Winning Colors

Chapter Thirteen

Cecelia felt a certain tension as she entered the stable office. Nothing she could put her finger on—dear Marcia smiling so amiably, and Poots with an even more foolish grin. Slangsby, the head groom, with no grin at all but something twinkling in the depth of his little blue eyes. Were they upset, perhaps, because she had visited two other breeding farms before coming here? They hadn’t been that sensitive in years past.

“Such a fortunate escape,” Marcia said. “We’ve heard all about it.”

Now what did that mean? Lorenza’s attack, or something else entirely? “I’m surprised such a minor matter stayed on the news this far out,” Cecelia said. “With the king’s resignation—”

“As if you didn’t have something to do with that!” Poots sounded almost annoyed with her. Cecelia blinked, assessing the undercurrents.

“I think perhaps my influence was considerably exaggerated,” she said. “Of course, I was at the Grand Council meeting, but—”

“Never mind, then.” Marcia’s smile vanished, replaced by her more usual expression, which had always reminded Cecelia of one of those toys with a spring-controlled lid that snapped tight. “If you don’t want to trust your oldest, dearest friends—”

So that was it. Plain jealousy, and feeling left out. None of the honest replies that sprang quickly to mind would work, because, though true, they were insulting. Marcia and Poots were so far from being old and dear friends that they made the phrase ridiculous. Yes, they were rich, in the same class as those who played with the titles of vanished aristocracies. Yes, they considered themselves the equal of anyone. But half of that was the fraternity of horsemen, who allow no rank but that earned in the saddle. She had known them for years, ridden with them, bought and sold horses in the same markets . . . friends? No. Cecelia tried to think of something placating, but Marcia was already in spate again.

“I suppose you’re upset that we didn’t come at once to help you,” she said. Cecelia had not thought of that, and now resented the suggestion that she might have held such a foolish hope. “I’m sure we would have,” Marcia said, “except that we didn’t even find out for months and months, and by then it seemed—and it was foaling time anyway—and it would have taken us months to get there, because as you know we don’t have a private yacht. . . .” The explanation, like most explanations, simply dug a deeper and muckier hole in the claimed relationship. If they could “know all about it” so soon after the king’s resignation, then they should have known about her collapse that soon too. Foaling season was a weak excuse; no one would have expected them to load up a ship full of pregnant mares, and it had been years since Marcia attended foalings herself. As for “don’t have a private yacht,” that was, strictly, true. Their Fortune’s Darling was well out of the yacht class, and might have served as the flagship of a small shipping company.

Cecelia reminded herself that she had not expected help from them, and wasn’t (despite the clumsy excuses) upset that they hadn’t provided it. “Never mind,” she said, trying to drag the conversation back to her reason for being there. “All I’m really interested in is your bloodstock. Mac said you still had some of that Singularity sperm available?”

“What are you doing, restocking the royal—excuse me, formerly royal—stables for yourself?”

That was too much. Cecelia felt her neck get hot, and didn’t really care what her face looked like. “Not at all,” she said with icy restraint. “I am trying to do a favor for some friends who saved my life and assisted my recovery. Since you are, as you say, old and dear friends—” The accent she put on “friends” would have sliced through a ship’s hull plating. “—I had hoped to purchase both sperm and time-locked embryos from you. However, it seems that other suppliers might be more convenient.”

Marcia turned red; Poots, as usual, looked as if he might cry. Slangsby now had the grin the others had discarded.

“I didn’t—you don’t have to take it that way—”

“What way?” Cecelia considered herself a reasonable person, and she could put no friendly interpretation on Marcia’s words. But, as a reasonable person, she would let Marcia try to wriggle out of this. It might even be interesting, in a purely zoological way, to watch the wriggling.

Marcia tried a giggle that cracked in midstream. “Cecelia, my dear, you take everything so seriously. I was just teasing. Honestly, my dear, that rejuvenation seems to have affected your temper.” But the oyster-gray eyes were wary, watchful, entirely unlike the frank tone of the voice.

Cecelia let her eyebrows rise of themselves. “Really?”

“All right; I’m sorry.” Marcia didn’t sound sorry; she sounded very grumpy indeed. “If you want Singularity genes, we’ve got ’em. Sperm and embryos both. I suppose you’re thinking of the Buccinator line you favored so?”

