admiral?"

"I suppose-if I could convince them somehow that I don't hate Brun, and I didn't ever say that she deserved what she got-"

"They think you said that?"

"Casea-the woman who's after Barin-says I did. Says she knew me at the Academy and I was always

saying things about the senior Families. Of course I didn't . . ."

"Muerto de Dios," Luci said. "I would have a knife for that one if I saw her. But if she's having

to lie about you to keep Barin away from you, then he's not that eager for her. Go back, Esmay. Go back and make them know how good you are."

"And you, cousin?"

"And I will breed horses, and-with your consent and support-marry the man I love and have babies."

"And be Landbride someday?" Esmay asked, after a decent interval.

"That is entirely up to you," Luci said. "I don't want that job too soon, I can tell you. At least

let me prove my abilities with your herd before I take on another."

Esmay sat alone as the light dimmed, thinking over what Luci had said. She knew what she wanted-she was supposed to be a tactical genius-so it should be possible to figure out what she could do to get herself out of the mess she was in. If she could retrieve her intelligence from the mush her emotions had made . . .

And yet, what she wanted had more to do with emotions than brains: what she wanted was love, and respect, and honor, and the sense that she was serving something worth serving.

She could do nothing about it here. With every passing minute, she realized that no matter how hard she worked, or how pleasant a life she could contrive here, as one of the wealthiest women on the planet, she would never satisfy her own desires, her own needs, by being a Landbride, even the best Landbride she could be. She would always know she had run away from trouble. She would always know she had failed. In her mind's eye, she could see herself-her civilian self-meeting an older Barin far in the future. They would be polite. He would admire, politely, her empire. And then he would go away, and she . . . she blinked back tears, and pushed herself up from the chair.

The judge and the advocates and auditors were annoyed when she walked in on them, and insisted that she must soon return to Fleet.

"We understood you had indefinite leave."

"My pardons, sirs, but there are events afoot which I cannot discuss, but which make it very desirable that I return as soon as I can. I must know how long this will take."

"We could, if we hurried, have the transfers ready within five days . . ."

Esmay had already looked up the commercial passenger schedules. "Sirs, the next ship leaves in five days, but the one after is another twenty days. I'm sure you can have all ready in four days, with all the cooperation and resources of this house."

"It will hardly be possible," said one of the advocates, but the judge waved him to silence.

"You have honored Altiplano already by your deeds, Sera; for you, this is possible. Not easy, but possible."

"My thanks are eternal, and I will place the household at your service."

On the last of the four days, having signed the last paper, Esmay asked her father to come to the library, scene of that earlier confrontation. This time, however, she put that aside, and asked his advice. With the same precision and organization that she might have briefed someone on a military problem, she told him what she faced. "So you see, far from being a credit to our house, I am in disgrace," she said. "But I cannot change that here-and if I stay here-"

"I see," he said. He nodded, sharply. "You are a credit to this house, Esmaya, and to Altiplano; you will never be a disgrace in my sight. But I agree: for your own sake, you must clear your name. If you cannot, you are always welcome to return, and you must not give up your Landbride Gift until this is over. Stand or fall, it will be as the Landbride Suiza."

She had been more than half afraid he would demand that she give it up; her eyes filled.

"As for the matter of the Speaker's daughter-you were wrong, there, and you know it. Her rudeness does not excuse yours. But your reasons for not claiming the man's affection makes sense to me, though perhaps not to those with different ways. Still-they will not hold it against you, if you can prove that you wish her no harm, and can convince her, when and if she is rescued. As for the man-even I have heard of Serranos. A remarkable family, and well suited to this house. You must have made friends, Esmaya, and this is the time to call on them."

"Approach them?"

"Yes. When under attack, seek allies-you cannot fight all Fleet alone, and when people are lying about you, you need those who will not. If you say nothing, if you avoid them, they can more easily believe the lies are true." His voice grew husky. "Thank you, daughter, for your great

courtesy in confiding this to me . . . I always did care for you."

"I know." She did know, and she also knew it had not been enough-but it was all he had to give.

Bitterness rolled over her one last time, and then washed away.

With her family's advice in her ears, and more resources than she had ever had at her disposal, Esmay chose to take the fastest transport she could find. Civilian fast-transit passenger ships were almost as fast as Fleet, and more reliable in schedule-she would not risk being told there was no more room when she held first-class tickets. She had never traveled this way before. In her stateroom, with access to the first-class exercise and entertainment facilities, she thought of Brun, who had grown up thinking this was normal.

