Rules of Engagement

  This appeal cut through Esmay’s worry about her classes. “Come on in,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s something wrong with Master Chief Vecchi,” Brun said.

  “Wrong? What kind of wrong?” Esmay, her mind on their previous conversation, had been expecting a question about Fleet manners.

  “Well . . . right in the middle of the lecture today, he suddenly didn’t make sense. He was telling us how to secure a line on a derelict in zero gravity, and he got it backwards.”

  “How would you know?”

  Brun had the grace to blush. “I read the book,” she said. “His book, actually. Safety Techniques in Space Rescue.”

  “It slipped his mind,” Esmay said. “Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.”

  “But he didn’t know it. I mean, he went right on, explaining things wrong. When one of the jigs asked if he was sure, Vecchi blew up . . . then got very red, walked out, and when he came back, he said he had a headache.”

  “Maybe-”

  “It’s not the first time,” Brun said. “A week ago, he actually inserted a Briggs pin upside down.”

  “Testing you?”

  “No-it was his own line, and he was about to move on it when one of the junior instructors-Kim something. Tough little woman, about half my size but can haul me up one-handed. She did. Anyway, she noticed Vecchi’s mistake and fixed it.”

  “Um.” Esmay couldn’t think why this was her problem, except that anything that bothered Brun was her problem.

  “It bothered her, I could tell. She watched every­thing else he did, checked it all. Not the usual cross-checks, but as if he were a student.”

  “How old is Vecchi?”

  “What, are you thinking he’s just gotten old? He’s rejuved, I know that. One of the first enlisted rejuvs.”

  “When?”

  Brun looked disgusted. “I don’t have his medical records-how would I know?”

  “I just wondered . . . maybe it’s wearing off.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Brun said. Esmay raised her eyebrows and waited. “My father,” Brun went on. “He’s rejuved, so is Mother. Their friends . . . so I naturally know how it works.”

  “And?” Esmay prompted.

  “Well, the usual reason for repeating a rejuv is physical. The people I know who’ve had more than one certainly didn’t have any mental problems. Their personalities don’t change, and they’re just as alert.”

  “But wasn’t that earlier kind of rejuvenation asso­ciated with mental degeneration?”

  “Only if you tried to repeat it.” Brun made a face. “Mother’s second cousin or something did that, and it was horrible. Mother tried to keep me away from her, but you know little kids . . . I thought there must be something special in that suite if they wanted me out of it, so I sneaked in.”

  “So . . . is Vecchi anything like your mother’s cousin?”

  “Not . . . exactly. Not as severe, anyway. You don’t suppose they made a mistake and gave him the wrong kind of rejuv procedure, do you?”

  “I don’t know. It would help if we knew more about reju­venation, and also about the procedure used on Vecchi.”

  “I thought you could do something, since you’re in Fleet.”

  Esmay snorted. “Not dig into his personnel and medical records-I have no reason to see them, and it’s against regulations to snoop.”

  “Not even . . . unofficially?”

  “No.” She would stop this right here. “I’m not going to ruin my career to satisfy your curiosity. If Vecchi is impaired, someone in his chain of command will ­notice. If I observe something myself, I can report it. But I cannot-and will not-attempt to snoop in his records. You can report it, to-oh-whoever’s commanding over there. Who’s the senior ­instructor?”

  “A Commander Priallo, but she’s on leave some­where.”

  “Well, find someone else-whoever is her ­junior-”

  “I’d think you’d care,” Brun said.

  “I care-” If anything at all was wrong, but this was only Brun’s word. “But I have no right to inter­vene; this needs to go to his commander. I suppose you could tell the Commandant.”

  “Maybe I will,” Brun said, and after a moment sighed and went out. Esmay put Brun’s worries out of her mind and tackled her assignments.

  When the field exercise team assignments came out the next day, she found Vericour was right. Brun was on her team, and she had the smallest team of all-because her security would have to come along. How would that work? Would they really let her be roughed up? Or would they interfere in the exercise? And what would that do to the scoring?