Buccinator, Cecelia thought to herself, had only been the most prepotent sire of the past three decades for performance horses. Minimal tweaking of the frozen sperm gave breeders options for speed on the flat or substance for jumping; Buccinator had been almost a sport, but his genome had enough variety for that. But Marcia had refused to jump on that fad, as she’d called it, and out here in the boonies she had produced, after decades of work, one horse not more than fifteen percent worse than Buccinator. Singularity’s sperm would offer genetic diversity, but she intended to have top equine geneticists do some editing before she turned it over to her friends.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you’d be kind enough to show me what you’ve got available. I’d like to see the breeding stock, then the ones in training, then the gene maps.”

Slangsby twinkled at her, but she distrusted that twinkle. Marcia and Poots said nothing, and simply led her out into the aisle of the great barn. Cecelia looked up. Marcia’s pigheadedness about Buccinator aside, she had excellent judgment elsewhere, and this barn proved it. Local wood, used as logs, so that even the most irate equine couldn’t kick through the walls. Good insulation, too. Wide aisles, perfect ventilation for this climate, utilities laid safely underground—no exposed pipes or wiring—and kept immaculate by the workers Slangsby supervised. Tools properly hung out of traffic, the only barrow in sight in active use . . . and down the long aisle, one sleek head after another looking over the stall doors. The horses were under roof in the daytime to avoid the assaults of local insectlike parasites, who lived lives too short to learn that horse blood wouldn’t nourish them. The bites—otherwise harmless—were painful and made horses nervous.

“The oldest live-bred Singularity daughter,” Marcia said proudly. Cecelia had seen the mare before; her infallible memory for horses overlaid her memory of the four-year-old being shown in the ring with this matronly mare only a month from foaling. Star, crooked stripe, snip, all against a background of seal brown. Common coloring for Singularity offspring, because Marcia (like too many people) had a fancy for color. Predictably, she now said, “We sell the loud-colored ones.” Buccinator’s gorgeous copper color had been one of the things she didn’t like about him, Cecelia knew. She also knew that basic coat color was the easiest thing to tweak in the equine genome; if Marcia had wanted all dark foals she could have had them. But other people wanted variety, and she produced brighter ones in order to increase her sales.

“Lovely,” Cecelia murmured. She was, too, a good solid mare who had produced both ova and live foals. “I’m surprised you’re still using her to produce live—isn’t it a bit risky at her age?”

Marcia’s face creased in a real grin. “I keep telling you genetic wizard types that if you breed live, you get real soundness, long-term soundness. Of course we’ve stripped her ova a few times, because it’s so hard to transport the mature horses, but the proof of the value of live breeding is right there: an eighteen-year-old mare who can withstand pregnancy and deliver a live foal.”

Cecelia kept her face straight with an effort. Given the right pelvic conformation and good legs, any mare could do that. And any mare could get in trouble in any foaling, too. She preferred to use nurse mares of larger breeds for any of her own bloodstock. She moved to the next stall, and the next. Marcia’s idea of perfect conformation hadn’t changed since her last visit. Sound, yes, but sacrificing elegance for it. They all looked a bit stubby to her, heavier in the neck and chunkier in the body than necessary.

“And this is our pride,” Marcia said. They had passed under the dome at the crossing of the aisles, and were now in the stallion end of the barn. Marcia’s pride was, of course, the closest thing to Singularity she had been able to produce. He certainly looked like his famous grandsire, Cecelia thought. Dark brown with the merest whisker of white on his brow, a powerful, well-muscled body, and the arrogance of any stallion who comes first in the barn hierarchy.

“Very much like,” Cecelia said.

“He’s double-line bred,” Marcia said.

“What’s his outcross line?” Cecelia asked. She thought she could guess, but waited.

“Consequential,” Marcia said, and Cecelia congratulated herself. Consequential had passed a curious whorl on the neck to his progeny, and this stallion had it. And trust Marcia to talk about the stallion side of the outcross line.

“He’s a real bargain,” Marcia said, and named a price per straw of frozen semen that Cecelia didn’t think was a bargain at all. Not for an inbred chunk with all his grandsire’s faults and probably few of his virtues.

