“So you connived at her escape.” Snelund sipped. “That’s tacitly realized by everyone, Commander. A sound judgment, whether or not we dare put it in the record. She can be tracked down later.”
“But sir, I didn’t.”
“What!” Snelund sat bolt erect.
Flandry said fast: “Let’s drop the euphemisms, sir. She made some extremely serious accusations against you. Some people might use them to buttress a claim that your actions were what caused this rebellion. I didn’t want that. If you’ve read much history, you’ll agree nothing works like a Boadicea — no? — a martyr, especially an attractive female martyr, to create trouble. The Empire would suffer. I felt it was my duty to keep her. To get the men’s agreement, I had to convince them she would not be returned here. She’d go to a Naval section, where rules protect prisoners and testimony isn’t likely to be suppressed.”
Snelund had turned deadpan. “Continue,” he said.
Flandry sketched his means of smuggling her in. “The fleet should be assembled and ready to depart for Satan in about three days,” he finished, “now that scouts have verified the enemy is still using the code I brought. I’m not expected to accompany it. I am expected, though, by my men, to obtain orders for myself that will send the Rommel to Ifri, Terra, or some other place where she’ll be safe. They’ll have ways of finding out whether I do. You know how word circulates in any set of offices. If I don’t — I’m not sure that secrecy will bind every one of those lads. And disclosure would inconvenience you, sir, at this highly critical time.”
Snelund drained his brandy glass and refilled it. The little glug-glug sounded loud across the music. “Why do you tell me?”
“Because of what I’ve said. As a patriot, I can’t allow anything that might prolong the rebellion.”
Snelund studied him. “And she refused you?” he said at length.
Spite etched Flandry’s tones. “I don’t appreciate that, from third-hand goods like her.” With quick smoothness: “But this is beside the point. My obligation … to you, Your Excellency, as well as to the Imperium—”
“Ah, yes.” Snelund eased. “It does no harm to have a man in your debt who is on his way up, does it?”
Flandry looked smug.
“Yes-s-s, I think we resonate, you and I,” Snelund said. “What is your suggestion?”
“Well,” Flandry replied, “as far as officialdom knows, Rommel contains no life other than my multiple Didonian. And heesh will never talk. If my orders were cut tonight — not specifically to anywhere, let’s say, only for ‘reconnaissance and report at discretion, employing minimal crew’ — a phone call by Your Excellency to someone on Admiral Bickens’ staff would take care of that — I could go aboard and depart. My men would relax about Lady McCormac. When they haven’t heard news of her in a year or two — well, reassignment will have scattered them and feelings will have cooled. Oblivion is a most valuable servant, Your Excellency.”
“Like yourself,” Snelund beamed. “I do believe our careers are going to be linked, Commander. If I can trust you—”
“Come see for yourself,” Flandry proposed.
“Eh?”
“You said you’d be interested in meeting my Didonian anyway. It can be discreet. I’ll give you the Rommel’s orbital elements and you go up alone in your flitter, not telling anybody where you’re bound.” Flandry blew a smoke ring. “You might like to take personal charge of the execution. To make sure it’s done in a manner suitable to the crime. We could have hours.”
Then he waited.
Until sweat made beads on Snelund’s skin and an avid voice said, “Yes!”
Flandry hadn’t dared hope to catch the prize for which he angled. Had he failed, he would have made it his mission in life to accomplish the same result by other methods. The fact left him feeling so weak and lightheaded that he wondered vaguely if he could walk out of there.
He did, after a period of conference and arrangement-making. A gubernatorial car delivered him at Catawrayannis Base, where he changed into working garb, accepted his orders, and got a flitter to the Rommel.
Time must be allowed for that craft to descend again, lest the pilot notice another and ornate one lay alongside. Flandry sat on the bridge, alone with his thoughts. The viewscreen showed him planet and stars, a huge calm beauty.
Vibration sounded in the metal, as airlocks joined and magnetronic grapples made fast. Flandry went down to admit his guest.
Snelund came through the airlock breathing hard. He carried a surgical kit. “Where is she?” he demanded.
“This way, sir.” Flandry let him go ahead. He did not appear to have noticed Flandry’s gun, packed in case of bodyguards. There weren’t any. They might have gossiped.
Woe stood outside the captain’s cabin. Xenological interest or no, Snelund barely glanced at heesh and jittered while Flandry said in pidgin: “Whatever you hear, stay where you are until I command you otherwise.”
The noga’s horn dipped in acknowledgment. The ruka touched the ax at his side. The krippo sat like a bird of prey.
Flandry opened the door. “I brought you a visitor, Kathryn,” he said.
She uttered a noise that would long run through his nightmares. His Merseian war knife flew into her hand.
He wrenched the bag from Snelund and pinioned the man in a grip that was not to be shaken. Kicking the door shut behind him, he said, “Any way you choose, Kathryn. Any way at all.”
Snelund began screaming.
XV
Seated at the pilot board of the gig, Flandry pushed controls to slide aside the housing and activate the view-screens. Space leaped at him. The gloom of Satan and the glitter of stars drifted slowly past as Rommel swung around the planet and tumbled along her invariable plane. Twice he identified slivers of blackness crossing the constellations and the Milky Way: nearby warcraft. But unaided senses could not really prove to him that he was at the heart of the rebel fleet.
Instruments had done that as he drove inward, and several curt conversations once he came in range. Even when Kathryn spoke directly with Hugh McCormac, reserve stood between them. Warned by his communications officer what to expect, the admiral had had time to don a mask. How could he know it wasn’t a trick? If he spoke to his wife at all, and not to an electronic shadow show, she might be under brainscrub, speaking the words that her operator projected into her middle ear. Her own mostly impersonal sentences, uttered from a visage nearly blank, yet the whole of her unsteady, might lend credence to that fear. Flandry had been astonished. He had taken for granted she would cry forth in joy.
Was it perhaps a simple but strong wish for privacy, or was it that at this ultimate moment and ultimate stress she must fight too hard to keep from flying apart? There had been no chance to ask her. She obeyed Flandry’s directive, revealing no secret of his, insisting that the two men hold a closed-door parley before anything else was done; and McCormac agreed, his voice rough and not altogether firm; and then things went too fast — the giving of directions, the study of meters, the maneuvers of approach and orbit matching — for Flandry to learn what she felt.
But while he prepared to go, she came from the cabin to which she had retreated. She seized his hands and looked into his eyes and whispered, “Dominic, I’m prayin’ for both of you.” Her lips brushed across his. They were cold, like her fingers, and tasted of salt. Before he could respond, she walked quickly away again.