The Serrano Succession

by Elizabeth Moon

  Her com chimed. She punched it live. "Vida? It's Gadar Livadhi. Have you heard this ridiculous order taking rejuved admirals off duty?"

  "Just saw the orders, Gadar," she said. "One of yours brought them to me, in fact. Nice shiny new star young Arash has."

  "Well . . . what are we going to do about it?"

  "I don't know about you, but I'm going to take myself off active duty. Were you one of the experimentals too?"

  "Yes, and there's not a thing wrong with my brain but the smoke coming off it from this nonsense."

  "Gadar—this is no time—"

  "—To start trouble. I know. But at a time like this, with Thornbuckle gone, we need experienced leaders."

  "If we've done our job, our juniors can take over." She knew she didn't believe that, and Gadar's snort told her he didn't believe it either.

  "You're an optimist. By the way, what do you hear from Copper Mountain?"

  "Nothing," Vida said. "Should I?"

  "Well . . . you know my brother Arkad's in the judicial division . . ."

  "Yes . . ."

  "He's been investigating the records of prisoners sent to Copper Mountain's secure facilities—that Stack Islands thing—because that's one of the places that Lepescu stashed your niece's crew."

  Vida noted Livadhi's turn of phrase. Run hot, run cold, that was Livadhi. "And . . .?"

  "And he turned up something interesting. Lepescu's juniors—the ones too far down to have been caught with their hands in the honey jar after he was killed—have been cycling through Stack Islands. Not as prisoners, but as guards. Not all the guards, of course, but some of them."

  "Oh . . . my."

  "If you wanted to recruit desperate and dangerous personnel—even those who serve their terms and aren't discharged are going to have that mark against them—you could hardly do better than to start there."

  "And you think they're up to something, of course. Any idea what?"

  "Another mutiny—perhaps a breakaway—"

  "In service to whom? What kind of financial backing do they have?"

  "I haven't been able to find out anything. I've always rather wondered if Lepescu wasn't close to the Morrellines, given his involvement in Patchcock—"

  "He made things worse—the whole thing rebounded—"

  "Yes—but in the long run, it cemented Morrelline control. Got the Familias as a whole bad publicity—"

  "You didn't say anything about that at the time," Vida said.

  "No. I didn't realize it at the time. I was all the way over in One, chatting up those Lone Star Confederation diplomats. I hate staff rotations." Vida didn't rise to that bait, and eventually Livadhi went on. "It's only recently, after your—mmm—adventure there, that I began looking into it."

  "Well, there's nothing we can do now but go home like good little children," Vida said. "I hope they realize what an opportunity this is for foreign interests. Not to say anything against your family member Gadar, but your new admiral minor almost turned up his toes when he realized he was about to be responsible for the sector most likely to be attacked by the NewTex Militia, with only thirty-six hours of OJT."

  "My heart bleeds," Gadar said. "I hope these are only temporary ranks, because the instant they check us out medically, I'm going to be back in my office."

  "I hope it's quick," Vida said. "But if someone wanted to get rid of us—or some of us—all they'd have to do is delay the medical."

  "You Serranos are so cheerful!" he said.

  "You Livadhis are so lively," she said, and cut the connection.

  * * *

  Vida could not remember a time in her adult life when she had had nothing specific to do for days on end. She'd taken leave, of course, but she'd always had plans. A trip to take, a course, a family crisis that needed her time and talents. She had money enough—she hadn't spent all her salary since she made lieutenant, and her investments had prospered. She could live quite well on half-pay. It was the idleness that bothered her, the sense of being cut off from her family.

  Well . . . she'd go home, then, to the Serrano compound on Melander, that source of all—or at least many—of the Serrano family.

  Making reservations on a civilian ship was annoying; she tried to laugh at herself for expecting people to jump when she said hop, but it wasn't easy. She'd so often thought of civilians as disorganized, but when you didn't have a staff . . . she grumbled at herself repeatedly, as she arranged to ship this and store that and decided what to carry on and what to stow in cargo.

  She recognized other flag officers the first day on the ship; by mutual unspoken consent, they avoided each other. Though all wore uniforms at first—and of course they were entitled to do so, on leave—she and most of the others changed to civilian clothes early in the voyage.

  Melander's orbital station had grown since she'd last seen it, but was still smaller than the huge combined Fleet/civilian stations she was used to. She saw plenty of people in uniform, but they ignored her—ignored her, just because she wasn't wearing hers, and they could not see the admiral inside the red civilian suit. She glowered at them anyway. Two of them, at least, were Serranos.

  She caught a Northside shuttle, checked the arrival station weather, and pulled out a warmer jacket. Early spring on Melander would be colder than the regulated temperature on ship or station.

