The Serrano Connection Read Free Page A

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?"
     
    "Ageists?" Esmay scrambled through what she knew of politics at home—she had not been home since she was sixteen—and came up with nothing. "I don't think anyone in Altiplano hates old people."
     
    "No, no," the man said. " Ageists —surely you know. They oppose rejuvenation."
     
    Esmay stared at him, now thoroughly confused. "Oppose rejuvenation? Why?" Not her relatives, who would be only too happy if Papa Stefan lived forever; he was the only one who could keep Sanni and Berthol from each other's throats, and those two were essential.
     
    "How closely do you follow events on Altiplano?" the man asked.
     
    "I don't," Esmay said. She had left it behind gladly; she had discarded without watching the newscube subscription her family sent her. She had finally decided, in the bleak aftermath of a nightmare in which she was not only stripped of her commission but sentenced to a term of hard labor, that she would never go back to Altiplano, no matter what. They could throw her out of Fleet, but they couldn't make her go home. She had looked it up: no judicial action could force someone to return to their planet of origin for crimes committed somewhere else. "And I can't believe they really oppose rejuvenation . . . at least, I can't imagine anyone I know thinking that way."
     
    "Oh?"
     
    Since he seemed interested, the first person in years who had shown any interest at all, Esmay found herself telling him about Papa Stefan, Sanni, Berthol, and the rest, at least insofar as it bore on their likely attitude towards rejuv. When she slowed down, he interrupted.
     
    "And is your family . . . er . . . prominent on Altiplano?"
     
    Surely that was in her file. "My father's a regional commander in the militia," she said. "The ranks aren't equivalent, but there are only four regional commanders on Altiplano." It would be the height of bad manners to say more; if he couldn't figure out from that where she stood socially on her home planet, then he'd have to suffer in ignorance.
     
    "And you chose to go into Fleet? Why?"
     
    That again. She had dealt with that in her first application, and during the entrance interviews and the military psychology classes as well. She rattled off the explanation that had always seemed to go best, and it sank into the investigator's unresponsive gaze.
     
    "Is that all?"
     
    "Well . . . yes." The smart young officer did not talk about wish fulfillment, the hours she'd spent in the manor orchard staring up at the stars and promising herself she'd be there someday. Better to be matter-of-fact, practical, sensible. No one wanted wild-eyed dreamers, fanatics. Especially not from worlds that had only a couple of centuries of human colonization.
     
    But his silence dragged another sentence out of her. "I loved the thought of going into space," she said. And felt herself flushing, the telltale heat on her face and neck. She hated her fair skin that always showed her emotions.
     
    "Ah," he said, touching his stylus to his datapad. "Well, Lieutenant, that will be all." For now , his look said. It could not be the end of questioning; that wasn't how things worked. Esmay said nothing except the polite formula he expected, and went back to her temporary quarters.
     
    She had not realized until the second or third shift aboard the flagship that only she, of the young mutineers, had a private compartment. She wasn't sure why, since there were three other women, all crammed into one compartment. She'd have been happy to