Rules of Engagement

Chapter Sixteen

After lunch, Luci followed Esmay into the Landbride’s quarters with obvious intent. Esmay, who’d been hoping for a time alone to think things over, decided she would have more peace if she let Luci talk herself out. “So what is it now?” she asked, half laughing. “Do you have five other schemes for the estancia, or are you planning to take over the government?”

Luci, it seemed, loved a boy—young man, actually—in a neighboring household. “Your father is set against it—I don’t know why,” she said. “It’s a good family—”

“Who is it?” asked Esmay, who had a suspicion. At the name, she nodded. “I know why, but I think he’s wrong.”

“Is this another of those things you can’t tell me about?” Luci asked with a pettish note in her voice. “Because if it is, I think it’s mean to let me know you know . . .”

“Come all the way in, and sit down,” Esmay said, shutting the door carefully. No one would disturb them now. She gestured to one of the comfortable chintz-covered chairs, and sat in another one herself. “I’ll tell you, but it’s not a pleasant tale. You know I was miserable the last time I was here, and I suppose no one told you why . . .”

“No one knew,” Luci said. “Except that you had some kind of fight with your father.”

“Yes. Well . . . there are too many secrets going around, and now that I’m Landbride, I’m going to do things differently. Back before you were born, when I was a small child, and my mother had died, I ran away.”

“You!”

“Yes. I wanted to find my father, who was off at war. I didn’t understand about war . . . it had been safe, here. Anyway, I ended up in a very dangerous—” Her throat closed, and she cleared it. “A village right in the middle of the war. Soldiers came.”

“Oh—Esmay—”

“I was . . . assaulted. Raped. Then one of my father’s troops found me—but I was very sick . . .”

“Esmay, I never heard of this—”

“No, you wouldn’t have. They hushed it up. Because the soldier that did it was in my father’s brigade.”

“No—!” Luci’s face was white to the lips.

“Yes. He was killed—old Seb Coron killed him, in fact. But they told me it was all a bad dream—that I’d caught my mother’s fever, which I may have, and anything else was a fever dream. All those nightmares I had—they made me think I was crazy.”

“And you found out, finally—?”

“Seb Coron told me, because he thought I knew already—that Fleet’s psych exams would have found it and cured me.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So . . . I confronted Father, and when I identified the face in the regimental rolls, he admitted it. That it had happened, that I remembered correctly.”

From white, Luci went rage-red. “That’s—hideous! Lying to you like that! I would’ve—”

“And the thing is,” Esmay went on, remotely cheered by Luci’s response. “The thing is, the person who did it was of that family. The man you love is his nephew, his older brother’s son—”

Luci’s face whitened again. “Arlen? You can’t mean Arlen. But he was killed in action—they have a shrine to him in the front hall.”

“I know. He was killed in action—by Seb Coron for assaulting a child—me.”

“Oh . . . my.” Luci sat back. “And his father was commanding something—so your father didn’t tell him—? Or did he?”

“I don’t know if his family knows anything at all, but even if they do it was all kept quiet. He got his medals; he got his shrine in the front hall.” She could not quite keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“And your father doesn’t want anything to do with their family . . . I understand . . .”

“No . . . they stayed friends, or at least close professionally. I think my father considered it an aberration, nothing to do with his family. I danced with his younger brother when I was fourteen, and he said nothing. He’d have been delighted if I’d married Carl. But he’s worried now, because he knows I know, and he isn’t sure what I’ll do.”

“I’ll—I’ll break it off, Esmay.” Luci’s eyes glittered with unshed tears.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Esmay leaned forward. “If you love him, there’s no reason to break it off on my account.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“I . . . don’t know how I’d react, if he looks much like Arlen did. But that shouldn’t matter, to you or the family, if he’s suitable otherwise. Is he a good man?”

“I think so,” Luci said, “but girls in love are supposed to be bad judges of character.” That with a hint of mischief.

