Hunting Party Read online

  “But it’s not fair,” he whined now. He had expected her to let them all travel with him, all twenty or so of his favorites among his fellow officers and their sweethearts of both sexes. She ignored that, smiled at her new captain, thinking, Don’t you dare laugh at me, you little blot, and called Bates to take the captain to her quarters. And away she went, impossibly bright-eyed for this hour of the morning (no adolescent partying had disturbed her sleep), her trim figure making the girls in the room look like haggard barflies. Which they weren’t, really. It was terrible what girls did these days, but these were decent girls, of reasonably nice families. Nothing like hers, or Ronnie’s (except Bubbles, the snoring one, and the present cause of dissension), but nice enough.

  With a last glance at the captain’s retreating form, she turned back to Ronnie. “What is not fair, young man, is that you are intruding on my life, taking up space on my yacht, making my staff work harder, and all because you lacked the common sense to keep your mouth shut about things which no gentleman discusses.”

  Sulky. He had been sulky at one, at two; his parents had doted on his adorable tantrums, his big lower lip. He was sulky now, and she did not dote on the lip or the tongue behind it. “She said I was better. It’s not fair that I’m getting sent away, when she’s the one who said it. She wanted to be with me—”

  “She said it to you, in the confidence of the bedroom.” Surely someone had already told him this. Why should she have to explain? “And you don’t even know if she meant it, or if she says it to everyone.”

  “Of course she meant it!” Young male pride, stung, flushed his cheeks and drove sulkiness into temper. “I am better.”

  “I won’t argue,” Cecelia said. “I will only remind you that you may be better in bed with the prince’s favorite singer, but you are now on my yacht, by order of your father and the king, and the singer is stuck with the prince.” Her pun got through to her a moment before Ronnie caught it, and she shook her finger at him. “Literally and figuratively: you’re here, and he’s there, and you’ve gained nothing by blabbing except whatever momentary amusement you shared with your barracks-mates.” He chuckled, and the odious George—who had well earned the nickname everyone in society knew—snickered. Cecelia knew the odious George’s father fairly well, and dismissed the snicker as an unconscious copy of his father’s courtroom manner. She supposed it went over well in the junior mess of the Royal Space Service, where the young sprouts of aristocracy and wealth flaunted their boughten commissions in the intervals of leave and training. “You’re the one who talked,” she said, ignoring the side glances of her nephew and his crony. “The . . . er . . . lady didn’t. Therefore you are in trouble, and you are sent away, and it’s my misfortune that I happened to be near enough to serve your father’s purpose.” He opened his mouth to say something else she was sure she would not want to hear, and she went on, inexorably. “It’s better than it could have been, young Ronald, as you will see when you quit feeling sorry for yourself. And I am stretching my generosity to let you bring these”—she waved her hand at the others—“when it crowds my ship and wastes my time. If it weren’t that Bubbles and Buttons were going to Bunny’s anyway—”

  “Well—in fact they don’t want to go—”

  “Nonsense. I’ve already sent word I’m bringing them. A season in the field will do you all immense good.” She gave him another lengthy stare. “And I don’t want any of you sneaking offship to cause trouble on the Station before we launch. It’s bad enough having to wait for your luggage; I shall have your father pay the reset fees for changing the launch schedule. I hope he takes it out of your allowance.”

  “But that’s not—” She held up her hand before “fair” could emerge and decided to drop her own bombshell now.

  “And by the way, my new captain is ex-Regular Space Service, so don’t try any of your tricks with her. She could probably tie you all in knots without trying.” Cecelia turned on her heel and walked out, satisfied that she had given them something besides her hard-heartedness to think about.

  It was too bad, really. She lived on her yacht precisely so as to avoid family complications, just as she had avoided marriage and political service. They could have found some other way to keep Ronnie out of the capital for a year or so. They didn’t have to use her, as if she were a handy piece of furniture. But that was Berenice all over again: big sisters existed to be of service to the beauty of the family.

