1 Chapter 1
“You never call your mother,” Lady Elise’s virtual image grumbled across time and space. Imperial Starship Captain Catherine Everington contemplated thumping her head against her own desk, under the sympathetic artificial gleam of the wall lights. She didn’t. Her mother would see.
She said instead, “I’m calling you now,” which was true and therefore inarguable.
“Only because I called you first. Ten times.”
All right, maybe it was arguable. “Mother, I’m busy.”
“You are not too busy for this. It’s important, Catherine.”
“To you,” Kit said, and tipped her chair back on two legs, mostly to watch her mother cringe. Her chair was used to this, and bent obligingly. The captain’s personal briefing room folded curved sleek walls around her in solidarity; out on the Dreamer’s bridge, she knew, her crew would be waiting. Her family. Her home. “I’m not part of your politics. I haven’t been that for years.”
“I’ll make it an order if I must.”
“You don’t have the authority.”
“I’m having tea with the Lord Admiral tomorrow, and he’ll be perfectly delighted to issue you a new set of directives.” Steel and rose petals; lace and swords. Kit sighed again. Her mother was every bit a child of the aristocracy, each diminutive inch crackling with brilliance. Lady Elise had been born to power, and wouldn’t let anything as simple as not technically in fact being a commander of the Imperial Exoplanetary Survey Service stand in her way.
Kit, of course, would inherit all that power.
She tried not to think about it, most days. About the title, the planets, the gardens, the vast shipping consortium. About that other life, full of waltzes and ballgowns and necklaces strung with rare gems from a thousand worlds.
About the disappointment in her mother’s eyes, when faced with an only child who’d chosen the Academy and exploration and clunky exo-suit boots and short spiky hair and the delicate curl of tattoo-script along her left forearm, the lines her crew had convinced her to get while they’d all been merrily tipsy on the resort planet of Mira, on leave and planning the next leap into the unknown, toasting the IESS motto with sweet winter-vine wine: We seek the next star…
At the moment all the stars glittered, tantalizing and slipping even further away, outside her briefing-room window.
She tried, hopelessly, “I don’t want to.”
“You have a duty to the family, Catherine.” Lady Elise shook out flowing sleeves, smoothed them down, and did nothing so inelegant as cross her arms or scowl. “To the name. To the position. You will someday be the fifty-second Lady of the Fourth—”
“I know!” So did her crew. Qi’in had laughed for twenty minutes. Serena had asked about Lady Elise’s famous dazzling salon nights. Gil, Kit’s unflappable second in command, had known her since the Academy, and had raised eyebrows and said, teasing, “So now that everyone knows, can Hugh and I borrow your summer home on Utopia One for a vacation, sometime…?”
“You can’t ignore your social obligations forever.”
“I’m working, Mother!”
“Yes…so you are.” Plainly a personal insult, that. Elise eyed her daughter with steel behind blue-and-silver bejeweled eyelashes. “I do know it’s quite a current trend for ladies to slip on trousers and run corporations and even join the Fleet—and don’t think I’ve not heard that you’ve inspired them—but, Catherine, you’ve made your point. You needn’t run around in the dirt of strange planets any longer. We all know you can, if you so desire; you’re perfectly capable of whatever you’d like to achieve. So you’re welcome to return home for the Emperor’s celebration gala.” In that voice the words welcome tobecame a command. Not to be disobeyed.
“Mother—” But it wouldn’t do any good. Hadn’t on any of the countless other occasions, over the previous ten years. The chair curled itself more closely around her.
Changing tactics, perhaps. Kit tried, anyway. “We’re half a galaxy away and busy, we’ve got three more worlds to survey, we can’t just call off the mission for a celebration—”
“Darling, it’s the end of the Regency!” Her mother spread both hands: can’t you see it? “It’s positively historic. Our new young Emperor finally of age—it has been nearly twenty years, and we’ve had those six old men bickering with each other for so long about what’s best for the throne, so this will be the beginning of an era…I wonder what he’ll wear. His uncle Pericles always favored reds, with that overdone gold embroidery…”
“He’ll wear clothing,” Kit said flatly. “Mother, you don’t need me there. I only ever embarrass you.”
“Oh, how can you say that?”
“It’s true.”
“Of course it is, but you don’t have to sayit.” Lady Elise sighed. “Catherine, we areone of the leading families of the Empire, like it or not, and you are the only child of the Fourth House. Your absence would be remarked. But it won’t be.”
“…because I’m going to the celebration party.”
“Precisely.” With a head-tilt, contemplative. “You ought to wear blue. Or green. You look lovely in green.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does.” Those sapphire-blue eyes, a shade poets had once committed sonnets over, looked surprised. “The trend-setters, the dressmakers, the tailors, the weavers…the merchants who import various dyes…the murmurs in ballrooms, in palaces, whether you’ve worn this color or refused that favor…it all leads somewhere, Catherine. How many times have I told you?”
“Enough,” Kit said, and instantly felt guilty, that undefined sense of generalized shame that came along with her mother’s beauty and political acumen and precisely calculated raptures over a bolt of new chiffon. Lady Elise was in many ways everything her daughter was not; and even Kit sometimes forgot as much, fooled along with the rest of the universe by the spun-sugar smile
She said, not precisely an apology, “You think it will be noticed, then. If I’m not in attendance.”
Her mother waited, eyebrows up.
