“No thanks,” Ky said, summoning a smile. “I just have a few things to do before bed.” The aides stayed on the lift; Ky nodded to the guard at the door of her suite and entered, closing it carefully behind her, closing the second door that shut off the little entrance foyer.
Even then she did not do what she felt like doing, which was screaming and smashing something. Jaw clenched to keep from the screaming part, she undressed carefully, hanging her evening dress uniform on the rack provided, where she could push it into the antechamber for the cleaners to take care of.
Damn Rafe. Damn, damn, damn Rafe. How dare he? How dare Stella talk to Rafe? How dare Stella read that letter, which she herself had so carefully forgotten? How dare anyone remind her…and to see Hal again, in that context, with everyone around. She yanked the pillow off her bed and threw it at the mattress, a trick she’d learned as a child—it made no sound or mess. She showered, brushed her teeth…she was still too angry to rest. She went into the suite’s office area.
Unlike either the bridge or the CCC, it had no shipboard ansible…she’d forgotten that. It did have a terminal for normal ansibles, though, and that was all she really needed. She put through the call to Stella’s office up on the station, managing a pleasant tone as Stella’s assistant answered and until she had Stella on a full-visual link.
“So how was the reception, Ky?” asked Stella. She looked relaxed, happy, and completely unaware of the trouble she’d caused.
“You disgusting, nosy, interfering bitch!”
“What?” Stella stared, eyes wide. “What do you think I’ve done?”
“Don’t play innocent! You poked around in my desk is what you did. You found the letter…you found the ring! And you couldn’t even keep quiet about it. You told him—you told Rafe, of all people, and probably everyone else—”
“I did not,” Stella said, coloring. “I told Rafe, yes, but he was the only one—”
“You had no right!” Ky’s head throbbed; she felt like throwing up and smashing the screen and bursting into tears, and she must not do any of those. “You had no right to tell him—to tell anyone—least of all him—”
“It was for your own good, Ky,” Stella said. “He’s…he’s not safe. He’s not the right man for you. He needed to know that you’d been hurt, and I didn’t want you hurt again—”
“I am not a fragile blown-glass flower,” Ky said. “And it’s none of your business who I like, or who I choose to be with—and anyway, maybe it’s just that you want him back. Maybe it just stuck in your throat that for once beautiful Stella didn’t get what she wanted and Ky did—or would have if you hadn’t ruined it.”
Stella paled again. “That is ridiculous! And unfair. I am not after Rafe; I do not want Rafe; if I didn’t think he was bad for you, dangerous for you, I wouldn’t care if the two of you spent the next twenty years in bed.”
“Which we will never have a chance to do, thanks to you!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stella said.
“Because of you, because you told him about…about Hal, tonight at the reception—the formal reception, in front of everyone in the universe—he buttonholed Hal and ripped him a new one—”
“What! Rafe?”
“Yes, Rafe. Publicly. So everyone knows the whole story now. I’m sure the entire fleet and the governments of at least four planets are having a nice juicy gossip about my first love affair and what they think is my second…”
“I can’t believe he would—”
“Believe it. He did. Made me the laughingstock of…of everyone. And it’s because of you, and your interference—”
“Ky, I’m sorry, but I never meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant. What matters is that you’ve completely ruined my reputation and my authority—”
“Don’t be so melodramatic—”
“Don’t tell me what to be!”
Stella opened her mouth, then shut it. Ky could see the pulse beating in her throat. Good.
“Ky, I’m sorry,” Stella said then. “I did not mean to hurt you. I did not mean to embarrass you. When I read it, it was an accident—”
Ky huffed but said nothing.
“And yes, it was a time when I was annoyed with you, and yes, that may have colored my judgment. When I read it, I wanted to—I wanted to make it go away, so I didn’t tell you I had. And when Rafe came, and told me he was—was in love with you, I didn’t believe him—”
“Because little cousin Ky couldn’t possibly have someone in love with her,” Ky muttered.
