The Serrano Connection (60 page)

"Lieutenant?"

"I just came in," Esmay said. "Our ship was on . . ."

"Fleet Standard. I understand Lieutenant . . . you're overdue for . . . midday, right? Do you want a full meal or a snack?"

"Just a snack." She would get herself on the planet's schedule faster this way, but she felt hollow as a new-built hull at the moment.

He seated her at a table a discreet distance from the two that were occupied, and left to bring the food. Esmay glanced casually at the others, wondering if they would be in her class. A young woman in fatigues without insignia, her curly blonde hair cropped short, sat hunched over what looked like a bowl of soup. Beside her, an older man in a lieutenant commander's uniform who, from his posture, was laying down the law about something.

Esmay looked away. Unusual to chew someone out while they were eating, but it would be rude to observe. Could this be father and daughter? At the other table, three young men wearing exercise clothes who were, she realized, watching
her
. She met their gaze coolly, and they looked away, not as if they were embarrassed, but as if they had seen all they wanted. Their gaze wandered the room steadily; they ignored the litter of plates and cups before them.

The steward brought out a platter of sandwiches, pastries, and raw vegetable slices arranged in a fan-shaped pattern. Esmay ate a sandwich of thinly sliced cattleope spread with horseradish sauce, several carrot sticks, and was considering one of the curly pastry things which smelled so deliciously of cinnamon and hot apples when the blonde woman erupted.

"I'm
not
quitting!" she said, loudly enough that Esmay could not fail to hear. She was sitting upright now, her face flushed slightly. With that flush Esmay could spot the irregular patches of fresh healing . . . she had been in a regen tank to repair some kind of injury to her face and—Esmay could not help looking—hands and arms.

The older man, with a cautionary glance at Esmay, rumbled something she could not hear.

"No!" the blonde said. "It's something else—something important. I know—" Then she too looked around, met Esmay's eyes, and fell silent for a moment.

Some instinct prompted Esmay to look not merely down, but—under lowered lids—across at the other table. The three men there now made sense . . . their dismissive assessment of her, their constant surveillance of the room. These were the bodyguards of someone who hired the best—or to whom the best were, by custom, assigned.

Whom were they guarding? Surely not the young woman . . . if they had been, they had failed in some way or she would not have been hurt. A lieutenant commander? Hardly . . . unless he were not a lieutenant commander at all.

She glanced back at the young woman, and surprised by an expression on both faces so alike that it had to imply a relationship. Her eye, trained on a planet where families mattered, and where she had been expected to recognize even the most distant Suiza cousin, picked out now the similarities of bone and proportion, as well as behavioral quirks like the sudden lift of eyebrow that both older man and younger woman showed at that moment.

"Brun . . ." That carried, in part because the tone was so like the pleading tone her own father had used. Her mind caught on the unusual word. Brun. Wasn't that—? She clamped her mouth shut on the apple tart. If that was the blonde girl who had been involved in the Xavier affair, then her father was the present Speaker of the Grand Council . . . the most powerful man in the Familias Regnant. What could they be doing here?

Speculation having outrun data, she munched steadily through the tart, studiously ignoring the argument which continued, in lower voices, at the other table. She struggled to remember all the snippets of rumor she'd heard about Thornbuckle's wild youngest daughter . . . a spoiled beauty, a hotheaded fool who had plunged into the thick of intrigue with no training, an idiot who'd ended up dead drunk and naked in a rockhopper's pod in the aftermath of a battle. But also something about being, in some obscure way, Admiral Vida Serrano's protÈgÈ, because of her services to the Familias and—most particularly—to Admiral Serrano's niece Heris.

"Excuse me," someone said. Esmay swallowed the last bite of tart, and looked up. She had been concentrating so hard on not noticing what she shouldn't notice that she hadn't noticed anyone approaching her table.

It was one of the bodyguards. He had no rank insignia on his exercise clothes, but from his face he was older than she.

"Yes?"

"You're Lieutenant Suiza, aren't you?"

Despite the therapy, her gut tightened. "Yes, that's right."

"Lieutenant Commander . . . Smith . . . would like to meet you."

"Lieutenant Commander Smith?"

He nodded his head toward the other table. "Smith," he said firmly. "And his daughter."

For a moment Esmay wished that she had just lived with her hunger until the next scheduled main meal. She had no desire to get involved in whatever was going on, whether it was a matter of father-daughter dissension or some plot against the Familias.

"Of course," she said, and rose from the table.

The older man and the young woman watched her approach with, Esmay thought, the wrong sort of interest. The older man had the sort of face which might have been pleasant, but presently had locked into a tight mask of concern. The young woman looked both annoyed and afraid.

"Commander Smith," Esmay said, "I'm Lieutenant Suiza."

"Have a seat," the man said. Although his uniform fitted his tall, lanky body perfectly, she was sure it did not fit his spirit . . . it would have needed stars on the shoulders, and plenty of them.

"This is an unexpected honor," the man went on. "I had heard about you, of course, from Admiral Serrano, after Xavier—and now this recent business—"

This, for instance, was not the way a real lieutenant commander would have brought it up. Esmay wondered whether to relieve him of the need for faking a military identity, and had her mouth open when the young woman spoke.

"Dad! Stop it!"

"Brun, I'm merely—"

Now almost whispering, but still angrily, the young woman continued. "You're
not
really a lieutenant commander and it's not fair." She turned to Esmay. "I'm Brun Meager, Lord Thornbuckle's daughter, and this is my father."

"I'm pleased to meet Commander Smith," Esmay said, "under the circumstances."

