Elizabeth Moon - Serrano 4 - Once A Hero

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CHAPTER ONE
R.S.S. Harrier, near Xavier
Esmay Suiza had done her best to clean up before reporting as ordered to the admiral aboard her
flagship, but the mutiny and the following battle had left her little time. She had showered, and
run her uniform through the cycler, but it wasn't her dress uniform—the fight aboard Despite had
put holes through interior bulkheads and started innumerable small fires, including one in the
junior officers' storage compartment. She herself, though clean, had not slept well in . . .
however many days it had been. She knew her eyes were bloodshot and sticky with fatigue; her hands
trembled. She had the stomach-clenching feeling that her best wasn't good enough.
Admiral Serrano looked like an older edition of Captain Serrano, the same compact trim frame, the
same bronze skin. Here the dark hair was streaked silver, and a few lines marked the broad
forehead, but she gave an impression of crackling energy held just in check.
"Lieutenant Junior Grade Suiza reporting, sir." At least her voice didn't shake. Those few days of
command had ironed out the uneasy flutter she used to struggle against.
"Have a seat, Lieutenant." The admiral had no expression Esmay could read. She sat in the
appointed chair, glad that her knees held and she made it a controlled descent. When she was down
safely, the admiral nodded, and went on. "I have reviewed your summary of events aboard Despite.
It seems to have been a very . . . difficult . . . time."
"Yes, sir." That was safe. In a world of danger, that was always safe; so she had been taught in
the Academy and her first ship postings. But her memory reminded her that it wasn't always true,
that a "Yes, sir," to Captain Hearne had been treason, and a "Yes, sir," to Major Dovir had been
mutiny.
"You do understand, Lieutenant, that it is mandatory for all officers participating in a mutiny to
stand before a court to justify their actions?" That in a voice almost gentle, as if she were a
child. She would never be a child again.
"Yes, sir," she said, grateful for the gentleness even though she knew it would do her no lasting
good. "We—I—have to take responsibility."
"That's right. And you, because you are the senior surviving officer, and the one who ended up in
command of the ship, will bear the brunt of this investigation and the court." The admiral paused,
looking at her with that quiet, expressionless face; Esmay felt cold inside. They had to have a
scapegoat, is that what it meant? She would be to blame for the whole thing, even though she
hadn't even known, at first—even though the senior officers—now dead—had tried to keep the
youngsters out of it? Panic filled in a quick sketch of her future: dismissed, disgraced, thrown
out of Fleet and forced to return home. She wanted to argue that it wasn't fair, but she knew
better. Fairness wasn't the issue here. The survival of ships, which depended on the absolute
obedience of all to the captain . . . that was the issue.
"I understand," she said finally. She almost understood.
"I won't tell you that such a court is merely a formality, even in a case like this," the admiral
said. "A court is never a mere formality. Things always come out in courts to the detriment of
everyone concerned—things that might not matter ordinarily. But in this case, I don't want you to
panic. It is clear from your report, and that of other personnel—" Which, Esmay hoped, might mean
the admiral's niece, "—that you did not instigate the mutiny, and that there is a reasonable
probability that the mutiny will be held to be justified." The knot in Esmay's stomach loosened
slightly. "Obviously, it is necessary to remove you from command of Despite."
Esmay felt her face heating, more relief than embarrassment. She was so tired of having to figure
out how to ask the senior NCOs what to do next without violating protocol. "Of course, sir," she
said, with a little more enthusiasm than she meant to show. The admiral actually smiled now.
"Frankly, I'm surprised that a jig could take over Despite and handle her in battle—let alone get
off the decisive shot. That was good work, Lieutenant."
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"Thank you, sir." She felt herself going even redder, and embarrassment overcame reticence.
"Actually, it was the crew—'specially Master Chief Vesec—they knew what to do."
"They always do," the admiral said. "But you had the sense to let them, and the guts to come back.
You're young; you made mistakes of course—" Esmay thought of their first attempt to join the
fight, the way she'd insisted on too high an insertion velocity and forced them to blow past. She
hadn't known then about the glitch in the nav computer, but that was no excuse. The admiral went
on, recapturing her attention. "But I believe you have the root of the matter in you. Stand your
court, take your medicine, whatever it is, and—good luck to you, Lieutenant Suiza." The admiral
stood; Esmay scrambled up to shake the hand extended to her. She was being dismissed; she didn't
know where she was going or what would happen next, but—but she felt a warm glow where the cold
knot had been.
