by David Weber
The evening went smoothly, Midshipman Winton not speaking unless spoken to, but offering intelligent answers to those questions put to him. Carlie had even begun to think that maybe Michael wasn't as stuck-up as she had believed.
Then came the conclusion of the meal, and wine was poured for the traditional toast to the Queen. As the junior officer present, the duty fell on Midshipman Winton.
He needed no prompting. Nor did Carlie expect him to need such. Carlie had shared stories with many officers of her acquaintance, and all agreed that this stepping forth into the limelight in the presence of those who were for the first time your peers rather than those august others known as Officers was a landmark occasion in a career.
Raising his glass to just the right level, Michael Winton said in a clear, carrying voice: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Queen!"
"The Queen!" came the affirmation.
Carlie had sipped from her glass, using the action to cover a glance at her charge. Michael Winton had settled back into his seat, but he wasn't drinking the captain's excellent wine. Instead he was—Carlie was certain of it—he was smirking.
Lieutenant Carlotta Dunsinane, loyal officer of the Navy and therefore to the Queen it served, was shocked to the core. Her shock must have shown in her expression because the Intransigent's communications officer, Tab Tilson, leaned toward her.
"Are you feeling all right, Carlie?"
"Fine," she managed. "Just got a little wine down the wrong pipe."
Tab nodded, reassured, and turned to answer a question put to him by Captain Boniece. When Carlie again turned her gaze to Mr. Winton, the prince was politely talking to his near neighbor, his expression as correct as it had been all evening.
But Carlie knew what she had seen, and again doubted to the depths of her heart whether this prince could ever humble himself from his position of power and privilege to embrace the life of service that was at the heart and soul of what it meant to be a true naval officer.
Michael didn't know if he was going to survive this middy cruise. It wasn't just the workload, though he had done a quiet survey of his own as compared to his fellows and knew that it wasn't just his imagination that Lieutenant Dunsinane heaped more on him than on any of the other eleven middies.
It wasn't that about half of his ostensible free time was taken up by the diplomatic corps briefings, briefings that—to him—seemed unnecessary, since his job was to be seen but, as Lawler stated over and over again, definitely not heard.
It was the isolation that was killing him.
Michael had lived for fifteen days now crowded into a berth furnished with six double bunks, each bunk furnished with its tenant, and he had yet to have a decent conversation with anyone—not even with several people who, on Saganami Island, he would have called friends.
Michael wasn't a fool. He'd even expected something like this. It took time for people to get used to the idea that they were rooming with someone who, if he talked about his sister, was talking about the Queen. Michael and his first roommate at Saganami Island had been stiff and formal strangers for a few weeks, but eventually Sam had become comfortable enough with the idea of rooming with royalty that Michael hadn't felt like he was letting the Crown down by walking around in his underwear.
He and Sam had never become buddies, but they had become solid acquaintances. Maybe helped by a bit of distance, Michael had made his best friends among those who didn't have to share living quarters with him. Foremost among these had been Todd Liatt, who had bridged that final gap to become Michael's roommate later on.
What wouldn't Michael give to have Toad-breath here now! That psychic radar of Todd's would pin down why it was that Lieutenant Dunsinane never looked at Michael without her expression turning stiff as an armorplast bulkhead. But Todd wasn't here and Michael didn't want to think what Lieutenant Dunsinane would think of him if she caught him looking at her public record. It was pretty clear she didn't think much of him already.
Michael could have kicked himself up one side of the hull and around the other when he saw the ATO's expression there at Captain Boniece's dinner party. He'd been feeling so good about getting through that toast that he'd slipped, remembering how Beth had teased him regarding that very earth-shattering event while he was on his last leave.
"And don't forget you'll have to toast the Queen," she had said primly one morning over a very informal breakfast. "You're my officer now, you know."
Michael had seen an irresistible opportunity.
"Let me practice, Your Majesty," he'd said, and rising to his feet he'd picked up the entire plate of freshly toasted bread slices and up-ended them over her head.
