“Begging the captain’s pardon, but if you did that at me, I’d think you were having a seizure.” Oblo, of course.
“And then we jump Garrivay and kill him? It’s going to take all of us, and no one’s going to notice?”
“Petris, for a bloodthirsty pirate, you’re being ridiculously cautious. No, we’re going to walk into as many of the traitors as we can find gathered with Garrivay—Koutsoudas’s ongoing sound tap will help us there—and kill all of them. You notice that they like to gather and gab—Koutsoudas has them on three separate occasions already. I’d like to take out all three ship captains, but I doubt we’ll find them all together. Four or five traitorous officers, though, will reduce the resistance we face. Admiral Serrano’s reputation will do the rest. Or not, as the case may be.”
“Everyone knows you’re not in Fleet anymore,” Meharry said.
“Yes . . . officially. But suppose the whole thing was a feint—suppose I’m on special assignment.” They stared at her, this time shocked into silence.
“You’re . . . not . . . really, are you?” asked Ginese finally.
“See?” Heris grinned at them. “If you can think that, even for a moment—after what we’ve been through—then it can work.”
“But seriously—you didn’t resign because your aunt—” Ginese continued to stare at her with an expression blank of all emotion.
“No! I resigned—stupidly, I now admit—for the reasons I told you, and without hearing a word from my sainted aunt. But if she had intended something like this, no one would know. It is plausible—just—with the Serrano reputation. And it’s our chance. A slim one, but a chance.”
“I’ve seen fatter chances die of starvation,” Petris said, but his tone approved. He sighed, then stretched. “One thing about it, Heris . . . Captain . . . it’s never dull shipping with Serranos.” She ignored that.
“So now for the details. It’s tricky enough, so we’ll have rehearsals—and hope we’re not still rehearsing when the Benignity arrives.”
Chapter Thirteen
Cecelia felt a certain tension as she entered the stable office. Nothing she could put her finger on—dear Marcia smiling so amiably, and Poots with an even more foolish grin. Slangsby, the head groom, with no grin at all but something twinkling in the depth of his little blue eyes. Were they upset, perhaps, because she had visited two other breeding farms before coming here? They hadn’t been that sensitive in years past.
“Such a fortunate escape,” Marcia said. “We’ve heard all about it.”
Now what did that mean? Lorenza’s attack, or something else entirely? “I’m surprised such a minor matter stayed on the news this far out,” Cecelia said. “With the king’s resignation—”
“As if you didn’t have something to do with that!” Poots sounded almost annoyed with her. Cecelia blinked, assessing the undercurrents.
“I think perhaps my influence was considerably exaggerated,” she said. “Of course, I was at the Grand Council meeting, but—”
“Never mind, then.” Marcia’s smile vanished, replaced by her more usual expression, which had always reminded Cecelia of one of those toys with a spring-controlled lid that snapped tight. “If you don’t want to trust your oldest, dearest friends—”
So that was it. Plain jealousy, and feeling left out. None of the honest replies that sprang quickly to mind would work, because, though true, they were insulting. Marcia and Poots were so far from being old and dear friends that they made the phrase ridiculous. Yes, they were rich, in the same class as those who played with the titles of vanished aristocracies. Yes, they considered themselves the equal of anyone. But half of that was the fraternity of horsemen, who allow no rank but that earned in the saddle. She had known them for years, ridden with them, bought and sold horses in the same markets . . . friends? No. Cecelia tried to think of something placating, but Marcia was already in spate again.
“I suppose you’re upset that we didn’t come at once to help you,” she said. Cecelia had not thought of that, and now resented the suggestion that she might have held such a foolish hope. “I’m sure we would have,” Marcia said, “except that we didn’t even find out for months and months, and by then it seemed—and it was foaling time anyway—and it would have taken us months to get there, because as you know we don’t have a private yacht. . . .” The explanation, like most explanations, simply dug a deeper and muckier hole in the claimed relationship. If they could “know all about it” so soon after the king’s resignation, then they should have known about her collapse that soon too. Foaling season was a weak excuse; no one would have expected them to load up a ship full of pregnant mares, and it had been years since Marcia attended foalings herself. As for “don’t have a private yacht,” that was, strictly, true. Their Fortune’s Darling was well out of the yacht class, and might have served as the flagship of a small shipping company.
Cecelia reminded herself that she had not expected help from them, and wasn’t (despite the clumsy excuses) upset that they hadn’t provided it. “Never mind,” she said, trying to drag the conversation back to her reason for being there. “All I’m really interested in is your bloodstock. Mac said you still had some of that Singularity sperm available?”
“What are you doing, restocking the royal—excuse me, formerly royal—stables for yourself?”
That was too much. Cecelia felt her neck get hot, and didn’t really care what her face looked like. “Not at all,” she said with icy restraint. “I am trying to do a favor for some friends who saved my life and assisted my recovery. Since you are, as you say, old and dear friends—” The accent she put on “friends” would have sliced through a ship’s hull plating. “—I had hoped to purchase both sperm and time-locked embryos from you. However, it seems that other suppliers might be more convenient.”
Marcia turned red; Poots, as usual, looked as if he might cry. Slangsby now had the grin the others had discarded.
“I didn’t—you don’t have to take it that way—”
“What way?” Cecelia considered herself a reasonable person, and she could put no friendly interpretation on Marcia’s words. But, as a reasonable person, she would let Marcia try to wriggle out of this. It might even be interesting, in a purely zoological way, to watch the wriggling.
Marcia tried a giggle that cracked in midstream. “Cecelia, my dear, you take everything so seriously. I was just teasing. Honestly, my dear, that rejuvenation seems to have affected your temper.” But the oyster-gray eyes were wary, watchful, entirely unlike the frank tone of the voice.
Cecelia let her eyebrows rise of themselves. “Really?”
“All right; I’m sorry.” Marcia didn’t sound sorry; she sounded very grumpy indeed. “If you want Singularity genes, we’ve got ’em. Sperm and embryos both. I suppose you’re thinking of the Buccinator line you favored so?”
Buccinator, Cecelia thought to herself, had only been the most prepotent sire of the past three decades for performance horses. Minimal tweaking of the frozen sperm gave breeders options for speed on the flat or substance for jumping; Buccinator had been almost a sport, but his genome had enough variety for that. But Marcia had refused to jump on that fad, as she’d called it, and out here in the boonies she had produced, after decades of work, one horse not more than fifteen percent worse than Buccinator. Singularity’s sperm would offer genetic diversity, but she intended to have top equine geneticists do some editing before she turned it over to her friends.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you’d be kind enough to show me what you’ve got available. I’d like to see the breeding stock, then the ones in training, then the gene maps.”