His face relaxed a bit, and his mouth quirked. "Well, one of you young ladies has a bit of discretion."

"I'm not being indiscreet," Brun said. "She could see you weren't really a Fleet officer, and I could see the wheels going around in her head as she tried to figure out how to handle it."

"One allows prominent people to introduce themselves as they choose," Esmay said. "One's private curiosity never intrudes."

Brun blinked. "Where are you from?"

"Altiplano," Esmay said. "Where, on occasion, senior officials may choose to appear in borrowed identities."

"And where good manners seem to have penetrated more than in some other places," Lord Thornbuckle said pointedly. Brun flushed again.

"I don't like deception."

"Oh, really? That's why you so carefully avoided using your own name when you were coming back to Rockhouse—"

"That was different," Brun said. "There was a good reason—"

"There's a good reason
now
, Brun, and if you can't see that I'll go back to calling you Bubbles with reason." For all his low, even voice and quiet face, Lord Thornbuckle was seriously angry. Esmay wished she were on the other side of the planet. Father-daughter conflict raised ghosts she wanted laid to rest. Brun subsided, but Esmay had the feeling she was not really subdued.

"Perhaps we could continue this in another location," Lord Thornbuckle said. Esmay could think of no polite way to refuse, and she wasn't sure where her duty lay, as an R.S.S. officer. But she would have to report to class at 0800 local time the next morning, and she had a lot to do in the meantime. Still . . . he was who he was, and even who he wasn't outranked her.

"Of course, sir," Esmay said.

Thornbuckle nodded to the men at the other table, who stood up. "I'm afraid we will have an escort."

That didn't bother Esmay; what bothered her was landing in the middle of whatever mess this was. She noticed that the escort split up, two going ahead and one trailing behind. Were they Fleet? She couldn't tell. She felt she should be able to tell; the civilians aboard
Kos
had been obvious enough. These didn't look like civilians, but they didn't quite fit Fleet, either. Private guards?

The conference room they finally entered was small, centered with a table large enough for only eight or so to surround. It had a display console at one end, but Lord Thornbuckle ignored that. He waited until his escort nodded, then sat at one end of the table. Habit, Esmay supposed.

"Sit down, and I'll make this as brief as possible. You haven't been here long, have you?"

"Just got off the shuttle, sir," Esmay said. "I'm here for the command courses I missed earlier, and then the standard junior officers' course." The one that would qualify her to command a ship in combat, according to the Board of Inquiry which had recommended it. Of course, not being qualified hadn't stopped her yet—but she put that out of mind and prepared to focus on whatever Lord Thornbuckle had to say.

"My daughter wanted to take some training with Fleet experts," Thornbuckle said. "I agreed, in part because she'd gotten herself in so much trouble without training . . . it seemed the risk-taking genes had all come together in her."

"And the lucky genes," Brun said. "I know they're not enough, but they're also not negligible. That's what Captain—Commander—Serrano said. And her aunt admiral."

The thought of anyone calling Vida Serrano "aunt admiral"—even a niece—shocked Esmay. For this girl—for Brun was clearly younger than she was—to do so would have been unthinkable except that Brun had just done it.

"But there've been incidents," Thornbuckle went on, ignoring what Brun had just said. "I thought she'd be safer here, on a Fleet training facility—"

"I
am
safer," Brun said.

"Brun, face the facts: someone shot at you. Tried to kill you."

Esmay managed not to say what she was thinking, that a Fleet training facility was not, in the nature of things, the safest place in the universe. Live fire exercises, for instance. Was this what the girl had gotten into?

"It wasn't anywhere near a live fire exercise," Thornbuckle went on. "That was my first thought, of course. Military training is dangerous; it has to be. But we—and by 'we' I mean not only myself, but others who've seen Brun in action—thought it would be less dangerous than turning her loose on the universe untrained." He spread his hands. "No—this has been different. I suppose we were just careless. We knew there were traitors in Fleet; that mess with Xavier proved it. But it didn't dawn on me that there might be traitors here, in a training base, until Admiral Serrano pointed it out. We knew that Brun might be at special risk, but we didn't react fast enough."

"I'm alive," Brun said.

"You survived with your usual flair," her father said. "But you also had to spend a day in the regen tank, which is not what I call coming out unscathed. Too close for comfort is my analysis. You have to have more protection, or you have to leave."

Brun's shoulders twitched. "I'll be careful," she said.

"Not good enough. You have to sleep sometime."

"Have you identified the nature of the threat?" Esmay asked, to forestall another round of useless argument.

"No. Not . . . precisely. And the worst of it is that I can see a variety of threats. The Benignity's not happy with their loss at Xavier, and we are sure they have other agents in Fleet. Some have been identified, others haven't. They consider assassination a political tool. The Bloodhorde . . . well, you can imagine how they would like to have my daughter in their control. Then there are my personal enemies among the Familias. A few years ago, I would not have believed any of the Families would make war on personal relations, but now—things have changed."

"And you—or your advisors—think your daughter should leave this facility?"

"It would be easier to protect her at home, or even on Castle Rock."

"I would go crazy," Brun muttered. "I'm not a child, and I can't just sit around doing nothing."

"Do you want to join Fleet?" Esmay asked. She couldn't really imagine this obvious rebel wanting to join anything with discipline, but if she hadn't understood . . .

"I did at one time," Brun said, eyeing her father. "Now—I'm not sure."

"She doesn't want to get stuck doing boring things," Thornbuckle said. Brun flushed.

"It's not that—!"

"Isn't it? When Captain Serrano pointed out how much of her time was spent on boring routine, you said you didn't much like that prospect."