“I won’t have to do anything to hurt my papa, will I?”
Maddy Fralick sounded like the child she still was. Linc focused his thoughts on her, with Katy there too but at a separate level—right now there was no need for him to cause mother’s and daughter’s minds to touch, and if he did so he suspected that both would be confused.
Neither of them needed that. Katy had to concentrate, and so did Maddy.
“I won’t ask you to,” he assured the little girl. “And remember, Maddy, I can’t make you do anything and I’m not going to try. All I’m going to do is guide you, and I won’t even do that if you’d rather I didn’t.”
“I don’t want Papa to take me to Earth on this ship,” the child said, with a firmness that was all Katy. “I still love him, but he’s not like he was on Kesra. I’m scared, Linc. I want to stay on Narsai with Mum, and with you.”
“And we want you to do that.” He sent the assurance back with all of his mind’s warmth, and realized that for the first time in his life he had an idea of what it might mean to be a father. He’d called Dan his foster son, and he had nurtured more young officers than he could remember during the years of his service career; but this was different. This was being a father in the sense that a Morthan was, that so few males of his kind had been able to experience since humans had first found their world and the interbreeding among the two species had begun.
It was something he was glad he hadn’t missed. To hell with being able to touch just anyone’s mind, as his fully gifted cousins could do. It was likely that none of the males among them would ever understand what this felt like, to have a young mind known during its coming to self-awareness in its mother’s womb turn to him in love and recognition and cling to him in trust.
He wasn’t going to let this little girl down, any more than he would have let Katy down. He no longer felt embarrassed or cheated because he was physically sheltered at Narsai Control. The two females out there on the winter plains were relying on him, and his very physical safety was going to make it possible for him to focus exclusively on them at a time when his being able to do so might make every difference.
But something was wrong. The people here were agitated, they were talking to each other in raised voices and they were afraid. He wished he had sought a private room, now, and that he hadn’t chosen to sit in a vacant controller’s chair so that if he needed to see what was going on in Narsai’s skies he could do so.
What was going on in Narsai’s skies wasn’t a problem, but what was happening in space within the planet’s star system decidedly was. He told Maddy, silently, that he must shift his attention away from her for just a moment; he reminded her that she could regain that attention at any time, she only had to let him know what she needed. He knew that Katy was already aware of whatever was going on, and that his mind was only following hers as he refocused.
No longer did he see the instrument panel in front of Madeleine Fralick. He saw the viewscreens at Narsai Control, and in their holo-imaged depths moved sixteen predatory shapes.
One of them, the largest, was Archangel. Fifteen of them varied in size, but those fifteen maneuvered with deadly precision.
The heavy cruiser lasted longer than Casey would have expected. Giandrea was a good captain, damned good. But with those odds, the Matushka herself might not have been able to get out in one piece; and Giandrea, to his credit or his folly, wasn’t trying to do that. He had attempted to get far enough clear of Narsai so that the planet’s orbiting infrastructure would not be damaged, but outright flight from the battle clearly was not his intention—that he might have pulled off.
No, he was only trying to get clear enough to fight back. Trying to defend the world below against this flock of raptors, which was all Casey could think of as he watched them dipping and swirling and seeking an opening in the Archangel’s defenses.
There were birds like that on Sestus 3, where he had grown up. They were carrion-birds, primarily; but from time to time a flock of them would attack a living animal, and when they did that it looked just like this.
Just as ugly, and just as hopeless. Except that animals cried out when they were hurt, and the Archangel couldn’t do that. Not as she appeared in the viewscreens of Narsai Control, anyway.
Such a terrible silence. Giandrea, the captain who had risked not just his career and his own life, but also his family’s future, to give Rachel Kane a chance at her freedom. Kerle Marin, the healer who was Linc’s own cousin by clanstribe reckoning as well as in species; who had kept him alive, and who had encouraged Dan Archer when Casey’s foster son had been under the surface of the Romanov Farmstead and awaiting capture by the corporate marshal by giving Archer the simple knowledge that someone knew what was happening and that help was being planned. Those were the only two people Linc knew for sure on board that ship, but considering how many officers he’d known during his career—and especially how many he had trained, during his tenure as commander of the Academy—the odds were that if he ever saw this particular casualty list, he was going to recognize many more than just two of the names on it.
Archangel took six of her tormentors with her. But finally she died, in a burst of released energy that even when translated through a holo-screen was almost blinding.
Linc felt Katy’s bitterness, and knew that she had witnessed it also from wherever the Archangel’s shuttle was located at this moment. There had been no time to get it back to its mother ship, Giandrea hadn’t issued a recall order and whoever had command of the shuttle had had brains enough not to attempt that on his own.
But Fralick didn’t know what had happened, because Maddy did not know. Casey realized that as soon as he thought to direct his attention back to her, and he carefully screened out all that he had just seen as he did so.
Fralick was concentrating on going to the Marshal Service shuttle’s hatch, to assist as the two prisoners were transferred from the civilian aircar. And while he was doing so, Casey saw to it that little Maddy quietly transferred control of all the shuttle’s systems—starting with its helm—to the co-pilot’s panel.
Good; there was no provision for the helm to ask who was giving it commands. The Marshal Service was seldom guilty of raw hubris, but Casey almost grinned when he realized that in this one thing they were sadly over confident. Anyone could operate this shuttle, it requested no I.D. whatsoever! It allowed a thirteen-year-old to take control, and then to lock that control in.
