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.
CHAPTER 22
“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.