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Bassingford Medical Center,

City of Landing,

Planet Manticore,

Manticore Binary System,

March 1860 PD.


Senior Chief Radchenko, Alfred’s senior yeoman, met Allison at the shuttle pad. He was a big, red-haired bear of a man, only three centimeters shorter than Alfred, and he’d always struck Allison as a solid, unshakable rock.

She needed that now.

“Where’s the Commander?” she asked as Radchenko cycled the air car hatch open.

“At the hospital with your brother, Ma’am,” the senior chief said in a reassuringly calm tone. “They sent me to collect you and the baby.” He paused to smile down at Honor, asleep in her soft carrier across Allison’s chest. “If you’ll climb aboard, I’ll take you straight to them.”

“How badly is Jacques hurt?”

“Ma’am, I haven’t actually seen your brother, and I’m no doctor. I just work for one. So I think it’d be best if I just get you to the Commander as quick as I can and let him explain everything.”

“You’re right. You’re right!” Allison put a small hand on his forearm and squeezed. “Sorry. I’m just . . . worried.”

“I know.” Radchenko nodded and laid one large paw gently across her hand for a moment. “I know. So, if you’ll climb in . . .”

Allison did just that. She settled into the backseat, the air car’s computer recognized the baby carrier and configured the safety harness to stay clear of it, and she told herself to relax as Radchenko cleared their departure with traffic control and lifted into the city’s traffic flow.

Flight time to Bassingford was barely fifteen minutes, and Radchenko landed the air car on the parking belt. He took the diaper bag Allison handed him as she climbed back out of the vehicle, then tapped his ID against the parking belt’s reader, and the belt trundled the air car off to its assigned stall.

“This way, Ma’am,” he said.

He steered her respectfully toward the central lift bank, and Allison was more than willing to let him take the lead. She’d visited Bassingford scores of times, but she was just a bit distracted today. Better to let the local guide navigate.

They rode the lift shaft upward, then stepped out into one of Bassingford’s airy corridors. It was one of the outer corridors, on the inside of the tower but with a crystoplast wall looking out across one of the three-story atriums at the tower’s hollow core. There were over a dozen of those atriums, stacked vertically every fourteen floors, but Allison had little attention to spare for the greenery and water features today.

Radchenko led her down the hall, then pressed the button beside a closed door.

“Yes?” Alfred’s voice said over the speaker.

“We’re here, Sir.”

“Thank you, Jayden,” Alfred said, and the door slid open.

Radchenko waved Allison past him, and she stepped quickly through the door and—

“Allison?!” the small, exquisitely beautiful woman standing beside the empty bed said, wheeling toward the door.

“Mom?!”

Allison froze. They stared at one another in shock, and then, as one, wheeled to glare at Alfred.

He stood at the foot of the bed, memo board under one arm, and looked back calmly.

“What’s the meaning of—?!” Jennifer began furiously.

“Where’s Jacques?!” Allison demanded, her eyes glittering with mingled shock, disbelief, and anger as she felt Alfred at the other end of their link. His emotions were too complex to sort out—the link didn’t carry enough bandwidth for that—but one thing he wasn’t was surprised. In fact, she realized, he’d set this entire thing up. And he’d done it expressly to get her and—

Those glittering eyes swept back to her mother, and her thoughts paused as she found Jennifer looking back at her.

No. Not back at her. Her mother was staring at Honor, and there was no anger, no shock, in her eyes. Not now. There was only soul-deep longing, and Jennifer half-raised a hand, reaching out before she snatched it back and those longing eyes moved back to Allison’s face.

Silence hung heavy between them, almost as if it were afraid of itself. Or as if the two women on the opposite sides of it were afraid. Seconds trickled away, and then Jennifer inhaled deeply.

