“Ma’am.” The shuttle pilot spoke softly to Romanova, after she had finished hugging her child and as she was about to leave the cabin for the cargo bay where the three people in the tangle-net were reposing in unconsciousness.
“I know,” Romanova said, just as softly. “But he’s committed no crime in the legal, provable sense, Lieutenant; and he’s my little girl’s father.”
It did seem like a gross tactical error, to fly off and leave George Fralick in possession of a warp-capable shuttle at the start of what promised to be either a hostile occupation or—what? This was a situation unlike any of the others Romanova had faced during her career, though; and she could tell herself without stretching her credibility that destroying or disabling that shuttle in order to kill Fralick would be a stupid waste unless it was the only way to prevent him from killing someone else. Which it wasn’t, not yet anyway.
She said, “Circle back, Lieutenant. But give me time to deal with what’s down in our cargo bay.”
To Maddy she said firmly, “Stay up here, love. Cab, come with me.”
A cornered animal, that was still what Marshal Vargas reminded her of when she saw him lying in the tangle-net’s mesh. She said to the doctor, “Scan him first. Stay out of his reach while you do it! If he’s not still dead to the world, I don’t want to find that out the hard way.”
She herself deactivated the sections of the net that held Rachel Kane and Daniel Archer captive. She was no physician, but like most Service officers she was a trained field medic. She scanned Kane first, and was able to assure herself that the woman’s vitals weren’t shocky. And within her abdomen there were still three heartbeats, although Romanova’s knowledge base stopped her there. She could not tell whether those heartbeats sounded the way they ought to, or if they were too fast—too slow—?
Whatever, they were alive anyway. And if Kane was getting ready to miscarry, Romanova thought, she ought not to have vitals within acceptable limits. So the admiral moved next to her foster son, and scanned his body and grinned with relief.
Dan was fine. Healthy as the proverbial horse. Even as she finished the scan he stirred, and groaned, and tried to sit up.
She wanted to help him and comfort him, but she did not dare to take the time. She turned toward the still-imprisoned marshal instead, and saw him moving within the tangle-net just in time.
Cab Barrett, for all her brilliance as a doctor, knew nothing about self-defense. Vargas must have gone deliberately limp as soon as he gained enough awareness to feel the mesh around him, which meant he had some play inside it now. It would tighten as he tried to use that play, of course; but he could reach toward the Narsatian woman as she bent over him, and he was doing that.
Romanova’s blaster left her belt without her giving it conscious thought. She brought the beam to its tightest possible focus, to avoid hitting Barrett, and she fired.
“One less jackal in the universe,” she muttered as she stood there afterward, her breast heaving because the incident had taken her so completely by surprise. But she was pleased, in some corner of her mind, that her reflexes still were all that they should be.
Barrett had uttered a shriek, and now she was shaking. But after a moment she took her hands away from her face and she said in a choked voice, “He would have killed me, wouldn’t he, Katy?”
“Yes. Or if he thought he could make it work, he’d have used you for a shield to force me to release him. Anyway, he won’t do anything more to hurt anyone.” The moment those words were out of her mouth, though, Romanova sensed their wrongness.
What was it she’d heard about marshals, through the Service grapevine that functioned across even the most unbelievable interstellar distances? They almost never died in the line of duty, but when they did….
She grabbed Barrett and hauled her across the cargo bay. She hit two controls on the nearest panel, simultaneously. One to set up a forcefield that would keep everything on her side of it in place for the next few moments—herself, Barrett, and the two humans who were trying so hard to wake up. The other to open one of the belly doors again, the one on which the corporate marshal’s body rested.
The explosion still made the deckplates quiver, but it was outside the shuttle and they were inside it. They were unharmed.
“Matushka?” Dan Archer spoke the familiar title both interrogatively and shakily. He was sitting up now, and his eyes had found Romanova.
“Mum!” That was Maddy, crying out to her mother via comm.
“Katy?” Linc’s voice inside her mind, concerned and tender.
“It’s okay, it’s over,” Romanova told all of them, and drew a breath to still her own body’s impulse to tremble. That had been close, much too close.
Rachel Kane cried out, and drew her knees up. And that caused Cab Barrett to hurry to her patient’s side, her own recent terror forgotten.
“Admiral, we’re almost back to where we left the marshal’s shuttle.” That voice from the cabin had recalled Romanova from the cargo bay, after she had once again closed its belly doors. She could not stay with the young woman who was in such clear physical distress, she could only leave her in the hands of her lover and a very competent physician.
They would probably prefer to lay her out down there, anyway, instead of trying to get her up into the cabin where there was no place for her to lie down and no room for anyone to work over her.
