“Katy. How long?”
“It’s 2349 hours,” she said, glancing up at the chrono near his bed. “Linc, I had to take command. After you were brought up here a recall to duty order caught up with me, and I was dodging it and trying to figure out what to do about it; and then when my bastard of an ex-husband had you put into stasis, I started dying along with you and so did Maddy. We were brought aboard, the doctor here took you out of stasis against George’s orders—and when I got my wind back, the next thing I did was yell for a yeoman and a command-grade witness.”
“Admiral Romanova,” another voice said, with apology in its tone. “I’m sorry to interrupt you right now, but you need to know this.”
Katy sighed, and turned her head toward the comm. She did not move away from her husband; in fact she tightened her arms around him as she said tautly, “Romanova here. What is it, Captain?”
“Ambassador Fralick has left the ship. He and Madeleine were ported to the Corporate Marshal’s shuttle, just a couple of minutes ago.”
“Damn! Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn!” Katy heard the series of monosyllables exploding from her lips, but her mind was listening to her husband’s mind and he was listening with all his fast-returning strength for someone else’s thoughts.
“I can’t find her, Katy. But that may not mean a thing, she may not have regained consciousness yet from what my going into stasis did to her.” Regret was in Casey’s thoughts, poignant and sincere. “Damn, I wish being attuned to me didn’t have that kind of effect on either of you!”
“It’s not your fault,” Katy told him, still without audible words. “And I accepted feeling pain with you a long time ago, Linc. I know you could have shielded me, and you would have, if you’d been conscious instead of sedated when the stasis field started working—but if you had done that, I’d never have found you in time. But Maddy—”
“I know. Fralick probably thinks he’s protecting her from me, Katy. And maybe this time what the man’s trying to do is right, maybe it really isn’t safe for the kid to be around me if anything that harms me is also going to harm her. Damn, I didn’t have this kind of spillover from my mother’s mind—not when I was Maddy’s age, anyway!”
“But your parents didn’t have the kind of telepathic connection you and I have, you’ve told me that,” Katy objected, taking the time for this exchange even though she knew Giandrea was waiting on the other end of the open commlink for her instructions and probably couldn’t comprehend why she was hesitating. The Morthan doctor, of course, knew why. He was courteously not intruding on the married couple’s communion with each other, but he knew perfectly well what was happening between them in sickbay’s apparent silence.
“True. My father found telepathy repulsive, unlike most humans who take Morthan mates he avoided that part of being intimate with my mother as much as it was possible for him to avoid it. I—don’t think they slept together all that much, in fact, because you and I both know what effect that has over time on mind-to-mind bonding!” There was a flash of rueful humor in Casey’s thoughts, which he squelched quickly. “I never knew what it was like to have his mind touch me while I was in my mother’s womb. Which I realize now is probably exactly why I got stunted the way I did, I always assumed that because he was human it shouldn’t have made a difference—but now I think it sure as hell did. Because it’s pretty clear that my being around you while you carried Maddy did something to her. Something I started off thinking was wonderful when I finally got to meet her, but it doesn’t seem very wonderful now that it’s damned near killed the poor kid once and it’s caused Fralick to haul her off.”
“If it helps, my love, Maddy thought it was wonderful too.” Katy kissed her husband as she sent that thought in his direction, and with it she sent every gram of love and reassurance that she was capable of projecting. “You’ll be okay now. There wasn’t a recall order for you, so for now at least you’re still a civilian. Stay that way, all right? Until it works better for you to be something else, at least.”
She took her arms from around him then, and she rose from his bedside and turned away. He let her go, but not without trailing a hand along her arm so that his fingers brushed against hers to maintain their physical contact through the last possible second. She said crisply to the younger golden-eyed man who was standing nearby, “Take good care of him, Doctor. Captain Giandrea! I’m on my way to your office. When I get there, I want Ambassador Fralick standing by on comm to talk to me. And tell Narsai Control to get ready to punch a transmission through to Fleet Command, the next thing I’ll want to do is talk to them.”
Well, it wasn’t exactly the next thing she wanted to do; but it most definitely was the next thing she needed to do.
CHAPTER 15
“We’ve got them!” The triumphant bellow came from the throat of an unassuming, wiry little man in an unmarked jumpsuit, who had not been present at all when Johnnie Romanov had last looked over the work party’s progress.
It was a moonlit night on the North Continent of Narsai, now. That particular moon hadn’t risen until the night was half gone, but even before that the landing party from the Archangel had been going about its business in the illumination provided by their own portable light sources.
Johnnie Romanov had fallen asleep in the aircar, after having given in to temptation and calling his nearest neighbors at the Wang Farmstead. He had told them what had happened here, had listened to their outrage and their sympathy, and had said that three people were unaccounted for. And then he had known he was understood, because Clara Wang had responded with a promise to “let you know if we hear anything, Johnnie.”
In other words she and her spouse would watch their end of the ancient tunnel system, and if anyone reached them there they would be ready to give aid.
There was nothing more he could do, except talk to his daughter at her home in a far-off city. No, she did not need to come here and be with him; in fact he hoped she would not, because this was not something he wanted her to see. After that call he had curled up in exhaustion, figuring that whatever happened next he would be better able to cope with it if he rested while he was free to do so.
Now he swung himself out of the seat, and was just in time to see that the landing party’s principals had congregated around a battered outbuilding where Romanov knew perfectly well the tunnel system had an access point. Somehow it didn’t surprise him when he reached the building, having dashed across the space between it and the aircar, to hear the landing party’s military commander saying to the little man in the plain jumpsuit, “We’ll have them out of there shortly, Marshal. Congratulations.”
“Your people did superb work, Lieutenant,” the small man replied in that surprisingly resonant voice of his. Then he turned as Romanov approached and asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Romanov?”
A trap, Johnnie realized immediately. This Corporate Marshal knew damned well that he, the farmstead’s proprietor, must have been aware of the fugitives’ location all along—and he was hoping to hear something that would amount to an admission of that knowledge.
He schooled his face into worried innocence, which really wasn’t difficult because he certainly was worried, and he asked a question in return. “Did you find something, Marshal? You are the Marshal that HR Solutions sent after the missing gen, aren’t you?”
The small man’s eyes were light blue, so light they almost seemed colorless under these conditions. He studied Johnnie still more carefully as he answered, “I’m Vargas, yes. And we found something, all right, Mr. Romanov. Your ancestors had shelters, a place to go in case of alien attack on Narsai?”