Free Out of the Dark by David Weber

height. She was probably going to equal her mother’s hundred and seventy centimeters, although itwas unlikely she was going to accomplish six-year-old Daria’s ambition to top her father’s hundred and eighty-five. Ruslan, on the other hand, who was two years her junior, was just finishing a growth spurt which had left him a good two centimeters taller than she was, and he’d been making remarks about short people ever since he’d caught up with her. Now that he’d actually surpassed her, he was finally tall enough to literally look down his nose at her, and she didn’t appreciate it one bit. She especially didn’t appreciate it when her father was tactless enough to point out that now that Ruslan had taken the lead in altitude, she was never going to catch up with him again, growth spurts or no. For that matter, according to the pediatrician, Ruslan was going to be at least six or seven centimeters taller than Pieter by the time he was finished.
    “Boy may have a future in basketball,” he remarked now.
    “Oh, that would be a marvelous thing to tell him in front of Daria.” Vladislava shook her head. “Why don’t you find out? If you get up and run after them right this minute, you could probably catch them before they get to the boat. Oh, and don’t forget to take an anchor with you, so she can tie it to his ankles before she tosses him in! In fact, take
two
—I’m sure she could find a use for the second one, as well.”
    “Military men learn not to expose themselves to hostile fire unnecessarily,” he told her. “Besides, for now at least he’s way too interested in hockey to think about basketball.”
    “Like father, like son,” Vladislava agreed. “And what brought up basketball, in that case?”
    “Well, if he’s going to be tall enough for it, you tend to lose less teeth on a basketball court,” Pieter said philosophically. “Besides, he’s got the hand-eye coordination for the game. And if we decide to go ahead and take Aldokim’s offer, I understand professional basketball pays better than professional hockey.”
    “Are you really thinking about taking him up on that?” Vladislava raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged.
    “I don’t know, Slavachka,” he said, reaching out to run one hand over her long, wheat-colored hair. “I don’t know. But I have to say, it’s been seeming more tempting lately.”
    “But the Army’s been your life, Pieter.” She enveloped Grigori in her arms, resting her chin on the top of his head and gazing across into her husband’s eyes. “You’ve invested fifteen years in it.”
    “And made it all the way to captain,” he replied with a crooked smile.
    “The Colonel swears you’ll be on the next list for major,” Vladislava countered, and he snorted.
    “Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. Oh, I don’t think he’s lying to us. I just think it’s likely that under the current circumstances promotion’s more likely to go to someone whose politics are a little more acceptable to the powers that be. Face it, Slavachka—I stepped on too many toes.”
    She said nothing for several moments, bending over the child in her arms to press her face into Grigori’s sweet-smelling golden hair. What Pieter had said was true enough, she reflected. His outspokenly pro-Western attitudes would probably have been enough to put at least a bit of a damper on his promotion prospects, after the recent elections, but that wasn’t the real problem. No, the
real
problem was his stint in the Inspector General’s office.
    Pieter Ushakov was only thirty-six. He’d been in his very early teens when the old Soviet Union dissolved, and he’d never served in the Ukrainian military when it had been an official part of the Soviet armed forces. He was part of an entirely new generation of officers—Ukrainian patriots and nationalists determined to build a
Ukrainian
military to protect and serve their country.
    In general, that military had done an outstanding job of