Heris Serrano

by Elizabeth Moon

  "Begging the captain's pardon, but if you did that at me, I'd think you were having a seizure." Oblo, of course.

  "And then we jump Garrivay and kill him? It's going to take all of us, and no one's going to notice?"

  "Petris, for a bloodthirsty pirate, you're being ridiculously cautious. No, we're going to walk into as many of the traitors as we can find gathered with Garrivay—Koutsoudas's ongoing sound tap will help us there—and kill all of them. You notice that they like to gather and gab—Koutsoudas has them on three separate occasions already. I'd like to take out all three ship captains, but I doubt we'll find them all together. Four or five traitorous officers, though, will reduce the resistance we face. Admiral Serrano's reputation will do the rest. Or not, as the case may be."

  "Everyone knows you're not in Fleet anymore," Meharry said.

  "Yes . . . officially. But suppose the whole thing was a feint—suppose I'm on special assignment." They stared at her, this time shocked into silence.

  "You're . . . not . . . really, are you?" asked Ginese finally.

  "See?" Heris grinned at them. "If you can think that, even for a moment—after what we've been through—then it can work."

  "But seriously—you didn't resign because your aunt—" Ginese continued to stare at her with an expression blank of all emotion.

  "No! I resigned—stupidly, I now admit—for the reasons I told you, and without hearing a word from my sainted aunt. But if she had intended something like this, no one would know. It is plausible—just—with the Serrano reputation. And it's our chance. A slim one, but a chance."

  "I've seen fatter chances die of starvation," Petris said, but his tone approved. He sighed, then stretched. "One thing about it, Heris . . . Captain . . . it's never dull shipping with Serranos." She ignored that.

  "So now for the details. It's tricky enough, so we'll have rehearsals—and hope we're not still rehearsing when the Benignity arrives."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Xavier, Fairhollow Farm

  Cecelia felt a certain tension as she entered the stable office. Nothing she could put her finger on—dear Marcia smiling so amiably, and Poots with an even more foolish grin. Slangsby, the head groom, with no grin at all but something twinkling in the depth of his little blue eyes. Were they upset, perhaps, because she had visited two other breeding farms before coming here? They hadn't been that sensitive in years past.

  "Such a fortunate escape," Marcia said. "We've heard all about it."

  Now what did that mean? Lorenza's attack, or something else entirely? "I'm surprised such a minor matter stayed on the news this far out," Cecelia said. "With the king's resignation—"

  "As if you didn't have something to do with that!" Poots sounded almost annoyed with her. Cecelia blinked, assessing the undercurrents.

  "I think perhaps my influence was considerably exaggerated," she said. "Of course, I was at the Grand Council meeting, but—"

  "Never mind, then." Marcia's smile vanished, replaced by her more usual expression, which had always reminded Cecelia of one of those toys with a spring-controlled lid that snapped tight. "If you don't want to trust your oldest, dearest friends—"

  So that was it. Plain jealousy, and feeling left out. None of the honest replies that sprang quickly to mind would work, because, though true, they were insulting. Marcia and Poots were so far from being old and dear friends that they made the phrase ridiculous. Yes, they were rich, in the same class as those who played with the titles of vanished aristocracies. Yes, they considered themselves the equal of anyone. But half of that was the fraternity of horsemen, who allow no rank but that earned in the saddle. She had known them for years, ridden with them, bought and sold horses in the same markets . . . friends? No. Cecelia tried to think of something placating, but Marcia was already in spate again.

  "I suppose you're upset that we didn't come at once to help you," she said. Cecelia had not thought of that, and now resented the suggestion that she might have held such a foolish hope. "I'm sure we would have," Marcia said, "except that we didn't even find out for months and months, and by then it seemed—and it was foaling time anyway—and it would have taken us months to get there, because as you know we don't have a private yacht. . . ." The explanation, like most explanations, simply dug a deeper and muckier hole in the claimed relationship. If they could "know all about it" so soon after the king's resignation, then they should have known about her collapse that soon too. Foaling season was a weak excuse; no one would have expected them to load up a ship full of pregnant mares, and it had been years since Marcia attended foalings herself. As for "don't have a private yacht," that was, strictly, true. Their Fortune's Darling was well out of the yacht class, and might have served as the flagship of a small shipping company.

