man reacted.

“Captain who?” Petris looked dangerous again. Ronnie choked down the rest of the ration bar.

“Serrano. Heris Serrano. She’s ex-Regular Space Service, like you.”

“So that’s where she ended up.” A feral gleam lightened his dark eye. Ronnie was startled; it was the first personal emotion he’d seen Petris exhibit. Petris grinned; it was not a nice grin. “She did have a comedown, after all.”

“A comedown?”

“To play captain of a rich lady’s yacht. Serves her right.”

“What for?” asked George. Ronnie was glad; he too wanted to know, but he had already been chewed out for asking too many questions.

Petris glared at him. “None o’ your—”

“Tell them,” Oblo said. “Why not? You don’t want to protect her.”

Petris shook his head. “No. That’s right enough. But do you think these Royal-ass punks can understand it?”

“Might learn something,” Oblo said. Ronnie felt a tension between the two men, not quite conflict, and wondered what it could be.

“All right.” Petris wiped his mouth with his hand, and settled back, looking past them. “It started with the Cavinatto campaign, which is too new to have been in your studies, so don’t argue with me about it. Scuttlebutt says it was Admiral Lepescu who thought up the lousy plan; from what I know of him I wouldn’t doubt it. If our captain had followed his orders, most of us would’ve died, and it wouldn’t have accomplished a damn thing. It was a stupid plan, and a stupid order.”

“But—” George began; Petris glared him down.

“Do you want the gag again? Then be quiet. I know what you think—officers that refuse orders are traitors and should be shot—right?”

George nodded and shrugged at the same time, trying not to offend. Ronnie almost laughed aloud—but not when he saw Petris’s face.

“That’s what the rules say,” Petris went on. “No matter how stupid, how bloody, or how unnecessary, officers obey their seniors and enlisted obey officers. Mostly they do, and mostly it works, because when you’re not in combat, a stupid order won’t kill you. Usually. But then there’s combat. You expect to die someday—it’s not a safe profession, after all—” Behind Petris, the others chuckled, but he ignored them. “But what you hope for is that your death will mean something—you’ll be expended, as the saying is, in some action that accomplishes something more than just turning you into a bloody mess.” He was silent after that so long that George stirred and opened his mouth; Ronnie waved at him, hoping he would keep quiet. Finally Petris looked at both of them and started speaking again.

“It’s not that anyone doubted Serrano’s courage, you know. She’d been in action before; she had a couple of decorations you don’t get for just sitting by a console and pushing the right buttons. No—what she did, refusing a stupid order that would kill a lot of people without accomplishing any objective, that was damn brave, and we all knew it. She was risking her career, maybe her life. When it was over, and she faced the inquiry on it, she didn’t try to spread the blame—she took it just the way you’d expect—would have expected—from knowing her before. I’d been with her on three different ships; I knew—I thought I knew—what she was. She was facing a court-martial, dishonorable discharge, maybe prison time or execution, if she couldn’t prove that Admiral Lepescu’s order was not only stupid but illegal. I was scared for her; I knew she had friends in high places, but not that high, and it’s damned hard to prove an admiral is giving bad orders just because he likes to see bloodshed.”

He paused again, and drank two long swallows from his flask. “That was the Serrano I thought I knew—the woman who would risk that.” His voice slowed, pronouncing every word as if it hurt his mouth. “Not the woman who would take the chance to resign her commission before the court and lay the blame on her crew. Leave us to face court-martial, and conviction, and this—this sentence.” His wave included the place, the people, the situation. “She didn’t come to our trial; she didn’t offer any testimony, any written support, nothing. She dumped us, the very crew she’d supposedly risked her career to save. It didn’t make sense, unless her decision to avoid that engagement really was cowardice, or she saw it as a way to leave the Service. . . .”

Ronnie said nothing. He remembered his first sight of Captain Serrano, the rigidity with which she had held herself, like someone in great pain who will not admit it. He remembered the reaming out she’d given him, that time on the bridge, and what he’d heard her say to his aunt . . . scathing, both times, and he’d sworn to get his vengeance someday. She had held him captive, forced his attention, “tamed” him, as she’d put it. He had had to watch her take to riding, and hunting, as if she were born to it, while he loathed every hour on horseback; he had had to hear his aunt’s praise of her captain’s ability, and her scorn of him. That, too, he had sworn to avenge. Now was his chance, and it required nothing of him but silence.

He met George’s eyes. . . . He had told George, he remembered, what Serrano had said about her past. He had been angry, and he had eavesdropped without shame, and shared the gossip without shame. Now he felt the shame; he could feel his ears burning.

“It wasn’t that,” he heard himself saying. Petris looked at him, brows raised. “She didn’t know,” he said.

