She stiffened, and closed her eyes. She swallowed, hard. And without words she cried out.
“Linc! Oh, Linc, it is you.”
“Yes, Katy, it’s me. Listen fast, if anyone up here realizes we can do this they’re apt to put me under sedation or into stasis. I’m in the brig aboard the Archangel. I’m not sure—”
Love had enveloped her, she had clearly perceived a familiar masculine strength and tenderness. And then the loved presence was gone, thankfully not in a burst of fear and physical pain like the one she had felt some hours before—but in an abrupt vanishing of the connection. One second he was with her, they were touching as intimately as if she had been holding his body in her arms; and the next instant he was completely absent from her universe.
Then she heard Maddy’s startled cry.
“Mum?” The girl was sitting up on the edge of the sofa when Katy turned toward her. She had the afghan tangled around her, and she was struggling sleepily to get free from it. Her eyes were wide open, though; and she looked as frightened as she sounded. “Mum, was that a dream I just had? I thought I heard Linc’s voice, but he’s not here.”
Katy gently brushed Johnnie’s comforting hand aside. She went to her child, sat down beside her and unsnarled the afghan. She said, “You did hear him, Maddy. Just for a minute, then someone stopped him from being able to talk to us.”
“Do you mean they killed him?”
Oh, gods, the directness of the young! But Katy meant it with all her soul when she answered firmly, “I won’t believe that. They did something to make him unconscious, and that’s certainly not good; but anyone who’s gone to the trouble of kidnapping him and keeping him alive for this long, isn’t likely to kill him unless they absolutely have to.”
“I heard him say Archangel.” Maddy yawned, and reached up to scrub a hand across her eyes. “I thought I heard ‘brig.’”
I wonder what you’d have heard if Linc and I had been making love? Katy thought, and then was ashamed of herself. Not that marital privacy wasn’t a completely legitimate concern, but right now it was one that did not matter. One that might never matter again…. She crushed that thought by asking, “Maddy, is your father the only civilian passenger on the Archangel?”
She hated to ask even that innocent a question; she, at least, had vowed never to use her daughter as a source of information about her ex-husband’s activities. Nor had she ever deliberately said or written anything to Maddy that would have reduced her father’s standing in her eyes—but that kind of fair play might now be on a very short course toward becoming an unaffordable luxury, because finding a way to leave Maddy safely out of it while she went after Linc was not going to be possible.
“I think so,” the girl answered, her drowsiness returning as fatigue reasserted itself. What was the difference between the Greenwich Mean Time that was followed by all starships, and local time in the Narsatian city of MinTar? Lord knew how long it had actually been since the child’s “day” had started. “I was lonesome on the way here, Mum. Papa didn’t want me to talk to the officers, and there wasn’t anyone else on board I could have talked to.”
The comm’s announcer signal sounded then, and Katy moved toward it. She was aware of Johnnie taking her place at Maddy’s side, putting his arm around the child and saying something to her in a soft paternal voice; and in spite of everything, Katy smiled to herself. How would that sight affect George Fralick if he could see it, she wondered? The Johnnie Romanov who had been Katy’s own lover, from the time she was thirteen until she had left Narsai at eighteen, sitting on a sofa with his arm around thirteen-year-old Maddy.
Fralick would probably have a stroke. Which right now didn’t bother Katy one bit, even when it was her former husband’s face that greeted her when she accepted the transmission.
“Katy? Where’s Maddy, is she all right?” was the first thing Fralick said, his voice a tense demand.
“She’s here with me, she’s tired out but otherwise she’s fine.” Romanova glanced toward her daughter, and saw that Maddy had roused again at the sound of her father’s voice. “Do you want to talk to her?”
“Papa?” Maddy sounded puzzled, and sleepy.
Her voice made it to the pickup, because Fralick’s concerned face relaxed. But he said softly, as if to himself, “I should have left her on Kesra, nothing’s going the way I expected. Damn! But it’s too late for me to rethink that now.”
“Much as I’ve wanted to have her with me, for the past thirteen years—I have to agree with you this time, George.” Katy nodded sadly. “Now, dammit, tell me what’s going on. I know you have Linc up there in your brig. And don’t try to tell me you’re a civilian passenger and you had nothing to do with it, because I’m not going to believe you!”
“Got your recall order yet, Katy? If so, you’re going to have to refuse it.” Fralick had hesitated only a moment before he decided to plunge ahead, and not worry about what a sleepy little girl just barely within hearing might pick up of the conversation. He didn’t want to wait while his ex-wife corrected that situation; in fact, he really did not want Maddy out of her mother’s sight.
He had misjudged the situation, misjudged it badly. And George Fralick hated it when that happened, even when the stakes were far lower—personally and officially—than they were right now. He went on, “The idea of taking your—husband—along to Terra with us, was to make sure you wouldn’t agree to help the Rebs. But I wasn’t expecting the Star Service to recall you to duty, I only just found out about that when we got back here and I picked up the latest dispatches; and I’m telling you right now you’d better not accept that recall. Back in command of the Fleet is the last place I want to see you, I want you to stay right where you are.”
“I have no intention of going back to the Fleet, George.” She hadn’t been sure until this moment how she would finally answer that order. Her father had bought her time that she needed to get Linc back safely, but once that most pressing of concerns was answered she would still have to face the moral implications of that order—and now she knew how she was going to respond.
She wasn’t going to return meekly to Terra and let the Star Service put her out to some kind of pasture there, nor was she going to lead that Service to victory over her own native world. If George had thought he needed to hold someone she loved hostage to keep her from doing that, or to keep her from providing the so-called Rebs with her services, then George knew less about his own former wife than he did about anyone else in the universe.
Now, that was entirely possible. After all, George looked at her through a film of assumptions; while he looked at other people clear-eyed, for the most part anyway.
At least he had caught himself before he had called Linc by that dreadful vernacular term that was often substituted for “Morthan.” Probably just in case Maddy could hear him, because Katy could not imagine that her ex-husband had denied himself the pleasure of using that word in order to spare her feelings.
“That’s good,” Fralick said, and nodded his head thoughtfully. “I’ll see that you aren’t penalized, Katy, if we do succeed in fending off a war. And I still think that’s possible, if hotheads like the ex-scramblers can be neutralized in time.”
“So why did the Archangel turn back, after she’d sailed for Terra?” Romanova sensed a diversion in progress, and she moved swiftly to flank her former husband before he could escape.
Whether he could or could not protect her from being charged with treason if war didn’t come, so that the Star Service continued to have a legal claim on her—or if war did come, but the Outworlds lost it—wasn’t a matter she could address right now, so she chose to put it out of her mind. At worst, she thought, she might wind up permanently stuck on Narsai. There was no way her native world would allow one of its citizens to be extradited to Terra, especially not for a “crime” that was almost administrative in its nature. At best the recall order would be rescinded when the current crisis was over, and her failure to respond in time for her to be of any use could be blamed on the lost message that hadn’t been relayed to her by the Narsatian Council.