The Serrano Connection (66 page)

Her new team waited for her in the afternoon skills exercise. They had a bored, wary look . . . they were, she realized, the team that Anton Livadhi had led. And Anton had remarked, just too audibly, that he had his doubts about the source of Suiza's success. "Serrano pet" was a phrase she'd been meant to overhear; she had ignored it, but these people hadn't. Two other women, four men; she ran the names over quickly in her mind. All but one had been in her class in the Academy, but she hadn't seen any of them for years, and she hadn't been close to them even then.

That afternoon's exercise was deceptively simple. From a scatter of raw materials, improvise a way to cross a series of "natural" barriers. Each obstacle required not only teamwork but also innovative thinking . . . none of the poles were long enough, none of the ropes strong enough, none of the assorted other objects were obviously meant for the tasks at hand. Esmay tried being forthright and cheerful, as recommended in the leadership manual, but only some of her new team responded. Lieutenant Taras was inclined to be pettish if her ideas were not accepted the first time; Lieutenant Paradh and Jig Bearlin could always think of ways for things not to work. By the time the period was over, they had completed only four of the five obstacles. Esmay was aware of the frowning instructor, ticking off points on his chart. This team had been ranked first or second in every exercise; now they wouldn't be.

It was possible to request overtime, though it was rarely done because it imposed a twenty percent penalty on the entire score. Esmay raised her hand; Taras made a sound that might have been a groan. Esmay rounded on her. "We are going to finish this, Lieutenant, if we have to stay here all night—"

"We can't
win
," Bearlin said. "We might as well take the eighty percent we've got—"

"And when you need that other twenty percent of experience, where are you planning to get it?" Esmay asked. "We're completing this exercise, and we're doing it now."

She expected more resistance, but despite some sidelong grumpy looks, they tackled the final obstacle with more energy than they had any of the others. Five minutes later, they had solved the problem—and although Esmay halfway expected them to dump her in the mud, they got her over the pit with the same care they expended on each other.

"Good choice," the instructor told them afterwards. "You wouldn't have got eighty percent before—you were about as effective as a jug of eelworms—but you've got it now."

By the time they got back to the mess hall, Esmay felt she had a chance with this group—a slim chance, but a real one. If only she'd had a few more days before the field exercise.

The next day's prelims went better; her new team seemed willing to work together again, and they were back up to third in the daily ratings. Esmay went to her quarters to pack her gear for the field exercise, and try to snatch a few hours of sleep before time to leave.

She had everything laid out on her bunk when her doorchime rang. Stifling a curse, she went to open it. Barin might have stopped by, though she'd hardly seen him for days, except with Brun. She hoped it was Barin. But instead it was Brun, and a very angry Brun at that.

"I suppose you're proud of yourself!" Brun said first.

"Excuse me?" What was the girl talking about?

"You never did want me on your team; you haven't liked me from the beginning."

"I—"

"And now you've made sure I can't do the field exercise, so you can take over a top team . . ."

"I did not," Esmay said, beginning a slow burn. "They just assigned me—"

"Oh, don't be stupid," Brun said, flopping onto the bunk and making a mess of Esmay's careful arrangement. "You're the heroic Lieutenant Suiza—they want you to shine, and they've arranged it. Never mind what it does to other people's plans . . ."

"Like yours?" Esmay said. She could feel her pulse speeding up.

"Like mine. Like Anton's. Like Barin's."

"Barin's!"

"You know, he's really quite fond of you," Brun said, idly prodding a stack of concentrate bars until they collapsed. Two slid off onto the floor. Esmay gritted her teeth and picked them up without comment. She did not want this. "I was trying to find out why you're such a cold fish, and I thought he might know—and I'll bet you didn't even know the poor boy's half in love with you."

Didn't she . . . ? Esmay contemplated for a moment the probable result of pulling out Brun's tousled gold curls by the roots.

