Daniel Archer was trying not to pace the control room of his ship, because there really was not enough deck space to permit such an activity. He had been able to pace in the engine room of the Archangel, and Rachel Kane had been able to pace on the starship’s bridge; but here they did not have that luxury, even though they were the compartment’s only occupants.
Archer’s co-shipowners were not happy, to the extent that even his old friend Hansie Braeden was deliberately avoiding him right now. Hansie had known there was an occupied stasis tube on the lifeboat they’d salvaged, but that it had contained a gen? They were in this much trouble because their captain and senior partner had been sleeping with a goddamned gen, and then hadn’t been willing to surrender her to the authorities when she turned up pregnant and in stasis? Because they were sure, every one of them, that it was for sheltering that gen—however briefly—their ship had been targeted for destruction. And Archer was choosing to let them think that, since no one else aboard Triad was likely to believe what he had deduced as the real reason.
“You shouldn’t have tried to help me,” Rachel Kane said softly to her lover, as she sat in the navigator’s chair and watched Archer’s face as he sat in the pilot’s seat. “Even now, you should leave me behind when you make your run for open space. Tell your friends you didn’t realize you were putting them in so much danger, get them out of this mess, and then they just may forgive you.”
“You don’t sound much like a command officer!” He reached for her hand, and once he’d captured it he squeezed it tenderly. “That won’t work, Rachel. Even if I was willing to leave you, which I’m not, I’d be lying if I told them I didn’t realize I was putting them at risk. I knew—I kept them in the dark, about some things I’m still keeping them there—and they’re right to be mad as hell.” With that the ex-engineer reached out to the comm, which was beeping for attention. “What the hell? Oh, Reen, I’m sorry. I don’t know when I’ve been this jumpy! What is it?”
“Get everyone off that ship, now,” Reen Romanova said bluntly from somewhere inside the farmhouse. “The Archangel’s back in orbit, and I’ve just decided not to respond to a call from her captain asking if anyone down here knows what’s in the barn that doesn’t belong there. Quick, there’s no time!”
Archer slapped the emergency alarm, the civilian vessel’s ear-piercing equivalent of a military starship’s “red alert.” He bellowed into the comm pickup, “Abandon ship! Everyone out, now!”
He reached up and steadied his pregnant companion on the access ladder’s final rungs, since lowering a ramp would have taken time that they did not have. Once her feet were on the barn’s floor, they turned together and they dashed out through a forcefield that prevented cold and bad weather from entering the building without keeping solid objects such as humans from moving in and out of it.
A moment after they were clear of the barn, the ship started to move. It took the structure’s roof along, it ascended slowly and almost painfully—as if it were fighting not to rise.
Reen called from the farmhouse’s door. “Get in here! We’re going underground, hurry!”
Her two guests obeyed her. They dashed inside the farmhouse’s kitchen, and followed Reen into a lift that took them far underneath that room.
Even from the shaft’s lowest reaches they felt the explosion. Hansie had made it to the Triad’s control room and had brought the engines on line, she had fought to break the Archangel’s tractor beam with everything the trade-ship had…the farmhouse was rubble, and a crater yawned where the maintenance barn had been, when the three people who had fled to safety underground returned to the surface. Not at the point from which they had descended, but half a klick away.
There had been a time in Narsai’s history when another interplanetary war had threatened. Most farmsteads still possessed a network of underground tunnels and shelters dating from that time, so that if their residents were forced downward they would not be obliged to re-emerge in a predictable spot where an enemy could be waiting to pick them off.
People in Star Service uniforms were already on the ground scanning the rubble when the three survivors looked out of the remains of a small outbuilding where they had come back to the surface, and the sight made Dan Archer’s stomach contract sickly.
He and Hansie had managed to get away with their swift switch of ship’s I.D. codes, and with the Triad’s descent into hiding, because even though someone on the Archangel’s inspection party almost certainly had planted the explosives Captain Giandrea and his officers hadn’t been looking for Dan and his partners then.
But they were now, and that was for damned sure.
“Thanks for waiting so long, Johnnie.” Katy found her cousin still there when she returned to her home as twilight became full darkness, and that didn’t surprise her.