George. What in hell to do about George? That was a question Catherine Romanova seemed to have spent far more of her life asking herself than really ought to have been necessary, and she’d never asked it with greater exasperation—or with more at stake—than she asked it now
Linc’s mind said to hers, “Katy, if you need to kill him in order to be safe, do it!”
“If I have to, I will,” she answered, and her mental tone was that of a promise. “But not unless it’s necessary, Linc.”
He didn’t understand that. The image that had inadvertently passed from her thoughts to his a few hours ago, in a library conference room where an entire world’s leaders had been assembled, had made it impossible for him to comprehend why she hadn’t killed George Fralick long ago. And that was a matter that she and her husband would have to work out between them, when they had leisure again for a personal conversation; but right now it had no place in her thoughts, and allowing it to distract her could get everyone who was with her killed. So she pushed it away, out of her consciousness, and was relieved when after an instant’s rebellion Linc followed her lead and did the same thing.
“What’s going on with the Rebs?” she asked him, and also asked the shuttle’s crew, as she came back into the cabin and took a moment to squeeze Maddy’s shoulder in reassurance.
“A stray shot from the battle killed almost a thousand people aboard Habitat Three,” Casey’s thought answered her. “We also lost a comm satellite, a long-range booster.”
“Damn, now calling for back-up’s not going to be possible.” That one probably hadn’t been a stray shot, it was the first thing she would have aimed at if she had been commanding that rebel fleet. But she hoped with all her soul the deaths on the orbiting habitat hadn’t been deliberate, because if the Rebs were people with that kind of disregard for life then she hated to imagine what Narsai was going to be like if occupation was what her world now must face.
“Fralick’s got that thing underway, ma’am.” The lieutenant at their own craft’s helm looked grim. “Do we let him go, or do we take him out?”
“Oh, gods,” Katy Romanova muttered, and felt the same helpless fury that she had last known lying on a bed in a house on Kesra—her nightgown torn off, her baby daughter asleep nearby, and with the man who had once promised to love her forever poised above her and about to force his body into hers.
That damned bastard. And once again Maddy was the reason she must hold back from killing him, because then to do so would have been to guarantee that her baby would grow up orphaned—her mother executed for her father’s murder, since on Kesra a mated female simply had no right to refuse her male’s advances—and to do so now would mean that Maddy must spend the rest of her life with the memory of hearing her mother give the order for her father to be shot down before her eyes.
She hadn’t done it then, and she wasn’t going to do it now. So as the lieutenant asked again, “Ma’am? Admiral Romanova?”, she gripped the back of his chair and she stared at the viewscreen from over his shoulder.
And at last she said, “He’s heading up toward orbit, Lieutenant. So let him go, we need to get back to Narsai Control while we still can make it there.”
She heard her daughter’s sigh of relief, and a moment later the girl butted her head against her mother’s shoulder like a leggy colt looking for its dam’s attention.
She did look just about like one, too, Romanova thought absently as she put her arm around the child and held her close. And then from the hatch leading down to the cargo bay she heard Dan Archer calling to her, “Matushka! How long until we can get to a hospital? Or can we port Rachel to one right now? Dr. Barrett says if these kids don’t go into stasis the second they come out of her, we’re going to lose them. We’re probably going to lose them anyhow, but in a hospital they might have a chance.”
There was something wrong about those ships. Lincoln Casey had been a starship command officer for most of his adult life, and he knew just by watching the blips. The peculiar readings that went along with them only confirmed it; of the nine ships that remained after the Archangel had taken six with her into oblivion, he was certain that seven had not come from any yard operated by human shipwrights.
Yet two definitely had, which made the puzzle even more baffling. Not that one space-going species could not appropriate and fly another’s ships, he himself had prize captained a few alien vessels during his junior officer days; but with every sense he possessed focused now on the actions of those holo-imaged blips, and on the thousand different readings that they were generating on Narsai Control’s tracking computers, he was certain that he was looking at a mixed fleet.
Morthans did not fight. As far as he knew, he was the only individual of his kind who had ever wanted to become a Star Service officer; so those ships out there could not be “manned” (ridiculous, inappropriate word!) by people from his mother’s home-world. Sestians, natives of Sestus 4, occasionally contributed a member of their species to the Service; but those individuals did not rise far, and they usually didn’t stay long, because they were notoriously unable to grasp the idea that they must take orders from humans. In other words, as they saw it, from animals. And Kesrans seldom deigned to leave their watery world at all, although Linc did know there had been one Kesran aboard the destroyed Archangel.