“Seriously . . .”

“Seriously . . . he makes my knees weak, my heart pound, and I’ve seen him at work—he wants to be a doctor, and he helps out in the estancia clinic. He’s gentle.”

“Well, then,” Esmay said, “for what good it will do, I’m on your side.”

“What good it will do? Don’t be silly—you’re the Landbride. If you approve a match, no one’s going to argue with you.”

That had not occurred to her, having never contemplated a match herself. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I am!” Luci grinned. “Didn’t you realize? What happened when you—” She sobered suddenly. “Oh. Did it—what happened—make you not want to marry?”

“It may have,” Esmay said, ever more uncomfortable with where this was heading, onto turf that Luci clearly knew well. “I didn’t think of it at the time—I just wanted off-planet. Away from it all.”

“But surely you’ve met someone, sometime, who made your knees weak?”

Before she could say anything, she felt the telltale heat rushing to her face. Luci nodded.

“You did . . . and you don’t want anyone to know . . . Is it something . . . outworldly?”

“Outworldly?” Barin was an outworlder, but she wasn’t sure that’s what Luci had meant.

Now it was Luci blushing. “You know—those things people do that—we don’t do here. Or at least, not officially.”

Esmay laughed, surprising both of them. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’ve met people like that, of course—they don’t think anything of it, and they’re quite ordinary.”

Luci had turned brick red by now. “I always wondered,” she muttered. “How . . .”

“We had that in the Academy prep school,” Esmay said, grinning as she remembered her own paralyzing embarrassment. “It was part of the classes on health maintenance and I nearly crawled under the desk.”

“Don’t tell me; you can show me the data cube,” Luci said, looking away. Then she looked back. “But I do want to know about him—whoever it was—is?”

“Was,” Esmay said firmly, though pain stabbed her. “Another Fleet officer. Good family.”

“Did he not love you?” Luci asked. She went on without waiting for an answer. “That happened to me—the second time I fell in love, he didn’t care a fig about me. Told me so quite frankly. I thought I’d die . . . I used to ride out in the woods and cry.”

“No, he—he liked me.” Esmay swallowed and went on. “I think—I think he liked me a lot, actually, and I—”

“Well, what happened, then,” Luci said.

“We . . . quarrelled.”

Luci rolled her eyes. “Quarrel! What’s a quarrel? Surely you didn’t let one quarrel end it!”

“He’s . . . angry,” Esmay said.

Luci looked puzzled. “Is he violent when he’s angry? You still love him—that’s obvious. So why—?”

“It’s—mixed up with Fleet business,” Esmay said. “That’s why I can’t explain—”

“You can’t stop now,” Luci said. “And I’ll bet most of it’s about you and him anyway, and nothing to do with any universe-shattering secrets. You trust me with your horses and your money; you ought to trust me to keep a few stupid secrets about Fleet.”

The logic made no sense, but Esmay was past caring; she’d held it in as long as she could; she had to talk to somebody. As simply as she could—which turned out to be not very simply at all—she explained about Barin, about her transfer to command track, and her arrival at Copper Mountain. And Brun. When she first mentioned Brun, Luci stopped her.

“So—that’s the rat in the grain bin.”

“She’s not a rat . . . she’s a talented, bright, attractive—”

“Rat. She went after your man, didn’t she? I can see it from here. Used to getting what she wants, probably started falling in love at twelve—”

Esmay had to smile at Luci’s tone. “It’s not that simple, though. I mean, that’s what I thought—that’s what other people said, with all the time she spent with Barin—”

“And why weren’t you spending time with him?”

“I was taking double courses, that’s why. They both had more time off—everyone had more time off than I had. And then she talked to me . . . she said she wanted to be friends, but she was always telling me how to dress, how to do my hair—”

Luci pursed her lips. “You could use some advice there—”

“It’s my hair!” Esmay heard her own voice rise, and brought it down with an effort. “Sorry. She wanted to talk about Altiplano, and about our customs, and it sounded so . . . so condescending, and one day she was talking about Barin, and I just . . . blew up.”

