"Like her?"

"So . . . free. So happy."

"Umph. Well, I'm mostly convinced but I doubt anyone else will be. Better see you don't make any mistakes, Suiza. With the data we have aboard, we're sure to be called back to confer with the task force. You will be questioned about her, and one wrong word will ruin you."

Esmay put that out of her mind, and instead thought of Brun the laughing, Brun the golden. She had not thought of herself as religious-in her great-grandmother's sense-for years, but she found herself praying nonetheless.

Aragon Station, Sector VII HQ, Task Force Briefing

Barin found himself in the very uncomfortable position of being the youngest person at a very ticklish conference. He knew why he was there: he had trained with Brun on Copper Mountain; he and Esmay had saved her skin. He had known about her disappearance almost from its discovery for precisely that reason. But nothing in his training had prepared him to sit at a table with a Grand Admiral, his admiral grandmother, two other three-star admirals, a sprinkling of commanders-his cousin Heris among them-and the Speaker of the Council of Families of the Familias Regnant.

Nothing except growing up Serrano, which at the moment he felt was a distinctly overrated qualification.

Brun Meager's father, Lord Thornbuckle, was far beyond distraught . . . balanced on the thinnest knife-edge of stability Barin had ever seen in a previously functioning adult. In the harsh light that shone onto the polished table, Barin could see the fine tremor of the man's hands, the glitter of silver in his close-cropped blond hair as his head shifted in tense jerks from side to side, when someone spoke.

You've got to tell them everything. That's what his captain had said. Everything. But how could you tell a roomful of brass, in front of the woman's father, about her less admirable behavior? He sat very still and hoped against hope that something would interrupt this before he had to hurt a man already hurting so much.

"Grand Admiral Savanche, we have a flash-priority message-"

Savanche pushed himself back. "This had best be worth it." Barin knew that despite this almost- regulation growl, he was secretly glad to have something break the tension of the briefing.

Savanche took the message cube, and put it in the player.

"It's from Captain Solis, aboard the search-and-rescue ship Shrike . . . they were pursuing leads in the disappearance of a Boros Consortium merchanter, and have been out of contact for weeks. He just heard about the yacht's disappearance, and-you'd better see this for yourself." He transferred output to the room's main screen.

Onto the screen came a section of star chart, with a corner window of Captain Solis.

"-trace of a very small craft in the system as well," he was saying. "We presumed at first that it was the raider's tail on the Elias Madero. When we located debris and bodies from the merchanter,

amounting to the entire adult crew and one juvenile apprentice-but not the other apprentice, nor four small children-we also located five bodies which were not crew, and which we could not identify. My forensics team believes them to have been military, but they weren't Fleet, and the usual identification sites had been mutilated."

"There were ten . . ." breathed Lord Thornbuckle.

"We sent off a report on this to Sector, top priority, when we got back to Bezaire, but we had to use a commercial ansible. At that time we had not received word that the Speaker's daughter was missing. However, when we came out of jump at Sil Peak, we received that news and specifications of her ship. My Exec, Lieutenant Suiza, immediately thought of the other bodies we'd found. The ship trace we found is consistent with a yacht of the stated mass. We have the recovered bodies in storage; please advise next move."

"We own stock in Boros," Lord Thornbuckle said. "She was out there-she'd said she wanted to look into the olive orchards on . . . whichever one it is, I can't think. It has to be her . . . her yacht. Her guards . . ."

"Do you know anything about them, Lord Thornbuckle?"

"They're from my militia. Brun had . . . not gotten along with the Royal Space Service security personnel who had gone with her to Copper Mountain. There had been an incident-"

"And you say there were more than five-"

"Yes . . . there should have been ten." Lord Thornbuckle stared at the table between his hands.

"She thought that was too many."

"Well, it's imperative that we get what evidence Solis has gathered as soon as possible."

Savanche's eye swept the room and lighted on Barin. "Ensign-go find my signals chief and tell her I want a secure link to Shrike."

