The few Bharaputrans, hopeless of bringing the shuttle down with there sniper’s weapons, changed their tactics. They began concentrating their fire on Quinn, shot after shot pumping into her overloading mirror field. She shimmered in a haze of blue fire, staggering under the impact. Clones and Dendarii pelted up the ramp. Command helmets draw fire. He could see no other way but to run in front of her. The air around him lit as his mirror field spilled energy, but in the brief respite Quinn regained her balance. She grabbed him by the hand and together they sprinted up the ramp, the last to board. The shuttle was lurching back into the air and the ramp withdrawing even as they fell through the hatch. The hatch sealed behind them. The silence felt like a song. Mark rolled over on his back and lay gasping for air, lungs on fire, Quinn sat up, her face red in its circle of gray. Just a sunburn. She cried hysterically for three breaths, then clamped her mouth shut. Tearfully, her fingers touched her hot cheeks, and Mark remembered at this was the woman who had had her face burned entirely away by plasma fire, once. But not twice. Not twice.
She scrambled to her knees, and began keying through command channels on her almost-fatal headset again. She then yanked herself to her feet and ricocheted forward in the jinking accelerations of the shuttle. Mark sat up and stared around, disoriented. Sergeant Taura, Thorne, the clones, he recognized. The rest were strange Dendarii, Lieutenant Kimura’s Yellow Squad presumably, some in the usual gray fatigues, some in full space armor. They looked rather the worse for wear. All four bunks for wounded in the hack were folded down and filled, and a fifth man was laid out on the floor. But the attending medic moved smoothly, not frantically. Her patients were clearly stabilized, able to wait for further treatment under more favorable conditions. Yellow Squad’s cryo-chamber was recently occupied, though. The prognosis was now so bad for the foil-wrapped Phillipi, Mark wondered if they would even attempt to continue freezing her, once they were back aboard the Peregrine. But except for the bike-trooper and the cryo-chamber, there were no more covered forms, no body bags—Kimura’s squad seemed to have made it through their mission, whatever it had been, fairly lightly.
The shuttle banked; they were circling, not boosting to orbit yet. Mark moaned under his breath, and rose to follow Quinn and find out what was going on.
When he came in sight of the prisoner he stopped short. The man sat with his hands bound behind him, securely strapped into a seat and guarded by two Yellow Squad troopers, a big fellow and a thin woman who made Mark think of a snake, all sinuous muscle and unblinking beady eyes. The prisoner looked a striking forty or so years of age, and wore a torn brown silk tunic and trousers. Loose strands of dark hair escaped from a gold ring on the back of his head and fell about his face. He did not struggle, but sat calmly, waiting, with a cold patience that quite matched the snake-woman’s.
Bharaputra. The Bharaputra, Baron Bharaputra, Vasa Luigi himself. The man hadn’t changed a hair in the eight years since Mark had last glimpsed him.
Vasa Luigi’s face rose, and his eyes widened slightly, seeing Mark. “So, Admiral,” he murmured.
“Just so,” Mark responded automatically with a Naismith-phrase. He swayed as the shuttle banked more sharply, concealing weak-kneed terror, concealing exhaustion. He hadn’t slept the night before this mission, either. Bharaputra, here?
The Baron cocked an eyebrow. “Who is that on your shirt?”
Mark glanced down at himself. The bandolier of blood had not yet turned brown, and was still damp, sticky and cold. He found himself actually wanting to answer, My brother, for the shock value. But he wasn’t sure the Baron was shockable. He fled forward, avoiding more intimate conversation. Baron Bharaputra. Did Quinn and company plan to ride this tiger, and how? But at least he now understood why the shuttle could circle the combat zone without apparent fear of enemy fire.
He found Quinn and Thorne both in the pilot’s compartment, along with Kimura the Yellow Squad commander. Quinn had taken over the shuttle’s communication station, her gray hood pushed back, sweat-soaked dark curls in disarray.
“Framingham! Report!” she was crying into the comm. “You’ve got to get into the air. Bharaputran airborne reinforcements are almost on top of you.”
Across the flight deck at the station opposite Quinn’s, Thorne monitored a tactical holovid. Two Dendarii colored dots, fighter shuttles, set upon but failed to break up an array of enemy shuttles passing a ghost city, astral projection of the live city turning below them. Mark glanced out the window past the pilots’ shoulders, but could not spot the originals in the sunlit morning smog. We have a downed-man recovery in progress, ma’am,” Framing-s voice returned. “One minute, till the squad gets back.”
“Do you have everyone else? Do you have Norwood? I can’t raise his helmet!”
There was a short delay. Quinn’s fists clenched, opened. Her finger-were bitten to red stumps.
Framingham’s voice at last. “We’ve got him now, ma’am. Got everyone–the quick and the dead alike, except for Phillipi. I don’t want to leave anyone for those bloody bastards if I can help it—” We have Phillipi.”
“Thank God! Then everyone’s accounted for. We have lift-off now, Captain Quinn.”
“That’s precious cargo, Framingham,” said Quinn. “We rendezvous in the Perigrine’s umbrella of fire. The fighter shuttles will guard your ass.” In the tac display, the Dendarii dots peeled away from the faltering enemy and left them behind. “What about your wings?”
“We’ll be right behind you. Yellow Squad bought us a first-class ticket home free. Home free is Fell Station.”
“And then we head out?”
“No. The Ariel took some damage, earlier. We’re docking.”
“Understood. See you there.”
The Dendarii formation came together at last, and began to boost hard. Mark fell into a station chair, and hung on. The fighter shuttles were more at risk from enemy fire than the drop shuttles, he feared, watching the tac display. One fighter shuttle was distinctly lagging. It clung close to the Yellow Squad’s craft. The formation slowed itself to its wounded member. But for once, things ran to plan. Bharaputran harriers dropped reluctantly behind as they broke ’f the atmosphere and into orbit.
Quinn rested her elbows for a weary moment on her console, and hid her red-and-white face in her hands, rubbing tender eyelids. Thorne sat silent. Quinn, Thorne, himself, all bore broken segments of that ribbon of blood. Like a red ribbon, binding them one to another.
Fell Station was coming up at last. It was a huge structure, the largest of the orbital transfer stations circling Jackson’s Whole, and House Fell’s headquarters and homei city. Baron Fell liked holding the high ground. In the delicate interlocking network of the Great Houses, House Fell probably held the most raw power, in terms of capacity for destruction. But raw destruction was seldom profitable, and coup was counted in coins, here. What coin were the Dendarii using to buy Fell Station’s help, or at least neutrality? The person of Baron Bharaputra, now secured in the cargo bay? What kind of bargaining chips were the clones, then, small change? And to think he’d despised the Jacksonians for being dealers in flesh.