“Oh, stop it!” Stella leaned forward. “Ky, I have an adolescent love-crazed girl living with me now, and I also remember what it was like. Of course you could have someone in love with you; of course you could love someone. But consider this: the last time I’d seen you, you didn’t show any signs of caring about Rafe. With his past, I didn’t believe he really cared about you, except as another of his conquests. I thought, if he knew that you’d had a bad experience, he’d go pester someone else, particularly in a political situation where showing interest in you would harm his interests.”
She paused; Ky said nothing. “And I did what I thought was best for you at the time, and…I had no idea he’d go off his rocker and make an embarrassing scene at your reception.” Another pause. “What exactly did he do?”
She said it again, slowly and distinctly. “He went and found Hal. I don’t know how he found him, but it is Rafe, after all. Somehow he found him, and—I didn’t hear it all, but knowing Rafe I imagine he introduced himself and started in slowly. I knew Rafe had come in—he’d passed through the receiving line—he looked better than he had on Cascadia Station, before—” He had looked like the old Rafe, fully alive, an edged weapon looking for blood; she had felt her pulse quicken. “—and the Premier wanted to talk to him. I said I’d go find him. I was trying to get away from a terminally boring district superintendent from someplace on Cascadia, who wanted to tell me all about the genealogy of trees or something.”
“There’s one at every business party,” Stella said, with feeling.
“So I spotted Rafe, but didn’t recognize Hal from behind, and got there just in time to hear Rafe quoting…one of the more scathing bits of Hal’s letter…”
“That idiot!” Stella said. “What was he thinking?”
“And by then people had seen me; I had to just go on, and I didn’t know—well, not for sure—that it was Hal until I saw his face. And there was Rafe, and Hal, and all those people staring to see what I’d do…” Suddenly, unexpectedly, it seemed funny. She felt the laughter bubbling up, uncontrollable as the rage had been, and struggled to hold it down. She was not ready for it to be funny; she had a right to be angry. But the laughter came anyway. “Oh, Stella. If you could have seen their faces—and probably mine—it was horrible—but it must have been funny, too—”
“What did you do?” Stella said.
“What could I do? I’m the Great Admiral Vatta; I’m not allowed to have vapors or girlish feelings. I was coolly polite to both of them and led Rafe back to the Premier. Then I had to be gracious and polite to fifty more people, when what I wanted to do was disembowel someone. Rafe. You. Anyone. I did glare at the district superintendent until he backed off.” She could not help the chuckle that escaped.
“You did better than I would have,” Stella said. “I would have killed him. Them. Both of them. At least.”
“You wouldn’t—” But now something heard and not registered caught up with her, something that had generated the bubble of humor. “Did you say—did you actually say—Rafe told you he was in love with me?”
“Yes. I didn’t believe him; if I had—”
“But he said it. You think that was why—”
“Oh, Ky, for pity’s sake! I get enough of this with Zori! Of course it was why. Of course he meant it. Now would you please either go stick a knife in him for embarrassing you, or go tell him you love him, and let me get on with thi
s beastly audit?”
“But—what about you?”
“What about me? I’m buried in paperwork, that’s what about me. I would much rather have been at the reception, but I couldn’t spare the time.”
“And you don’t…you’re not…”
Stella looked ready to explode, but instead burst out laughing. “Ky, you and I are both idiots, but in different ways. Listen carefully, cousin. I do not want Rafe. I do not need Rafe. I don’t, I’ve realized, need any man. I think I may turn out rather like Aunt Grace—”
“Who has MacRobert.”
“Good for her. In her—I dare not say dotage; she’ll come through the ansible and whap me with a fruitcake—in her golden years, let’s say, she’s enjoying herself. But for much of her life she ran solo.”
Ky laughed again. She didn’t feel angry anymore, or not very. “What does your mother say?”
