"Esmay!" Her heart leapt. That was Barin, and he would get her out of this, whatever it was. He came toward her, clearly gleeful and full of himself. She could have killed him, and hoped he understood steel behind her fixed smile.
"I'm sorry I wasn't at the lift to meet you," he said. "I had an urgent call—"
Esmay couldn't bring herself to be polite and say it didn't matter. "What is this?" she said instead.
Barin grimaced. "It got out of hand," he said. "I wanted you to meet my parents, and they were coming through here on the way home. Then grandmother—" he waved; Esmay followed the gesture to see Admiral Vida Serrano at the far end of the room, surrounded by an earnest cluster of older people. "—Grandmother wanted to talk to you about something, and thought this would be a good opportunity. And then . . . they started precipitating, falling out of the sky . . ."
"Mmm." Esmay could not say any of what she was thinking, not with his parents standing there smiling at her a little nervously. "Are we . . . going to have a chance to talk?" By ourselves she meant.
"I don't know," Barin said. "I hope so. But—" His gaze slid to his mother, who quirked an eyebrow.
"Barin, you know it's important family business. We must confer."
Great. The only leave she'd been able to wangle, in the current crises, and it looked as if she'd be spending it conferring with his family instead of hers.
"How was your trip, Esmay?" asked Barin's father. He had lieutenant commander's insignia, with a technical flash.
"Fine, though we lost a day at Karpat for unscheduled maintenance procedures." She couldn't keep the edge out of her voice.
"Mmm. That's typical." Barin's father nodded across the room. "Let me show you to your room."
"My—"
"Of course you have your own room here. We may have descended in force, but we're not entirely uncivilized. You have to stay somewhere." Across the room, through another door, into another corridor . . . Esmay was by this time beyond astonishment when he showed her to a small suite, its sitting room wall showing a view of the station's exterior. "This is yours—and I'm sure the staff are sending up your things."
"I have only the carryon," Esmay said.
"Well, then. Come out when you're ready." With a smile, he turned away and closed the door behind him. Esmay sank down onto one of the rose-and-cream-striped chairs. What she wanted to do was put her head in her hands and scream. That wouldn't be productive, she was sure. But what was going on?
A tap on the door interrupted her uneasy thoughts. Her carryon? "Come in," she said. The door opened, and Barin stood there looking sheepish.
"May I?" he asked. Esmay nodded; he entered, shutting the door behind him, and pulled her up from the chair. She stiffened for a moment, then relaxed against him.
"Your family—" she began.
"I'm sorry. It wasn't my idea, but it is my family. They're . . . headstrong."
"And you aren't?" She wasn't ready to think it was funny; she wanted to indulge her annoyance—such justified annoyance—a little longer, but suddenly her sense of humor kicked in. She could just imagine Barin, having planned this quiet little retreat, being maneuvered by his powerful and numerous family. She stifled the giggle that tried to come out.
"Not headstrong enough," Barin said, with a rueful grin. "I tried to tell them to let us alone, but you see how well I did."
Esmay lost control of the giggle; she could feel it vibrating in her throat and then it was out.
"You aren't angry?" he asked hopefully.
"Not at you, anyway," Esmay said. "I suppose a quiet few days alone was too much to hope for."
"I didn't think so," Barin said. "You would think the entire universe was playing tricks on us—"
"Ummm . . . I've read that lovers always put themselves in the center of everything."
"I'd like to put us in the center of a bed, a long way from everywhere else," Barin said, with a hint of a growl.
"We'll get there," Esmay said. Her arms tightened around him; he felt as good as ever, and she wanted to melt right into him until their bones chimed together.
Someone knocked on the door. "Barin, if you don't let her get dressed, we'll never get to dinner—" A female voice, one she hadn't met yet.
"Oh, shut up," muttered Barin in Esmay's ear. "Why wasn't I born an orphan?"
"It would have been too simple," Esmay said. "Let me go—I want to change. And are we eating up here, or in public?" Not that the entire Serrano family wasn't public enough.
"Here. It's coming up." He let go, went to the door, and opened it. There stood a woman in her thirties, about Esmay's size, with the Serrano features.
"Esmay, I'm Dolcent. Barin—go away, I need to talk to her for a moment."
"I hate you," Barin said, but he left. Dolcent grinned.
"Listen—I gather you were expecting a quiet evening of entertainment and you have only one carryon. If I were in that situation, I'd have brought only the clothes I meant to wear, which weren't exactly family-meeting ones . . . so may I offer you something?"
Annoyance returned, a wave of it—who did they think they were?—but then she remembered the contents of her carryon. Clothes for a casual day or so with her fiance, one nice dress to meet the parents . . . blast the woman, she was right.
"Thank you," Esmay said, as graciously as she could while swallowing another lump of resentment.
"I wouldn't like having to borrow clothes, but there are times—look—"
She had to admit that Dolcent's offerings were better than anything she'd brought, and Dolcent's blue tunic over her own casual slacks met both requirements. Esmay thanked her.
"Never mind. I'll raid your wardrobe someday. If you make my little brother happy, that is."
"Otherwise you'll blow it up, eh?"
"Something like that," Dolcent said. "Or if you call me Dolly . . . just a warning." She grinned.
Dinner was less formal than she'd feared; the hotel staff brought in a buffet and left it, and people served themselves from it, sitting wherever they fancied. Esmay had a corner of a big puffy sofa with a table at her elbow, and Dolcent beside her, offering explanations. A man's voice emerged from the general babble.
"And I told him that technology wasn't mature enough, but he's determined—"
"Iones—a distant uncle. In material research; you just missed him when you were on
Koskiusko
," Dolcent said. "He's a terrible bore, but what he knows he really knows."
