given as indeterminate-I'm assuming you'll notify the nearest sector HQ when you know how long you'll need?"

"That's right," Esmay said. The familiar routine, the familiar phrases eased the numbing chill of the admiral's attitude.

"That would be Sector Nine, and I'll just add the recognition codes you'll need-and here you are, sir."

"Thank you again," Esmay said, managing a genuine smile for the clerk. He, at least, treated her as if she were a normal person worth respect.

Her transport would undock in six hours; she hurried back to her quarters to pack.

Marta Katerina Saenz, Chairholder in her own right, and voter of two other Chairs in the Family sept, had been expecting the summons for weeks before it came. Bunny's wild daughter had at last fallen into more trouble than youth and dash could get her out of, though the news media had been fairly vague about what it was, having had her listed first as "missing" and then as "presumed captured by pirates." She suspected it might be worse than that; pirates normally killed any captives or ransomed them quickly. Bunny, who had succeeded Kemtre as the chief executive of the Familias Grand Council, had actually done quite well in the various crises that had followed the king's abdication-the Morellines and the Consellines had not in fact pulled out; the Crescent Worlds hadn't caused trouble; the Benignity's attempt at invasion in the Xavier system had been quickly scotched. But rumor had it that his daughter's disappearance had sent him into a state close to unreason. Rumor was usually wrong in details, Marta had found, but right in essence.

She herself was the logical person to call in for advice and help. Family connections and cross- connections, for one thing, and-paradoxically-her reputation for avoiding the hurly-burly of political life. Her axes had all been ground long since, and stored in the closet for future need.

Several of the Families had already contacted her, asking her to make discreet inquiries.

Moreover, she had helped Bunny in the Patchcock affair, and she knew the redoubtable Admiral Serrano. In addition, whatever trouble Brun had gotten herself into involved this side of Familias space-that was clear from the number of increased Fleet patrols, and the way her own carriers were being stopped for inspection. So it was natural that someone would think of asking her to-what was the phrase?-"assist in the investigations."

She did not resent the call as much as she might have a decade or so earlier. That affair on Patchcock had been much more fun than she'd expected, and the aftermath-when she'd tackled Raffaele's difficult mother about the girl's marriage-even more so. Perhaps she'd had enough, for a while, of secluded mountain estates and laboratory research. Perhaps it was time for another fling.

Though by all accounts this would be no fling. When she boarded the R.S.S. Gazehound, which had been sent to fetch her, she was given a data cube which made that clear. Marta had met Brun more than once, in her wildest stages, and the vid of Brun helpless and mute was worse than shocking.

She put it out of her mind, and concentrated instead on testing her powers with the crew of the

R.S.S. Gazehound.

Captain Bonnirs had welcomed her aboard with the grave deference due her age and rank; Marta had managed not to chuckle aloud at that point, but it wasn't easy. He seemed so young, and his crew were mere children . . . but of course they weren't. Still, they responded to her as her many nieces and nephews had, treating her as an honorary grandmother. For the price of listening to the same old stories of love, betrayal, and reconciliation, she could acquire vast amounts of information the youngsters never knew they were giving.

Pivot-major Gleason, for instance, while apparently unaware of any conflict between his loyalty to the Regular Space Service and that to his family, was carrying undeclared packages from his brother to his sister-in-law's family: packages that, under the scrutiny now given such mail, would have been opened and inspected by postal authorities. He didn't see anything wrong with this; Marta hoped very much he was merely hauling stolen jewels or something equally innocuous and not explosives.

Ensign Currany, in the midst of asking advice on handling unwanted advances from a senior officer, revealed that she had a startling misconception of the nature of Registered Embryos which suggested a political orientation quite different from that she overtly claimed. Normally this wouldn't have mattered, but now Marta had to wonder just why Currany had joined Fleet-and when.

She discovered that an environmental tech had a hopeless crush on the senior navigator, who was happily married, and that the curious smell in the enlisted crew quarters emanated from an illicit pet citra, kept in a secret compartment in the bulkhead behind a bunk. It was brought out to show her, and she enchanted its owners by letting it run up her arm and curl its furry tail around her neck. She overheard part of a furious argument between two pivot-majors about Esmay Suiza-one, having served aboard Despite, insisted she was loyal and talented; the other, who had never met her, insisted she was a secret traitor who had wanted Brun to be captured and had probably told the pirates where to find her. She would like to have heard more of that, but the argument ended the moment they realized she was lurking in the corridor, and neither would talk more about it.

By the end of the twenty-one day voyage, she was remembering exactly why she normally lived in isolation: people told her things, they always had, and after just a few weeks of it, she felt stuffed with the innumerable details of their lives and feelings. Therapist had never been her favorite self-definition.

