“Heris, you’re still suffering, but you aren’t yet seeing clearly . . . you did not ask any of us. Most of us didn’t know until afterwards—I didn’t—and you did not ask anyone directly for help. Did you?”
She had not. She had not thought she had to. She had expected them to come to her side without being asked.
“No . . . I didn’t.” Had that been wrong? She had never wanted to depend on the family connection, overuse it.
“No. And of course we taught you that, early on. That was our fault, perhaps. We wanted all you youngsters to be competent in your own right, not to lean on the family name. Alclass="underline" not just you, Heris.”
“But—”
“But you still think someone should have come. I think so, myself. Your parents could have reacted faster. As I said, I don’t know why they didn’t.”
“If I had asked, would they have come?” Heris asked.
“I don’t know that, either. Until this mess, I had no reason to suspect them of being any less committed to you than you to them. Had you?”
“No . . . we hadn’t seen much of each other for some years, what with assignments, but I thought everything was fine.” Heris struggled for calm, getting her voice back under control.
“You’re aware that Lord Thornbuckle has some antagonism to our family?”
“Yes—he mentioned it on Sirialis, and I never did find out more.”
“Did you ask?” This was becoming monotonous.
“No,” Heris said.
“Ah. You know, Heris, someone who wants senior command should cultivate a lively curiosity. Technical competence, even tactical competence, isn’t enough. Strategy depends on intelligence, and that depends on asking the right questions.”
Heris grimaced. “I felt—uneasy. I didn’t want to seem—” Her voice trailed away; she couldn’t define now how she’d felt that far back.
“Disloyal?” Her aunt did not smile. “You were angry, bitter, hurt, and yet you didn’t want an outsider to think you were disloyal to the family?”
“I suppose.”
“You always were an idealist . . . it’s one of the things I liked about you. Well, it’s time you knew where all that came from.” Vida took a long swallow from the drink at her side. “This gets complicated. Every family has its black sheep, or at least its less competent members. Serranos are no exception. One entire branch left the military—flunked out of the Academy, one after another—and went into business. I suppose the best way to put it is that they conducted their business affairs with the same flair as the rest of us conduct wars.”
“I never knew that.”
“No—like most families, we don’t advertise our black sheep. Sometimes we can’t even agree on who they are. But I suspect it’s this branch which taught Lord Thornbuckle to distrust the name. At any rate, back to your parents—”
“It’s still not right.”
Now the famous tilt of the head. “Are you telling me you never made mistakes?”
“No—of course I did, but—”
“No personal mistakes, nothing that would look bad if everyone knew—” Sarcasm, when she least deserved it.
Heris glared at her aunt, hoping to shock her. “I have a lover—he was enlisted, one of my crew that was hunted by Lepescu—and when we found each other again, we—”
“Good for you,” Vida said. “The burden of perfection ruins more people than you’d think. He’s with the yacht?”
“Yes. Of course we haven’t—”
“Of course.” Vida grimaced. “Heris, I’d hoped you’d learned how to be human—how to forgive yourself for being human. Do you love him?”
“Yes . . . I do . . . but not . . .” It was going to sound crass, but she found herself unwilling to lie to this aunt, so much like Cecelia in some ways, so much like herself in others. “But not more than Fleet,” she finished.
“Ah. Yes. A Serrano problem, not unique to you. When you talk to your parents again, perhaps you’ll notice how little time they’ve had together in the past fifty years. One solution, it seems to me, is to encourage your friend to take a commission.”
“A commission?” She had said that to Petris, but she hadn’t thought it would really be possible.
“Yes, you idiot. Did it not occur to you that there’s a lot of good cess to spread around after your defense of Xavier? Commissioning a civilian—even a civilian who used to be enlisted—will cause no difficulty.” Vida grinned. “And I for one want to meet this paragon who overcame your resistance.”
Her aunt had insisted that she must make the contact. Would they answer? And if they did, what would they say? She hoped to find that they were outsystem somewhere, a safe distance. Instead, the directory listed them not only insystem, but on the base itself. Aunt Vida’s meddling, no doubt. Heris left her message in both stacks, and waited. Tried not to query her own stack every five minutes.
Finally she made herself go to lunch, then to the tailor’s, for a new set of uniforms. When she came back, her desk’s telltale blinked. Someone had left messages. Her heart thundered; she could hear nothing past the pulse in her ears. A long breath. She touched the controls. And there it was: a formal request for a personal meeting. Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t. She had to.
“Heris.” Her mother and father stood side by side, formally, their faces as wary as hers must be.
“Come in,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to call them by name.
“Thank you for seeing us.” That was her mother, as usual the spokesperson.
“I . . . talked to Aunt Vida.”
A quick look passed between them, the kind of sidelong glance Heris remembered so well. Her father spoke at last. “Heris, I won’t try to explain—”
She wanted to say something, but couldn’t. The silence stretched, until she felt that her bones were drawn out thin as wires.
“I will,” her mother said finally. “I’m not a born Serrano; I don’t have to play this game.” Her mother, the bronze eldest of a bronze clan, the Sunier-Lucchesi, whose roots went as far back in Fleet as any. “We heard it; we didn’t believe it; we expected you to come and tell us what you wanted us to do.”
“So it’s my fault?” Heris managed to say it calmly.
“No,” her mother said. “It is not your fault. It was our fault, for listening to the wrong advice, and for not realizing that you would not come. And saying we’re sorry doesn’t change it. If you want to stay angry, you can.”
“That’s true,” said Heris. But she didn’t feel angry; she felt tired. “What do you mean, wrong advice?”
“Admiral Sorkangh. He called your father, and said you were determined to work your own way out of it—that if you needed help, you’d call. We didn’t know until afterwards that he’d turned.”
“And then you listened to Aunt Vida, who said let me alone?”
Her father grimaced. “No, then I tried to figure out some way of killing Sorkangh without getting caught, or hurting anyone else. I told him—never mind what I told him; it’s on both our records now. And I called in every family member I could find. Your Aunt Vida came up with a plan—I didn’t like it, but she pointed out that I had made a royal mess already.”
Heris could almost smile. She could imagine her Aunt Vida making them all squirm. She was glad.
“Did she tell you about it?” her mother asked.
“She told me that she’d ordered everyone to avoid contact once I’d resigned my commission.”
“Did she tell you why?”
“No—but I guessed some of it. A Serrano she believed loyal, in a perfect position to strain blackmailers and enemy agents out of the stream . . .”