Serrano Legacy 05 - Rules of Engagement by Moon Elizabeth

Author:Moon, Elizabeth [Moon, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780671577773
Google: eGtEc5op9ZMC
Goodreads: 1658670
Publisher: Baen
Published: 1998-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Marta prepared herself for her first meeting with Bunny; she knew, from the tension all around her, that whether she liked it or not, she was everyone's favorite candidate for therapist where Bunny was concerned. She swept into the room with her usual flair, hoping it would have its usual effect on him.

This time it did not. Lord Thornbuckle looked up at her with the expression of a man very near the edge of sanity. Desperate, exhausted . . . not the expression one wanted to see on the chief executive of the Familias Regnant, someone on whose judgement the security of the entire empire depended.

Marta moderated her instinctive verve, and instead walked quietly across the room to take the hand he held out to her.

"Bunny, I'm so sorry."

He stared at her silently.

"But I know Brun, and if she's alive, we can and will help her."

"You don't know"—he swallowed—"what they did to her. To my daughter—"

She did know, but clearly he needed to tell her. "Tell me," she said, and held his hand through the recitation of all the horrors he knew Brun had endured, and the ones that might have followed. She interrupted this latter list.

"You can't know that—you can't know, and until we know for certain, you must not waste your strength worrying about it."

"Easy for you to say—"

"It was my niece you sent off to rescue Ronnie and George," Marta said crisply. "It is not easy to say, or to do, but people of our rank have responsibilities. Yours is heavy, but not beyond your strength, if you will quit adding to the load by imagining even more horrors."

"But Brun—"

"What you are doing by tearing yourself up does not help her."

"I don't know what to do . . ."

"Where's Miranda?" Bunny's exquisitely beautiful wife was, under her beauty, a woman of spun-steel endurance, capable of enforcing sense on her husband—one of the few who could.

"She's . . . back on Castle Rock. I didn't want her out here."

"Then, in her place, I will tell you what to do. Eat a hot meal. Sleep at least nine hours. Eat another hot meal. Don't talk to anyone about anything important until you have done so. You will be even more miserable if your bad judgement, born of hunger and exhaustion, harms Brun's chances."

"But I can't just sleep—"

"Then get medication." Marta paused a moment for that to take effect, and went on. "Bunny, I'm terribly, terribly sorry that this has happened . . . but you simply must not go into this as you are."

"Who called you here?" he asked, at last reacting to her immediate presence.

"It doesn't matter. I'm here; I belong here, because those people are only a jump point away from my home; and I'm taking charge of you, at this moment, because I'm older, meaner, and you daren't hit me."

With that, she punched in a call to the infirmary and the kitchen, and stood over Bunny until he had downed a bowl of soup and a plate of chicken and rice.

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