“Told her to keep her sticky fingers off your man, did you?”

“Well . . . not exactly. I told her—” She didn’t want to repeat those angry phrases, which echoed in her head sounding far worse than they had at the time. “I called her names, Luci, and told her she had no morals worth mentioning, and should go away and quit corrupting people.”

“Oof. I can see I don’t ever want you mad at me.”

“And then I had to leave for the field exercise in Escape and Evasion—no, I’ll tell you about that later—and when I came back she’d left Copper Mountain, and my commander was furious with me for what I’d said to her. She was under surveillance, being the Speaker’s daughter, so they had it all recorded, and somehow the news vids had got hold of it. Barin—I thought he’d slept with her, and then he was mad at me for thinking he would. And as if that weren’t bad enough, she was later captured by pirates, and they tortured her and took her away—and everyone’s blaming me.”

Luci gave her a long, cool look and shook her head slowly. “Landbride you may be, and Fleet officer, and decorated hero, but you’ve been acting like a schoolgirl with her first crush. Your brains have all gone to mush.”

“What!?” After the previous conversation, she had expected some form of sympathy, not this.

“Yes,” Luci said, nodding. “I guess I can see why—no background at all. But still—what a wet ninny you’ve been! Let me tell you something, cousin, if you don’t get yourself back to wherever Barin is and tell him all about it—why you blew up at Brun, and that you love him—you will be confirmed as a total complete idiot.”

Esmay could say nothing for the shock; she was aware that Luci was thoroughly enjoying what must be her first chance to lecture an elder.

“All right, this was your first love affair. But you’ve made every mistake there is.”

“Like what?” Esmay said.

“Like not telling him. Not telling this Brun person. She may be the sort who snatches other peoples’ lovers for the fun of it, but if you didn’t even tell her—”

“How could I? We hadn’t—and anyway there are the regulations—” Quickly she outlined the relevant portions of the code of conduct.

“Poppycock,” Luci said confidently. On a roll, ready to lecture, apparently for hours—Esmay wondered if she had been like this with Brun. No wonder Brun had flounced away; if she’d known how to flounce, she’d have done it herself. “You weren’t exploiting Barin; emotionally you’re younger than I am. You could be reasonably careful and professional without turning into an icicle.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“I do. You are a fool if you sit here playing about at being Landbride, when you don’t really care about this land at all—”

“I do so care about the land!”

“In the abstract, yes. And you’d like it to be here, unchanged, when you visit. But you can’t convince me that you feel really passionate about whether coastal pastures are crossfenced to allow HILF grazing or left open and grazed in alternate years.”

“Er . . . no.” Esmay scrabbled at her memory, trying to think what “HILF grazing” was.

“Or whether we quit buying cattelope breeding stock from Garranos and develop our own breed, and if so, on what criteria.”

“Not really . . .” She hadn’t known they had been buying cattelope from the Garranos.

“Or whether to bring in new rootstock for the nut trees, or top-graft with the latest varieties onto the old.”

“I suppose not.” Rootstock? Top-graft? She had not suspected her great-grandmother of knowing anything about any of this.

“Well, then. You have always wanted a wider world, and you made your way into it. You found love there—that proves it was the right choice for you.” That was a line of reasoning Esmay had never heard, let alone thought of, before. “Don’t let anyone take it away from you,” Luci finished, triumphantly.

“They can,” Esmay said bleakly. “They can ask me to resign my commission—”

“Have they?”

“No, not yet. But Admiral Hornan hinted at it.”

“There’s more than one admiral, surely. Esmaya—you are older than I am, and you are the head of my family now, but you cannot be a good Landbride if your heart is somewhere else. You want a career in Fleet, you want this man Barin—go get them. No one in our family has ever been shy about going after what he or she wanted. Don’t break with tradition.” Luci sat back, arms crossed, and gave Esmay a challenging stare.

