Captain Serrano 3 - Winning Colors

by Moon, Elizabeth

  "Aunt Cecelia has decided to drop her suit against my parents." He reached for another muffin. "She says if you are going back in Fleet, and can put up with your aunt the admiral, she can put up with Mother."

  "And we're leaving this godforsaken hole," George said. He alone looked gloomy. "I suppose I have to go home—"

  Cecelia chose that moment to arrive at the table. "We're all going home," she said. "Heris, we have to straighten out the yacht's title—"

  "It's yours," Heris said. "It always was, and it still is—"

  "Because I'm thinking of selling it." That stopped conversation for a moment as everyone stared at her.

  Heris finally said, "Sell it? Why?"

  "Because I don't really like living on it. Yes, it's nice to be able to travel when and where I want, but most of the time I want to be on a planet. With horses." She stared at the wall a moment, and turned to Heris. "And to tell you the truth, Heris Serrano, I don't want to travel on that yacht with any other captain but you—and I don't want you anyplace but where you belong. In Fleet." Heris could think of nothing to say. The moment lengthened uncomfortably, until George knocked over the sugar.

  They were days from Patchcock, well on their way to Rockhouse Major, when Heris thought of an adequate answer. She looked across Cecelia's study and saw her employer frowning over a hardcopy of equine genetics studies.

  "There's another way to travel freely, you know," she said.

  "Hmm? Oh—don't worry about it."

  "Seriously. You could use a smaller, faster hull than this. It wouldn't be as luxurious, but it would be too small to allow for many—even any—guests."

  "I couldn't get stuck with Ronnie," Cecelia said, the beginnings of a grin quirking her mouth. "Although I have to admit that had good consequences as well as bad . . . and I realize I made some of Venezia's mistakes, letting myself be alienated from my family." So it was more than dropping the lawsuit. Cecelia was going home with more than her body healed, this time.

  "Yes, but rescuing one nephew is enough," Heris said. She ticked off the other advantages on her fingers. "Faster—less time in transit—so you wouldn't miss the amenities. If you learned to pilot it yourself—"

  "What!" Shock in the tone, but Cecelia's eyes sparkled.

  "Would you rather ride or be driven?" Heris asked. "You're more than bright; you've gained enough time in your rejuvenation—as we now understand it—that the time taken to qualify for a civilian license would hardly dent what's left. I think you'd enjoy it; your psychological profile certainly fits." She watched as Cecelia's face ran its gamut from surprise to anticipation. "Your own ship under your own control—of course you'd need crew, a few, because it's not safe to solo at the distances you travel. But a small crew, and you yourself in charge—" That would be the real lure; Cecelia's lack of political ambition sprang from no contempt for power itself.

  "How long would it take?" Cecelia asked. Ah. She would talk herself into it. Heris relaxed.

  "Depends if you go full-time or part," Heris said. "Brun has all the current standards—she's planning to qualify too. As you Rejuvenants are discovering, there are no limits to learning new skills."

  Cecelia had a faint flush on her cheeks, more excitement than anything else, Heris thought.

  "I can't seem to get used to it—the idea that we could keep living for centuries . . . forever—"

  "Maybe you can't. Maybe there are limits. But you will certainly have time to learn to pilot your own craft, if you want."

  "I'd like that," Cecelia said. "I really would. And you?"

  "Me? I go back in Fleet, of course—and, while you've been very courteous in not asking, that includes my former crew. Petris as well. We have . . . an understanding."

  "Good," Cecelia said. "I'd hate to have you lose what you gained, there. And your family?"

  That brought a knot to her stomach. "My family . . . well. My aunt the admiral said we'd talk. I'll do what I have to."

  "It will be better than that," Cecelia said. She looked as if she wanted to say more, but Heris was in no mood to listen to auntly platitudes from someone who had taken her own family to court. Perhaps Cecelia recognized that; instead of going on, she asked about Sirkin's plans.

  "There's someone you should talk to," Lord Thornbuckle said. He opened the door, and Heris managed by the slightest margin to keep her jaw from hitting the floor. She had not expected to meet her aunt here. Lord Thornbuckle nodded at Admiral Serrano, and went out, closing the door behind him.

  "Good to see you again, Heris."

  "Sir." Formality always worked; Heris fled into it as into a thicket.

  "We're off duty, both of us. You can call me Aunt Vida, or Aunt Admiral . . . but not sir."

  "Yes, sir—Aunt. Vida."

  "Better." Vida took one of the big leather chairs and leaned back comfortably. "You did a remarkable job in Xavier, as you well know."

  "Thank you." Heris eyed her aunt, wondering what was coming.

  "And on Patchcock."

  "That wasn't really my doing, sir—Aunt. Lady Cecelia and the others—"

  "Nonetheless. I'm very pleased with your performance. You have more than justified my confidence."