But it was beyond imagining, even for him, that an influx of crew members from the three nonhuman sentient species that inhabited the Outworlds as he knew them could account for the strangeness that emanated from the ragged formation in that holoscreen. It was just too alien, and although he did not like Sestians or Kesrans much he did not find them strange—just annoying. And Morthans, even when he had been a child and his cousins had taunted him, were still just as much part of what he was as were humans.
There was nothing familiar out there. The fleet wheeled, and came in toward Narsai in a fan formation that was clearly intended to place that world’s globe within its center.
The ships in orbit around Narsai included armed freighters, twenty-three of them just now; a passenger liner, which had a few defensive weapons but which really was not equipped to fight anyone or anything; and the usual assortment of shuttles, private yachts (rarely affected by Narsatians, though, so there were only a couple of them while an Inner World of similar population would have had dozens cluttering up its orbital pathways), and work-boats for the habitats and satellites that also accompanied Narsai in its annual journey around its sun. In other words, there really wasn’t anything out there that could even consider challenging the fleet of warships.
Maybe some of them could run, though, if their captains had brains enough to realize it was time for that. Yet Casey knew after decades of having protected civilian shipping that civvie officers weren’t trained that way. Heading for open space when they were in trouble was the exact opposite of what they were taught to do, so he was sadly unsurprised to see that although Narsai Control’s commlinks were crackling—alive with frightened voices transmitting questions, making demands for explanations that right now the controllers could not supply—the civvies were staying put.
One blip was not doing that, though. Even on a controller’s monitoring screen that particular blip generated a code all its own, a “top priority” indicator that was supposed to tell everyone who saw it (and every navigational computer that read it) that the vessel it represented was not to be challenged or interfered with in any way.
“Coming through!” was what that code said, and it was a rare circumstance under which anyone who recognized it would do anything else but give it full heed.
George Fralick aboard the Corporate Marshal Service’s long-range shuttlecraft. So small that the alien fleet probably wouldn’t bother to pursue him, so fast that he could be at New Orient—the closest Star Service base to Narsai—in two weeks’ time, easily, if he headed straight there at the shuttle’s maximum warp.
I never thought I’d be cheering for Fralick again! Casey thought, as an incredulous grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. But now I’ve got to. I guess Katy’s right, that guy who was our first captain still is inside that stuffed shirt someplace.
“Of course I’m right!” came his wife’s thought, acerbic and half-distracted. “He’s smart, he’s got guts, he can think on his feet. That’s why he was a good captain, and he hasn’t lost any of it.”
“He’s still a goddamn bastard,” Linc responded, as he gave himself a physical shake to break out of the near-trance that watching the monitors with such utter concentration had caused him to enter. “A sick bastard.”
“Yes. That, too, and someday it’s going to catch up with him. But right now every prayer I know how to say is going with him, because if he can get through and send help back to us he may be the only hope we’ve got.” Katy’s thoughts became even more distracted. “I’m going to get my parents, Linc, as soon as we drop our patient off at MinTar Medical. And I’m ditching this uniform, that may make me a coward but right now I don’t feel the least bit duty-bound to identify myself as a Star Service flag officer. I’m not sure whether Narsai Control is the worst or the best place you could be right now, because depending on that fleet commander’s strategy it could be his next target or it could be the facility he most needs to preserve for his own use later; but I’m going to bet my credits on that last option, it’s what I’d do. So I’ll see you there. Please tell the watch commander not to shoot when we come in low and fast and don’t announce ourselves first.”
“Your patient?” Linc realized he had missed some key events aboard the Archangel’s surviving shuttle, while he had stared in fascination at the alien fleet’s maneuvers. “And you know that fleet’s not under human control, Katy?”
“Of course it isn’t. It still may be the Rebs, though, if they’ve allied themselves with another space-traveling species. From what I’ve been hearing they are desperate enough to do that, and while I can’t imagine what alien species they could have hooked up with it’s clear that most of those ships weren’t built from any design we’ve ever seen before. Could be that it’s Rebs using ships they got from another species that actually has enough vessels so they can sell them cheap—but there’s something about the way they’re handling themselves that feels funny to me, something that makes me believe all those captains can’t possibly be Rebs and humans.”
She paused, awaiting his response. Casey answered her, “I read it that way, too.”
“Good.” All their professional lives they’d served as each other’s sounding boards, and even though neither liked that conclusion the fact that they had reached it independently gave it an astronomically higher chance of proving to be the truth. Romanova continued, “Rachel’s gone into labor, Linc. Months too soon. I had to use a wide-dispersion stunner to get Dan and her separated from Vargas, and afterward when I scanned her she seemed to be okay; but then suddenly her body had just had enough, and now we’ve got to get her to proper care or at best the babies are going to die.”
And at worst, of course, so would Rachel. Katy didn’t say that, but she didn’t have to.