“I’ve been told they did,” Johnnie responded. “But—are you telling me the people whose bodies weren’t found, went underground? Into an old shelter?” He let his voice rise with hope, even though that was decidedly not what he was actually feeling.
“Underground, anyway. And they’re coming up now, all three of them. One would be your wife, I think.” Vargas studied him a moment longer, with the air of a man who had all the time in the universe. He turned away only when there was fresh activity within the outbuilding’s ruins.
The railcar started reversing its course after it had traveled some distance through the ancient passage toward the next farmstead. However, at that point its doing so was almost welcome; because it had stopped, brought to rest against rubble that blocked its course, and Dan Archer had to scramble back aboard it hastily in order to keep from being left behind.
He said to Reen Romanova, who had literally hauled him inside when he hadn’t quite made it on his own, “Damn! I’d just made up my mind we were probably going to have to do this anyway, I couldn’t see any chance of getting through that blockage without the kind of power and equipment that we just don’t have—but I was hoping we might get back to where we started and find that no one’s still looking for us there.”
“Someone has to be, the remotes didn’t activate by themselves,” Reen answered him bluntly. She was starting to look haggard in the weak light of the lumipanels.
But she was in better shape than was the much younger woman beside her. Rachel Kane barely opened her eyes when Dan sat down at her other side, and when he put his arm around her she muttered unintelligibly and sank back into sleep.
She was armed; so was he. Reen was not, she’d had no reason to carry a weapon on a civilized world and inside her own home. But two blasters against everything a starship landing party could throw at them, was about as unequal a contest as Dan Archer could imagine.
And he knew all about what they were being drawn back into, because he had been part of such landing parties in the days before he’d become a senior engineer. And Rachel Kane, as a command officer, had led those parties many times.
Just how would the members of this particular party react, anyway, when two of the people they’d been sent to capture emerged from underground and were seen to be their own former executive officer and chief engineer? Not that there hadn’t been personnel changes during the more than a year that he and Rachel had both been off the Archangel, but he was willing to bet that a good number of that landing party’s members would turn out to be men and women who would recognize him—and that even more would recognize their former exec. Now, that could be worth something in delayed reaction times.
So could the usual human reluctance to do harm to a pregnant female. With a trapped animal’s desperation, Daniel Archer thought and planned and struggled to find alternatives.
And as he did so the railcar carried him relentlessly backward to the place he least wanted to go in the entire universe right now, and the woman who carried his children lay limp against him and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
George Fralick kept his ex-wife waiting, which of course was a typical negotiator’s tactic for putting an adversary at disadvantage. Which bothered Katy not at all, since she had a heavy starcruiser under her control and Fralick was aboard someone else’s warp-capable shuttlecraft. Still, no one could have guessed that from Fralick’s demeanor when he finally appeared in the holoscreen in Captain Giandrea’s office. “Katy. Sorry to leave you without any explanation like that, but—”
“Cut the crap, George.” She was speaking to him without measuring her words, because even though he had their daughter with him she now felt that she had nothing to lose where this man was concerned. Once she had needed him. He was her boys’ father, and she was a Narsatian woman for whom unfaithfulness to a spouse wasn’t thinkable. Whatever marital companionship she received would have to come from him, as she had viewed her future then; and their sons really had loved him even though he hadn’t always seemed to understand that they were her children, too, and that some of their values and character traits had come from her. Then the boys had been gone, and even though George had been verbally abusive to her after that tragedy—hell, the man had been nothing less than cruel—still, he was the father of the little girl in her womb. And besides that she had felt sorry for him, and had convinced herself he must be insane with grief. He would get better; and after the baby came and they were a family again, they would both be able to heal.
It hadn’t happened that way. She’d had to leave, or lose everything in life that kept her sane. Even his withholding Maddy from her hadn’t been enough to change her mind. And then on the last night she would spend under his roof….
She had visited that house many times afterward, because he would not let her see her daughter anywhere else. But she had taken someone along with her each time, someone who wasn’t a Kesran servant who must turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what happened between master and mistress, and she had never stayed there overnight again. And even with a fellow Service officer beside her (always a friend who, of course, knew nothing about what she’d suffered on her last night of residence there), Katy Romanova had done few things in her life that had required as much courage as had walking back into that place which had once been her home.
She pushed that memory aside, because if Linc should innocently reach for her she did not want him to find it in her mind. This one recollection she had withheld from him, as far as she knew with complete success, during even their most intimate moments of shared pain and shared rapture. She had made it plain to him, the first time they’d talked about their ability to speak mind to mind (which had happened long before the end of her marriage to George, back while she was still pregnant with Maddy), that there would always be private areas of her thoughts and that she expected him to stay out of those areas; and he had agreed to that, had in fact found it a completely normal and necessary desire. Even after they became lovers, he had gone on respecting the citadel at the heart of her individual consciousness. But to think about something which aroused emotions this powerful, at a time when she knew he might need to touch her, would be foolish. He might quite unintentionally pick up a stray thought from among the ones she did not want to share with him, given these circumstances; and she might find herself suddenly obliged to push him away, at just the moment when he needed her most urgently.
Besides, that was over. The only way George could hurt her now would be through Maddy, and George wasn’t going to harm his own child. In fact George would never let anyone else hurt her, hurt Katy; that was a privilege that he had reserved for himself, because in his eyes she was still his property.
She looked into his face and she continued, “I’ve got incoming from Bill Tanaka at Fleet Command on Terra. Anything you’d like me to tell him, George?”
“No. But I’d like you to tell me what you’ll do if he orders you to lead an attack on the Rebs, Katy.” Fralick still didn’t get it, that was plain. His tone and his choice of words indicated that he was still talking to the woman he felt he’d conquered, hundreds of times over the course of a long married life; and then in one final and decisive demonstration of his power to take control of her body and compel her will to bend to his.
And all that was over now, dammit. Katy asked softly, as she might have asked any other stuffed shirt of a diplomat who was being stupid enough to bait her, “Wouldn’t you like to know the answer to that, George?” At which point she cut the commlink.