  Meanwhile, Brun maintained an indecent level of energy and enthusiasm. She learned content as fast as anyone Esmay had ever known-Esmay wondered if her intellectual capacity had ever been pushed near its limit. She did not, however, seem able to learn the attitudes that were by now second nature to those young officers for whom they were not first nature. Reprimands slid off her impene­trable confidence; suggestion and example alike had no effect.

  “She’s a dilettante,” Vericour said, in another of those mealtime discussions. “Though what else could we expect from someone of her background? But she takes nothing seriously, least of all Fleet culture.”

  Anton Livadhi, a cousin of the Livadhi with whom Esmay had served on Despite, shook his head. “She takes us seriously enough . . . but she’s not one of us, and she knows it. She wants us to be serious, while she has fun.” He had his own team for the field exercise, and they were well up the chart on the evaluations for the preliminary exercises. Esmay’s team performance was only middling; Brun fluctuated between brilliant and maddening, and her security could not commit emotionally as team members were supposed to do, and still be guards. They had taken almost twice as long as the fastest team in several exercises.

  Esmay began to dread the field exercise itself, four days of intense and dangerous work in the badlands west of the base. She was reasonably sure that Brun’s guards wouldn’t let her be killed, but that left her and Jig Medars to do the work of an entire team. Two days before the exercise, she left a lecture on ship systems maintenance and found a message on her personal comunit: Lieutenant Commander Uhlis wanted to see her at her earliest convenience. Since she had an hour between classes, that meant right now.

  She could hear the angry voices from ten meters down the corridor; Uhlis’s door was ajar.

  “You have to see that it’s impossible.” Uhlis sounded annoyed.

  “Why?” Brun sounded more than annoyed; Esmay paused, wishing the door had shut firmly.

  “Because you’re already the target of assassins. The field exercise is by nature dangerous, and it’s also impossible to secure. All it would take is one person-just one, with the right skills-to pick you off.”

  “You mean to tell me that on a base covered with Fleet personnel, you can’t even let me do a simple field exercise?” Scorn in that, as if Brun expected to shame Uhlis into changing his mind. That wouldn’t work.

  “I mean we will not approve it. Nor will your father; I have already forwarded our decision, and our reasons for it, to him. He agreed.”

  “That’s-that’s-the stupidest thing I ever heard!” Brun’s voice had gone up another notch. “If I’m a target for terrorists, then it’s perfectly clear that escape and evasion is exactly what I need to know. What am I supposed to do if I get kidnapped and need to escape?”

  “The escape segment will be available-at least the urban end . . .”

  “Fine. So I’ve broken out of some provincial jail somewhere and have to cover a hundred kilometers to a safe haven, and I have no training?”

  “According to your father, you have had ample training in the basics of survival and navigation in the field, both on Sirialis and on Castle Rock. Your field skills are, in his opinion and those of our instructors who reviewed the recordings, equivalent to those of most graduates. So the escape segments should fill out your skills very well.”
>
  Silence for a moment. Esmay wondered if she could just walk past the door now, but even as she moved, Brun stormed out, silent but obviously in a rage. She broke stride when she saw Esmay.

  “You will not believe-!” she began.

  “Excuse me,” Esmay said, not wanting to hear it all again. “I overheard a little, and I have an appointment.” Brun’s eyes widened, but she moved aside. Esmay edged past Brun and into the office, where a grim-faced Commander Uhlis looked ready to melt bulkheads with his glare. “Sir, Lieutenant Suiza ­repor­ting-”

  “Close the door,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” Esmay shut the door firmly, aware of Brun hovering outside.

  Uhlis took a deep breath, then another, and then looked at her with less intensity. “I wanted to talk to you about your team assignment,” he said. “If you overheard much of that”-he nodded at the door-“then you know we have concerns about security. Up until last night, we still had orders to accommodate Meager and include her in all the courses, including the field exercise. However, since we now have permission from the highest levels to exclude her and her bodyguards, we need to rearrange team assignments. We’re going to split the exercise, and you’ll be assigned to a new team, acting commander.” He gave her a dangerous smile. “I understand you do very well at motivating strangers, Lieutenant.”