  "Thank you." Heris decided there was no use not asking the question that had burned in her mind for all the time since Xavier. "You did put that keyhole into the database—"

  "Of course." Vida grinned. "If you were smart enough to figure it out, you were smart enough to need it."

  That didn't compute, in Heris's mind, but she had no time to think it over.

  "I want to talk to you about the family." Vida wasn't smiling now. Heris shifted uneasily in her chair. The old anger and confusion rose like a foul tide.

  "I don't," she said shortly. "If they wanted to contact me, they could have easily enough. They haven't."

  Vida shook her head. "Heris, your parents made a mistake. They didn't come to your assistance instantly. I do not know their reasons; I have not asked. The only person who really needs to know is you."

  "I don't—"

  "Perhaps not. If you can accept that they made the wrong decision, without rancor, then you don't need to know. But if not you, then no one. You are still angry; you are still hurt. You should ask them."

  "It doesn't matter," Heris said. She had no intention of asking them. She didn't care what their reasons had been. The lump in her throat grew to choking size. She tried not to look at Vida's face, or anything else.

  Her aunt sighed. "If you're going to be terminally angry with anyone, be angry with me."

  "Why? You're the only one who ever contacted me, who ever bothered—"

  "On my orders." A flat statement, no possibility of error. Heris stared at her, seeing nothing in that face she could understand.

  "What?"

  "On my orders, once you had resigned." Vida paused, and gave Heris another long stare from those remarkable eyes. "You know, that surprised us all. Your resignation, coming so fast."

  "Surely Admiral Sorkangh told you—"

  "Afterwards, yes. Not at the time of the Board. I would not have expected that—I would have expected you to fight back—"

  Rage exploded in her head like ships in combat, vast flowering shapes of colored light. "By myself? With no one from the family coming to my aid? With Sorkangh against me? You weren't there—no one was there for me—" The fury came out of her mouth, the debris of her hopes, her career. When she ran down, shaking with rage and sorrow, her aunt sat as quietly as before.

  "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. All: 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 . . ."

  "Something like that. When you got Lepescu, she felt she'd proved her point. I didn't." Her mother grimaced. "I thought that should be the end of it; you'd earned it. But your Aunt Vida—"

  Heris felt tired. "I wish—" She couldn't finish; she didn't know what she wished, except that none of this had happened.

  "I'm sorry," her mother said again. "But I hope you'll forgive us, in time. If not now."

  If not now, when? A family saying intended to spur reluctant youngsters to try the difficult, to achieve the impossible. Forgiveness was impossible, looked at one way—the pain was still pain, the loss was still loss. In another way . . . it had been too long already. She could tell that they had suffered too; she was not alone in that.

  "I missed you," Heris said, and reached out for them. "I missed you so much—"

  Vida Serrano, in uniform, behind her own desk, was back to being the admiral, full of advice for younger officers.

  "If you get your mind straightened out—if you learn to ask the right questions—you'll be an admiral yourself, in a few years. As for now—you did well enough with Vigilance and Parad
ox. We'll see what you can do with a real battle group. I'll expect you to be ready to ship out as soon as you get Vigilance back out of the yards."

  A battle group. Vigilance? A real—? She looked at her aunt, and Vida grinned, a wicked grin of delight at her niece's surprise. "You've earned that much; I can't get you a star yet, but if you handle the group the way I expect, it'll come. You'll be going straight into trouble, of course—"

  "What about personnel?"

  "Your lover?"

  "All of them," Heris said, persisting.

  "I thought I'd give you Arash Livadhi as second in command," her aunt said, ignoring her question. "That should make an interesting combination, you and Arash."

  "He's senior." Heris had her doubts about Arash, even now.

  "He was. You're getting a promotion, remember?"

  What was the right question? Did you trust me? Did you care? Heris fumbled around in her memories of the past few years, trying to untangle what she burned to know from what her aunt would consider strategic thinking.

  "How did I get that first job, with Lady Cecelia?"

  "Good girl." Vida's grin widened, pure approval this time. "That took a bit of pressure on the employment agency. I wanted you to have flexibility, a ship with decent legs, a wealthy employer with an irregular schedule. Lady Cecelia was the first one to meet those qualifications."

  "Did you know her?"

  "Not really. We'd met years back at a function she probably doesn't remember. That didn't matter. The other things did. And, since you're now on the right track, I won't make you drag the rest out piecemeal. Yes, it was more than blind good luck or your talented scavenger's native ability that put certain items in his way when you needed them—those military grade scans, that weapons-control upgrade. You'd earned that when you got Lepescu. I made sure Livadhi got the assignment to carry the prince, rather than Sorkangh's grandson. And yes, Koutsoudas was planted on you—and a good thing, too. Not that we didn't need to get him away from the trouble he'd brewed before it cost us his life and Livadhi's ship. You don't know yet how ticklish things were in Fleet after the abdication. Or how many holes I had to try to plug with too few resources."