The Serrano Connection (13 page)

"If you'd been my daughter, I think I'd have told you. It helps the trainees to talk things through after a bad engagement."

"My father thought differently," Esmay said. Dust was no dryer than her mouth; she felt drought-cracks opening in her mind, bottomless mouths to trap her . . .

"Yes. Well, anyway, I'm glad you had the chance to deal with it in the end. But it must've been hard when you had that traitor captain to deal with, that second betrayal—" The almost musing tone of his voice sharpened. "Esmaya! Is something wrong? I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

"It would be most helpful if you could simply tell me the story from your point of view," Esmay managed to say; her voice was thickening now, the dust compressing into angular blocks of rock-hard clay. "Remember, I had only my own somewhat fragmentary memories to go on, and the psychnannies found them somewhat inadequate." The psychnannies would have found them inadequate, if they'd found them at all, but they hadn't. They had assumed that anyone with her background would have had any such problems dealt with earlier. And she, convinced by her family's insistence that everything in the nightmares was just fever dreams, had been afraid to let them know she had problems. She'd been afraid of being labeled crazy or unstable, unfit for duty . . . rejected, to come home a failure. Was this why her family had assumed she'd fail, even to the point of keeping her trail horse unassigned?

"Perhaps you should ask your father," Coron said doubtfully.

"I suspect he would be displeased at having his judgment questioned," Esmay said with all sincerity. "Even by the Fleet's psychiatric specialists." Coron nodded. "It would be a help, if you wouldn't mind."

"If you're sure," Coron said. She had to meet his eyes a moment; she had to endure the worry in them, the tightness of the lines around his eyes, the furrowed brow. "It's not a pleasant matter—but of course you know that already."

Nausea bucked in her gut, sending sour signals to her mouth. Not yet, she begged it. Not until I know. "I'm sure," she said.

It had been a time of riot and civil disorder, when a single small child, if determined and sure of herself, could travel by pony and then by rail some thousand kilometers. "You'd always been good at explaining yourself," Coron said. "You could come up with a story the moment you were caught out. I suppose that's why no one really noticed you—you spun some yarn about being sent to an auntie or grandmother, and since you didn't act scared or confused, and you had enough money, they let you on the trains."

All this was supposition; they had not been able to trace her path between the time she left the pony—they never found it, but in those days it might well have ended up in someone's stew pot—and the last part of her journey, the train she'd taken right into disaster.

"The last despatches home had given your father's station as Buhollow Barracks, and that's where the train would have gone. But in the meantime the rebels had overrun the eastern end of the county, putting everything they had into an assault aimed at the big arms depot at Bute Bagin. The force at Buhollow Barracks was too small to hold them, so your father had rolled aside to hook around and cut them off from the rear, while the Tenth Cav moved up from Cavender to hit them in the flank."

"I remember that," Esmay said. She remembered it from the records, not from real memory. The rebels had counted on her father's reputation which had never included leaving a plum like Buhollow unprotected . . . they had planned to immobilize his forces there with part of their army, while the rest went on to Bute Bagin and the supplies there. Later, his decision to abandon Buhollow and trap the rebel army would be taught as an example of tactical brilliance. He had done what he could for the town. The civilian population of Buhollow fled ahead of the rebels; they had been told which way to go. Most of them survived.

But Esmay, crammed in amongst refugees from earlier fighting, had ridden the train two stops too far. Both sides had mined the railroad; although the official reports said a rebel mine had blown the low bridge over the Sinets Canal just as the locomotive passed, Esmay had never been sure. Would any government admit its own mines had blown up its own train?

She did remember the enormous jolt that slammed the carriage crooked. They had been going slowly; she had been stuffed between a fat woman with a crying baby and a skinny older boy who kept poking her ribs. The jolt rocked the carriage, but didn't knock it over. Others weren't so lucky. She could just recall jumping down from the step—a big jump for her at that age—and following the woman and her baby for no reason than that the woman was a mother. The skinny boy had poked her once more then turned away to follow someone else. Streams of frightened people scurried away from the train, away from the blowing smoke and screams at the front end of the train.

She had lost track of direction; she had forgotten, for the moment, which way she was supposed to go. She had followed the woman and baby . . . and they had been following others . . . and then her legs were too tired, and she stopped.

"There was a little village the locals called Greer's Crossing," Coron went on. "Not even one klick from the train track, where the shipping canal turned. You must've gone there with others from the train wreck."

"And that's when the rebels came through," Esmay said.

"That's when the war came through." Coron paused; she heard the faint slurp as he sipped his tea. She glanced up to meet a gaze that no longer twinkled. "It wasn't just the rebels, as you know only too well."

I do? she thought.

"It was right about there the rebels realized that they were being herded into a trap. Say what you like about Chia Valantos, he had a tactical brain between his ears."

Esmay made a noise intended to indicate agreement.

"And maybe he had good scouts—I don't know. Anyway, the rebels had been on the old road, because they had some heavy vehicles, and so they had to go through the village, to get across on the bridge. They were making a mess of the village, because the people around there had never been supporters. I suppose they thought the people from the train had something to do with the loyalists . . ."

The old memories forced themselves up, lumping under her calm surface; she could feel her face changing and struggled to keep the muscles still. Her legs had begun to hurt, after the hours on the train, the crash, the fall . . . the woman, even with a baby, had longer legs and took longer steps. She had fallen behind, and by the time she got to the village it was gone. Already the roofs had collapsed; what walls remained were broken and cantways. Smoke blew across streets littered with stones and trash and tree limbs and piles of old clothes. It was noisy; she could not classify the noises except that they scared her. They were too loud; they sounded angry, and tangled in her mind with her father's voice scolding her. She wasn't supposed to be so close to whatever made those noises.

