In Her Name

was not terribly surprised to learn that one of the most frequent visitors had been Dr. Deliha Rabat.

She glowered at the screen, willing the current ACCESS DENIED warning to go away.

Trying again with the last bypass algorithm the worm program had been written to attempt, the words disappeared.

“All right,” she said eagerly. “Maybe we’re getting somewhere.”

But what echoed on the screen was not at all reassuring:

VIOLATION OF SECURITY LOCK

128904-34-23341

USER 527-903-482-71 ACCESS SUSPENDED

SECURITY MANAGER ALERTED

REMOTE STATION DISCONNECT

The screen suddenly went blank and the terminal refused to respond to her frantic hammering on the keyboard.

“Oh, shit,” she muttered. She quickly tossed everything but the data card with all the information she had downloaded into her shoulder bag. The card she put in her boot. It would not escape anything more than a cursory search, but it might make the difference.

Opening the door just a crack to see if anything unusual was going on, she saw that the center, crowded as always, remained quiet. She made her way toward the main lobby at a brisk walk, her eyes alert for any sign of trouble.

Because she was in trouble. She just did not realize yet how much.

Forty-Three

L’Houillier’s eyes opened unwillingly at the urgent beep coming from the General Staff comm link beside his bed. Beside him, his wife rolled over, burying her head in her pillow in a reflex she had developed over many years of being married to a Navy officer constantly on call.

He rolled over and slapped the machine, nearly knocking it from the nightstand. “L’Houillier,” he said groggily. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the ability to become alert immediately upon awakening had always eluded him.

“Forgive intrusion, admiral, but something most urgent has come up.”

Zhukovski, L’Houillier thought. Of course. Did the man never sleep? “I’ll be there in thirty minutes, Evgeni.”

“Pardon, admiral, but matter cannot wait thirty minutes,” Zhukovski’s voice shot back. “I am on my way to you. Five minutes.”

Before L’Houillier had a chance to protest, Zhukovski had terminated the transmission. “Merde,” he muttered.

“Evgeni again?” his wife asked, fully awake.

“Who else?” L’Houillier said grumpily. She could fall asleep in five minutes, be awake instantly, and fall asleep again without missing a beat. The same cycle took him hours, if he could manage it at all. He was terribly jealous.

“I’ll start the coffee and tea,” she said crisply as she got up, donned a robe, and disappeared out of the room.

Forcing himself out of bed, he had just managed to go to the bathroom and put on his own robe when he heard Zhukovski hammering on the front door, pointedly ignoring the more pleasant doorbell.

A few minutes later, L’Houillier was indeed awake, and not because of his wife’s special version of Navy coffee.

“Evgeni, this is fantastic,” he said as he reviewed again the message from Commodore Marchand aboard Furious. “A willing Kreelan prisoner and a child they think belongs to Reza Gard?”

“So Commodore Marchand reports, sir,” Evgeni said as he took another sip of the excellent tea proffered by L’Houillier’s wife. For Zhukovski, that was enough incentive to rouse his commander from sleep for an impromptu visit. “We have great opportunity here, admiral. But we can do nothing without translator.”

“Gard, you mean?”

Zhukovski nodded. “Correct, sir. This is our chance to find out more. We must bring all of them together.”

“What if the Kreelans – or Reza – do not wish to help?”

Zhukovski shrugged. “Then we have lost nothing but time courier ship needs to bring prisoners to Earth.”

L’Houillier did not hesitate. “Make it so, Evgeni.”

* * *

The situation in the sick bay on board Furious was tense, Eustus thought, but it was under control. For the moment. The huge warrior stood a silent vigil over the Kreelan child, watching with the greatest trepidation every move made by the ship’s surgeon as she began to work on the girl.

Eustus remembered little between passing out in the tunnel after the warrior started carrying him and waking up here on the Furious. But he had apparently managed to keep the Navy boat and the surviving Marines from shooting the Kreelan woman and the child, and Commodore Marchand had been ecstatic about their capture.

But no one on the ship who’d seen the warrior was under any delusions that she was truly a prisoner. Wisely, no one had tried to take her weapons. Even if someone had, her physical strength and her rapier claws would have wrought havoc in the close quarters of the ship before she could have been brought down. But there were no human weapons here, no Marines or armed sailors. The sickbay had been sealed off, the surgeon and two assistants tending to the girl as the warrior looked on, while Eustus was left to the accurate but less-than-tender ministrations of one of the automated aid stations that could easily repair the damage to his leg. But a platoon of fully armed Marines in battle armor waited tensely outside the door.

The surgeon was busy pulling away the lower part of the black undergarment to check on the girl’s legs.

“Lord of All,” she whispered. The two nurses gawked in astonishment.

“What is it?” Eustus asked just as Marchand’s voice cut in over the intercom with the same question. The commodore, along with half the ship’s officers, was glued to a screen in her ready room, watching the video feed from the operating theater.

“This isn’t any girl,” the surgeon pronounced. “We’ve got ourselves a male child here, people.”

“Jesus,” Eustus breathed. It was certainly a day of firsts.

The warrior looked at Eustus uncertainly, her great hands flexing in a gesture Eustus knew well from Reza. She was nervous, anxious.

“It’s all right,” he said quietly, hoping that a reassuring tone would suffice for words he did not know. “We just expected a girl, is all.”

She frowned, but seemed to relax slightly. If a figure as imposing as she could be said to relax.

The surgeon worked on the boy for nearly two hours, doing the best she could to repair the damage to a kind