The trick would be to keep the damnable corporate jackal from killing his prey rather than risk surrendering it alive to someone else, Katy thought as her pilot brought the Archangel’s shuttle down almost on top of the larger craft. They were too close to be fired upon, literally; and as the belly doors retracted a tangle-net dropped into the space between the Narsatian aircar and the Marshal Service shuttle.
It surrounded the small man who had to be Vargas, and of course it also enveloped his two prisoners. Designed to restrain a prisoner from committing self-harm as well as from lashing out at others, the net tightened only in response to struggling within its strands; but it did that relentlessly. And it knew the difference between living flesh, which it would not crush or even compress dangerously, and a weapon.
Vargas lost the blaster rifle he had been holding, it was flattened. But the web did not crush the rifle’s power pac, it also “knew” that to do so would cause an explosion.
Vargas uttered one curse. He did not fight; he let the web take him, relaxed within its strands.
He had never been more dangerous than he was at this moment, a predator caught in a trap but still conscious and physically unharmed. Just restrained, and furious, and ready to fight the instant he once again became able to do so.
If Dan Archer had possessed the power to kill Vargas at that moment, he would have done exactly that. And he would have felt he was doing the universe a service, because the look Vargas sent in Rachel Kane’s direction was the most intense look of hate that Archer had ever seen on an otherwise human face. The corporate marshal was helpless, in a sense it would have been a cowardly thing to shoot him while a tangle-net held him fast; but that was probably the only time when it was going to be possible to kill a creature as ruthless as this one, and Archer knew it.
From the shuttle above them a widely dispersed stun-beam flashed blue. Archer had just time enough to wonder whether Rachel Kane and her unborn babies could absorb that energy safely before he lost consciousness.
Bringing a physician—a civilian one, anyway—along on this sort of a ride was definitely a first for Katy Romanova. But although she had gone through three pregnancies resulting in four healthy babies while on active duty status, retreating to Kesra only when in her final trimester (with Maddy, in her last month actually), she hadn’t been subjected to the kind of physical battering that she knew Rachel Kane might be in for before this day’s work was over. So she had asked for Cab Barrett’s company, and her friend and doctor had joined her immediately while the Harbormaster and the Chief Constable had been left behind.
Stunning, a good idea? Of course not, Barrett said when asked, but neither was the stasis that had saved her patient’s life earlier; and one thing was certain, getting Kane away from that damned jackal was the top priority right now. Whether or not anyone else wanted to come out and say so, keeping the children she was carrying alive had to be secondary.
Katy nodded, and when the time came to use the wide-dispersion stun beam she did so. There was no better way, not unless she wanted to try to hit Vargas only with something more deadly—and she wasn’t about to attempt to work that closely with three people inside the same tangle-net.
The hatch of the marshal’s shuttle was still open. On the monitor she saw George Fralick coming to its edge, which placed him inside the airlock but did not expose him to fire from the larger ship that still hovered overhead, gently suspended on its antigravs until it could retract the net with its three passengers.
Fralick had a blade in his hand. He was going to cut the marshal loose, and Romanova was sure he knew how to calibrate that blade’s settings so that it would be effective against a tangle-net.
She said within her mind, “Linc! Have Maddy shut the hatch, now!”
Her husband was still reeling from what had just happened out in space, and all around him at Narsai Control people were scrambling to try to figure out how to defend their world against the incoming Rebel ships. She, too, was profoundly distressed by the Archangel’s loss—and how Narsai thought it was going to do anything, since it was a world without weapons, she did not know—but halting what they’d begun here was not going to help those larger events one bit. So she made that demand, and felt Linc gathering his resources and relaying it, and knew that he was deliberately and successfully shielding Maddy from the knowledge they both had of what was happening far beyond Narsai’s northern hemisphere winter skies.
The hatch slammed shut at Fralick’s back. Katy could not see it happening, of course, but she could see her ex-husband’s reaction. He turned, and stopped trying to free Vargas.
“Retract net!” she ordered her own people, and then gave Cab Barrett a grin. The Narsatian doctor was pale under her skin’s natural olive darkness. If Katy who had fought so many other battles had been disturbed by the one that had just been lost in space above them, then Barrett must have been flabbergasted by what she had seen; but somehow she still managed to smile back.
Lives were being saved, and that was what Cab Barrett’s existence was all about.
“I’m going down to the other shuttle now,” Romanova announced. Suddenly that seemed to be her job, somehow George Fralick down there alone with Maddy seemed to be her responsibility. Her unfinished business, that needed to be resolved right now before she had to start dealing with the new crisis that was inbound from space.
“Incoming teleport,” the shuttle’s copilot announced. The two crewpeople from Archangel had gone on doing their jobs here, in spite of what they knew had happened to their ship and to their comrades; and Romanova thought as she watched them that she had never seen more complete professionalism in the face of terror and loss.
“Linc? Is it—”
Romanova’s thought was answered instantly. “Yes. After you wanted her to slam the hatch, the next thing seemed to be to get her out of there before Fralick can get it open. Which ought to give him a good reason not to fire on you while you’re heading back here, I think?” Her husband sounded quite pleased with himself.
The person who materialized on the shuttle’s small porter platform leaped down from it the moment she had control of her limbs, and she threw herself against Katy. And with all thoughts of going anywhere right now banished from her mind, Romanova gathered her daughter in and held her as gratefully as she had in the first moments after Maddy’s birth.