"Of course, such an upright professional as yourself would never stoop to dally with mere ensigns," Brun went on, in a tone that could have removed several layers of paint from a bulkhead. "He, like the rest of us, is far beneath your notice—unless someone gets in your way." This time she picked up a water bottle and opened and shut the spout.

"That is not fair," Esmay said. "I didn't have anything to do with your being taken out of the field exercise—"

"I suppose you want me to believe you support me?"

"No, but that's not the same thing. It wasn't my decision to make."

"But if it had been—" Brun gave her a challenging glare.

"It wasn't. What might have been doesn't matter."

"So true. You
might have been
a friend; you
might have been
Barin's lover; instead—"

"What do you mean 'might have been' someone's lover?" Even as angry as she was, she could not say Barin's name in that context. Not to this woman.

"You don't expect him to hang around worshipping your footsteps forever, do you? Just in case you might come down from your pinnacle and notice him? Even a bad case of hero worship yields at last to time."

This was her worst fear, right here and now. Had it been only hero worship? Was it . . . over?

"And you, of course, were right there to help him over this unwarranted fixation . . . ?"

"I did my part," Brun said, flipping out the gold curls with a gesture that left no doubt what she meant. Esmay had an instant vision of them strewn about the room, little gold tufts of hair like fleece on the shed floor after shearing. "He's intelligent, witty, fun, not to mention incredibly handsome—I'd have thought you'd notice—"

A light of unnatural clarity seemed to illuminate the room; Esmay felt weightless with pure rage. This . . .
this
to be pursuing Barin.
This
to displace her, to ruin her relationship with Barin. A young woman who boasted openly of her sexual conquests, who refused to abide by any rules, who claimed to be unafraid of rape because "it's just mechanics; and aside from that, no one can make me pregnant." She was like Casea Ferradi, without Ferradi's excuse of a colonial background.

Hardly conscious of what she was doing, she reached out and lifted Brun off the bunk, and set her against the wall, as easily as she could have picked up a small child.

"You . . ." She could not say the words she was really thinking; she struggled to find something hurtful enough. "You playgirl," she said finally. "You come bouncing in here, all full of your genetically engineered brains and beauty, showing it all off, playing with us—
playing
with the people who are risking their lives to keep you and your wonderful family alive and safe."

Brun opened her mouth, but Esmay gave her no chance; the words she had longed to say came pouring out.

"You wanted to be friends, you said—what did you ever do but get in my way, take up my time, and go lusting after anyone who caught your fancy? It never occurred to you that some of us have a job to do here—that people's lives, not just ours, will depend on how we do it. No. You want to go play in Q-town, someone should go with you . . . it doesn't matter to you if that means learning less. After all, what does it matter if you pass a course or flunk it? It's not your life on the line. You don't care whether you ruin Barin's career or not—" Not the way she herself cared; not the way she agonized over it. "You think your money and your family make it right for you to have anyone you want."

Brun was white to the lips. Esmay didn't care. Her anxiety about the next day, her exhaustion from weeks of extra work—all had vanished, in righteous rage. "You have the morality of a mare in heat; you have no more spiritual depth than a water drop on a window. And someday you will need that, and I promise you—I promise you, Miss Rich and Famous—you will wish you had it, and you will know I'm right. Now get out, and stay out. I have work to do."

With that, Esmay yanked the door open; she was ready to shove Brun out, but Brun stalked past her, under the eyes of her waiting security, who carefully looked at neither of them. The doors were not made to slam, or Esmay would have slammed hers. As it was, she restacked her gear with shaking hands, packed it, set it aside, then lay unsleeping on her bunk to wait for the alarm.

Brun stalked along the streets of Q-town trying to push her anger back down her throat. That sanctimonious little prig . . . that prissy backcountry
chit
 . . . her family probably slopped hogs in their bare feet. Just because she herself had grown up rich, just because she could talk about sex without squinching her face up—!

In one corner of her mind, she knew this was unfair. Esmay was not an ignorant girl, but an accomplished older woman. Not much older, but an Academy graduate, a Fleet officer, a combat veteran—Brun would have been glad to have Esmay's experience. She wanted Esmay's respect.

