Winning Colors

Chapter Nine

“We want to honor you,” Senior Captain Vassilos kept saying when she tried to get her point across.

“There’s nothing to honor, yet,” Heris said for the tenth time. “You may well have worse trouble coming.”

“You must understand, Captain Serrano, that this is the first time in years that we have been able to resist successfully. I shouldn’t say we, since you did it. But we must celebrate this victory—it will put heart in the troops.”

“They mean it,” muttered Cecelia from the corner of the office. “Remember that band? That’s how they are—you must let them celebrate.”

“Very well,” Heris said, with as much grace as she could muster. “But I’m still worried—I would very much like to have a serious discussion—”

“Of course! Of course, Captain Serrano. The General Secretary wants to meet you—the entire government wishes to thank you. After the parade—” Heris tried not to let her eyes roll up at this. Cecelia, out of pickup range, was grinning at her wickedly. “And just a few speeches, nothing really fancy—” She could imagine.

As it happened, she couldn’t have imagined.

“Aren’t you glad I taught you to ride?” Cecelia asked. She sat the stocky white horse with the flowing mane as if she’d grown out of its back. After the first block, Heris had had enough of the rhythmic bouncing trot of her matching white horse. So it was in time to the music—so her legs hurt. She knew she didn’t look as good as Cecelia. She was sure her uniform jacket over riding breeches looked particularly silly. Hard to believe that real soldiers had once ridden into battle.

“I’m glad this is a small city,” Heris said. “I bounce too much.”

“Open your joints and relax,” Cecelia said. “This is fun.”

Fun for someone who had been born with calloused thighs, maybe. Fun for someone who had ridden in front of crowds much of her adult life. Heris would rather have celebrated victory by floating for a few hours in some body of warm water. But duty was duty.

By the time they arrived at the site of the celebration, Heris wondered if she’d ever get off the horse without help. Cecelia wasn’t sympathetic.

“I told you to spend more hours on the simulator,” she said.

“I had other things to do,” Heris said. It wasn’t an excuse she’d have accepted from anyone else, but she still couldn’t see that riding horses was a necessary skill for a ship captain.

“Captain—?” That was a young man in the colorful uniform of the Civil Guard. Heris sighed, and managed to dismount without either groaning or kicking him in the head. She was going to be more than sore for a few days. Cecelia, already down, looked eager and happy. Heris moved over to stand beside her. She had no idea what this world would consider an appropriate celebration, certainly not what might come after a parade on horseback.

The same little band she had first seen on the wide plain of the spaceport (she recognized the conductor’s exuberant moustache) struck up another of those jaunty marches. Despite herself, she felt a prickle of excitement run up her spine.

“Up here, Captain,” said her escort. Up here was atop a stone platform that resembled every reviewing stand she had ever seen except its being solid stone instead of slightly quivery metal and plastic. Rows of chairs, each with a bright blue cushion on it—that was different—and a little railing painted brilliant white. Behind the chairs, the flags of Armitage, Xavier, Roualt, and the Familias Regnant swung gently in the light breeze. In front of them, the wide field where the parade was coming apart into its constituent elements. Some of them reformed into obvious military units, and some (the children on ponies) milled around until the Civil Guard shooed them away.

Heris sat where she was bidden, and found herself looking down on the heads of the band. Directly beneath her the coiled shape of some kind of horn gleamed in the sun, and it produced substantial deep blats from its great bell. In front of that row were the horns held up and facing outward, and in front of them the little dark and silver cylinders . . . she wished she knew more about musical instruments. The required music appreciation classes long ago had left a residue of tangled facts: some things had strings, and some had tubes you blew through or tubes with holes in them you blew across. Which left that thing on the end there: it looked like an inflated pillow with sticks coming out. Whatever it was, it made a sound she had never heard before, as if something alive were being strangled inside.

As she watched, its player stepped smartly out in front of the band, revolved in place, and faced the reviewing stand. Now she could hear the discordant squeals and gurgles clearly; the rest of the band had stopped in mid-phrase (if music had phrases) to allow it a solo turn.

“Our top piper,” her escort said. Heris smiled politely. At least now she had a label for it. Piper.