  Stores. She would have to check with Bates to be sure they had ordered enough additional food—after last night, she suspected they might need more. Young people did eat so, when they ate. She reached her own suite with relief. That miserable decorator Berenice had sent her to insisted on doing the whole ship in lavender and teal, with touches of acid green and cream, but she had not let him in here. Perhaps the young people did prefer lavender plush, but she hated it. Here in her own rooms, she could have it her way. Brighter colors, polished wood, carved chairs piled with pillows.

  She paused at her desk. Inlaid wood made a pattern of vines and flowers; until she pressed the central blossom, it could have passed for an antique of Old Earth. The desktop cleared, showing the floorplan of that deck, with ghostly shadows of the others. A cluster of dots showed Ronnie and friends, back in the lounge. A dot in her bedroom; that would be Myrtis, her maid. A dot for the captain, in her quarters; a moving dot that must be Bates, coming back. She touched her finger to that one, and his voice came out of the desk speaker.

  “Yes, madam?”

  “Have Cook check the quantities Ronnie and his friends consumed last night; they seem to eat quite a lot. . . .”

  “Cook has estimated an additional fifteen percent over your orders yesterday, madam, and has the purchase order ready for your stamp.”

  “Thank you, Bates.” She might have known. They were usually two steps ahead of her—but that was their duty. She flicked up the lower service deck on the display, found Cook’s dot, and touched it. Cook transferred the purchase order to her desktop, and she looked at it. Even with six additional people aboard, it looked like enough to feed them all three times over. It would serve them right, she thought, if she made them eat survival rations until they got to Bunny’s. Certainly it would cost less and take up less room. Cook had pointed out that they’d need to air up two more refrigeration units and set out another full section of ’ponics.

  That would start another argument between crewside and staffside. The environmental techs were ship’s crew, under the captain’s command; Cecelia knew better than to interfere with her captain’s crew. But that part of ’ponics devoted to the kitchen came under the heading of “gardening,” which meant staff—her staff. Felix, head gardener, and two boys (one female), kept her private solarium in fresh flowers and Cook supplied with fresh vegetables. Felix and the environmental techs always got into some hassle which required her decision—one of the things she had not liked about her former captain was his tendency to let things slide until she had to quell an incipient riot in staff.

  She found Felix’s icon, touched it, and told him about the ’ponics section. He wanted to use half of it for a new set of exotics he’d bought seedstock for; the pictures of the so-called vegetables didn’t impress her. Felix insisted, though, that if he could have seed available when they arrived at Bunny’s, he could trade with Bunny’s ferocious head gardener for her favorite (and rarest) mushrooms. Cecelia shrugged; Ronnie and his pals could eat the things she didn’t like.

  “And what you tell the moles, eh?” he said finally, having won his main point. “You got to let them know it’s okay, whatever I grow.”

  “I will tell Captain Serrano, our new captain, that I’ve approved your use of an additional ’ponics section for fresh produce.”

  “They bother me, I’ll send ’em the halobeets,” Felix said. He would, too. He had done it before, when displeased with someone. A genius of his type—but like most such geniuses, a trifle tempery. She put up with him for the luscious fruits and f
resh vegetables, the abundant flowers, which so amazed those who came to dinner. . . . No other yacht she knew of was completely self-sufficient in fresh produce.

  She looked again for the captain’s icon, and found it moving toward the bridge. Best not interrupt her now; she would have had the crew assembled. Cecelia’s finger hovered over the control. . . . She could easily listen in on the captain’s first briefing . . . but she decided against it. Instead, she routed a message to the captain’s desk about the ’ponics, and called up a credit status.

