Well, it wasn’t exactly the next thing she wanted to do; but it most definitely was the next thing she needed to do.
CHAPTER 15
“We’ve got them!” The triumphant bellow came from the throat of an unassuming, wiry little man in an unmarked jumpsuit, who had not been present at all when Johnnie Romanov had last looked over the work party’s progress.
It was a moonlit night on the North Continent of Narsai, now. That particular moon hadn’t risen until the night was half gone, but even before that the landing party from the Archangel had been going about its business in the illumination provided by their own portable light sources.
Johnnie Romanov had fallen asleep in the aircar, after having given in to temptation and calling his nearest neighbors at the Wang Farmstead. He had told them what had happened here, had listened to their outrage and their sympathy, and had said that three people were unaccounted for. And then he had known he was understood, because Clara Wang had responded with a promise to “let you know if we hear anything, Johnnie.”
In other words she and her spouse would watch their end of the ancient tunnel system, and if anyone reached them there they would be ready to give aid.
There was nothing more he could do, except talk to his daughter at her home in a far-off city. No, she did not need to come here and be with him; in fact he hoped she would not, because this was not something he wanted her to see. After that call he had curled up in exhaustion, figuring that whatever happened next he would be better able to cope with it if he rested while he was free to do so.
Now he swung himself out of the seat, and was just in time to see that the landing party’s principals had congregated around a battered outbuilding where Romanov knew perfectly well the tunnel system had an access point. Somehow it didn’t surprise him when he reached the building, having dashed across the space between it and the aircar, to hear the landing party’s military commander saying to the little man in the plain jumpsuit, “We’ll have them out of there shortly, Marshal. Congratulations.”
“Your people did superb work, Lieutenant,” the small man replied in that surprisingly resonant voice of his. Then he turned as Romanov approached and asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Romanov?”
A trap, Johnnie realized immediately. This Corporate Marshal knew damned well that he, the farmstead’s proprietor, must have been aware of the fugitives’ location all along—and he was hoping to hear something that would amount to an admission of that knowledge.
He schooled his face into worried innocence, which really wasn’t difficult because he certainly was worried, and he asked a question in return. “Did you find something, Marshal? You are the Marshal that HR Solutions sent after the missing gen, aren’t you?”
The small man’s eyes were light blue, so light they almost seemed colorless under these conditions. He studied Johnnie still more carefully as he answered, “I’m Vargas, yes. And we found something, all right, Mr. Romanov. Your ancestors had shelters, a place to go in case of alien attack on Narsai?”
“I’ve been told they did,” Johnnie responded. “But—are you telling me the people whose bodies weren’t found, went underground? Into an old shelter?” He let his voice rise with hope, even though that was decidedly not what he was actually feeling.
“Underground, anyway. And they’re coming up now, all three of them. One would be your wife, I think.” Vargas studied him a moment longer, with the air of a man who had all the time in the universe. He turned away only when there was fresh activity within the outbuilding’s ruins.
The railcar started reversing its course after it had traveled some distance through the ancient passage toward the next farmstead. However, at that point its doing so was almost welcome; because it had stopped, brought to rest against rubble that blocked its course, and Dan Archer had to scramble back aboard it hastily in order to keep from being left behind.
He said to Reen Romanova, who had literally hauled him inside when he hadn’t quite made it on his own, “Damn! I’d just made up my mind we were probably going to have to do this anyway, I couldn’t see any chance of getting through that blockage without the kind of power and equipment that we just don’t have—but I was hoping we might get back to where we started and find that no one’s still looking for us there.”
“Someone has to be, the remotes didn’t activate by themselves,” Reen answered him bluntly. She was starting to look haggard in the weak light of the lumipanels.
But she was in better shape than was the much younger woman beside her. Rachel Kane barely opened her eyes when Dan sat down at her other side, and when he put his arm around her she muttered unintelligibly and sank back into sleep.
She was armed; so was he. Reen was not, she’d had no reason to carry a weapon on a civilized world and inside her own home. But two blasters against everything a starship landing party could throw at them, was about as unequal a contest as Dan Archer could imagine.
And he knew all about what they were being drawn back into, because he had been part of such landing parties in the days before he’d become a senior engineer. And Rachel Kane, as a command officer, had led those parties many times.
Just how would the members of this particular party react, anyway, when two of the people they’d been sent to capture emerged from underground and were seen to be their own former executive officer and chief engineer? Not that there hadn’t been personnel changes during the more than a year that he and Rachel had both been off the Archangel, but he was willing to bet that a good number of that landing party’s members would turn out to be men and women who would recognize him—and that even more would recognize their former exec. Now, that could be worth something in delayed reaction times.
So could the usual human reluctance to do harm to a pregnant female. With a trapped animal’s desperation, Daniel Archer thought and planned and struggled to find alternatives.
