Change of Command Read online

  At the Laurels, she stopped at the concierge's desk to ask for assistance in leasing a yacht. The Laurels expected such requests; it took only a moment for the concierge to connect Cecelia to the booking agent for Allsystems Leasing.

  Her inspiration had been her nephew Ronnie. Ronnie and Raffaele, as newlyweds, had taken off for the frontier—to Excet-24, a world newly opened to colonization. Cecelia hoped it would have a more euphonious name before it qualified for full membership in the Familias. At last report, Ronnie and Raffa had no children yet, but were "hoping." Cecelia wasn't sure who was hoping—the young people or their parents—but she remembered Raffa's problem-solving abilities, and was sure that Raffa could find the boys a good home if she didn't want them herself.

  But this meant a long trip—six weeks at least. She discussed the route with the leasing agent, and ordered the Premium Platinum package of consumables. She didn't mind doing Bunny's family this service, but why should she suffer for it? She wanted fresh food again.

  On Miranda's advice, Cecelia hired three more nursemaids. One wanted to emigrate, and was glad to accept a colony share in lieu of salary. She brought along her own children, a two- and a four-year-old. Five people to care for four children might be overdoing it, Cecelia thought, but she herself didn't intend to wash a single diaper or wipe a single drippy nose.

  By midnight, Cecelia had arranged everything. The yacht would not be ready immediately, of course; even with the assurance of large sums of money, it took time to prepare a large spaceship for a luxury voyage. But Cecelia had arranged for one of the nursemaids from Miranda's to take the boys to a park with the newly hired maid and her children, leaving the suite clear for at least some hours of the days. No one had seen pictures of them for months; no one, Cecelia was sure, would notice two more young women with children in a park full of young women with children. She had discussed with the nursemaids what clothes would be needed for the voyage and for six months afterward; she didn't know how easy it would be to find childrens' clothes on a colony world. She set up credit lines so that purchases by the nursemaids would not be traceable to her or to Miranda.

  Then she fell into bed with a glow of conscious virtue. When the twins woke, bawling, at two in the morning, she pulled a pillow over her head and went back to sleep. That part of it was someone else's problem.

  By the time they boosted from Rockhouse Major, Cecelia felt sure that no one had suspected anything. As far as anyone outside the Palace knew, the twins were still there. The news media had shown no more than normal interest in her doings, and seemed to accept her offhand comment that she had leased the big yacht because she was tired of doing all the work in her little one, and wanted someone else along to cook and clean.

  The two boys thoroughly enjoyed the company of other children; Cecelia pored over their medical records in her stateroom, and came to the same conclusion as the doctors and psychologists. Normal children, who could expect to have normal lives. The real question was . . . should she tell Raffaele and Ronnie who they really were? In her own mind, the boys should not know—that they were adopted, yes, but not that their fathers had raped their mother and kept her captive. Of course they must have access to their medical records someday; advances in therapy might make it possible to finish cleaning up their genome.

  She saw moral and emotional shoals in either direction.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Excet Colony 24 looked, from space, like a paradise, sapphire

  seas and emerald forests, tawny drylands and olive savannas, all spatched and streaked with white water-vapor clouds. It had been seeded two hundred years before with the usual package of invader species, and closely monitored thereafter. Originally, colonization had been planned for a century later, when the introduced ecosystem would be more stable, but oxygen levels had never fallen dangerously low; the original system here had already been oxy-carbon.

  The colony spaceport, in contrast, was a dirty little dump, in Cecelia's view. Her chartered yacht had its own shuttle, whose wide viewscreen gave a clear view of the mess. Discarded cargo containers lay scattered near either end of the runway. The single runway. The spaceport buildings were ugly piles, too much like the Patchcock port. The white plumes of cement factories, the lime kilns where limestone and shale were converted to cement for construction, lay gently on a background of rich green forest in the near distance.

  Customs consisted of a harried young woman with a nearly impenetrable accent, whose only concern was whether the new arrivals had colony shares.

