In Enemy Hands

She punched for an elevator car, then folded her arms while she waited for it.

On the other hand, there may actually be a silver lining to all this, she mused. Not immediately, no, but the execution was Ransom's idea, and Pierre and Saint-Just refused to override her, now didn't they? And the officer corps is going to know that as well as I do. For that matter, the Manties will know it, too. That could just make the whole thing a card worth playing when the time comes. After all, I'll be acting out of moral outrage over the excesses of State Security and the Committee, won't I? Of course I will.

The elevator doors opened, and Esther McQueen's lip curled in a bitterly sardonic smile as she stepped through them.

Miranda LaFollet sat on the shaded bench and watched the children play. Farragut lay sprawled on his belly on the bench beside her, his chin resting companionably on her thigh, and she smiled down at him and reached out to stroke the magical softness of his spine. His gentle purr buzzed in her ear, and he arched his back ever so slightly, and even that tiny response made the wonder and amazement of him brand-new all over again. She couldn't imagine anything she could possibly have done to deserve his love or the magic of her bond with him. He was her companion, her champion, and her closest friend, all in one, and already the mere thought of a life without him in it had become impossible to conceive of. It simply couldn't happen, and she was unspeakably grateful to...

Her thought chopped off, and her gray eyes went dark. It always happened that way. She managed to put the thought out of her mind by concentrating on the things that had to be done, the simple, daily duties which could consume so much of her time, and then something would happen, and the darkness would return with abrupt, brutal power.

She looked back out at the other 'cats, and familiar worry twisted deep within her. Samantha and Hera lay stretched out along separate limbs of an Old Earth oak tree, the very tips of their prehensile tails twitching as they guarded the kittens and watched Cassandra and Andromeda stalk their brothers through the underbrush under Artemis' tutelage. From here, everything looked completely normal, but Miranda had been there when James MacGuiness returned to Grayson. She'd watched him face Samantha, and she'd held Farragut in her own arms, feeling his tension as MacGuiness explained what had happened to Samantha's mate.

If anyone present had ever doubted treecats understood English, they would never doubt again. Samantha had been tense and ill at ease from the moment MacGuiness walked in, clearly sensing his own emotional turmoil, not that anyone would have needed an empathic sense for that. His worn, exhausted face had shouted it to the universe, and he'd gone down on his knees to face Samantha. The 'cat had sat fully upright, green eyes meeting his, and he'd told her.

Miranda would never forget that moment. She'd already heard the news herself, knew her brother, as well as her Steadholder, was missing. Yet she had all the rest of her huge, loving family... and Farragut. Terrible as the news had been, she'd had people who cared and duties to distract her from it. But Samantha had lost her adopted person barely twenty T-months before. Now her mate and his person had disappeared, as well, and the desolation in her eyes had twisted Miranda's heart. The other 'cats had converged upon her, even Farragut, surrounding her with the physical warmth of their bodies even as they lent her the deeper, i

In some ways, the endless days which had passed since then had been a blessing, for they had blunted the immediacy of their knowledge. Time might not heal all wounds, but no one, 'cat or human, could sustain the anguish of the moment of loss indefinitely, and like Miranda, Samantha had her family. She had the rest of the clan she and Nimitz had brought to Grayson, and her children, and she'd buried herself in them as desperately as Miranda had turned to her family. And the 'cats hadn't forgotten MacGuiness. It was as if they understood, as no doubt they did, that he, too, needed his "family" at a time like this, and one of the adults was perpetually bringing him a kitten to rock to sleep or some other problem which required his attention. They watched over him as attentively as they guarded Samantha’s children, and Miranda saw to it that the Harrington House staff did the same. None of Lady Harrington’s people would ever admit that was what they were doing, of course, but the truth was that they were almost as attached to MacGuiness as they were to the Steadholder, and somehow watching over him was like a promise to Lady Harrington that her household and her steading would be ready when she returned.

Farragut stirred, raising his head from her lap. Miranda turned her head to see what had caught his attention, and a wry smile twitched her lips as the newest citizen of Harrington Steading walked down the path towards her. In some respects, there could not have been a worse time for Doctor Harrington to arrive on Grayson, but Miranda was devoutly grateful that she was here.

She had dived into the task of organizing the clinic with an energy every bit as formidable as her daughters, and the results had been impressive. Manticoran physicians had flooded into Grayson over the past few years. Almost a third of them had been women, and the huge gap between modern medicine and that of Pre-Alliance Grayson had gone a long way towards demolishing any reservations about female doctors. It was difficult for any physician to argue that women must be less competent than men when the medical knowledge of the women in question was at least a century in advance of their own. Of course, nothing was impossible for the sufficiently bigoted. A certain percentage of the most conservative Grayson doctors had managed to maintain their prejudices, but they were a distinct minority. Despite that, however, some members of the Grayson medical profession, and not all of them bigots, by any means, had been prepared to assume that Dr. Harrington’s relationship to the Steadholder, more than her own abilities, helped explain her selection to head the clinic.

So far, the longest anyone had managed to hang onto that assumption after meeting her was less than twenty minutes, and it didn't matter whether they'd come to consult her on an administrative matter or a medical one. She'd been trained at the finest medical university and best teaching hospitals in the known galaxy; she had sixty-five T-years of experience to draw upon and an energy and enthusiasm anyone a quarter of her age might have envied; and, like her daughter, she was simply incapable of offering less than her very best. She didn't even have to try to impress her critics; she simply had to be herself.