“You’ll see the massed pipes, too,” he said, as if that were a treat in store. A mass of these squealers? Heris thought longingly of earplugs. She looked beyond the band. Now the near side of the field was almost empty, and a crowd had formed on the far side. A couple of dogs ran in circles, chasing each other. “I’m sorry for the delay,” her escort murmured. “We wanted to get everyone here—”

“Quite all right,” Cecelia said, before Heris could think past the piper’s screeches to what she might politely say.

“But here they are—” A horse-drawn vehicle rolled across the field, to distant cheers from the crowd. One of the dogs fled; the other ran yapping after the horses, who ignored this familiar accompaniment. So did the elegant spotted dog sitting upright beside the driver.

“The General Secretary, the Mayor and Council,” her escort said. “I hope it accords with your etiquette; in ours, the greater honor goes to the one who arrives first.” He stood, and Heris took the hint. The little band began something that made her want to sway from foot to foot—not a march, but almost a waltz. The General Secretary, resplendent in a long cape edged with silver braid, bowed to the reviewing stand. Heris had no idea what was required; Cecelia, she noticed, stood still. The Mayor’s cape had bright red braid; the Council, in various bright-colored outfits, all glittering with braid, buttons, or other adornment, descended one by one from the carriage and bowed before climbing the steps. When the last was seated, the solo piper let out a resounding screech. Heris was delighted to see that the horses hitched to the vehicle flattened their ears and tried to shy. The driver lifted the reins and they exploded into a fast trot.

No one on the platform said a word; if they had, no one could have heard it, Heris was sure. With a final tweedle and squeal, the piper spun around, and the little band snapped to attention, and marched away. Now what?

Now the General Secretary, it seemed, had something to say. Long experience of political speeches had Heris ready for long-winded platitudes.

“We’re here to honor our old friend Lady Cecelia, and our new heroes,” the General Secretary. “You saw Captain Serrano in the parade; we now consider her a friend of the same status as Lady Cecelia.” The General Secretary turned to Heris. “Please accept this as a token of our esteem,” he said. “Wear it when you visit us, if you will.” It was a small silver button, stamped with the design of a leaping horse.

“Thank you,” Heris said. Before she could finish with the requisite reminder that she had done nothing of herself, but only with the help of others, the General Secretary was interrupting.

“And now, let’s show our visitors and friends the pride of our people.” And he sat down abruptly, leaving Heris no choice but to do the same.

Heris blinked. Short, and not particularly graceful—not at all what she expected. But it wasn’t her place to expect. Now at the far end of the field, a thin sound like the strangling of dozens of geese . . . “The massed pipes,” her escort confirmed. Suddenly they were in motion, and with them an array of drums.

“I’m . . . not familiar with the instrument,” Heris said, hoping for a diversion. Her escort beamed.

“Not that many worlds have preserved them,” he said with evident pride. She could understand that; suppression seemed more reasonable than preservation. “Here we have not only preserved, but developed, the four main varieties of pipe that survived the Great Dispersal. For marching bands, we prefer the purely acoustic, though there is an amplified variety with a portable powerpack.”

“They seem quite loud enough,” Heris said.

“Oh, but they were battlefield instruments at one time. We find them very effective in riot control.”

She could imagine that. An amplified piper—or, worse, a mass of amplified pipers—could send the average rioter into acoustic shock. Most security services had acoustic weapons, but none that looked or sounded like this.

Cecelia leaned past the escort between them. “Isn’t it thrilling? I’ve always loved pipes.”

Heris was saved the necessity of answering by the pipes themselves, now close enough to make a wall of sound. The pipers marched with a characteristic strut, the drums thundered behind them, and despite herself her toes began to move in rhythm inside her shoes. The pipes when playing a quick melody sounded much more musical, she thought, dancing from note to note above the rattling drums. Behind this group marched what must be, she realized, the entire planetary militia, each unit in its own colors. Each, as it passed the reviewing stand, turned heads sharply, and shouted out its origin (so her escort explained). She had no idea where “Onslow” and “Pedigrate” were, but the pride certainly showed. Far to their right, the massed pipes wheeled and marched back, this time nearer the crowd.

To Heris’s relief, they returned through the town in the gleaming cars of their first visit. She had not looked forward to climbing back on a horse.

