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.