The tumult inside subsided gradually. It seemed so simple to Luci, and it wasn’t simple . . . and yet it was. If she had a goal—and she did—then why wasn’t she pursuing it? Why had she been sidetracked? And, more importantly, what could she do about it?

“They’re organizing an attempt to free Brun,” Esmay said. She could talk calmly now. “The ship I was on is part of it. I should be part of it, but Lord Thornbuckle is blaming me for the whole thing—he insists that he doesn’t want me to have anything to do with it. And someone I knew in the Academy is sticking to Barin like dried egg to a plate—”

“He’s the sort of man other women want,” Luci said, with no heat. “You said that—”

“Yes . . . but she’s a bad one, really.”

“So what would it take to get you back in Barin’s good graces, so you can find out if he still loves you, and back in your admiral’s good graces?”

“I don’t know . . .” She paused. “I don’t know if Barin will ever forgive me . . .”

“He might not,” Luci said frankly, “But you won’t know that until you see him again. And the admiral?”

“I suppose—if I could convince them somehow that I don’t hate Brun, and I didn’t ever say that she deserved what she got—”

“They think you said that?”

“Casea—the woman who’s after Barin—says I did. Says she knew me at the Academy and I was always saying things about the senior Families. Of course I didn’t . . .”

“Muerto de Dios,” Luci said. “I would have a knife for that one if I saw her. But if she’s having to lie about you to keep Barin away from you, then he’s not that eager for her. Go back, Esmay. Go back and make them know how good you are.”

“And you, cousin?”

“And I will breed horses, and—with your consent and support—marry the man I love and have babies.”

“And be Landbride someday?” Esmay asked, after a decent interval.

“That is entirely up to you,” Luci said. “I don’t want that job too soon, I can tell you. At least let me prove my abilities with your herd before I take on another.”

Esmay sat alone as the light dimmed, thinking over what Luci had said. She knew what she wanted—she was supposed to be a tactical genius—so it should be possible to figure out what she could do to get herself out of the mess she was in. If she could retrieve her intelligence from the mush her emotions had made . . .

And yet, what she wanted had more to do with emotions than brains: what she wanted was love, and respect, and honor, and the sense that she was serving something worth serving.

She could do nothing about it here. With every passing minute, she realized that no matter how hard she worked, or how pleasant a life she could contrive here, as one of the wealthiest women on the planet, she would never satisfy her own desires, her own needs, by being a Landbride, even the best Landbride she could be. She would always know she had run away from trouble. She would always know she had failed. In her mind’s eye, she could see herself—her civilian self—meeting an older Barin far in the future. They would be polite. He would admire, politely, her empire. And then he would go away, and she . . . she blinked back tears, and pushed herself up from the chair.

The judge and the advocates and auditors were annoyed when she walked in on them, and insisted that she must soon return to Fleet.

“We understood you had indefinite leave.”

“My pardons, sirs, but there are events afoot which I cannot discuss, but which make it very desirable that I return as soon as I can. I must know how long this will take.”

“We could, if we hurried, have the transfers ready within five days . . .”

Esmay had already looked up the commercial passenger schedules. “Sirs, the next ship leaves in five days, but the one after is another twenty days. I’m sure you can have all ready in four days, with all the cooperation and resources of this house.”

“It will hardly be possible,” said one of the advocates, but the judge waved him to silence.

“You have honored Altiplano already by your deeds, Sera; for you, this is possible. Not easy, but possible.”

“My thanks are eternal, and I will place the household at your service.”

