Rules of Engagement

Chapter Eleven

Lord Thornbuckle, Speaker of the Table of Ministers and the Grand Council of the Familias Regnant, successor to the abdicated king, had spent the morning working on the new Regular Space Service budget proposal with his friend—now the Grand Council’s legal advisor—Kevil Starbridge Mahoney. All morning a succession of ministers and accountants had bombarded them with inconvenient facts that cluttered what should have been—Lord Thornbuckle thought—a fairly simple matter of financing replacements for the ships lost at Xavier. They had decided to lunch privately, in the small green dining room with its view of the circular pond in which long-finned fish swam lazily, in the hope that the peaceful spring garden would restore their equanimity. A spicy soup and slices of lemon—and-garlic roasted chicken had helped, and now they toyed with salad of mixed spring greens, putting off the inevitable return to columns of numbers.

“Heard from Brun lately?” Kevil asked, after reporting on his son George, now in law school.

“Not for several weeks,” Thornbuckle said. “I expect she’s in jumpspace somewhere; she wanted to visit Cecelia’s stud before coming home for the hunt opening day.”

“You don’t worry?”

“Of course I worry. But what can I do about it? If she doesn’t show up soon, I’ll put someone on her tail—the problem is that as soon as I do, the newsflash shooters will know where to look, and the real sharks follow the bait.”

Kevil nodded. They had both been targets of political and private violence, as well as intrusive newsflash stories. “You could always use Fleet resources,” he suggested, not for the first time.

“I could—except that after Copper Mountain I’m not at all sure it’s safe to do so. First she’s nearly killed right on the base—they still haven’t figured out who was shooting at her—and then the heroic Lieutenant Suiza takes it upon herself to question Brun’s morality.”

Kevil held his silence but one eyebrow went up. Thornbuckle glared at him.

“I know—you think she’s—”

“I didn’t say a word,” Kevil said. “But there are two sides or more to any quarrel.”

“It was unprofessional—”

“Yes. No doubt about that. But if Brun were not your daughter, I think you would find it more understandable.”

Thornbuckle sighed. “Perhaps. She can be . . . provocative. But still—”

“But still you’re annoyed because Lieutenant Suiza wasn’t more tactful. I sympathize. In the meantime—”

The knock on the door interrupted him; he turned to look. Normally, no one disturbed a private meal here, and that knock had a tempo that alerted them both.

Poisson, the most senior of the private secretaries attached to Lord Thornbuckle’s official position, followed on that knock without waiting. Unusual—and more unusual was his face, pale and set as if carved from stone.

“What is it?” asked Thornbuckle. His gaze fixed on the package Poisson carried, the yellow and green stripes familiar from the largest of the commercial express-mail companies, Hymail.

“Milord—milord—” Poisson was never at a loss for words; even when Kemtre abdicated, he had been suavely capable from the first moments. But now, the package he held out quivered from the tremor in his hands.

Thornbuckle felt an all-too-familiar chill as the food he had just eaten turned to a cold lump in his belly. In the months of his Speakership, he had faced crisis after crisis, but none of them had arrived in a Hymail Express package. Still, if Poisson was reacting like this, it must be serious. He reached out for the package, but had to almost pry it from Poisson’s grip.

“You opened it,” he said.

“With the others that came in, yes, milord. I had no idea—”

Thornbuckle reached into the package and pulled out a sheaf of flatpics; a data cube rolled out when he shook the package upside down. He glanced at the first of the flatpics and time stopped.

In a distant way, he was aware of the way the other flatpics slid out of his grasp, and fell slowly—so slowly—turning and wavering in the air on their way from his hand to the floor. He was aware of Poisson with his hand still extended, of Kevil across the table, of the beat of his own pulse, that had stumbled and then begun to race.

But all he could see, really see, was Brun’s face staring into his with an expression of such terror and misery that he could not draw breath.

“Bunny . . . ?” That was Kevil.

Thornbuckle shook his head, clamping his jaw shut on the cry he wanted to give. He closed his eyes, trying to replace the pictured face with one of Brun happy, laughing, but—in his mind’s eye, her haunted frightened gaze met his.

He didn’t have to look at the rest. He knew what had happened, without going on.

