Elizabeth Moon: Change of Command

Ahead, on the right, she spotted a doorway just opening as someone came out, and a gush of cooler air brushed her side. She turned into it.

It was only moderately crowded—less crowded than the two bars she’d glanced into and left—and smelled of food as much as drink. Margiu made her way to one of the open booths, and slid in, then looked around. The tables and seats looked a little strange, until she realized they were meant to look like ship parts. No, they were ship parts. Her quick glance took in the long dark bar—obviously hull material. The models—obviously military vessels. The battle honors hung on the walls, the photographs.

It was a shrine, then. Margiu felt obscurely comforted, and lowered her head to pray for the dead and the survivors alike. Her family were Synorhines; she had learned the right forms for valediction and commemoration from early childhood.

“Do you need help?” someone asked. Margiu looked up to find herself face to face with a man in a float-chair.

“No, sir—I was honoring the dead,” she said.

His brows rose, crinkling the skin around the scars on his bald scalp. “You knew about this place?”

“No, sir . . . but it’s obvious.”

“Hmm. May I have the honor of your name?”

“Ensign Pardalt,” she said. “From Xavier.”

“Ah. Xavier.” He looked her over carefully. “And you were at the Academy when—”

“No, sir. I was home . . . on Xavier, I mean.” She knew already that to Fleet personnel, Fleet was home, and the planet of origin was just that—the planet of origin.

“And you survived the Benignity—your family as well?”

“Most of them.”

“You’re welcome here anytime, Ensign. You’ve earned it.”

But she hadn’t earned anything. Not yet. The way she saw it, everything she had, Masiu had earned. Still, she was not going to contradict someone like this, a combat veteran.

“Thank you,” she said instead. And then, carefully, hoping she’d read the signals right, “May I offer you a drink?”

She saw a reaction, but she wasn’t sure what. “As it is your first time in my establishment, I hope you will honor me by accepting one.”

She dipped her head. “I would be honored.” Then, as he waited, she realized he wanted her to name it. She wasn’t used to that, but she glanced at the menu display and chose a dark ale spiced with ginger.

When the mug arrived, heavily frosted, it came with a bowl of raw vegetable sticks on shaved ice.

“If you like spiced ales, I thought you might like these,” the man said. Margiu nibbled one; it had a refreshing bite. He sipped his own drink, watching her over the rim. She found it disconcerting.

“We had Lieutenant Suiza in here when she was on a course,” he said finally.

That name she knew, of course. Suiza had been added to her family’s prayers, and she had heard a lot about Suiza in the Academy and after. “I’ve never met her,” Margiu said. “But we owe her a lot.”

“You remind me of her,” the man said. “She’s quiet too.”

“She’s a real hero,” Margiu said. “I’m just a very green ensign.”

“You might surprise yourself,” the man said.

She did fantasize about that, sometimes, but she knew it was ridiculous. She could be serious, careful, diligent, prudent—and none of those were heroic virtues, as she understood heroism.

“Lady Cecelia de Marktos, who returned to competition several years ago on one of the D’Amerosia string, has qualified for the Senior Horse Trials at Wherrin this season on a horse bred at her own stables, Seniority. With the veteran rider/owner up, Seniority won the Challenge Event for rising novices, then the Stavenge. The pair are expected to threaten the reigning champion, Liam Ardahi and the experienced champion Plantagenet, competing under the colors of Orregiemos Combine . . .”

Viewers saw Lady Cecelia’s pleasant, bony, somewhat horselike face, beneath rumpled red-gold curls . . . then a shot of her exercising Seniority over fences, the horse’s gleaming red coat only a shade darker than her hair, then a shot of them over the last fence of the Stavenge. The video shifted to Liam Ardahi guiding Plantagenet over the Wherrin Trials’ B Course big drop-bridge combination the year before, freezing on the instant before landing, while the commentator recited their previous record.

Cecelia grimaced at the display. Like any expert rider, she could find flaws in everything she did, and would have much preferred to have the vid show her over the seventeenth fence—where she and Seniority had made neat work of a difficult combination—than that last fence, where Seniority had jumped flat, and her own hand position showed why. She’d lost concentration for a crucial few seconds.

Why had she been thinking about Pedar Orregiemos and the Rejuvenants, and not Fence Thirty?

Two days later, Cecelia brought Seniority in from the gallops in exactly the shape she wanted—pulse and respiration had recovered beautifully, and he could have gone another mile without strain. But any more fitness now, and he would peak before the Senior Trials. No, a long hack this afternoon, then tomorrow—

“Cece! Have you heard?” Colum was waiting for her at the entrance to the gallops, as he usually did, but he spoke first.

“What?” She loosened the strap of her helmet, and pushed back under it the one lock of red hair that always managed to get loose and tickle her forehead.

“Lord Thornbuckle’s been killed—it’s on all the newsvids—”

She felt a heaviness in her chest as if she’d been kicked. “Bunny?” A swift montage of pictures ran through her mind—Bunny at the head of the table, Bunny on horseback on Opening Day of the hunt season, Bunny taking over from Kemtre at the Grand Council, Bunny and Kevil, heads together, discussing something . . . “It can’t be—” He was younger than she by twenty-odd years; he was healthy as a horse—

“They say it might be those terrorists.”

Reality came back as Seniority reached down to rub his face on his leg, and yanked the reins; Cecelia blinked, looked around, saw the subdued flurry of activity near the barns. The first acid bite of sadness seeped through the shock. If it was true, this was going to hurt a lot. Colum seemed to understand that she could say nothing; he flung a cooler over the horse’s back, and put a hand to the rein. Cecelia sat there, as he led Seniority on into the aisle between the barns, where the look on the grooms’ faces told her that the newsvids were playing this straight.

“You heard?” That was Roz, her head groom.

“Yes.” She slid down, ran the stirrups up, automatically coordinating with the groom as they untacked the chestnut horse and began the after-workout rubdown.

“You knew him, didn’t you?”

Already past tense. Cecelia shivered. “Yes. For a long time.”

“It’s terrible. It said on the news there wasn’t even enough left for a neuroscan. No chance—”

She didn’t want to hear this; she didn’t want to think about this. Her rejuvenated body felt alien suddenly, the reverse of the way she had felt when her young mind lived in her old one . . . now she felt trapped in a body that could not feel what she felt emotionally.

“Do you think they’ll cancel the Trials?”

Cecelia looked over at Roz, who flushed in unbecoming splotches. “I doubt it,” she said. “They didn’t stop the Trials when Kemtre abdicated.”

But even as she said it, she felt uneasy. Whether the Trials went on or not, should she ride? What was the right thing to do? She paused in her strokes down Seniority’s muscled haunch to calculate travel times. She could not possibly make it to Castle Rock for any memorial service, even if she gave up the competition. That being so, what good would it do Bunny for her to withdraw?