“I could get addicted to this,” Cecelia said. They had the closed compartment to themselves. Her cheeks had reddened with the unaccustomed sun, but her eyes were bright. A few rose petals clung incongruously to her red hair, and one lay for a moment on her shoulder until the errant breeze lifted it off.

“Addicted to what, riding in parades?” Heris asked.

“That and . . . being the conquering hero. Knowing I did something really worthwhile.”

Heris refrained from pointing out that Cecelia herself hadn’t done that much. She’d volunteered her—well, their—yacht and crew, but she herself had not fired a weapon. Still, she had been in danger with them. And in all honesty, Heris herself had enjoyed the cheering crowds, even the roses and ribbons. “This is the easy part,” she said.

“I know,” Cecelia said. “But then I always did like victory celebrations. I never thought I’d have another one—not like the old days.”

“Didn’t you get any satisfaction out of your return to Rockhouse?” Heris asked.

For the first time, Cecelia looked ready to answer that. “Not really. The king resigned—I had no chance to talk to him first. And Lorenza—she escaped. Even if she died—and I agree she must have—she escaped me. I wanted to slap her smug face myself. Then I found out the yacht wasn’t mine anymore—I couldn’t even take off on my own—”

“But we did—”

“Yes . . . we did. Out of your courtesy; it was no longer my right.” Cecelia sighed. “I’m sorry, Heris. It must sound silly to you. But all the way back from the Guerni Republic, I fantasized such a gorgeous, impressive homecoming—storming in and confounding everyone. The feeling we’ve had today—that’s what I had in mind. Bands playing, flags waving, my family all in a heap of contrition. Admissions of guilt, begging of forgiveness. Instead—with the king’s resignation, everything seemed to fall apart. My affairs didn’t matter that much compared to the change in government; I wasn’t a hero after all. Very annoying, actually, especially when Berenice had the nerve to say that if I was going to get rejuvenation, I should have spent a little more and gotten some remodelling—”

“What!” Heris had not heard this before.

“Oh, yes. After all, I didn’t have to live the same selfish life as before, and if I’d bother to try, I could look quite nice and perhaps marry—I swear, Heris, it was at that moment I decided to sue them for their idiocy. Before that I had been annoyed, but that did it. Not a scrap of remorse for the hell she’d put me through in that damned nursing home, but the same old superior attitude about my looks and my duty to the family. I’ll show her duty, I thought.”

Heris had wondered more than once why Cecelia was so determined to sue the family; now she was caught between sympathy and laughter. “It wasn’t very tactful of her,” she said, trying for middle ground.

“She never was tactful,” Cecelia said. “No small child is—one reason I don’t like small children—but she was remarkable even for a child. She told me once ‘You may be famous, but I’m pretty, and you never will be.’ It was true, of course, but it hurt anyway.”

“So that’s why you’ve sued them?”

“Yes . . . mostly. I suppose. They keep thinking I’m nothing—handy to do their chores, when they wanted Ronnie off Rockhouse for a year, handy for loans when they want to expand their holdings, handy for a joke whenever they want to feel elegant and so on . . . and I just got tired of it.”

Heris said, “It’s Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy take a walk. . . .”

“What?”

“I thought perhaps you might know Kipling. One of his poems that will live as long as military organizations, because that’s how the military’s always treated. Despised until needed, then cozened into things—blamed for whatever goes wrong, and praised—when it gets praise—for the wrong things.”

“Exactly. Though I suppose my life hasn’t been that bad, really.” Heris watched the flicker of amusement in Cecelia’s eyes. Just when she’d given up, the woman would show that wry self-assessment, that ability to keep things in balance. They rode another few blocks in companionable silence. Then Cecelia shifted to face Heris directly. “What’s worrying you? You were as tense as on the island today, and it wasn’t all saddle sores.”

“We’re celebrating too early,” Heris said. “There’s something wrong with that raid—we won too easily, and we may have made things worse by winning. I’m half-expecting Koutsoudas to call and say there’s an entire fleet of enemy ships coming in.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Cecelia said. “Here? What are they going to steal, horses and cattle and antelopes and sheep? And what enemy?”

“There are mining colonies on the gas giants’ moons,” Heris said.