Marta prepared herself for her first meeting with Bunny; she knew, from the tension all around her, that whether she liked it or not, she was everyone's favorite candidate for therapist where Bunny was concerned. She swept into the room with her usual flair, hoping it would have its usual effect on him.

This time it did not. Lord Thornbuckle looked up at her with the expression of a man very near the edge of sanity. Desperate, exhausted . . . not the expression one wanted to see on the chief executive of the Familias Regnant, someone on whose judgement the security of the entire empire depended.

Marta moderated her instinctive verve, and instead walked quietly across the room to take the hand he held out to her.

"Bunny, I'm so sorry."

He stared at her silently.

"But I know Brun, and if she's alive, we can and will help her."

"You don't know"-he swallowed-"what they did to her. To my daughter-"

She did know, but clearly he needed to tell her. "Tell me," she said, and held his hand through the recitation of all the horrors he knew Brun had endured, and the ones that might have followed.

She interrupted this latter list.

"You can't know that-you can't know, and until we know for certain, you must not waste your strength worrying about it."

"Easy for you to say-"

"It was my niece you sent off to rescue Ronnie and George," Marta said crisply. "It is not easy to say, or to do, but people of our rank have responsibilities. Yours is heavy, but not beyond your strength, if you will quit adding to the load by imagining even more horrors."

"But Brun-"

"What you are doing by tearing yourself up does not help her."

"I don't know what to do . . ."

"Where's Miranda?" Bunny's exquisitely beautiful wife was, under her beauty, a woman of spun-steel

endurance, capable of enforcing sense on her husband-one of the few who could.

"She's . . . back on Castle Rock. I didn't want her out here."

"Then, in her place, I will tell you what to do. Eat a hot meal. Sleep at least nine hours. Eat another hot meal. Don't talk to anyone about anything important until you have done so. You will be even more miserable if your bad judgement, born of hunger and exhaustion, harms Brun's chances."

"But I can't just sleep-"

"Then get medication." Marta paused a moment for that to take effect, and went on. "Bunny, I'm terribly, terribly sorry that this has happened . . . but you simply must not go into this as you are."

"Who called you here?" he asked, at last reacting to her immediate presence.

"It doesn't matter. I'm here; I belong here, because those people are only a jump point away from my home; and I'm taking charge of you, at this moment, because I'm older, meaner, and you daren't hit me."

With that, she punched in a call to the infirmary and the kitchen, and stood over Bunny until he had downed a bowl of soup and a plate of chicken and rice. Then she insisted that he take the medication provided, and nodded to his valet. "Don't let him up until morning, or he's slept ten hours, whichever comes latest. Then make him eat again."

From the startled, but relieved, expressions of those around her, Marta judged that no one else had been able to make the Speaker see reason. He was, after all, the Speaker of the Grand Council.

She felt her lip curling. That was exactly why she let someone else vote her Seat most of the time, all this ridiculous social etiquette getting in the way of common sense.

Her next stop was a brief call on Admiral Serrano, who was said to be in line to command the task force. On her way through the interminable layers of military bureaucracy between the outer and inner office, she heard a sleek blonde female officer murmur to another woman, "Well, it was Suiza, after all." Both shook their heads.

Marta decided she didn't like the sleek blonde, on no more evidence than the unlikely perfection of her bone structure and perfect grooming. She said nothing, but filed the comment away.

Vida Serrano looked almost as harried and exhausted as Thornbuckle had. Marta blinked; she had not expected this.

"What happened to you?"

"Lord Thornbuckle," Vida said. "He's furious with the Serrano family in general, and me in particular."

"Why?"

"Because he thinks it was his daughter's attachment to my niece Heris which led her into what he calls 'dangerous interests.' Of course, there was that regrettable incident at Xavier, but it certainly wasn't Heris's fault. Then I recommended that she go to the Fleet training facility at Copper Mountain to get some practical knowledge-and I had hoped, some discipline as well-but that blew up in our faces when she was shot at, then quarrelled with Lieutenant Suiza and stormed off on her own. Still, it was my recommendation, so it's my fault." She heaved a sigh and managed a weary smile. "I really had thought she was ready for something like Copper Mountain. Lord Thornbuckle himself introduced his daughter to Lieutenant Suiza, but apparently that young woman is not at all what she seemed."

"I'm confused," Marta said, sitting down firmly. "I thought young Brun had managed to get herself captured by pirates and hauled off somewhere. I saw the vid of her mutilation, that's all. But I've heard nasty comments about Lieutenant Suiza from more than one person, and this is the first