Beth had shrieked like they were both kids again, and started throwing toast at him, her treecat Ariel joining the game with pinpoint enthusiasm. The sound had pulled Justin out of his drowsy perusal of the morning newsfax, and brought Queen Mother Angelique into the room at an undignified run.
The memory of Beth's reaction had brought a smile to Michael's lips, a smile he had instantly tried to suppress lest he be seen as irreverent at this most solemn occasion. Unhappily, he'd caught his own expression in a polished serving dish and knew the squelched smile looked worse than any open grin would have done.
He'd longed to talk to Lieutenant Dunsinane, to explain what had happened, but he couldn't seem to find an opening. Talking to the ATO was much harder than talking to the dean. Commander Shrake at least seemed to think Michael was a person. Lieutenant Dunsinane couldn't seem to see past the prince and everything Michael did only made her more formal and severe.
Michael knew he couldn't ask someone else to talk to her, though he was tempted to ask Lieutenant Tilson, the communications' chief. Whenever they met, the com officer seemed quite businesslike, as if he believed Michael was more interested in learning his duties than in reminding people he was the Queen's little brother.
But though Michael's nascent specialization in communications placed him frequently in Lieutenant Tilson's sphere, Michael couldn't talk to Tilson about his problems with Lieutenant Dunsinane. It wouldn't be right. Michael possessed a Winton's fierce loyalty and he wouldn't undermine the officer responsible for supervising the middy berth, even if Lieutenant Dunsinane had misjudged him.
Lieutenant Dunsinane wasn't the worst of Michael's problems. He hoped that if he worked hard enough, he might win her over. What really troubled him were the five middies who, despite everything Michael did to gently dissuade them, hung around him like a self-appointed honor guard.
Soon after the middy berth was fully assembled, Michael learned that the leaders of this corps were also newly reassigned to Intransigent. It didn't take Michael's lifelong immersion in politics to realize that the pair had gotten posted to Intransigent precisely for the proximity that would give them to the Crown Prince.
Astrid Heywood was a scion of one of Manticore's more powerful noble houses, the Honorable Astrid in civilian life. She was a pretty young woman, honey-blond, with enormous long-lashed blue eyes. Her slightly too regular features suggested that her attractiveness had been helped along with various cosmetic enhancements, but Michael doubted that most men his age would look beyond the melting glances Astrid kept casting in his direction to notice.
Astrid's mother, Baroness White Springs, sat in Lords where she was an increasingly vocal speaker for the Independents. Unlike the Crown Loyalists, each Independent supported Crown policy more flexibly. Michael didn't know how Baroness White Springs would react if her daughter was openly rebuked by the Queen's brother, but he didn't think it would be good. The Heywood family had to have put out a good amount in favors or bribes to get Astrid moved onto Intransigent at such short notice, and Michael suspected the baroness expected a solid return on her investment.
That calculating use by mother of daughter might have made Michael pity Astrid, except for something that had become all too apparent during the days Astrid had been trailing him. Despite her intelligence and willingness to work hard—traits proven by h
er completing Saganami Island—Astrid was one of those impossible members of the Manticoran nobility who really did believe that an accident of birth made her better than anyone else. Astrid didn't see Michael's attempts to avoid her as anything other than a fellow dodging the awkward attentions of a pretty girl, simply because it didn't occur to her that anyone would want to avoid her. Moreover, despite the logical twisting involved in such thinking, Astrid's already good opinion of herself was enhanced by the fact that she now shared a berth with the Crown Prince.
Osgood "Ozzie" Russo was a more subtle character, though one would never guess it on initially meeting this bright-eyed, laughing imp. His family was connected to the incredibly rich Hauptman cartel, and Michael was certain that Ozzie's transfer had been bought outright. Whether the purchase price had been in bribes or in concessions for supplies needed by the rapidly expanding Navy, Michael had no idea, nor did he really care—except to hope that the Navy proper rather than some corrupt individual over in BuPersonnel had benefitted.
