Change of Command - Heris Serrano 06 Read online

  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 Speaker of the Table of Ministers.

  “Hobart?” Cecela blinked. “He’s not that bad, is he? He was always polite to me. I never had that much to do with him, but-”

  “Hobart is a raging bully,” Brun said grimly. She waved Cecelia to a comfortable chintz-covered chair and threw herself into another. “Just wait until you hear-” She took off at a conversational gallop, surprising Cecelia with her grasp of Family relationships. Had the girl been listening behind doors and actually paying attention when she seemed just a young fluffhead? It was always possible-this was, after all, the same Brun who had engineered her escape from the nursing home.

  “I wouldn’t have believed it,” Cecelia said at last. “Are you sure . . . I mean, he’s always been a bit pigheaded, but most of us are, from time to time.” A maid had brought in trays of pastries and sliced fruits, and pots of coffee and tea. Cecelia filled a little plate with apple slices and munched. They were just as crisp and flavorful as she remembered.

  “He slapped down Great-Uncle Viktor in the meeting. Viktor! And Stefan didn’t say a word. He’s found excuses to get rid of most of the Ministers, replacing them with his own people-and now that he has the votes, it doesn’t really matter if a few of Dad’s are left.” Brun was ignoring the food so far, but Cecelia took one of the ginger curls as well.

  “What about Harlis?”

  “He’s bought Harlis, I suspect with the help of his new Minister of Judicial Affairs, Norm Radsin. You know how helpful or unhelpful the courts can be in estate cases-”

  “Indeed I do.” The old anger washed over her.

  “Well, it’s amazing how many rulings have changed in Harlis’s favor since Norm took over that ministry. Without Kevil Mahoney, or access to his private files-and nobody, not even George, knows the access codes to Kevil’s files-”

  She did. Cecelia thought back to their last conversation, when they had discussed her own tangled legal problems in the wake of being declared incompetent. Kevil had trusted her with the voice codes for just this sort of situation.

  “Has anyone tried to have Kevil declared incompetent?” she asked.

  “Not that I know of. George certainly hasn’t. Why?”

  Why not, she thought, if Kevil was still incapacitated and unable to access his own files? Had no one in his offices tried to get access?

  “I mean,” Brun went on, “we could use the information, but we’re not going to press for that-not after what happened to yo
u.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Yes, but he can’t seem to remember much, or concentrate. His doctors don’t advise rejuvenation because of the extent of the neurological damage, and the recent discoveries of what went wrong with Fleet rejuvenations.” Brun finally poured herself a cup of tea, and took a pastry.

  “I hadn’t heard about that.”

  “No, it came out after you left. Some of the senior NCOs, the chiefs, started going senile-I actually saw one like that, back on Copper Mountain, before I . . . before I left and all the rest happened. Memory loss, irrational thought processes. I mentioned it to Esmay, in fact, but then we had that fight. Anyway, there were more of them, a lot more, and when they did some research they found flaws in the process. They’ve put about half the flag officers on indefinite leave, because they were rejuved, just in case. None of them had shown symptoms yet, unless you count Lepescu.”

  Cecelia frowned. “Flaws in the process, or in the drugs themselves? Remember what happened on Patchcock . . .”

  “That’s what I thought of first, just a bad batch of drugs. I raised a formal Question in Council-the second meeting, that is, not the first-but Hobart claimed I was just trying to embar­rass him, use it as an excuse for family rivalry, and one of his bootlickers got up and spouted a whole involved line about genetic susceptibility and the inbred genome of Fleet families.”

  “What did Venezia Morrelline say?”

  “She wasn’t there. And I can’t get hold of Heris or Vida Serrano, either. Both Serrano admirals were taken off active duty; Fleet personnel offices claim not to know where they are. Heris has a ship, but it’s out on patrol or something, inaccessible to civilians. Which doesn’t make sense, because I’ve been able to contact Esmay, and she’s on an SAR, way off at the remote end of Familias Space.”

  “How is Esmay?” Cecelia asked, to give herself time to think about the rest of this.

  “Pining for Barin, worried about his NewTex wives-­apparently Fleet accounting has garnished Barin’s entire salary to help support them-and getting a little bored with the SAR, I gather. Also she’s found out that Fleet doesn’t think Landbrides should marry Fleet officers.”

  “But she is a Landbride. What do they think of that?”

  “Yes-it’s funny, really. She says they’ve got it all wrong, and she didn’t want to be one anyway. But it’s tied up the paperwork for her to marry Barin, even if he weren’t going broke trying to support all those NewTex women. Poor Esmay.” Brun gave a wry chuckle. “It’s her first time in love; I ­remember how I pined for Tommy Rakeseller, the first time I had it bad, and thought the universe was dreadfully unfair because his parents sent him off to camp. I know this is more serious, but it’s really hard on her.”

  “And Barin?”

  “Barin’s at the other end of our universe, escorting a Lone Star Confederation Ranger back here.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. They warned me-or rather, Waltraude did, that crazy professor who’s hanging around the NewTex women. It never occurred to anyone official that introducing me to a Ranger might upset me. Apparently, Hobart’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs-he fired Cabby DeLancre for daring to contradict him-decided to shut the wrong barn door long after the horse had returned, and froze all the assets of Lone Star Confederation citizens, and closed the border.”

  “But Lone Star had nothing to do with it.”

  “You know that, my father knew that, even I know that. But all Hobart had to hear was the word ‘Texas,’ and the fact that they were Ageists, as he calls it. The Lone Star Confederation has been a reasonable trading partner for centuries; they were understandably annoyed, and insisted on sending someone to educate us.”

  Cecelia leaned back in her chair. “You know, Brun, I find it hard to believe that you, of all people, are being this politically minded.”

