Elizabeth Moon: Winning Colors

She had forgotten that, if she’d ever known. Implants carried the original prescription codes; that had something to do with proving malpractice. Sikar touched the implant to a flat plate on the tool’s side, and laughed harshly.

“As we suspected. This is no Finnvardian assembly worker. This is a Rejuvenant, child of Rejuvenants, our mortal enemies. This is one who would enslave our children to her pleasure, for all time.”

“No—” She got that out in a miserable squeak before Sikar slapped her. It hurt more than she had imagined.

“I hate you!” That was Irena, who had come up behind her and now clouted her head. “You lied to me—you were never my friend—”

“I was—” But no one was listening. Shouts, growls, curses, those hands tight on her arms, and Sikar staring at her with utter contempt.

“Rich girl,” he said. “This is not a game.”

Before she died, she wanted to revise her earlier opinion, and say that some conspirators tasted of neither vanilla nor chocolate, but of blood. But she could not speak, and no one would have listened if she had.

Midafternoon already, and they’d hardly made a dent in the day’s work. Lord Thornbuckle leaned back in his chair and stretched. “I could be angry with Kemtre about this, too: because he was an idiot, I have to sit here doing his work.”

“You wanted the job.” Kevil Mahoney, formerly an independent and successful attorney, had agreed to help his friend in the political crisis left by the king’s resignation. “Am I supposed to sympathize? I could be in court, showing off—”

“As if you’d miss it. No, we’re doing the right thing, if we can pull it off.”

“If? The eminent Lord Thornbuckle has doubts?”

“Your old friend Bunny has doubts. Nothing makes a rabbit nervous like the predator who pretends not to see him. We haven’t heard anything from the Benignity; by now, I expected at least one raid.”

“Don’t stare at that fox too long, my friend: there are wolves in the world too.”

“As if I didn’t—” He paused, as his deskcomp chimed, and flicked the controls. “Yes?”

“Sorry, milord. An urgent signal from Patchcock. Shall I transfer, or bring it in?”

“Bring it,” Bunny said. “And the coffee, if it’s ready.” He would have that, at least, no matter what the trouble was.

One of the senior clerks—Poisson, he thought the name was—came in with a cube, followed by two juniors with a trolley. Poisson waited until they had left before handing over the cube.

“It’s partly encrypted, milord, but I read the part that wasn’t. It’s the same region on Patchcock where the troubles were before, and apparently a Family heir has gone missing.”

Family. Bunny could hear the capital letter that elevated mere genetic relationship to political power—not just a family, but a Family, one of the Chairholding Families.

“Ottala Morreline, the second oldest but designated heir of—”

“Oscar and Vitille Morreline, Vorey sept of the Consellines. Right.” One of his own daughter’s schoolmates. He remembered Bubbles—no, she was calling herself Brun now—talking about her. Brun hadn’t liked her; he remembered that much, though he didn’t remember why. The Consellines . . . that extended family had over a dozen Chairs in Council; the Vorey sept, though the minor branch, had five. The Morrelines held four of them. “Kidnapped?” he asked.

“Ah . . . no. It seems she had disguised herself as a Finnvardian and infiltrated a workers’ group—”

“A Morreline?” The Morrelines had, for the past two centuries at least, chosen to emphasize their darker ancestry. And the video of Ottala that came up when he inserted the cube showed a dark-skinned, dark-haired young woman. A beauty, Bunny noted, remembering now that he had seen her at some social function a year or so before. She had matured, as Brun had, showing more bone structure. But how had this girl imitated a pale, blue-eyed Finnvardian?

“The family located the skinsculptor. She bought a four hundred day depigmentation package, bleached her hair, wore blue contact lenses—”

“Why didn’t she get an eye job while she was at it? What if she’d dropped a lens?” That was Kevil Mahoney, cross-examining as usual.

Poisson shrugged. “I couldn’t say, sir. When she didn’t turn up for her younger brother’s seegrin , the family popped her emergency cache, and found her last report. She included a vid of herself after she adopted the disguise, and said she planned to involve herself in a workers’ organization to see what it felt like.”

“Ummm.” Bunny watched the cube readout. Ottala’s disguised self looked very different, he had to admit—if not quite Finnvardian, at least nothing like the Morreline heir. He wondered if she’d had a temporary bone job too—her face seemed to have changed shape as well as color. According to the readout, she had had no trouble buying false IDs, and getting a job in an assembly factory on Patchcock. But she’d dropped out of sight, without notice to her work supervisor or anyone else, some forty days before her family came looking.

“The problem is, milord, that it’s Patchcock. . . .” Bunny looked up.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know if you knew . . . all about Patchcock.”

“Not really. It was a nasty situation, is all I know, and someone in the Regular Space Service messed up in a major way.”

“I think perhaps you need to read the background briefs.” That was far more assertive than Poisson’s usual approach, and Bunny stared.

“Very well. If you’ll—”

“Here they are.” A stack of cubes it would take him hours to wade through, all marked with the security code that meant they were encrypted and could be read only with all the room’s security systems engaged. Bunny glanced at Kevil, and sighed.

“Don’t remind me that I volunteered for this job. I could cheerfully strangle his late majesty.” Poisson, he noticed, had the look he had always imagined concealed satisfaction at landing responsibility on someone else.

The Patchcock affair, when they finally got it straight late that night, explained a lot of things . . . many more than were explicated in the cubes, revealing as those were.

“That had to be the stupidest thing Ottala could have done,” Kevil said, summing up the latest chapter in the story. “Going undercover in a workers’ organization would be risky enough right here in Castle Rock—but on Patchcock! Didn’t she know any history?”

“We didn’t,” Bunny pointed out. “If she thought it was just a military blunder, if she didn’t know how her family came to gain control of the investments there—”

“She must be dead, you know,” Kevil said. “If she were alive, she’d have refreshed her emergency cache.”

“Captive? Held for ransom?”

“No. My criminal experience tells me she’s dead. They found her out somehow, stripped her of any information they could pry out, and killed her. Eventually the Morrelines will figure that out too, and then—then we’ll have real trouble.”

“Yes.” Bunny thought about the Morrelines: he knew them in the casual way that all the Chairholders knew each other, but they were not really in his set. They didn’t hunt, for one thing. But he had dealt with them more than once in business, and in the Council—they were tough, aggressive, and very sore losers. That this could be a self-description he recognized, but that didn’t make the prospect of angry Morrelines any more appealing.

“If we send Fleet back in there, it will only make things worse—”

“If she’s dead already—” If she was dead already, why bother? But he had to know what Ottala Morreline had found, even if he couldn’t bring her back. He sighed, and stretched his back out. The whole situation he’d inherited— jumped into , he reminded himself—felt dangerously mushy. Too many things he didn’t know, past and present. Too many ways to make mistakes even if he did know everything. And the image of his daughter Brun intruded—Brun had already involved herself in wild adventures, working her way across Familias space as an ordinary spacer. If Brun heard about this, she would insist on going herself to find out about Ottala. Where could he park her safely?