  The figures meant little to her; the reality was that she could afford to buy anything for sale on Rockhouse two or three times over. The desktop offered a bright-colored graphic which showed how much more she was spending to transport herself and six young people compared to herself alone. It didn’t matter, and Berenice had transferred stock to cover it anyway. She called up Ronnie’s status, and pursed her lips. Berenice had put him on the silver family line, and he had already used it. Hardin’s Clothiers, Vetris Accessories, Spaulding . . . Cecelia whistled. He had started with two cubes of storage, and at this rate would need another two.

  Her desk chimed. “Aunt Cecelia?” came the plaintive voice. “Please—I need to talk to you.”

  Hardly, she thought. He needed to listen to her. “Ah, Ronnie. Very good—I meant to ask you, did you bring your hunting tackle?”

  “My . . . uh . . . what?”

  “Your riding clothes, your saddles—”

  “I—no! Of course not. Aunt Cecelia, just because you’re crazy enough to ride big stupid animals across rocks and mud—”

  “I presumed,” said Cecelia, overriding his voice with a surge of glee, “that that was your rather large order at Hardin’s and Vetris’s and Spaulding’s. But since it wasn’t, perhaps you’d return some of that foppery, whatever it was, and get yourself some decent riding kit. We are going to Bunny’s, as you know, for the season, and since I’m saddled with you, you might as well saddle a horse and learn something useful.” She felt good about the pun; puns usually came to her four hours too late, if at all.

  The fashion in invective, she was happy to discover, had swung once more from the rough crudities copied from the lower classes to an entertaining polysyllabic baroque style. When Ronnie ran out of breath (which happened more quickly, she noted, with the longer words and phrases), she interrupted again, before he could start another rampage.

  “I do not care that you do not like horses, or riding, or that none of your set consider hunting a reasonable or enjoyable pastime. I do not care if you are miserable for the entire year of your exile. You may sulk in your cabin if you like—you will certainly not sulk in mine, or interfere with my pleasure one bit more than I can help. And if you do not order yourself the proper clothes, saddles, and so on, I shall do it for you and charge it to your account.” Although it would really make sense to wait until they were at Bunny’s—all the really good saddlers came there for the season. But her blood was up. So, it seemed, was his. She could order what she liked, he said angrily, but he was not about to pretend to copy the amusements of a horse-faced old spinster with more money than sense, and he would be damned if she ever found him on a horse chasing some innocent helpless animal across the dripping fields.

  “If you think the fox is either innocent or helpless, young Ronald, you are more foolish than I think.” She was not sure which of them broke the connection. She did not care. She called her personal assistant at Spaulding’s and arranged everything as she wished—of course they knew all his measurements already, and of course they were happy to help a wealthy aunt surprise an almost-as-wealthy nephew. In a final burst of pique, she put the bill on her own account, and not Berenice’s. . . . She wanted no questions from the doting mother who had let the brat become so useless.

  Chapter Two

  Heris led the way into her cabin, wondering if civilians had any concept of shipboard courtesy. Would they know enough to stay on their side of the office? Sirkin did; she stood across the desk as Heris called up the files on the desk display, looking young and earnest.

  She looked at the course Sirkin had originally planned. Direct, reasonable flux levels, no abrupt course changes, adequate clearance of the mapped obstacles. It was close to the course she would have selected, although R.S.S. ships could and did shave the clearance margins in the interest of speed.

  “And Captain Olin disapproved this course? Why?”

  “He said it was too risky. Here—” Sirkin laid her finger on the display, and it enlarged to show finer detail. “He claimed that coming this close to T-77 with a flux of 0.06 was suicidal. I asked him why, and he said he was captain and I’d learn better in time.”

  “Hmm.” Heris leaned over the display. “Did you look up T-77 in the reference library?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Heris looked up at the younger woman—then remembered that it might be legitimate civilian usage. The R.S.S. used “sir” for either sex—it meant respect, not recognition of one’s chromosome type. Sirkin seemed respectful and attentive. “Baird and Logan said that T-77 is a gravitational anomaly, nothing more. Ciro speculates that it’s a burnt-out star. But all the references agree that it’s not as dangerous as Gumma’s Tangle, and it’s perfectly safe to transit that at a flux of 0.2. I was being conservative.” That had the bite of old resentment. Heris shook her head.

