Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 52 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Raven pushed herself up onto her palms first, then her good knee, and finally—

…jesus…

–to all fours. She took several ragged breaths, tasting dirt and heat and grease and blood, and began to crawl toward Kane’s voice, dragging the pack behind her. He wasn’t too far. She settled against a stump and peered through some bushes at the Mexican standoff he was forming.

Kane had his gun in some lady’s mouth and was speaking past her to another alien. V’kai, Kane had called him, and if Raven had ever needed to know for sure that word really meant ‘cop’, she only had to look at him. Uniform and everything.

As she watched, the cop bent and put the ugly flashlight-looking thing he’d been holding on the ground, so Raven guessed negotiations were well and underway. She leaned back against the rotting support of her stump and closed her eyes, exhausted and sweaty and shivering, to listen to the sounds of their voices and wait for it to be done. After a while, she heard Kane say, “Start walking, ichuta’a,” and that, figured Raven, was it. All over but the shooting.

And no sooner had the phrase wobbled through Raven’s addled head, then some real shooting started, making her think for a second that she’d caused it somehow. She opened her eyes and pawed at the bushes in dismay, and there it was—lady on the ground, maybe dead, and both aliens popping away at each other like kids with squirt guns.

Kane sprang to one side, firing fast as he ran for cover. The cop hit the dirt, came up with his flashlight, and sprayed out a volley of blue beams of light. The bullets were busting up chunks of bark and whatever the cop was shooting was turning into huge fiery craters when they hit, and the whole thing lasted maybe two seconds and ended in a splash of blood as a bullet hit the cop in the hand and his flashlight dropped. Undaunted, the cop lunged—must pay them better on Jota—and Kane smiled, aimed his gun right at the cop’s face, and squeezed the trigger.

Kik.

No more bullets.

Kane’s expression buckled briefly into a flawless ‘Jesus-Christ-what-next’ and without another sound, he twirled the empty gun around, gripped the muzzle, and hammered the thing into the cop’s head like the world’s most mis-shaped set of knuckles. The cop rolled with it like a champ, came back with a fist to Kane’s right side, and then the two of them were locked and at it. They didn’t make a sound, not one. Not a gasp, not a growl. Not nothing but the killing.

The cop was bigger, but the cop was injured. All the same, it occurred to Raven that Kane might not win this match. Especially if the lady did something stupid like grab up that flashlight and shoot a hole through him.

Raven leaned out of her bush, grabbed the lady’s ankles and pulled as hard as she could, dragging her back and out of the arena. If Kane won, he’d thank her for getting the lady under wraps. And…and if he lost, Raven could always say she was trying to protect her.

He wouldn’t lose. Kane wouldn’t lose. He just…couldn’t.

“Raven, I presume?” The lady’s voice was slurred, but steady and not without humor.

Raven hushed her, her eyes on Kane. He was flagging, straining. God, he was losing. Fear put a tremor in her hastily-chosen words, something about keeping quiet, she wasn’t really paying attention to herself. Kane stumbled, regrouped slashing, and heaved the cop into a tree. He was shaking, she could see it from here.

She couldn’t watch. She ducked away, hands over her eyes, and listened. If she could get up, she’d leap out there and take the cop’s eyes out. But she couldn’t. She could barely crawl.

The lady beside her suddenly gasped. Raven took her hands away from her face hopefully. The cop was on his back on the ground, his hands locked around Kane’s wrists, straining to keep the claws away that were steadily sinking towards his throat. Raven clenched her own hands into fists, her stomach like a tiny lump of molten lead, helpless.

“Don’t move!” the lady whispered. She looked around wildly, seized a length of charred branch from some ancient and illegal campfire, and leapt to her feet.

Raven grabbed at her ankle, holding her in place. “Don’t leave me!” she hissed desperately. “I’m hurt!”

The lady hesitated, her hand flexing on her impromptu weapon. Bark sifted off between her fingers. The stupid thing probably wouldn’t even last more than one whack before turning itself into kindling. “I have to help,” the lady said. “Tagen needs me.”

Raven burst into tears. It wasn’t hard. She was still all fucked-up-feeling from the crash, she hurt all over, and Kane was fighting for his life just a few feet away. This numb bitch and her rotten stick might actually make the difference between him winning and losing and Raven couldn’t do anything. “Please!” she cried. “Please, don’t!”

