And she, too, had treated Brun as a silly piece of decorative statuary—she had not seen the person behind the pretty face, the lovely hair, the exuberance. Familiar guilt rolled over her, and she pushed it away. Guilt would not help. Remorse would not help. Brun the person was in trouble, and Esmay the person would have to figure out how to help her—and not by ignoring the person she was.
She put her mind back on the problem, as she spent an hour in the ship’s countercurrent swim salon.
Brun was, or had been, pregnant. Would pregnancy give her a reason to stay alive, or not? Would babies? She had told Esmay, the day of the disasterous argument, that she didn’t want children . . . but that didn’t mean she hated them.
That stuffed toy. Esmay stopped swimming, and the pool’s current pushed her back to the edge. That stuffed toy from the Elias Madero . . . there had been children aboard, and no children’s bodies had been found. If—perhaps—the Militia had kept the children, if Brun had been with them, would that give her a focus? Something to live for? Some reason to be patient, in a way that nothing in her past had made her be patient?
It might. Esmay climbed out of the pool, dried off, and went back to her stateroom hardly noticing those who spoke to her. She spent the last days of the transit putting together everything she remembered about the debris from the trader, and Brun, and trying out one scenario after another. If she had fixed on the children as a means of staying sane, she would want to bring them out too. How could that be done? Esmay didn’t let herself think it might be impossible.
Casea Ferradi was having more luck with blackening Esmay Suiza’s name than with capturing Barin Serrano. She had managed to get herself assigned to Admiral Hornan’s personal staff with only the slightest, insigificant pressure on the major—now lieutenant commander—she’d known so well on her first ship. Everyone knew she’d been Suiza’s classmate, so her opinion had been asked more than once—she hadn’t had to create opportunities to talk about Esmay. With Suiza off on leave to her home planet, Casea didn’t even have to worry about contradiction.
“And she really said she thought the Great Families were a ridiculous institution?”
Casea didn’t answer directly; she stared thoughtfully into the distance in a way that suggested noble reticence. “I think it’s because Altiplano has no Chair in Council,” she said, after a long pause. Neither did the Crescent Worlds, but that didn’t matter. “There’s no tradition of respect, you see.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t notice anything when she was in the Academy,” Master Chief Pell said. He was, though enlisted, senior enough to have access to files in which Casea had particular interest.
“She kept a low profile,” Casea said. “Actually, so did I—we were both outsiders in a way, you know. That’s why we were together so much, and why I didn’t realize that what she said was important.” She shook her head, regretting her own innocence. “Then I got absorbed into things, you see, and just . . . didn’t notice.”
“It’s not your fault,” Pell said, just as she had meant him to say.
“Perhaps not,” Casea said. “But I still feel bad about it. If I’d only known, maybe all this could’ve been prevented.”
Pell looked confused. “I don’t see how—”
She should have picked a brighter one. “I mean,” Casea said, edging nearer to her intended message, “if I’d realized how bitter she was toward the Families, perhaps she would never have had any influence on Sera Meager.”
Pell blinked. “You can’t mean—she actually had something to do with the capture itself? I thought that was accidental; she just happened to enter the same system where they were plundering that merchanter . . .”
“A very handy coincidence, don’t you think? And Sera Meager had traveled widely . . . I find myself wondering why she happened to take that particular shortcut at that particular time.”
“And you think Lieutenant Suiza told her about that? Or told them—”
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,” Casea said. The chances of this rescue succeeding were, in her unspoken opinion, so close to zero as made no difference.
“But—but does the Admiral know about this? That would be treason . . .”
“I’m sure someone else has thought of it,” Casea said. “I’m only a lieutenant, and it occurred to me . . .”
“But you knew her before,” he said. “Those more senior might not know what she said at the Academy.”
“Well . . .” Casea feigned reluctance, though it was getting harder. She had trailed this particular theory across several potential helpers, and so far had no takers. Even Sesenta Veron, who had been telling his own wicked-Suiza stories, thought it was impossible.
“I think you ought to tell the Admiral,” Pell said. Then, with returning caution, “It would help if you had any documentation.”
“I’m afraid not,” Casea said. “The only files which might contain useful references are all well out of my clearance.”
The following silence lasted so long she almost gave up, but at last Pell’s sluggish processors put two and two together. “Oh! You need access. Er . . . what files did you have in mind?”
“I did just wonder if anything had come up during the investigation of that mutiny.”
“But surely you don’t think—I mean, she was decorated for that action—”
“I think they might have been asking questions they didn’t ask before,” Casea said. “Even if they didn’t look too carefully at the answers.”
Pell shook his head. “It won’t be easy, Lieutenant, but I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have to see who I can talk to over in legal . . . but I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks,” Casea said, giving him the full benefit of her violet gaze and her smile. “I just want to help.”
Barin Serrano was used to Fleet politics; he had grown up in that dangerous sea. He navigated the tricky currents of influence at the task force headquarters with care, noticing which competing Fleet families were taking advantage of Lord Thornbuckle’s present annoyance with the Serrano name. The Livadhis were split, as usuaclass="underline" some were proclaiming their friendship and loyalty to various Serrano seniors like his grandmother, while others were passing snide remarks in the junior officers’ recreation areas. Barin ignored the insults, but kept track. Someone in the family would need to know this, when he had enough data.
In another compartment of his busy brain, he began looking for signs of trouble in other master chief petty officers. Once is accident, twice is coincidence . . . he was willing to admit that Zuckerman could be an accident, and the others he’d heard of only as rumors, but if they were true . . . something was going on. His captain would’ve reported it, but in the present crisis, would anyone listen?
His duties consisted mostly of hand-carrying data cubes back and forth; he spent plenty of time kicking his heels in someone’s front office, and thus had plenty of time to chat with people with lots of time-in-grade.
“ . . . Like you take Chief Pell,” an impossibly perky female pivot-major was saying. “I don’t know if it’s the strain of all this, or what, but he’s not the man he was last Fleet Birthday.”
“Really?” Barin’s mental ears rose.
“No. Why, the other day I had to look up access codes for legal investigations for him—I’m not even supposed to know the lockout sequences, but he started asking me to keep track of that six months ago—and he couldn’t remember any of them.”
“My, my,” Barin said, his mind flickering over the reasons why Admiral Hornan’s chief administrative NCO would be poking into legal investigations now, when supposedly the admiral was after Barin’s grandmother’s job as task force commander. Was he trying to get something on Heris Serrano, who had been through a sticky legal process? “I don’t suppose you’d know whose files he was sucking . . . ?”