  “Captain Olin must have had some reason. Your relative velocity would have been quite low, there—did you suggest boosting your flux and achieving a higher V?”

  “No, ma’am. He said it was dangerous at 0.06; boosting the flux would make it worse—”

  “If he meant a flux/mass interaction. That’s not the only danger out there.” She chewed her lip, thinking. She hadn’t been in that area for a long time; she wished she had access to R.S.S. charts and intelligence data.

  “But why didn’t he say so?” Sirkin had flushed, which made her look even younger. “I could have redone it for a higher flux—”

  “He didn’t want to go anywhere near T-77,” Heris said. “Let’s see what else he didn’t want to go near.” She looked at the rest of Sirkin’s course, comparing it to Olin’s, and calling up references when needed. Slowly, she felt her way into Olin’s logic. “He didn’t want to go near any of the low-danger obstacles, did he? Made you go clear around Cumber’s Finger, instead of taking that short Wedding Ring hop—and that’s a safe hop everyone takes. Made you wander over here—and why?” She looked up, to meet the same confusion in Sirkin’s expression. “Did Lady Cecelia have a preferred arrival time? Did she ask him to be here on a certain day?”

  Sirkin nodded. “She had wanted to be here eight days before we arrived, for some kind of family party. Olin told her he couldn’t make it; it’s one reason she wanted a new captain. She said he was too slow.”

  “You heard her?” Heris let her brows rise.

  Sirkin turned red. “Well . . . I overheard it. I mean, Tonni over on the staff side, he told Engineering, and Mr. Gavin told me.”

  “Staff side . . .” Heris said.

  “You know. There’s the household staff, with Bates on top, and there’s the ship’s crew, with the captain—with you—on top. We’re not supposed to mix much, but at certain levels we have to. Our moles are always getting into rows with milady’s gardeners.”

  Heris felt she’d fallen into a farce of some kind. Gardeners aboard ship? But she couldn’t let this young woman sense her confusion. “When we say ’staff,’ we mean non-line officers,” she said, as if it had been a confusion of terms.

  “Oh.” Sirkin clearly had no idea what that meant, and Heris let it pass. Far more important was getting this ship ready to travel. She could ask Sirkin, but she should learn more about the rest of the crew, and inspections would do just that. She looked back at Olin’s chosen route and shook her head.

  “I wonder . . . it’s as if he knew something about these areas not listed in the references.” She wondered what. There were always rumors about “robbers’ coasts” a
nd “pirate dens” to excuse ships that showed up late or missing cargo. But those were just rumors . . . weren’t they? Olin had chosen to skirt more dangerous—according to the references—points more closely; he had shaved past T-89 inside the line she’d have taken with a cruiser. Of course a cruiser massed more. Slow on the first leg of the trip, hanging about for a long time . . . then racing through the middle section, direct and sure . . . then dodging about again at the end. Smuggling came to mind, but she controlled her expression. Later she could figure out what, and with whom, Captain Olin had been smuggling.

  “And you’re the newest crew member? What made you decide on this job rather than another?”

  Sirkin blushed. “Well . . . it was a . . . friend of mine.” From the blush and tone of voice, a lover. Heris looked again: blue eyes, brown hair, slender, unremarkable face. Just very young, and very emotional.

  “Aboard this ship?” She kept her fingers crossed.

  “No, ma’am. She’s back at school—a third-year in ship systems maintenance. If I’d signed with a corporate ship, they’d have expected me to stay with them forever.” Not really forever, Heris knew, but to the young even the basic five- and ten-year contracts sounded permanent. “When she graduates—she’s not exactly at the top of her class—we wanted to be together, same ship or at least same company. . . .”