  "I don't need a colony share," Cecelia said. "I'm not staying; I'm just here to visit—"

  The young woman glared, took Cecelia's IDs, and inserted them in a machine. After a moment, she turned to give Cecelia a long look.

  "Yer not stain."

  "I'm not staying, no. I'm here to visit my nephew and his wife. Ronald Vandormer."

  "Aow! Rownnie! Whyntcha sai so?"

  "I tried," Cecelia said.

  "He's at th' office, about naow," the woman said. "Ya kin gover." She pointed out the "office," a two-story cube of concrete.

  Like most colonies, this one had been given a head start by its investors: the spaceport town had a small grid of paved streets and a larger grid of gravelled ones. The first hundred or so buildings had been put up of substantial materials—in this case concrete blocks. Beyond that were rickety constructions that Cecelia could only call shacks—crudely built of raw timber. Cecelia noticed, as she walked along, the number of people who were carrying things by hand . . . the absence of hand trucks, let alone vehicles.

  The two-story building had a low wall enclosing a courtyard to one side, where a group of men were working on some piece of machinery she didn't understand. She started to speak up and ask them about Ronnie, when one of the faces in the group suddenly looked familiar. Ronnie? She blinked in the brilliant sunlight, and it still was . . . in face. The glossy young aristocrat, who had always been just one hair from a dandy—and that only because his friend George had been born with creases and a shine, as they said—stood there in tan workshirt and pants, with smears of mud or grease on both. She couldn't even tell what color his boots had been. But it was Ronnie—as handsome as ever, or more so.

  Before she could call out, he turned and went inside; the men went back to doing something with machinery and wood. She followed him inside, to a rough-walled room with a concrete floor, and found him jotting something down on a deskcomp.

  "Ronnie—"

  He looked up, then his eyes widened. "Aunt Cecelia!"

  "I sent word," Cecelia said.

  "We never got it." He shrugged. "It's probably in the batch somewhere but everyone's been too busy . . ." He looked out the window at the bustle in the courtyard.

  "It looks like a lot of work," Cecelia said, eyeing him. This was not a change she had ever expected to see in Ronnie. And why hadn't he said anything about Bunny's death? Or asked about Brun?

  "It is. It's not something I thought I'd ever be doing, to tell you the truth."

  "Who's your colony governor?"

  "Er . . . I am, now that Misktov ran off."

  "Ran off?"

  "Yes . . . it's easy enough. He stowed away on an outbound flight with most of our negotiable resources."

  "But—but that's criminal."

  "So it is," Ronnie said. "But I didn't see any police force around to stop him, and we don't have ansible access down here. No money, no communications."

  "Oh." Perhaps he didn't know about Bunny's assassination. Cecelia took another look around the room. Not an office, exactly—she saw furniture she recognized from Raffa's mother's summer cottage. A dining room table covered with data cubes and books. A sofa piled with more books and sheets of plastic and paper that looked like construction drawings. Over everything, a layer of gritty gray dust and ash.

  "But we're doing well, considering," Ronnie said, before she could organize her thoughts. "It's just . . . there's a lot I didn't know. Don't know yet. You know, Aunt C
ecelia, no matter how many cubes you study, there's always something . . ."

  "For instance?"

  "Well . . . the cement plants are working all right, and we've got plenty of sand and gravel, so we're fine for unreinforced construction. But my cubes said unreinforced concrete is dangerous . . ."

  "What does your colony engineering team say?"

  "Engineering team? We haven't one. I know, the prospectus says we do, but we don't. Aunt Cece, ninety percent of our population are low-level workers . . . which makes sense . . . but these people are low-level workers in a high-level system. They're used to a more advanced infrastructure. They know how to do their work in a world where everything's already set up, not how to work from scratch. The farmers know how to grow crops in big fields, but they don't know how to level them. The plumbers know how to connect pipes in standard modular buildings, but they don't know how to set up a plumbing system from scratch. That's what the engineering team is supposed to do, make the connection between standard designs and standard practices, and the conditions we have locally. But we don't have one."

