The Serrano Connection (103 page)

"Admiral Serrano's going to have a clear run with the task force," Escovar commented on the way back to
Gyrfalcon
.

"Why, sir?"

"Because Hornan's not going to risk what you might say if he tries for it. Don't play stupid, Ensign—you know as well as I do that he must have been involved at some level. For one thing Ferradi isn't smart enough to get his codes without his help. And Pell couldn't help her—he couldn't remember his own codes, let alone the admiral's. Now if that civilian—Lady Marta whatshername—can put a collar on Lord Thornbuckle, we might finally get this rescue attempt off the ground."

"Sir."

"It's been a mess," Escovar went on, lengthening his stride. "It wouldn't have been easy anyway, but Thornbuckle's been more hindrance than help, and Hornan has kept putting obstacles in the way—and I would never have suspected that nailing Ferradi would get rid of the other problems, too."

Such as what to do about Esmay Suiza. Barin waited for his captain's dismissal, then made his way to the first public com booth he could find, and looked up Esmay's comcode. She had one now, he was glad to see.

Her voice answered, crisp and professional.

"Lieutenant—it's Ensign Serrano. I—" How was he going to say this? "I'd like—I need—to talk to you."

A long pause, during which he felt himself turning hot, then cold, then hot again.

"In the office, or—I mean—" Her voice had softened, and sounded almost as tentative as his.

"Anywhere. There's something you need to know, and besides—"
Besides, I love you madly
was not something he could say over a public line.

"How about the base library. Ten minutes? Fifteen?"

"Fifteen; I'm just outside
Gyrfalcon
."

He made it in ten, nonetheless, not realizing until he almost overran a pair of commanders strolling ahead of him just how fast he was going. Patience. Calmness. He paused in the library entrance, and didn't see her coming in either direction. Ducked inside, and—there she was.

"Lieutenant . . ."

"Ensign." But her eyes glowed; her whole being glowed. And there were people who had thought he might be attracted to Casea Ferradi!

"I'm so sorry—" he said, and found that his words had tangled with hers. The same words. Silently, he looked at her, and she looked back.

Waltraude Meyerson had been watching the young female officer's lame attempt to pretend an interest in the online catalog. She was waiting for someone; it was not the first time Waltraude had seen a student hanging around waiting for another; she could not mistake it. Sure enough, a few minutes later a young male officer arrived. They spoke; they paused; they blushed and stammered. It was all very normal, but also very distracting when she was trying to correlate Professor Lemon's data with her own for the impeccably organized report she would present in a few hours.

The librarian was, of course, nowhere to be seen; he never was at this time of day. That didn't bother Waltraude ordinarily, since she didn't need his help to navigate her own and Professor Lemon's databases, but he was responsible for keeping order. Without his direction, and left to their own devices, these two would murmur sweet nothings for hours . . . she knew their type. Waltraude rose to her full height and cleared her throat. The two looked at her with the guilty expression typical of young love.

"This is a library, not a trysting place," Waltraude said firmly. "Kindly go pursue your passion elsewhere." Shock blanked their expressions for a moment, then they turned and left quickly. Better. Perhaps now she could find a way to convince these military people that the key to extracting people from a hostile society would come from better thinking, not more guns.

"I love you madly," Barin said, the moment they got out the door.

"Me, too," said Esmay, and blinked back tears. Then she giggled. "Wasn't she
awful
?"

"Yes—oh, Esmay, let's not ever
ever
fight again."

"My cousin Luci says people in love can fight and get over it."

"And her background is—?"

"More experience than I've got. She said I was an idiot."

"Maybe," Barin said, daring to close in, after a quick look up and down the corridor, and smell her hair. "But you're
my
idiot." He looked her up and down. "Dear idiot. Lieutenant, sir." He felt like dancing down the corridor, or walking on his hands, or something equally ridiculous. "Oh, and by the way—Lieutenant Ferradi is confined to quarters and will be facing charges."

"What!?"

"I can't tell you all of it—I mean, I'd better not, at least not out here, but that's why I had to avoid you after you got back—I was supposed to pretend to go along with her."

"I think she lied about me," Esmay said.

"She did more than that—she was trying to insert incriminating stuff in your old personnel and legal files. But we really shouldn't discuss that right now."

"Fine. Let's discuss—"

"Us," Barin said. "Maybe with something to eat?"

"So—now that your agent has confirmed that she's there, and knows where she is—we get to the specifics." The speaker, a commander with the shoulder flashes of headquarters staff, put up a chart. "It's not unheard of for men to sneak over the back wall of the nursery compound for a quick poke at some woman they particularly want. He can grab her, bundle her into his groundcar, and be out of the city in twenty minutes."

It sounded like a ridiculous plan to Marta, but she had given up trying to convince them that they had to cooperate with Brun, not treat her like lost luggage. She glanced across the room at Professor Meyerson, who had come with her usual stack of books, papers, and data cubes. Meyerson had footnotes and bibliography to back up her views—which were similar to Marta's—but that hadn't worked either.

"What if she resists?" asked a female commander across the room. "How will she know this man is our agent?"

"He can tell her," the first commander said.

And she's supposed to believe that, Marta thought, after almost two years of captivity? It might work, or Brun—being Brun—might clobber the fellow and take the car herself. And then where would they be? She would have no idea where to go, and they would have no idea what had happened.