Not surprisingly, given his family interests, Ozzie was specializing in Supply. Logistically, he was brilliant, able to glance at a complicated schematic and reduce it to its component parts before Michael had finished reading the headers. Although Supply was outside the line of command, and thus often discounted by ambitious sorts, Michael was enough of a history buff to realize that many battles had been won or lost even before they were joined due to logistical considerations.
The problem with Ozzie was that he apparently saw Michael as another resource to be cultivated for the future benefit of himself and his family—and he figured Michael should see him in the same light. Michael didn't like this one bit, but although Ozzie was not ostensibly connected to anyone in politics, money could be used as easily as aristocratic connections to obstruct the Queen and her policies, so Michael made certain not to alienate Ozzie, while quietly fuming beneath the other's fawning attention.
What united Astrid and Ozzie was a sense of superiority over their fellows, though ironically Michael was fairly certain that each privately thought little of the other. Like a lodestone attracting iron filings, these two had drawn the more amorally ambitious middies toward them. In doing so they had pushed away what Michael, at least, saw as the better elements of the middy berth, those who wanted to earn their rank on their own merit, not because of whom they knew.
Not wishing to be seen in the same light as Astrid and Ozzie—neither by Michael nor by the rest of the ship's officers—six of the middies hardly spoke to Michael. That two of these, Sally Pike and Kareem Jones, had been among Michael's circle of friendly acquaintances at Saganami Island, made this ostracization confusing as well as painful.
But there was nothing Michael could say to them that wouldn't make the situation worse, so he hauled his way through his day, wondering if what he was feeling was anything like what he'd heard about the isolation of command.
At fourteen, after several very intensive sessions with Dinah—sessions that were represented to a pleased Ephraim as preparing Judith to resume her childbearing duties—Judith had been initiated into the very small, highly secret, and slightly mystical Sisterhood of Barbara.
The Sisterhood took its inspiration from Barbara Bancroft, the woman who had foiled the Masadan plot to destroy all life on Grayson following the failure of their attempt to seize control of it. Even before she was captured by Ephraim, Judith had heard of Barbara, for on Grayson she was revered as the planet's savior. The Barbara of whom Judith heard from the Faithful was a completely different person: evil, conniving, traitorous, faithless, and blasphemous.
Indeed, the Faithful's version of Barbara Bancroft was so horrendous that initially Judith wondered that the Sisterhood had taken "this Harlot of Satan" as their patron. After a few secret meetings with Dinah and her cell, Judith understood that it was precisely because Barbara was so vilified that these brave Masadan women named themselves for her. However else Barbara Bancroft was represented by the Masadans, the one thing the Faithful could not say of her was that she was cowardly. Moreover, Barbara had won in her battle against Masadan tyranny. She had paid a terrifying price for that victory, but she had won.
The Sisterhood had two goals. The first was to educate and, when possible, to protect other women. That protection was granted to any woman, but the educational benefits were only extended to those women who had been tried and found perfectly trustworthy. Maintaining secrecy was made easier in that any woman who so much as learned to read a few simple lines or do more complex mathematics than could be worked out by counting on fingers was considered suspect by the Elders of the Faithful.
Tales of the punishments doled out to those who had transgressed were told in the nursery, repeated in sermons, and reinforced in a hundred little ways. There was even a sub-set of the Faithful who viewed these simple arts as the first step down the slippery slope to technological corruption. These, known as the Pure in Faith, refused to have even their men learn to read or write. As a result, the Pure lived in isolated enclaves and had little to do with the rest of the Faithful—other than providing some of the most ferocious and unquestioning soldiers.
Such indoctrination made it highly unlikely that any Masadan woman who took the daring step of joining the Sisterhood would betray her Sisters later. Indeed, that irrevocable loss of intellectual virginity drew the women closer to each other, bound by their awareness of the penalties all would share—even one who might later regret her learning and report the rest.
