“Yes.”
“And so I said I’d come here, but I wanted help, and he said he’d get your Captain Serrano—whom I presume is you?” She turned to Heris.
“Yes,” said Heris, not quite sure how to address Raffa’s Aunt Marta. She was clearly someone of importance, if she could pressure Lord Thornbuckle to ask favors of her aunt admiral, but did she use a title?
“I just got off the commercial flight a few hours ago, and saw that your yacht was listed as incoming, so I waited—I haven’t tried to call yet. I thought I’d see what Captain Serrano advised.” Her glance at Heris combined deference and command.
“No harm in calling, I wouldn’t think,” Heris said carefully. Two aunts! Three, if you counted aunt admiral. She felt outnumbered and very much outgunned.
“I’ll do it,” Marta said. They followed her to a row of combooths, and waited while she made her call. Heris wondered again if she should have brought along some of her crew, and reminded herself again that she and Cecelia had booked the last two seats on the next down shuttle. When Marta opened the door of the booth, her face had a dangerous expression that erased all musings from Heris’s mind.
“You won’t believe this,” she began. “They’re under arrest.”
“What?”
“For murder and attempted sexual assault.”
“Ronnie? George? Raffa?”
“According to the hotel security chief, they tried to get four hotel employees to engage in—and I quote—‘unnatural and lascivious acts against their will.’ Then tried to beat them into submission, and then shot two of them. George, apparently, had the gun.”
“George is Kevil Mahoney’s son,” Cecelia said. “If he had shot someone, he wouldn’t be caught holding the weapon.”
“We’ll see about this,” Marta said grimly. “They’re not holding my niece—”
“Or my nephew—”
“Or George,” said Heris, purely for symmetry. If George had had an aunt, she would have said it.
The waiting lounge for the down shuttle was decorated with the ugliest ceramics Heris had ever seen. It filled slowly, though it didn’t seem to hold a full shuttle load. Perhaps they had small shuttles here, or perhaps there was a heavy cargo load. Cecelia and Marta paced back and forth; Heris sat and watched them. The time for scheduled departure came and went. People began to grumble. Grumbles mounted as time passed.
“We always have to wait if they’re coming,” she heard. “It’s got to be family—it’s always family.”
Heris kept an eye out along the corridor, and soon spotted the likeliest candidate, a short, bunchy, gray-haired woman swathed in layers of uneven soft colors. Behind her, a harried-looking man trundled a dolly loaded with boxes and soft luggage. Sure enough, when she entered the lounge, the signal light came on for boarding. Heris picked up her own duffel, and caught Cecelia’s eye.
But Cecelia and Marta were staring at the newcomer. They pounced before she could move past the others, in the lane cleared for her by flight attendants.
“Venezia!”
She turned, her wrinkled face lighting up. “Cecelia! Marta! How lovely to see you—I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Why did you—”
“Your idiot police—” Their voices had collided; they both stopped, and into the brief silence Heris spoke.
“Let’s get aboard first.” She grabbed Cecelia’s elbow and pushed. Cecelia snorted, but let herself be guided into the clear lane behind Venezia; Marta closed in behind Heris.
The shuttle was full only because Venezia had reserved an entire section. Cecelia and Marta followed her into it as by right, settling into the wide padded seats; Heris noticed that the attendants didn’t challenge them. She wished she could call the yacht and slip a couple of her crew into the seats she and Cecelia would have used, but she could not delay the shuttle now.
The shuttle had not cleared the station before Cecelia attacked again. “Venezia, my nephew is down there on your planet being accused of murder that he didn’t do—”
“And my niece,” Marta said. “Locked up in your filthy police station—”
“What do you know about this?” demanded Cecelia.
“Yes, what?” Marta glared.
Venezia shivered, as if she were a leaf dancing in stormwinds. “I—I don’t know anything. I just got here from Guerni. When I asked Raffa to come here and investigate, I had no idea—”
“You asked her!” Venezia flinched from that tone as if Marta had hit her.
“I just—it seemed—nobody would tell me anything about Ottala, and I thought maybe she’d done something foolish, like a girl might do, and Raffa being young, maybe she’d figure it out—”
“You sent her into danger—my niece—!”
“And my nephew,” Cecelia said, with no less heat.
“I didn’t know it was dangerous,” Venezia pleaded. “I thought—I thought Ottala had just run away. Perhaps fallen in love with an unsuitable young man, the way Raffaele did—”
“Ronnie,” said Cecelia stiffly, “is not unsuitable.”
“Raffa,” said Marta, “did not run away.”
“And I still want to know what happened to Ottala,” Venezia said. Silence fell; Marta and Cecelia looked at each other, then at Heris, then at Venezia. “You know, don’t you?” she asked.
“Not for sure,” Heris said. “But—what is known is that she infiltrated a workers’ organization, after having skinsculpting to match her appearance to the Finnvardian workers on Patchcock. Then she disappeared. If she were discovered—”
“Then she’s dead.” Venezia’s chin quivered.
“And the same people could have killed Raffa,” Marta said. “And the others.”
“Only now they’re in jail,” Cecelia said, “for crimes they certainly did not commit. And it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for you.”
The rest of the trip to the surface passed in very uncomfortable silence.
“I want to see my nephew,” Cecelia said.
“I want to see my niece,” Marta said.
“I want to see whoever’s in charge,” Venezia said. Heris said nothing. The three older women had charged off the shuttle like a commando team, every action coordinated for maximum efficiency. Venezia made the three necessary calls—to the police, the hotel, and the local corporate headquarters. Marta arranged ground transportation. Cecelia gathered everyone’s luggage and dealt with local customs. Heris wondered how they’d worked that out when they hadn’t said a word after that first confrontation. She was supposed to be the military expert, but she felt like a young ensign on a first live-fire maneuver.
The groundcar driver, after a look at Venezia’s ID, had driven as if they not only owned the road but had proprietary rights to a sizable volume of space above and on either side of it. The three older women stared at each other in grim silence; Heris, after looking out the window to see two battered trucks diving for the nearest ditch, looked at the back of the driver’s neck.
When they arrived in the scruffy little town, and pulled up at the police station, Venezia led the group inside. Now they were lined up in front of a long gray desk.
The uniformed officer behind the desk blinked. The mirage didn’t go away. Three angry women—three old angry women, the young-looking one wore a Rejuvenant ring—loomed over him like harpies on a cliff. Behind them was a younger but no less formidable woman, who had the unmistakable carriage of a military officer.
“And your name, ma’am?” the man said, trying to stick to ordinary rules.
“I am Lady Cecelia de Marktos, and my nephew is Ronald Vortigern Carruthers.” She leaned over as he reached for one of the pencils in a particularly gruesome pottery jar that leaned drunkenly to one side. As he began to write out the names laboriously in longhand, she growled, “Use your computer, idiot, and hurry up.”
“What’s the problem out here?” That was the captain, languid and unshaven after a night of interrogating the most infuriating prisoners he’d seen in years. “Let’s not have any rowdy behavior, ladies, please.” Then he blinked at Venezia. “Uh—sorry, Madame Glendower-Morreline—we weren’t expecting you.”