Vida swung her chair away from her desk, staring through the bulkhead into decades of memory. All lay clear to her inward sight, vista after vista, crisp images, faces, names, relationships. They were wrong—they had to be wrong. Nothing blurred her mind. She swung back. “Fine, then. I’ll take myself off duty, hike down to Medical, they can take a look and put me back on.”
“No, sir. Please—would the admiral look at the orders?”
“Which you didn’t draft, I presume. All right.” She looked at them, read them carefully, every word of every old-fashioned paper sheet.
Worse than bad. Mandatory immediate release from active duty. Immediate replacement by officers specified—in her case, Admiral minor Livadhi. Immediate surrender of all communications devices, encryption/decryption devices, data access devices . . .
“I’m not—I’m sorry, Admiral, I think it’s unreasonable and ridiculous to make flag officers leave their quarters and their duty stations so fast—”
“Makes sense if someone really wants us gone, though,” Vida said. She was past the first flash of anger now, and her brain had moved into combat-speed computation. “Rush us out, make sure we can’t contact our friends still on active duty except by monitored channels, make sure we have no access to files—”
“I have a room in the Transient Officers’ Bay,” Livadhi said. “I see no reason to enforce this to the letter—”
Vida looked up and caught sympathy on his face. Heris had said he had his good points. “Don’t you? Then you’re more a fool than I ever thought, young man. When the wind changes, so must the sails. If you don’t enforce your orders, you won’t last long. I’ll be out of here by the deadline.”
“Yes, but—I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to do—” That was almost plaintive. Vida gave him a wide Serrano grin, full teeth, and he paled, the freckles standing out.
“You’ll do your job, son, the same way I did mine—and learn it the same way too. Scary to get what you always wanted, isn’t it? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to clear my desk.” She punched for her clerk. “Sandy—come on in; we have a situation.”
Within the hour, she had started the process that would transfer command of Sector Seven to Admiral minor Livadhi. No big change-of-command ceremony, because there was no time for it if they were to make the deadline. She called in her staff, advised them of the orders, and had them start briefing Livadhi, who had just come from Sector Five, about the peculiarities of Sector Seven. While they did so, she began peeling out her personal files from the official ones stored under her codes. She would definitely take with her the files on rejuvenation, for instance—should she offer Livadhi copies? No. If he were found to have them, he might get in trouble. What about the scant information she’d collected on the new powers in the Grand Council? Maybe. Lists of family members on active duty, people from whom she might legitimately—well, almost legitimately—seek information . . . all the Admirals Serrano had been rejuved, so all would be affected. From Davor, now a third-year at the Academy, to Gossin—her nose wrinkled at the thought of trying to work with Gossin, who was one of the rare light-skinned Serranos (though that was only the most obvious of her problems)—the list included nineteen—no, seventeen, because Heris’s parents had just retired. Barin’s mother was still on active duty, but his father had retired to take over as the Serrano family’s agent.
Her com chimed. She punched it live. “Vida? It’s Gadar Livadhi. Have you heard this ridiculous order taking rejuved admirals off duty?”
“Just saw the orders, Gadar,” she said. “One of yours brought them to me, in fact. Nice shiny new star young Arash has.”
“Well . . . what are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take myself off active duty. Were you one of the experimentals too?”
“Yes, and there’s not a thing wrong with my brain but the smoke coming off it from this nonsense.”
“Gadar—this is no time—”
“—To start trouble. I know. But at a time like this, with Thornbuckle gone, we need experienced leaders.”
“If we’ve done our job, our juniors can take over.” She knew she didn’t believe that, and Gadar’s snort told her he didn’t believe it either.
“You’re an optimist. By the way, what do you hear from Copper Mountain?”
“Nothing,” Vida said. “Should I?”
“Well . . . you know my brother Arkad’s in the judicial division . . .”
“Yes . . .”
“He’s been investigating the records of prisoners sent to Copper Mountain’s secure facilities—that Stack Islands thing—because that’s one of the places that Lepescu stashed your niece’s crew.”
Vida noted Livadhi’s turn of phrase. Run hot, run cold, that was Livadhi. “And . . .?”
“And he turned up something interesting. Lepescu’s juniors—the ones too far down to have been caught with their hands in the honey jar after he was killed—have been cycling through Stack Islands. Not as prisoners, but as guards. Not all the guards, of course, but some of them.”
“Oh . . . my.”
“If you wanted to recruit desperate and dangerous personnel—even those who serve their terms and aren’t discharged are going to have that mark against them—you could hardly do better than to start there.”
“And you think they’re up to something, of course. Any idea what?”
“Another mutiny—perhaps a breakaway—”
“In service to whom? What kind of financial backing do they have?”
“I haven’t been able to find out anything. I’ve always rather wondered if Lepescu wasn’t close to the Morrellines, given his involvement in Patchcock—”
“He made things worse—the whole thing rebounded—”
“Yes—but in the long run, it cemented Morrelline control. Got the Familias as a whole bad publicity—”
“You didn’t say anything about that at the time,” Vida said.
“No. I didn’t realize it at the time. I was all the way over in One, chatting up those Lone Star Confederation diplomats. I hate staff rotations.” Vida didn’t rise to that bait, and eventually Livadhi went on. “It’s only recently, after your—mmm—adventure there, that I began looking into it.”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do now but go home like good little children,” Vida said. “I hope they realize what an opportunity this is for foreign interests. Not to say anything against your family member Gadar, but your new admiral minor almost turned up his toes when he realized he was about to be responsible for the sector most likely to be attacked by the NewTex Militia, with only thirty-six hours of OJT.”
“My heart bleeds,” Gadar said. “I hope these are only temporary ranks, because the instant they check us out medically, I’m going to be back in my office.”
“I hope it’s quick,” Vida said. “But if someone wanted to get rid of us—or some of us—all they’d have to do is delay the medical.”
“You Serranos are so cheerful!” he said.
“You Livadhis are so lively,” she said, and cut the connection.
Vida could not remember a time in her adult life when she had had nothing specific to do for days on end. She’d taken leave, of course, but she’d always had plans. A trip to take, a course, a family crisis that needed her time and talents. She had money enough—she hadn’t spent all her salary since she made lieutenant, and her investments had prospered. She could live quite well on half-pay. It was the idleness that bothered her, the sense of being cut off from her family.
Well . . . she’d go home, then, to the Serrano compound on Melander, that source of all—or at least many—of the Serrano family.
Making reservations on a civilian ship was annoying; she tried to laugh at herself for expecting people to jump when she said hop, but it wasn’t easy. She’d so often thought of civilians as disorganized, but when you didn’t have a staff . . . she grumbled at herself repeatedly, as she arranged to ship this and store that and decided what to carry on and what to stow in cargo.