  So the camaraderie she’d built up with her team over the past week would be no use to her-and the team she went to might well resent losing its familiar commander. But at least she wouldn’t have Brun to worry about.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “Thank me afterwards,” he said. “If you can. Remember, your score depends on not only your own successful evasion, but how many of your team make it.”

  Her new team waited for her in the afternoon skills exercise. They had a bored, wary look . . . they were, she realized, the team that Anton Livadhi had led. And Anton had remarked, just too audibly, that he had his doubts about the source of Suiza’s success. “Serrano pet” was a phrase she’d been meant to overhear; she had ignored it, but these people hadn’t. Two other women, four men; she ran the names over quickly in her mind. All but one had been in her class in the Academy, but she hadn’t seen any of them for years, and she hadn’t been close to them even then.

  That afternoon’s exercise was deceptively simple. From a scatter of raw materials, improvise a way to cross a series of “natural” barriers. Each obstacle required not only teamwork but also innovative think­ing . . . none of the poles were long enough, none of the ropes strong enough, none of the assorted other objects were obviously meant for the tasks at hand. Esmay tried being forthright and cheerful, as recom­mended in the leadership manual, but only some of her new team responded. Lieu­tenant Taras was inclined to be pettish if her ideas were not accepted the first time; Lieutenant Paradh and Jig Bearlin could always think of ways for things not to work. By the time the period was over, they had completed only four of the five obstacles. Esmay was aware of the frowning instructor, ticking off points on his chart. This team had been ranked first or second in every exercise; now they wouldn’t be.

  It was possible to request overtime, though it was rarely done because it imposed a twenty percent penalty on the entire score. Esmay raised her hand; Taras made a sound that might have been a groan. Esmay rounded on her. “We are going to finish this, Lieutenant, if we have to stay here all night-”

  “We can’t win,” Bearlin said. “We might as well take the eighty percent we’ve got-”

  “And when you need that other twenty percent of experience, where are you planning to get it?” Esmay asked. “We’re completing this exercise, and we’re doing it now.”

  She expected more resistance, but despite some sidelong grumpy looks, they tackled the final obstacle with more energy than they had any of the others. Five minutes later, they had solved the problem-and ­although Esmay halfway expected them to dump her in the mud, they got her over the pit with the same care they expended on each other.

  “Good choice,” the instructor told them afterwards. “You wouldn’t have got eighty percent before-you were about as effective as a jug of eelworms-but you’ve got it now.”

  By the time they got back to the mess hall, Esmay felt she had a chance with this group-a slim chance, but a real one. If only she’d had a few more days before the field exercise.

  The next day’s prelims went better; her new team seemed willing to work together again, and they were back up to third in the daily ratings. Esmay went to her quarters to pack her gear for the field exercise, and try to snatch a few hours of sleep before time to leave.

  She had everything laid out on her bunk when her doorchime rang. Stifling a curse, she went to open it. Barin might have stopped by, though she’d hardly seen him for days, except with Brun. She hoped it was Barin. But instead it was Brun, and a very angry Brun at that.

  “I suppose you’re proud of yourself!” Brun said first.

  “Excuse me?” What was the girl talking about?

  “You never did want me on your team; you haven’t liked me from the beginning.”

  “I-”

  “And now you’ve made sure I can’t do the field exercise, so you can take over a top team . . .”

  “I did not,” Esmay said, beginning a slow burn. “They just assigned me-”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” Brun said, flopping onto the bunk and making a mess of Esmay’s careful arrangement. “You’re the heroic Lieutenant Suiza-they want you to shine, and they’ve arranged it. Never mind what it does to other people’s plans . . .”

  “Like yours?” Esmay said. She could feel her pulse speeding up.