  Cecelia reminded herself that she had not expected help from them, and wasn't (despite the clumsy excuses) upset that they hadn't provided it. "Never mind," she said, trying to drag the conversation back to her reason for being there. "All I'm really interested in is your bloodstock. Mac said you still had some of that Singularity sperm available?"

  "What are you doing, restocking the royal—excuse me, formerly royal—stables for yourself?"

  That was too much. Cecelia felt her neck get hot, and didn't really care what her face looked like. "Not at all," she said with icy restraint. "I am trying to do a favor for some friends who saved my life and assisted my recovery. Since you are, as you say, old and dear friends—" The accent she put on "friends" would have sliced through a ship's hull plating. "—I had hoped to purchase both sperm and time-locked embryos from you. However, it seems that other suppliers might be more convenient."

  Marcia turned red; Poots, as usual, looked as if he might cry. Slangsby now had the grin the others had discarded.

  "I didn't—you don't have to take it that way—"

  "What way?" Cecelia considered herself a reasonable person, and she could put no friendly interpretation on Marcia's words. But, as a reasonable person, she would let Marcia try to wriggle out of this. It might even be interesting, in a purely zoological way, to watch the wriggling.

  Marcia tried a giggle that cracked in midstream. "Cecelia, my dear, you take everything so seriously. I was just teasing. Honestly, my dear, that rejuvenation seems to have affected your temper." But the oyster-gray eyes were wary, watchful, entirely unlike the frank tone of the voice.

  Cecelia let her eyebrows rise of themselves. "Really?"

  "All right; I'm sorry." Marcia didn't sound sorry; she sounded very grumpy indeed. "If you want Singularity genes, we've got 'em. Sperm and embryos both. I suppose you're thinking of the Buccinator line you favored so?"

  Buccinator, Cecelia thought to herself, had only been the most prepotent sire of the past three decades for performance horses. Minimal tweaking of the frozen sperm gave breeders options for speed on the flat or substance for jumping; Buccinator had been almost a sport, but his genome had enough variety for that. But Marcia had refused to jump on that fad, as she'd called it, and out here in the boonies she had produced, after decades of work, one horse not more than fifteen percent worse than Buccinator. Singularity's sperm would offer genetic diversity, but she intended to have top equine geneticists do some editing before she turned it over to her friends.

  "Perhaps," she said, "you'd be kind enough to show me what you've got available. I'd like to see the breeding stock, then the ones in training, then the gene maps."

  Slangsby twinkled at her, but she distrusted that twinkle. Marcia and Poots said nothing, and simply led her out into the aisle of the great barn. Cecelia looked up. Marcia's pigheadedness about Buccinator aside, she had excellent judgment elsewhere, and this barn proved it. Local wood, used as logs, so that even the most irate equine couldn't kick through the walls. Good insulation, too. Wide aisles, perfect ventilation for this climate, utilities laid safely underground—no exposed pipes or wiring—and kept immaculate by the workers Slangsby supervised. Tools properly hung out of traffic, the only barrow
in sight in active use . . . and down the long aisle, one sleek head after another looking over the stall doors. The horses were under roof in the daytime to avoid the assaults of local insectlike parasites, who lived lives too short to learn that horse blood wouldn't nourish them. The bites—otherwise harmless—were painful and made horses nervous.

