“Could land their force on Miksland quick enough to keep the others from killing you all. Then Grace got a call from someone in the military—Slotter Key’s, that is—and shooed us all out. Someone’s head would roll was the last I heard from her.”
“I don’t think she’s involved in what happened to your people,” Rafe said to Ky. “Teague and I overheard enough while in her house to know she was concerned about the others as well as you. But there’s division in the Slotter Key military, which she thinks might go back to that civil war.”
“Civil war?” Stella wrinkled her nose. “You mean that little insurrection thing she got caught in?”
Rafe cocked his head. “You don’t know more than that?”
“She told me about it,” Stella said. “Back when I was in trouble—you know, Ky, with the gardener’s son. She got involved with someone and ended up in some kind of violent mess. It barely shows up in our history books at all. Something happened to her; she was in a psych hospital for a while.”
“She didn’t give the details?”
“Not exactly. She did tell me she’d killed some people, that she’d been scared a lot.” Stella’s voice was cool, calm, as if whatever had happened to Grace didn’t matter in the slightest.
“I suspect it was a lot more than that,” Rafe said. “She’s a very complex woman, and she’s—she reminds me of someone I knew.”
“Well, it’s a hard job.”
Rafe looked at Ky. “We’d better get some rest, too, Ky.”
“I want to talk to her now—” Ky could feel the anger boiling up again.
“It’s late,” Stella said. “There’s nothing she could do tonight anyway.”
Ky stiffened. “If she’s involved, she certainly could do something tonight! Others are still in prison—or somewhere—being mistreated like these.”
“I know you’re upset,” Stella said, “but be reasonable, Ky. They aren’t really your troops; you don’t have any authority. Grace does, but she’s got a lot on her plate.”
The tone ripped the last shreds of Ky’s control. In just that calm, almost syrupy voice Stella had insisted Ky’s earlier enthusiasms and angers were unreasonable overreactions. Older to younger, senior to junior.
“You do not get to tell me who my people are or aren’t!” Ky said. “You weren’t there, you don’t—” Someone had hold of her arm; she spun, freeing herself, and struck before she realized who it was. Rafe, who had slipped the worst of the force and now stood just out of reach, poised in case she attacked.
“Ky!” Stella said, now roused and angry.
“Don’t,” Rafe said to Stella. She stepped back, frowning.
Ky turned slowly to face Stella. “He’s right. Don’t. Don’t lecture me in that tone, Stella. Ever again.”
For a long instant the three of them did not move. Ky stood rigid with the control she exerted not to strike again. Then Stella shrugged. “You’re right, Ky. You’re not a shareholder anymore, you’re not living on Slotter Key, what you do is your own business and not any concern of mine.” Her voice was cool, level. “Except that you are in my house, and you are the one who decided to bring strangers into it, fugitives, and then give me orders. And I am your cousin; your actions do affect me; I was attacked in my own apartment on Cascadia because of you. You might remember that when your temper cools.”
Ky felt the rage subsiding as if it were a column of boiling water leaking out of a pipe.
“I do,” she said, her voice still colored by it, but quieter. “I didn’t know about the attack.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Yes. Some.” She felt sore, as the tension dropped, sore and tired inside and out.
Stella made it to her own suite, closed the door behind her, and let loose a streak of language that Ky probably did not suspect she knew. How dare Ky treat her that way! Ky hadn’t even spoken to her on the flight back from Corleigh, had just sat there sulking, as if Stella were responsible for the bad news about her money and missing out on a longer vacation with Rafe.
The problem wasn’t just money. Ky didn’t have a ship to boss around anymore, a crew that hung on her every word and thought she was wonderful. She was feeling sorry for herself and probably believed Stella had it easier because Stella still had both the homes she’d grown up in, a mother alive, and Jo’s children as a promise of the future.
“Easier!” she said aloud, surprising herself with the venom in her voice. “Ha! I have nothing. My mother—my real mother—is someone I never met and never will, and my real father was a monster. My so-called family lied about my birth, Jo wasn’t any relation to me, and her children—how can I love them as if they were my real niece and nephew when I will never have children of my own?”
Not that she’d really wanted children. But still. The things she might have said to Ky, wanted to say to Ky, boiled through her head, vicious and potent as vitriol. Ky was the lucky one. Ky’s parents had been her real parents; yes, they were dead, but she was not being hassled by a live “mother” who wasn’t, a woman riven by grief and fear, whose only real grip on life was the twins she clung to. And yet Ky, as always, had grabbed the moral high ground, eager to play rescuer to those three peculiar-looking women, no doubt eager to have them kneel at her feet again, bask in their adulation of the great, wonderful Admiral Vatta who had saved everyone.
“Gah!” Stella said aloud. “And ordering me around like one of her soldiers!”
She was sweating now, pure fury hot as summer sun. All the quarrels in their past rose up, all the times she’d been told Ky was smarter or more sensible.
Her daysetter chimed, reminding her it was time for bed. She took a shower instead, letting the familiar beat of hot water on her shoulders relax them, inhaling the fragrances designed to calm, until she could think more clearly. She was the elder. And she was CEO of Vatta, all of it, responsible for the businesses, the employees, their families. That was where her energy should go, not on trying to fix her stormy younger cousin that no one else had ever been able to fix, either.
She had the shares now. She had the support of the corporate Board. Ky couldn’t touch any of that. She would show everybody that—monster’s bastard or not—she deserved to be where she was: in the big corner office. She drifted into sleep imagining that office and herself in charge… She hated the thought of her birth father, the family traitor, the criminal—but it was amusing to realize that he would be proud to see one of his own in charge. More than her adoptive father, the father of her childhood, who had never trusted her ability, who had preferred Jo, “the smart one,” to “that idiot Stella.”
CHAPTER TWO
At last. Iskin Kvannis, Commandant of the Academy, had changed from his stark white uniform into more comfortable clothes in the Commandant’s quarters. He settled into the comfortable chair behind his desk and ran through the messages waiting for him. His wife reminded him about his daughters’ birthdays coming up in a couple of tendays—as if he needed a reminder. Their presents were already wrapped and stowed in the desk in front of him. Three minor infractions by cadets were now on his schedule for Commandant’s Hours the next day. And the fugitives from the military prison at the nearby base were still on the run. His focus sharpened; he checked the time and called the officer who was supposed to have found and taken them back to prison days ago.