Judith rapidly discovered that the Sisterhood did more than teach forbidden arts and knowledge. The Sisters were also trained in dissembling so that the accidental revelation of their knowledge—even by something as casual as being seen to read a printed label—could not betray them.
But these were all elements of the first of the Sisterhood's missions. The second of the Sisterhood's goals was far more daring, perhaps impossible, for the Sisterhood hoped to someday lead an Exodus that would set the Sisters free from domination by their masters.
No matter how hard the Faithful tried to keep knowledge of the outer universe from their women, the truth had filtered in—often hinted at in the very restrictions and rulings the men enforced upon their women. The Sisters knew that somewhere beyond the reach of Masada's sun were worlds where women were not regarded as property. There were worlds where women were permitted to read, write, and think; worlds where, so the most daring among them whispered, women were even permitted to live without male protectors.
From the day Ephraim had dragged the shocked and traumatized Grayson ten-year-old into the nursery, Dinah had dreamed that Judith might be the promised Moses who would lead the Sisterhood to freedom. Nor had the girl disappointed the older woman's hopes. From the start Judith had demonstrated both education and self-control—and the intelligence to hide both. Her innocent anecdotes about the life she had left, mostly told before she realized how dangerous they were, had confirmed the Sisterhood's most sacred hopes and dreams.
Thus Judith, while believing herself alone, had been cocooned within the watchful web of the senior Sisters. They had not dared draw her into their secret, not until they saw if Judith would, like so many women, perversely fasten onto her tormentor, envisioning him as a hero who had the right to treat her as a mere thing. Four years of brutal testing, two of those after Judith was married to a man who had set his seal on ostensibly stronger souls, were allowed to pass before Dinah confronted Judith and drew her into the Sisterhood.
Now, two years after Judith's initiation, faced with Ephraim's plans to abort her unborn daughter, confronting a future marked by similar abuse, Judith accepted the mantle the Sisterhood had set upon her shoulders. She would be their Moses, and, though hearing no divine voice to guide her actions, she decreed that the time for the Sisterhood's Exodus had come.
Although he understood the reasons, Michael still found the wholly male diplomatic corps bound for Endicott rather odd. Every political meeting he had attended since his father's death had
been dominated by Beth. Even when Beth had been a minor, her regent had been their aunt Caitrin, the Grand Duchess Winton-Henke. This all male group was positively weird.
Then again, maybe the fact that gender and availability, rather than pure ability, had been key elements in selecting this group was why it was so peculiar. There was also the fact that much of the Manticoran diplomatic corps felt that its first task was preserving peace rather than preparing for war. Many of the best and the brightest among them were employing their energies trying to figure out how to work with the Peeps. Doubtless the Masadan mission was not an assignment those would seek.
Perhaps, too, the reality that Masada was not the Queen's first choice for an ally in this region of space had something to do with those who had volunteered. Those diplomats, like Sir Anthony Langtry, more of Her Majesty's way of thinking and ready to embrace the possibility that war could not be prevented would be striving to win over the Graysons.
The men who had volunteered for the Masadan mission were eager for any chance to prove themselves—as they most surely would if they could win the misogynistic and egocentric Faithful over to an alliance.
Forbes Lawler, a first generation prolong recipient and former member of the House of Commons, was the head of the group. Handsome, with iron grey hair, and a lean, athletic build, Lawler spoke in a straight-at-them, square-jawed fashion that reminded Michael of his first gym teacher. Although Lawler never said so directly, he clearly hoped that in addition to bringing new instructions he would soon be replacing the current ambassador.
Quentin Cayen served as Lawler's personal assistant. Young enough to be a second-generation prolong recipient, Cayen tinted his hair silver at the temples and affected reading glasses in an attempt to bring gravity to his otherwise boyishly plump features. Michael thought Cayen looked rather silly, but since Cayen was otherwise competent, and eager to please without being offensive, the midshipman tried to overlook the other man's cosmetic enhancements.
