Elizabeth Moon - Rules of Engagement

The boys were in the boys’ wing; Prima despatched one of the other women to fetch them, while she herself led them to the nursery to pick up Brun’s twins. They seemed healthy, happy babies, scooting about on the floor in a way that suggested they would soon be crawling.

“Simplicity . . .” Hazel breathed, nodding toward a young woman who sat rocking her baby. The girl looked up with a shy smile; her eyes widened when she saw the others. Hazel picked up one twin, and Prima carried the other; by the time they were back to the front hall, the boys were there, looking worried and uncertain.

“Paolo!” Brandy said. “We’re going home!” She reached out to hug him, but he moved aside.

“I don’t think—”

“You need to hear this, Ensign—” That in his earplug. Automatically, he switched audio to the speakers of the cube reader.

“—Satan’s snares!” the man in the blue robe was saying. “God’s judgement has fallen on those Rangers, and on their families, for their sins. Suffer not the wicked to prosper, nor the ungodly woman to speak—”

“He means you,” Professor Meyerson said to Prima. “You’re in danger now.”

“We must retake the Rangers’ houses, and cleanse them of the filth of contamination—destroy the infidels with holy fire—”

“Not that there’s anything really to worry about,” the marine major said; his voice overrode the other man’s on the com. “All they’ve got is old-fashioned small arms and big knives. You’ll be safe enough in the ground transport—”

“No,” Hazel said. “They have whatever was on Elias Madero . They said so, when they were talking after I was captured.”

“What was on Elias Madero ?” Barin asked. “Ship weapons?”

“I don’t know, but something bad, something they’d stolen from Fleet.”

A cold wave ran down Barin’s spine, as if someone had swiped along it with a piece of ice. The Guernesi had talked about arms traffickers and stolen weapons . . . and Esmay had mentioned that her captain was concerned about missing nuclear warheads.

“Major, it could be a lot worse than that—these guys may have our missing nukes.”

A pause, in which the ranting voice went on about sin and defilement and tyranny. Then: “I knew we shouldn’t have brought a Serrano along. Things always get interesting with a Serrano along. All right, Ensign, suppose you tell the admiral while I see what I can do to keep these guys from using whatever it is they’ve got.”

Barin had just presence of mind to sever the connection to the cube reader’s speakers, then switched channels to contact Navarino in orbit.

“We’re on it,” he was told first. “Monitoring all local transmissions . . . and we have scan working on locating any fissionables. Get those kids out now, if you can.”

“I don’t want to be another man’s servant,” Prima said suddenly. “I don’t want my children brought up in another man’s house. . . .”

Barin spared her a glance, but no more; he was trying to patch into ship’s scan and see if he could spot anything. Then Prima grabbed his arm.

“You—your grandmother is really the commander? And you are a man of her family—you must give me your protection.”

“I’m trying,” Barin said.

“I want to go,” Prima said. “Me, all my children. Take me to my husband.”

Barin stared at her, startled out of his immediate concern. “Take you—? You mean, to the ship?”

“Yes. That man—” She pointed at the now-blank screen. “He will give me to someone else; he may tell them to mute me just because I have talked with you—and if he knew I had killed Jed last night, he would certainly do so.” Heavily, with no grace at all, she knelt in front of Barin. “I claim you as my protector, in place of my husband.”

Barin glanced around; Professor Meyerson had her usual expression of alert interest, and the guards looked frankly amused. “I—let me talk to my grandmother,” he said. When in doubt, ask help.

“No—it is you I claim.”

“She means it,” Meyerson said. “And she’ll probably do something drastic if you don’t agree.”

And he had always wanted command track. Well, he had it now. “Fine,” he said. “You’re under my protection. Get your household together—”

“I can’t speak for the other wives,” Prima said.

“Would he give them away? Mute them ?”

“Yes . . .”

“Then you jolly well can speak for them, and you have. Get them together; don’t bring anything but warm bodies.” He chinned his comunit. “Major, we’re going to be bringing out the whole household. I don’t even know how many—” He looked at Hazel, who shook her head. Even she didn’t know. “More transports,” he said, trying to think if they’d have shuttle space. If they crammed in, if nobody blew the shuttles on the way up—

People started crowding into the front hall: women, carrying babies; girls leading younger girls, boys pushing younger boys ahead of them, and one man—a narrow, angular fellow that Barin disliked on sight. They all stared at Barin and the guards, but there was less noise than he expected. The girls were all looking silently at the floor; the boys were all staring silently, with obvious awe and longing, at the soldiers’ weapons.

Prima made her way through the crowd and dipped her head to him, which made Barin acutely uncomfortable.

“May I speak?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“I have sent messengers to the other Rangers’ houses—by the women’s doors—to their ladies.”

“What? No!” But even as he said it, he realized it must be so. “You think—”

“You said I could speak for the other wives. As you are my protector, so you are theirs, through me; it is your people who killed their husbands, after all.”

Barin looked over the crowd that filled the hall from side to side, and was packed into the rear passages—somewhere between fifty and a hundred people, he was sure, and made the easy calculation.

“We need more shuttles,” he murmured to himself. And what of the male relatives of the other Rangers, who were surely in their houses as—what was his name? That fellow Ranger Bowie had been talking to—had been here. Wouldn’t they resist? He could not possibly get that many people out of a city in riot, without casualties. A child whimpered, and someone shushed it.

“What’s your situation, Ensign?”

Waiting for inspiration , he could have said. Instead, he gave his report as succinctly as possible, into the hissing void of the comunit, which hissed emptily at him for long enough to make him worry. Then his grandmother’s voice in his ear.

“Am I to understand that you have undertaken the evacuation to our ships of the entire civilian population of that misbegotten excuse for a city?”

“No sir: only about five hundred of them. Rangers’ households.”

“And upon whose authority?”

“It . . . had become a matter of family honor, sir. And Familias honor.”

“I see. In that case, I suppose we are bound to support your actions, if only to have you present and accounted for when the bill comes in.” His grandmother, according to rumor which he had never cared to test, could remove a laggard officer’s hide in a single spiraling strip, from crown of head to tip of toe, without raising her voice. He felt dangerously close to finding out whether she would use its full powers on a callow young descendant.

“Contact!” That was the marine major in charge of the landing party. “We are being fired upon; say again: we are receiving hostile fire.”

“Engagement code: open green.” His grandmother’s voice when speaking to the others was flat and edgeless. “Say again: engagement code is open green.”