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to do? Go visit her? He gave a snort. He’d be booted off the property. And it appeared she had slipped out. He shouldn’t betray her by revealing her illicit nighttime flight. He had seemed to help her though he wasn’t sure what he had done.
    He remembered the feel of her breast pressed against his chest as he carried her to the flitter. The memory elicited an embarrassing physical reaction. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought about her face. There was something familiar… The thought slipped away, and he gave his head a shake.
    By breakfast time tomorrow his father would know the worst. Know that there would be no university education. There was no doubt his father would start in on him to accept the commission to The High Ground. Tracy wished there was somebody to help him.

4
CONFRONTATIONS
    The “young gentlemen” had begun arriving over the past week to be fitted for their uniforms for The High Ground, and his father had made sad eyes at Tracy, and once said hesitantly, “Are you sure?” Tracy’s blazing look had his father stuttering into muteness. Since then there had been tense silence in the shop and the apartment.
    One such noble scion stood on the raised platform idly sipping champagne—Beauregard Honorius Sinclair Cullen, Vizconde Dorado Arco, Knight of the Shells, Shareholder General of the Grand Cartel and heir apparent to the 19th Duque de Argento y Pepco. Tracy knelt at Cullen’s feet, marking and pinning the cuffs of the pants. The spider silk had the consistency of flowing water against his skin. His father stood behind the young nobleman, smoothing the material across the broad shoulders and checking the fit of the coat at the tapering waistline.
    “Good God, Arturo, military victories? Don’t be so conventional,” Cullen mocked, responding to a remark from his friend, Lord Arturo Espadero del Campo, one of the three sons of the Duque Agua de Negra. The man who had been the heir apparent to the Solar League until Mercedes Adalina Saturnina Inez de Arango, the Infanta, had agreed to attend The High Ground.
    Tracy lowered his lashes to veil his eyes and hide the secret he had hugged close ever since the news services had announced that the Infanta would attend the military academy, the first required step of her ascent to the throne. There had been pictures of the girl in the modified uniform that had a long skirt instead of pants, and it was then that Tracy realized the identity of the girl on the beach.
    The girl who had filled his thoughts, and had him waking sticky and panting from vividly erotic dreams. In some ways Tracy felt a fool. How could he have failed to recognize her? But she had been so out of context that it had never occurred to him, because context was everything in the carefully structured world of the Solar League.
    I met the eldest child of the Emperor. We talked, and I said something. Something that helped her in some way. I wonder what it was?
    If he had accepted the commission he might have found out. Tracy gave a quiet, derisive snort. As if he’d be allowed anywhere near her up on the space station—the
cosmódromo
—that housed the academy.
    Cullen continued, “Military governor, that’s what you want. You can make a fortune when you have a planet to squeeze. Especially if you land a Hidden World. The government doesn’t care how much you bleed them.”
    Del Campo sprawled on the sofa twirling his glass by the stem and watching the bubbles rise. “I don’t need money,” he said. His voice was a soft drawl. Both the young men had that FFH upper class accent, but it was even more pronounced in del Campo. Maybe because he was a cousin of the Emperor, Tracy wondered. “I want the people’s love,” he concluded.
    “Why? Are you planning on going into politics after you leave the fleet?” Cullen laughed as if the very idea were absurd. He drained his glass and thrust it out.
    Bajit minced over and refilled the glass, bowed and backed away. Tracy caught his