The Serrano Succession (50 page)

More and more people in uniform got on at every stop. Not only Serranos had been here, and Esmay wondered how they were all going to get where they were going. At the Fleet gate, she found out.

As the long line snaked through the security gate, they were divided into crew and transients: crew members of docked ships went directly to their ships, and transients were divided by speciality and rank. Within a couple of hours, Esmay and Barin both had new orders cut, sending them out on a civilian liner to join a battle group forming for Copper Mountain. They walked back down the concourse, and found eighteen other Fleet personnel in the waiting lounge for the
Cecily Marie
. Thirteen more appeared before they boarded, and a knot of angry civilian passengers were by then complaining bitterly to the gate agent.

"Welcome aboard, please take your seats, you'll be shown your cabins later—" The steward looked tense, as well he might. Thirty-three last-minute military passengers, a mutiny in Fleet, who knew what else? Esmay and Barin sat down together in the observation lounge, and she wondered if he felt as peculiar as she did. Probably not. She had come off this very ship not six hours before, and now she was back on it.

The senior Fleet officer aboard was Commander Deparre, who quickly organized the others as if the ship were Fleet and not civilian. Esmay had had a brief fantasy of spending the time with Barin—the time they had still not had, the time she had been longing for since before Brun's rescue. But Commander Deparre wanted to impress upon them the seriousness of the situation, and be sure they grasped the importance of upholding Fleet's reputation among the civilians of Familias Regnant.

The civilians aboard
Cecily Marie
, Esmay thought, were more alarmed than reassured by the way Commander Deparre controlled his little group. If they had been mutineers plotting to take over this very ship, they could not have been more ominous—always together as a group, always apart from the others. Commander Deparre, however, seemed to relish this opportunity for leadership: he was, it turned out, normally in charge of payroll processing at Sector Four HQ. He assigned Esmay responsibility for the female personnel—she was actually the senior female officer—and insisted that they should be protected from intrusion by posting a watch outside their quarters at night.

"But sir—"

"We cannot have the slightest whisper of irregularity, Lieutenant," he said firmly. Behind him, Barin rolled his eyes expressively, but Esmay felt more ready to scream than laugh. The maidens whose virtue she was supposed to guard were, all but one bright-eyed young pivot-major, older than she was, and two of the seven were senior NCOs who had been travelling with their husbands. This made no difference to Commander Deparre, who insisted that it would be "unseemly" for them to share cabins with their husbands. Why, exactly, he would not explain, and Esmay could not understand.

At least these older women understood that the vagaries of officers like Deparre should not be blamed on their subordinates, and that argument was futile. More difficult were the sergeant and corporal who had spotted civilian men they fancied, and wheedled endlessly for a chance to chat with them.

She and Barin were separated even at meals, because the commander felt that the women should dine at a different table. They could chat—cautiously—in the half-hour twice daily that Commander Deparre felt necessary for the officers to sustain their professional associations and exclusivity from the enlisted, who had the same half-hours to chat without an officer present. Lucky enlisted, Esmay thought, because they at least didn't have to have Deparre around, while she did . . . and the commander felt it his duty to have a little chat with each of "his" officers at least once a day.

"Nothing lasts forever," Barin said. "Even this voyage has to end sometime . . ." It hadn't been that many days, but it felt like years.

"With our luck, we'll end up on the same ship as Commander Deparre for the rest of our careers."

"No . . . he'll go back to his accounting, I'm sure."

"I hope so."

"Mutiny!" Hobart Conselline glared at the face on the screen. "What do you mean, mutiny?"

"Copper Mountain, milord. Mutineers have taken it over, the whole system—"

Copper Mountain was a long way away—Hobart had no idea how far, exactly, but far enough. A training base, wasn't it? Probably a bunch of disgruntled trainees, and nothing to worry about. "Who's in charge?"

"Milord?"

He was surrounded by idiots. "Who is in charge of Copper Mountain? The base there?" A blank look, followed by a confused gabble about Main Base and Camp This and Island Something. "Never mind—just put a cordon around it."

"A cordon, milord?"

Did he have to explain everything? And these were supposed to be military personnel. "Cut them off," he said firmly. "Blockade or cordon or whatever you people call it. Just isolate them, and they'll run out of supplies soon enough."

A different face appeared, this one somewhat older. "Speaker, you do not understand. The mutiny began at Copper Mountain, but the mutineers now control the entire system—they have the orbital station, and the system defenses—we know at least ten warships are involved. That's enough to mount an attack on any other orbital station, or even one of the more lightly defended planets."

"But why would they do that?"

"We don't know, Lord Conselline, and not knowing their plans we must take what precautions we can to protect the most vulnerable population centers—"

"Damn them! I want to know who they represent! I want to know now!"

"Milord, the first thing is to secure—"

"I'll wager it's the Barracloughs—or the Serranos—"

The face on the screen seemed to stiffen. "We have no information—"

"Well, find out. I'll expect a report immediately." He shut off his unit, and swung his chair around so fast he banged his knee on his desk and caught his breath. Blast them. Smug, condescending . . . all they wanted was to feather their own nests, anyway. He sensed, as he always did, the vast sticky web of someone else's conspiracy, someone else's malice and opposition. It was unfair . . . why couldn't they see that he was only trying to make things better for the
real
Familias Regnant, that mental image of hard-working beneficent lords and ladies, and hard-working appreciative lesser families and workers, for whom he was grinding himself to nothing between two stones? Why did they always have to argue, talk back, bicker, complain? If they would only do what he told them, at once and without argument, the government could move smoothly, quickly, responding to whatever crises came up.

