“Now, Mother, you mustn’t show me up,” Mardina said, faintly embarrassed, trying to hurry her on. “Not today.” She glanced at Kerys, who was a pretty significant figure in Mardina’s universe. The ship’s commander who had once plucked Mardina’s mother from a hulk ship of unknown origins was no longer a trierarchus. Now she was a nauarchus, another hierarchical title borrowed from the Latin, a language replete with such words as Brikanti was not—a commander of a squadron of ten ships, and, it was said, overdue for further promotion, which she had refused so far because of her love of life in her own command, out in Ymir’s Skull.
But Beth said, “Oh, don’t worry. Your father will be embarrassment enough. Does he have to be here, Kerys?”
“A recruit for officer school has to be sponsored by both sides of her family, Beth. Yes, I’m afraid he does.”
“Well, just stop making silly remarks about the architecture then,” Mardina said.
“Actually your mother is being perfectly sensible,” Kerys put in diplomatically. “One thing you’ll learn as an officer, Mardina, is that you don’t take unnecessary risks. A good survival strategy.”
“There,” said Beth, satisfied. “I remember very well my mother, your grandmother, Mardina, saying the same thing. She was a space officer, you know, Kerys.”
“As you’ve told me once or twice since I picked you up in the Ukelwydd. Now, follow me.” She led them to the Hall’s huge doors, and waved security credentials at the guards to gain admittance.
Inside the Hall, Mardina found herself facing a long corridor walled by rows of doors on two levels, the upper accessible by iron gantries and walkways. Clerks and other officials carrying bundles of parchment hurried along the central hall and the upper walkways, and strip lamps suspended from the ceiling cast a light that seemed to turn everything gray. Mardina felt oddly disappointed.
Kerys grinned back at her. “Not the romance you were expecting? This is where we administer the largest single organization controlled by the Brikanti government—a Navy that now spans the planets and beyond, as well as its traditional seafaring arm. Mardina, it’s not some kind of temple, or museum—and nor does everything revolve around you, I’m afraid.” She winked. “But don’t worry. I felt just as small and insignificant when I was in your position. The Navy does notice you, I promise…”
Beth grunted. “It’s like a hive. I grew up on an empty planet. You couldn’t get a place more unlike that than this.”
Mardina shook her head. “Oh, Mother, please don’t start on about Before. Not today.” The English word was their private code for Beth’s strange other life before she had come to this place, this world, to Terra, to Brikanti. But Brikanti was all Mardina knew. She had come to loathe all that strangeness, as if it were a kind of flaw in her own nature.
If Kerys was aware of all this—and after all it was she who had retrieved Beth from the ship that had carried her here from Before—she didn’t show it, to Mardina’s relief.
They came to a small office maybe halfway along the length of the Hall, a nondescript little room that Mardina probably couldn’t have found again without memorizing the number etched into the wooden door. The room was laid out like a classroom, maybe, or a court, with rows of benches and small desks facing a more substantial table at the front. Here two officers sat, looking over paperwork, murmuring to each other; one, a burly man, was evidently the senior, judging by the ornate flashes on the shoulder of his tunic, and the other a scribe or adviser. The room was otherwise empty.
But it was in this mundane room, Mardina realized, one of a warren of such rooms, that her future was to be decided, for good or ill, in the next few hours.
She tried to stay composed as she sat with her mother on the front row of benches, close to the wall. The older man barely looked up at Kerys as she approached the table and presented a packet of papers, and he did not bother to look over at Mardina at all.
Beth whispered, “So who’s the big cheese?”
“Stick to Brikanti, Mother.”
“Sorry.”
Kerys sat with them. “That is Deputy Prefect Skafhog. Very senior. Do you know how senior, cadet? You should…”
Mardina nodded. She’d soon become aware that the most important thing a would-be naval officer had to learn was the constellation of ranking officials above her. “A Deputy Prefect reports only to—well, the Prefect. The chief of the whole Navy, who reports in to the relevant minister in the Althing—”
“There are only a dozen Deputy Prefects to administer the whole of the Navy, on Terra and in the Skull. So you see, cadet, we are taking you seriously.”
“Then it’s a shame such a prominent officer, with respect, is going to have to wait for you,” came a voice behind Mardina. “Or rather, for all of us. Because we have family business to discuss.”
Beth stood slowly, her tattooed face a mask of anger. “Ari Guthfrithson. So you deigned to turn up.”
Mardina gave a look of pleading to Kerys, who shrugged and whispered, “It’s your family.” Mardina closed her eyes for one second, made a fervent prayer to Jesu the Boatman, and stood with her mother.
Her father, Ari, looked sleek in his own uniform, that of a senior druidh, one of the Navy’s intellectual elite; he carried a neat leather satchel at his side. At least he had been expected. Mardina was more surprised to see that he was accompanied by Penny Kalinski, one of her mother’s old companions from the semi-mythical days of Before. Penny was bent and old—how old was she now? Eighty-eight, eighty-nine? And she leaned on the arm of Jiang Youwei. A comparatively youthful sixty, with a heavy-looking bag slung across his shoulder, Mardina had only rarely heard the taciturn Xin speak, but he was never far from Penny’s side.
With care, Penny sat down, a couple of rows back from Mardina and Beth. She said with a voice like rustling paper, “I’m afraid you must blame me for this. Well, indirectly.”
Beth glowered. “I know who to blame. You—Ari—you’d do anything to worm your way back into our lives, wouldn’t you? You knew we had to ask you to attend this procedure today. The rules demanded it. Just this one day, I have to stand your company.”
He grinned. “Yes, you do, don’t you?”
“And you can’t resist manipulating the situation to your own ends.”
Ari, nearly fifty years old now, glanced around at the company, at Penny and Jiang, at Kerys—at the Deputy Prefect at his desk, who was rapidly becoming visibly irritated. “It’s not so much that I couldn’t resist it. I couldn’t waste the opportunity. We need to talk, Beth. And not about us—not even about Mardina.”
Mardina’s hopes of getting through this day successfully were receding. With rising panic she took her father’s arm. “Father, please—this is a big day for me. I’ve waited half a year already for this hearing. Can’t we wait until later?”
He patted her hand. “I’m afraid not, darling—but, oh! It’s good to see you again, and I’m so proud of you today, of what you’ve become.”
Beth growled, “Become? She wouldn’t even exist if you’d had your way.”
“Mother, please—”