“True. But now you have some time before that happens, and now you have forewarning. And if you can’t think of something to do with those advantages, then I’ll be damned if I can imagine why you ever were given command of a lifeboat—let alone command of the whole Star Service.” Kourdakov grinned tautly. “Face it, Katy, it’s a preemptive strike on the Commonwealth’s part and it’s a brilliant one. They’re scared to death the Rebs will tap you and you’ll agree to help them, so they’re pulling you back before that can happen.”
“You’re right about that, Dad.” The former Fleet Admiral gave her father back an exact duplicate of his own grin. “I had it figured that way myself.”
She paused in the university’s coffee shop and bought two sandwiches, and ate hers without tasting it. She gulped coffee, and made sure Maddy had a beverage that was familiar to a child who had spent her entire lifetime on another planet.
Should she have left the little girl with her grandparents? One would think that the home of the Senior Chairholder of the Narsatian Council would be a safe place for anyone…. But one would also have thought that the home of the former Fleet Admiral of the Star Service would be a safe place for her husband, who was also an officer of many years’ experience. And it hadn’t been safe there for Linc, not at all.
She would have to keep Maddy with her. In her sight at all times, and preferably within her reach.
Damn. She had loved her boys, but she had felt encumbered by their presence when they had been under her command as officers on other ships. To have a little girl of thirteen on her hands was galling, now when she needed desperately to be free to move swiftly and do whatever it took to go after the Archangel and get Linc back.
CHAPTER 11
Daniel Archer was trying not to pace the control room of his ship, because there really was not enough deck space to permit such an activity. He had been able to pace in the engine room of the Archangel, and Rachel Kane had been able to pace on the starship’s bridge; but here they did not have that luxury, even though they were the compartment’s only occupants.
Archer’s co-shipowners were not happy, to the extent that even his old friend Hansie Braeden was deliberately avoiding him right now. Hansie had known there was an occupied stasis tube on the lifeboat they’d salvaged, but that it had contained a gen? They were in this much trouble because their captain and senior partner had been sleeping with a goddamned gen, and then hadn’t been willing to surrender her to the authorities when she turned up pregnant and in stasis? Because they were sure, every one of them, that it was for sheltering that gen—however briefly—their ship had been targeted for destruction. And Archer was choosing to let them think that, since no one else aboard Triad was likely to believe what he had deduced as the real reason.
“You shouldn’t have tried to help me,” Rachel Kane said softly to her lover, as she sat in the navigator’s chair and watched Archer’s face as he sat in the pilot’s seat. “Even now, you should leave me behind when you make your run for open space. Tell your friends you didn’t realize you were putting them in so much danger, get them out of this mess, and then they just may forgive you.”
“You don’t sound much like a command officer!” He reached for her hand, and once he’d captured it he squeezed it tenderly. “That won’t work, Rachel. Even if I was willing to leave you, which I’m not, I’d be lying if I told them I didn’t realize I was putting them at risk. I knew—I kept them in the dark, about some things I’m still keeping them there—and they’re right to be mad as hell.” With that the ex-engineer reached out to the comm, which was beeping for attention. “What the hell? Oh, Reen, I’m sorry. I don’t know when I’ve been this jumpy! What is it?”
“Get everyone off that ship, now,” Reen Romanova said bluntly from somewhere inside the farmhouse. “The Archangel’s back in orbit, and I’ve just decided not to respond to a call from her captain asking if anyone down here knows what’s in the barn that doesn’t belong there. Quick, there’s no time!”
Archer slapped the emergency alarm, the civilian vessel’s ear-piercing equivalent of a military starship’s “red alert.” He bellowed into the comm pickup, “Abandon ship! Everyone out, now!”
He reached up and steadied his pregnant companion on the access ladder’s final rungs, since lowering a ramp would have taken time that they did not have. Once her feet were on the barn’s floor, they turned together and they dashed out through a forcefield that prevented cold and bad weather from entering the building without keeping solid objects such as humans from moving in and out of it.
A moment after they were clear of the barn, the ship started to move. It took the structure’s roof along, it ascended slowly and almost painfully—as if it were fighting not to rise.
Reen called from the farmhouse’s door. “Get in here! We’re going underground, hurry!”
Her two guests obeyed her. They dashed inside the farmhouse’s kitchen, and followed Reen into a lift that took them far underneath that room.
Even from the shaft’s lowest reaches they felt the explosion. Hansie had made it to the Triad’s control room and had brought the engines on line, she had fought to break the Archangel’s tractor beam with everything the trade-ship had…the farmhouse was rubble, and a crater yawned where the maintenance barn had been, when the three people who had fled to safety underground returned to the surface. Not at the point from which they had descended, but half a klick away.
There had been a time in Narsai’s history when another interplanetary war had threatened. Most farmsteads still possessed a network of underground tunnels and shelters dating from that time, so that if their residents were forced downward they would not be obliged to re-emerge in a predictable spot where an enemy could be waiting to pick them off.
People in Star Service uniforms were already on the ground scanning the rubble when the three survivors looked out of the remains of a small outbuilding where they had come back to the surface, and the sight made Dan Archer’s stomach contract sickly.
He and Hansie had managed to get away with their swift switch of ship’s I.D. codes, and with the Triad’s descent into hiding, because even though someone on the Archangel’s inspection party almost certainly had planted the explosives Captain Giandrea and his officers hadn’t been looking for Dan and his partners then.
But they were now, and that was for damned sure.
“Thanks for waiting so long, Johnnie.” Katy found her cousin still there when she returned to her home as twilight became full darkness, and that didn’t surprise her.
Maddy had done what she ought to have remembered a young adolescent was very likely to do, and had suddenly fallen sound asleep in the aircar. Her mother was untroubled by lifting the girl’s weight—she might have put on a couple of kilos since she’d stopped taking full combat training, but she had remained active enough so that she could handle Maddy easily. But what she was supposed to do with a sleepy child, when she was smack in the middle of a crisis, she had no idea.
Johnnie took the girl from Katy’s arms, and put her on the sofa and covered her with an afghan. And inquired softly after he had done so, “Did you think I’d leave you until I knew what you’re going to do next, Katy? I take it things didn’t go very well with Uncle Trabe.”
“They did and they didn’t,” she answered. But before she could say anything more, before she could start to tell him about her first conversation with her parents in as many years as Maddy had been alive, she felt something she had not hoped to feel again any time soon.