Elizabeth Moon - Change of Command

That set off another uproar, in which Love is nothing but hormones! clashed with Love is more than just hormones! and a dozen other comments Esmay had heard before. Through that, the shrill pipe of a communications alarm cut like a knife; the noise level dropped.

Someone across the suite picked up the com, and absolute silence spread from that focus toward the group still muttering softly about love and betrayal and honor. Heads turned; people moved away, looking in that direction.

Finally Esmay could see. A Serrano she hadn’t met yet stood, one hand up for silence, listening, his face more gray than brown with some shock. He put the comunit down, finally, with exaggerated care.

“Mutiny. There’s been a mutiny, on Copper Mountain, and the mutineers have ten ships already.”

“What?”

“All leaves cancelled, all personnel return to their ships at once—” His eyes sought Vida Serrano’s. “They’re calling the inactive flags back, sir; you’re to take the fastest possible route to Headquarters.”

“Who?” Heris called. “Did you get anything on who started it?”

“ Bonar Tighe was the first ship, Heris, but they took the Copper Mountain orbital station with convicts from Stack Three, and the commander there was named Bacarion.”

“Bacarion.” Heris thought a long moment. “Lepescu’s staff—one of his staff officers. It’s that bunch again, our own little Bloodhorde. And you know how Lepescu’s crowd feels about Serranos.”

Barin pulled Esmay to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. “It’s always something,” he murmured. “But I do love you, and I will marry you, and nothing —not Grandmother, or history, or mutinies, or anything—is going to stop me.”

She hugged him back, oblivious for a long, long delicious moment, vaguely aware of people moving in the room, of doors opening and closing. Finally someone coughed loudly.

“You’ve made your point, both of you,” Vida Serrano said. “But right now, you’d better get in uniform and get going.”

Esmay lifted her head from Barin’s shoulder and saw nothing but uniforms now, Serranos with carisacks and rollerbags, one after another emerging from the side rooms and heading for the door to the lift tubes.

“I do love him,” she said, right into Vida’s face. “And I’m not a traitor, and I won’t hurt him.”

Vida sighed. “There’s a lot more at stake than the happiness of you two,” she said. “But for what it’s worth, I hope it works out for you.”

Barin turned into his own room, and Esmay went back to hers, stripping quickly out of the borrowed clothes and putting on the creased uniform she’d been wearing—not even time to have it pressed. She looked at Dolcent’s clothes, considered leaving them on the bed, and then remembered having seen her, in uniform, leaving with two others. She stuffed them into her own luggage—maybe she’d run into Dolcent on a ship out of here—smoothed her wayward hair, and went out to find Barin waiting for her. In the hall, the last eight of the Serrano family were clustered at the lift tubes, waiting.

“I will never again complain about having to come to a boring family reunion,” said one, a woman who looked to be in her forties. She gave Esmay a sidelong look. “First we find out that what had seemed to be an ordinary inspection of a potential spouse is almost the lynching of an old enemy, and then there’s a mutiny.” Nervous chuckles from half the others. “Is it you, my dear, or the conjunction of Heris and Vida? Those two are certainly lightning rods.”

“Lightning and rod, I would say today.” That was a bookish-looking young man. “Sparks were definitely flying.”

“She knows that.” Another speculative look at Esmay that made her face heat up. One of the tubes opened, and they crowded in, descending so fast that Esmay felt her stomach hovering near the back of her throat.

The hotel lobby swarmed with a crowded mass of men and women in R.S.S. uniforms, some struggling at the counters, trying to check out, and others crowding to the exits. “Don’t worry about registration,” the man who had spoken said. “I’ll take care of it—we were last out, and that’s my job.”

“Cousin Andy,” Barin said, in Esmay’s ear. “Administration. Let’s go.”

The crush continued on the slidewalks and trams to the Fleet gate of the station. Every newsvid display had the story, with serious-faced commentators talking, while scenes of Copper Mountain played in the background. Esmay didn’t stop to listen, but there was a clump of people near every display.

More and more people in uniform got on at every stop. Not only Serranos had been here, and Esmay wondered how they were all going to get where they were going. At the Fleet gate, she found out.

As the long line snaked through the security gate, they were divided into crew and transients: crew members of docked ships went directly to their ships, and transients were divided by speciality and rank. Within a couple of hours, Esmay and Barin both had new orders cut, sending them out on a civilian liner to join a battle group forming for Copper Mountain. They walked back down the concourse, and found eighteen other Fleet personnel in the waiting lounge for the Cecily Marie . Thirteen more appeared before they boarded, and a knot of angry civilian passengers were by then complaining bitterly to the gate agent.

“Welcome aboard, please take your seats, you’ll be shown your cabins later—” The steward looked tense, as well he might. Thirty-three last-minute military passengers, a mutiny in Fleet, who knew what else? Esmay and Barin sat down together in the observation lounge, and she wondered if he felt as peculiar as she did. Probably not. She had come off this very ship not six hours before, and now she was back on it.

The senior Fleet officer aboard was Commander Deparre, who quickly organized the others as if the ship were Fleet and not civilian. Esmay had had a brief fantasy of spending the time with Barin—the time they had still not had, the time she had been longing for since before Brun’s rescue. But Commander Deparre wanted to impress upon them the seriousness of the situation, and be sure they grasped the importance of upholding Fleet’s reputation among the civilians of Familias Regnant.

The civilians aboard Cecily Marie , Esmay thought, were more alarmed than reassured by the way Commander Deparre controlled his little group. If they had been mutineers plotting to take over this very ship, they could not have been more ominous—always together as a group, always apart from the others. Commander Deparre, however, seemed to relish this opportunity for leadership: he was, it turned out, normally in charge of payroll processing at Sector Four HQ. He assigned Esmay responsibility for the female personnel—she was actually the senior female officer—and insisted that they should be protected from intrusion by posting a watch outside their quarters at night.

“But sir—”

“We cannot have the slightest whisper of irregularity, Lieutenant,” he said firmly. Behind him, Barin rolled his eyes expressively, but Esmay felt more ready to scream than laugh. The maidens whose virtue she was supposed to guard were, all but one bright-eyed young pivot-major, older than she was, and two of the seven were senior NCOs who had been travelling with their husbands. This made no difference to Commander Deparre, who insisted that it would be “unseemly” for them to share cabins with their husbands. Why, exactly, he would not explain, and Esmay could not understand.

At least these older women understood that the vagaries of officers like Deparre should not be blamed on their subordinates, and that argument was futile. More difficult were the sergeant and corporal who had spotted civilian men they fancied, and wheedled endlessly for a chance to chat with them.