  The Serrano family compound lay along the shore of a lake inaccurately named Serenity, since it seemed always ruffled by the breeze channeled up from the sea between the hills. A row of solid, respectable houses built of buff-and-brown stone or brick, each with its neat green lawn and floral border, rows of shade and fruit trees marking the edges of yards, neat pebbled walks from the road up to each house . . . it looked far less attractive than it had the last time she'd seen it. That had been . . . nearly thirty years ago, when the crabapple trees now in brilliant bloom above her head had been tiny sticks, her aunt's idea. They did look pretty, but she still didn't want to be here.

  All the Fleet families who built compounds tended to the same organization . . . separate houses for the guardians with young children, those with older children, for the transient younger officers, for the senior officers on long leave, for those in retirement. Flag officers each had an apartment, which might be used for a special guest when its owner was not in residence. Vida had never seen hers, having qualified for it since her last visit, but she knew it would be there, furnished with the things she had sent home over the years.

  It smelled of wax and wood and leather and the clean sharp scent of top-grade electronics. It was just as she'd imagined it, filled with souvenirs from all over the Familias, arranged attractively . . . and she hated it. Why had she bought that "Design in Blues" which was now, no doubt, worth four times what she paid for it? It reminded her of her first cruiser tour, and now she didn't want to be reminded. She turned on the music, Prescott's "Andante for Manamash Strings," and spent the first half hour turning pictures to the wall. If she couldn't be on a ship, a real ship, she wasn't going to have them staring at her from the walls. Or the caricature of the young officer's promotion dance. Or the view of Castle Rock from Rockhouse Major, with the old Mordant's pods framing the continents.

  Was it the rejuv going bad, or just frustration? Vida didn't know, and almost didn't care. The apartment was bigger than her quarters onstation, but it felt cramped, enclosed, in a way that ship compartments never did. She glared out the window at the lake. A walk, then, to work off this bad temper.

  On the way downstairs, she saw Sabatino, the other Serrano flag officer, and her distant cousin. "I hate planets," he said by way of greeting.

  "So do I," Vida said. They had never been close friends, but they were both Serrano admirals, and thus had common interests.

  "I'm going up in the mountains for a week or so," Sabatino said. "Leaving tomorrow." She remembered that he had always liked wilderness camping.

  "I'm going for a walk," Vida said. "Dinner?"

  "Might as well." He waved and wen
t on into his apartment.

  Out of doors felt entirely too exposed. The wind, no proper ventilation current, whipped the lake surface into choppy little waves and tried to push Vida sideways. Clouds rushed by overhead, and behind the clouds was that opaque lid which groundsiders insisted was beautiful, hiding the stars.

  She had liked the planet well enough growing up on it. She hadn't minded the blues and grays and mauves and pinks of the sky then, or the many shades of cloud. Vida pushed herself to walk faster, down the pebbled walk, across the road, to the footpath by the lake. Far out, bright sails glinted in red and yellow against the water. One thing about planets, you could walk a long way without retracing your steps. She walked herself breathless heading east, well past the end of the Serrano estate. There had been a small cluster of shops down here at one time, where a public boat ramp gave access to the lake for those who didn't have waterfront property.

  Recovering her breath while waiting in a line of noisy children for a drink and a snack—she chose tea and a cinnamon pastry, not the sweet drinks and cream buns the children were buying—she recovered her sense of humor as well. Planets were not that bad, all things considered. She settled on a bench, protected from the wind by one of the shops, and looked at the hills behind the estates across the road. She had wandered there, as a child, splashing in the creeks and exploring little hidden valleys. She had run down here, hot and thirsty, to buy the same sweet drinks. Not bad at all, planets, if you were there by choice.

  She would have to find something useful to do. With that resolve, she started back to the family compound, and by the time she arrived, she was quite ready for dinner with Sabatino. They chatted about music and art—her collection of modern prints, and his of music recordings. He invited her to come hear Malachy vu Suba's new bassoon concerto in his apartment, and she spent a pleasanter evening than she'd expected, arguing about the merits of that controversial work. Vu Suba had chosen to write for the ancient instrument, not the modern one, which limited performance to those orchestras which possessed period instruments. Sabatino argued that the tonal qualities were different enough to make this worthwhile, but Vida contended that only a very few could hear the difference.

  * * *

  The next morning, however, he was gone and she still hadn't decided what to do. She turned her pictures face-out again, rearranged a few ornaments, checked for a third time that everything had been put away neatly. Shrieks from outside brought her to the window of the second bedroom.

  The smallest Serrano children played in the garden between the houses as she had done, screaming and laughing the way children always did. Vida looked down on their playscape with its ramps and towers and bridges, and found it hard to believe she had ever been that noisy. Now that she had noticed them, the noise seemed to pierce her head with little needles.