  "The oldest live-bred Singularity daughter," Marcia said proudly. Cecelia had seen the mare before; her infallible memory for horses overlaid her memory of the four-year-old being shown in the ring with this matronly mare only a month from foaling. Star, crooked stripe, snip, all against a background of seal brown. Common coloring for Singularity offspring, because Marcia (like too many people) had a fancy for color. Predictably, she now said, "We sell the loud-colored ones." Buccinator's gorgeous copper color had been one of the things she didn't like about him, Cecelia knew. She also knew that basic coat color was the easiest thing to tweak in the equine genome; if Marcia had wanted all dark foals she could have had them. But other people wanted variety, and she produced brighter ones in order to increase her sales.

  "Lovely," Cecelia murmured. She was, too, a good solid mare who had produced both ova and live foals. "I'm surprised you're still using her to produce live—isn't it a bit risky at her age?"

  Marcia's face creased in a real grin. "I keep telling you genetic wizard types that if you breed live, you get real soundness, long-term soundness. Of course we've stripped her ova a few times, because it's so hard to transport the mature horses, but the proof of the value of live breeding is right there: an eighteen-year-old mare who can withstand pregnancy and deliver a live foal."

  Cecelia kept her face straight with an effort. Given the right pelvic conformation and good legs, any mare could do that. And any mare could get in trouble in any foaling, too. She preferred to use nurse mares of larger breeds for any of her own bloodstock. She moved to the next stall, and the next. Marcia's idea of perfect conformation hadn't changed since her last visit. Sound, yes, but sacrificing elegance for it. They all looked a bit stubby to her, heavier in the neck and chunkier in the body than necessary.

  "And this is our pride," Marcia said. They had passed under the dome at the crossing of the aisles, and were now in the stallion end of the barn. Marcia's pride was, of course, the closest thing to Singularity she had been able to produce. He certainly looked like his famous grandsire, Cecelia thought. Dark brown with the merest whisker of white on his brow, a powerful, well-muscled body, and the arrogance of any stallion who comes first in the barn hierarchy.

  "Very much like," Cecelia said.

  "He's double-line bred," Marcia said.

  "What's his outcross line?" Cecelia asked. She thought she could guess, but waited.

  "Consequential," Marcia said, and Cecelia congratulated herself. Consequential had passed a curious whorl on the neck to his progeny, and this stallion had it. And trust Marcia to talk about the stallion side of the outcross line.

  "He's a real bargain," Marcia said, and named a price per straw of frozen semen that Cecelia didn't think was a bargain at all. Not for an inbred chunk with all his grandsire's faults and probably few of his virtues.

  To check that, she asked, "What's his speed?"

  Not to her surprise, Marcia's smile vanished again. "He's far too valuable to risk on the track, Cecelia. His breeding alone, his conformation, show his quality. We wouldn't take the chance of injury." Of proving him racing sound, of proving that his grandsire's unlikely speed and agility had come through along with a pretty brown coat and a thick neck. Cecelia couldn't tell for sure, but even from this angle she suspected that his hocks were not sufficient for his build.

  "What's your price for Singularity straws?" Cecelia asked. "They must be getting rare now."

  "Well, they are, of course. And we must reserve a certain supply for our own program." As if they didn't already have all that influence they needed. "But I could let you have fifty straws for forty thousand. Each, of course."

  Cecelia bit back the "Nonsense!" that wanted to burst out. That was only the asking price, which no one dealing in horses ever paid unless they were novices, in which case it was the price of their education. "Umm," she said instead. It meant she wasn't stupid enough to take the asking price, but might bargain later.

  "So you see what a bargain this one is," Marcia went on. "Sixty-two percent Singularity—"

  Cecelia had run into this before, the ardent preserver of ancient breeds convinced that concentrating bloodlines would somehow overcome the limitations of time and restore the glories of Terran genetics. Cecelia doubted they had been glories anyway (well, perhaps those pretty beasts with the odd number of vertebrae). From the remaining video chips, most of the breeds had been minor variations on a few themes—large and massive, tall and fast, short and hardy—with serious improvement written out of possibility by restrictive breed registries. Half a dozen breeds supposedly intended for racing, for instance, never raced each other and weren't allowed to interbreed . . . stupid.

