Bretta Martyn (Henry Martyn) by L. Neil Smith

Author:L. Neil Smith [Smith, L. Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 1997-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXIII:

A CEO’S SECRET

“Bretta!”

Loreanna’s voice echoed unavailingly throughout the lower gundeck. Like others aboard the ship, she was beginning to grow hoarse with calling for her daughter. She betrayed herself by no outward manifestation of fear or grief, but Phoebus had noticed that her hands trembled, and she wrung incessantly at a handkerchief.

“Bretta Islay!” That voice would be Sedgeley’s, issuing from the mast well. He had surprised his niece—and Krumm, in the bargain—by knowing his way round a starship very handily. Perhaps he had been a yachtsman in his youth.

It was the Osprey’s youngest officers who had first missed Bretta at the “morning” meal. She was the sort of individual who would be missed. Her family and traveling companions had next assured themselves that she had not merely overslept—an idea the girl would have regarded as insulting had she known of it—but no amount of shouting throughout the ship had elicited a response.

Acting quickly, Arran and Phoebus conducted a more and more frantically fear-driven search of the whole vessel. The captain’s hands trembled as well, more from rage, Phoebus suspected, than anything else. What he was apparently looking for now was an object for his burgeoning anger. Before beginning to search this morning, he had strapped upon his forearms both of the outsized Oplyte’s thrustibles he had worn through the late war. Phoebus, too, carried one such. He had experience of boats’ projectibles that boasted of less power.

Most of their effort this day had been wasted before it had been spent. With better than fifteenscore of diligent crew members conducting their search tier by tier, deck by deck, in every recess and locker of a starship they all knew blindfolded, it soon became obvious that no trace of any kind remained of the girl. Arran’s response—twice—was to set them searching all over again. At the end of it, even those who loved her best had no choice other than to assume that their worst fears upon her account had somehow come to pass.

Not knowing for certain was by far the worst of it. Phoebus suspected this was only the beginning, that it would continue to be so for years to come.

“The poor darling must have been wandering about the all-but-deserted vessel during the sparsely peopled nightwatch,” Tula Krumm theorized for the benefit of her husband. Hanoverian was not her native language (although she had been speaking it almost exclusively for more than twenty years) and her pronouncements in it tended to be a trifle stilted, for all that they were sincere.

She touched Loreanna upon the arm.

Tillie (whose own command of the official Monopolitan tongue was little better) nodded sadly. “That appears to have been her habit of late. A girl-child of this particular age requires her privacy and freedom. I certainly did. Why, I remember my own adolescence as if it had been only yesterday.”

Their husband agreed reluctantly. By now he had started to worry more about the girl’s mother and father than about the girl herself. Something inside him, something he did not like very much, was starting to give Bretta up for dead.

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