“Piddly,” Cecelia said. “They’re hardly two decades old, and just now beginning to break even. Nothing unusual, and most of it will be processed in this system, developing an industrial base to allow bulk mining later.”

“A slow payback on the investment,” Heris said, just to make a comment. To her surprise, Cecelia looked startled.

“You’re right—it hadn’t occurred to me, but—I wonder if that’s going to be an effect of Rejuvenant political influence?”

“What?” Heris was still trying to think why some enemy would make Xavier a target. As Cecelia had said, horses and cattle weren’t usually of great interest to aggressive political entities. Shipyards, manufacturing centers, things like that.

“Well . . . Rejuvenants can afford the years to develop slow-growth industries—things that would have been marginal at best for non-rejuvenated individuals. Projects that families can carry out only if they convince successive generations to support them.”

“Mmm.” Heris filed that away to think about later. At the moment, she was more interested in what had really happened with the raid, and what she could say to the Xavieran government. Such as it was.

Once at the party, the General Secretary bowed over her hand and murmured, “I understand you are worried and need to talk. Give us an hour or so, eh? And then we’ll find you. People just want to say thanks.” Unlike Senior Captain Vassilos, who had seemed almost theatrical in his military posture, the General Secretary looked like an amiable bear. Graying brown hair, bright brown eyes . . . Heris had not really looked at him before, but now she liked what she saw. She smiled, nodded, and let herself be passed on down the reception line.

Beyond the line, her faithful escort showed her to a comfortable, softly padded seat. A waiter appeared with a tray of drinks, and another with a tray of finger foods. Heris chose a sunset-colored juice, and found it tangy and refreshing; the crisp shapes on the plate at her side turned out to be bite-sized pastries filled with meat or cheese. None of the people who came up to her seemed to think she looked funny, and after a while she quit thinking about the riding boots and breeches. Especially when she saw half a dozen others wearing them.

“Heris—these are the Carmody sisters,” Cecelia said, appearing at her side with three rangy women as tall as herself. “They own one of the breeding farms I’ll be visiting.”

“Cecelia says you ride,” said the youngest of the sisters—or the one who looked youngest—Heris suddenly noticed a blue—and-silver ring like Cecelia’s, only higher on the woman’s left ear. Then it sank in—another horse enthusiast.

“Only a little,” Heris said. “In the parade, for instance.”

“But she said you rode to hounds,” the woman said. “Tell me—does Bunny still have that fierce trainer—what was his name?” Heris couldn’t believe it. Did they know anything but horses? Did they think this reception was about horses?

“Yes, he does, and you’re supposed to be thanking Heris for knocking off that raider,” said Cecelia. Heris felt her irritation subsiding.

“Well, of course. But Davin said all that, I thought. Now that it’s over—”

“I’m really not an expert on horses,” Heris said, as gently as she could manage. “Lady Cecelia has very kindly tutored me, but I’m already out of my depth.”

“Oh. Well . . . Cecelia, suppose you give us some idea what you’re looking for?” Heris would have laughed if she hadn’t been trapped by her stiffening body into a corner that soon filled with all the horsey set on Xavier . . . breeders, mostly, whom Cecelia introduced. Most of them just managed to remember why Heris was being honored before they launched into anecdotes about horses, arguments about breeding strategies and training methods, and plain unmistakable brags. By the time the General Secretary’s assistant came to suggest that she might like to meet with him and a few others in the library, she was feeling very grumpy indeed.

“If I understood Captain Vassilos correctly, you believe there were more ships in the system, observing your battle with the raider. If that is so, can you explain why it bothered you? I may as well mention that none of our scan technicians found a trace of such a ship, even when they went back over the recorded scans.”

Heris chose her words carefully. “Sir, let me take the last point first. Your scan techs are working with civilian-level scans, and old ones at that. We happen to have more up-to-date scans on the yacht, which means that we can see farther and detect smaller disturbances.”

“You have military-grade equipment?” asked Vassilos.

“I . . . prefer not to specify the equipment we have,” Heris said. “Not to impugn the integrity of anyone in this room, but—it may be that our ability to detect trouble at a range where trouble believes itself undetectable will save lives.”

“I see.” The General Secretary went back to his first point. “And you believe there were other ships in the system, observing . . . how many ships?”