To check that, she asked, “What’s his speed?”

Not to her surprise, Marcia’s smile vanished again. “He’s far too valuable to risk on the track, Cecelia. His breeding alone, his conformation, show his quality. We wouldn’t take the chance of injury.” Of proving him racing sound, of proving that his grandsire’s unlikely speed and agility had come through along with a pretty brown coat and a thick neck. Cecelia couldn’t tell for sure, but even from this angle she suspected that his hocks were not sufficient for his build.

“What’s your price for Singularity straws?” Cecelia asked. “They must be getting rare now.”

“Well, they are, of course. And we must reserve a certain supply for our own program.” As if they didn’t already have all that influence they needed. “But I could let you have fifty straws for forty thousand. Each, of course.”

Cecelia bit back the “Nonsense!” that wanted to burst out. That was only the asking price, which no one dealing in horses ever paid unless they were novices, in which case it was the price of their education. “Umm,” she said instead. It meant she wasn’t stupid enough to take the asking price, but might bargain later.

“So you see what a bargain this one is,” Marcia went on. “Sixty-two percent Singularity—”

Cecelia had run into this before, the ardent preserver of ancient breeds convinced that concentrating bloodlines would somehow overcome the limitations of time and restore the glories of Terran genetics. Cecelia doubted they had been glories anyway (well, perhaps those pretty beasts with the odd number of vertebrae). From the remaining video chips, most of the breeds had been minor variations on a few themes—large and massive, tall and fast, short and hardy—with serious improvement written out of possibility by restrictive breed registries. Half a dozen breeds supposedly intended for racing, for instance, never raced each other and weren’t allowed to interbreed . . . stupid.

“Perhaps I could see this fellow moving a bit?” Cecelia said.

Marcia’s smile returned. “Of course. Slangsby, put him in the front ring.”

Cecelia stepped back to watch. Disposition mattered, as far as she was concerned. Slangsby clipped a lead to the stallion’s halter before he opened the stall door, and ran the chain over the nose and back through the mouth. So. Not a quiet one. With that restraint, however, the dark horse stepped demurely from his stall with an air of innocence that Cecelia didn’t believe for a moment. He did not dance, which might have been considered unmannerly, but he walked as if on eggs, as if any moment he might dance. Marcia urged Cecelia on, but Cecelia hung back. She wanted to see those hocks close up.

“He can be a bit fresh, when he’s been in the stall this long,” Marcia said, now pulling Cecelia back. Cecelia ignored this; she was farther back than the longest-legged horse could strike. She closed her ears to Marcia’s earnest twaddle, and watched the hocks closely. The stallion swaggered a bit; stallions did that. So the sway of the rump might be swagger, and there would be, from swagger alone, a slight sideways jut of the hock as the weight came over it. But here, as she’d expected, was the real problem. From footfall to footlift, the hock described a crooked circle as weight came onto that leg, and the leg pushed the weight forward. She had seen—had even owned—lanky horses whose hocks moved like that, and they’d been sound. But the chunky, muscley horses, those were the ones to watch; those were the ones who needed rock-solid hocks.

The joint narrowed too quickly, too, more trapezoidal than rectangular, flowing into the lower leg too smoothly. Cecelia liked a hock that resembled a box, flat on either side and cleanly marked off above and below. In action, with weight on, it should flex in one plane only, not wobble like this one. She knew she wouldn’t buy a straw of this one’s semen; she might as well tell Marcia now . . . but that wasn’t how the game was played. She strolled on, and took one of the comfortable padded seats just outside the display ring.

Slangsby unlooped the chain, and clipped on a longe line instead of the short lead. The stallion moved out on the line, circled Slangsby at a mincing trot, and exploded suddenly in a flurry of hooves and tail, storming around in a gallop, then flinging himself in the air, bucking. Slangsby growled something at him, and he quieted to a tight canter, then to a trot, slightly more relaxed than before.

“So athletic,” said Marcia. “So balanced.” Cecelia said nothing, watching the hind legs swing forward, back, forward, back . . . never quite reaching under as far as she liked. Of course he was not under saddle; he might never have been taught. That kind of explosiveness, she knew, came from a preponderance of fast-twitch muscle fibers, something jumpers and event horses needed, along with the slow-twitch fibers that let them gallop miles without tiring. But she didn’t want the rest of that genome, at least not the way it was.