He had to look. He had to know, and then act. Without a word, he passed the first flatpic to Kevil, and leaned over to pick up the rest. They had landed in a scattered heap, and before his hands—steady, he noted with surprise—could gather them together a half-dozen images had seared his eyes: Brun naked, bound to a bunk, a raw wound on her leg where her contraceptive implant had been. Brun in her custom protective suit, with a gag in her mouth, being held by gloved hands. Brun’s face again, unconscious and slack, with some kind of instrument in her mouth. Brun . . . he put the stack down, and looked across at Kevil.

“My God, Bunny!” Kevil’s face was as white as his own must be.

“Get us a cube reader,” Thornbuckle said to Poisson, surprised that he could speak at all past the rapidly enlarging lump in his throat.

“Yes, milord. I’m—”

“Just do it,” Thornbuckle said, cutting off whatever Poisson had been planning to say. “And get this cleared away.” The very smell of the food on the table nauseated him. As Poisson left, he retrieved the flatpic Kevil had, and turned the whole stack carefully upside down. Two of the serving staff came and cleared the table, eyeing them worriedly but saying nothing. They had just gone out when Poisson returned with a cube reader and screen.

“Here it is, milord.”

“Stay.” Poisson paused on his way back out.

“Are you sure?” Kevil asked.

“The damage is done,” Thornbuckle said. “We’ll need at least one of the secretaries to handle communications. But first, we need to see what we’re up against.” He did not offer Kevil the other flatpics.

The image on the cube reader’s screen wavered, as if it were a copy of a badly recorded original, but it was clear enough to see Brun, and the heavily accented voice on the audio—a man’s voice—was just understandable. Thornbuckle tried to fix his mind on the words, but time and again he lost track of the man’s speech, falling into his daughter’s anguish.

When it was done, no one spoke. Thornbuckle struggled with tears; he could hear the other men breathing harshly as well. Finally—he could not have said how long after—he looked up to meet their gaze. For the first time in his experience, Kevil had nothing to say; he shook his head mutely. Poisson was the first to speak.

“Milord—will want to contact the Admiralty.”

“Yes.” A rough croak, all he could make. Brun, Brun . . . that golden loveliness, that quick intelligence, that laughter . . . reduced to the shambling, mute misery of that recording. It could not be . . . yet, though recordings could be faked, he knew in his heart that this one had not been. “The Admiralty, by all means. We must find her. I’ll go—get transport.” He knew as he said it how impossible that could be. In Familias space alone, there were hundreds of worlds, thousands perhaps—he had never actually counted—where someone might be lost forever. Poisson bowed and went out. He had not told the man to be discreet—but Poisson had been born discreet.

“We will find her,” Kevil said, the rich trained voice loaded with the overtones that had moved courtrooms. “We must—”

“And if we don’t?” Thornbuckle felt his control wavering, and pushed himself up out of the chair. If he stood, if he walked, if he acted, perhaps he would not collapse in an agony that could not help Brun. “What am I going to tell Miranda?”

“For now, nothing,” Kevil said. “It might still be a fake—”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No. But I want someone expert with image enhancement to work on it before you tell her.”

“Look at those,” Thornbuckle said, gesturing at the pile of flatpics on the table. He stared out into the green and gold garden, the water dimpling as a breeze swept across it. Behind him, he heard Kevil’s breath catch, and catch again. Then the chair moved, and he felt more than heard Kevil come up behind him.

“We will get her back,” Kevil said, this time with no courtroom overtones. It was as if the rock itself had spoken. Not for the first time, Thornbuckle was aware of the depth of character that lay behind Kevil’s easy, practiced manner. “Do you want me to concentrate on the search, or the administration?”

“I have to go,” Thornbuckle said.

“Then I’ll work with—whom do you want to act as Speaker while you’re gone?”

“Could you?”

“I doubt it, not without starting a row. Your best bet would be a Cavendish, a de Marktos, or a Barraclough. I can certainly stay as legal advisor, and hold the carnage to a minimum. But you’re the only one everyone trusts right now. Almost everyone.”

“Your transportation is here, sir.” Poisson again.

“I’ll come with you this far,” Kevil said. It was not a question.

“Thank you.” Thornbuckle did not entirely trust his voice. “I’ll . . . just wash up, I think.” He gathered up the flatpics and the data cube, stuffing them back into the striped package. Kevil nodded and went on toward the side entrance.