“Oh, Allison,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Allison’s lips quivered as she tried to sort through her own emotional flood. Lingering shock. A sense of betrayal for the way Alfred had tricked her into coming. Anger at her mother for the breach between them . . . and a perversely sharper flare of that anger at the uselessness of apologies after so much hurt, so much pain. As if just apologizing could make it all go away. Make everything all right again. As if—

But under the shock, under the betrayal, and under the anger there was something else. There was . . . a sense of wonder. Of disbelief. And the sheer joy of seeing her mother again after so many T-years.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why—”

“That’s my fault. Mine and Alfred’s,” a voice said from behind her, and she wheeled to see her brother in the doorway.

His left arm ended just below the shoulder, and a black patch covered his right eye. He looked terrible, a corner of Allison’s brain thought, but he was on his own feet, standing unassisted. Clearly, he hadn’t been hit by a disrupter, and from painful experience, she knew how well he responded to regeneration.

“I figured that in my current wounded condition,” he continued, walking slowly and carefully across to settle into the bedside chair, “neither of you would wreak mayhem upon me. Alfred’s big enough, I figure he can take care of himself.”

His drawn, weary face smiled whimsically, and despite herself, Allison’s lips quivered ever so slightly. She felt Alfred’s answering amusement flowing into her, but then Jacques’s expression sobered.

“We really did get shot up badly,” he said, lifting the stub of his truncated arm. “We gave better than we got, and we took out all the mercs before Captain Gomez could get there, but it was ugly. And that brought me face to face with some of the . . . unfinished business in my life. Like the fact that two of the people I love most in the universe have dug themselves into a position neither of them has a clue how to un-dig.”

“In fairness to Jacques,” Alfred said quietly, “he’s not the only one who’s felt a lot of pain over this. Doctor,” he looked at Jennifer, “I’ve tried to tell you before. The breach between you and Allison is the last thing I ever wanted. And, Alley,” he looked back at his wife, “you already knew that. Just like I already knew it wasn’t what you wanted, either. But Jacques was right years ago when he asked me what God could have been thinking to put the two most stubborn women in human history into the same family. I’ll be damned if I have any better answer for that now than I had then, but I have figured out one thing since then.”

“What?” Allison asked, when he paused.

“I’ve figured out that my daughter—our daughter—has two sets of grandparents, and there’s no way in hell I’m letting anyone, including the two of you, take one of those sets away from her. I don’t think there’s any point digging into how we got where we are, or assigning blame for it. Trust me, there’s blame on both sides. What matters here is that people make mistakes, and after they make them—if they’re as smart as I know the two of you are, and if they love each other as much as I know the two of you do—they make amends.

“All the people who love both of you are waiting for you to do that. If you think the timing on this was easy to arrange, then you just think again. There’s a reason I didn’t tell you Jacques had been wounded until your mother’s ship had been in-system for eighteen hours, Alley. And there was a reason he was ‘in treatment’ when you got here, Doctor! We didn’t want either of you seeing him until you both got here. But the fact that we went to such lengths to engineer this—that we were willing to go to them—should tell you both how deeply loved you are. So, please—for our sake, if not yours—admit it to yourselves and to each other. The only thing either of you want at this point is for it to be over. It’s not about counting coup or proving who was right. What you want is to look at each other again and admit how much you love each other. And how much you’ve missed each other.”

Allison’s mouth quivered as she felt his love, his passionate honesty, flow through her. But her mother didn’t have that connection. She couldn’t feel his sincerity, the intensity of his desire—his need—for the two of them to heal their breach.

Any more than she could know, as Allison did, that he didn’t want that for himself at all. He wanted it for them.

For both of them.

She looked at her mother. Jennifer looked back, and then squared her shoulders, inhaled deeply, and looked at Alfred.

“You’re wrong, Commander Harrington,” she said. “That isn’t the only thing I want. Not by a long chalk.”

Allison’s spine stiffened, but her mother wasn’t done yet.

“I do want that. But what I want most in the universe at this moment”—she held out her arms, tears sparkled on her lashes, and her voice went husky—“is to hold my granddaughter at last.”


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Framed