A long silence. Stella sighed. “We’ve talked. This thing with Zori—I realized I have to get over—”
Ky’s door chime binged. Startled, she looked at the clock, an antique-styled confection on the fake mantelpiece. Late. Later than late. More than halfway to morning. “Stella, I’ve got to go—I’ll call you later.” She closed the ansible down and spoke to the guard at the door. “Yes?”
“There’s a gentleman to see you, Admiral.”
“At this hour?”
“I told him—but you did say you had work to do; I thought you might be still up.”
Up, but not dressed. “Who is it?”
“Ser—Ser Dunbarger.”
Not again, was her first thought. Wasn’t it enough that he’d ruined her reputation in front of everyone at the reception—now he was coming to her suite in the middle of the night? Her heart thundered, drowning out the prudent voice in her head.
“A moment,” she said. She raced to the bedroom, flung off the robe, snatched her uniform from the rack, and put it on. Snarling at her fingers as she fumbled for buttons. Cursing the day anyone invented formal footwear. Jabbing at the deskcomp’s controls to bring up an impressive screen full of obviously military data. Knowing the whole time that the snarling and cursing and complaining were covering up something else.
She opened the inner door, and signaled the guard to open the outer one.
Rafe was still in impeccable evening dress, holding a bouquet so large it almost hid his face. “In honor of your stellar performance this evening,” he said. One eyebrow lifted just a bit. “I had foolishly left it behind earlier—”
Drops of water sparkled on the shoulders of his jacket; his hair was shining not just with its natural gloss but with water.
“You’re wet,” she said.
“Well…I had to find a flower market. And it’s started raining…”
“You’d better come in and dry off—” Her voice was cool, contained. “I’m working on—” She waved toward the desk. He came past her.
“Where’s your guard—Gary?”
“Gone. He took the last shuttle up, to catch a ship back to Nexus tomorrow. Today, maybe. I’m not sure what time it is on the station. Do you have a vase? I’m sure the hotel—”
“That one, on the mantel.” She closed the inner door, fully aware of all implications.
Rafe unwrapped the paper around the stems, not looking at her; she watched his hands as he flicked the paper loose at last and eased the stems into the vase. “I was an idiot,” he said, still not looking at her, pushing the flowers this way and that in the vase. A blue one flopped over sideways, and he prodded it upright. “Gary told me…I should have known—”
“That making it clear to all the world I’d been dumped by a third-rate coward wasn’t the way to enhance my reputation? Yes, you should have—and if you think you’ve improved it by showing up at my suite in the middle of the night—”
But now he was looking at her, the look she remembered; her voice disappeared to somewhere south of her navel. Head slightly cocked, eyebrow raised high, corner of his mouth twitching a little. “You didn’t have that uniform on five minutes ago.”
“I certainly did!” Ky said.
“Did not. You were undressed…probably in that robe I can just see half on the bed in the other room—”
She should have shut the door. She’d meant to shut the door.
“And the way I can tell, before you ask, is the buttons. Admiral Vatta never in her life buttoned her tunic crooked. So either Admiral Vatta wasn’t wearing that uniform five minutes ago or…you are someone else. Maybe not the Admiral Vatta I embarrassed over there across the street, but—”
Ky glanced down at her tunic. He was right, damn him. It was crooked. If the guard had seen—and guards always saw everything—he, too, would know she had not been at work, still dressed.
“I was talking to Stella,” she said. He flinched. “She told me how you knew. The pair of you—I was—am—furious with you both.”
“Yes,” he said. “I understand that. I’m sorry. Truly.”
“And back before I left for Moray—the way you were then—”
He closed his eyes a moment; his mouth thinned. Then he gave her a challenging look. “I think your not letting me know you were alive, after Moray, was as bad.”
For a moment she glared back, the anger rising again. But it was no use. All the old clichés ran through her mind: in for a penny, in for a pound; might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. She moved to the desk and shut down the deskcomp, then went to the suite’s bar, crouching to look into the cooler.
“What’s this—?” Rafe began. But she had found what she was looking for, and stood up again, holding a pair of limes.