Blinded by stinging smoke, she had stumbled over one of the heaps of old clothes, and only then recognized it as a person. A corpse, her adult mind corrected. The child she had been had thought it a silly place for someone to go to sleep, a grown woman, and she had shaken the slack heavy arm, trying to wake an adult to help her find her way. She had not seen death before, not human death—she had not been allowed to see her mother, because of the fever—and it took her a long time to realize that the woman with no face would never pick her up and soothe her and promise that everything would be all right soon.

She had looked around, blinking against the stinging in her eyes that was not all smoke, and saw the other piles of clothes, the other people, the dead . . . and the dying, whose cries she could now recognize. Even across the years, she remembered that the first thought she could recognize was an apology: I'm sorry—I didn't mean to . . . Even now, she knew this was both necessary and futile. It had not been her fault—she had not caused the war—but she was there, and so far untouched, and for that, if nothing else, she must apologize.

That day, she had stumbled along the broken lane, falling again and again, crying without realizing it, until her legs gave out and she huddled into the corner of a wall, where someone's garden had once held bright flowers. The noise rose and fell, shadowy figures moving through the smoke, some wearing one color and some another. Most, she knew later, must have been the terrified passengers on the train; some were rebels. Later—later they all wore the same uniform, the uniform she knew, the one her father and uncles wore.

But she didn't remember. She couldn't remember, not all of it. She had remembered, and they'd said it was dreams.

"It'd have been better, I always thought, if they'd told you," Sebastian said. "At least when you got old enough. Bein' as the man was dead, and couldn't hurt anyone again, least of all you."

She did not want to hear this. She did not want to remember this . . . no, she
could
not. Fever dreams, she thought. Only fever dreams.

"Bad enough for it to happen at all, no matter who did it. The rape of a child—sickening. But to have it one of ours—"

She fixed on the one thing she could stand to know. "I . . . didn't know he was dead."

"Well, your father couldn't tell you that without bringing up the rest of it, could he? He hoped you'd forget the whole thing . . . or think it was just a fever dream."

He'd said it was a fever dream; he'd said it was over now, that she'd always be safe . . . he'd said he wasn't angry at her. Yet his anger had hovered around her, a vast cloud, dangerous, blinding her mind as the smoke had blinded her eyes.

"You're . . . sure?"

"That the bastard died? Oh yes . . . I have no doubt at all."

The invisible mechanisms whirled, paused, slid into place with a final inaudible crunch. "You killed him?"

"It was that or your father's career. Officers can't just kill their men, even animals who rape children. And to wait, to charge him—that'd have brought you into it, and none of us wanted that. Better for me to do it, and take my lumps . . . not that there was anything worse than a stiff chewing out, at the end of it. Mitigating circumstances."

Or extenuating . . . her mind dove eagerly into that momentary tangle, reminding her that extenuation and mitigation were, although similar, applied to different ends of the judicial process, as it were.

"I'm glad to know that," Esmay said, for something to say.

"I always said you should be told," he said. Then he looked embarrassed. "Not that I talked about it, you understand. I said it to myself, I mean. It was no use arguing with your father. And after all, you were his daughter."

"Don't worry about it," Esmay said. She was finding it hard to pay attention; she felt the room drifting slowly away, on a slow spiral to the left.

"And you're sure you got it all sorted out, all but him being dead, I mean? They helped you in the R.S.S.?"

Esmay tried to drag her mind back to the topic, from which it wanted to shy away. "I'm fine," she said. "Don't worry about it."

"No . . . I was real surprised, you know, when you wanted to go off-planet and join them. Figured you'd had enough combat for any one life . . . but I guess it's your blood coming out, eh?"

How was she going to get rid of him, politely and discreetly? She could hardly tell him to go away, she had a headache. Suizas did not treat guests that way. But she needed—how she needed—some hours alone.

"Esmaya?" Esmay looked up. Her half-brother Germond grinned shyly at her. "Father said would you come to the conservatory, please?" He turned to Coron. "If you can excuse her, sir?"

"Of course. It's your family's turn now—Esmaya, thank you for your time." He bowed, very formal again at the end, and withdrew.

Esmay turned to Germond, now fifteen, all ears and nose and big feet. "What—did Father want?"

"He's in the conservatory with Uncle Berthol . . . he said you'd be getting tired of listening to old soldiers' tales, for one thing, and for another he wanted to ask you more about Fleet."

Her mouth was dry; she could not think. "Tell him . . . tell him Seb's gone, and I'll be out in a few minutes. I've gone upstairs to . . . to freshen up." For once, the impenetrable assumptions of Altiplano society worked in her favor. No male would question her need to be alone for a few minutes with an array of plumbing fixtures. Nor would they rush her.

She went up the stairs by instinct; she was not seeing the brass rails holding the carpet snug to the risers, the scuffs on the steps themselves. Her body knew how to get up the stairs, around the corners, where to find the switches that gave her absolute privacy.

She leaned against the wall, turned on the cold-water tap, and put her hands into it. She wasn't sure why. She wasn't sure of anything, including the passage of time. The water cut off automatically, just as it would aboard ship, and she nudged the controls again. Abruptly she threw up; the curdled remains of lunch slopped into the clean swirl of water and disappeared down the drain with it. Her stomach heaved again, then settled uneasily. She cupped her hand under the faucet, and drank a handful of the cold, sweet water. Her stomach lurched, but steadied. She had never been prone to nausea. Not even then, not even when the pain was so bad she'd been sure she was being torn apart. The real pain, not the imagined pain induced by fever dreams.