The Serrano Connection Read Online Free PDF Page B

never bothered you before. We have good security; we'll be taking precautions. Do you want that rejuvenation, or don't you?"
     
    "Of course I want it."
     
    "I think you're just annoyed that I found the contract, and not you."
     
    "Maybe." She sighed, then grinned, as she rarely did now. "I must need one, turning into a cautious old lady before my time."
     
    "You're not an old lady, Losa, and now you never will be."
     
     
     
    R.S.S. Harrier
     
    By the time the flagship reached sector headquarters, Esmay had begun thinking of the court as a door to freedom—freedom from the tensions and rivalries of a cluster of scared junior officers with not enough to do. While it made legal sense, she supposed, to keep them all isolated and relatively idle, it felt like punishment.
     
    Even the largest ship has limited resources for recreation; duties normally fill most of its crew's time. Esmay tried to make herself use the teaching cubes—she encouraged the others to use them—but with a knot of uncertainty lodged in the middle of her brain, the rest of it couldn't concentrate on anything as dry as "Methods for back-flushing filters in a closed system" or "Communications protocols for Fleet vessels operating in zones classified F and R." As for the tactical cubes, she already knew where she'd gone wrong coming back to Xavier, and there was nothing she could do about it now. Besides, none of the tactical cubes considered the technical problems she'd faced in starting a battle with a ship which had suffered internal damage in a mutiny.
     
    She could not work hard enough by day to ensure restful sleep at night. Physical exhaustion might have done that, but her share of the gym time wasn't enough to achieve that. So the nightmares came, night after night, and she woke sweat-soaked and gritty-eyed. The ones she understood were bad enough, replays of the mutiny or the battle at Xavier, complete with sound and smell. But others seemed to have drawn from memories of every training film, every military gory story she'd ever heard . . . all jumbled together like the vivid shards of a shattered bowl.
     
    She looked up at a killer's face . . . she looked down to see her own hands slimy with blood and guts . . . she stared into the muzzle of a Pearce-Xochin 382, which seemed to widen until her whole body could slide down inside it . . . she heard herself begging, in a high thin voice, for someone to stop. . . . NO. That time when she woke, tangled in damp bedding, someone was pounding on her door and calling for her. She coughed a few times, then found voice enough to answer.
     
    It was not a door, but a hatch: she was not home, but aboard a ship, which was better than home. She took the deep breaths she told herself to take, and explained to the voice outside that it had been just a bad dream. Grumbles from without: some of us need our sleep too, you know. She apologized, struggling with a rush of sudden, inexplicable anger which urged her to yank open the . . . hatch, not door . . . and strangle the speaker. It was the situation; tempers would naturally flare, and she must set an example. Finally the grumbler left, and she lay back against the bulkhead—the safe gray bulkhead—thinking.
     
    She had not had such dreams in years, not since leaving home for the Fleet prep school. Even at home, they'd been rarer as she got older, although they had been frequent enough to worry her family. Her stepmother and her father had both explained, at tedious length, their origin. She had run away once, after her mother died, a stupid and irresponsible act mitigated by youth and the fact that she was probably already sick with the same fever that killed her mother. She had found trouble, a minor battle in the insurrection now known as the Califer Uprising. Her father's troops had found and rescued her, but she'd nearly died of the fever. Somehow, what she'd seen and heard and smelled had tangled with the fever during the days