Beyond the bushes, Kane suddenly roared and Raven clapped a hand to her mouth, realizing too late that he’d heard her. He broke free of the cop’s hold and even as Raven screamed for him to stop, he turned and lunged toward her.

The cop had only to catch hold of Kane’s leg and pull. It probably didn’t even take that much effort. Kane hit the ground with quaking force, his breath knocking up a cloud of red earth and pine needles as it barked free of him. The cop was on him in an instant as Raven wailed. He took something from his belt—that handy little hissing gadget Kane had used on her so often—and drove it down into Kane’s neck like it was a knife instead of an air-gun.

The fight went out of him so immediately, so completely, that it was as though the cop had found Kane’s on/off switch and flicked it. The powerful body that had been fighting to rise dropped with a muffled whump back onto the ground and went limp. Kane’s eyes met Raven’s through the thicket, but there was only a glimmer of recognition in them. One claw twitched. That was all. The shark-black eyes rolled back and closed.

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Chapter Forty

There is no silence so complete as the one that follows a fight.

Raven stared at Kane where he lay facedown, her hands fluttering to her face, her throat, her arms, and finally clenching at the dry soil. “Is he dead?” she whispered. The only part of her that was not numb was the stomach that fought to vomit out all the horror congealing in her.

“No.” The cop gained his feet, leaning heavily on Kane’s motionless body to do so. He looked at her. It was a hard look, a cop’s look, the kind that saw through every shade of bullshit. “You belong to him,” he said.

Se ven garrug-ta.

Raven’s eyes welled with fresh tears. She bent her head and brayed.

The lady’s arms were around her at once and she hissed some sort of admonition to the cop that Raven could not hear over the force of her tears. But the cop’s voice she heard; it rolled above her like God’s own thunder, every bit as commanding in its own way as Kane’s.

“You said yourself E’Var could never have gone so far without aid. Who do you think has aided him all this time if not her?”

The surviving element in Mary Frances Carter that had once made her lie down with the taste of the Devil in her mouth now took control of her again. She flung out her arms, exposing the mosaic of blood and metal and bruises that her body had become after the crash and screamed, “Look what he’s done to me!”

The cop stepped back, the grim animosity slapped utterly free of his face. He looked at her, and she followed his eyes down across the mottled canvas she’d become. He saw the bruises, no doubt. She saw silver and gold and Kane’s own name marking her flesh. Her arms closed around herself again and she folded over, touching her head to the dry ground. She squeezed her eyes shut and sobbed.

“We can’t leave her here, Tagen,” the lady said quietly. “She’s hurt, we’re in the middle of nowhere…and people are looking for her.”

Raven peered up through the broken veil of her matted hair and watched the cop rake his claws through his hair as he glared down at her. She tried to look as bereft as possible. It didn’t require much acting.

The cop shot a black look down at Kane’s still and silent body, bared his teeth, and finally sighed and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Bring me my pack.”

Raven’s good leg twitched, trying to obey the command she’d heard aimed at her so many, many times. She pressed her brow to the ground again and listened to the lady rise and limp away.

Silence. She heard her heart drumming, setting the beat for all her aches to throb by. She heard the hoarse wind of her breath, deafening in her ears. She stared into the earth, shivering in the heat.

A soft rustle beside her. She turned her head just a little and saw the cop’s knee and one hand dangling relaxed across it. She looked up and he was looking down. She wouldn’t have thought there could be eyes any scarier than Kane’s, but she was looking at them now. Kane’s eyes hid all his secrets. The cop’s eyes showed every cold doubt openly.

Raven met that piercing, raptor’s gaze without flinching. She could feel that survivor’s shadow-self separate from the back of her, circling the cop with chisel in hand, hunting for the soft heel of him.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

The look on his face had a sound, and it was the sound of a chisel striking in under armor.

“No,” he said. He glanced away at Kane, who was still facedown and motionless.

Raven followed his eyes. She could see the faint rise and fall of Kane’s breath, but it looked shallow and he showed no signs of waking up. One of his arms was still stretched out, the claws curled and the blood that tipped them dulled by dust. She could reach out a hand and touch him, but she didn’t dare even to look at him too long. She said, “Are people really looking for me?”

“Yes.”

“Cops?”

“Yes.”

She looked up at him; he was still gazing down at Kane. “Do they think I killed those people?” she asked.

He hesitated and finally met her eyes. “Yes,” he said.