As the escort outside made clear, where she was going was a quarantined section of officers'
country on the flagship. Peli and the few other junior officers were already there, stowing their
duffels in the lockers and looking glum.
"Well, she didn't eat you alive," Peli said. "I suppose my turn's coming. What's she like?"
"A Serrano," Esmay said. That should be enough; she wasn't about to discuss an admiral's character
on board a ship. "There's a court coming—but you know that." They had not so much talked about it,
as touched the subject and flinched away.
"At the moment," Peli said, "I'm just as glad you had the seniority and not me. Though we're all
in trouble."
She had been glad to lay down command, but just for a moment she wanted it back, so she could tell
Peli to be quiet. And so she would have something to do. It took only a minute or two to stow her
own meager duffel in the compartment she'd been assigned, and only another to wonder how much the
officer evicted from it would resent having to double up with someone else. Then she was faced
with blank walls—or an empty passage—or the cluster of fellow mutineers in the tiny wardroom which
was all the common space they would have until the admiral decreed otherwise. Esmay lay back on
her bunk and wished she could turn off the relentless playback in her head, that kept showing her
the same gruesome scenes over and over and over. Why did they seem worse each time?
"Of course they're listening," Peli said. Esmay paused in the wardroom entrance; four of the
others were there, listening to Peli. He looked up, his glance including her in the conversation.
"We have to assume they're monitoring everything we say and do."
"That's standard," Esmay said. "Even in normal situations." One of her own stomach-clenching fears
was that the forensic teams sent to Despite would find out that she talked in her sleep. She
didn't know, but if she had, and if she had talked during those nightmares . . .
"Yes, but now they're paying attention," Peli said.
"Well, we didn't do anything wrong." That was Arphan, a mere ensign. "We weren't traitors, and we
didn't lead the mutiny either. So I don't see where they can do anything to us."
"Not to you, no," Peli said, with an edge of contempt. "From this, if from nothing else, ensigns
are safe. Although you could die of fright facing the court."
"Why should I face a court?" Arphan, like Esmay, had come to the Academy from a non-Service
family. Unlike Esmay, he had come from an influential non-Service Family, with friends who held
Seats in Council, and expected family clout to get him out of things.
"Regulations," Peli said crisply. "You were a commissioned officer serving aboard a vessel on
which a mutiny occurred: you will stand before a court." Esmay didn't mind Peli's brutal
directness so much when it was aimed at someone else, but she knew he'd be at her soon enough.
"But don't worry," Peli went on. "You're unlikely to spend very long at hard labor. Esmay and I,
on the other hand—" he looked up at her and smiled, a tight unhappy smile. "Esmay and I are the
senior surviving officers. Questions will be asked. If they decide to make an example, we are the
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ones to be made an example of. Jigs are an eminently expendable class."
Arphan looked at both of them, and then, without another word, squeezed past two of the others,
and Esmay at the door.
"Avoiding contamination," Liam said cheerfully. He was another jig, junior to Peli but part of
Peli's "expendable class."
"Just as well," Peli said. "I don't like whiners. D'you know, he wanted me to press the admiral
for damage payments to replace a ruined uniform?"
Esmay could not help thinking what the necessary replacements were going to do to her small
savings.
"And he's rich," Liam said. Liam Livadhi, Service to the core and for many generations, on both
sides of the family. He could afford to sound cheerful; he probably had a dozen cousins who had
just outgrown whatever uniforms he needed.
"Speaking of the court," Esmay made herself say. "What are the uniform protocols?"
"Uniforms!" Peli glared at her. "You too?"
"For the court, Peli, not for display!" It came out sharper than she intended, and he blinked in
surprise.
"Oh. Right." She could practically see the little wheels flickering behind his eyes, calculating,
remembering. "I don't really know; the only things I've seen were those cubes back in the Academy,
in military law classes. And that was usually just the last day, the verdict. I don't know if they
wore dress the whole time."
"The thing is," Esmay said, "if we need new uniforms made, we have to have time for it." Officers'
dress uniforms, unlike regular duty uniforms, were handmade by licensed tailors. She did not want
to appear before a court in something non-regulation.