“How do you know?” asked Oblo, before Petris could.

“I—I heard her talking to my aunt,” Ronnie said. He dared not look at Raffa; she would be ashamed of him. “They told her—I suppose that admiral you mentioned—that if she stood trial, the crew would be tried with her, but if she resigned, no action would be taken against her subordinates.”

Petris snorted. “Likely! Of course she’d make up a good story for later; she wouldn’t want to admit she’d sold us—”

“I’m not sure,” Oblo said. “It could be. Think, Petris: which is more like our Serrano?”

“She’s not my Serrano!” Petris said furiously. For a moment, Ronnie thought he might attack Oblo. “Dammit, man—she could have—”

“Could have been tricked, same as us.” Oblo, Ronnie realized, had never wanted to believe Serrano guilty of treachery. He turned to Ronnie. “Of course, lad, she’s your aunt’s captain—you’d like her and defend her, I daresay. . . .”

“Like her!” That was George, unable to keep quiet any longer. “That—that puffed-up, arrogant, autocratic, bossy—! No one could like her. Do you know what she did to Ronnie? To Ronnie—on his own aunt’s ship? Slapped him in the face! Ordered him off the bridge, as if he were any stupid civilian! And me—she told me I was nothing but a popinjay, a pretty face with not the sense to find my left foot—”

“George,” said Ronnie, trying not to laugh. “George, never mind—”

“No, Ronnie.” George looked as regal as he could, which was almost funnier. “I’ve had enough of this. Captain Serrano may have been your aunt’s choice, but she was not mine. All those ridiculous emergency drills—I’ve never seen such a thing on a proper yacht. All that fussing about centers of mass, and alternative navigation computer checks, and whatnot. I’m not a bit surprised that woman got herself in trouble somewhere; she’s obsessed with rules and regulations. That sort always go bonkers sometime. She drove you—the least mischievous of our set—to eavesdrop on her conversations with your aunt—”

“Enough,” said Petris, and George stopped abruptly.

“Let’s hear, and briefly, from you, Ronnie. What precisely did you hear, and under what circumstances?”

Ronnie gathered his wits again. “Well . . . she had chewed me out, and waked us up three lateshifts running for drills. I wanted to get back at her—” Put that way, it sounded pretty childish; he realized now it had been. “So I patched into the audio in my aunt’s study.” He didn’t think he needed to tell Petris about the stink bomb, or its consequences. “She and my aunt talked a lot—mostly about books or music or art, sometimes about the ship or riding. But my aunt wanted to know about her time in the Service, why she resigned. I could tell the captain didn’t want to answer, but my aunt can be . . . persuasive. So that’s what she said, what I told you before. She was offered a chance to resign her commission rather than face a court-martial, and was promised that if she resigned no action would be taken against any of her crew. Otherwise, she was told, her crew would also be charged, and it was more than likely they’d all be condemned. She . . . cried, Petris. I don’t think she cries often.”

The man’s face was closed, tight as a fist; Ronnie wondered what he was thinking. Oblo spoke first.

“That’s our Serrano, Petris. She didn’t know. She did it for us—they probably wouldn’t let her come back and explain—”

“Yes,” Ronnie put in. “She said that—she had to resign, right then, in that office, and not return to the ship. She said that was the worst of it, that someone might think she’d abandoned her crew, but at least they’d be safe.”

“That . . . miserable excuse for an admiral . . .” Petris breathed. Ronnie sensed anger too deep for any common expletives, even in one so accomplished. “He might have done that. He might think it was funny.”

“Nah,” said Sid. Ronnie recognized the nasty voice that had raised the hairs on his arms earlier. “I don’t believe that. It’s the captain, like you told me at first. Why’d she resign if she wasn’t up to something, eh? Stands to reason she has friends to cover for her.”

“You weren’t in her crew,” Oblo said. “You got no right to judge.” He looked at Ronnie. “You are telling the truth.” It was not so much a statement, as a threat.

Ronnie swallowed before he could answer. “I overheard what I told you—and I told George. I hated her; I hoped to find some way to get back at her. But . . .” His voice trailed away.

“But you couldn’t quite let us believe the lie, eh?” said Petris. He smiled, the first genuine friendly smile Ronnie had seen on his face. “Well, son, for a Royal ASS peep, you’ve got surprising ethics.” He sighed, and stretched. “And what would you want to bet,” he asked the others, “that Admiral Lepescu planned to let her know later what he’d done? When it was too late; when it would drive her to something he could use. . . .”

“Does he know she’s here?” Ronnie asked, surprising himself. “Could he have known who hired her, where she was going?”

“Lepescu? He could know which fork she ate with, if he wanted to.”