“We detected one,” Heris said. The General Secretary nodded; he had caught the implication. “It may, of course, have been an innocent vessel with a very cautious captain . . . but its arrival, its response to the battle, and its departure, suggest something else. My scan tech has been working on the data we got; there is some indication that the ship has a history of traversing systems just as raids are going on. A paymaster, perhaps.”

“But who would be doing that? Even when they trashed our orbital station, they got little for it—we couldn’t figure out then what they really wanted.”

“To see if the Fleet would come clean house, I suspect,” Heris said. “When you got so little response from Fleet, they came back—as much to test that hypothesis as anything else.”

“But why? We have no great wealth—we are not on the direct route to anywhere else, as I’m sure you noticed.”

“To be honest, I have not yet had time for a serious consideration of what may lie behind what we saw. But I am sure that another ship observed our handling of the raider, and that it was there precisely to observe your defensive capability. That suggests some plan for an attack. From whom, or why, I cannot say at this point.” She suspected, but she did not want to commit herself yet.

“What should we do?”

“Send an urgent message to Fleet, of course. I’m sure you’re aware that things are . . . unsettled . . . in places. They have other problems. Still, we can draft a report that should elicit some response. Even sending such a report may help out; I would expect those watching your situation to know of such a request. They would probably delay any action until they ascertained whether Fleet responded in force.” Or they would attack all the faster. If they were nearly ready. Heris wished she had more knowledge, and less intuitive sense of time ticking away.

“You were not . . . sent here? As a sort of . . . representative of Fleet?”

“No,” Heris said, making it very firm. From the tone, they wanted her to be a covert presence; they wanted the reassurance that Fleet had not forgotten them. Remote worlds often felt neglected, and some were. “I am not now in the Regular Space Service. I’m a civilian, hired by Lady Cecelia to take her where she wishes . . . in this case, here, to look for bloodstock.”

“I thought it was her yacht,” someone down the table said. A third secretary to the defense council, Heris remembered.

“It was, but through a legal tangle when she was in a coma last year, it became mine. She will probably tell you the whole thing if you ask her.” Heris didn’t want to; she realized that someone who wanted to see her arrival with the Sweet Delight as more than providential could find other reasons for the change of ownership.

“As long as you are here,” the General Secretary said, “could we beg your assistance, your advice? I quite understand that you are not, as you say, now in Fleet . . . but you have more experience in these matters than anyone else here. If you could suggest how we should think about this menace you spoke of, or how we could prepare to meet it . . .”

Prepare to die, she could have said honestly enough. With one cranky old escort, underpowered and lightly armed, with no bulk transport to get its population away to someplace safe, Xavier would be no more a match for a serious invasion than the raider had been for Sweet Delight. But for all their bright, perky music, their colorful impractical uniforms, their screeching massed pipes—yes, and even the number of horse enthusiasts—Heris liked these people. She liked the careful way a farmer’s daughter had documented the raider’s characteristics with her homemade scan equipment. The stubborn determination to resist and keep resisting that had led them to mount phase cannon in an atmospheric shuttle. The surprising competence of the old escort’s crew . . . even the length of the General Secretary’s speech at the parade ground . . . all went into the equation.

“While we’re here,” she said finally, into the silence, “I will be glad to give you what advice I can. But whether it does any good—that I can’t know.”

“Of course not. And we will show our gratitude by taking your first advice, to send word to the Regular arm of Fleet—” He reddened. “Sorry—I mean to Fleet Sector HQ.”

“I’ll get back up to my ship, and see what we’ve got in our records,” Heris said. “Lady Cecelia brought her things down—she plans to visit various breeders here. So, if you can tell me about the next shuttle—”

“You won’t stay the night?”

“No—to be honest, I’ll be more comfortable up there, in direct contact with our scan techs.”

“Quite so. Then if it’s agreeable, we’ll plan to confer with you on the station in the next few days. And there’ll be a shuttle ready—when, Captain Vassilos?”

“Three hours,” Vassilos said. “It’s fuelling now.”

“Thank you,” Heris said. She started to stand up, and winced. “Lady Cecelia’s right,” she said. “I really should practice more on her simulator.”

“Never mind,” the General Secretary said. “It’s not your equestrian expertise we need now.”