"Sir." Barin found the Grand Admiral's staff signals specialist hovering outside the room-someone had anticipated the need-and sent her in. He was glad to be out of there, and hoped he wouldn't be called back. Shrike . . . Esmay was on Shrike. He wondered how she was taking the news.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

Shrike came into the system like an avenging angel, a high-vee insertion through a lane cleared for that purpose, and then shifted insystem in a series of microjumps . . . reducing a normal eight-day down transit to a mere eleven hours. Three tugs went out to meet her, and dragged her toward the station at a relative velocity that seemed reckless. Barin, aboard Gyrfalcon, lurked in scan and watched along with everyone else.

"Ensign-" He glanced back to find his captain beckoning, and followed him to his office.

"We've been getting realtime downloads from Shrike for the past hour," the captain said. "I want you to hand-carry this to the Grand Admiral's office-it's for his eyes only, and I want you to put it in his hands personally."

"Sir." Barin took the rack of four data cubes-a lot of data-and headed for the Grand Admiral's temporary suite of offices. He'd been couriering one thing and another since they'd arrived, so the Admiral's staff listened when he said, "-in his hands personally."

"You'll have to wait, though. The Admiral's receiving a delegation from the Guernesi Republic."

"Fine." Barin found a spot out of the way of the traffic through the outer office, and let his mind wander to Shrike's arrival . . . and her executive officer. Would he have a chance to see Esmay? Not likely; Shrike's captain would certainly be the one coming to any briefings. Perhaps

this new information would divert attention from his supposed expertise on Brun, which seemed more tawdry every time he thought of it. So she had wanted to bed him-so what? So she had been, in his mind, a difficult and headstrong individual . . . but whatever she had been, she didn't deserve what had happened to her. Once again he saw the video clip of the surgery and felt his own throat close; he swallowed with an effort.

"Hello, Ensign Serrano-"

His eyes snapped to the left, where Lieutenant Esmay Suiza stood with a challenging look . . . and a lockbag of data, no doubt.

"Lieutenant!"

"Wool-gathering?" she asked, in almost the tone of the old Esmay, the Esmay of the Koskiusko.

"Sir, my mind had wandered-"

"Just another minute, he said," the clerk at the desk interrupted. "If the lieutenant wouldn't mind going in with Ensign Serrano-"

"Not at all," said Esmay.

Barin tried not to stare, but-she looked so good. Nothing like Casea Ferradi; if she was priggish in some ways, she was at least clean.

The admiral's door opened, and a harried-looking commander waved them both in. "Come on Serrano, Suiza-he's waiting for both of you."

From within someone said "No!" very loudly. Barin paused. "I won't have her-I don't want to see her." The commander holding the door closed it again. "-all her fault!" leaked out just before it snicked shut.

Thornbuckle. Still angry, still unreasonable . . . Barin gave Esmay a sidelong glance; she was staring straight ahead, almost expressionless. He wanted to say something-but what?-but the door opened again, this time to Grand Admiral Savanche.

"Lieutenant, I believe you have a hand-to-hand for me?"

"Yes, sir." Esmay's voice expressed no more than her face as she handed him the databag.

"Very well. Dismissed." He turned to Barin. "Come along in, Ensign." Barin tried to catch Esmay's eye, but she looked past him. He followed Savanche into the conference, his heart sinking rapidly past the deck toward the gravitational center of the universe.

"The tissue typing confirms that the unidentified bodies found at the site of the Elias Madero hijacking were those of five members of the ten from Lord Thornbuckle's personal militia: Savoy Ardenil, Basil Verenci, Klara Pronoth, Seren Verenci, and Kaspar Pronoth. This very strongly suggests that Sera Meager's ship was there at the time, and may have attempted to intervene."

Which meant that they knew, at last, where Brun's yacht had been when she was attacked. At last they could narrow the search to something other than all space everywhere. Shrike's subsequent search for traces of the Elias Madero narrowed it further. Barin tried to fix his mind on the evidence and its logical consequences, but Esmay's set face kept intruding. She had been wrong, yes-but Lord Thornbuckle's outburst, his refusal to see her, was profoundly unjust. Brun's situation was not Esmay's fault.