Esmay nodded.
“Lieutenant, I’m really glad to meet you. I—we’ve always wondered what it’s like outside during FTL flight. Would you mind telling us about it? They tell us the debriefing sims won’t be out for another six months.”
“It’s . . . really odd,” Esmay said. “First, the starfield disappears—” She was about to go on when the clerk called her name.
“If we don’t take you now, you’ll be here for hours,” the clerk said. “These neuro-enhanced jobs take forever.”
Esmay felt a wave of cold dislike rise from the seated squad, and hoped they were aiming it at the clerk, and not her. “Excuse me,” she said to them all.
“Of course, Lieutenant,” said the woman who had asked her the question. She had green eyes, startling in her dark face. Then she looked beyond Esmay to the clerk, and Esmay was not surprised to hear the clerk’s breath catch.
She hadn’t had a full neuroscan since she entered the Academy, and it was still as boring as ever, being stuck in the dark maw of the machine following orders to think of this, or that, or imagine moving her left little finger . . .
Finally it was done, and the last yellow line led her back to the desk where her duffel lay waiting for her, along with a handful of ID tags she would need for the facilities she was authorized to enter.
“Junior officers’ quarters and mess that way, sir,” the sergeant said, and gave a crisp salute as he passed her through. Esmay returned it and stepped onto the indicated walkway. She had missed out on command training, once she’d chosen technical track, so now she would be taking back-to-back courses—more school! Her own fault, she reminded herself, and yet not a fault to spend much time on. Her Altiplano conscience worried about the quickness with which her retrained neurons pushed away that momentary pang of guilt, and she grinned mentally at it. Her Altiplano conscience, like her Altiplano family, could stay where it belonged . . . on Altiplano.
She signed into the officers’ quarters and the officers’ mess, showing her clearance tags each time, picked up a duty roster, then a class schedule. She slung her gear into 235-H, one anonymous cubicle in a row of anonymous cubicles, and then headed for the mess. Even if it was between mealtimes for the school, they should have something for officers arriving from different time zones.
The dining room was almost empty; when she walked in, a mess steward peered out from the galleys and then came toward her.
“Lieutenant?”
“I just came in,” Esmay said. “Our ship was on . . .”
“Fleet Standard. I understand Lieutenant . . . you’re overdue for . . . midday, right? Do you want a full meal or a snack?”
“Just a snack.” She would get herself on the planet’s schedule faster this way, but she felt hollow as a new-built hull at the moment.
He seated her at a table a discreet distance from the two that were occupied, and left to bring the food. Esmay glanced casually at the others, wondering if they would be in her class. A young woman in fatigues without insignia, her curly blonde hair cropped short, sat hunched over what looked like a bowl of soup. Beside her, an older man in a lieutenant commander’s uniform who, from his posture, was laying down the law about something.
Esmay looked away. Unusual to chew someone out while they were eating, but it would be rude to observe. Could this be father and daughter? At the other table, three young men wearing exercise clothes who were, she realized, watching her. She met their gaze coolly, and they looked away, not as if they were embarrassed, but as if they had seen all they wanted. Their gaze wandered the room steadily; they ignored the litter of plates and cups before them.
The steward brought out a platter of sandwiches, pastries, and raw vegetable slices arranged in a fan-shaped pattern. Esmay ate a sandwich of thinly sliced cattleope spread with horseradish sauce, several carrot sticks, and was considering one of the curly pastry things which smelled so deliciously of cinnamon and hot apples when the blonde woman erupted.
“I’m not quitting!” she said, loudly enough that Esmay could not fail to hear. She was sitting upright now, her face flushed slightly. With that flush Esmay could spot the irregular patches of fresh healing . . . she had been in a regen tank to repair some kind of injury to her face and—Esmay could not help looking—hands and arms.
The older man, with a cautionary glance at Esmay, rumbled something she could not hear.
“No!” the blonde said. “It’s something else—something important. I know—” Then she too looked around, met Esmay’s eyes, and fell silent for a moment.
Some instinct prompted Esmay to look not merely down, but—under lowered lids—across at the other table. The three men there now made sense . . . their dismissive assessment of her, their constant surveillance of the room. These were the bodyguards of someone who hired the best—or to whom the best were, by custom, assigned.
Whom were they guarding? Surely not the young woman . . . if they had been, they had failed in some way or she would not have been hurt. A lieutenant commander? Hardly . . . unless he were not a lieutenant commander at all.
She glanced back at the young woman, and surprised by an expression on both faces so alike that it had to imply a relationship. Her eye, trained on a planet where families mattered, and where she had been expected to recognize even the most distant Suiza cousin, picked out now the similarities of bone and proportion, as well as behavioral quirks like the sudden lift of eyebrow that both older man and younger woman showed at that moment.
“Brun . . .” That carried, in part because the tone was so like the pleading tone her own father had used. Her mind caught on the unusual word. Brun. Wasn’t that—? She clamped her mouth shut on the apple tart. If that was the blonde girl who had been involved in the Xavier affair, then her father was the present Speaker of the Grand Council . . . the most powerful man in the Familias Regnant. What could they be doing here?
Speculation having outrun data, she munched steadily through the tart, studiously ignoring the argument which continued, in lower voices, at the other table. She struggled to remember all the snippets of rumor she’d heard about Thornbuckle’s wild youngest daughter . . . a spoiled beauty, a hotheaded fool who had plunged into the thick of intrigue with no training, an idiot who’d ended up dead drunk and naked in a rockhopper’s pod in the aftermath of a battle. But also something about being, in some obscure way, Admiral Vida Serrano’s protÈgÈ, because of her services to the Familias and—most particularly—to Admiral Serrano’s niece Heris.
“Excuse me,” someone said. Esmay swallowed the last bite of tart, and looked up. She had been concentrating so hard on not noticing what she shouldn’t notice that she hadn’t noticed anyone approaching her table.
It was one of the bodyguards. He had no rank insignia on his exercise clothes, but from his face he was older than she.
“Yes?”
“You’re Lieutenant Suiza, aren’t you?”
Despite the therapy, her gut tightened. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Lieutenant Commander . . . Smith . . . would like to meet you.”
“Lieutenant Commander Smith?”
He nodded his head toward the other table. “Smith,” he said firmly. “And his daughter.”
For a moment Esmay wished that she had just lived with her hunger until the next scheduled main meal. She had no desire to get involved in whatever was going on, whether it was a matter of father-daughter dissension or some plot against the Familias.
“Of course,” she said, and rose from the table.
The older man and the young woman watched her approach with, Esmay thought, the wrong sort of interest. The older man had the sort of face which might have been pleasant, but presently had locked into a tight mask of concern. The young woman looked both annoyed and afraid.