She began to think what it would cost to fiddle the Singularity sperm along. She’d need top equine gene sculptors, and the best were in the Guerni Republic, where a healthy racing industry supported them. It might be simpler to go there in the first place, and not bother with Marcia’s overmuscled stock, but the Guernesi concentrated on lighter-boned flat racers. Attempts to sculpt more bone into those had foundered on the difficulty of defining the ideal bone mass for each developing limb at each stage.

The rest of the afternoon, as she watched one horse after another, half her mind was wandering off to Rotterdam and the Guerni Republic. That brought up the last discussion she’d had with her doctors.

“You are physically a young woman again,” they’d said. “Your body is in peak condition. But rejuvenation doesn’t make your mind forget all it’s learned. You are not in your early thirties: you are, in your experience, between eighty and ninety. You will find you want to use your new body in ways that satisfy your mature mind.”

She had not imagined what that might mean. What was she to do with the abundant energy that now made her restless? The Wherrin Trials had shown that she could be competitive; she was sure she could regain the championship. She had swum easily against the strongest current the yacht’s pool provided, refreshed and not tired by an hour’s swim. Pedar’s revelations of a Rejuvenant clique didn’t attract her, except when younger people were being especially tiresome . . . but they were more tiresome now than when her aging body had left her with less energy to express her irritation.

She considered her family: would young Ronnie have been so feckless if his parents had not been Rejuvenants? Parents who knew they would live forever didn’t want competition from their children . . . might be glad if the children were “too immature” at twenty or even thirty to be given responsibility. Were the Rejuvenants heading for a society in which the young would have no opportunity to develop mature judgment? The youngsters had done well enough when they had to—when they had the chance, like Brun, to demonstrate the maturity they should have.

“Would you like to try out some of his get?” asked Marcia. Cecelia yanked herself back to the present, where the chestnut stallion posed in the ring, showing off his muscles. The Singularity line, whatever its structural faults, had never been short of showy personality.

Would she like to ride one? She thought of Marcia’s past, and her past, and the way she always felt on a horse. No contest. It was never any contest. She always wanted to ride a live horse, even a bad horse.

An hour later she felt that even the Singularity line had its virtues. True, they didn’t have the extension she liked. True, they had trouble with lateral flexion of their stubby bodies. But they provided both springy comfort in collection, and explosive leaps over fences. Cecelia dismounted at last, feeling almost smug. She had seen, in the look on Slangsby’s face, that he had not expected her to be that good. And Marcia, who had surely rejuved more than once, must not have expected it either—they both looked slightly stunned.

It might be worth it to have one just for fun—just for herself. Not to breed—she still didn’t like the structure—but to ride. An embryo transfer to Rotterdam, brought out of one of the big old mares Meredith kept for the purpose. In a few years, she could play with it—hard to believe she had those years now, could look that far ahead.

It did change the decision points.

“Let’s talk about this,” she said to Marcia. She was very glad she’d taken care to see her bankers before coming out here; Marcia had made everyone on the circuit uncomfortable about money years ago, and that sort of stinginess didn’t change.

“Excuse me, Commander, but Captain Serrano asked if she could come aboard. She’d like to speak to you personally.” It was past half, in the second shift, a time when attention blurred toward dinner. A time when, according to Koutsoudas and his instruments, Garrivay gathered with his conspirators for a daily conference. The guard at the access, crisply efficient in his spotless uniform, watched Heris and the others closely as he spoke into the intercom. A pause, during which Heris tried not to hold her breath visibly. He must want her to come; it would make things so much easier for him. A Serrano with an armed yacht was the only menace he faced; if the mouse walked into the cat’s parlor, it saved the trouble of hunting it down. He had to be smart enough to figure that out. If only Koutsoudas’s genius had included mind probes . . .

“Oh, very well.” The reply was easily loud enough for her to hear. Then, in a more cordial tone. “Yes, yes—do bring her aboard, and any of her crew that came along. Delighted . . .”