Maddy had done what she ought to have remembered a young adolescent was very likely to do, and had suddenly fallen sound asleep in the aircar. Her mother was untroubled by lifting the girl’s weight—she might have put on a couple of kilos since she’d stopped taking full combat training, but she had remained active enough so that she could handle Maddy easily. But what she was supposed to do with a sleepy child, when she was smack in the middle of a crisis, she had no idea.
Johnnie took the girl from Katy’s arms, and put her on the sofa and covered her with an afghan. And inquired softly after he had done so, “Did you think I’d leave you until I knew what you’re going to do next, Katy? I take it things didn’t go very well with Uncle Trabe.”
“They did and they didn’t,” she answered. But before she could say anything more, before she could start to tell him about her first conversation with her parents in as many years as Maddy had been alive, she felt something she had not hoped to feel again any time soon.
She stiffened, and closed her eyes. She swallowed, hard. And without words she cried out.
“Linc! Oh, Linc, it is you.”
“Yes, Katy, it’s me. Listen fast, if anyone up here realizes we can do this they’re apt to put me under sedation or into stasis. I’m in the brig aboard the Archangel. I’m not sure—”
Love had enveloped her, she had clearly perceived a familiar masculine strength and tenderness. And then the loved presence was gone, thankfully not in a burst of fear and physical pain like the one she had felt some hours before—but in an abrupt vanishing of the connection. One second he was with her, they were touching as intimately as if she had been holding his body in her arms; and the next instant he was completely absent from her universe.
Then she heard Maddy’s startled cry.
“Mum?” The girl was sitting up on the edge of the sofa when Katy turned toward her. She had the afghan tangled around her, and she was struggling sleepily to get free from it. Her eyes were wide open, though; and she looked as frightened as she sounded. “Mum, was that a dream I just had? I thought I heard Linc’s voice, but he’s not here.”
Katy gently brushed Johnnie’s comforting hand aside. She went to her child, sat down beside her and unsnarled the afghan. She said, “You did hear him, Maddy. Just for a minute, then someone stopped him from being able to talk to us.”
“Do you mean they killed him?”
Oh, gods, the directness of the young! But Katy meant it with all her soul when she answered firmly, “I won’t believe that. They did something to make him unconscious, and that’s certainly not good; but anyone who’s gone to the trouble of kidnapping him and keeping him alive for this long, isn’t likely to kill him unless they absolutely have to.”
“I heard him say Archangel.” Maddy yawned, and reached up to scrub a hand across her eyes. “I thought I heard ‘brig.’”
I wonder what you’d have heard if Linc and I had been making love? Katy thought, and then was ashamed of herself. Not that marital privacy wasn’t a completely legitimate concern, but right now it was one that did not matter. One that might never matter again…. She crushed that thought by asking, “Maddy, is your father the only civilian passenger on the Archangel?”
She hated to ask even that innocent a question; she, at least, had vowed never to use her daughter as a source of information about her ex-husband’s activities. Nor had she ever deliberately said or written anything to Maddy that would have reduced her father’s standing in her eyes—but that kind of fair play might now be on a very short course toward becoming an unaffordable luxury, because finding a way to leave Maddy safely out of it while she went after Linc was not going to be possible.
“I think so,” the girl answered, her drowsiness returning as fatigue reasserted itself. What was the difference between the Greenwich Mean Time that was followed by all starships, and local time in the Narsatian city of MinTar? Lord knew how long it had actually been since the child’s “day” had started. “I was lonesome on the way here, Mum. Papa didn’t want me to talk to the officers, and there wasn’t anyone else on board I could have talked to.”
The comm’s announcer signal sounded then, and Katy moved toward it. She was aware of Johnnie taking her place at Maddy’s side, putting his arm around the child and saying something to her in a soft paternal voice; and in spite of everything, Katy smiled to herself. How would that sight affect George Fralick if he could see it, she wondered? The Johnnie Romanov who had been Katy’s own lover, from the time she was thirteen until she had left Narsai at eighteen, sitting on a sofa with his arm around thirteen-year-old Maddy.