"Good point. There wasn't much left of the stuff in that compartment, so we have to assume that
all our dress uniforms were damaged." He looked up at her. "You'll have to ask about it, Esmay;
you're still the senior."
"Not any more." Even as she said it, she knew she was, for this purpose. Peli didn't quite sneer,
but he didn't offer to help out, either.
"On this, you are the one. Sorry, Es', but you have to."
Asking about the uniforms brought her to the notice of the paper-pushers again. As captain—even
for those few days—she had the responsibility to sign off on all the innumerable forms required.
"Not the death letters," Lieutenant Commander Hosri said. "The admiral felt that the families
would prefer to have those signed by a more senior officer who could better explain the
circumstances." Esmay had completely forgotten that duty: the captain must write to the family of
any crew members who died while assigned to the ship. She felt herself blushing. "And there are
other major reports which the admiral feels should be deferred until Forensics has completed its
examination. But you left a lot of routine stuff undone, Suiza."
"Yes, sir," Esmay said, her heart sinking again. When could she have done it? How could she have
known? The excuses raced through her mind and out again: no excuses were enough.
"Have your officers fill out these forms—" he handed her a sheaf of them. "Turn them in, completed
and countersigned by you, within forty-eight hours, and I'll forward them to the admiral's staff
for approval. If approved, that will authorize officers to arrange for replacements of
uniforms—and yes, that will include Fleet authorization to forward measurements to registered
tailors, so they can get started. Now, we need to deal with the basic reports that should have
been filed, or ready to file, at the time when you were relieved of command of Despite."
The junior officers were not delighted with the forms; some of them procrastinated, and Esmay
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found herself having to nag them to finish the paperwork by the deadline. "None too early,"
grunted Hosri's senior clerk, when Esmay brought the reports in. He glanced at the clock. "What'd
you do, wait until the last minute?"
She said nothing; she didn't like this clerk, and she had had to work with him for two straight
shifts on the incomplete reports Hosri thought she should do. Just let it be over with, she told
herself, even though she knew that the reports were the least of her problems. While she worked on
those, the other young officers faced daily sessions with investigators determined to find out
exactly how it was that a R.S.S. patrol ship had been captained by a traitor, and then embroiled
in mutiny. Her turn would come next.
Forensics had swarmed over the Despite, stripping the records from the automatic surveillance
equipment, searching every compartment, questioning every survivor, examining all the bodies in
the ship's morgue. Esmay could only imagine that search, from the questions they asked each day.
First with no visual cues at all, when they asked her to explain, moment by moment, where she had
been and what she had seen, heard, and done when Captain Hearne took the ship away from Xavier.
Later, with a 3-D display of the ship, they led her through it again. Exactly where had she been?
Facing which way? When she said she saw Captain Hearne the last time, where was Hearne, and what
had she been doing?
Esmay had never been good at this sort of thing. She found out quickly that she had apparently
perjured herself already: she could not, from where she remembered she'd been sitting, have seen
Lt. Commander Forrester come out of the cross-corridor the way she'd said. It was, the
interrogator pointed out, physically impossible to see around corners without special instruments.
Had she had any? No. But her specialty had been scan. Was she sure she had not rigged something
up? And again here—lines of her earlier testimony moved down the monitor alongside the image of
the ship. Could she explain how she had gotten from her own quarters back here all the way forward
and down two decks in only fifteen seconds? Because there was a clear picture of her—she
recognized herself with familiar distaste—in the access corridor to the forward portside battery
at 18:30:15, when she had insisted she was in her own quarters for the 18:30 duty report.
Esmay had no idea, and said so. She had made a habit of being in her quarters for that duty
report; it had meant that she didn't have to linger in the junior officers' wardroom and join the
day's gossip, or make her report with the others. Surely she would have done so even more readily
with the rumors then sweeping the ship. She didn't like rumors; rumors got you in trouble. People
fought over rumors and then were in more trouble. She hadn't known that Captain Hearne was a
traitor—of course she hadn't—but she had had an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she
had tried not to think about it.
Not until she'd been dragged through it again did she remember that someone had paged her and told
her to come initial the daily scan log of the warhead lockers. Checking the automatic scans had
been part of her daily routine. She'd insisted that she had done it, and whoever it was had
insisted she hadn't, and finally she'd gone down to see. Who had called her? She didn't remember.
And what had she found when she got there?
"I'd made an error entering the scan code," Esmay said. "At least—I guess that's what it was."