"He tells us that for enough money he can get her passage offworld in a small atmospheric shuttle. He will take her out of the city, provide a disguise, and then send her to this other person. Our present plan is to insert an SAR—which can approach quite close in microjumps—to pick her up, with the rest of the task force standing by at a distance in case of trouble."

Someone else asked the question Marta wanted to ask, about system defenses, and she listened to the answer with half her mind, the other half wondering what Brun was doing. Not sitting still waiting to be rescued, that much she was sure of.

Brun picked up the paring knife, and slid it into her sleeve. The matron was supposed to count the knives each day, but she didn't. She liked to doze in her own room, after swigging from an earthenware jar, and a good half the time left the kitchen unlocked. Brun had checked that repeatedly, making sure that her theft had a reasonable chance of going unnoticed.

The knife's pressure against her arm, under the bands she'd tied to hold it, gave her courage again. She had waited as long as she could; she dared not wait longer for rescue. Neither she nor her babies had to live in this place . . . but when she laid the blade to the moist soft neck of the sleeping redhead (she was sure which
his
father was), she knew she could not do it. She didn't love the babies, not as mothers were reputed to do, the way the other mothers here seemed to love theirs, but she didn't hate them, either. It was not their fault; they had not engendered themselves on her unwilling body.

She could not take them with her when she escaped, though. She was going to have to disguise herself as a man, somehow . . . and men did not carry babies around the streets, even if two squirming and all-too-vocal babies would not have slowed her down too much. If she left them behind, they would be squalling for their next meal in just an hour or so . . . yet she could not face killing them, just to give herself a longer start.

Another idea occurred to her. Though the nursery had no drugs that she knew—and she knew nothing about which, if any, of the herbs in the pantry might put the babies to sleep, there was a simple soporific available to anyone with access to fruit and water and a little time.

In late afternoon she walked as usual in the orchard, carrying one baby on her back and the other in front. Her feet had toughened; the gravel paths no longer hurt her. Beneath the long skirt, her legs had developed ropes of hard muscle from the exercises she'd sweated on. Without the babies, she would be able to move fast and far; she would be able to fight, if she was not taken off-guard. She did not intend to be off-guard again. If only she knew
where
 . . . where to find Hazel and the little girls, where to find open country in which—she was sure—she could hide.

Out of sight of the house, she slid the knife into her hand, and then laid it in the crotch of an apple tree. She checked to be sure that the blade would not glint in the light and catch someone's eye. She stuffed some of last year's fallen leaves around it, and strolled on, coming back to the house with a spray of wildflowers in her hand.

Two days later, she pilfered a jug from the kitchen. She carried it into the orchard, concealed in the sling she now used to carry the babies. It was the wrong season for ripe fruit, but she had dried fruit, always available to the women, honey, and water.

The mix fermented in only a few days of warm sunshine. It smelled odd, but definitely alcoholic. She tasted it cautiously. It had a kick . . . enough, she hoped, to put the babies heavily to sleep.

Sector VII HQ

As the task force planning crept onward, Marta kept a weather eye on Bunny. He had not softened his opposition to Esmay Suiza, even when it became obvious that much of the evidence against her had been lies and more lies. Why not? She had known him most of his life; he was neither stupid nor vicious. His reputation for staying calm in a crisis, and being fair to all parties, had made him the one person the Grand Council would trust after Kemtre's abdication. So why was he, at this late date, trying to make sure Suiza didn't go with the task force?

She was tempted to contact Miranda, conspicuously absent, but refrained. Never get between man and wife, her grandmother had taught her, and in her life she'd seen nothing but grief come of it when someone tried. So, five days before the task force was due to depart, she tackled him privately.

"Don't start," Bunny said, before she even opened her mouth. "You're going to tell me Suiza isn't that bad, that she's earned her slot as exec on
Shrike
, that it's not fair to pull her off—"

"No," Marta said. "I'm going to ask you why you blame Suiza for Brun's behavior."

"She drove her into a frenzy—" Bunny began. Marta interrupted.

"Bunny—who chose Brun's genome pattern?"

"We did, of course—"

"Including her personality profile?"

"Well . . . yes, but—"

"You told me before, you deliberately chose a risk-taking profile. You chose outgoing, quick-reacting, risk-taking, a girl who would always find the glass half-full, and think a roomful of manure meant a cute pony around the corner."

"Yes . . ."

"And you got a charming, lovable scapegrace, full of mischief as a basket of kittens, and you enjoyed it for years, didn't you?"

"Yes, but—"

"You spoiled her, Bunny." He stared at her, his ears reddening. "You chose for her a personality profile, a physical type, and a level of intelligence which would
predictably
make her likely to get into certain kinds of trouble . . . and what did you do, in her young days, to provide the counterbalance she needed, of judgement and self-control?"

"We'd had other children, Marta. We were experienced parents—"

"Yes, for the bright conformists you designed first. And they turned out well—you had given them what they needed." Marta calculated the pause, then went on. "Did you give Brun what she needed?"

"We gave her everything—" But his gaze wavered.

"Bunny, I know this sounds like condemnation, but it's not. Brun is a very unusual young woman, and she would have needed a very unusual childhood to bring her to her present age able to handle her talents safely. It's no wonder you and Miranda, enchanted just like everyone else with that explosion of joy, didn't provide the kind of background that would do her good." She paused again; Bunny almost nodded—she could see the softening of the muscles in his neck. "But it's my opinion that your real objection to Esmay Suiza—perhaps unknown to you—is that she's like Brun with a throttle, with controls. And her father, whatever he's like, did a better job for his daughter than you did for yours."