Trading in Danger Read Free Page A

put
Naval Etiquette: Essentials for Officers
into the reader and found that someone had already bookmarked the section on resignations. Voluntary and involuntary, sections of the legal code relating to, forms of appropriate and inappropriate… She paused there and looked at the appropriate wording for resigning one’s commission while in command of a ship, while in command of a flotilla, while between commands, while on leave, while suffering an incurable mental or physical condition precluding further duty… That’s me, Ky thought. Suffering from an incurable tendency to trust people in trouble and help lame dogs.
    She turned to the keyboard—she didn’t trust her voice to use the speech-activated system—and copied in the phrasing. “I, [name], hereby resign my [cadetship/commission] for reasons of [reason.]”
    “I, Kylara Evangeline Dominique Vatta, hereby resign my cadetship for reasons of overwhelming stupidity and weak sentimentality.” No, that wouldn’t do. “For reasons of totally unfair blame for something I didn’t do.” That wouldn’t do either. “For reasons of a mental illness called gullibility?”
    “Softheartedness?” No.
    Tears blurred her vision suddenly; she blinked them back. Memory stirred, bringing her Mandy Rocher’s image as he sat, shoulders hunched, hands trembling a little, telling her that he had to find a chaplain, he really did. Had his hands trembled with secret laughter that she was so easy to fool? Had he looked down to hide the scorn in his eyes? He was such a little… little… she searched her vocabulary for a sufficiently descriptive phrase. Insignificant. Forgettable. Boring. Pitiful. Nonentity. And to lose her cadetship because of
him
!
    She would get him someday. Vengeance, said her grandmother, was an unworthy goal, but this was a special case. Surely this was a special case.
    “I, Kylara Evangeline Dominique Vatta, hereby resign from the Academy for reasons that reflect on my ability to carry out the duties of a naval officer.”
    Close. Not quite yet.
    She looked around the room, squinting to bring the titles of the old books into focus. Herren and Herren’s
Chronicles of the Dispersion
, all ten volumes. Her family owned III through X, but I and II were very rare indeed in paper form. Cantabria’s
Principles of Space Warfare
, evidently a first edition. She longed to pull it down and check, but was afraid to. A row bound identically in blue-gray cloth… logbooks, the old-fashioned kind. Those would be centuries and centuries old; she got up and looked at the names on the spines.
Darius II
,
Paleologus
,
Sargon
,
Ataturk
… she felt the gooseflesh come up on her arms, and looked quickly at the last, least-faded volume.
Centaurus
. Not in fact centuries old, not even one century: these were logs that the Commandant had kept, his personal logs from every ship on which he’d served. She’d once memorized the sequence on a dare. Her fingers twitched. What had he thought, felt, done as a young man on his first ship?
    She would never know. She had no right to know. The adventures she had hoped to write into such logs herself would never come her way now. She made herself step away from that shelf and look at another. History here, biography there, reference works on all the neighboring states, on the biota of First Colony, on the ecology of water gardens… Water gardens? The Commandant studied water gardens?
    A sound outside in the passage startled her and sent her back to the table, but the footsteps passed by. She stared at the screen again. “For reasons of…” Back to the hand reader. Alternate phrasing: “due to.” Clumsy.
    Never say more than you need, her father had said; her mother had muttered that Kylara always said more than she needed.
    She’d stop that right now.
    “I, Kylara Evangeline Dominique Vatta, hereby resign from the Academy for personal reasons.” Short and… not sweet. Nothing about this was sweet.
    She stared at the screen a