Price of Ransom Read Free Page B

I’m still not convinced—that was the only way to free the League from the Empire. Or at least the most expedient one. But they’re inured to killing now, to destruction, to that entire mind-set of using violence as a way to solve conflict. We might as well reinstate human sacrifice. I won’t let that happen. I’ll use every means I have to see that every last one of Soerensen’s terrorists is put in prison.”
    “You’re not going to get them all in prison,” he replied, standing and going to the door. It slipped open. “Are you coming? I’m going to get something to eat.”
    Maria remained fixed in her place, staring at the chamber in which Korrigan Windsor, bounty hunter, hell-raiser, and former terrorist, had so recently walked. “Then they’re better off dead.”
    “You really hate them, don’t you?” He sounded surprised. “I dislike what they did as much as the next person, and I certainly want to make sure that their way of thinking is never again fostered in our children, but—you do seem rather vehement.”
    She did not reply immediately, as if she was considering whether or not to confide in him. After a bit he came back into the room and the motion of the doorway sliding shut behind him triggered something in her. She spoke in a low voice. “The saboteurs killed my sister.”
    “ Killed her? I’m—I’m sorry, Maria. Was it at Chaldee? That’s the only place I know of that civilians died.”
    “Besides nonhuman civilians? Who don’t count? No. She was seduced into joining them. She was a saboteur. She disgraced our family. And now she’s dead.”
    “I’m sorry,” he repeated helplessly. “I didn’t know.”
    “No one does. My family disowned her, and we never spoke of her again. But I loved her. I’ll never forgive them for her death.” Then, as if this admission ended the conversation, she rose and went to the door, waiting as it opened. “Dinner sounds good,” she said in an entirely different voice, casual and pleasant. “How about Stripe’s cousin’s place, over at Benthic Nexus? She does those great Ridani pastries, dappling tarts.”
    The door, unbidden, sighed shut behind them as they left. On the screen, the remaining pictures flicked off, one by one, into blackness.

2 Forsaken
    T HE CORRIDORS OF THE Forlorn Hope held a luminescence that fascinated Gregori. Dimmed down, the lights revealed intricate, textured shadings on the walls that seemed endlessly interesting to him. He could follow them for hours, aimlessly, or hide in the shadows to listen to the impassioned conversations that brightened the half-lit mess hall or the high banks of Engineering. The only place he never went was the Green Room—that impenetrable mass of growing things—because it scared him.
    Sometimes he even managed to slip unseen onto the bridge, dimmed now like every place else. He would stand in the darkest, most obscure corner and stare at the captain where she sat brooding at the captain’s console, ensconced in a deep-backed chair, the miraculous Bach hovering at her side. It seemed she spent most of her time here the past few days, while they had been drifting in some forgotten tag-end of space; just sitting, staring at the screen of space and stars and one distant sun, a suggestion of brilliance at the edge of the screen.
    The dimness lent her pale skin a luminescence that reminded him of the corridors of the ship, as if she were slowly taking in the essence and reflecting it back. As if she were becoming part of the ship in the same way he often felt he was: knowing it too well, so that eventually one’s own self could no longer be separated from the self, the substance , of the Forlorn Hope.
    He knew that she knew that he was there, hiding in the shadows. The others—most of them—often forgot he existed, or ignored him, but she was always aware of him, at least when he was on the bridge. That she allowed him to stay, or at least did not care if he did, when others might have