“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 . . .”
She slipped a package of flatpics out of the book, and opened it. The images were still blurry, but Esmay caught her breath. Altiplano . . . she could not mistake that pair of mountain peaks. And the building—the old part of the Landsmen’s Guildhall, as shown in the oldest pictures she had seen in her history classes.
“You recognize it?” Vida asked Esmay.
“Yes . . . the mountains are the Dragon’s Teeth—” And below them, an ancient bunker . . . she didn’t want to think about that now. “And the building looks like the Landsmen’s Guildhall the way it was before they added onto it in my great-grandfather’s time.”
“I thought as much. Behind one of the flatpics, hidden by it, I found this.” She held up a piece of paper that didn’t look old enough. “This isn’t the original, of course—that’s back home, with the conservators humming over it. This is a copy. And, Esmay Suiza, it makes clear that your ancestors earned the enmity of mine, by rebelling against their patrons and slaughtering them all.”
“What?”
“Your ancestors led the rebellion, Esmay. They massacred the family we were sworn to protect.”
Esmay stared. “How can you know that? If no one survived—”
“Listen: Against these our oath is laid: the sons of Simon Escandon, and the sons of Barios Suiza and the sons of Mario Vicarios, for it is they who led the rebellions against our Patron. Against their sons, and their sons’ sons, to the most distant generation. May their Landbrides be barren, and their priests burn in hell, for they murdered their lawful lord and all his family, man and wife, father and mother, brother and sister, to the youngest suckling child. There is blood between their children and our children, until the stars die and the heavens fall. Signed: Miguel Serrano, Erenzia Serrano, Domingues Serrano.”
Silence held the room; Esmay could scarcely breathe, and cold pierced her. She glanced around; the faces that had been welcoming an hour before had closed against her, stone-hard, the dark eyes cold. All but Barin, who looked stunned, but not yet rejecting.