Thornbuckle looked at his face in the mirror after splashing cold water on it. He looked . . . surprisingly normal. Pale, tired, angry . . . well, that he was. After the shock, the pain, came the anger . . . deep, and burning hotter every moment. Without his quite realizing how, it spread from the thugs who had perpetrated this most recent abomination to everyone who had contributed to it . . . the blaze spreading back down the trail Brun had taken, outlining in flame every person who had influenced her on that path.

When he left the dining room he was still in shock . . . by the time he arrived at the Admiralty, he was already beginning to think whom else to blame. Kevil, sitting beside him in the groundcar, said nothing to interfere with the inexorable progress of his rage.

At the Admiralty’s planetside headquarters, a commander awaited him . . . someone he remembered from the briefings of the past week, when the replacement of ships from the Xavier action had been under discussion. He realized with a shock that Poisson had not told them what this was about—and then that Poisson had been right.

He nodded to the commander, and as soon as they were inside said, “This is not about the budget; I need to speak to the highest ranking officer present.”

“Yes, sir; Admiral Glaslin is waiting. Secretary Poisson said it was confidential and urgent. But since I had met you before, he thought I should be your escort.”

Admiral Glaslin—tall and angular, with a heronlike droop of neck—met him in the anteroom and led them into the inner office. “Lord Thornbuckle—how may we help you?”

Thornbuckle threw the package on the desk. “You can find these . . . persons . . . and my daughter.”

“Sir?”

“Look inside,” Kevil said quietly. “Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter has been abducted and mutilated—”

The admiral’s mouth opened, then he shut it firmly and emptied the contents of the package onto his desk. At the sight of the flatpics, his face paled from its normal bronze to an unattractive mud color. “When did you get this?”

“Just now,” Thornbuckle said.

“It was delivered sixty-four minutes ago, at the palace, as part of the normal Hymail Express daily delivery; Secretary Poisson opened it because it was labelled Personal, and when he realized its nature, brought it immediately to Lord Thornbuckle.” Kevil paused in his recitation until the admiral nodded. “We were eating lunch, at the time. We have also viewed the data cube.”

“Same as the flatpics?”

“The data cube contains both a video record of the capture and an apparent surgical procedure, and audio threats against the government of the Familias Regnant.”

“Lord Thornbuckle?” The admiral looked at him.

“I—didn’t hear most of the words. Kevil will be correct, however. I want a copy, when you’ve made one—”

The admiral looked at Kevil. “Do you think that’s wise—?”

“Dammit, man! I’m the Speaker; I know what I need!”

“Certainly. But I must tell you—this will have to go to the Grand Admiral—”

“Of course. The sooner the better. You have to find her—” Thornbuckle forced himself to stand, to shake the admiral’s hand, to turn and walk out of the office, down the polished corridors, to the entrance where his car waited.

Twelve hours later, Thornbuckle woke from a fitful doze at the approach of the Grand Admiral’s aide.

“They’re here now, milord.”

The conference room, as secure as any room could be, was crammed with officers. Thornbuckle reminded himself that the blue shoulder-flashes were Intelligence, and the green were Technical. At one end of the long black table, Grand Admiral Savanche leaned forward, and at the other was the only empty seat in the room, waiting for the government’s senior civilian representative: himself.

He edged past the others to his place, and stood there facing Savanche.

“You’ve seen the recording,” Lord Thornbuckle said. “What I want to know is, what kind of force are you committing to getting her back?”

“There’s not a damn thing we can do,” Grand Admiral Savanche said. After a brief pause, he appended, “Sir.”

“There has to be.” Thornbuckle’s voice was flat, even, and unyielding.

“We can search,” Savanche said. “Which we’re doing. We have experts going through the intel database, trying to figure out who these people are, and thus where they might be.”

“You have to—”

“My Lord Thornbuckle. Your daughter has not made any official checkpoint since Podj, sixty-two days ago. We have already begun running the traffic records and sightings from all stations—but there are thousands, tens of thousands, of stations, just in Familias space alone. You have three orbiting your own Sirialis. With the staff we can release for this, that’s going to take weeks to months, just to sift the existing data.”

“That’s not good enough,” Thornbuckle said.

“With all due respect, my lord, given the recent incursions by the Compassionate Hand and the Bloodhorde, we dare not divert resources from our borders. They can certainly add surveillance for your daughter or her ship to their other duties; those orders have gone out. But it would be suicidal to put all Fleet on this single mission.”

“Tell me what else you have done,” Thornbuckle said.

