Page 30 of Rules of Engagement

  * * *

  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.”

  Pell blinked. “You can’t mean-she actually had something to do with the capture itself? I thought that was accidental; she just happened to enter the same system where they were plundering that merchanter . . .”

  “A very handy coincidence, don’t you think? And Sera Meager had traveled widely . . . I find myself wondering why she happened to take that particular shortcut at that particular time.”

  “And you think Lieutenant Suiza told her about that? Or told them-”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,” Casea said. The chances of this rescue succeeding were, in her unspoken opinion, so close to zero as made no difference.

  “But-but does the Admiral know about this? That would be treason . . .”

  “I’m sure someone else has thought of it,” Casea said. “I’m only a lieutenant, and it occurred to me . . .”

  “But you knew her before,” he said. “Those more senior might not know what she said at the Academy.”

  “Well . . .” Casea feigned reluctance, though it was getting harder. She had trailed this particular theory across several potential helpers, and so far had no takers. Even Sesenta Veron, who had been telling his own wicked-Suiza stories, thought it was impossible.

  “I think you ought to tell the Admiral,” Pell said. Then, with returning caution, “It would help if you had any documentation.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Casea said. “The only files which might contain useful references are all well out of my clearance.”

  The following silence lasted so long she almost gave up, but at last Pell’s sluggish processors put two and two together. “Oh! You need access. Er . . . what files did you have in mind?”

  “I did just wonder if anything had come up during the investigation of that mutiny.”

  “But surely you don’t think-I mean, she was decorated for that action-”

  “I think they might have been asking questions they didn’t ask before,” Casea said. “Even if they didn’t look too carefully at the answers.”

  Pell shook his head. “It won’t be easy, Lieutenant, but I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have to see who I can talk to over in legal . . . but I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks,” Casea said, giving him the full benefit of her violet gaze and her smile. “I just want to help.”

  * * *

  Barin Serrano was used to Fleet politics; he had grown up in that dangerous sea. He navigated the tricky currents of influence at the task force head­quarters with care, noticing which competing Fleet families were taking advantage of Lord Thorn­buckle’s present annoyance with the Serrano name. The Livad­his were split, as usual: some were pro­claiming their friendship and loyalty to various Serrano seniors like his grandmother, while others were passing snide ­remarks in the junior officers’ recreation areas. Barin ignored the insults, but kept track. Someone in the family would need to know this, when he had enough data.

  In another compartment of his busy brain, he began looking for signs of trouble in other master chief petty officers. Once is accident, twice is coinci­dence . . . he was willing to admit that Zuckerman could be an accident, and the others he’d heard of only as rumors, but if they were true . . . something was going on. His captain would’ve reported it, but in the present crisis, would anyone listen?

  His duties consisted mostly of hand-carrying data cubes back and forth; he spent plenty of time kicking his heels in someone’s front office, and thus had plenty of time to chat with people with lots of time-in-grade.

  “ . . . Like you take Chief Pell,” an impossibly perky female pivot-major was saying. “I don’t know if it’s the strain of all this, or what, but he’s not the man he was last Fleet Birthday.”

  “Really?” Barin’s mental ears rose.

  “No. Why, the other day I had to look up access codes for legal investigations for him-I’m not even supposed to know the lockout sequences, but he started asking me to keep track of that six months ago-and he couldn’t remember any of them.”

  “My, my,” Barin said, his mind flickering over the reasons why Admiral Hornan’s chief administrative NCO would be poking into legal investigations now, when supposedly the admiral was after Barin’s grand­mother’s job as task force commander. Was he trying to get something on Heris Serrano, who had been through a sticky legal process? “I don’t suppose you’d know whose files he was sucking . . . ?”

  “That awful Esmay Suiza,” the pivot-major said, with a toss of her head. “The one that practically sold poor Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter to the pirates.”

  Barin managed not to leap over the desk and snap the girl’s neck, but it was an effort.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” he murmured.

  “Well, everybody knows she hated her. And I heard Lieutenant Ferradi say that if everyone had known what she knew about Lieutenant Suiza, she’d never have been allowed near Sera Meager.”

  Barin mentally moved a marker in his head to change Casea Ferradi’s label from “nuisance” to “enemy.”

  “She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” cooed the pivot-major.

  “Mmm?”

  “Lieutenant Ferradi. You’re lucky she likes you; she could have any man on the base.”

  “She probably has,” Barin said without thinking; he looked up to find her outraged, glaring at him. “-Them all thinking about her,” he amended quickly. She held the glare long enough to let him know she wasn’t convinced, then relaxed.