“You showed me once,” she said, “the way you peel a lime.”
His face shifted from confusion to disbelief to delight. A rakish, wicked delight. “So I did.”
“Perhaps,” she said, as coolly as she could, “you would like to show me again…”
“You might be more comfortable with the demonstration if that tunic were buttoned properly…”
“Or,” Ky said, “if it were not buttoned at all.” She opened the top button. “Peel me a lime, Rafe.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
S ub-lieutenant Hal Coughlin was awake when Master Sergeant Pitt arrived, staring up at the ceiling with his one mostly open eye. Pitt tapped on the door; he barely glanced at her and stared up again.
“Want to talk to you,” she said. “You may not remember me, and anyway we didn’t get a chance for introductions. I’m Master Sergeant Cally Pitt, Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation, and we’re interested in you.”
“Huwh?”
“How? As a possible recruit. We do take people who are…how shall I say…not happy in their current organization, if we think they have potential…”
“You ought to be recruiting her,” he said, his voice blurred by the injuries and repairs.
“Oh, I tried,” Pitt said. “Tried for quite a while, more than once. Ky Vatta had better things to do, I think was what it came down to. You, on the other hand, don’t.”
He appeared to ruminate on that for a few moments, then asked, “How do you know I’m any good?”
Pitt ticked off points on her fingers. “You were an honor graduate of your Academy. That means you’re not stupid. You’ve had good to excellent fitness reports since. That means you’re not obviously lazy, dishonest, or incompetent. Until recent events, your CO thought highly of you and considered you promising.”
“She doesn’t now,” he said.
“Well…no. Not just because of what you’re alleged to have done, but also because you’ve become a public relations nightmare and you’ve created a discipline problem in your own fleet.” Pitt thought it amusing that the man who had dumped Ky Vatta for being a public relations nightmare was now himself a public relations nightmare. She doubted he appreciated the irony. “There’s always been a place for men and women who needed a change of identity for perfectly legitimate reasons—people like you. W
e can solve your fleet’s problem, and your problem.”
Within a day, former Slotter Key sub-lieutenant Hal Coughlin had resigned his commission with the full consent of his commander, and had been moved aboard a Mackensee ship to continue medical treatment.
Once they were safely aboard Ashford, Lieutenant Colonel Parker nodded to Pitt. “Good job, Master Sergeant. This should do us good with Slotter Key, and our intel people should learn a lot. A triple win. How’re you coming along with that fellow in their Defense Department? MacRobert, isn’t it?”
Pitt shook her head. “He’s as tough as I am or tougher, sir. Years of experience in spycraft, is my assessment, and not about to let out anything he doesn’t want to. And no, sir, before you ask, I can’t get him drunk.”
“Just maintain a friendly contact, then. You know what we’re after—”
“Yes, sir.” Pitt knew she hadn’t a chance of getting useful information out of MacRobert, but she was enjoying the time she spent with him. Still…he called the Slotter Key Rector of Defense “Grace.” However much she enjoyed the time, he was not for her.
Master Sergeant MacRobert (ret.) appeared on Admiral Vatta’s list of morning appointments with a tiny question mark beside his name. Ky deleted the question mark. Of course she wanted to meet with MacRobert again. She had seen him from a distance, and they had nodded at each other in recognition, but this would be a chance to find out about the situation back home. Including whether MacRobert and Grace Vatta were more than co-workers.
Ky finished up the list of commendations for the Nexus commanders involved in the final battle, handed that to the Nexus Defense Department courier, and stretched before telling her secretary (seconded from Cascadia’s Defense Ministry) that she was ready for MacRobert.
“Admiral Vatta,” he said. “It’s been awhile.”
“It has that,” she said. “And I wasn’t an admiral. Sit down, Master Sergeant. You’ve come with messages from the Rector, I imagine?”
“Your Aunt Grace, yes. Some from her as Rector and some from her as your aunt. Which would you like first?”
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