This was the part where panic should be chewing her up from the insides out, she knew, but it wasn’t. Calm had her in a grip so profound it made her head feel swollen. All her thoughts had weight and substance, all her nerves were awake and tingling, but she couldn’t make herself not be calm. “I didn’t,” she said, and looked down at her hands where they gripped the ground. She had no fingernails and she couldn’t remember biting them or anything. “I was there, but…how was I supposed to stop him? You tell me. How?”

She looked at him. He looked away.

“He did things to me,” Raven said.

The lady was coming back with a pack in her arms, bigger than Kane’s, dark blue instead of black, with a funny star-like symbol over the lid, but made of the same stuff. She watched the cop open it with a slide of his finger along the seam and her heart ached a little. Her own hand went to pull Kane’s pack a little tighter against her side.

“She’s hurt pretty bad,” the lady said, circling Raven’s leg with a worried look. “Tagen, if we take her to a hospital—”

“I know.” The cop loaded drops of liquid from an assortment of vials into the spray-gun and held out his hand for Raven’s arm.

She offered it, her expression carefully blanked. “I’m clean,” she said. “He cleaned me. So that…it was safe. For him.”

The cop’s jaw tightened. That was all. He emptied the contents of the spray-gun into Raven’s arm in a hiss of air, and then put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her onto her back. “Hold her, Daria. This is going to hurt,” he told Raven, in eerie half-remembered echo of Kane’s words to her that first awful night as she lay in convulsions beneath him.

Her nod came with fresh tears and she clapped both hands over her mouth and shut her eyes as the cop untied the shirt binding her leg and had himself a look. She felt one of his hands close on her thigh just above her knee and then the other wrapped around her ankle. “Steady,” he said, and pulled.

Raven meant to scream—he was clearly the sort of cop that reacted best to a girl screaming—but the sound of her bones grinding up and snapping back into place deafened her and after that, all sounds and colors kind of ebbed away like the tide on a flat, sickly beach. She stared glassily up at the lady’s face, silhouetted by the sun behind her, and waited to see if she was going to throw up or faint or what. The cop was still doing things to her down there, but she couldn’t even manage to move her eyes enough to see what. Eventually, things began to fade back in.

“…car seems to be working,” the lady was saying. “I think I can siphon some gas out of their tank and put it into ours. Enough to get us to a gas station, anyway.” A tactful pause came here, during which the lady’s fingers brushed thoughtfully at Raven’s brow. “What are you going to do with him?”

“He is unconscious,” the cop said sourly. “Killing him now would make for an awkward report.”

A touching tribute to cop-hood everywhere.

“He is arrested,” the cop continued. “And I will take him to Jota and see him imprisoned for his crimes. That is what I am going to do with him.”

“What’s going to happen when he wakes up?”

“I have…sedative…enough to ensure that does not happen.” He rose, a tower in the shape of a man, and Raven managed with effort to look directly at him.

“What are you going to do with her?” the lady asked softly.

Silence. Raven stayed as still as possible, staring at him without smiling and without speaking.

“We will take her with us,” the cop said at last, and threw out a sigh that held more then just a little snarl in it. “For now.”

And with that, Raven had to be content.

For now.

*

As with every mission that Tagen had known, the empty time following a difficult capture were weighted with doubts and lingering disappointments. The pursuit was done and now all that he had suffered in bringing it about had passed into the realm of the inconsequential. E’Var lay in the hold of Daria’s groundcar, by all appearances as innocent a passenger as any other, with all his history of violence suppressed by sleep. And Tagen himself, once more superfluous, sat and gazed out the window at the passing world, trusting to Daria to take them where they needed to be. He needed only to say, “East, presently,” or “Further south,” as the groundcar circled towards the hiding place of his ship.

They had made one stop to refuel, and Daria had gone into one of the roadside shops and left Tagen alone in the groundcar with the female who called herself Raven. She spoke to him in a low and listless voice from the seat behind him where she huddled with Tagen’s uniform jacket around her shoulders and Grendel sleeping happily in her arms. To hear of the monstrosities that had been performed on her in those tones of apathy and exhaustion had been among the most difficult acts Tagen had ever had to perform in a lifetime of service to the Fleet.

“He made me ask,” she would say, as Tagen stared out at the highway and the passing human cars. The sun was so bright, the sky so blue and peaceful. There was no evil apparent in this world, and yet: “He made me thank him.”