Delighted. She let no hint of her own delight at setting foot on a cruiser deck again slip past her guard. She was the renegade, the outcast who hadn’t dared come back in the Fleet. She was a coward who hadn’t yet admitted it; she let herself shiver as Garrivay’s security patted her down, as if it bothered her.

None of her weapons would show. Behind her, her crew submitted as well. She had worried some about Meharry, who had been a bit too eager to come along, but Meharry said nothing untoward. They were all in obviously civilian shipsuits with Cecelia’s family name stenciled (a few hours before) on the chest. Heris had not known how Garrivay would react to this many crew—she had alternate plans for different possibilities—but they were led to his office in a clump.

“Ah . . . Captain . . . or may I call you Heris?” Garrivay, expansive in his own ship, eyed her up and down with the clear intent of discovering any lingering scrap of backbone. As she had hoped, he had not dismissed the other officers. She had suspected he would prefer to humiliate her before an audience.

Heris drooped as submissively as she could, giving a nervous laugh. She scarcely glanced at the other officers in the compartment. They would all have been junior to her, if she were still in; they were all junior to Garrivay. And they were all conspirators. She hoped Koutsoudas was right about that. She had enough innocent blood on her conscience.

“You’re the commodore,” she said. Would this be too much? But no, he accepted that as his due.

“Right,” he said. “I am. You know, I really wish you had left here with your rich lady, your owner. I might have to confiscate that ship if there is an emergency.”

“I know,” Heris said, heaving a dramatic sigh. “She just wouldn’t listen. She doesn’t understand things; she doesn’t believe it can happen to her.” Koutsoudas had assured her that Garrivay could not have intercepted the messages between her and Cecelia supposedly discussing that possibility; she hoped not, because all the messages had been fakes. Cecelia had gone blissfully into that horse farm and had yet to emerge. The safest place she could be, right now. “I suppose you’d install your own crew?” she asked, aiming for wistfulness.

“Do you want the job?” he asked.

Heris shook her head, looking down as if ashamed. She was afraid she couldn’t control the expression in her eyes. “No, I—you know I—had the chance to go back in Fleet.”

“And got out while the going was good, eh? Well, probably wise. And your crew—ex-Fleet as well—I don’t suppose any of them want a berth on a real fighting ship again?”

“No, sir,” said Meharry. Shut up, Heris thought at her. Don’t ruin this. “I got more’n enough scars, sir.” Meharry at her best didn’t sound entirely respectful, and at the moment she sounded downright sullen.

“I hope we won’t have to impress you, then,” Garrivay said, in a voice that enjoyed the threat. “If there is trouble, and we run short of . . . whatever your specialty was . . .” He waited, but Meharry didn’t enlighten him. Heris stared at the carpet, waiting, feeling the others at her back. Garrivay chuckled suddenly, and she looked up, as he would have expected. “Don’t look so worried, Heris. I’m not planning to run off with your owner’s ship and your crew unless I have to. You’ll never have to fight another battle. Now . . . what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Well . . . Commodore . . .” He liked the title; she could see him swelling up like a dampened sponge. “It’s partly my owner and partly the local government. You see, before you arrived, they kind of got to asking me things. . . .” She went off into a long, complicated tale she had thought up, something that kept offering Garrivay hints of intrigue and possibly profit, but entangled in enough detail that he had to listen carefully. She had rehearsed it repeatedly, adding even more complicated sections so that it took up enough time. It had an ending, if needed, but within the next anecdote or so Koutsoudas should—

“Sir—an urgent signal—” There it was; the prearranged distractor, one of Koutsoudas’s elegant fakeries. A bobble on the ship’s scans that might be incoming ships, something the bridge crew would have to report and Garrivay would have to acknowledge.

“Yes?” Garrivay turned away, reaching for his desk controls; his officers, for that instant, looked where he looked.

No one needed a signal. Heris threw herself forward and sideways, in a roll—and-kick combination that caught Garrivay on the angle of the jaw. His hands flew wide; before he could recover, she was on him, the edge of her hand smashing his larynx. Her other hand had reached the com button, preventing its automatic alarm at the sudden loss of contact. Garrivay, heaving as he tried to suck air and got none, thrashed against his desk and fell to the deck. From his earplug came the tinny squeak of someone reporting the surprise Koutsoudas had created for their sensors.