  "If it's that bad, why don't you leave?"

  Ronnie looked stubborn. "We don't want to leave, Aunt Cecelia; we want to make it work. We sank all our money in it—even the wedding presents—"

  "Even your reserves?"

  He flushed. "Not at first, but when Misktov ran off we had to do something. We could've bought ourselves out and run home like silly children, but . . . the colony needed help. So we blew the last on enough to keep the rest alive while we worked it out."

  This was a very different Ronnie from the spoiled boy she'd known. Not a hint of petulance or whine anywhere in his voice or manner—he'd been dumped into trouble, and he was going to handle it.

  "How's Raffa?" she asked.

  "She's fine . . . tired, though." Ronnie grinned, but his eyes were worried. "She's trying to get a school started, but it's hard—the parents say they're too busy, they need the children at home."

  "Don't these colony groups include trained teachers?"

  "On paper, yes." Ronnie grimaced. "There's a lot I didn't know, in the old days. I thought every standard colony dropped with prefab housing, the five-year-contract engineering team, the education and medical backups that are on the contract."

  "And they don't?"

  "No—at least, right before Misktov ran off, while we still had the credit for it, I made some inquiries and found that many colonies are shorted. But they're stuck on some planet, mostly uneducated people who haven't a clue who to contact in the Colonial Office . . . no one ever knows. Even me—I sent messages out, but never got any back. We haven't heard from our families in over a year, though we've scraped up enough to piggyback messages to them three times."

  "Um. Well, Ronnie, I may have added to your burdens, but—"

  "Cecelia!" Raffa came through the door like a burst of spring breeze. "I'm so glad to see you! The only thing about this is that I miss my friends sometimes!"

  The girl—no, young woman—looked healthy enough, and genuinely glad to see her. Cecelia braced herself for what she must do.

  "Raffaele, Ronnie . . . have you heard about Bunny?"

  "Bunny? No—what's wrong?"

  "He was assassinated several months ago, supposedly by allies of the men executed after Brun's capture—"

  "Wait—Brun was captured? By whom? Is she all right?"

  How long had they been out of contact? Cecelia could hardly believe they didn't know. She gave them a quick review of what had happened, ending with, "So you see, when I started thinking of a good home for the babies, I thought of you—I was sure you could find a home for them."

  "Brun's babies?"

  Now she'd done it. "Yes."

  "Of course I want them," Raffa said, almost fiercely. Then with a glance at Ronnie. "We do, don't we, Ron?"

  "Of course," Ronnie said, but he sounded tired again. "I don't exactly know how, but we'll manage."

  "I've brought along nursemaids, including one with two children of her own who wants to stay. And some money Miranda sent, for their education later."

  "If it's enough to hire a teacher," Raffa said, "we can start that school . . ."

  Cecelia had no idea if it was enough, but she would pry the necessary out of Raffa and Ronnie's parents if she had to. She would also, she thought, find out why incoming messages, including hers, weren't getting through.

  "Where are the babies?" Raffa said, looking around.

  "Still in the shuttle," Cecelia said. "I doubt I'd ever have gotten them past that . . . that person in the terminal."

  "Oh, Ganner . . . she was Misktov's girlfriend, and he left her here, marooned her. She thought she was going to be the governor's lady, and lord it over everyone, but here she is. She hates everybody."

  "Except handsome men," Raffa said, with a touch of asperity. "Lady Cecelia, you should see how she fawns on Ronnie. I know he's not susceptible, but it's a little disgusting sometimes."

  "It's handy when I want something," Ronnie said. "Come on, let's get those babies out of the shuttle. If I have babies crawling all over me, I'll bet Ganner finds me less attractive."