Daria returned ages later with bandages to dress all their wounds, a new shirt for Raven, and a medical brace she called a ‘crutch’ so that she could help Raven hobble to the station’s privy and back again. And then there was more road, more silence swelling out the groundcar’s interior. More time slipping like sand through Tagen’s fingers, bringing him inexorably to the moment when he would leave this Earth.

And now here it was, the moment come at last. They had left the last road behind them, driving on uneven ground at a walking pace, until Tagen had called them to halt. He had stepped out into the seemingly-empty clearing, walked to the low dimples of flattened grass that marked the landing struts of the shielded ship, made a few adjustments in mid-air and behold, a star-cruiser.

Now Tagen stood before his ship, the airlock open and ready to receive him and his prisoner, looking down on Daria’s face. She tried to smile, an effort that stabbed him to the heart. He was intensely aware of the other human watching them from the groundcar, and it made him over-conscious of the very little distance between them.

He stepped back, and then, pretending not to see the hurt in Daria’s eyes at that withdrawal, went to the hatch of the groundcar for E’Var.

Grendel was curled comfortably upon the killer’s chest, purring loudly. The cat complained at being moved aside and complained still further when Tagen pulled the unconscious man onto his shoulder rather than pause to rub the furry head. Grendel tried to follow, but Tagen shut the hatch. He felt the cat’s eyes on him, confused and stung, as he walked back to the ship. Daria watched him come with the same hurt expression, but she at least dropped her gaze when he met it.

Tagen passed her, his arm just brushing her shoulder, and then stopped. He shifted the dead weight of his prisoner and, glancing awkwardly over the lump of E’Var to see her, said, “Would you…like to see my ship?”

She blinked at him, blinked again, and finally faintly smiled. “Sure.”

Tagen went ahead of her, bending to carry his prone burden through the tight airlock, and then again through the narrow door to the holding cell. He set E’Var down, rolled him onto his back, and strapped him into the prisoner’s flight harness. After a moment, and not without a sour sense of obligation, Tagen brought out a fluid pack and raised a vein in E’Var’s limp arm.

He heard a soft step behind him and moved to allow Daria sight of his actions, but it was the other female, Raven, he saw when he turned. She had Grendel clutched tightly in her arms as she leaned on her brace and a Jotan chemist’s pack slung over one bruised shoulder. E’Var’s, no doubt. She never let it go far; there was something of hers in it, he thought, something E’Var had been keeping, tormenting her with its absence. Raven’s face was pale and blank and still damp from tears, reminding Tagen strongly of the seashore once the fickle tide had washed out and erased the day’s activities there. He did not trust this female. Which was an appalling reflection of his character, perhaps, but nonetheless.

Tagen returned his attention to his prisoner, inserting the line that would keep E’Var hydrated for the travel back to Jota and securing it with bonding paste. “You should not be walking,” he told her.

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“I do not know.”

The answer was cruelly laughable. He was a man of law. He knew very well.

Tagen activated the drip, checked the instrument panel, and finally stood up and turned to face her. Raven’s eyes remained on him, solemn, helpless, unblinking. He gestured to her and she backed out of the cell with a broken obedience all too familiar to him after recovering so many slaves. Tagen followed her, shut the door and sealed it, and then stood, staring down at her.

No, he did not trust her, but neither could he get his teeth into just why. She was not the twin of the blonde human Tagen had apprehended at the fair, not the bitter and raging accomplice he had expected. His eyes told him this was a victim, taken through no fault of her own and molded to E’Var’s sadistic whims. Freeing her when he knew the human Fleet was already seeking her for E’Var’s crimes would only condemn her to imprisonment and perhaps death.

His gut, though, his gut told him an entirely different and darker tale. His gut told him to be wary of the face that never showed emotion and the eyes that had a way of lingering on E’Var’s body when they had nowhere else to go. His gut told him that this was perhaps not so much a beaten human as it was a terribly sly one.

But then, he knew already the limits of his gift for insight. And after so much time on Earth, so many days of relentless summer, and so many conniving humans on episodes of Daria’s despised law program, he was aware that he couldn’t be very objective. And, as was beginning to feel disturbingly like habit these days, when he felt the need for wisdom, he found himself seeking Daria. She was standing in the doorway between the main bay and the pilot’s pit, hugging herself as if for warmth and gazing back at him with her eerie sympathy.

Tagen looked back at Raven, his talons flexing on the floor, resisting the urge to tak them even though she, as a human, couldn’t possibly read anything meaningful in the gesture. “If the choice were yours alone,” he said slowly, “what would you choose?”

