down, take a drink or three before dinner.” Since he feared she might
refuse, lest that seem to herself like running away from what was in
her, he added, “Trohdwyr would like a toast to his manes, wouldn’t he?”
She followed the suggestion in a numb way. “Will the whole job be this
bad?” she asked.
“No.” He joined her, pouring Merseian telloch for them both though he
really wanted a Mars-dry martini. “I was afraid things might go as they
went, the first time, but couldn’t see any road around. You did witness
Trohdwyr’s murder, he suffered hideously, and he’d been your beloved
mentor your whole life. The pain wasn’t annulled just because your
thalamus was temporarily anesthetized. Being your strongest lost memory,
already half in consciousness, it came out ahead of any others. And it’s
still so isolated it feels like yesterday.”
She settled wearily back. “Yes,” she said. “Before, everything was
blurred, even that. Now … the faces, the whole betrayal–”
{Nobody died in the cave except Trohdwyr. The rest stood by when a mere
couple of marines arrived to arrest her. “You called them!” she screamed
to the one who bore the name Steve Johnson, surely not his own. He
grinned. Trohdwyr lunged, trying to get her free, win her a chance to
scramble down the slope and vanish. The lieutenant blasted him. The life
in his tough old body had not ebbed out, under the red moons, when they
pulled her away from him.
Afterward she overheard Johnson: “Why’d you kill the servant? Why not
take him along?”
And the lieutenant: “He’d only be a nuisance. As is, when the Diomedeans
find him, they won’t get suspicious at your disappearance. They’ll
suppose the Terrans caught you. Which should make them handier material.
For instance, if we want any of those who met you here to go guerrilla,
our contact men can warn them they’ve been identified through data
pulled out of you prisoners.”
“Hm, what about us four?”
“They’ll decide at headquarters. I daresay they’ll reassign you to a
different region. Come on, now, let’s haul mass.” The lieutenant’s boot
nudged Kossara, where she slumped wrist-bound against the cold cave
wall. “On your feet, bitch!”}
“His death happened many weeks ago,” Flandry said. “Once you get more
memories back, you’ll see it, feel it in perspective–including time
perspective. You’ll have done your grieving … which you did, down
underneath; and you’re too healthy to mourn forever.”
“I will always miss him,” she whispered.
Flandry regarded ghosts of his own. “Yes, I know.”
She straightened. He saw her features harden, as if bones lent strength
to flesh. The blue-green eyes turned arctic. “Sir Dominic, you were
right in what you did to Snell. Nobody in that gang was–is–fit to
live.”
“Well, we’re in a war, we and they, the nastier for being undeclared,”
he said carefully. “What you and I must do, if we can, is keep the
sickness from infecting your planet. Or to the extent it has, if I may
continue the metaphor, we’ve got to supply an antibiotic before the high
fever takes hold and the eruptions begin.”
His brutal practicality worked as he had hoped, to divert her from both
sorrow and rage. “What do you plan?” The question held some of the
crispness which ordinarily was hers.
“Before leaving Diomedes,” he said, “I contacted Lagard’s field office
on Lannach, transmitted a coded message for him to record, and showed
him my authority to command immediate courier service. The message is
directly to the Emperor. The code will bypass channels. In summary, it
says, ‘Hold off at Dennitza, no matter what you hear, till I’ve
collected full information’–followed by a synopsis of all I’ve learned
thus far.”
She began faintly to glow in her exhaustion. “Why, wonderful.”
“M-m-m, not altogether, I’m afraid.” Flandry let the telloch savage his
throat. “Remember, by now his Majesty’s barbarian-quelling on the Spican
frontier. He’ll move around a lot. The courier may not track him down
for a while. Meantime–the Admiralty on Terra may get word which
provokes it to emergency action, without consulting Emperor or Policy
Board. It has that right, subject to a later court of inquiry. And I’ve