Trading in Danger

“Right mess you made of things,” he said, when they were around a corner from Signals.

“Yes,” Ky said.

“I won’t say I told you so,” he said. He just had, of course, but she didn’t answer. “I daresay you feel bad enough already.”

A shadow of a question in that. Anger stirred suddenly, beneath the anguish. “Yes, I do,” she said, hearing the sharp edge to her own voice.

“Thought so,” he said. “Here you are.” He opened the door for her. She had never been in the Commandant’s private library before; the long narrow room held not only racks of ordinary books and journals, but shelves of ancient books like those in her family’s oldest house. A long table ran down the middle of the room, and at one end someone had set out a stack of white paper and a selection of pens. “It’s appropriate that a resignation of this type be handwritten,” MacRobert told her. “You can use the voice recorder or the keyboard to rough it out, but it’s better to stick to the simplest format…” Someone had also laid out a copy of Naval Etiquette: Essentials for Officers, and the hand reader.

“Thank you,” Ky said. It was still not 1000 hours. Her world had ended less than an hour ago. She had another couple of hours…

“What time did you arrange transport for?” MacRobert asked.

“Noon,” Ky said.

“I’ll see that your gear is at the gate by 1130,” MacRobert said.

“Thank you,” Ky said again. She felt unreal, still, as if this were a dream, as if she were floating a few centimeters off the floor.

“I’ll leave you alone,” MacRobert said. “When you’re finished, you can leave the resignation here—”

“The Commandant said on his desk,” Ky said.

“That’s right. And so it will be; just tell me when you’re finished.” He nodded and went out, shutting the door silently behind him.

She 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 long time, glaring at the tiny blue words on the gray screen. Then she moved the paper over and copied the words very carefully, in her best script, the handwriting of a properly-brought-up child and good student.

Panic gripped her when she had signed it. She did not want to do this. She could not do this. She must do this. She looked at the time, 10:22:38. Had destroying her life really taken so little time?

A tap on the door, then it opened. MacRobert again, this time with a large silver tray. A teapot, incongruously splotched with big pink roses. A pair of matching cups, gold-rimmed, on saucers. A small plate of lemon cookies, and another of tiny, precisely cut sandwiches.

“The Commandant will be joining you,” MacRobert said. He set the tray on the end of the library table, picked up her resignation, and walked out with it. Ky sat immobile, staring at the steam rising from the teapot’s spout, trying not to smell the fragrance of cookies obviously fresh from the oven, trying not to think or feel anything at all.

The Commandant’s entrance brought her upright, to attention; he waved her back down. “You’ve resigned, sit down.” He sighed. His left eyelid was back up where it should be, but his whole face sagged. “Pour out, will you?”

Ky carried out the familiar ritual, something she didn’t have to think about, and handed him his cup of tea. He waited, and nodded at her. She poured one for herself. It was good tea; it would be, she thought. He took a sandwich and gave her a look; she took one, too.

He ate his sandwich in one bite, and sipped his tea. “It’s a shame, really,” he said. “Here I had a perfectly good excuse to remove your internal organs and hang them from the towers, make an example of you… It’s my job, and I’m supposed to relish it, or why did I ask for it? But you were a good cadet, Mistress Vatta, and I know you intended to be a good officer.”

Then why did you make me resign? That was a question she must never ask; she knew that much.

“In consideration of your past performance, and on my own responsibility, I’ve chosen to let you keep your insignia and wear it as you depart; I trust your sense of honor not to wear it again.”