She did not answer. Her eyes fell from his, stared at the floor between her feet. Her hand passed through Grendel’s fur, nearly in exact tandem with the cat’s contented rumbles, but she looked to be a thousand years detached from her physical self. A slave-look.

“Understand that I cannot offer you a return to the life you knew before. Not in any way. I could perhaps take you elsewhere here on Earth—”

“What good would that do?” she asked strengthlessly. “They’ll find me anywhere I go. They’ll arrest me.” She pulled Grendel up and drew a cat-scented breath, hiding her face from him. “They’ll kill me.”

Tagen frowned. His eyes sought Daria’s. She looked away and nodded once.

“How was I supposed to stop him?” Raven was saying, still without emotion. “I couldn’t even stop him from hurting me.”

Slave-words, and all the right ones. Tagen’s talons flexed again and again, he stilled them. In all his years of service and after all the encounters with recovered humans from every form of slavery, he had never met one so evocative with all the things she said…and didn’t say.

“Can’t I come with you?” Raven asked suddenly. She still did not look at him and her shoulders were bowed, without hope. “I don’t care what you do with me, I just can’t…stay here. Please. Can’t I just come with you?”

E’Var’s blonde human had asked virtually the same thing, albeit in a cruder fashion. Tagen’s doubts itched at him.

Raven’s eyes peeked at him behind the masking strands of her hair. “Please, don’t leave me here. Please. I can…I can be nice.” She cringed as she said it.

Tagen’s jaw clenched and this time it was his claws that flexed, wanting the visceral and wholly unprofessional satisfaction of ripping E’Var open. His doubts did not disappear, but they were diminished. No one could fabricate such an unhappy offer.

“I will,” he said finally. “No, do not mistake me, human. I will not harm you.” He started to say more, sighed, and pulled down a jump seat and gestured for her to sit. He took the cat from her arms and once Daria had come to collect the protesting animal, half-knelt to put his eyes more on level with Raven’s and said, “We need to have an understanding,” he said.

Raven’s face underwent a buckling of unmasked anguish and she clapped a shaking hand to cover the eyes that welled with water.

Tagen looked helplessly back at Daria, but she merely touched his shoulder in silent commiseration and went outside.

Tagen waited, searching the corners of the star cruiser’s ceiling for hints on how to proceed. Slaves did a lot of crying. In the past, however, he’d been able to simply move on and leave them to it while he dealt with a fresh one. He’d never had to console one before, and in light of her offer to be…nice, he was loathe to even touch her. Fortunately, Raven’s tears abated on their own. She swiped at her eyes with bruising force, and then picked up the chemist’s pack that had been sitting at her side to hold on her lap in Grendel’s absence. She gripped it until her knuckles whitened, staring fixedly at the floor as unhappiness still twisted her features.

“I can take you away from Earth,” he said, still addressing the main bay’s ceiling. “But you must understand that you will never be permitted to return.”

“I know,” she whispered. “What…what will you do to me?”

“I expect you will be detained at first, for medical purposes. I am sure you will be made as comfortable as possible and no one will harm you. Afterwards…” He hesitated, risking a sidelong glance that showed him only her spiritless profile. “You will be moved to a…facility…forgive me, I do not know the correct word. A place for humans we have recovered from others like E’Var.”

She nodded dully.

“It is the place you will live thereafter,” he continued. “There will be many other humans and no Jotan. You will be assigned a room at first, but you are, of course, free to move when and where you will. The moon is—”

“Moon?” She raised herself to look at him. “Aren’t I going to live on Jota?”

“No.” Again, he hesitated, trying to see through the face she showed him and gauge how much of the truth she needed to know and how much would only upset her further. “It is well within our space and is monitored to preserve the stability of its inhabitants, and to provide medical services and other aids when necessary, but it is not on Jota. We wished to prevent escape.”

She only stared at him.

“And abductions,” he admitted.

She looked away.

“It is not much like Earth, but it is a safe place. And it is the only place I can take you if I remove you from this world.”

Raven drew a deep breath and let it out as a shuddery sigh. Her shoulders hunched. “I don’t have a choice,” she said. She glanced toward the door to the prisoner’s holding cell and her hands clenched on the chemist’s pack. “What about…”

“He will be imprisoned for what remains of his life,” Tagen told her firmly. “He will sleep out the flight to Jota and be taken directly into custody. You will not have to see him or speak to him. There is no escape from our prisons. Once he is installed, he will be gone.”

