What to her meant the sharing of love and the giving and receiving of pleasure, to him conferred a certain contempt on the partner whose body was invaded in the act of union and who for nine months afterward became increasingly ruled by the new life that his invasion could so easily begin. She had learned that to her cost, and seeing that knowledge confirmed now did not surprise her in the least.
But it made her angrier still, so that now the heat of her fury turned cold. And that was good, because that was when her intellect kicked into high gear and Catherine Romanova became a truly dangerous opponent.
George Fralick did not know that. He had been her captain, long ago at the start of her career; but he had never gone into battle with her in command, and in their private disagreements she had always held back the part of her nature that was ascendant now.
Always she’d had the children to think about, first their three boys and then small Maddy. Always, even that last night in his home on Kesra when his parting gift had been to take her against her will, Katy had held back from using her full fighting capacity against George Fralick. On that night she had known the only way to escape him was to kill him, or hurt him so badly that the Kesran authorities would have condemned her just as if she had killed him; and she had also known that on Kesra marital rape was a legal oxymoron, and the fact that she had been present in his house voluntarily while still his wife would have been all the defense Fralick needed for his actions. She had known he could be vain, she had known that where she was concerned he could be both irrational and possessive; but that he would deliberately hurt her, physically hurt her, had not entered her mind before then.
In order to live—so that baby Maddy would not have to begin her life with one parent being executed for having murdered the other while she lay in her crib in the next room, and while the Kesran house-servants pretended to hear nothing because what happened behind a married couple’s bedroom door was not their business—Katy had stopped fighting at the moment when she knew what it would cost her to continue. And now she saw the same look on her former husband’s face that she had seen on it then.
Only now she wasn’t lying naked under him in a bedroom in his home on Kesra. Now she was in a starship sickbay, she was (damn and blast it!) the former commander of this and every other ship in the whole Star Service fleet, and that meant he was on her turf whether or not his vanity would allow him to see that.
Why hadn’t she seen it, until this moment? What in hell had happened to her eighteen months ago on Earth, anyway, when the order ejecting the scramblers from the Service had come down from civilian authorities above her and Linc had started getting sick for the first time since she had known him? He’d been wounded in battle before, of course; but her husband had never once been ill. Morthans, the species that healed others, did not get sick.
And that had scared her, that had made her helpless. In just the same way, in spite of the drastically differing contexts, that being physically violated by George Fralick had temporarily robbed her of all that gave her personal power and self-confidence even though her yielding to him had been a conscious choice.
A terrible choice, but one she knew that thousands—hell, more likely millions—of other human women had made before her, when trapped by circumstances that made yielding a lesser evil than the consequences of offering resistance.
She wasn’t helpless now. But Linc was, and Maddy was, and she was the only person in the universe who could protect them. She said to Marin, “Comm, if you please, Commander!” And then when he held one out to her, with shock in his golden eyes, she said into it in the same tone: “Captain Giandrea. This is Fleet Admiral Catherine Romanova, Retired. I want to lodge an official complaint against George Fralick, citizen of Kesra. I’m charging him with attempting to kill three citizens of other Commonwealth Accord worlds. Myself and my daughter, Madeleine Romanova, citizens of Narsai; and Lincoln Casey, a citizen of Terra by his father’s birth and a citizen of Mortha by his mother’s birth.”
“Admiral Romanova! You made it, you’re alive!” Giandrea answered her promptly, and his relief carried plainly over the comm. “Ma’am, that’s wonderful news. But I have to tell you that this ship was placed at Ambassador Fralick’s disposal by the order of my superiors, and that even the diversion back here to Narsai to cooperate with the Corporate Marshal—”
“He wouldn’t have acceded to that if he’d had the kind of authority that he seems to think he has,” Romanova said sharply. She lifted her eyes, and looked straight into Fralick’s eyes.
And knew she was right. She went on, “If he couldn’t say ‘no, we’re not going back’ to a Corporate Marshal, that means he’s still expected to obey all the normal laws of the worlds that are part of the Commonwealth. And it also means that if you’ve allowed him to bully you into cooperating while he’s violated the rights, and the person, of a civilian who has neither been charged with a crime nor made any threats against anyone you’re supposed to be protecting—”
“It’s my understanding, ma’am, that I’m under Mr. Fralick’s orders. If he had told me to ignore the Marshal’s hail, I would have done that.” Giandrea had hesitated, but now he was plainly making up his mind and digging in his heels. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. So I’ll record your complaint, but until we reach a Star Service base or until I receive other orders….”
“That does it,” Romanova said, much too quietly now. This she had not wanted to do, this she probably was going to regret five minutes after she did it; but under these circumstances that hardly mattered. If she failed to use the one weapon she had at her disposal now, Linc was going to die—she probably was, too—and although she did not believe George Fralick would deliberately harm his own child, the man plainly didn’t understand the implications of his actions well enough for her to have confidence that he wouldn’t wind up killing Maddy, too. So to hell with it, she would sort out the moral issues later; and in the meantime she would use everything she had to protect those for whom love had made her responsible.
She said, “Get me a yeoman, Captain Giandrea. And you get down here, too, because I need a command officer to witness what I’m about to do. Which is respond officially, on the record, to a ‘recall to duty’ order that reached me a few hours ago in my father’s office. I’m going to accept that recall, and then I’m going to countermand the order you were given that puts you under Mr. Fralick’s control. And don’t try to tell me I can’t do that, because I know Archangel’s home port is New Orient and that means your orders were issued by a commodore. So I goddam well can do that, or anything else I see fit to do, unless you want to contact Fleet Command on Terra and let me make my complaint to my successor there! And I would love to do that, Captain. I almost hope you’ll let me.”
CHAPTER 14
Johnnie Romanov was thankful, immeasurably thankful, that his daughter and her husband had not appeared here; and that he knew his grandchild would not be doing so because that grandchild’s university was not located on Narsai. His heirs knew all the proprietors’ secrets about the farmstead, and right now his most pressing concern was to make sure the landing party from the Archangel went on being ignorant of those secrets.
If the missing trio had made it into the tunnels, and if they had managed to get the ancient railcar operating, they would arrive at the Wang Farmstead sometime tomorrow. If the rail system failed them (which it very well might, testing it was something that hadn’t been done within Johnnie’s memory), walking that many klicks would take them…how long? He didn’t know, and when he thought about how pregnant that female gen already was he wondered if she could make it that far. Or if Reen could, because although his wife was in good health that would still be asking a lot of a woman who was accustomed to working hard but not to forced marches.