But not enough to turn into a frumpy, tight-buttoned, sexless, joyless . . .

Esmay wasn't joyless, though.

Brun didn't want to be fair. She wanted to be angry, righteously angry. Esmay had had no right to ream her out like that, no right to say she had no moral sense. Of course she had moral sense. She had rescued Lady Cecelia, for one thing. Even Esmay granted that. Aside from the requisite helling around that all the people in her set went through in adolescence, no one had ever accused her of being immoral.

She hunted through her past, finding one instance after another in which she had acted in ways she was sure Esmay would approve . . . not that it was any of her business. She had protected that little Ponsibar girl at school, the one who had arrived so scared and so easy to bully. She had told the truth about the incident in the biology lab, even though it had cost her a month's detention and the friendship of Ottala Morreline. She had been polite to Great-Aunt Trema even when that formidable old lady had regaled guests at the Hunt Ball with tales of "little Bubbles" cavorting naked in the fountain as a toddler. She'd had to fight off entirely too many of her schoolmates' brothers after that one, but she hadn't turned against Aunt Trema. She and Raffa on the island . . . they had saved each others' lives.

She could not, however, find something to plaster over all the accusations. Well . . . so what? Her standards were different; that didn't mean she had none. Just as her inner voices began to talk about that, she decided she was thirsty, and turned into one of the bars that lined the street.

Diamond Sims, the sign read. Brun assumed it referred to fake diamonds, with an implication of world-weariness. Inside, the tables and booths were full of men and women who might as well all have been in uniform as in the mostly-drab shipsuits now the favorite casual wear for the military. The way they sat, their gestures . . . all revealed their profession. A few—less than a third—were in uniform. She didn't see any of the students from the courses here—not that she'd know any but those in her own section, anyway. But she hadn't wanted to see anyone she knew, anyone who would wonder where her bodyguards were. She wanted new faces, and a new start, and new proof that she was who she thought she was.

With that in mind, she edged past crowded tables to the one double seat empty toward the back. She sat down, and touched the order pad on the table—Stenner ale, one of her favorites—and put her credit cube in the debit slot. She glanced around. On the wall to her right were framed pictures of ships and people, and a display of little metal bits arranged in rows. A faded red banner hung up in the far corner; she could not make out the lettering from where she sat.

A waitress deposited her frosted mug and the bottle of ale, and gave her a saucy grin. "What ship, hon?"

Brun shook her head. "I'm on a course." The waitress looked slightly surprised, but nodded and went on her way to deliver the rest of the tray to another table. Brun poured her ale. Behind her, she heard the dim confused sound of voices, and realized that there was another room—apparently private—adjoining the main room. And on her left, the long bar, the same matte black as the stuff covering ships' hulls . . . could it possibly be a section of the same material? Above it, suspended from the high ceiling, were ship models. Brun recognized the odd angular shape of a minesweeper among the more ordinary ovoids of the warships. And behind the bar, the expected mirrors were framed with . . . her eyes widened. She knew enough about ordnance now to recognize that every frame had once been part of a functioning weapon. In a quick glance around the room, she saw more and more . . . it was as if the inside of the bar were made of the salvaged pieces of wrecks.

She felt the hair rising on the back of her neck, on her arms. It wasn't real—it could not be real—no one would really . . . but her eye snagged on a display at the near end of the bar.
Paradox
. That name—she could not forget that name. And here was a plate—an ordinary dinner plate, its broad rim carrying the same dark-blue chain design she'd seen on all the dinnerware aboard Admiral Serrano's ship, with the four lozenges that had surrounded the name
Harrier
. Here, the design inside the lozenges was slightly different . . . and the plate, sitting on a stand she was suddenly sure had been made of other debris, was brightly lit by a tiny spot that also illuminated the label, for those who were too far away to see the lozenges. Beside it was a stack of crockery.