But no. They let personal ambition, mere selfishness and silly pride, get in the way . . . They were sabotaging his effort to save the Familias Regnant. Tears stung his eyes, and he blinked them away. It was tempting to resign, and let them find out what a muddle—what a disastrous quicksand pit—they'd be in without him. He'd certainly done his part; he'd earned respite. But no—he would do his duty, as he had always done it. He would uproot the lazy, conniving schemers who laughed at him behind his back, and save the realm in spite of itself.

He placed his own call . . . he would not work through that lemon-faced Poisson . . . and demanded of the man's secretary a word with his Minister of Defense.

"A terrible thing," he was saying even as his face slid into pickup range.

"Don't you start," Hobart said. "I'm getting no help out of the Grand Admiral's office—"

"They're upset—you know, Lord Conselline, the Grand Admiral was a mere one-star before the other flag officers were sent away—"

"Don't make excuses, Ed! Mutinies don't come out of nowhere. I want to know who's responsible for this outrage. Names, dates, the whole drill. Heads will roll, do you hear me, Ed?"

"Absolutely, Lord Conselline. As soon as I know anything, I'll report—"

"I have enemies, you know," Hobart said. "There are those who would like to embarrass me. I could name names . . ."

"In the Fleet, milord?"

"Not exactly, though I understand that the Serranos were quite close to Lord Thornbuckle and his daughter. Weren't they involved in her rescue, that flagrant misuse of government resources?"

"Yes, milord, but no Serranos have so far been identified as crew members of any of the vessels involved. In fact, a large group of them were attending a social function—"

"A flagrant alibi," Hobart said. "Suspicious by its very nature."

"Uh . . . it was a betrothal party, I understand. Milord, Fleet asked my permission to cancel the order removing rejuvenated flag officers from active duty, and of course I gave it—"

"Why?"

The man looked at him blankly. "Because we need them, milord. With part of the Fleet in mutiny, we need loyal officers, and especially the command structure—"

"How do you know they're loyal? How do you know they didn't engineer this mutiny just to be put back in the cushy jobs they had before?"

"Lord Conselline, there is no evidence—"

"If you're going to
argue
, Ed—" Hobart began, feeling himself growing hotter by the moment.

"Milord, I'm not arguing, I'm only telling you what the facts are as we know them."

"And you don't know anything worth knowing!" Hobart cut the connection, started to whirl his chair, and stopped just short of banging his leg again. He was surrounded by complete incompetents. He had
made
that man. He had taught him, shaped him, and brought him into the government, and this—
this
was his reward. Insubordination, incompetence . . .

He could fire him, of course. But whom could he appoint in his place? None of them had lived up to his hopes for them. Instead of working with him, supporting him, helping him, they all acted like spoiled prima donnas. Could he find anyone better?

"Goonar—wake up, man!" Goonar rolled over and glared at his cousin.

"It is my off watch. The ship is now in pieces. Go away."

"Goonar, listen—we just sucked a priority one report—"

"Is Laisa crazy? If we go sucking Fleet data, they'll—"

"There's a mutiny, Goonar."

"Mutiny?"

"Ten ships they know of, all in the Copper Mountain system. Who knows how many elsewhere."

"
Open
mutiny?" He was wide awake now, his stomach in a cold knot.

"That's what it said. A ship sent down LACs to a prison downside, brought up a bunch of dangerous criminals, used them to break the orbital station, got control of communications and systemwide defenses, and has declared that system to be part of the Society of Natural Men."

"And who is that when it's at home?" It sounded like nothing he'd ever heard of. Natural men? What did they do, run around naked and eat raw fish?

"My guess is it's some of those bloodthirsty lot who hung around with Admiral Lepescu. Remember the bald man who got blind drunk and wanted to show us trophies that time, after the fight in the bar? And what Kaim told us?"

"Lepescu's dead," Goonar said.

"Meanness isn't, just because one mean man dies." Basil shifted his shoulders restlessly. "I wonder if Kaim's all right, or if he's mixed up in this some way."

"He'd have told us . . . family . . ."

"Can you see real conspirators confiding in Kaim? He's so sure he can't be fooled, he's like the man holding his wallet and showing pickpockets where it is. I'd hate to have a Terakian involved, even by accident."

"I'm more concerned about the rest of the family. Mutiny in Fleet's going to play hob with shipping schedules, ours included. Things were unsettled enough before."

"Which is why I woke you up. We're playing skip-the-loop with the
Terakian Harvest
, and Laisa says we're almost in tightbeam range."

"We don't have to tube over, do we?" Goonar asked. He hated ship-to-ship transfer tubes worse than being woken out of a sound sleep.

"No. Or rather, you don't; I do. But they want to talk to you."

Goonar groaned, but rolled out of the bunk, and rubbed his head vigorously. He was not any good fresh out of sleep; he could have smacked Basil just for looking so brisk and awake.

On the bridge of
Flavor
, Laisa grinned at him. "Exciting times, Goonar."

"I never prayed for excitement," he growled. He just wanted to live his life in peace, he thought, holding the memory of dinner around the table on Caskadar . . . the mellow lamplight, the smell of the food, the children's sweet piping voices. He sighed, and linked in to
Harvest
's com officer.

"Your analysis, Goonar?"

How was he supposed to have an analysis when he was barely awake? Yet though he could barely speak, he could feel the little rolls moving in his brain, the numbers flickering past, faster and faster.