Petersen shook his head. "Woller married a widow. A wealthy one, with a daughter. They didn't get along too well. The woman died. Some people thought it might be suicide."
The quick joy flooded up in Nolan. Petersen saw it and his face grew somber. "That's one of the things, Steve," he said. "The other one—Hell, this is hard to say."
Nolan stood up and the joy was gone from his face. "Damn you, Pete," he said emotionlessly. "Don't break things gently to me."
Petersen shrugged. "Ailse wasn't anywhere we could find her—and we know a lot of places to look in. The ship left to come here. She was at Woller's home till just before then. Woller sent men to bring something from his apartment to the ship. I thought it was papers at the time—but it could have been a girl. So—where does that leave Ailse?"
Where? Nolan stood rocklike as the thought trickled through the automatic barrier his mind had set up. Where did it leave Ailse?
A charred fragment of what had once been beauty. A castoff target for TPL's searching pyros.
"I'll say it again, Steve. You know what was at stake. If the Junta had time—Well, we didn't know what kind of weapons they had there. That was one reason why I was sent ahead in that crazy disguise. If I had had time to scout around it might have been possible to do things less bloodily. I didn't have time. We couldn't take chances."
There was no anger in Nolan, no room for it. He sat there, waiting for Petersen to start the jets and send them back to the dome. He knew how he would scour the ashes, hoping against hope. And he knew what he would find.
It would have been better, he thought, almost to have died under Woller's pyro, or the TPL ships'. If he'd stayed behind—if Woller had put him in the sleep-box as Vincennes had suggested, and he had shared obliteration with her....