I must have fallen asleep.
Which was hard to believe; the colossal worry of the situation had kept her mind feverishly active.
The usual two female police officers appeared in the doorway. Louise blinked up at their wavering outlines, and tried to right herself. Bright lights flashed painfully behind her eyes; she had to clamp her mouth shut against the sudden burst of nausea.
What is wrong with me?
“Woo there, steady on.” One of the police officers was sitting on the bed beside her, holding her up.
Louise shook uncontrollably, cold sweat beading on her skin. Her reaction calmed slightly, though it was still terribly hard to concentrate.
“One minute,” the woman said. “Let me reprogram your medical package. Try to take some deeper breaths, okay?”
That was simple enough. She gulped down some air, her chest juddering. Another couple of breaths. Her rogue body seemed to be calming. “Wha . . . What?” she panted.
“Anxiety attack,” said the policewoman. “We see a lot of them in here. That and worse things.”
Louise nodded urgently, an attempt to convince herself that’s all it was. No big deal. Nothing badly amiss. The baby’s fine—the medical package would insure that. Just stay calm.
“Okay. I’m okay now. Thank you.” She proffered a small smile at the police officer, only to be greeted with blank-faced indifference.
“Let’s go, then,” said the officer standing by the door.
Louise girded herself, and slowly stood on slightly unsteady legs. “Where are we going?”
“Parole Office.” She sounded disgusted.
“Where’s Genevieve? Where’s my sister?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Come on.”
Louise was almost shoved out into the corridor. She was improving by the minute, although the headache lingered longer than anything else. A small patch of skin at the back of her skull tingled, as if she’d been stung. Her fingers stroked it absently. Anxiety attack? She hadn’t known there was such a thing before. But given everything she currently had to think about, such a malaise was more than likely.
They got into a lift which had to be heading down. The gravity field had risen to almost normal when they got out. This part of the asteroid was different to the cells and interview rooms she’d been kept in until now. Definitely government offices, the standardized furniture and eternally polite personnel with their never-smiling faces were evidence of that. She took a little cheer from the fact these corridors and glimpsed rooms weren’t as crushingly bleak as the upper level. Her status had changed for the better. Slightly.
The police officers showed her into a room with a narrow window looking out over High York’s biosphere cavern. Not much to see, it was dawn, or dusk, Louise didn’t know which. The grassland and trees soaking up the gold-orange light were a brighter, more welcoming green than the cavern in Phobos. Two curving settees had been set up facing each other in the middle of the floor, bracketing an oval table. Genevieve slouched on one of them, hands stuffed into the pockets of her shipsuit, feet swinging just off the floor, looking out of the window. Her expression was a mongrel cross between sullen resentment and utter boredom.
“Gen.” Louise’s voice nearly cracked.
Genevieve raced across the room and thudded into her. They hugged each other tightly. “They wouldn’t tell me where you were!” Genevive protested loudly. “They wouldn’t let me see you. They wouldn’t say what was happening.”
Louise stroked her sister’s hair. “I’m here now.”
“It’s been forever. Days!”
“No, no. It just seems like that.”
“Days,” Genevieve insisted.
Louise managed a slightly uncertain smile; wanting for herself the reassurance she was attempting to project. “Have they been questioning you?”
“Yes,” Genevieve mumbled morosely. “They kept on and on about what happened in Norwich. I told them a hundred times.”
“Me too.”
“Everybody must be really stupid on Earth. They don’t understand anything unless you’ve explained it five times.”
Louise wanted to laugh at the childish derision in Gen’s voice, pitched just perfectly to infuriate any adult.
“And they took my games block away. That’s stealing, that is.”
“I haven’t seen any of my stuff either.”
“The food’s horrid. I suppose they’re too thick to cook it properly. And I haven’t had any clean clothes.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
Brent Roi hurried into the room, and dismissed the two waiting police officers with a casual wave. “Okay, ladies, take a seat.”
Louise flashed him a resentful look.
“Please?” he entreated without noticeable sincerity.
Holding hands, the sisters sat on the settee opposite him. “Are we under arrest?” Louise asked.
“No.”
“Then you believe what I told you?”
“To my amazement, I find sections of your story contain the odd nugget of truth.”
Louise frowned. This attitude was completely different to the one he’d shown her during the interview. Not that he was repenting, more like he’d been proved right instead of her.
“So you’ll watch out for Quinn Dexter?”
“Most assuredly.”
Genevieve shuddered. “I hate him.”
“That’s all that truly matters,” Louise said. “He must never be allowed to get down to Earth. If you believe me, then I’ve won.”
Brent Roi shifted uncomfortably. “Okay, we’ve been trying to decide what to do with the pair of you. Which I can tell you is not an easy thing, given what you were attempting. You thought you were doing the right thing, bringing Christian here. But believe me, from the legal side of things, you are about as wrong as it’s possible to be. The Halo police commissioner has spent two days being advised by some of our best legal experts on what the hell to do with you, which hasn’t improved his temper any. Ordinarily we’d just walk you past a warm judge and fly you off to a penal colony. There’d be no problem obtaining a guilty verdict.” He gazed at Genevieve. “Not even your age would get you off.”
Genevieve pushed her shoulders up against her neck, and glowered at him.
“However, there are mitigating circumstances, and these are strange times. Lucky for you, that gives the Halo police force a large amount of discretion right now.”
“So?” Louise asked calmly. For whatever reason she wasn’t afraid; if they were due to face a trial none of this would be happening.
“So. Pretty obviously: we don’t want you up here after what you’ve done; plus you don’t have the basic technical knowledge necessary to live in an asteroid settlement, which makes you a liability. Unfortunately, there’s an interstellar quarantine in force right now, which means we can’t send you off to Tranquillity where your fiancй can take care of you. That just leaves us with one option: Earth. You have money, you can afford to stay there for the duration of the crisis.”
Louise glanced at Genevieve, who squashed her lips together with a dismissive lack of interest.
“I’m not going to object,” Louise said.
“I couldn’t care less if you did,” Brent Roi told her. “You have no say in this at all. As well as deporting you, I am officially issuing you with a police caution. You have engaged in an illegal act with the potential of endangering High York, and this will be entered into Govcentral’s criminal data memory store with a suspended action designation. Should you at any time in the future be found committing another criminal act of any nature within Govcentral’s domain this case will be reactivated and used in your prosecution. Is that clear?”