“How—” Her voice failed her and it was a little while before she could go on. “How long before that happens? Will he go directly to jail?”

“I think not. There will be questions for him.” Tagen’s gaze went to the sealed cell and darkened grimly. “He will be held some time on Jota, I suspect.”

“Not in prison?”

“No.” He sorted through his N’Glish warily for his next words. Raven had gone as tight as a coiled spring; he would have to be careful of the way in which he chose to comfort her. “To have a interrogation team stationed at the prison would be too great a risk to their safety, and to transport them in each day would present too much opportunity of escape for the other prisoners. But his cell on Jota will be quite secure and his transport to prison afterwards will surely be better orchestrated than his first. And he does not know you are here,” he finished. “He will never come for you. He will never know that you have left Earth.”

Raven nodded, drew a deep breath, and nodded again.

“Are you certain this is what you want?” he asked.

She looked at him, her face empty. “I don’t think it matters what I want anymore,” she said. She stared at E’Var’s door. “None of this was supposed to happen. None of this is one bit fair. But if you need me to say it so your conscience is clear, then sure, this is what I want. Take me to your concentration camp. I’ll survive.”

Tagen’s talons did tak then, but he brought down the bars of the flight harness and began to strap her to her seat. He supposed he understood where she was coming from well enough, but he did wish he could hear more bitterness in her voice. At least then he could be certain of her sincerity.

Wit, insight, humor, and now sensitivity. Gods, he was beginning to think he was more than merely a terrible officer, he was what the humans called a stone-cold bastard. How Daria had managed to live with him this long—

Daria.

Tagen glanced behind him at the open airlock as he cinched the last safety on Raven’s harness tight. He saw only open forest at first, and then the twitch of an orange tail at hip-height just beyond the door. He rose and went outside.

Daria continued to lean against the side of the cruiser, rubbing Grendel’s neck and gazing down at the dry soil of her home world. She did not speak to him.

Tagen glanced up once at the glaring eye of Earth’s sun. He could feel Heat creeping in at him and it gave him a strange sensation that was almost nostalgia. He would be gone from here before his tsesac filled and it would be many, many years before he underwent the experience again. At this point (and again, he would admit he was not being objective), he would be happy if he never went into Heat again. He did not care if he returned to Jota and a full thousand admiring females anxious to breed. Never again. But then, neither had his time here passed in a wholly unpleasant manner.

Grendel miaked contentedly, its eyes slivers of serenity and pleasure as it kneaded the flesh of Daria’s arm. Tagen reached out and rubbed the short furs on the animal’s nose. Daria still did not speak. Well. He supposed he should say something.

“I am taking Raven with me,” he said.

“Good.”

Silence. He could feel sweat beading on his chest and stomach, making his uniform cling uncomfortably to his skin.

“I was hoping you’d find a way to help her,” Daria said suddenly.

“I do not know how ‘helped’ she will feel,” he admitted. “I do not imagine it is an easy life. I—”

He stopped there, glanced within at the human secured for flight with E’Var’s pack hugged to her chest, and then began to walk. Daria followed him. They moved without speaking to the groundcar and stopped there. Neither of them looked at the vehicle, but all of Grendel’s attention was fixed hungrily within at his greatly-reduced supply of food tins.

“My obligations on this world should not begin and end with E’Var’s capture,” Tagen said. “I cannot in all honesty say that I trust this Raven, but I feel compelled to make some reparation for all that has been done to her. And…for all that I have done to you, I suppose I should feel the same sense of duty.”

She smiled just a little, gazing down at the hand at work in Grendel’s fur. “But you don’t?” she guessed.

“No.” He paced a little ways back towards his ship, and then returned to the groundcar and turned to face her. “I wish that I did. I am a solider. My sense of duty has always been clear to me and easily followed.”

“Tagen—”

“No, let me speak. I love you. The thought that I must leave you is the most brutal blow I have ever known. I would have you come with me as well, Daria Cleavon.” He did not allow her time to answer, but spoke on rapidly, turning his back so that he could not see her reactions and let himself be crippled by them. “You are, of course, free to do what you will on Earth. It would be wisest, I am sure, to return to your home and I trust you to say nothing more of me. I will not argue if such is your decision. If you choose to leave this world, you will never return to it, and although I will fight to keep you with me, I can make you no promise that you will not be sent to the same life awaiting E’Var’s female. It is a risk. I hold you no blame if you choose not to accept it.”