  “She’s a fine officer, and Chief Pell thinks so too. So does the admiral.”

  Did he . . . did he indeed. Barin went out thinking hard in several directions, and nearly ran over the fine, beautiful Lieutenant Ferradi.

  “Oh-Ensign-”

  “Yes, sir?” He managed to smile at her.

  “Have you heard anything from Lieutenant Suiza?”

  “No, sir. I believe the lieutenant is on leave, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, but-actually I wanted to talk to you about her.”

  Now it was coming. He
gripped his temper firmly by the collar, and waited.

  “I know you . . . used to be friends.”

  “We served together on Koskiusko,” Barin said.

  “I know. And I heard you were friends. And I’m sorry, but-I think you should know that continuing that friendship would not be in your best profes­sional interest.”

  As if Ferradi cared about his professional standing, other than to take advantage of his family name.

  “I have not had any contact with Lieutenant Suiza since Copper Mountain,” Barin said.

  “Very wise,” she said, approving.

  Barin headed back to Gyrfalcon’s berth, hoping that Captain Escovar was aboard. This time he knew when to call for help.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Escovar was not aboard; he was at another meeting.

  “Is there something I could answer?” asked Lieutenant Com­mander Dockery. Barin hesitated only a moment.

  “Yes, sir, quite possibly, but it would be better somewhere else.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Sten, you have the bridge,” Dockery said. And to Barin, “Come on, then-we’ll use the captain’s office.”

  Barin had just time to realize that he might be scuttling several careers, not just his own, when Dockery turned to him.

  “Out with it, then. Found another problem with master chiefs?”

  Barin’s jaw almost dropped. “As a matter of fact, sir, possibly yes. But that’s not my main concern.”

  “Which is?”

  Best get it out quickly, before he was tempted to soften it. “Sir, an officer from this ship has ­accessed records which she has no legitimate interest in, and may have given false information about someone else.”

  “Hmm . . . that’s a serious charge about an indefinite-I presume you have a name for each of these?”

  “Yes, sir.” Barin took a deep breath. “Lieutenant Ferradi talked a master chief named Pell-who incidentally is known to his juniors to be forgetting things this past year-into accessing Lieutenant Suiza’s legal records from the court-martial.”

  “It didn’t occur to you that she might have had orders to do so? She is on Admiral Hornan’s staff for the present . . .”

  “No, sir. If she’d had orders, she’d have gone through channels, not Chief Pell.”

  “And you also accuse her of giving false infor­mation about Lieutenant Suiza? What kind of false infor­mation?”

  “She’s said a lot of things about what Es-what Lieutenant Suiza was like in the Academy. Now I was too far behind to have witnessed any of this directly, but other people who were there don’t have the same account at all.”

  Dockery pursed his lips. “I know that Lieutenant Ferradi’s been interested in you, Ensign-it’s been fairly obvious. Scuttlebutt had it that you were . . . ‘falling under her spell,’ I believe, is the term I heard used most. Are you sure this isn’t just a lovers’ quarrel you’re trying to make official business? Because if so, you’re about to be in more trouble than you were in over Zuckerman.”

  “No, sir, it is not a lover’s quarrel. I have no interest in Lieutenant Ferradi and never did.”

  “Mm. The other rumor was that you had been in love with Esmay Suiza-” Barin felt his face getting hot; the exec nodded. “And so the other possibility I see is that you’re accusing Lieutenant Ferradi of unprofessional behavior toward another officer because you’re still besotted with Suiza and can’t stand to hear her criticized.”

  “Sir, I became . . . very fond of Lieutenant Suiza when we were both on Koskiusko. I think she’s a fine officer. We quarrelled at Copper Mountain, over what she’d said to Brun Meager”-and to him, though he wasn’t going to mention that at the moment-“and I haven’t seen her since. Whether I have a bad case of hero worship, which is what Lieutenant Ferradi’s told me, or a friendship, or-or something else, doesn’t really matter. What does, is whether the stories Fer­radi’s spreading about her are true.”

  “If they were true, what would you think?”

  Barin felt a pain in his chest squeezing out hope. “Then, sir-I would have to change my opinion.”

  “Barin, I’m going to tell you something, in confidence, because right now you need to know it. Casea Ferradi has been trouble for every commander she’s had-it’s why she’s at the back of her class’s promotion list-but she’s never quite managed to get herself thrown out. If Lieutenant Suiza hadn’t had that quarrel with Sera Meager, if Lord Thorn­buckle hadn’t fastened on her as the scapegoat in this mess, no one would be paying the slightest attention to Ferradi’s accusations. Now they are-and if she’s so far overreached herself as to break regulations concerning legal paperwork, we’ve got her at last. Tell me, do you know if Koutsoudas is still running scan on your cousin’s ship?”