Fralick would probably have a stroke. Which right now didn’t bother Katy one bit, even when it was her former husband’s face that greeted her when she accepted the transmission.
“Katy? Where’s Maddy, is she all right?” was the first thing Fralick said, his voice a tense demand.
“She’s here with me, she’s tired out but otherwise she’s fine.” Romanova glanced toward her daughter, and saw that Maddy had roused again at the sound of her father’s voice. “Do you want to talk to her?”
“Papa?” Maddy sounded puzzled, and sleepy.
Her voice made it to the pickup, because Fralick’s concerned face relaxed. But he said softly, as if to himself, “I should have left her on Kesra, nothing’s going the way I expected. Damn! But it’s too late for me to rethink that now.”
“Much as I’ve wanted to have her with me, for the past thirteen years—I have to agree with you this time, George.” Katy nodded sadly. “Now, dammit, tell me what’s going on. I know you have Linc up there in your brig. And don’t try to tell me you’re a civilian passenger and you had nothing to do with it, because I’m not going to believe you!”
“Got your recall order yet, Katy? If so, you’re going to have to refuse it.” Fralick had hesitated only a moment before he decided to plunge ahead, and not worry about what a sleepy little girl just barely within hearing might pick up of the conversation. He didn’t want to wait while his ex-wife corrected that situation; in fact, he really did not want Maddy out of her mother’s sight.
He had misjudged the situation, misjudged it badly. And George Fralick hated it when that happened, even when the stakes were far lower—personally and officially—than they were right now. He went on, “The idea of taking your—husband—along to Terra with us, was to make sure you wouldn’t agree to help the Rebs. But I wasn’t expecting the Star Service to recall you to duty, I only just found out about that when we got back here and I picked up the latest dispatches; and I’m telling you right now you’d better not accept that recall. Back in command of the Fleet is the last place I want to see you, I want you to stay right where you are.”
“I have no intention of going back to the Fleet, George.” She hadn’t been sure until this moment how she would finally answer that order. Her father had bought her time that she needed to get Linc back safely, but once that most pressing of concerns was answered she would still have to face the moral implications of that order—and now she knew how she was going to respond.
She wasn’t going to return meekly to Terra and let the Star Service put her out to some kind of pasture there, nor was she going to lead that Service to victory over her own native world. If George had thought he needed to hold someone she loved hostage to keep her from doing that, or to keep her from providing the so-called Rebs with her services, then George knew less about his own former wife than he did about anyone else in the universe.
Now, that was entirely possible. After all, George looked at her through a film of assumptions; while he looked at other people clear-eyed, for the most part anyway.
At least he had caught himself before he had called Linc by that dreadful vernacular term that was often substituted for “Morthan.” Probably just in case Maddy could hear him, because Katy could not imagine that her ex-husband had denied himself the pleasure of using that word in order to spare her feelings.
“That’s good,” Fralick said, and nodded his head thoughtfully. “I’ll see that you aren’t penalized, Katy, if we do succeed in fending off a war. And I still think that’s possible, if hotheads like the ex-scramblers can be neutralized in time.”
“So why did the Archangel turn back, after she’d sailed for Terra?” Romanova sensed a diversion in progress, and she moved swiftly to flank her former husband before he could escape.
Whether he could or could not protect her from being charged with treason if war didn’t come, so that the Star Service continued to have a legal claim on her—or if war did come, but the Outworlds lost it—wasn’t a matter she could address right now, so she chose to put it out of her mind. At worst, she thought, she might wind up permanently stuck on Narsai. There was no way her native world would allow one of its citizens to be extradited to Terra, especially not for a “crime” that was almost administrative in its nature. At best the recall order would be rescinded when the current crisis was over, and her failure to respond in time for her to be of any use could be blamed on the lost message that hadn’t been relayed to her by the Narsatian Council.
“Pursuing a fugitive, of all the stupid reasons.” Fralick scowled. “I can’t believe that has priority over getting a diplomatic envoy to a negotiating table, but that’s why we were turned back!”
“A fugitive? What kind of a fugitive?” Katy schooled her face into perfectly normal puzzlement.