  "Perhaps I could see this fellow moving a bit?" Cecelia said.

  Marcia's smile returned. "Of course. Slangsby, put him in the front ring."

  Cecelia stepped back to watch. Disposition mattered, as far as she was concerned. Slangsby clipped a lead to the stallion's halter before he opened the stall door, and ran the chain over the nose and back through the mouth. So. Not a quiet one. With that restraint, however, the dark horse stepped demurely from his stall with an air of innocence that Cecelia didn't believe for a moment. He did not dance, which might have been considered unmannerly, but he walked as if on eggs, as if any moment he might dance. Marcia urged Cecelia on, but Cecelia hung back. She wanted to see those hocks close up.

  "He can be a bit fresh, when he's been in the stall this long," Marcia said, now pulling Cecelia back. Cecelia ignored this; she was farther back than the longest-legged horse could strike. She closed her ears to Marcia's earnest twaddle, and watched the hocks closely. The stallion swaggered a bit; stallions did that. So the sway of the rump might be swagger, and there would be, from swagger alone, a slight sideways jut of the hock as the weight came over it. But here, as she'd expected, was the real problem. From footfall to footlift, the hock described a crooked circle as weight came onto that leg, and the leg pushed the weight forward. She had seen—had even owned—lanky horses whose hocks moved like that, and they'd been sound. But the chunky, muscley horses, those were the ones to watch; those were the ones who needed rock-solid hocks.

  The joint narrowed too quickly, too, more trapezoidal than rectangular, flowing into the lower leg too smoothly. Cecelia liked a hock that resembled a box, flat on either side and cleanly marked off above and below. In action, with weight on, it should flex in one plane only, not wobble like this one. She knew she wouldn't buy a straw of this one's semen; she might as well tell Marcia now . . . but that wasn't how the game was played. She strolled on, and took one of the comfortable padded seats just outside the display ring.

  Slangsby unlooped the chain, and clipped on a longe line instead of the short lead. The stallion moved out on the line, circled Slangsby at a mincing trot, and exploded suddenly in a flurry of hooves and tail, storming around in a gallop, then flinging himself in the air, bucking. Slangsby growled something at him, and he quieted to a tight canter, then to a trot, slightly more relaxed than before.

  "So athletic," said Marcia. "So balanced." Cecelia said nothing, watching the hind legs swing forward, back, forward, back . . . never quite reaching under as far as she liked. Of course he was not under saddle; he might never have been taught. That kind of explosiveness, she knew, came from a preponderance of fast-twitch muscle fibers, something jumpers and event horses needed, along with the slow-twitch fibers that let them gallop miles without tiring. But she didn't want the rest of that genome, at least not the way it was.

  She began to think what it would cost to fiddle the Singularity sperm along. She'd need top equine gene sculptors, and the best were in the Guerni Republic, where a healthy r
acing industry supported them. It might be simpler to go there in the first place, and not bother with Marcia's overmuscled stock, but the Guernesi concentrated on lighter-boned flat racers. Attempts to sculpt more bone into those had foundered on the difficulty of defining the ideal bone mass for each developing limb at each stage.

  The rest of the afternoon, as she watched one horse after another, half her mind was wandering off to Rotterdam and the Guerni Republic. That brought up the last discussion she'd had with her doctors.

  "You are physically a young woman again," they'd said. "Your body is in peak condition. But rejuvenation doesn't make your mind forget all it's learned. You are not in your early thirties: you are, in your experience, between eighty and ninety. You will find you want to use your new body in ways that satisfy your mature mind."

  She had not imagined what that might mean. What was she to do with the abundant energy that now made her restless? The Wherrin Trials had shown that she could be competitive; she was sure she could regain the championship. She had swum easily against the strongest current the yacht's pool provided, refreshed and not tired by an hour's swim. Pedar's revelations of a Rejuvenant clique didn't attract her, except when younger people were being especially tiresome . . . but they were more tiresome now than when her aging body had left her with less energy to express her irritation.