The Serrano Connection (65 page)

"No," Esmay said. She had never paid much attention to the gossipy newsflashes, with their emphasis on fashion and celebrity.

"Well . . . if you had, you'd have seen Brun Meager in everything from formal gowns to skinsuits, posing elegantly on a horse or lounging by a picturesque beach. Flatpics of her are probably in more lockers than anyone but actual storycube stars."

Great. Someone else who thought she was astoundingly beautiful. Esmay could picture every flaw in that face and body—not that there were many.

"But except for the daring rescue of the most noble Lady Cecelia"—that sounded like a quote from someone's purple prose—"nothing I've read suggests she had any real sense. So now we're stuck with her . . ."

"If the teams are the same," Marden said. "Maybe they aren't."

"Maybe they aren't, but I'll bet Esmay ends up on the same team. They'll want to put another woman on her team, and who else would they put? Taras? Don't make me laugh. Taras wouldn't have a chance with Brun Meager. No, they'll put the best they have, and that's you, m'dear." Vericour bowed, grinning. Esmay felt embarrassed. How could she deal with this? It did not help that Brun chose that moment to appear at their table.

"Won't do you any good to flirt with Suiza," she said to Vericour, apparently apropos of the bow. "But you could always flirt with me."

Vericour spread his hands, rolled his eyes, and then mimed a swoon; everyone laughed but Esmay. It was funny, but she was too conscious of the vivid intensity next to her to enjoy it.

"Could I talk to you a bit?" Brun said, turning to her with a more serious expression than usual. Under the eyes of the others, Esmay had to say yes.

"I know I did something wrong, but not what . . . how could I arrange air cover when we didn't have any resources? And why should I have worried about it, when the information we were given didn't mention any such threat?"

A technical problem she could answer; Esmay quickly outlined the logic behind their low score. Brun nodded, apparently paying attention, and Esmay warmed to her again.

"So . . . even if there's no evidence to indicate a certain kind of threat, you still have to counter it?"

"You have to assume your intelligence is incomplete," Marden put in. "It always is."

"But if you're too cautious, you can't get anything done," Brun said. "You have to act, even before you know everything—"

"Yes, but with an awareness of what you don't know, and its implications," Esmay said.

"And it's not so much what you don't know, as what you think you do know—that's wrong—that will get you killed," Vericour said. "It's the assumptions—that no mention of an aerial threat means no aerial threat, or no mention of piracy in a sector means there are no pirates."

"I see," Brun said. "I'll try to do better next time, but I have to say I'm better at reacting quickly than seeing invisible possibilities."

When Esmay got up to leave, Brun trailed along instead of heading for the ball courts with the others, and Esmay sighed internally. She was tired already, and had at least four hours of studying to do; if Brun insisted on talking to her, she would be up late again, and her energy was running out.

"I know you're busy," Brun said, as they got to Esmay's quarters. "But this shouldn't take long, and I really don't know where else to go."

This appeal cut through Esmay's worry about her classes. "Come on in," she said. "What's wrong?"

"There's something wrong with Master Chief Vecchi," Brun said.

"Wrong? What kind of wrong?" Esmay, her mind on their previous conversation, had been expecting a question about Fleet manners.

"Well . . . right in the middle of the lecture today, he suddenly didn't make sense. He was telling us how to secure a line on a derelict in zero gravity, and he got it backwards."

"How would
you
know?"

Brun had the grace to blush. "I read the book," she said. "His book, actually.
Safety Techniques in Space Rescue
."

"It slipped his mind," Esmay said. "Everyone makes mistakes sometimes."

"But he didn't know it. I mean, he went right on, explaining things wrong. When one of the jigs asked if he was sure, Vecchi blew up . . . then got very red, walked out, and when he came back, he said he had a headache."

"Maybe—"

"It's not the first time," Brun said. "A week ago, he actually inserted a Briggs pin upside down."

"Testing you?"

"No—it was his own line, and he was about to move on it when one of the junior instructors—Kim something. Tough little woman, about half my size but can haul me up one-handed. She did. Anyway, she noticed Vecchi's mistake and fixed it."

"Um." Esmay couldn't think why this was her problem, except that anything that bothered Brun was her problem.

"It bothered her, I could tell. She watched everything else he did, checked it all. Not the usual cross-checks, but as if he were a student."

"How old is Vecchi?"

"What, are you thinking he's just gotten old? He's rejuved, I know that. One of the first enlisted rejuvs."

"When?"

Brun looked disgusted. "I don't have his medical records—how would I know?"

"I just wondered . . . maybe it's wearing off."

"It doesn't work that way," Brun said. Esmay raised her eyebrows and waited. "My father," Brun went on. "He's rejuved, so is Mother. Their friends . . . so I naturally know how it works."

"And?" Esmay prompted.

"Well, the usual reason for repeating a rejuv is physical. The people I know who've had more than one certainly didn't have any mental problems. Their personalities don't change, and they're just as alert."

"But wasn't that earlier kind of rejuvenation associated with mental degeneration?"

"Only if you tried to repeat it." Brun made a face. "Mother's second cousin or something did that, and it was horrible. Mother tried to keep me away from her, but you know little kids . . . I thought there must be something special in that suite if they wanted me out of it, so I sneaked in."

"So . . . is Vecchi anything like your mother's cousin?"

"Not . . . exactly. Not as severe, anyway. You don't suppose they made a mistake and gave him the wrong kind of rejuv procedure, do you?"

"I don't know. It would help if we knew more about rejuvenation, and also about the procedure used on Vecchi."