On the last of the four days, having signed the last paper, Esmay asked her father to come to the library, scene of that earlier confrontation. This time, however, she put that aside, and asked his advice. With the same precision and organization that she might have briefed someone on a military problem, she told him what she faced. “So you see, far from being a credit to our house, I am in disgrace,” she said. “But I cannot change that here—and if I stay here—”

“I see,” he said. He nodded, sharply. “You are a credit to this house, Esmaya, and to Altiplano; you will never be a disgrace in my sight. But I agree: for your own sake, you must clear your name. If you cannot, you are always welcome to return, and you must not give up your Landbride Gift until this is over. Stand or fall, it will be as the Landbride Suiza.”

She had been more than half afraid he would demand that she give it up; her eyes filled.

“As for the matter of the Speaker’s daughter—you were wrong, there, and you know it. Her rudeness does not excuse yours. But your reasons for not claiming the man’s affection makes sense to me, though perhaps not to those with different ways. Still—they will not hold it against you, if you can prove that you wish her no harm, and can convince her, when and if she is rescued. As for the man—even I have heard of Serranos. A remarkable family, and well suited to this house. You must have made friends, Esmaya, and this is the time to call on them.”

“Approach them?”

“Yes. When under attack, seek allies—you cannot fight all Fleet alone, and when people are lying about you, you need those who will not. If you say nothing, if you avoid them, they can more easily believe the lies are true.” His voice grew husky. “Thank you, daughter, for your great courtesy in confiding this to me . . . I always did care for you.”

“I know.” She did know, and she also knew it had not been enough—but it was all he had to give. Bitterness rolled over her one last time, and then washed away.

With her family’s advice in her ears, and more resources than she had ever had at her disposal, Esmay chose to take the fastest transport she could find. Civilian fast-transit passenger ships were almost as fast as Fleet, and more reliable in schedule—she would not risk being told there was no more room when she held first-class tickets. She had never traveled this way before. In her stateroom, with access to the first-class exercise and entertainment facilities, she thought of Brun, who had grown up thinking this was normal.

If captivity and brutality were bad for an ordinary person, how must they be for a girl who had experienced luxury, with every whim indulged? How could she withstand the shock? She had taken the E&E course, yes, but Esmay doubted she had taken the lectures about nonresistance, passive resistance, seriously. Brun had no habit of passive survival. She had no experience of being silenced, of having no one listen to her. She would fret, rebel, bring on herself more punishment and abuse. Only if she had a possibility on which to focus her mind and effort—only if she could imagine herself into a different future—would Brun be able to concentrate her resistance into that hope, and not waste herself on futility.

So far as Esmay knew, from the little she’d been allowed to know after being banished in disgrace, the planning had concentrated on a covert operation to extract Brun, with no consideration of her own need for activity. They were clinging to the hope that she had survived, but they didn’t consider finding a way to include her help in her own rescue. They were thinking of her as a passive object, something to be snatched from a thief—just as her captors had thought of her as a passive object, some valuable to be stolen and appropriated for their own use.

Just as she herself had been only an object to the man who raped her in childhood—and had himself been only a disgusting object to the sergeant who killed him—and she again had been only an object when her family ignored her memory of the rape and made her into the outcast with nightmares who lived at the far end of the house. She wondered suddenly if Brun’s family had ever seen her as a person, not a decorative object . . . if all her wild behavior had been as much a cry for recognition as Esmay’s dreams.

And she, too, had treated Brun as a silly piece of decorative statuary—she had not seen the person behind the pretty face, the lovely hair, the exuberance. Familiar guilt rolled over her, and she pushed it away. Guilt would not help. Remorse would not help. Brun the person was in trouble, and Esmay the person would have to figure out how to help her—and not by ignoring the person she was.

She put her mind back on the problem, as she spent an hour in the ship’s countercurrent swim salon.

Brun was, or had been, pregnant. Would pregnancy give her a reason to stay alive, or not? Would babies? She had told Esmay, the day of the disasterous argument, that she didn’t want children . . . but that didn’t mean she hated them.