“We know that she leased the yacht Jester from Allsystems; ten personnel identified as your personal militia boarded with her. Allsystems has provided us full identification profiles for that ship; if it shows up in Familias space, within range of any of our ships, we will know it. We know that she took it from Correlia to Podj without incident. Do you know where she was going next?”

“No.” He hated admitting that. “She—she said she wanted to visit several friends, and check into some of her investments, before coming to Sirialis. She had no itinerary; she said if she made one, the newsflash shooters would find her. She said she’d be at Sirialis for the opening day of the hunt.”

“So—you expected her to be out of contact.”

“Yes. She had mentioned visiting Lady Cecelia de Marktos on Rotterdam, and perhaps even Xavier’s system.”

“I see. So when would you have considered her overdue?”

“I was beginning to worry—I expected her to call in more often—”

“You see, milord, it’s a very large universe, and she is only one person. Our technicians are still working on the data cube and the flatpics, but so far nothing definite has shown up. The cube itself is one of the cheap brands sold in bulk through discount suppliers; the image has been through some sort of editing process which removed considerable data. The flatpics were taken with old technology, but the prints you have are simply copies of prints, not prints from negatives. That again reduced the data available for analysis.” Savanche cleared his throat. “Right now, there is nothing whatever to give us any idea what we’re dealing with, let alone where she is.”

“But they said they were the Nutaxis something or other—”

“New Texas Godfearing Militia, yes. Something we never heard of before; it sounds utterly ridiculous to me. We are making discreet inquiries, but until something comes along—some confirmatory evidence—this might as well be the act of lunatics.”

“And how long will that take?” Thornbuckle asked. “Don’t you realize what’s happening to her?”

Savanche sighed, the creases in his face deepening. “It will take as long as it takes . . . and yes, I understand your concern, and I can imagine—though I don’t want to—what may be happening to her.”

“Ensign Serrano, report to the Captain’s office. Ensign Serrano, report to the Captain’s office.” What had he done wrong this time? Lieutenant Garrick turned to look at him, and then jerked her thumb toward the hatch. Barin flicked the message-received button, and headed up to Command Deck.

When he knocked, Captain Escovar called him in at once. He was sitting behind his desk, holding what looked like a decoded hardcopy.

“Ensign, you knew the Speaker’s daughter, didn’t you?”

For an instant Barin could not think who this might be—what chairman, what daughter. Then he said, “Brun Meager, sir? Yes, sir, I did. I met her at Copper Mountain Schools, and we were in the escape and evasion course together.”

“Bad news,” Escovar said. “She was on her way back to her family home when her ship was attacked by raiders.”

Brun dead . . . Barin could not believe that vivid laughing girl was dead . . .

“She was alone?”

“Not quite. She’d chartered a small yacht, about like one of our couriers, and she had a small security detachment, her father’s private militia.” Escovar paused, as if to make sure that he was not interrupted again. Barin clamped his jaw. “The ship has not been found, but a message packet was sent to her father, via commercial postal service.” Another pause. “The Speaker’s daughter . . . was not killed. She was captured.”

Barin felt his jaw dropping and bit down hard on everything he felt.

“The raiders . . . wanted her family to know that they had taken her, and what they had done.” Escovar made a noise deep in his throat. “Barbarians, is what they are. Information has been forwarded to me; it should arrive shortly.” He looked at Barin, over the top of the hardcopy. “I called you in because we have no adequate professional assessment of this young woman’s temperament and abilities. I know she was referred to Copper Mountain by Admiral Vida Serrano, apparently on the advice of Commander Serrano. But her Schools files were wiped, when she left, as a security measure. If anything is to be done for her, we need to know what she herself is capable of, and what she is likely to do.”

Barin’s first impulse was to say that Brun would always come out on top—it was her nature to be lucky—but he had to base this on facts. He wasn’t going to make rash assumptions this time about what he knew and what he merely surmised.

“She’s very bright,” he began. “Learns in a flash. Quick in everything . . . impulsive, but her impulses are often right.”

“Often has a number attached?”

“No, sir . . . not without really thinking it over. In field problems, I’d say eighty percent right, but I don’t know how much of that was impulse. They didn’t let her do the big field exercise, for security reasons. She did have a problem . . .” How could he put this so that it wouldn’t hurt her reputation? “She was used to getting what she wanted,” he said finally. “With people—with relationships. She assumed it.”