  Maybe the archives would be quieter. She went downstairs, and down again, into the underground library that housed the oldest documents the Serrano family owned.

  Rows of Serrano biographies . . . Vida reread Rogier Xavier Serrano, one of her favorites (he had every attribute of a hero, including having made love to and won the heart of a beautiful heroine as brave as himself), and Millicent Serrano, born blind but gifted with extraordinary spatial abilities. She'd always meant to read about her own great-uncle Alcandor, who had managed to get thrown out of the Fleet for smuggling a tricorn vermuge onto a ship as a prank . . . and had then been readmitted, because no one else could get it off. That story in the official biography wasn't nearly as good as she remembered from his tales on the front porch of Rest House when he was a retired commander with a gimpy leg and a strange green spot on his arm. The official biography didn't mention the vermuge's lust for coffee, for instance, or the creature's curious mating behavior.

  Vida spent several days browsing the family biographies before she tired of that, and looked around for something else. Battle reports . . . she'd seen all she wanted of battle reports. Service records, leave records, slim volumes of verse by Serranos who thought themselves poets . . . she opened one of these and burst into laughter. Either Amory David Serrano wasn't a very good poet, or the language had changed a lot in the past two hundred years. Mercedes Esperanza, on the other hand, had written erotic verses that should, Vida thought, have ignited the whole archive . . . but Mercedes had died young, of a typical poetic fever. What kind of space commander would she have made?

  Stories, even: a few Serranos had written fiction, most of it clearly intended for children, and most of it—to Vida's taste anyway—pretty bad. Carlo and the Starship was nothing more than a child's tour of a passenger ship, with a biddable child asking obvious questions and a friendly puppy answering them. She passed by Carlo and the Power Plant, and Carlo Goes to the Mountains, glanced briefly at the illustrations for Helen Is a Good Girl (little Helen shaking hands; little Helen sitting up straight at table; little Helen offering a toy spaceship to another child with an improbably sweet smile—Serranos, even in childhood, didn't hand over ships willingly), and almost missed Long Ago on Altiplano.

  Altiplano. Her grandson's fiancee's homeworld. She pried it out of the tightly-squeezed group of skinny children's books. Its pages had turned brown and brittle; the illustrations were not drawn in, but pasted on, ancient faded flatpics.

  "Long ago, on Altiplano, a great Family ruled."

  So they had, the family the Serranos had been bound to.

  "A beautiful world, with magnificent snow-capped mountains, and great golden plains of grass. To this world, the Garcia-Macdonalds brought their people, who prospered there and spread across the fertile land. And their loyal guards and protectors, the brave Serranos, watched the sky above them, and kept their ships safe from piracy." That, too, she knew. The Serranos had been their space militia; someone else had been their ground militia.

  "But treachery surrounded them. They were betrayed by those they trusted to guard them." Vida felt a chill. They hadn't been betrayed by Serranos . . .

  "By their soldiers on the planet." That was better. Not Serranos at all, someone else.

  "And they were all killed, the mothers and fathers and all the little children, because of the wickedness of the rebels and traitors. And that is why when we say our prayers, we do not ask for blessing upon the people of Altiplano."

  What an odd book for a child! It was more like a diatribe, like a memoir. She looked on the other side of the gap in the row, but found only Carlo Visits the Observatory and Helen Starts School, followed by Three Little Serranos Visit the Seashore. Nothing else with the same faded brown binding.

  Vida took her find over to the table, and paged back through it. Very, very odd. Hand-printed, of course, and the flatpics glued on with something that had bled through. They were all blurry and faded, but one appeared to show a house, and another a face. The rest might have been landscapes. The pasted-in pictures made the book fatter than its spine suggested—no wonder the whole row had been wedged tight.

  Vida flipped every page, looking for any identifying mark. One of the flatpics fell off, and the paper folded behind it with it. She looked at it . . . thin, almost translucent, brown on the folds . . . it had been there for a very, very long time. Perhaps she should get the family librarian; she might damage it by unfolding it.

  But she couldn't resist peeking.

  Chapter Ten

  Castle Rock

  Back at Castle Rock, Cecelia was surprised to find that Miranda had left not just the Palace but the planet. She checked the net and found that Brun was the only family member onplanet. Brun had moved to Appledale, the Thornbuckle family estates on Castle Rock. Cecelia had always liked Appledale, with its pleasant view of rolling fields and orchards. She called and, as she'd expected, Brun invited her out to stay.

  Brun met her at the front door, quickly directed the staff to take her luggage upstairs, and then—even on the way to the handsome downstairs morning room—frothed over with indignation about Hobart Conselline, who had gotten himself elected Spea
ker of the Table of Ministers.