"I thought you could do something, since you're in Fleet."

Esmay snorted. "Not dig into his personnel and medical records—I have no reason to see them, and it's against regulations to snoop."

"Not even . . . unofficially?"

"No." She would stop this right here. "I'm not going to ruin my career to satisfy your curiosity. If Vecchi is impaired, someone in his chain of command will notice. If I observe something myself, I can report it. But I cannot—and will not—attempt to snoop in his records. You can report it, to—oh—whoever's commanding over there. Who's the senior instructor?"

"A Commander Priallo, but she's on leave somewhere."

"Well, find someone else—whoever is her junior—"

"I'd think you'd care," Brun said.

"I care—" If anything at all was wrong, but this was only Brun's word. "But I have no right to intervene; this needs to go to his commander. I suppose you could tell the Commandant."

"Maybe I will," Brun said, and after a moment sighed and went out. Esmay put Brun's worries out of her mind and tackled her assignments.

When the field exercise team assignments came out the next day, she found Vericour was right. Brun was on her team, and she had the smallest team of all—because her security would have to come along. How would that work? Would they really let her be roughed up? Or would they interfere in the exercise? And what would that do to the scoring?

Meanwhile, Brun maintained an indecent level of energy and enthusiasm. She learned content as fast as anyone Esmay had ever known—Esmay wondered if her intellectual capacity had ever been pushed near its limit. She did not, however, seem able to learn the attitudes that were by now second nature to those young officers for whom they were not first nature. Reprimands slid off her impenetrable confidence; suggestion and example alike had no effect.

"She's a dilettante," Vericour said, in another of those mealtime discussions. "Though what else could we expect from someone of her background? But she takes nothing seriously, least of all Fleet culture."

Anton Livadhi, a cousin of the Livadhi with whom Esmay had served on
Despite
, shook his head. "She takes us seriously enough . . . but she's not one of us, and she knows it. She wants us to be serious, while she has fun." He had his own team for the field exercise, and they were well up the chart on the evaluations for the preliminary exercises. Esmay's team performance was only middling; Brun fluctuated between brilliant and maddening, and her security could not commit emotionally as team members were supposed to do, and still be guards. They had taken almost twice as long as the fastest team in several exercises.

Esmay began to dread the field exercise itself, four days of intense and dangerous work in the badlands west of the base. She was reasonably sure that Brun's guards wouldn't let her be killed, but that left her and Jig Medars to do the work of an entire team. Two days before the exercise, she left a lecture on ship systems maintenance and found a message on her personal comunit: Lieutenant Commander Uhlis wanted to see her at her earliest convenience. Since she had an hour between classes, that meant right now.

She could hear the angry voices from ten meters down the corridor; Uhlis's door was ajar.

"You have to see that it's impossible." Uhlis sounded annoyed.

"Why?" Brun sounded more than annoyed; Esmay paused, wishing the door had shut firmly.

"Because you're already the target of assassins. The field exercise is by nature dangerous, and it's also impossible to secure. All it would take is one person—just one, with the right skills—to pick you off."

"You mean to tell me that on a base covered with Fleet personnel, you can't even let me do a simple field exercise?" Scorn in that, as if Brun expected to shame Uhlis into changing his mind. That wouldn't work.

"I mean we will not approve it. Nor will your father; I have already forwarded our decision, and our reasons for it, to him. He agreed."

"That's—that's—the stupidest thing I ever heard!" Brun's voice had gone up another notch. "If I'm a target for terrorists, then it's perfectly clear that escape and evasion is exactly what I need to know. What am I supposed to do if I get kidnapped and need to escape?"

"The escape segment will be available—at least the urban end . . ."

"Fine. So I've broken out of some provincial jail somewhere and have to cover a hundred kilometers to a safe haven, and I have no training?"

"According to your father, you have had ample training in the basics of survival and navigation in the field, both on Sirialis and on Castle Rock. Your field skills are, in his opinion and those of our instructors who reviewed the recordings, equivalent to those of most graduates. So the escape segments should fill out your skills very well."

Silence for a moment. Esmay wondered if she could just walk past the door now, but even as she moved, Brun stormed out, silent but obviously in a rage. She broke stride when she saw Esmay.

"You will not believe—!" she began.

"Excuse me," Esmay said, not wanting to hear it all again. "I overheard a little, and I have an appointment." Brun's eyes widened, but she moved aside. Esmay edged past Brun and into the office, where a grim-faced Commander Uhlis looked ready to melt bulkheads with his glare. "Sir, Lieutenant Suiza reporting—"

"Close the door," he said.

"Yes, sir." Esmay shut the door firmly, aware of Brun hovering outside.

Uhlis took a deep breath, then another, and then looked at her with less intensity. "I wanted to talk to you about your team assignment," he said. "If you overheard much of that"—he nodded at the door—"then you know we have concerns about security. Up until last night, we still had orders to accommodate Meager and include her in all the courses, including the field exercise. However, since we now have permission from the highest levels to exclude her and her bodyguards, we need to rearrange team assignments. We're going to split the exercise, and you'll be assigned to a new team, acting commander." He gave her a dangerous smile. "I understand you do very well at motivating strangers, Lieutenant."

So the camaraderie she'd built up with her team over the past week would be no use to her—and the team she went to might well resent losing its familiar commander. But at least she wouldn't have Brun to worry about.

"Thank you, sir," she said.

"Thank me afterwards," he said. "If you can. Remember, your score depends on not only your own successful evasion, but how many of your team make it."