“Um. What did she try with you? And I’m sorry if this is a sore subject, but we need to know.”

“Well . . . she found me attractive. Cute, I think was her word.” Like a puppy, he had thought at the time; it had annoyed him slightly even as he was attracted to her energy and intelligence. “She wanted more. I . . . didn’t.”

“Aware of the social problems?”

“No, sir. Not exactly.” How could he explain when he didn’t understand it himself? “Mostly . . . I’m . . . I was . . . close to Lieutenant Suiza.”

“Ah. I can see why. Exceptional officer by all accounts.”

Then he hadn’t heard. Barin felt a chill. He didn’t want to be the one to tell the captain about Esmay’s stupid explosion, or the quarrel they’d had.

“Brun is . . . like Esmay—Lieutenant Suiza—with the brakes off. They’re both smart, both brave, both strong, but Brun . . . when the danger’s over, she’s put it completely aside. Lieutenant Suiza will still be thinking it over. And Brun would take chances, just for the thrill of it. She was lucky, but she expected to be lucky.”

“Well, I know who I’d want on my ship,” Escovar said. Then he touched a button on his desk. “Ensign, what I’m going to tell you now is highly sensitive. We have some information on the young woman’s condition after capture, but that information must not—must not—spread. It will, I think, be obvious to you why, when I tell you about it. I am doing this because, in my judgement, you may be able to help us concoct a way to help her, if you have enough information. But I warn you—if I find out that you’ve slipped on this, I will personally remove your hide in strips, right before the court-martial. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Barin swallowed.

“All right. The raiders left behind a vid they made of her after the capture. It’s one of the ugliest things I’ve ever watched, and I’ve been in combat and seen good friends blown to bits. It is clear from this vid that the raiders intend to take her to one of their home planets and keep her there as breeding stock—”

“What!” That got out past his guard; he clamped his teeth together again. He’d thought of rape; he’d thought of ransom; he’d thought of political pressure, but certainly not that.

“Yes. And they’ve mutilated her: they’ve done surgery and destroyed her vocal cords.” He paused; Barin said nothing, trying not to think of voluble Brun silent, unable to speak. Rage rose in him. “We do not at this time know where she is; we do not know if she is still alive or not—though we suspect she is. We do not know her physical condition at any time subsequent to the vid left by the raiders. It may be impossible to find her.”

Barin wanted to argue, to insist that they must—but he knew better. One person—even Brun, even the Speaker’s daughter—was not enough reason to start a war.

“I see no reason for you to view the vid,” Escovar said. “It makes voyeurs of us, who would least want to participate in something like that. But this may be a requirement later, and you need to know that for calculated cruelty without much actual injury, this is the worst I’ve seen. The important thing is that what you know about her might make rescue possible. We don’t want to shoot her by accident because we failed to understand her way of thinking.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I would like you to record every detail you can remember about her—anything, from the color of her underwear to every preference she ever expressed. We’re trying to get more information from other people she knew, but you and Lieutenant Suiza have the advantage of understanding the military perspective, and having known her in a dangerous situation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I put no deadline on this, but I do consider it urgent. The longer she is in their hands, the more likely that permanent damage will result, not to mention political chaos.” Barin digested that in silence. He dared not ask how her father was taking it—the little bit that he knew.

“Is her voice—permanently gone?”

“No way to tell until she’s retrieved. The surgeon who viewed this tape says it depends on the exact type of surgery they performed. But she could always be fitted with a vocal prosthesis. If the only damage is to the vocal cords, she can whisper—and a fairly simple prosthesis will amplify that. However, they may have done more damage that we don’t know about, and since their intent is to silence her, they may punish any attempt to whisper.”

“But how are we going to find her?”

“I don’t know, Ensign. If you come up with any ideas, be sure to share them. We have been assigned to the task force charged with finding and rescuing her.”

Only a day later, Escovar called him into the office again. “They found the yacht. It was dead in space, tethered to an unmanned navigation station; local traffic hadn’t noticed it. It was found by the maintenance crew that went out to service the station. Empty, and so far no idea where it came from. Forensics will be all over it . . . there is evidence of a struggle inside.”

Barin’s heart sank, if possible, even lower. A vid of Brun was one thing, but her yacht, empty and bearing signs of a fight, was not something likely to have been faked.