  By the time she left again, Cecelia knew that more was wrong with Excet-24 than one scoundrelly governor and a missing engineering team. She'd never paid much attention to colony worlds—why choose to live uncomfortably if you didn't have to?—or colonial policy, but surely it hadn't been intended to work like this. The nursemaids had been understandably wide-eyed at the conditions on the planet, and Cecelia had had some difficulty persuading them to stay until she returned.

  "I'll find out why messages aren't getting through," she promised Ronnie. "And find you some of the experts you need. You've done wonderfully—" She didn't really believe that, but the young couple had tried, and weren't whining, and that counted for a lot in her private grade-book. "It'll be a few months, you understand—"

  "That's what they all say," Ronnie said, but with no sting in it.

  * * *

  All the way to Sirialis, Miranda had planned what to do. If she tried to call on her family's expertise, Harlis might find out, and would certainly do his best to stop her. She had to assume he'd figure it out; she had to assume she had only a limited lead before he found some way of separating her from the data she needed to explore.

  Bunny had teased her, at first, when she insisted on having her own archives, separate from the family, in machines not physically connected to anything but a solar power supply. Paranoia, he'd said, ran in the Meager family line. She pressed her lips together tightly, remembering that laugh, and her scornful reply . . . she had been so young, so sure of herself.

  And so right. Not for nothing had her family been in information technology for centuries. She had insisted; Bunny had given in; her personal and very complete archives lay not at the big house—though she kept a blind copy there, as a decoy—but in a remote hunting lodge. Every hunting season—and in between, if they were in residence—she added another set of records, stripping the current logs.

  It would have been easier if she could have had Kevil's help, but she could do it herself, given enough time. That was the trick, finding enough time.

  The staff at Sirialis met her with the sympathy and respect she'd expected. Harlis might have local spies and supporters, but they wouldn't show themselves yet. She spent the first few days as anyone would expect, taking sympathy calls and answering what questions she could about the future of their world.

  The big house felt empty, even with all the servants in it . . . knowing Bunny would never come down those stairs, never wander out of that library, never sit at the head of the long table. She missed him almost as much in the stables and kennels; although she had ridden to hounds every season, foxhunting had never been her favorite sport; she had done it because Bunny enjoyed it so, and enjoyed her company.

  That first evening, alone in the big room she had once shared, her mind wandered back to Cecelia's visit. Where had she taken the t
wins? She had seemed to know exactly where she was going . . . well, that was Cecelia, and always had been, though it usually involved a horse.

  But before the twins, what was it she'd said? About Bunny's killers, about some plot—Miranda struggled to remember, past the confusion of the last weeks, the urgency of her concern about the estate, and the travel-induced headache. Finally she shrugged, and gave up for the night.

  The name didn't come to her until she was at the hunting lodge far north of the main house, where the snow still lay deep on the shadowed sides of the mountains. She'd made copies of all the critical data—astonishing herself with the number of cubes it took to hold it all—and then packed it neatly into her carryall for the flight back. It was too late that day—she didn't want to risk a night flight, as tired as she was—so she'd heated up one of the frozen lumps of soup, and settled in by the fireplace with a mug of soup and another of cocoa. She felt—not smug, exactly, but pleased with herself. She had the backups, which she could work on at the main house, and her surveillance link showed no ships in the system. That meant Harlis could not possibly get there in time to discover her hiding place.

  Her mind wandered off to the twins again, and from there to Cecelia, and then—as if a cube were playing—her memory handed her the first part of their conversation. Not the NewTex Militia—well, she'd been doubtful of that herself, though they were certainly capable of killing and maiming. But . . . Pedar Orregiemos?

  Cecelia hadn't mentioned it, and perhaps didn't know it, but Pedar had once wanted to marry her. She hadn't loved him; he was older than Bunny, and fussy pomposity had never attracted her—but he'd been convinced she married Bunny just for his money. He'd even said so, one afternoon in the rose garden. She hadn't quite smacked his face, but she'd been tempted.