She suspected that Fleet would not do anything, but she had to make the attempt. Sure enough, after taking her report, the admiral minor on the screen shook her head.
“I’m sorry, sera, but in the present situation we can’t detach troops to protect one world.” One rich family’s playground world was the implication.
“I understand that,” Brun said. After the expense of her rescue, she knew she could not ask Fleet for favors. “But you needed to know that we suspect one of the mutineers’ ships—or maybe more—is headed there.”
“Yes, I understand that. But that’s a fairly isolated world with a small population. Better they should go there than attack a more populous planet. It has no manufacturing capacity, has it?”
“No—only light industry.”
“It would take them five years to build up a shipyard capable of producing FTL ships, and that’s with stolen parts, not from scratch. That gives us time to cut them off. I doubt very much they have the resources to mount a proper systemwide defense. In the meantime, we have urgent concerns elsewhere. As soon as possible, we’ll go get them.”
“I’ve already warned the population that Harlis may be coming with an armed ship. I don’t want to interfere with your dispositions, but may I at least tell them you won’t be coming?”
“Of course, sera. In fact, if the mutineers go there, and find that out, perhaps they’ll stay in what they think is a safe haven until we can get there. Quite frankly, sera, we have no resources that could reach Sirialis before the mutineers can, if you’re right about when they might have started.”
“Thank you,” Brun said. She wanted to rage, to kick desks and stamp the polished floor and scream . . . but that wasn’t the way to get things done, not now. “Do you have any idea what force of ships that man Taylor might have?”
“I’m sorry, sera, I don’t have that information.”
After Miranda and Cecelia left, Sirialis subsided into summer somnolence, with Opening Day a safe hundred or more days away. Not that its inhabitants were idle, not on an agricultural and recreational world. Sirialis fed itself and the guests who descended on it yearly. The early crops of grain were in; the first cutting of hay lay open to the sun, drying before baling. Truck farms were in full production and so were the food processing facilities that took the surplus and preserved it for the season. For most of the planet’s population, life went on as usuaclass="underline" the schools and stores and other services for the locals didn’t change much with the activities of the owners. The changing seasons and the vagaries of local weather were more important. Dredges grumbled away at the entrance to Hospitality Bay where unusually severe winter storms had raised a sandbar and caused problems for the fishing fleet. In the other hemisphere, scattered settlements—timber camps, mining camps—prepared for the depths of winter. Many people migrated with the seasons, but a few chose to stay in one place.
Whenever family members weren’t in residence, the big house went to a skeleton staff except for maintenance. This spring, plumbers worked on the balky pipes of the east wing, which had given trouble off and on for over fifty years, and the engineering consultant prodded at timbers in the attics in the triennial structural inspection. Stables and gardens, of course, were fully staffed year round. Horses and roses needed constant care; grooms and gardeners both preferred the quiet seasons.
System defense, at Sirialis, had been minimal for over a century. There was the communications ansible, by which the family alerted the system to their arrival. The landing fields at the main residence and Hospitality Bay had longscan capability, but system defense and traffic control was handled mostly by the Stationmaster at the largest orbital station. All three orbital stations had longscan and there were a few batteries of anti-ship missiles from the old days, which no one had tested in at least five years.
Brun’s first ansible message set off a flurry of activity. There were not enough shuttles and ships within the system to evacuate everyone from the surface; Sirialis’ population was small only by comparison with more developed worlds. They had no weapons that would stand up to a military invasion, and Brun had not been able to say how many ships might show up. She had been able to get Fleet to transmit the specs of various kinds so they’d have a clue.
Chapter Twenty
Goonar heard nothing from Bethya the next morning—or afternoon. Had she changed her mind? Was she trying to think of a way to let him down easily?
When the call finally came, he’d immersed himself in a study of the shipping figures for a colony Terakian & Sons was thinking of offering regular service to. He picked up the buzzing comunit absently. “Captain Terakian—how may I help you?”
“Goonar—” It was Bethya. His heart started to pound. “It’s done. I’m still at the hotel, and I’m really too tired to move tonight. But I’d like to have dinner—would you mind coming here?”
“Of course not,” Goonar said, dragging his mind away from the profitability analysis of the colony. “How formal?”
“Not very.”
Bethya looked very tired, almost wan in fact. He wondered if the execrable Dougie had been nagging at her and felt a strong urge to hunt Dougie up and push his face in.
“Are you up to this?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t be fooled by theatrics, Goonar. I—came up with something.
“The problem,” she said, over the salad, “was money. It usually is, in theater. Money or jealousy, or both. In this case, both.”
Money Goonar understood. “They owed you?”
“They owe both of us,” she said. “We still—they still—haven’t paid for the passage, beyond the first segment. And when we founded the company, the four of us—Merlay, Dion, Sarin and I—all contributed equal shares. Merlay died five years ago—the most ravishing tenor you ever heard, and it was just a stupid traffic accident. Dion got an offer from his homeworld’s most prestigious school of the arts a year later, and we bought out his share. We being Sarin—who’s our set and costume designer—and me. Well, we were short two males, and Sarin and I decided to look for more partners. What we really wanted was another good male lead and a business manager, but the people you want don’t necessarily have the money when they’re available. Usually, in fact.”
“So . . .”
“So Lisa, already in the company, wanted to buy in. She had the money—an inheritance, she said. We couldn’t reasonably refuse. Dougie was working for the Greenfield Players—he’d pulled them out of a financial hole, and he said he wanted to travel. We still didn’t have enough capital, so we talked to the rest of the troupe, and most of them scraped up enough to buy a share when we restructured.”
“Is it equal shares now?”
“No . . . the way it was, Sarin and I each had four, and everyone else had one. I thought it was fair, as long as we were all together. But when I leave, I’ll want to take out my shares in cash, and they won’t want to pay it.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to a clinic, and came back looking the way I look now, and explained I’d had a shock.”
“A shock.”
“Yes. I reminded Lisa that she’d been saying my voice was not what it had been—I could have smacked her for smirking at me—and that I hadn’t wanted to tell them where I was going ahead of time. And the doctors had found a problem—that I was going to have to give up singing, and have surgery, and it might never be as good after. That it would be months—it was something difficult, which regen wouldn’t fix.”
“Is that true?” Goonar asked. “When Brun Meager’s voice was lost—”