She looked up, to meet four triumphant grins. Too early for those; they had just started. She leaned over and removed Garrivay’s earplug, inserting it in her own ear.

“—it’s moving insystem at half insertion velocity, while the other—” She listened, only half hearing what she already knew, but aware of a little bubble of delight at being once more connected to a real ship’s command center. Even if it wasn’t her ship. Though it was—or would be—if the rest of this worked.

Already the others were stripping the bodies of their uniforms. Oblo looked up and waved something, a data strip it looked like. Heris leaned again to Garrivay, now unconscious, his body twitching with oxygen deprivation, and unpinned his insignia. Her nose wrinkled involuntarily at the unpleasant stench; she ignored the source and pinned the insignia to her own uniform. Thank goodness she had a uniform that could pass for Fleet in a pinch . . . because this was a pinch indeed.

“I can wear this,” Petris said doubtfully, nodding at the uniform he’d removed from someone with major’s rings.

“No,” Heris said. “It won’t really convince them, and once they discover where the uniforms came from they’ll worry again. I’m the key: if they accept me, they’ll accept you.” Otherwise, of course, they were all dead. In her ear, the flow of information stopped. She hit the com button twice, the usual signal of a busy captain that the message had been received.

From Garrivay’s inside pocket—no more twitches now—Heris took the thin wand that gave access to captain’s command switches. From here out, it would get more dangerous. Murder was one thing. Piracy, treason, and mutiny were . . . she didn’t think about it.

The wand slid into the desk slot easily. The hard part came next. To forestall just such coups as they had accomplished, the use of the captain’s wand triggered a demand for an identity check.

“Serrano, Heris,” Heris said, adding her identification numbers and rank, mentally crossing more fingers than she owned . . . if Koutsoudas was right, her aunt admiral might have managed to leave a back door in the Fleet database.

Lights flared on the captain’s desk, and the computer demanded a reason why Serrano, Heris, Commander was using Garrivay, Dekan Sostratos, Commander’s wand.

“Emergency,” she said. Then, with a deep breath, took her aunt’s name in vain. “On the orders of Admiral Vida Serrano.”

The computer paused. “Authorization number?” A sticky one. The only number her aunt had shared with her recently was the Serrano encryption code on that datacube. Would aunt admiral have risked putting her family code into the database, hiding it in plain sight, as it were? Right now Heris believed her aunt admiral might have done anything. She found another mental finger to cross, and gave that number. After the second group, the computer blinked all the lights. “Authorization accepted.” So . . . aunt admiral had had more in mind than an apology, had she? And had she known Heris would be in this sort of trouble? Koutsoudas’s remark about “lightning rods” flashed through her mind. Interesting—infuriating—but she had no time to sort it out.

Now a touch on the desk opened the service functions. She picked up the command headset and settled it on her hair.

“You don’t want the combat helmet?” Petris asked.

“No. If we can do this at all, we can do it this way. We cannot take the whole ship by force, if everyone’s turned.” She could, with the command wand, destroy it and everyone on it—and, in the process, the station to which they were docked. But she hoped very much that her string of good guesses would continue to hold. “They need to see my face. I’m legitimate, remember? The computer accepts me; my aunt is an admiral.” On the desk, she keyed up the status displays. Personnel . . . there were fifteen more known traitors on this ship, and four on one of the patrol craft. Koutsoudas thought he knew which fifteen, and she located them . . . on duty, six . . . one on the bridge, and five elsewhere about the ship.

“You can’t take the bridge alone,” Petris said.

“No . . . but I can isolate the compartments.” She touched the control panels. Now each was blocked from communication with the others, and if she could get control of the bridge crew, if they believed her, there was a chance of capturing the other traitors without a major fight in the ship.

The first thing was to establish her authority with even one legitimate onboard officer. Now on the bridge was a major Koutsoudas thought unlikely to be a traitor. Again, he had better be right. She selected his personal comcode from the officers list.

“Major Svatek, report to the captain’s office.”

“Yes, sir.” He had a voice that gave nothing away; she felt no intuitive nudge of like or dislike. Heris nodded to her crew; they placed themselves on either side of the door and waited.