  “Like mine. Like Anton’s. Like Barin’s.”

  “Barin’s!”

  “You know, he’s really quite fond of you,” Brun said, idly prodding a stack of concentrate bars until they collapsed. Two slid off onto the floor. Esmay gritted her teeth and picked them up without com­ment. She did not want this. “I was trying to find out why you’re such a cold fish, and I thought he might know-and I’ll bet you didn’t even know the poor boy’s half in love with you.”

  Didn’t she . . . ? Esmay contemplated for a ­moment the probable result of pulling out Brun’s tousled gold curls by the roots.

  “Of course, such an upright professional as yourself would never stoop to dally with mere ensigns,” Brun went on, in a tone that could have removed several layers of paint from a bulkhead. “He, like the rest of us, is far beneath your notice-unless someone gets in your way.” This time she picked up a water bottle and opened and shut the spout.

  “That is not fair,” Esmay said. “I didn’t have anything to do with your being taken out of the field exercise-”

  “I suppose you want me to believe you support me?”

  “No, but that’s not the same thing. It wasn’t my decision to make.”

  “But if it had been-” Brun gave her a chal­lenging glare.

  “It wasn’t. What might have been doesn’t matter.”

  “So true. You might have been a friend; you might have been Barin’s lover; instead-”

  “What do you mean ‘might have been’ someone’s lover?” Even as angry as she was, she could not say Barin’s name in that context. Not to this woman.

  “You don’t expect him to hang around wor­shipping your footsteps forever, do you? Just in case you might come down from your pinnacle and notice him? Even a bad case of hero worship yields at last to time.”

  This was her worst fear, right here and now. Had it been only hero worship? Was it . . . over?

  “And you, of course, were right there to help him over this unwarranted fixation . . . ?”

  “I did my part,” Brun said, flipping out the gold curls with a gesture that left no doubt what she meant. Esmay had an instant vision of them strewn about the room, little gold tufts of hair like fleece on the shed floor after shearing. “He’s intelligent, witty, fun, not to mention incredibly handsome-I’d have thought you’d no
tice-”

  A light of unnatural clarity seemed to illuminate the room; Esmay felt weightless with pure rage. This . . . this to be pursuing Barin. This to displace her, to ruin her relationship with Barin. A young woman who boasted openly of her sexual conquests, who refused to abide by any rules, who claimed to be unafraid of rape because “it’s just mechanics; and aside from that, no one can make me pregnant.” She was like Casea Ferradi, without Ferradi’s excuse of a colonial background.

  Hardly conscious of what she was doing, she reached out and lifted Brun off the bunk, and set her against the wall, as easily as she could have picked up a small child.

  “You . . .” She could not say the words she was really thinking; she struggled to find something hurtful enough. “You playgirl,” she said finally. “You come bouncing in here, all full of your genetically engin­eered brains and beauty, showing it all off, playing with us-playing with the people who are risking their lives to keep you and your wonderful family alive and safe.”

  Brun opened her mouth, but Esmay gave her no chance; the words she had longed to say came pouring out.

  “You wanted to be friends, you said-what did you ever do but get in my way, take up my time, and go lusting after anyone who caught your fancy? It never occurred to you that some of us have a job to do here-that people’s lives, not just ours, will depend on how we do it. No. You want to go play in Q-town, someone should go with you . . . it doesn’t matter to you if that means learning less. After all, what does it matter if you pass a course or flunk it? It’s not your life on the line. You don’t care whether you ruin Barin’s career or not-” Not the way she herself cared; not the way she agonized over it. “You think your money and your family make it right for you to have anyone you want.”

  Brun was white to the lips. Esmay didn’t care. Her anxiety about the next day, her exhaustion from weeks of extra work-all had vanished, in righteous rage. “You have the morality of a mare in heat; you have no more spiritual depth than a water drop on a window. And someday you will need that, and I promise you-I promise you, Miss Rich and Famous-you will wish you had it, and you will know I’m right. Now get out, and stay out. I have work to do.”