"What do you mean?" This interrogator had the most neutral voice Esmay had ever heard; it made her
nervous for reasons she could not define.
"Well . . . the number was wrong. Sometimes that happened. But usually it wouldn't enter; it would
signal a conflict."
"Explain, please."
Esmay struggled on, caught between the social desire not to bore the listener, and the innocent's
need to explain fully why she wasn't guilty. She had entered, during her rotation, thousands of
scan log codes. Sometimes she made mistakes; everyone did. She did not say, what she had long
thought, which was how silly it was to have officers entering codes by hand, when there were
perfectly decent, inexpensive code readers which could enter them directly. When she made a
mistake, the coder usually locked up, refusing entry. But occasionally, it would accept the error
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code, only to hang up when the next shift compared its code to hers.
"Then they'd call me, and I'd have to come myself and reset the code, and initial the change. That
must be what happened."
"I see." A pause during which she could feel the sweat springing out on her neck. "And from what
station did you make the 1830 report, then?"
She had no idea. Going from her quarters—she could see the route clearly in her mind, but she
could not remember calling in. Yet if she hadn't, someone would have logged it . . . except that
was when, up on the bridge, the mutineers made their move against Captain Hearne. Sometime around
then, anyway.
"I don't know that I did," she said. "I don't remember that I didn't. I got to the weapons bay,
reset the codes, initialed them, and came back to my quarters, and then—" By then the mutiny had
spread beyond the bridge, and the senior mutineers had sent someone down to keep the juniors out
of it if they could. That hadn't worked; there had been more traitors than that.
The investigator nodded shortly, and went on to something else. To a series of somethings else.
Finally, over many sessions, they worked their way up to the time when she herself was in charge.
Could she explain her decision to return to Xavier system and try to fight a battle against odds,
with no senior officers and substantial casualties?
Only briefly, and obliquely, had she allowed herself to think of her decision as heroic. Reality
wouldn't let her dwell on it. She hadn't known what she was doing; her inexperience had caused too
many deaths. Even though it came out all right in the end, in one way, it was not all right for
those who had died.
If it wasn't heroic, what was it? It looked stupid now, foolhardy. Yet . . . her crew, despite her
inexperience, had blown away the enemy flagship.
"I . . . remembered Commander Serrano," she said. "I had to come back. After sending a message, so
in case—"
"Gallant, but hardly practical," said this interrogator, whose voice had a twang she associated
with central Familias planets. "You are a protégée of Commander Serrano?"
"No." She dared not claim that; they had served on the same ship only once, and had not been
friends. She explained, to someone who surely knew better than she, how wide the gap between a raw
ensign of provincial background, and a major rising on the twin plumes of ability and family.
"Not a . . . er . . . particular friend?" This with a meaningful smirk.
Esmay barely kept herself from snorting. What did he think she was, some prude off a back-country
planet that didn't know one sex from the other? That could not call things by their right names?
She put out of mind her aunt, who certainly would never use the terms common in the Fleet.
"No. We were not lovers. We were not friends. She was a major, command track; I was an ensign,
technical track. It's just that she was polite—"
"Others weren't?" In the same tone.
"Not always," Esmay said, before she could stop herself. Too late now; she might as well complete
the portrait of a provincial idiot. "I'm not from a Fleet family. I'm from Altiplano—the first
person from Altiplano to attend the Academy. Some people thought it was a hoot." Too late again,
she remembered that expression's Fleet meaning. "A regrettably laughable imposition," she added,
to the raised eyebrows. "In our slang." Which was no stranger than Fleet slang, just someone
else's. Which was the point: Heris Serrano had never laughed at it. But she wouldn't say that to
those eyebrows, which right now made her wonder which great Fleet family she had just insulted.
"Altiplano. Yes." The eyebrows had come down, but the tone of condescension hadn't. "That is a
planet where the Ageist influence is particularly strong, isn't it?"
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file:///F|/rah/Elizabeth%20Moon/Moon,%20Elizabeth%20-%20The%20Serrano%20Legacy%2004%20-%20Once%20A%20Hero.txtCHAPTERONER.S.S.Harrier,nearXavierEsmaySuizahaddoneherbesttocleanupbeforereportingasorderedto headmiralaboardherflagship,butthemutinyandthefollowingbattlehadleftherlittletime.Shehadshowere...

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