“Did she say anything to you—anything at all—that might give us a clue to where she could have been when she was attacked?”

“No, sir. I brought the notes I’ve made—” Barin handed them over. “Mostly we talked about the courses, about the other students and instructors. Quite a lot about Lieutenant Suiza, because Brun—Sera Meager—asked about her.”

Escovar flipped through the pages, reading rapidly. “Here—she mentioned owning a lot of stock—did she ever say in which companies?”

“Not that I remember,” Barin said. “She may have, but that didn’t really interest me. She talked about hunting—on horseback, that is—and bloodstock, and something about pharmaceuticals, but I don’t know anything about that, so—”

They had been in jump for eight standard days, and Esmay had spent much of the last two shifts in the SAR ready rooms, briefing the specialist teams on the wonders of EVA during FTL traverses. Solis had asked her to work up a training syllabus. She would have expected this to take only an hour or so, but the teams had ever more questions—good questions. If it had been possible, they would have gone EVA on Shrike; Esmay was glad to find that the fail-safe of the airlocks worked here as well as on Koskiusko, and no one could get out.

“We really should practice it, though,” Kim Arek said. She had the single-minded intensity that Esmay recognized as her own past attitude. “Who knows when we might need it?”

“Someone should develop suit telemetry that works outside the jump-space shielding,” someone else said. “The temporal distortion could kill you if you didn’t know when your air was running out.”

“What techniques do you use when your air is running out?” Esmay asked. “I know what the manuals say, but the only time I saw my gauge hitting the red zone, I found ‘stay calm and breathe slowly’ wasn’t that easy.”

“No kidding.” Arais Demoy, one of the neuro-enhanced marines, grinned at her. “Imagine what it’s like when you’re not even on a ship, but knocked loose somehow. That happened to me one time, during a ship-to-ship. That’s why we have suit beacons in the space armor. Try to go limp, if you can—muscle contraction uses up oxygen—and think peaceful thoughts.”

The ship shuddered slightly, and everyone swallowed—the natural response to a downjump insertion; the insystem drive had been on standby for the past half hour, and now its steady hum went up a half tone.

“Prayer doesn’t hurt,” added Sirin. “If you’re any sort of believer.”

Esmay was about to inquire politely which sort she was, when the emergency bells rang.

“XO to the bridge; XO to the bridge—” She was moving before the repeat.

“Captain?”

Solis was glaring at her as if she had done something terrible, and she couldn’t think of anything. She had been in his good graces; he seemed to have put aside his earlier animosity.

“We have received a flash alert, Lieutenant.”

War? Esmay’s stomach clenched.

“Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter has been taken captive by an unknown force which threatens reprisals against Familias should any action be taken to rescue her. She has been mutilated—”

“Not . . . Brun!?” Esmay could feel the blood draining from her head; she put out a hand to the hatch coaming.

“Yes. There is, apparently, incontrovertible evidence of this capture. All ships are to report any trace of an Allsystems lease yacht Jester . . .” Solis shook his head, as if to clear it, and gave Esmay another long challenging look. “You don’t seem pleased that your prophecy that Sera Meager would come to grief has been fulfilled—”

For a moment she could not believe what he said. “Of course not!” she said, then. “It has nothing to do with—I never wanted anything bad to happen—”

“You had best hope, then, that she is recovered quickly and in good health,” Solis said. “Because otherwise, what everyone will remember—as I’m sure her father remembers—is that you bawled her out and she stormed away from Copper Mountain in a temper. You might as well realize, Lieutenant Suiza, that your future in the Regular Space Service depends on her future—which right this moment looks damned bleak.”

She could not think about that; it was too dire a threat to think about. Instead, her mind leaped for any useful connection. “That trader,” she said. Solis looked blank. “The little ship,” Esmay said. “The one that trailed it in, the five bodies that weren’t crew, but had been mutilated. That could have been Brun’s ship.”

Solis stared at her, then blinked. “You . . . may be right. It could be—could have been. And we sent the tissue for typing—”

“Sector HQ forensics—but they’ll be coded as related to the Elias Madero. And we don’t have any beacon data on the little ship.”

“No . . . but we have a mass estimate. All right, Suiza—and now, one more time, and I want the truth: is there even the slightest glimmer of satisfaction?”

