In Enemy Hands

"My God."

Sha

No, Lester Tourville thought shakenly. No, she didn't blow apart; she simply came apart. She... disintegrated.

And that, he realized, was precisely the right word. The battlecruiser’s fusion plants blew as their mag bottles failed, spewing white-hot fury amid the wreckage, but it didn't really matter. Nothing could have survived that dreadful, wrenching blow from inside her hull. All the fusion plants did was vaporize a few score tons of wreckage and silhouette the rest of it against a star-bright fury, like snowflakes in a ground car's headlights.

He stared in awe at the visual images of the carnage transmitted from their RD to the main view screen, and he knew how it had happened. He'd never actually seen it before, but there was only one thing the Manties could possibly have done to produce that effect, and a corner of his mind wondered distantly how they'd gotten past the fail-safes that were supposed to make it impossible.

Everard Honeker stood before him, even more stu

Cordelia Ransom was dead. And so was Henry Vladovich and all the other people aboard that ship who'd known what Ransom had pla

And then he saw Sha

Tourville gazed down over her shoulder at the tactical recording she'd been replaying, and his jaw clenched as he saw what she'd seen: two pieces of wreckage, larger than most of the others, and on a vector which had clearly taken them away from the murdered battlecruiser before she exploded. A vector which just happened to look very much like an unpowered reentry course.

He looked at them for another long moment, rubbing his fierce mustache with one finger. Sha

Yes, I know what "duty" requires, he thought, and reached down past Sha

"Too bad," he said gravely, and the sound of his voice startled Honeker into turning to look at him. "There can't be any survivors," Tourville told his commissioner, and shook his head regretfully. "Too bad... Lady Harrington deserved better than that."

Epilogue

She woke slowly, and that was very unlike her. Thirty-five years of naval service had trained her to awaken quickly and cleanly, ready to face any emergency, but this time was different. It was hard to wake, and she didn't want to do it. There was too much pain and despair waiting for her, too much loss, and her sleeping brain cringed away from facing it.

But then something changed. A warm weight draped itself across her chest, vibrating with the strength of a deep, buzzing purr, gentle with love, that seemed to pluck at the very core of her.

"N-Nimitz?"

She scarcely recognized the wondering voice. It was cracked and hoarse, its enunciation slurred, yet it was hers, and her eyes fluttered open as a strong, wiry true-hand touched the right side of her face with infinite tenderness.

Her eyes widened, and she sucked in a shuddering breath as Nimitz leaned closer to touch his nose to hers. She stared at him with her one working eye, raising her right hand to caress his ears as if the simple act of touching him was the most precious gift in the universe. Her hand trembled, with weakness as much as emotion, and the 'cat folded down on her chest to rest his cheek against hers while the depth of his love rumbled into her bones with his purr.

"Oh, Nimitz!" she whispered into his soft fur, and all the remembered anguish, all the fear and despair she would have died before admitting to an enemy was in that whisper, for this was the other half of her own being, the beloved she had known she would never see again. Tears spilled over her gaunt cheeks, and she reached up to hug him close... and froze.

Her right arm moved naturally to clasp him tight, but her left...

Her head snapped over, her working eye wide, and her nostrils flared as shock punched her in the belly, for she had no left arm.

She stared at the bandaged stump, and disbelief was a strange sort of anesthesia. There was no pain, and her mind insisted she could feel the fingers on the hand she no longer had, that they still obeyed her, clenching into a fist when she willed them to. But those sensations were lies, and she lay frozen in that moment of stu

"I'm sorry, Ma'am." Her head turned the other way, and she looked up into Fritz Montoya’s face. The surgeons eyes were shadowed, and she felt his mingled regret and sense of guilt as he sat beside her. "There was nothing else I could do," he told her. "There was too much damage, too much..." He stopped and inhaled, then looked her squarely in the eyes. "I didn't have the tools to save it, Ma'am, and if I hadn't amputated, we'd have lost you."

She stared at him, trapped between too many emotions for rational thought. Joy at her reunion with Nimitz, astonishment that she was alive at all, the shock of her mutilation, and behind all that the waking memories of friends who had died, who would never wake, as she, to find they had somehow survived after all, crushed down upon her, and she couldn't speak. She could only stare up into Montoya’s careworn face while her right arm held Nimitz tight and her soul clung even more tightly to his.

She didn't know how long it lasted, but finally the right corner of her mouth trembled in a fragile, almost-smile, and she freed her hand from Nimitz to hold it out to Montoya.

"Fritz," she said softly, wonderingly. He took her hand and squeezed it fiercely, and her too-thin fingers returned his clasp.