“Chilaili!” She broke and ran, shouting at the Tersae who would, by now, be in the approaching Bolo’s gunsights. “Chilaili!” Bessany skidded outside, slipped and slid through the snow to where the Tersae had stopped, swivelling her head in puzzlement from the noise of the approaching war machine to Bessany’s wide-eyed, coatless rush forward.
“What—?” the Tersae began.
“Get down!” Bessany shouted, hurtling herself between the katori and the massive weapon bearing down on them from the blizzard. It was going to fire, any second now . . . Wicked gun snouts appeared through the blinding white whirl of snow, towering above them. Antipersonnel guns were trained straight at them.
“Don’t shoot!” Bessany screamed at it, flinging out both hands in a hopeless gesture. It ground to a halt less than five meters away and sat motionless while Bessany’s deafening heartbeats slammed against her chest. She couldn’t even see all of it, just part of the prow with its bristling weapons and the fronts of its immense treads. “Chilaili,” she gasped out, “as you love life, don’t move! Don’t even breathe!”
She heard a hatch opening somewhere above, which startled her, heard the clatter of feet on metal. Then a man appeared through the wind-driven snow and ice, rushing forward, a wicked-looking gun in one hand. An instant later, she stared up into the very last face she had expected to see coming toward her out of a Thulian blizzard. Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open, but no sound emerged past the squeaking constriction in her throat.
“My God,” John Weyman breathed, “you’re alive . . .”
A jumble of emotions slammed through Bessany, wild relief fighting for space with shame and embarrassment. The raking claws of nightmare would never have descended on her if she’d simply believed this man in the first place. She struggled to find her voice. “You came. You must have read my reports. . . .”
“Yes,” he said grimly. “I’ve read them, all right. Some of them. About twenty minutes ago.”
“Twenty minutes?” she echoed, baffled. An absent shudder caught her, chattering her teeth in the biting, subzero wind. “But—”
“Later,” he said gruffly. “You’re freezing and so am I.”
He turned toward the med lab—and halted in his tracks.
Chilaili hadn’t moved. Wasn’t breathing, either. She was staring, pupils dilated with shock, at the Bolo’s towering war hull. Bessany didn’t like the look on John Weyman’s face. “Please ask your Bolo not to shoot Chilaili.”
“Are there any more of those things here?” His gaze never even flickered from Chilaili and his grip on the pistol was so tight, she wondered why the bones of his hand hadn’t cracked.
“No, there aren’t any more Tersae here,” she bit out. “And they’re not ‘things.’ They have names. This,” she gestured brusquely, “is Chilaili. My friend.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Rapier,” he growled, gaze still glued to Chilaili, “please do not shoot the prisoner. Not until I’ve had a chance to interrogate it, anyway.”
“You really are Alexander’s brother, aren’t you?” Bessany snarled.
John Weyman’s face ran deathly white in the glare of light pouring from the med lab. Bessany was so recklessly angry, she didn’t even care. “Chilaili,” she snapped, “forget about more wood for the cookfires. We’ll bring it in later. Let’s get inside before I freeze to death.” She strode toward the med lab, fists clenched.
The tall katori took a hesitant step to follow, head cocked sideways to keep one eye rolling backwards toward the Bolo’s bristling guns. Herve Sinclair blocked their way, gaping up at the Bolo. Bessany shoved roughly past. “Herve, please ask everyone to come in for a meeting. We’ve just officially been rescued. The Bolo’s commander will want to debrief everyone.”
“Is it safe?” he asked uncertainly.
John Weyman’s voice came as an impatient growl behind her. “Of course it’s safe. Rapier doesn’t shoot humans.” The slight emphasis on the last word brought Bessany around again, glaring. Chilaili had moved cautiously to one side, putting Bessany between herself and the massive machine outside. And, coincidentally, its commander.
“Bessany—” he began, pushing past Herve to stalk toward her.