If captivity and brutality were bad for an ordinary person, how must they be for a girl who had experienced luxury, with every whim indulged? How could she withstand the shock? She had taken the E&E course, yes, but Esmay doubted she had taken the lectures about nonresistance, passive resistance, seriously. Brun had no habit of passive survival. She had no experience of being silenced, of having no one listen to her. She would fret, rebel, bring on herself more punishment and abuse. Only if she had a possibility on which to focus her mind and effort-only if she could imagine herself into a different future-would Brun be able to concentrate her resistance into that hope, and not waste herself on futility.

So far as Esmay knew, from the little she'd been allowed to know after being banished in disgrace, the planning had concentrated on a covert operation to extract Brun, with no consideration of her own need for activity. They were clinging to the hope that she had survived, but they didn't consider finding a way to include her help in her own rescue. They were thinking of her as a passive object, something to be snatched from a thief-just as her captors had thought of her as a passive object, some valuable to be stolen and appropriated for their own use.

Just as she herself had been only an object to the man who raped her in childhood-and had himself been only a disgusting object to the sergeant who killed him-and she again had been only an object when her family ignored her memory of the rape and made her into the outcast with nightmares who lived at the far end of the house. She wondered suddenly if Brun's family had ever seen her as a person, not a decorative object . . . if all her wild behavior had been as much a cry for recognition as Esmay's dreams.

And she, too, had treated Brun as a silly piece of decorative statuary-she had not seen the person behind the pretty face, the lovely hair, the exuberance. Familiar guilt rolled over her, and she pushed it away. Guilt would not help. Remorse would not help. Brun the person was in trouble, and Esmay the person would have to figure out how to help her-and not by ignoring the person she was.

She put her mind back on the problem, as she spent an hour in the ship's countercurrent swim salon.

Brun was, or had been, pregnant. Would pregnancy give her a reason to stay alive, or not? Would babies? She had told Esmay, the day of the disasterous argument, that she didn't want children . .

. but that didn't mean she hated them.

That stuffed toy. Esmay stopped swimming, and the pool's current pushed her back to the edge. That stuffed toy from the Elias Madero . . . there had been children aboard, and no children's bodies had been found. If-perhaps-the Militia had kept the children, if Brun had been with them, would that give her a focus? Something to live for? Some reason to be patient, in a way that nothing in her past had made her be patient?

It might. Esmay climbed out of the pool, dried off, and went back to her stateroom hardly noticing those who spoke to her. She spent the last days of the transit putting together everything she remembered about the debris from the trader, and Brun, and trying out one scenario after another.

If she had fixed on the children as a means of staying sane, she would want to bring them out too.

How could that be done? Esmay didn't let herself think it might be impossible.

Sector VII HQ

Casea Ferradi was having more luck with blackening Esmay Suiza's name than with capturing Barin Serrano. She had managed to get herself assigned to Admiral Hornan's personal staff with only the slightest, insigificant pressure on the major-now lieutenant commander-she'd known so well on her first ship. Everyone knew she'd been Suiza's classmate, so her opinion had been asked more than once-she hadn't had to create opportunities to talk about Esmay. With Suiza off on leave to her home planet, Casea didn't even have to worry about contradiction.

"And she really said she thought the Great Families were a ridiculous institution?"

Casea didn't answer directly; she stared thoughtfully into the distance in a way that suggested noble reticence. "I think it's because Altiplano has no Chair in Council," she said, after a long pause. Neither did the Crescent Worlds, but that didn't matter. "There's no tradition of respect, you see."

"I'm surprised they didn't notice anything when she was in the Academy," Master Chief Pell said.

He was, though enlisted, senior enough to have access to files in which Casea had particular interest.

"She kept a low profile," Casea said. "Actually, so did I-we were both outsiders in a way, you know. That's why we were together so much, and why I didn't realize that what she said was important." She shook her head, regretting her own innocence. "Then I got absorbed into things, you see, and just . . . didn't notice."

"It's not your fault," Pell said, just as she had meant him to say.

"Perhaps not," Casea said. "But I still feel bad about it. If I'd only known, maybe all this could've been prevented."

Pell looked confused. "I don't see how-"

She should have picked a brighter one. "I mean," Casea said, edging nearer to her intended message, "if I'd realized how bitter she was toward the Families, perhaps she would never have had any influence on Sera Meager."