The Serrano Succession

by Elizabeth Moon

  "Not a child's book—"

  "Whatever kind of book. How can you believe that the real, secret truth was lost so long, and only comes to light just in time to keep me from marrying Esmay?"

  Voices rose in an angry gabble, but Barin shouted over them. "I don't care! I do not care that she's from Altiplano. I do not care that this—this scrap of paper says her family were murderers hundreds of years ago. Are all Serranos saints? I love her, and I admire her and I'm going to marry her, if I have to leave the family to do it!"

  "Barin, no!" Esmay grabbed for his other hand. "Wait—we have to find out—"

  "I already know what I need to know," he said, looking into her eyes. "I love you, and you are faithful and true and brave—and you love me. That is what matters, not what happened then."

  "There was an oath sworn . . ." Vida said.

  Barin rounded on her, and this time Esmay could see the family likeness as if stamped in living bronze. "And are all oaths worthy? That's not what you told me, Grandmother, when I swore to keep Misi's secrets. There are oaths and oaths, you said, and it's a wise soul that swears rightly, which is why we swear few."

  For an instant, Esmay thought Vida would scream her reply, but her voice, when she spoke, was soft.

  "Then we must find the truth of this matter, Grandson—whether the story as we know it, or as the Suizas know it, is the truth. For if we know at last the names of those who killed our patrons, I see no possibility of peace between us."

  "We have an oath to the Familias," Heris Serrano said. "As you keep telling the other Fleet families, when they remember who were their patrons. Would you have Serranos unravel Fleet, and possibly the Familias as well, to seek vengeance for ancient wrongs?"

  Silence, an uneasy silence in which Esmay could almost hear the unspoken arguments based on rank, active service, combat experience. Barin broke it.

  "It doesn't matter. I'm sticking by Esmay no matter what you say."

  "The question is, will she stick by you, or will she turn traitor like her ancestors?" That was not Vida, but a male Serrano at the rear of the crush.

  "Nonsense," Heris said. "The question is, does she love him?"

  That set off another uproar, in which Love is nothing but hormones! clashed with Love is more than just hormones! and a dozen other comments Esmay had heard before. Through that, the shrill pipe of a communications alarm cut like a knife; the noise level dropped.

  Someone across the suite picked up the com, and absolute silence spread from that focus toward the group still muttering softly about love and betrayal and honor. Heads turned; people moved away, looking in that direction.

  Finally Esmay could see. A Serrano she hadn't met yet stood, one hand up for silence, listening, his face more gray than brown with some shock. He put the comunit down, finally, with exaggerated care.

  "Mutiny. There's been a mutiny, on Copper Mountain, and the mutineers have ten ships already."

  "What?"

  "All leaves cancelled, all personnel return to their ships at once—" His eyes sought Vida Serrano's. "They're calling the inactive flags back, sir; you're to take the fastest possible route to Headquarters."

  "Who?" Heris called. "Did you get anything on who started it?"

  "Bonar Tighe was the first ship, Heris, but they took the Copper Mountain orbital station with convicts from Stack Three, and the commander there was named Bacarion."

  "Bacarion." Heris thought a long moment. "Lepescu's staff—one of his staff officers. It's that bunch again, our own little Bloodhorde. And you know how Lepescu's crowd feels about Serranos."

  Barin pulled Esmay to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. "It's always something," he murmured. "But I do love you, and I will marry you, and nothing—not Grandmother, or history, or mutinies, or anything—is going to stop me."

  She hugged him back, oblivious for a long, long delicious moment, vaguely aware of people moving in the room, of doors opening and closing. Finally someone coughed loudly.

  "You've made your point, both of you," Vida Serrano said. "But right now, you'd better get in uniform and get going."

  Esmay lifted her head from Barin's shoulder and saw nothing but uniforms now, Serranos with carisacks and rollerbags, one after another emerging from the side rooms and heading for the door to the lift tubes.

  "I do love him," she said, right into Vida's face. "And I'm not a traitor, and I won't hurt him."

  Vida sighed. "There's a lot more at stake than the happiness of you two," she said. "But for what it's worth, I hope it works out for you."

  Barin turned into his own room, and Esmay went back to hers, stripping quickly out of the borrowed clothes and putting on the creased uniform she'd been wearing—not even time to have it pressed. She looked at Dolcent's clothes, considered leaving them on the bed, and then remembered having seen her, in uniform, leaving with two others. She stuffed them into her own luggage—maybe she'd run into Dolcent on a ship out of here—smoothed her wayward hair, and went out to find Barin waiting for her. In the hall, the last eight of the Serrano family were clustered at the lift tubes, waiting.

  "I will never again complain about having to come to a boring family reunion," said one, a woman who looked to be in her forties. She gave Esmay a sidelong look. "First we find out that what had seemed to be an ordinary inspection of a potential spouse is almost the lynching of an old enemy, and then there's a mutiny." Nervous chuckles from half the others. "Is it you, my dear, or the conjunction of Heris and Vida? Those two are certainly lightning rods."

  "Lightning and rod, I would say today." That was a bookish-looking young man. "Sparks were definitely flying."

  "She knows that." Another speculative look at Esmay that made her face heat up. One of the tubes opened, and they crowded in, descending so fast that Esmay felt her stomach hovering near the back of her throat.

  The hotel lobby swarmed with a crowded mass of men and women in R.S.S. uniforms, some struggling at the counters, trying to check out, and others crowding to the exits. "Don't worry about registration," the man who had spoken said. "I'll take care of it—we were last out, and that's my job."

  "Cousin Andy," Barin said, in Esmay's ear. "Administration. Let's go."

  The crush continued on the slidewalks and trams to the Fleet gate of the station. Every newsvid display had the story, with serious-faced commentators talking, while scenes of Copper Mountain played in the background. Esmay didn't stop to listen, but there was a clump of people near every display.

  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 the
y 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."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Old Palace, Castle Rock

  "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. Bu
t 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.