  “I think so, sir.” Where was this leading?

  “Good. We’re going to need really good scan to catch her in the act, because she’s no dummy. And by the way, good job on finding Pell. We’ve found two others here . . . though we haven’t figured out what the problem is yet.”

  A half hour later, Barin was on his way to the berth of the Navarino, his cousin Heris’s ship. Heris was at home to family members-he had the distinct feeling that if he’d been an ensign named, perhaps, Livadhi or Hornan, he might have cooled his heels for an hour before getting in to see her.

  “You want my scan techs sucking for you? What’s wrong with yours? Escovar’s always been able to pick good people.”

  Dockery had left it to him how much to tell, but this was family. Barin made it as short as he could, emphasizing that he had thought at first it was Heris’s record Ferradi was after, in order to help Hornan wrest command of the task force from Admiral Serrano.

  “Are you involved?” The emphasis clearly meant culpable as well.

  “No, and yes,” Barin said. “Lieutenant Ferradi also happens to see me as her ticket to the Serrano dynasty.”

  “Does she now?” Heris looked suddenly very dangerous indeed, as if a sleeping falcon had waked, and aimed its deadly gaze at a target. “And what do you think she’s done, that you need Koutsoudas to discover?”

  “Gone hunting in supposedly secure legal files, and possibly altered data, sir.” That last was his own guess; Dockery hadn’t been impressed by it, but he was sure that if Ferradi would lie verbally, she would not be above fudging the records. Why else risk tinkering with those files at all?

  “Ah. Well . . . tell you what. You can have a couple of hours of Koutsoudas’ time-but I get the whole story afterwards.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And your captain owes me dinner.”

  Now how was he going to explain that one? He returned thoughtfully to Gyrfalcon’s berth, and ­reported his success to Dockery. “Koutsoudas will be along after lunch, sir,” he said at last.

  “Good. In the meantime, I want you to go destroy property and get yourself chewed out.”

  “Sir?”

  “Go find Lieutenant Ferradi-which shouldn’t be hard, as you say she’s been adherent-and figure out some way to damage her datawand. I want her to have to initialize another. I don’t care how you do it, as long as you don’t damage the lieutenant-but I will mention that just dropping one in an alcoholic beverage is not sufficient. On the other hand, the application of sufficient point pressure is.”

  Barin set out on this mission with the uneasy feeling that Dockery’s past might be more interesting than he had thought. When-and why-had Dockery discovered that dropping a datawand in alcohol wouldn’t damage it?

  Ferradi found him just as he was turning into the junior officers’ mess and recreation area. “Lunch, Ensign?” she asked brightly.

  “Oh-yes. Excuse me, Lieutenant-” He made a show of patting his pockets. “Drat!”

  “What?”

  “I was supposed to check on something for Com­mander Dockery, and then Major Carmody asked me something else, and-I forgot my data­wand. It’s back aboard. I’ll have to go back-
unless I could borrow yours, sir?”

  “You should carry it with you all the time,” Ferradi said, pulling out hers. “What did Dockery want?”

  “Spares delivery schedule,” Barin said promptly. “He says they’ve shorted on pre-dets the last four times. You probably know all about it.”

  “Oh-yeah. Everyone’s complaining.” She handed over the wand, and Barin looked around. The nearest high-speed dataport was out in the corridor.

  “I’ll just be moment,” he said. “I heard they have Lassaferan snailfish chowder today-” Sure enough, she went on to the serving tables. Snailfish chowder was a rare treat.

  Barin found the high-speed port and jammed the datawand in. Nothing happened; it lit up normally. He pulled it back out, looked around, and shoved it in as hard as he could. Its telltales came up normal again. He pulled it out and looked at the tip. Some­one had designed it to withstand normal carelessness . . . and he realized that a high-speed dataport probably had internal cushions to protect the port side of the contact as well. Fine. Now what? She’d be looking for him any moment.

  A thought occurred. He went back into the lounge, waved to Lieutenant Ferradi, who had found a seat at a small table facing the entrance, and pointed at the head, then strode quickly in that direction, as if in urgent need.

  Heads were full of hard surfaces; Barin tried one after another, between flushes, until he’d produced a crumple at the datawand’s tip by catching it between the door and its jamb, and then squashing it with the door as a lever. He’d had no idea datawands were that tough.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said to Lieutenant Ferradi, as he seated himself and handed her the wand. “Some kind of bug, I expect.”

  She had tucked it away without looking at it. “So-you’re not having chowder?”