“All the better, since I haven’t any,” said Heris; they all laughed.

Back aboard Sweet Delight, she called up the data they had gathered and came up with the answers—or answers that made sense. The Xavierans considered themselves remote, far from any population or power center. They were remote from the center of any political entity, but not so remote from frontiers. After all, she had had to file a letter of intent with the R.S.S. to visit Xavier, because it was in a frontier zone.

“Location, location, location,” she reminded herself. The Familias Regnant had grown by accretion, expanding along trade routes through unclaimed space, until it bumped into resistance. The neat “spheres of influence” predicted by earlier planners existed only for small political units. Larger entities looked more like multidimensional models of complex organic molecules. Although this meant a larger “surface” to protect for the volume included, the advantage of an outlying lobe that included vital jump points more than compensated for the extra defensive exposure.

Castle Rock, with its massive stations Rockhouse Major and Minor, lay more or less at the center of Familias Regnant space—at least in three major axes. But those axes were not equal. The longest dimension was five or six times the shortest, including two fat tentacles or pseudopods extending toward Compassionate Hand territory. The interface between the Familias and its neighbors resembled that of an enzyme and its protein companion: star by star, the competing entities had fit themselves together in a way that increased the defensive difficulties by making the contact surface vast. Most of the time, this surface was merely a potential one: in spaces far too large to garrison, contact existed only sporadically, and along the usual mapped routes of travel.

Heris knew from experience that the ability to visualize the spatial interactions required both innate talent and practice. The visual representation she took to the next meeting with the General Secretary and his staff was far simpler than the one she and Petris and Koutsoudas would use. Even so, the General Secretary had trouble with it.

“What’s this little skinny thing out here?” he asked.

“Us.” Heris grinned at his shocked expression. “I know—you thought we were closer to the interior because Xavier is a short jump from Byerly and Neugarten and Shiva. But they’re all strung out along one jump route, with an even smaller twig for Neverfall.” She pointed. “There’s Rockhouse. And there’s Rotterdam—” Rotterdam, on its own slender twig, three jump points from Xavier because of the need to go around the saddle-shaped Compassionate Hand intrusion.

As the General Secretary stared at the color-coded visual, Heris added the icons that were Koutsoudas’s best guess for the locations of Fleet and Compassionate Hand warships. The Compassionate Hand maintained major bases in the saddle between the lobes where Xavier and Rotterdam lay. Logical—so did the R.S.S. When this survey had been taken, they had had two battle groups at Partis, and one at Vashnagul.

Heris explained what that meant, trying to keep it simple. “The Compassionate Hand intends its battle groups to be more than just space fighters. Each battle group deploys units capable of invading and occupying fixed positions such as space stations and satellite defense systems. On a sparsely settled planet without good defenses, such teams could even take control of the entire world. More commonly, they would ‘scorch’ the population from space—blow the population centers, perhaps with tactical nukes. Then they’d land their own construction teams and equipment.”

“They’d just—kill everyone, for no reason?”

“From their point of view, there’s a reason. They don’t care about people they don’t need, and if they’ve chosen Xavier for a forward base, they won’t want to waste time converting your population.”

“And they might choose us because—”

“Because of the jump point access Xavier provides. Although the direct route in is straightforward, there are more alternatives from here than from Rotterdam. It’s still tricky—look—” Heris pointed out the difficulties the Compassionate Hand would face. “The point of coming through here is surprise, so if they lose surprise here they’ve expended effort for no gain. That means they’ll try to interrupt communications as soon as—even before—they attack. Do you have daily ansible traffic?”

“No . . . in fact, the charges are high enough that we usually store and batch it. Once a week at most.”

“So no one outside would notice if you didn’t send a batch for a week or so.”

“That’s right—oh. I see. Then I suppose they could fabricate a message—”

“If they needed to. My point being, Xavier is most valuable in the early stages of a war, then its value drops until they can get their defenses up, when it becomes valuable again simply because it denies those jump points to Fleet.”

“And our strategy?”

“Tell Fleet what we think, and keep telling them until they listen—and don’t let ourselves be surprised by an invasion force we weren’t expecting.” And hope that the enemy had not already intercepted their messages. But Heris kept that grim thought to herself.