It was perfect. Hell, it was poetic. It was pure Matushka, with a distinct flavor of Lincoln Casey aiding and abetting…and it was making one tired, disgusted starship captain smile at last.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Giandrea said to his fleet admiral.
I understand your order, and I will obey it. That was what the ancient nautical expression actually meant, and Giandrea had never used it with greater sincerity.
“What the hell?” In spite of himself, Dan Archer muttered the question under his breath. The vehicle that carried them was turning around, was heading away from MinTar just moments before it should have touched down inside the Terran Embassy’s compound there.
Marshal Vargas didn’t have time to deal with his prisoner, even if he had heard that forbidden murmur. He was busy with a comm that he was taking in hush mode, and then he was talking to the pilot—the woman the Embassy had sent as its representative, to the Romanov Farmstead where Archer and Kane had been captured.
Kane was sitting up straight, now, beside her lover. She was a valuable commodity, she had been fed after their capture and that seemed to have revived her just as much as the rest she’d had during their time underground. Archer hadn’t been, and his stomach had been protesting about its emptiness until now.
Now that was the least of his concerns, and even his body knew it. Turning back before entering the Embassy meant that something had changed. That could be a good thing—but the chances were that it was quite the reverse.
George Fralick hadn’t personally piloted a ship for many years, but this was only a shuttle and he felt confident about bringing it safely down to Narsai’s surface. It was a warp-capable shuttle, one that was large enough to accommodate the needs of up to four persons (human persons, specifically) for months at a time, but it still responded sweetly to his touch. And he remembered how much he had once loved piloting a starship, and he smiled even though right now the situation in general was not something to smile about.
Maddy sat beside him in the co-pilot’s chair, not because she could operate the ship’s controls but because he was damned if he was letting the child out of his sight. Even here, where nothing and no one ought to be able to get at her, he wanted to be able to glance over at her and see that she was unharmed. And if, Powers Beneath the Waves forbid it, something else managed to go wrong—as things so often seemed to when he locked horns with that blasted ex-wife of his!—he wanted Maddy where he could be sure of taking her with him, if he had to get out of this ship without warning.
She knew enough not to touch anything, that was one advantage to having a thirteen-year-old instead of a smaller child. Maybe that was one compensation for having to deal with an adolescent now, with a separate person who was capable of questioning his actions and who was starting to demonstrate her mother’s aggravating tendency to challenge him.
He hadn’t viewed her assertiveness in that negative way when it had been a two-year-old’s “no!” or a four-year-old’s “I can do it myself, Papa.” And her curiosity he had encouraged, of course, because he was proud to have such an intelligent daughter and because he wanted her someday to succeed him as the intermediary between Kesra and Terra. She was the only child he was ever going to have, since making a second family didn’t tempt him one bit after everything Katy had put him through. So his whole future was invested in her, and that was the only reason he had been willing to risk bringing her here to Narsai and giving her mother’s people access to her at last.
It had been the worst tactical error of his life, but now all he could do was try to mitigate the damage. There was no point in thinking that if he could make the decision over again, he would place young Madeleine with another human family on Kesra during his absence even though he knew that if war was declared every human on that world would be told to leave it immediately.
It had always been shaky, the relationship between the few human residents of Kesra and the native species of that world. Sometimes Fralick had honestly considered taking his family and starting over with them somewhere else, although certainly not on Narsai where grown men bedded little girls and their parents applauded (and where Katy’s family had political and social and economic clout that secretly awed him)—and not on Terra, where if he no longer represented Kesra he would be without status or connections except for those remaining from his long-ago Service days….
And that was why he hadn’t done it. As Kesra’s ambassador, for as long as peace lasted, he had power and dignity and economic security. As much of those things in his way as Katy had in hers, on Narsai; and he wasn’t going to give them up, not unless and until he had to do that.
Not until someone wrested them out of his dead hands, actually. Yet he had not been willing to risk sacrificing Maddy while he held onto his status on Kesra, because Maddy was the one person left in his life whom George Fralick genuinely loved.
His little girl, who was fast turning into a woman. His little girl, not that mindfucker Casey’s.
The shuttle settled down onto the Narsatian plain, and he was proud of that landing. Light and smooth, he hadn’t lost his touch.
The in-atmosphere vehicle was waiting. Fralick had set down at precisely the correct coordinates.
He would get the Marshal and his prisoners aboard, and they would lift off again and head out-system. From there they would make a straight run toward Terra, and there wasn’t a captain alive who would dare to interfere with a Corporate Marshal Service shuttle.
Once on Terra, he would deal with this Captain Giandrea and with whoever had made that stupid bastard think he could get away with turning gens—and thieves who stole them—over to sentimental idiots like the Narsatian authorities. Not that Fralick personally gave a damn about this so-called Rachel Kane, and that Daniel Archer had survived the Triad’s destruction was an error he meant to see corrected. Fralick detested that pet junior of Katy’s, whom she had adopted as if having another young man around could somehow make up for the sons she had lost with her incompetence at Mistworld, nearly as much as he hated Lincoln Casey. But he did give a damn, considerably more than that in fact, about Giandrea’s allowing Casey to escape after the Morthan pervert had invaded little Maddy’s thoughts and had come so terribly close to causing the child’s death.
How to make Casey pay for that? Fralick was going to find a way, but not right now. Right now getting Maddy as far away from the mindfucker as possible was her father’s top priority.
CHAPTER 20
“I knew it,” Romanova said softly. “I knew no corporate marshal would ever obey an order to give up a prisoner to anyone except the business that commissioned him.”
She and Casey, and the two Narsatian officials who had taken on the job of assisting them, were at Narsai Control now. She had spent considerable time, longer than she had wanted to devote to that business, on comm to far-off Luna talking first to Fleet Admiral Tanaka and then also to Tanaka’s boss. And then she had listened while Captain Paolo Giandrea spoke to the Terran Ambassador to Narsai, and had smiled as she heard another transmission coming in from Luna (incredible, considering the power it took to punch through at this distance! How many real-time transmissions did that make, within the past standard day?) confirming what Giandrea had said.