“The kind that makes a bio-engineering company send a Corporate Marshal all the way from Terra to Narsai,” Fralick answered. “A long-range shuttle carrying one hailed us, and he insisted that we come about and follow him in. He intended to catch up with us here anyway, but you know how tricky it is to match schedules when you’re operating over interstellar distances.”
Romanova nodded. She thought of Rachel Kane coming into this room starved and frightened and shivering, and she suppressed a shudder. But she said with apparent innocence, “I don’t see why any company would send a Marshal all the way to Narsai, George. Gengineering of sentient life forms is illegal here. Hell, we don’t even gen our cattle!”
Fralick turned away from the comm pickup he was using, and he spoke loudly to someone Romanova hadn’t suspected was in the same compartment with him. “Giandrea!” he said, not rudely but with the kind of informality that sometimes passed for friendliness with people of his social standing. “Would you please explain the situation to Admiral Romanova? Since one of the people Marshal Vargas is looking for lists her home as his permanent residence, she and I are both concerned about our daughter’s safety there.”
Katy Romanova had bluffed a lot of enemies during the years of her service career, but it had never been harder for her to keep up an act than it was right now. They were seeking not just Rachel Kane—that she’d expected, from the instant she’d heard that a corporate marshal had become involved—but the marshal also knew about Dan Archer’s part in this? She had accepted the possibility, but hearing it confirmed still jolted her.
Dan. Bound to her first by shared sorrow when her own boys had died; and since then, by many years of love. She and Linc desperately needing an adult child in their lives, Dan needing somewhere to call home and someone to be his family.
There were only two people in the universe whose safety mattered to her more than Dan’s did. One of them was in the brig aboard the starship from which her former husband had just been speaking to her, and she had no idea what his state of health was although she was certain he was still living. The other was the little girl whom Johnnie Romanov had just resettled on the sofa across the room from her.
She hoped she would never have to choose between Linc and Maddy, because for the life of her she didn’t know how a choice like that one could be made. Protecting Dan if she could still do that was a high priority; but if she had to decide during the next few moments, she knew she would let him go. Right along with Rachel Kane and the three unborn babies that belonged to both of them, if that was what it took for her to keep Linc and Maddy safe.
A person she did not recognize, dark-skinned and slim and of indeterminate age, appeared on the comm’s viewscreen as George Fralick moved away from its pickup. A deep voice said, “Paolo Giandrea, Admiral. I apologize for what’s happened to your husband, but I’m sure you know there are some orders an officer obeys even though he hates them.”
“I understand that, Captain.” He wore the four stripes which said that was his rank, not simply his title as commanding officer of a ship. But anything in Archangel’s class did rate a full captain, the three stripes of a commander usually were considered sufficient only for vessels up to and including light cruisers. “Can you tell me if he’s well? I can’t imagine that he went willingly when he was taken away from here, and until just now no one had told me where he was.”
If no one up there was bright enough to realize that a Morthan hybrid’s wife could hear him when he called out to her telepathically, then she certainly wasn’t going to remind them of that fact. Yet she really did want Giandrea’s answer to her question, she was not simply trying to rattle him—although that would be a perfectly good strategic move, too.
“Our chief medical officer is monitoring Captain Casey’s health, Admiral. I haven’t had any adverse reports about him, that’s as much as I can tell you.” Giandrea’s tone was guarded, as if he wanted very much to say more but knew he could not.
That was all right. Unless the Archangel was a very unusual ship, its CMO would be a Morthan hybrid. Like Linc. Better than Linc, much as Katy hated to think of her husband in those terms; but the fact was that most Morthan hybrids could do much more with their telepathic abilities than Linc could, and hopefully the one who was caring for him now would feel some sense of duty toward another member of his species. Or at least a physician’s compassion and decency toward a person who was being imprisoned only to gain control over the actions of someone who loved him.
Romanova nodded. She said, “Thank you, Captain Giandrea. Continue, if you please.”
