Two fliers, not just one, painted in bold splashes of dark green and white with a big gold logo and their name—MACKENSEE MILITARY ASSISTANCE CORPORATION—on the side. They hovered briefly, then landed. A team emerged from each, cautious. Ky recognized the lean, rangy form of Master Sergeant Pitt. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. The entire group, after a cursory look around, stared up the slope at the fresh scar of the rockslide and the scatter of bodies.
Ky signaled her people to stay down and eased her own way toward Pitt, close enough to hear Pitt’s exasperated, “She has to be around here somewhere! That didn’t happen by itself.”
“Good afternoon, Master Sergeant,” Ky said. Pitt whipped around and Ky found herself staring into the muzzles of many weapons.
“Why didn’t you fly yourself out and save us the trouble?” Pitt asked, nodding at the first flier. She signaled to the others, and they relaxed.
“I don’t have a license for this craft,” Ky said. “Can you give us a lift?”
“Yes,” Pitt said, “at a price. I want to know how you got past that monster.” She pointed at the bear.
“Carefully,” Ky said.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Admiral Vatta,” Pitt said. “Call in your wolf pack and let’s get you back to your formidable great-aunt.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Ky hadn’t wanted to come to Corleigh, but the Vatta tik plantation was one place the media could not easily invade, and for the sake of a little privacy she had accepted Helen’s invitation to use the new vacation home on the other side of the cove from the house she had grown up in. It looked different, for which she was gratefuclass="underline" an airy beach house up on stilts with a wide veranda all the way around. She and Rafe dropped their small luggage in the largest of three bedrooms, changed, then walked down to the shore. It was the middle of winter here, but a winter milder than Miksland’s summer, and as the sun set and all the colors of a tropical evening shifted in water and sky, she tried to pretend everything was the same as before she left that first time.
“We’re on a tropical island at last,” Rafe said. “Two of your moons are up.”
She had not noticed, deep in her thoughts. She stared at the night sky and felt nothing thematically related to moonlight on a tropical beach. “It’s the tropical island where my parents and brothers died.” She turned, facing the paler blur that was his face. “How comfortable were you, back in the house where you had to kill that man?”
“Not,” he said. “Not at all. We sold it—or rather, I hear from Penny that she did, for a good amount, shortly after I left. It was… eerie, when I went back there. I didn’t fit at all.”
“And you had a house,” Ky said. “I have the bare place where it was and the memory of it.” The memory of her mother’s dead face in the ash-covered pool, so vivid in her father’s implant, had faded when those memories were removed from her implant. She knew she had seen it; she just couldn’t retrieve it now.
She couldn’t see Rafe’s face, but she heard the change in his voice, the deliberate calm. “So… we should go back to the beach house. At least that’s not in your memories.” She could almost hear the unspoken We could make our own.
Ky nodded; they returned to the house in silence, and during supper talked only of inconsequential things. That set the pattern for the next five days. Avoiding the past, not discussing the future, and in that empty present feeling out whether they still had a future together without talking about it. They walked the beach from one cove to the other, swam several times a day, ate meals from the well-stocked freezer without paying much attention to them. Hours on the wide veranda that encircled the house, conversations that died away in a few minutes, leaving Ky still uncertain. The nights… the nights were good, comfort and ease and a reminder how well she and Rafe suited each other. But she woke while he slept, her mind still replaying scenes from the crash, from the lifeboats, from Miksland. Why had she done this, and not that? What else could she have done that would have had a better outcome?
She and Rafe had both brought their comunits, and they had both locked down their skullphones. The local hub at the Vatta office nearby could transmit wirelessly to the house, but Ky didn’t pick up her comunit from the table where she’d dropped it until the fourth day. If Rafe used his, he didn’t tell her about it.
Nothing from Stella or Helen or Grace: they knew she and Rafe wanted to be left alone. A query from a journalist wanting an interview. And a longer communication, via Captain Pordre in Vanguard, from Dan Pettygrew back on Greentoo. She’d known something like this might be coming, but—
“How’s the admiral business coming?” Rafe had been stirring eggs for breakfast. His expression now was wary.
Ky let out a huff of air. “It’s not. Official notice—” She calculated the date from Cascadian to Slotter Key calendar. “Three or four days ago, Cascadian.”
Rafe looked stunned, then furious. “They canned you? They canned you? It’s your fleet; you created it; you saved them—everybody—”
Ky shook her head. “They had reasons. The other governments might have let me come back, but Moscoe Confederation blames me for Commander Bentik’s death. Her family’s prominent in Cascadian politics. Dan Pettygrew sent a long apologetic letter about it. He argued but says here it was hopeless. He thought I’d want him to stay in command, so he went along. He did insist on having my back pay and severance pay deposited to my account at Crown & Spears in Cascadia and suggests I transfer it immediately to Slotter Key. They might block transfer, he said.”
“That’s disgusting!” Rafe turned back to the cooktop. “Damn. These eggs are—”
“Fine,” Ky said. “Or trash—it doesn’t matter.”
“You should—”
“I shouldn’t, whatever you’re thinking. Serve those eggs or toss them out and I’ll do the next batch.” She stood up and stretched. “I was never a very good desk admiral, you know.”
“You were. You just don’t realize your own—”
“Talents. Yes, I do. Rafe, you know—I told you—I didn’t like that part of it. I was bored; I had even thought of resigning—”
“You didn’t tell me that!”
“No.” She nudged him away from the stove, where the pan of eggs looked like nothing she wanted to eat. She opened the recycler hatch with her foot and slid the mess out of the pan, cracked four more eggs and started again. “Get that funny-looking cheese out of the cooler.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“I do. You’ll like the result. And some chives, and a slice of last night’s ham.”
Rafe leaned on the counter while Ky put together an omelet. “Our cooks would never let any of us do anything in the kitchen.”
“We had a cook sometimes, but my parents agreed that everyone should know how to cook.” Ky cut the omelet in the pan and slid half onto each plate. “The thing is, Rafe, after the first shock I feel free. I am not going to spend my life bitter about this. And I’m not broke—that much back pay and what Pettygrew told me was the severance, what was already in my account there—and what Stella owes me now that I’ve turned over my shares to her—it’s not pebbles. I can do anything I want, with time to think about what that is.”
Rafe had started on his portion of omelet; his eyebrows had gone up. “In light of that, then,” he said, “the Board at ISC prefers Penny to me, especially because of my attachment to you. They still have ridiculous notions about Vattas. So we’re both out of a job. Same as you, I turned over my inheritance and she’s paying fair for it and says she’ll keep me on the books with a regular remittance, as before. I was getting tired of that corner office anyway.” After a moment, he went on. “So what will it be?”