“No, sir.” She could say that with no hesitation. “I was wrong to lose my temper at the time—I know that, and I would’ve apologized if she’d still been there when we got back from the field exercise. And I would not wish captivity on anyone, any time, least of all someone like her . . .”

“Like her?”

“So . . . free. So happy.”

“Umph. Well, I’m mostly convinced but I doubt anyone else will be. Better see you don’t make any mistakes, Suiza. With the data we have aboard, we’re sure to be called back to confer with the task force. You will be questioned about her, and one wrong word will ruin you.”

Esmay put that out of her mind, and instead thought of Brun the laughing, Brun the golden. She had not thought of herself as religious—in her great-grandmother’s sense—for years, but she found herself praying nonetheless.

Barin found himself in the very uncomfortable position of being the youngest person at a very ticklish conference. He knew why he was there: he had trained with Brun on Copper Mountain; he and Esmay had saved her skin. He had known about her disappearance almost from its discovery for precisely that reason. But nothing in his training had prepared him to sit at a table with a Grand Admiral, his admiral grandmother, two other three-star admirals, a sprinkling of commanders—his cousin Heris among them—and the Speaker of the Council of Families of the Familias Regnant.

Nothing except growing up Serrano, which at the moment he felt was a distinctly overrated qualification.

Brun Meager’s father, Lord Thornbuckle, was far beyond distraught . . . balanced on the thinnest knife-edge of stability Barin had ever seen in a previously functioning adult. In the harsh light that shone onto the polished table, Barin could see the fine tremor of the man’s hands, the glitter of silver in his close-cropped blond hair as his head shifted in tense jerks from side to side, when someone spoke.

You’ve got to tell them everything. That’s what his captain had said. Everything. But how could you tell a roomful of brass, in front of the woman’s father, about her less admirable behavior? He sat very still and hoped against hope that something would interrupt this before he had to hurt a man already hurting so much.

“Grand Admiral Savanche, we have a flash-priority message—”

Savanche pushed himself back. “This had best be worth it.” Barin knew that despite this almost-regulation growl, he was secretly glad to have something break the tension of the briefing. Savanche took the message cube, and put it in the player.

“It’s from Captain Solis, aboard the search—and-rescue ship Shrike . . . they were pursuing leads in the disappearance of a Boros Consortium merchanter, and have been out of contact for weeks. He just heard about the yacht’s disappearance, and—you’d better see this for yourself.” He transferred output to the room’s main screen.

Onto the screen came a section of star chart, with a corner window of Captain Solis.

“—trace of a very small craft in the system as well,” he was saying. “We presumed at first that it was the raider’s tail on the Elias Madero. When we located debris and bodies from the merchanter, amounting to the entire adult crew and one juvenile apprentice—but not the other apprentice, nor four small children—we also located five bodies which were not crew, and which we could not identify. My forensics team believes them to have been military, but they weren’t Fleet, and the usual identification sites had been mutilated.”

“There were ten . . .” breathed Lord Thornbuckle.

“We sent off a report on this to Sector, top priority, when we got back to Bezaire, but we had to use a commercial ansible. At that time we had not received word that the Speaker’s daughter was missing. However, when we came out of jump at Sil Peak, we received that news and specifications of her ship. My Exec, Lieutenant Suiza, immediately thought of the other bodies we’d found. The ship trace we found is consistent with a yacht of the stated mass. We have the recovered bodies in storage; please advise next move.”

“We own stock in Boros,” Lord Thornbuckle said. “She was out there—she’d said she wanted to look into the olive orchards on . . . whichever one it is, I can’t think. It has to be her . . . her yacht. Her guards . . .”

“Do you know anything about them, Lord Thornbuckle?”

“They’re from my militia. Brun had . . . not gotten along with the Royal Space Service security personnel who had gone with her to Copper Mountain. There had been an incident—”

“And you say there were more than five—”

“Yes . . . there should have been ten.” Lord Thornbuckle stared at the table between his hands. “She thought that was too many.”

“Well, it’s imperative that we get what evidence Solis has gathered as soon as possible.” Savanche’s eye swept the room and lighted on Barin. “Ensign—go find my signals chief and tell her I want a secure link to Shrike.”

“Sir.” Barin found the Grand Admiral’s staff signals specialist hovering outside the room—someone had anticipated the need—and sent her in. He was glad to be out of there, and hoped he wouldn’t be called back. Shrike . . . Esmay was on Shrike. He wondered how she was taking the news.