“Well.” The man swallowed, as if that gave him time to collect his thoughts. “About eighteen months ago, just before the general order that discharged all officers who weren’t Academy graduates, something completely unprecedented happened aboard my ship. My executive officer stole a lifeboat and tried to desert in it. Or at the time we believed she only ‘tried’ to desert, because of course we fired on her when she refused to come back aboard; and the readings we got afterward indicated that we’d destroyed her. But since then the lifeboat she stole has been found, a trader picked it up as salvage and sold it back to the Service at Narsai.”
“What does that have to do with the Corporate Marshal who met you and made you come back here? He must have started out weeks ago, and I still don’t understand why a Marshal would be involved in a Service officer’s desertion.” The block of ice in Katy’s chest was getting larger and colder. Oh, Dan, why couldn’t you have just blasted that lifeboat after you got Rachel off it, instead of selling the damnable thing?
But she knew the answer to that, his partners. In order to keep Rachel’s existence secret from them, of course Dan had been obliged to do what they expected him to do with that valuable piece of salvage. And he would have thought he’d done an adequate job of erasing its identification codes; and he should have been able to, after all the man was a fully qualified computer science engineer.
But so were other people, and some of them were right here on Narsai. Damn!
“Oh, he was sent out to investigate as soon as my report on what had happened got back to the right people. You see, my executive officer was a gengineered human—the first gen that the HR Solutions Company ever designed especially for command-level military service. We’ve been using gens as ordinaries for years now, and they’ve worked out so well that we’re getting close to no longer needing to impress crew members at all. But Rachel Kane was the first gen who was ever created with the abilities it takes to command a ship, to lead people who aren’t other gens.” Giandrea swallowed again, clearly that was a mannerism he used unconsciously when he was unhappy or nervous—or both, as he was right now.
He continued, “She was good, too. So damn good, I sometimes forgot she wasn’t just another human officer! I thought of her as a friend. I wish I could be glad to know she didn’t die when I had to fire on that lifeboat.”
“So where does the Marshal think she is now?” Might as well ask that straight out, Romanova thought. Giandrea was hurting so much that she did not want to make him draw this out any longer, and she’d let him tell her enough of what she already knew so that she was not likely to slip up and accidentally reveal knowledge that she could not have gained from him.
“He knows where she is. She’s dead now, after all. But not aboard the lifeboat, that survived to be picked up by the trade-ship I mentioned. It was called the Triad.” Giandrea’s gulps were fast becoming annoying.
“That was my foster son Dan Archer’s ship,” Romanova said, still trying to speed the younger officer up. “I was informed earlier today of his death, when the ship exploded in orbit. No one seemed to know why that happened, but positive DNA identifications were made of Dan and of the others who owned Triad with him.”
“They also found Rachel Kane’s DNA, and I wish that was the end of the trail.” Giandrea suddenly squared his shoulders, firmed his jaw, and stopped that nervous gulping. He said in a starship commander’s steady tones, “But it wasn’t. There was something peculiar about the debris, and although Narsai Control told us they couldn’t possibly scan the surface of your world for the Triad if she still existed—if the debris was false—we could do that, and we did. And we found her.”
“Where?” Ivan Romanov had come to stand at his cousin’s side, and now he bent over her shoulder toward the pickup. His big farm-hardened hands gripped the back of her chair, and Katy found herself thinking that she was glad he wasn’t squeezing her that way. She suspected he could have broken bones with that clasp.
“Who are you?” Giandrea wanted to know, quite reasonably since no doubt he had thought he was giving all this information to a person who still possessed high-level clearances.
“This is my cousin, Ivan Romanov,” Katy interposed swiftly. “Proprietor of the Romanov Farmstead on the Upper North Continent.”
“Oh. Then I have to give you my condolences, Mr. Romanov.” Giandrea’s face relaxed from tension into sadness. “The Triad was detected inside a structure on your land, just a little more than an hour ago. We attempted to bring her out using a tractor beam, but whoever was in command put up a fight. And I’m afraid whoever that was didn’t just destroy the ship, and the people aboard her, and the building where she’d been hidden; there’s not much left standing at all in that area now. Just a small out-building or two, and those pretty badly smashed up. I am sorry, Mr. Romanov. I hope you and your family were away, and that’s how the fugitives happened to choose your property as a place to conceal themselves?”