And as he did so the railcar carried him relentlessly backward to the place he least wanted to go in the entire universe right now, and the woman who carried his children lay limp against him and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
George Fralick kept his ex-wife waiting, which of course was a typical negotiator’s tactic for putting an adversary at disadvantage. Which bothered Katy not at all, since she had a heavy starcruiser under her control and Fralick was aboard someone else’s warp-capable shuttlecraft. Still, no one could have guessed that from Fralick’s demeanor when he finally appeared in the holoscreen in Captain Giandrea’s office. “Katy. Sorry to leave you without any explanation like that, but—”
“Cut the crap, George.” She was speaking to him without measuring her words, because even though he had their daughter with him she now felt that she had nothing to lose where this man was concerned. Once she had needed him. He was her boys’ father, and she was a Narsatian woman for whom unfaithfulness to a spouse wasn’t thinkable. Whatever marital companionship she received would have to come from him, as she had viewed her future then; and their sons really had loved him even though he hadn’t always seemed to understand that they were her children, too, and that some of their values and character traits had come from her. Then the boys had been gone, and even though George had been verbally abusive to her after that tragedy—hell, the man had been nothing less than cruel—still, he was the father of the little girl in her womb. And besides that she had felt sorry for him, and had convinced herself he must be insane with grief. He would get better; and after the baby came and they were a family again, they would both be able to heal.
It hadn’t happened that way. She’d had to leave, or lose everything in life that kept her sane. Even his withholding Maddy from her hadn’t been enough to change her mind. And then on the last night she would spend under his roof….
She had visited that house many times afterward, because he would not let her see her daughter anywhere else. But she had taken someone along with her each time, someone who wasn’t a Kesran servant who must turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what happ
ened between master and mistress, and she had never stayed there overnight again. And even with a fellow Service officer beside her (always a friend who, of course, knew nothing about what she’d suffered on her last night of residence there), Katy Romanova had done few things in her life that had required as much courage as had walking back into that place which had once been her home.
She pushed that memory aside, because if Linc should innocently reach for her she did not want him to find it in her mind. This one recollection she had withheld from him, as far as she knew with complete success, during even their most intimate moments of shared pain and shared rapture. She had made it plain to him, the first time they’d talked about their ability to speak mind to mind (which had happened long before the end of her marriage to George, back while she was still pregnant with Maddy), that there would always be private areas of her thoughts and that she expected him to stay out of those areas; and he had agreed to that, had in fact found it a completely normal and necessary desire. Even after they became lovers, he had gone on respecting the citadel at the heart of her individual consciousness. But to think about something which aroused emotions this powerful, at a time when she knew he might need to touch her, would be foolish. He might quite unintentionally pick up a stray thought from among the ones she did not want to share with him, given these circumstances; and she might find herself suddenly obliged to push him away, at just the moment when he needed her most urgently.
Besides, that was over. The only way George could hurt her now would be through Maddy, and George wasn’t going to harm his own child. In fact George would never let anyone else hurt her, hurt Katy; that was a privilege that he had reserved for himself, because in his eyes she was still his property.
She looked into his face and she continued, “I’ve got incoming from Bill Tanaka at Fleet Command on Terra. Anything you’d like me to tell him, George?”
“No. But I’d like you to tell me what you’ll do if he orders you to lead an attack on the Rebs, Katy.” Fralick still didn’t get it, that was plain. His tone and his choice of words indicated that he was still talking to the woman he felt he’d conquered, hundreds of times over the course of a long married life; and then in one final and decisive demonstration of his power to take control of her body and compel her will to bend to his.
And all that was over now, dammit. Katy asked softly, as she might have asked any other stuffed shirt of a diplomat who was being stupid enough to bait her, “Wouldn’t you like to know the answer to that, George?” At which point she cut the commlink.
“You didn’t ask him how your daughter is?” That question came from Paolo Giandrea, who was sitting in a guest chair in his own office and watching the woman who’d taken over his chair with astonished eyes.
“I know she’s all right, or he’d have told me in graphic and heart-rending detail just exactly how she wasn’t all right,” Katy said, with a ghost of a grim smile playing about the corners of her mouth. “Trust me, that’s experience talking and not speculation! And much as I love my daughter, right now she’s not my top concern. Not while I know she’s safe, and believe it or not she is safe with her father. He didn’t know harming Linc would harm her, and frankly I didn’t know it either. Now!” She changed the commlink’s settings, and said to ops, “I’m ready for Admiral Tanaka now, Ensign.”
Another familiar face appeared in the holoscreen. This one had almond-shaped black eyes, black hair that was showing white at its temples, and the smooth golden skin of a human whose ancestors had been bred in Earth’s so-called Orient. But Willard Tanaka had grown up on New Orient, actually, and was therefore just as much a colonists’ descendant as was Katy Romanova.
And yet if war came he would not be finding himself on the other side of the battle from his birthplace, because New Orient was a so-called “Inner World”; one of the first Terran colonies, now regarded as a co-equal part of the mother planet’s political structure.
There were six “Inner Worlds,” plus Terra itself. The rest of the Commonwealth consisted of Narsai, Kesra, Mortha, and the Sestus System with its two inhabited worlds, plus additional planets located even farther out and inhabited almost entirely by non-human species that had entered the Commonwealth purely for the trade advantages their membership brought.