That stuffed toy. Esmay stopped swimming, and the pool’s current pushed her back to the edge. That stuffed toy from the Elias Madero . . . there had been children aboard, and no children’s bodies had been found. If—perhaps—the Militia had kept the children, if Brun had been with them, would that give her a focus? Something to live for? Some reason to be patient, in a way that nothing in her past had made her be patient?

It might. Esmay climbed out of the pool, dried off, and went back to her stateroom hardly noticing those who spoke to her. She spent the last days of the transit putting together everything she remembered about the debris from the trader, and Brun, and trying out one scenario after another. If she had fixed on the children as a means of staying sane, she would want to bring them out too. How could that be done? Esmay didn’t let herself think it might be impossible.

Casea Ferradi was having more luck with blackening Esmay Suiza’s name than with capturing Barin Serrano. She had managed to get herself assigned to Admiral Hornan’s personal staff with only the slightest, insigificant pressure on the major—now lieutenant commander—she’d known so well on her first ship. Everyone knew she’d been Suiza’s classmate, so her opinion had been asked more than once—she hadn’t had to create opportunities to talk about Esmay. With Suiza off on leave to her home planet, Casea didn’t even have to worry about contradiction.

“And she really said she thought the Great Families were a ridiculous institution?”

Casea didn’t answer directly; she stared thoughtfully into the distance in a way that suggested noble reticence. “I think it’s because Altiplano has no Chair in Council,” she said, after a long pause. Neither did the Crescent Worlds, but that didn’t matter. “There’s no tradition of respect, you see.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t notice anything when she was in the Academy,” Master Chief Pell said. He was, though enlisted, senior enough to have access to files in which Casea had particular interest.

“She kept a low profile,” Casea said. “Actually, so did I—we were both outsiders in a way, you know. That’s why we were together so much, and why I didn’t realize that what she said was important.” She shook her head, regretting her own innocence. “Then I got absorbed into things, you see, and just . . . didn’t notice.”

“It’s not your fault,” Pell said, just as she had meant him to say.

“Perhaps not,” Casea said. “But I still feel bad about it. If I’d only known, maybe all this could’ve been prevented.”

Pell looked confused. “I don’t see how—”

She should have picked a brighter one. “I mean,” Casea said, edging nearer to her intended message, “if I’d realized how bitter she was toward the Families, perhaps she would never have had any influence on Sera Meager.”

Pell blinked. “You can’t mean—she actually had something to do with the capture itself? I thought that was accidental; she just happened to enter the same system where they were plundering that merchanter . . .”

“A very handy coincidence, don’t you think? And Sera Meager had traveled widely . . . I find myself wondering why she happened to take that particular shortcut at that particular time.”

“And you think Lieutenant Suiza told her about that? Or told them—”

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,” Casea said. The chances of this rescue succeeding were, in her unspoken opinion, so close to zero as made no difference.

“But—but does the Admiral know about this? That would be treason . . .”

“I’m sure someone else has thought of it,” Casea said. “I’m only a lieutenant, and it occurred to me . . .”

“But you knew her before,” he said. “Those more senior might not know what she said at the Academy.”

“Well . . .” Casea feigned reluctance, though it was getting harder. She had trailed this particular theory across several potential helpers, and so far had no takers. Even Sesenta Veron, who had been telling his own wicked-Suiza stories, thought it was impossible.

“I think you ought to tell the Admiral,” Pell said. Then, with returning caution, “It would help if you had any documentation.”

“I’m afraid not,” Casea said. “The only files which might contain useful references are all well out of my clearance.”

The following silence lasted so long she almost gave up, but at last Pell’s sluggish processors put two and two together. “Oh! You need access. Er . . . what files did you have in mind?”

“I did just wonder if anything had come up during the investigation of that mutiny.”

“But surely you don’t think—I mean, she was decorated for that action—”

“I think they might have been asking questions they didn’t ask before,” Casea said. “Even if they didn’t look too carefully at the answers.”

