But Archer would be able to do it, the man was in his physical prime and looked as if he hadn’t slacked off endurance training after he had been kicked out of the military. So someone would be coming up from the underground at the Wang place, and now Johnnie needed an excuse to go there without being trailed by the Service people who were still swarming all over the ruins of his own home.
A complex that dated back to colonial times had been laid waste. That should be bothering him terribly, but until he found Reen and held her safe in his arms again it wasn’t going to trouble him at all.
How long since Katy and her child had been ported up to the starship? He checked his chrono, and was astonished that it hadn’t yet been thirty minutes. He felt as if he had wandered around the wrecked farmstead for hours, getting in the landing party’s way and trying to learn whatever he could about his wife’s fate without leading those people anywhere near the tunnel exits that might still be intact.
“Mr. Romanov! Comm for you.” The landing party’s leader, a harried-looking lieutenant junior grade, had been remarkably sympathetic both in his response to Katy’s and Maddy’s desperate need for medical assistance and to Johnnie’s own need to be allowed free access to what had recently been his home. He could easily have bundled the Narsatian man back into his aircar and told him that this site was off-limits to civilians until his people were finished with it, but instead he had merely kept a personal eye on the bereft farmer’s movements.
Johnnie moved back into the aircar, preferring privacy for whatever communication this might be. Hopefully it would be the Wangs, asking if he was all right… and that would tell him what he wanted most to hear.
Instead Katy’s voice greeted him, and so did her image in the aircar’s tiny holoscreen. “Johnnie! Anything to report yet?”
“Not yet. Katy, I didn’t expect you’d be back on your feet this fast! Is Maddy all right, too?” Romanov slumped into the pilot’s seat. Suddenly he was aware of how long it had been since he’d got out of his bed that morning—almost yesterday morning, now—and of how alone he’d been feeling, after his cousin and her child had left him.
“We’re both fine. Johnnie, I didn’t have a choice. I had to accept the recall, getting myself sworn back into active service immediately was the only way I could see to solve what was going on up here.” Katy’s familiar face was tense, and she paused to glance away from the pickup for an instant before she continued. “What I can’t do, unfortunately, is pull that landing party back until they’ve satisfied the Marshal as to whether Ms. Kane died aboard the Triad or whether she’s still a fugitive. We aren’t at war, so there’s no state of emergency that would justify me in countermanding a standard mutual aid order like the one Marshal Vargas is operating under.”
“Where IS this Marshal Vargas, anyway?” Romanov had been wondering that all along, and now he hoped to get an answer. That Katy had abruptly reversed herself on the recall question, was an event that hardly registered with her cousin just now. It didn’t matter to him, not compared to finding Reen alive.
“No one seems to know, Captain Giandrea included. And I don’t like that, Johnnie. I don’t like it at all.” Katy glanced away from the pickup again. Then she said, “Tell me what I can do to help, I’m giving orders that you’re to be put through to me immediately whenever you call. That’s all I can do right now, as far as I know—correct?”
“Unfortunately, yes. But thanks, Katy. I’m glad you and Maddy are all right now. And Linc?” Johnnie’s brain was foggy with a mixture of fatigue and worry, but he did remember that Katy’s husband was up there on that ship and that he had been taken there as a hostage against her. But that should have changed, now that she’d acted in the last way George Fralick had expected she would act.
Somehow Johnnie Romanov wasn’t surprised. He had quit being surprised by anything Katy did, on the day when she had commed to him from the Star Service Academy on Terra to tell him directly about her entrance there instead of at the civilian university she’d supposedly gone to Earth to attend.
Sweet, compliant little Katy, pushed too far in a direction where she didn’t want to go, suddenly turning and doing exactly what she wanted and needed to do instead of what everyone around her was telling her she had to do. Yes, he’d seen that phenomenon before. More than once, in fact; but somehow whenever she did that she usually astounded those her reversal affected the most.
“He’s waking up and he needs me, I have to go.” The comm went blank, and as it did so Katy’s image was already moving swiftly away from its pickup.
Johnnie Romanov sat for a moment longer, then realized that if he did not move out of this comfortable seat he was going to doze off. He shook his white head violently, heaved his big frame out of the aircar, and trudged back across the scarred dirt to find out what the scanning crew was doing as they swarmed through the remains of his devastated home.
“Shhh, it’s all right.” Katy said the words with both her voice and her thoughts, and as she did so she stroked her husband’s head.
How long had they had him sedated, anyway? Not too long, because he hadn’t been a prisoner for a full standard twenty-four hour starship day as yet; but during that time he had been stunned, knocked out chemically, put into stasis where he had come close to dying—and then pulled back just in time for his body to win its desperate fight to live. So she didn’t wonder that he was drifting groggily back to consciousness, and that she felt fear and remembered pain and terrible aloneness as his thoughts found hers and clasped her tightly.
For these few moments she must depend on Giandrea to hold things together on her behalf, and if the man deserved to be a captain at all then he should be capable of doing that. She had given him the legal foundation he needed to stand on, now she must trust him to keep George Fralick in check until she had done what no one else could do—which was make sure Linc recovered from what had almost been his death.
A stupid, pointless, and downright ignominious death it would have been, too, for a man who had served the Commonwealth so long and so well. Not that most deaths weren’t stupid and wasteful, Katy had long ago learned that the noble sacrifice was the exception rather than the rule for those who gave their lives in service; but what had almost happened to Linc was beyond excusing.
And now she was trying not to blame herself, because she knew perfectly well that if she had answered that recall order from the surface of Narsai it would not have made a difference. George would never have let her get aboard the Archangel, any way but the way she had come—in an emergency that he hadn’t anticipated and had not been able to control, so that she was there before he could prevent it. As it was she suspected that only the distraction of Maddy’s presence, with the child’s life in even more peril than her own, that had made it so simple for her to snatch control of the situation from under Fralick’s nose.
Linc’s arms were reaching for her now, the doctor had raised the head of the medical bed enough so that was possible. And she was leaning into his embrace, and then she was cradling him against her.
“My love, my love, my love.” Holding him was like holding some severed, and now restored, part of herself. He quieted in her arms, slowly relaxed, and finally managed to speak to her—although it was in a voice she scarcely recognized.