Narsai and Sestus 3 were completely human worlds, with no greater populations of aliens and hybrids than had Terra (percentage-wise, anyway). Narsai was a place of crowded cities, where population growth was strictly limited and rich agricultural lands were carefully managed—with the result that there was always food for export, and that life for most Narsatians was comfortable. Sestus 3, by contrast, was sparsely settled—but that was because it had so little to recommend it. With its stinking (although perfectly breathable) atmosphere and its sparse soils and wildly uneven climate zones, it was positive proof that there could be such a thing as a Class M world where humans seldom chose to live if they had the option of living somewhere else.
Kesra, of course, belonged mostly to its indigenous species with their incredibly long life spans and their huge extended families. The native Kesrans did not overrun the relatively small land areas of their planet, though, because within each family most of the adults were deliberately neutered or naturally infertile males and females. Only one or at most two breeding pairs were allowed in each such group, in each generation. The humans who lived there were mostly transients, with just a few permanently resident families like that of George Fralick—whose forebears had been rewarded for helping the Kesrans, with the gift that to a Kesran was the most valuable thing one could be offered. Land enough for a residence, on their land-poor planet.
And then there was Sestus 4, where the main usefulness of humans was to serve the indigenous species through dangerous labor such as that which Dan Archer’s grandparents had died performing in the mines; and then there was Mortha.
On Mortha there were millions of humans, and more millions of part-humans, and a relatively small number of more or less “pure” native Morthans. Mortha was the wild card of the Outworlds, because so many of the men on Mortha had been born on Terra or one of the other Inner Worlds; and because there were so many Morthan hybrids scattered throughout the Commonwealth, utilizing their unique gifts as healers of both the bodies and the minds of just about any other humanoid species they encountered.
“Normal” Morthans did not become fighters, which was one reason why Lincoln Casey had been such a fiercely driven cadet when Katy had first known him. To prove that he could do anything a fully human warrior could do, had been what motivated him in those days. Yet if Morthans as a species had been willing and able to go into battle as did their Terran counterparts, they would probably have been far more dangerous; because the abilities that they used to heal, could have been used just as effectively to devastate. What better advantage could there be, than to perceive an enemy’s thoughts and feelings?
Again, Linc was different. He could not touch just anyone’s thoughts, he could only touch Katy’s—and now, little Maddy’s as well. So Linc would never face the choice of whether or not to use his late-blooming and still terribly limited gifts to do harm. But the idea of a Morthan who might turn his mental abilities toward tormenting other beings, in the manner of humans who since time’s beginning had killed and tortured their fellows, was an idea that frightened Katy Romanova like no other.
So the Rebs were trying to gather a fleet, were they? And rumor said they were forming it up out beyond Mortha; that was the first thing she had learned from Paolo Giandrea, when she had asked him for the swiftest possible briefing on why he had been conveying George Fralick to meet with other Commonwealth representatives on Terra. Somehow that didn’t surprise her, because peaceful Mortha was without a doubt the safest bulwark in the universe that the Rebs could have placed between themselves and the Star Service ships patrolling the vast distances among the Outworlds. And right now, obviously, the Commonwealth’s more powerful members were concentrating on negotiations with the
Outworlds’ official representatives instead of massing military power to find that rumored Rebel fleet and wipe it out.
Yet if Sestus 4 should ever stop sending the Inner Worlds the ores their industries required, or if Narsai ever declined to send foodstuffs—or if Mortha stopped absorbing excess human males, and refused to send out its own men to become healers all over the rest of the human-explored galaxy (and yet never to sire offspring of their own, which no doubt made them particularly acceptable additions on worlds where population pressures were an issue)—that was the day when Terra and the other Inner Worlds could be counted upon to send as many ships as it took to destroy the Rebels, until the so-called trade balance was restored.
It was no balance, it was more like tribute. Katy Romanova knew that, but until now that had always been the Narsatian Council’s concern and not hers.
To the man in the holoscreen she said, “Hello, Bill. It’s been a long time.”
“Too damned long, Katy! We’d started wondering if you and Linc had died after you left Terra, and no one had bothered to tell us.” Her successor as Fleet Admiral gave her a warm, genuine smile of comradeship. “So you accepted recall. That’s good, we need you.”
“But you don’t need my husband?” She deliberately used the words that defined the relationship, and not Linc’s name. She needed another rumor confirmed or denied, and now was as good a time as any to try to make that happen.
Her tactic worked. Tanaka sighed, his smile disappeared, and he answered her with an old friend’s bluntness. “Katy, we’re not accepting Morthan officers anymore. Linc won’t be getting a recall, and from what I remember of his health just before you both retired—isn’t that just as well?”
“Maybe. Although Linc is perfectly well again now, thank goodness.” Romanova leaned back in the captain’s desk chair, and regarded Tanaka thoughtfully. They had never served on the same ship, but he was a member of her Academy graduating class. She knew the man, had socialized with him from time to time over more than forty years and had served with many officers who had shared his bridge and his wardroom.
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