Pell shook his head. “It won’t be easy, Lieutenant, but I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have to see who I can talk to over in legal . . . but I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” Casea said, giving him the full benefit of her violet gaze and her smile. “I just want to help.”

Barin Serrano was used to Fleet politics; he had grown up in that dangerous sea. He navigated the tricky currents of influence at the task force headquarters with care, noticing which competing Fleet families were taking advantage of Lord Thornbuckle’s present annoyance with the Serrano name. The Livadhis were split, as usual: some were proclaiming their friendship and loyalty to various Serrano seniors like his grandmother, while others were passing snide remarks in the junior officers’ recreation areas. Barin ignored the insults, but kept track. Someone in the family would need to know this, when he had enough data.

In another compartment of his busy brain, he began looking for signs of trouble in other master chief petty officers. Once is accident, twice is coincidence . . . he was willing to admit that Zuckerman could be an accident, and the others he’d heard of only as rumors, but if they were true . . . something was going on. His captain would’ve reported it, but in the present crisis, would anyone listen?

His duties consisted mostly of hand-carrying data cubes back and forth; he spent plenty of time kicking his heels in someone’s front office, and thus had plenty of time to chat with people with lots of time-in-grade.

“ . . . Like you take Chief Pell,” an impossibly perky female pivot-major was saying. “I don’t know if it’s the strain of all this, or what, but he’s not the man he was last Fleet Birthday.”

“Really?” Barin’s mental ears rose.

“No. Why, the other day I had to look up access codes for legal investigations for him—I’m not even supposed to know the lockout sequences, but he started asking me to keep track of that six months ago—and he couldn’t remember any of them.”

“My, my,” Barin said, his mind flickering over the reasons why Admiral Hornan’s chief administrative NCO would be poking into legal investigations now, when supposedly the admiral was after Barin’s grandmother’s job as task force commander. Was he trying to get something on Heris Serrano, who had been through a sticky legal process? “I don’t suppose you’d know whose files he was sucking . . . ?”

“That awful Esmay Suiza,” the pivot-major said, with a toss of her head. “The one that practically sold poor Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter to the pirates.”

Barin managed not to leap over the desk and snap the girl’s neck, but it was an effort.

“Whatever gave you that idea?” he murmured.

“Well, everybody knows she hated her. And I heard Lieutenant Ferradi say that if everyone had known what she knew about Lieutenant Suiza, she’d never have been allowed near Sera Meager.”

Barin mentally moved a marker in his head to change Casea Ferradi’s label from “nuisance” to “enemy.”

“She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” cooed the pivot-major.

“Mmm?”

“Lieutenant Ferradi. You’re lucky she likes you; she could have any man on the base.”

“She probably has,” Barin said without thinking; he looked up to find her outraged, glaring at him. “—Them all thinking about her,” he amended quickly. She held the glare long enough to let him know she wasn’t convinced, then relaxed.

“She’s a fine officer, and Chief Pell thinks so too. So does the admiral.”

Did he . . . did he indeed. Barin went out thinking hard in several directions, and nearly ran over the fine, beautiful Lieutenant Ferradi.

“Oh—Ensign—”

“Yes, sir?” He managed to smile at her.

“Have you heard anything from Lieutenant Suiza?”

“No, sir. I believe the lieutenant is on leave, isn’t she?”

“Yes, but—actually I wanted to talk to you about her.”

Now it was coming. He gripped his temper firmly by the collar, and waited.

“I know you . . . used to be friends.”

“We served together on Koskiusko,” Barin said.

“I know. And I heard you were friends. And I’m sorry, but—I think you should know that continuing that friendship would not be in your best professional interest.”

As if Ferradi cared about his professional standing, other than to take advantage of his family name.

“I have not had any contact with Lieutenant Suiza since Copper Mountain,” Barin said.

“Very wise,” she said, approving.

Barin headed back to Gyrfalcon’s berth, hoping that Captain Escovar was aboard. This time he knew when to call for help.