Sera Ennisay looked at her, and her face softened. “You—you have children—grandchildren—”
“No, I couldn’t have children—but I have nieces and nephews I loved as my own, and their children are like my own grandchildren.” Not entirely true, but not entirely false, either. She had taken the entire Vatta family as hers, after the disaster, and Shar and Justin definitely thought of her as a grandmother type. “It’s always hard when you don’t know where they are, if they’re all right.”
“Then you do know.” Sera Ennisay burst into tears and came forward, reaching for Grace’s hands. “Thank you! Thank you for bringing him home!”
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Grace said, giving the other woman’s hands a strong squeeze, then releasing them. “And I’m sorry I must leave you now, and see the others.”
“Oh—oh, of course, I’m sorry—”
“Just stay here and cheer him up,” Grace said, turning toward the door. A stupid thing to say to the woman, but maybe she’d stop crying and actually smile at the boy.
Next was Lakhani, who’d suffered a broken arm and a strained back in the melee that occurred during the third group rescue attempt. He, too, had family in the room: father, mother, and two brothers. They were undemonstrative people, taciturn but not unfriendly. “I brought a fruitcake,” Sera Lakhani said. “His favorite. There’s a little left.” She pushed a small piece onto a place and offered it to Grace with a fork.
“Thank you,” Grace said. “Is it your own recipe? I make fruitcake, too, and I’m always looking for new recipes.”
“Not really. I got it off the package of dried fruits years ago, when he was little.” Sera Lakhani pointed her own fork at Corporal Lakhani. “But since our orchard’s grown up, we dry some of our own fruit. I think it’s mostly the same.”
“Tastes the same,” Lakhani said.
“It’s very good,” Grace said after an exploratory nibble. “Is that—just a hint of cocoa powder in it?”
Sera Lakhani beamed. “It is, indeed. And no, it wasn’t in the original recipe. And we use our own honey for the sweetener. Citrus honey.”
“I will have to try that,” Grace said. “Corporal, I wish you a swift recovery.”
“Thank you, Rector,” Lakhani said. “They told me they’ll tank me to heal faster after the press conference.” He paused. “Is the admiral coming today?”
“I think not,” Grace said. “She was asked to take over the Academy as Commandant after Kvannis fled.”
“Good,” Lakhani said. “She’ll be good at that.”
The rest of the survivors and their families were milling about, going from room to room, stopping to exchange stories in doorways, blocking traffic. Families introduced themselves to other families. It was chaotic, but Colonel Byers led her from one to another of the survivors and helped her extricate herself from the family members. She had met almost all of them when the elevator doors opened again and General Molosay’s aide came up to her. “Rector, the general’s asking everyone to get ready for the press conference. The media vans are here.”
“Where exactly will we be?”
“In the lecture hall downstairs; there’s room for all the ambulatory survivors on the stage, and for families to be seated. Hookups for all the equipment, as well.”
Ky Vatta finally had time to sit down in the Commandant’s office, the one she had last seen the day she’d been ordered to resign from the Academy. The carpet had changed, she noted; it had been a deep green and now it was blue, with a thin gold border. The office had three doors, not something she’d noticed back then. There was the one she’d come through before, opening onto the passage. She investigated the others: the one on the left as she entered opened into the Commandant’s secretary’s office. An older woman with short gray hair looked up from a desk and stood up. She wore a neat blue suit, not a uniform.
“Commandant Vatta—I wasn’t sure you would be in today. Colonel Stornaki couldn’t tell me when I asked. I’m Sera Vonderlane. Perhaps you’d like to see the usual schedule? There are queries from some faculty and staff—and Commandant—er, former Commandant Kvannis—did not finish all the tasks he had said he would before he left.” Her singsong accent defined her origin, Hautvidor on Arland.
Ky smiled. “Sera, I need a few hours just to settle in and familiarize myself with the layout of the offices here. If you could send an ordinary day’s schedule to my desk display, we can go over it later today. Do you have a direct link to my office in the residence?”
“Yes, Commandant, certainly.”
“Then if you could arrange items in order of urgency, and send the less urgent to the residence office, I’ll work on those after dinner tonight. Unless there are too many urgent ones.”
“I have eleven red-flagged ones now, Commandant.”
Ky repressed a sigh and stepped over to Vonderlane’s desk. “Let’s see them.”
First up was the initial report from the night before of a disturbance in the second class. “That’s taken care of,” Ky said. “Those three”—calls from the Rector, General Molosay, and Public Affairs—“if they call me before I reach them, put the calls through. These four items I’ll need more background on; please send that to my desk display also, or if it’s classified, have the files ready. And the last three… I may need you to make courtesy calls and explain, but I’ll try to get through all of them.”
Vonderlane’s expression brightened. “You don’t waste time, do you, Commandant?”
“Not if I can help it,” Ky said. “And excuse me, now—I’m going to be walking around opening doors. For all I know something’s moved in the last eight years.”
She went back across the Commandant’s office, reminding herself it was now hers, and opened the door on the other side. She found a small room that could clearly serve as a break room for the Commandant—it held a small cooler, low table, small sofa, and two upholstered chairs; a half bath opened off it. Its narrow window overlooked the front court and main gate.
In the next half hour she found Stornaki’s office, the Communications office, the general Administration office where most of the clerical and accounting functions were carried out, and the Security office. She spoke briefly to everyone she saw, from Major Palnuss, the duty officer in Security, to Corporal Galyan, a file clerk coming down the passage from Admin with a rack of data cubes. Everyone knew she was aboard and in charge, and that, she hoped, would hold things steady until she really understood this assignment.
One door opened into the Commandant’s private library, where she had sat that day, struggling to find the right words for her resignation. Where she had waited until Master Sergeant MacRobert came to escort her to the gate, and had spent part of that time looking at shelves of logbooks, fascinated.
She looked, but did not find them on the shelf where they had been. Instead that shelf was filled with video racks full of entertainment titles. She could not imagine the Commandant of her day replacing those handwritten logbooks with entertainment.
Finally she went back to the Commandant’s office, walked around the desk, and sat down. Here she was. Not just in the Commandant’s office, but in the Commandant’s chair, behind the Commandant’s broad empty desktop and a hastily manufactured nameplate in polished wood. Wearing a Commandant’s uniform, with the gold braid and insignia. And incidentally missing the press conference out at the base, at which all the rescued survivors would be on display and Aunt Grace would give a speech.
This desk was not the same dark desktop she remembered; this one was a yellowish wood grained in gray. Had Kvannis brought in his own desk, or had the previous Commandant chosen a new one for some reason? She leaned over and looked at the dark-blue carpet. Yes… she could just see a faint depression where another piece of heavy furniture had been, not quite matching the footprint of this one.