The Serrano Connection Read Free

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 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 protÈgÈe 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