  For an instant, the old grin flashed out. “Me, too. I keep thinking, ‘This is not me; this is my evil twin.’ But one thing I did learn, in that hell, is what happens if you don’t pay attention. So Mother’s gone back to Sirialis, to dig out all of Dad’s files that she can-some of them were never transferred here-and try to stave off Uncle Harlis’s grab for the family properties. And here I am.”

  “Yes . . . I see.”

  “And . . . you did find a good home for the twins?” That in a tone almost wistful, and certainly pleading.

  “Yes,” Cecelia said firmly. “A very good home. They will be loved and cared for.”

  “Good. I thought, after you left, that I should have suggested Raffaele, but then she’s been cleaning up my messes for far too long. I’m glad you found someone else.”

  Cecelia’s brain tripped over that one and came up with a fresh topic. “You said a new Minister of Foreign Affairs-who would that be?”

  “Minor family, major pain. Pedar Orregiemos. You probably never heard of him.”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. He-” She shut down that line quickly and shifted to another. “He has event horses. I beat his entry in the Wherrin this year.”

  “Good. I wish you’d managed to trample him at the same time. You should see him fawning on Hobart, and Hobart lapping it up. The man has no background in the diplomatic service, no experience in dealing with foreign entities. He thinks any political system which doesn’t embrace rejuvenation is corrupt and probably about to attack us. He’s already managed to insult the Crescent Worlds, and they’re ours. Worse than that, he thinks he’s the right person to comfort widows-he keeps hinting to me that he would make me a fine stepfather.” Brun mimed gagging.

  Cecelia grabbed for yet another topic, anything but Pedar. She had never been in a conversation with quite so many landmines. “Who’s in Colonial Affairs, now?”

  “Another Conselline lackey, Davor Vraimont,” Brun said. “It’s dawned on them-well, on everyone, I guess-that repeatable rejuvenation could cause the biggest population explosion ever, as well as locking up wealth in the very, very old. That’d mean a lot of ambitious, frustrated young people. So colonization has been speeding up for some time-I didn’t know that; Buttons told me he’d talked to Dad about it. But I found out that Conselline Sept has major investments in development companies, and their projections for the rate at which excess population can be absorbed by development make no sense-unless there’s a much higher failure rate than before. That bit of information I got from a clerk in Colonial who’d been fired for insubordination. Makes me suspicious.”

  “Ummm. You remember that Ronnie is my nephew,” Cecelia said, carefully erecting bombproof partitions in her mind against a loose tongue.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “His parents are concerned about the situation on the world he’s moved to. I hear that some supplies in the contract weren’t actually delivered, that there’s the possibility of interference with communications. What if the Consellines are counting on a certain percentage of colonies to fail, because they get their profit from selling colony shares?”

  “I could believe that. But how can we prove it?”

  “I don’t know. We need Kevil,” Cecelia said. “I’d better go visit him.”

  “It’s-pretty bad. You know he lost an arm, too.”

  “No, I didn’t. When I saw him in the hospital, before I took off with the babies, he was just a shape in the bed. And I didn’t have much time.”

  “They’re trying to grow a replacement, but so far it hasn’t worked-they’ve lost three buds. And George says his memory’s still damaged, and he can’t concentrate.”

  “Is he still in the hospital?”

  “No; they moved him to a rehab center, and then George took him home. Our wonderful new Speaker decided he was a security risk at the rehab center.”

  “Well, then. I’ll go over tomorrow. Maybe I can be of some help.”

  “You know,” Brun said more slowly, “Uncle Harlis runs the planetary development corporations for the Barraclough Sept.” She took a long swallow of tea.

  “What co
lony are Ronnie and Raffa in?”

  “Excet-24.”

  “Rats. I was hoping it was one of ours-that way I could pump them. Excet Environmental Group is a Conselline corporation. I wonder why they chose that one, instead of family? Not that it matters.”

  “I don’t know,” Cecelia said. “Possibly the shares cost less?”

  “Could be. Anyway, I’d bet something’s going on in all these new colonies . . . I wish I had Kevil’s background files, ­because I rather suspect the data in the main computers has been fiddled as well.” Brun stretched. “And now that I’ve talked your ears off, both of them, how about a visit to the stable? We don’t have much here, as you probably remember, but there are a couple of niceish mares we can take a ride through the orchards on, if you’d like.”

  Cecelia shook her head. “No, thank you, my dear. Everyone thinks of me as a thoroughly horse-besotted old woman, but one prerogative of old women is to surprise young ones occasionally. I shall go stroll in your gardens, if I may.”

  “Well, then, I’m for the pool. See you at dinner.”

  At the Mahoney house, a uniformed nurse met Cecelia at the door. “Ser Mahoney is in the study, madam, but he is . . . not really himself.”

  Cecelia thought of asking who he was instead-she had a lingering distaste for medical euphemisms-but resisted the temptation. She followed the nurse down the familiar wide passage to the double doors that led into Kevil’s home office, steeling herself for what she would see. At the same time, she wondered where the security was. If Kevil was a security risk, shouldn’t there be more protection around him? She had seen no guards at all.

  “Ser George Mahoney is at the university,” the nurse said, over his shoulder. “He won’t be back until this evening.”

  Cecelia frowned. No security, one nurse all day . . . something wrong here.

  In the study, Kevil lay awkwardly in one of the big leather chairs. His face looked strange, twisted; she realized that regen had not been able to repair all the physical damage, that part of his jaw was missing, and the skin over it rumpled oddly. In his eyes, Cecelia saw no recognition, just anxiety. Then, slowly, a spark . . . as if he were walking through a dark corridor with a candle, closer and closer.