The people inside that compound had their own sovereignty to uphold. If they permitted Marshal Vargas to bring his prisoners into their sanctuary, their little bit of legal Terran soil here on Narsai, then they would be honor-bound (or at least legally bound) to release the two “Narsatian citizens” at the heart of this messy situation; but they would have to do it in defiance of the Marshal, and that they did not want to do. So someone inside had commed to the approaching vehicle, and had told Vargas he would not be allowed to land on embassy property.
Vargas had come about, of course. And now the corporate marshal’s long range shuttle was landing, on the plain outside MinTar, and the in-atmosphere vehicle was meeting it there to transfer Vargas and his captives. To hell with orders given by Terra to its ambassador here, the marshal was responsible only to those who had hired him—and he did not dare go back to them empty-handed.
“He’ll do what Hansie Braeden did with the Triad, if Giandrea tractors him,” Casey said quietly now. “He’d rather immolate himself and his prisoners along with him, than give them up.”
“I know,” his wife answered. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the back of a flight controller’s chair, and leaned over the man’s shoulder and watched the screen on which all in-atmosphere traffic in this district was being tracked. On other screens were all the satellites and habitats and trade-ships that orbited the planet, and among them was one blip that was the Archangel.
Like the being for which it was named, the starship could easily have reached down and snatched anything as tiny as an aircar from Narsai’s surface. But no aircar was built to stand vacuum, so that wasn’t a solution; and Linc was right about what Vargas would do once he had his captives aboard his shuttle. He would tear the small ship apart before he would allow it to be tractored up to Archangel, knowing that once there he would lose custody of his prisoners and they would be sent back down to Narsai as free people.
He would probably give up Archer, if someone suggested that possibility. But giving up the gen he had been commissioned to reclaim wasn’t an option. Losing her, let alone surrendering her willingly, would be professional suicide.
And Katy wasn’t going to risk having him immolate himself, because her child was aboard that shuttle and Maddy would die too if it was destroyed.
Maddy. It all depended, now, on a little girl of thirteen and on her connection to a man who was not her father in the biological sense—who hadn’t raised her, either—but who was connected to her, mind to mind. With a bond that would have been fading at this stage in her life if he had been her parent, but that instead was asserting itself with the power of something that had been denied expression for far too long a time.
“Let me see the control panel, Maddy.” Lincoln Casey’s physical eyes were closed, the better to focus on what he was seeing via Madeleine Fralick’s eyes. “Can you reach everything?”
“Of course I can, I’m as tall as Mum now if I’m not a little bit taller.” The girl’s mental tone was tart. She sounded very much like Katy when Katy was annoyed.
“Good.” Linc smiled inwardly. He knew just how to handle that irritation; having the child behave as the mother would have was incredibly convenient for him right now.
He was aware that Katy was leaving him, because for him to quarterback what Maddy needed to do it was best that he stay right here at Narsai Control. (Where had that term come from, anyway? He knew what “quarter” meant, both as the fourth part of a whole and as a word meaning “mercy.” “Back” was a body part, and a direction. But how had the compound of the two words come to mean “to give direction to others”? He was going to have to check that out in a linguistics database, the next time he thought of it while he wasn’t trying to do it.)
Katy would be boarding a shuttle, this one sent down to her from the Archangel. Nowhere on or near Narsai was there such a thing as an armed vessel, small or large. There were civilian ships in orbit that carried arms, of course, but none of them had a role to play in this situation. So Admiral Romanova required, and was being given, backup from the Star Service to implement the orders of the Defense Ministry concerning the release of two civilian citizens of this world.
There was another good reason for Casey to stay put, and it wasn’t one that made him proud. The last thing Katy needed right now was for him to wind up in enemy hands again. He had spent more than forty years as an active duty officer, from plebe to commander of the Star Service Academy; and that meant he should not feel the slightest need to prove his courage, that he should not be ashamed if this one time it was best for everyone if he kept himself out of harm’s way. Yet to stay here in this safe place, and work through the eyes and ears and hands of his wife’s young daughter while Katy herself flew off into what could swiftly turn into a combat situation, galled him to his core.
You’re a civilian now, dammit. Accept that, and help Katy and be glad you have a means to do that instead of having to just sit on your ass and wait this out, Casey told himself sternly.
A few months ago he had wanted to be a civilian. He had been appalled by the Star Service’s actions in expelling the scramblers, and he had been physically and mentally worn down by living as an atypical Morthan on Terra.
Never until he took command of the Academy had he been required to go regularly into public places among civilians, and find himself the target of hateful stares because he had golden eyes but wore a command officer’s imposing braid instead of a healer’s innocuous insignia. During his years as a starship exec, and then as a flag adjutant, he hadn’t had to deal pleasantly with diplomats like that toad Fralick (how could he once have looked up to that man as his first captain, anyway?); hadn’t had to socialize with them. When he was obliged to talk to them, which had sometimes happened during his tenure as a flag officer’s aide, he had done so from what he now realized was a position of superior power—perceived superior power, anyway—and if they had scorned him personally, it hadn’t mattered.
But it mattered very much, when he was in command of a service academy instead of a ship. Even though in theory the Academy was run no differently than any other base would be, even though he supposedly had the same absolute power as would any captain aboard his own command, theory sometimes was just that. The fact was that he had loved “his” scramblers, and their adjunct training program, because while he was among them he knew that the respect he received belonged to him—and that it was respect, and not fear of his authority and of his power to punish. Not that the cadets and faculty members of the Academy’s standard programs did not respect him, too, because they did; but he was not at ease with them, and enduring almost daily doses of civilian contempt exacerbated his discomfort until the time he spent with the scramblers became his psychological relief valve.
Then that safety valve had been taken away, a whole generation of officers who’d been smart enough and brave enough to merit field commissions had been betrayed (jettisoned like refuse, actually); and he had been given the task of telling them so. And something inside him had collapsed.
A Morthan who could get sick. That was the final insult. Not only was he unable to touch the mind of anyone except his wife, which meant that he was crippled in his ability to use the gifts of his mother’s species; now he’d lost the one advantage that his heritage really had conferred upon him, his unfailing physical health.
Yes, at the time when he’d come to live here with Katy he had wanted to be a civilian. But now it broke his heart that she was going out there, back in uniform (fetched from home when?) and with a blaster belt worn legally and openly because Star Service officers could carry arms even on Narsai, and he had to stay behind and wait for her.