[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

"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."
file:///F|/rah/Elizabeth%20Moon/Moon,%20Eli...Legacy%2006%20-%20Change%20Of%20Command.txt (180 of 202) [5/20/03 11:39:49 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Elizabeth%20Moon/Moon,%20Elizabeth%20-%20The%20Serrano%20Legacy%2006%20-%20Change%20Of%20Command.txt
"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."
file:///F|/rah/Elizabeth%20Moon/Moon,%20Eli...Legacy%2006%20-%20Change%20Of%20Command.txt (181 of 202) [5/20/03 11:39:49 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Elizabeth%20Moon/Moon,%20Elizabeth%20-%20The%20Serrano%20Legacy%2006%20-%20Change%20Of%20Command.txt
"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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]