Then a woman, close enough to see. "—and if she
ever
takes that tone to me again, I'll rip the brass right off her—"
"And that's Bindi—never mind her; she's not as bad as she sounds."
A shrimp came flying through the air with deadly accuracy, to bounce off Dolcent's head. "Am I not, you miserable eavesdropper?"
Calmly, Dolcent picked up the shrimp and ate it. "No, you're not. Nor am I an eavesdropper, when you're talking loud enough to be heard three rooms away."
Bindi shrugged and turned away.
"Is it always like this?" Esmay asked.
"Usually worse. But I'll be accused of dire things if I try to explain Serrano family politics. You come from a large family yourself, right? You should know."
"Ummm . . ." There was, after all, some of the same flavor in the interactions. The loud ones, staking out their space and their areas of power; the quiet ones in the corners, raising a sardonic eyebrow now and then. Bindi would be an Aunt Sanni; Barin's mother, like her stepmother, seemed to be a quiet peacemaker.
Heris Serrano pulled up a chair to the other side of the end table, and sat down, and put her plate beside Esmay's. Esmay had never thought of Commander Serrano wearing anything but a uniform, but . . . here she was in silvery-green patterned silk, a loose tunic over flowing slacks.
"Esmay—I don't know if you remember me—"
"Yes, si—Commander—"
"Heris, please. This room's so full of rank otherwise, we can hardly talk to each other. I don't think I've seen you face to face to thank you for saving our skins at Xavier—and not just ours—"
"Heris, not during dinner—I know you're going to talk tactics to her sometime, but not now." Dolcent pointed with a crab leg, a gesture that would have been a deadly insult on Altiplano. "She's going to be married; you could at least choose a more suitable topic."
"And you'd talk clothes to her, 'Centa? Or flowers, or which way to fold the napkins at the reception?"
"Better than old battles during dinner." Dolcent didn't seem perturbed by Heris's intensity; Esmay watched with interest.
"Picked out a wedding outfit yet, Esmay?" Heris asked, with too much sugar in her voice.
"No, s—Heris. Brun says she's taking care of it."
"Dear . . . me. How did that happen?"
"She just . . ." Esmay waved her hands helplessly. "She found out I had no ideas, and then the next thing I knew she was sending me fabric samples and talking about designers."
"She is something, isn't she?" Heris chuckled. "You should have seen her years back, when she was really wild. If you're not careful, she'll organize the whole wedding."
Esmay was feeling reasonably relaxed and almost full when she saw Admiral Vida Serrano coming toward her, with an expression far less friendly than those around her. Like almost all the others, she wore civilian clothes, but that failed to disguise her nature. Esmay tried to get up, but the admiral waved her back.
"There's something you must know," Admiral Serrano said. "I haven't told the others because it didn't seem fair to tell them behind your back. It's not widely known—in fact, it's been safely buried for centuries. But since those idiots in Medical sent most of the flag officers off on indefinite inactive status, several of us decided to clean up the Serrano archives, and transfer them onto more modern data storage media."
"Yes, sir?" She would call Heris by her first name if she insisted, but she wasn't going to call the admiral anything but "sir," whether or not she was in uniform.
"You know the official history of the Regular Space Service—how it is an amalgam of the private spacegoing militias of the founding Families?"
"Yes . . ."
"What you may not know is that despite the effort made to eradicate the memory of which Fleet family once served which Family, these realities still influence Fleet policy. Perhaps more than they should. The Serrano legacy—to the extent that we have one—consists in the peculiar fact of our origin."
A long pause, during which Esmay tried to guess which of the great families had once had the Serranos as no-doubt-difficult bodyguards.
"Our Family was destroyed," the admiral said finally. "We were the spacegoing militia; we were, at the time of the political cataclysm that wiped out our employers, far away guarding their ships. After that, we could not go back—for obvious reasons—and when the Regular Space Service was organized some thirty T-years later, most of our family petitioned to be enrolled. We were considered, by some, safer . . . because we were unaligned."
Esmay could think of nothing to say.
"This much is well-known, at least to most of the senior members of Fleet, and it's been at the root of some resentment of the Serrano influence. Every generation or so, some smart aleck from another Fleet family tries to suggest that we were part of the rebellion against our Family, and then we have to respond. If we're lucky, it's handled at the senior level, but a couple of hundred years back, we and the Barringtons lost two jigs in a duel."
Admiral Serrano cleared her throat. Esmay noticed that the room had grown quieter; the others had come nearer, and were listening.
"The Family we served was based on a single planet—many Families were, in those days. And that planet . . ." She paused again; and Esmay felt a chill down her back. It could not be. "That planet, Esmay, was Altiplano. Your world."
She wanted to say
Are you sure?
but she knew that Admiral Serrano would not have said it if it hadn't been verifiable.
"That much the Serranos know—we all know—and there were some who argued against you on those grounds. I didn't; I felt that you'd make my grandson a fine partner, and I said so."
There were murmurs from the others. Esmay looked at Barin, trying to read his face, but she couldn't.
Vida Serrano went on. "There's more, and I think I may be the first person to see this for centuries. I was down in the family archives, bored enough to look at a row of children's books written by some
very
untalented ancestor, when I found it." She held up a dingy brown book. "I don't think it's a children's book; I think it's someone's private journal, or part of it. The conservators think it dates from the time of the events it describes, or closely after, and the pictures it had were pasted-in flatpics. The conservators couldn't find anything in the vid archives corresponding, and with maximal image-boosting, this is the best we could get . . ."