The major came in without really looking, and by the time he had registered the bodies on the floor and the stranger behind the captain’s desk, Petris and Meharry had him covered.

“Sorry about this, Major,” Heris said. He looked stunned, and then angry, but not particularly frightened. “It is necessary that you listen to what I have to say, and there was no safe way to do this on the bridge without imperiling the ship.”

“Who . . . are you?” The expletives deleted by caution left a pause in that.

“I’m Commander Heris Serrano,” she said. It was not an officer she had ever seen before, but he had to know that name. “I’m on special assignment.”

“But—” The major’s eyes shifted from her to Petris to the bodies and back to her. Recognition; that was good. For once Heris didn’t mind having the family face. “But you were—I heard—”

Heris smiled. “You heard correctly. I resigned my commission and took employment as a civilian . . . in anticipation of recent crises.”

“Oh.” The blank look cleared slowly. “You mean it was all—all faked?”

“Well . . . not uncovering Lepescu’s plot,” Heris said cheerfully. Everyone knew about Lepescu, she was sure. “That wasn’t faked at all.”

“But—what are you doing here?” This time his glance at the bodies had been longer. His first anger was leaving him, and she saw a twitch of fear, quickly controlled.

“Right now, I’m taking command of this ship, as ordered.”

“You—are?” The major’s gears were trying to mesh, but achieved only useless spinning; Heris could almost hear the loose rattle. “As ordered?”

“You’re aware that this system will shortly be under attack by the Benignity of the Compassionate Hand?” Giving it the full title added weight, Heris thought, to the claim.

“Uh . . . no . . . uh . . . Captain.” Victory. The major didn’t know it yet, perhaps, but he had accepted Heris in command.

“They scouted it, sent a fake raider in to check out the defenses—”

“That raider we heard about?”

“Yes. With a surveillance ship in the distance. This group was then dispatched . . . but not by the R.S.S. command.”

“But—but what are you saying?”

“That your former captain, Dekan Garrivay, was a traitor, in the pay of the Benignity. That certain of his officers were also traitors, that the purpose of this mission was to strip Xavier of any defenses, including me—since I had killed the raider—and open it to the Benignity.”

“But—but how do you—” Disbelief and avid curiosity warred in the major’s expression.

“You may recall that I have an Aunt Vida . . . Admiral Vida, that is.”

Comprehension swept across the major’s face, and he sagged. An aunt admiral, a secret mission . . . it was all right. Behind the major, Petris relaxed a fraction. Heris didn’t.

“Now,” Heris said, “my people need uniforms; they’ve had to wear those miserable civilian things too long.” She paused a moment, wondering if she dared promote her associates to officers. She needed all the loyal officers she could find . . . but instinct said that even the smallest additional lie could topple the major’s fragile belief in her story. If he stopped to think, if he doubted, she would become a common murderer again, not a legitimate officer who had been operating under cover. She gave them their original ranks instead, and watched the major’s response. He might not know it, but he could still be dead any moment. “And you’ll need to get someone up to tape the scene for forensics, put the bodies on ice, and clean up this office afterwards. We strongly suspect that one or more are carrying discreet CH ID markings. And the following personnel must be located and put under guard.” She handed him Koutsoudas’s list. Making it all up as she went along, she realized, was a lot more fun.

“Yes, sir.” A long pause. “Anything else, sir?”

“No,” Heris said. “I’ll be on the bridge, speaking to the crew.”

“But you’ve got Cydin on your list, and she’s on the bridge now,” the major said.

“Thank you,” Heris said, as if she hadn’t known that. “Then I’ll take Mr. Vissisuan with me—” Oblo was almost as well known in the Fleet as Koutsoudas. “Who’s bridge officer at this time?”

“Lieutenant Milcini,” Major Svatek said.

“And the M.P. watch commander?”

“Lieutenant Ginese—” Svatek looked at Arkady Ginese, startled. Ginese smiled.

“That’s probably my Uncle Slava’s oldest boy. I’d heard he’d been commissioned.” Another thin layer added to the skin of belief; Heris could see Svatek processing this. Not only the famous Serrano name, but someone related to the ship’s own security personnel.

“Mr. Ginese, you’ll accompany me as well,” Heris said. “Let’s go.”