“No,” she gritted out. One hand came up involuntarily, halting him in much the same way as her outflung hands had stopped the Bolo. “Not yet. We’re scattered in half-a-dozen lab buildings. The Navy waited three months to answer my reports, so you can cool your heels for another five minutes, until we’re all here. You really need to hear what we have to say.”
That muscle jumped again in his jaw. “Yes. I do. More than you can possibly guess.”
Their gazes locked, striking sparks in the silence. Stone-hard muscles flexed in his jaw and his long, lean hands. The muzzle of the gun swung slightly at that movement, scaring Bessany. Then he surprised her. He ran one of those tense hands through his hair, brushing away melting snow, and let go an unhappy sigh.
“All right,” he said, voice low. “We may not have spoken since that damned wedding, but you’ve never given me any reason to mistrust you. And God knows, my family put you through enough hell, we owe you a break or fifty. I’ll give you, and it” —he glanced pointedly at the Tersae behind her— “the benefit of the doubt. For now.”
Bessany drew a long, shaky breath. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “And Chilaili is not an ‘it.’ She’s a master healer and she’s my friend. Please treat her with the courtesy she deserves.”
His mouth tightened into a thin, white line. “I’m trying,” he said roughly. “Given standing orders on those—creatures—you should be damned glad we didn’t fire on sight. Just for the record, were they,” he darted a cold look at Chilaili, “responsible for the damage here?”
“No. A tornado hit us. According to Chilaili, we picked the worst spot on Thule to build this lab. An assessment I fully support. And just for the record,” Bessany muttered, tucking both hands under her armpits to warm them, “why did it take you so long to read my reports?”
“We’ve been in the field, on the front lines of the Deng invasion,” he said with a growl. “Sector Command never forwarded your messages. Much as it galls to say it, you don’t fall into the immediate-family category. So a very junior communications technician dumped every one of your messages into a holding queue. I found out twenty minutes ago, when I queried Sector Command and the Ministry of Mineral Resources for any reports out of Eisenbrucke Station.”
“But . . .” she stared, aghast, “surely the Ministries sent some kind of message to the head of Sector Command? If not Mineral Resources, surely Xenology did?”
Anger sparked through his eyes. “No. I bounced copies immediately to General McIntyre, here on Thule. If anyone at Sector had seen them, McIntyre would have known. He was as shocked as I was.”
The staggering scale of bureaucratic bungling left Bessany ashen.
John said bitterly, “I suspect the only messages Mineral Resources bothered to read were those directly involving saganium. God only knows what Xenology’s excuse is.”
“And here I was, stuck out here, thinking—” She reddened, unable to hold his gaze. From the set of his mouth and the look in his shadowed eyes, John Weyman knew exactly what she had been about to say.
“It’s all right, Bessany,” he said quietly. ” I can imagine only too well what you’ve been thinking. Given what you went through with Alex, I don’t blame you a bit.” He fell silent then, studying the med lab with quiet intensity, taking in every detail, from the cracked and braced ceiling to the badly injured men and women in every bed they’d been able to salvage. Even so, some of them had been tucked into makeshift pallets on the floor.
A brooding frown hovered around his mouth, but he didn’t ask questions, waiting for the others to arrive. He kept his gun in his hand, however, and seemed electrically aware of Chilaili, who had remained utterly and prudently silent. Bessany noticed, for the first time, a medical brace around his elbow and wondered how he’d come to be injured. If the Tersae were behind it, he wouldn’t be the only human, by a long shot, with a score to settle.
People were arriving through the snow, wearing hastily donned coats or wrapped in blankets, most of them whispering in awed tones about the Bolo parked outside. When they’d all gathered, jamming themselves into every possible empty space in the room, John broke the hushed, expectant silence. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel John Weyman, Third Dinochrome Brigade. And in case you’re wondering about the name, Bessany is my sister-in-law.”
He cleared his throat slightly, his expression reflecting considerable chagrin. The scandal of his brother’s death had been reported from one end of human space to the other, so he had to be wondering what she might have told her colleagues, what deeply intimate and damaging details she might’ve shared about his relatives.