The hatch to the passageway opened again, and two humans wearing security uniforms came through it. Casey realized that the Morthan doctor had moved away from him, and knew that although he could not see it a forcefield had been erected between them. He had ordered that done to a potentially dangerous prisoner many times, when he had been the one in command.
“I’m sorry,” Captain Giandrea said again. “But I guess I don’t have to tell you that sometimes I don’t like my orders, Captain Casey. I never served with you, but I’ve heard plenty about you from Dan Archer—so I know you’ll understand there’s nothing personal about what I have to do now.”
The guards moved forward, stepping through the forcefield where gaps of precisely the necessary size opened to allow them to pass.
CHAPTER 7
“Dan!” Romanova was met at the farmhouse’s door not by her silver-haired cousin, but by someone she had not expected to see again unless there really was some kind of afterlife. She respected Linc’s intuition, but when it came to someone he loved as much as he loved their foster son she had honestly doubted him. She had been waiting for the results of Narsai Control’s investigation into the trader Triad’s explosion, which of course would include a scan of the debris for the smallest traces of organic remains—which almost always, except in cases where a gargantuan military carrier or a thousand-passenger civilian liner had suffered disaster, could confirm the identities of those who had died when a ship was lost and the debris was accessible for such scanning. Only if that had been completed without finding Dan would she have let herself begin believing that Linc might be right.
Yet here Dan was in front of her, and much as she wanted to throw her arms around him she could not allow herself that luxury. She could only draw in a breath of startled joy, and exhale it as his name.
“Better get inside, Matushka,” Archer said, and stood back from the door to invite the three females to enter.
Once the door had closed behind them, while Romanova was still hearing it seal itself, she found herself gathered into someone’s arms; but not Dan’s. Ivan Romanov was holding his cousin tightly, with a possessiveness she hadn’t felt in his touch since the days almost fifty years ago when she had been a barely-nubile girl and his intended bride. “Oh, Katy. I wasn’t expecting you, but after what almost happened to Dan I’m so glad to know you’re safe,” he said, and gave her a squeeze that took her breath before he kissed her forehead and let her go.
She’d stuffed her blaster back where it belonged, just in time. Now she stepped back from Johnnie’s arms, and saw that nearby Rachel Kane was being held close by Dan Archer.
Just for a moment. Then Archer was turning to Romanova, although he kept the female gen’s shoulders in the circle of one big arm. He asked tautly, “Were you told about the Triad yet, Matushka?”
“Yes.” Katy was aware of her daughter standing beside her, taking the whole scene in with enormous brown eyes but saying nothing. She had to be frightened, yet Maddy was more poised at the moment than Rachel Kane was with all her years of service experience. She put out a hand and touched the girl’s arm in reassurance as she continued to Archer, “Narsai Control called us, Linc and I are listed as your next of kin. But he didn’t believe you were dead, so when we came out here he stayed behind in case you tried to contact home.”
“Oh, damn,” Dan said. “I’m sorry. How in hell did Maddy wind up on Narsai, Matushka? Now of all times?”
“Papa has to go to Terra, and he asked Mum to keep me with her while he’s gone this time,” Madeleine Fralick announced, answering for herself with that calm confidence that so far nothing had been able to shake. “Who are you, and how do you know my name?”
“This is Dan Archer, sweetheart,” Romanova said, almost absently as she looked around the huge kitchen—traditionally an enormous room in Narsatian farmsteads, a leftover custom from colonial days where families had been large instead of strictly limited and when it had taken many hands to operate a farmstead like this one—and wondered with coldness in her chest why Lorena did not appear. And where Dan’s shipmates were, also. “You’ve heard me mention him before. He was your brother Ewan’s best friend, and now he lives with me and with Linc. So you should think of him as your brother, too, all right?”
“All right,” Maddy said, giving assent as if her mother really had intended for her to make a choice. “But why aren’t you dead, then, if that’s who you are? Your ship blew up, and you were supposed to be aboard her. Everyone said that, anyway.”
“Everyone was wrong,” Archer answered the child, with a taut grin that paid her the compliment of taking her just as seriously as she was taking herself. “We found the explosive before it went off. So a salvage ship went up instead, with Triad’s I.D. code and with enough traces of each of us aboard it so that the debris ought to check out to Narsai Control’s satisfaction.”
“And Triad is in the equipment barn here.” Romanova understood now, and it was so simple that she wanted to kick herself. But the little rented aircar carried no equipment for identifying a warp-capable ship’s I.D. signature. Its instruments had barely been able to tell her enough to make her come in with her suspicions aroused; so she really could not have known, and it was foolish to blame herself for not guessing. “But why, Dan? Who would try to destroy a trade-ship in orbit around a peaceful world like Narsai?”
“I don’t know, Matushka.” Archer gave Rachel Kane’s shoulders a squeeze as he said that. “We’re all former scramblers, so getting rid of us wouldn’t make anyone at Star Service Command shed any tears now that every trained officer they threw away eighteen months ago is apt to be thinking about joining the Rebs. But taking that much trouble to get rid of just five of us, for that reason only? I don’t think so. And that leaves Rachel here as the only reason I can think of why anyone might be that mad at me, or at any of my partners—and even that doesn’t make complete sense, because blowing us up wasn’t going to get her back for her owners. I might have expected them to have one of us grabbed to try to find out her whereabouts, but I wouldn’t expect them to kill when it wouldn’t gain them a thing. The Corporate Jackals just don’t operate that way.”
Romanova was barely hearing the second part of what her foster son had said. She was staring across the kitchen, and she was exhaling with profound relief because Lorena Romanova had entered the room from an inner doorway and was looking at her cousin with eyes that were just the same shade of brown as Katy’s.
Reen was a bit younger than Katy was, and her blood relationship to Ivan Romanov was one degree less close; but it hadn’t been possible for Katy’s parents to have another daughter to fulfill the marriage agreement that Katy had refused to complete, not when Johnnie had already waited an extra decade because Katy’s older sister had died in childhood and her parents had then conceived her to replace their lost heir. So the next branch of the Romanovs had been asked to contribute their daughter, and Lorena had acquiesced gladly.
How odd it was, that Reen hadn’t known Johnnie throughout her childhood as Katy had known him—hadn’t gone to his bed on her thirteenth birthday, to tremendous celebration and warm parental approval, as Katy had done—and yet it was plain that now Reen loved Johnnie in much the same way that Katy loved Lincoln Casey.
The human heart was the strangest of creatures, and no amount of discovering and settling new worlds and establishing new cultures was ever going to alter that simple fact.
Reen came to her husband’s side now, and took his hand in a gesture that conveyed intimacy far more clearly than had Dan Archer’s embrace of Rachel Kane. She said softly, “They’re all battened down to wait it out aboard their ship, dear. They say they don’t want to come inside. Now, this must be our guest—but who’s the young lady?”