Free Hell Hath No Fury by David Weber, Linda Evans

stunned
    – not by the carnage, but by who the victims had turned out to be. At that, he looked better than Uthik Dastiri. The younger diplomat simply sat there, jaw hanging, as if his brain flatly refused to accept what his eyes were reporting to him.
    "If you move so much as an eyelash without my permission," chan Baskay continued in that same icicle of a voice, "I will shoot you squarely in the head. Is that understood?"
    Skirvon only stared at him, and chan Baskay's thumb cocked the revolver's hammer. It wasn't necessary
    – the Polshana was a double-action weapon-but it had the desired punctuating effect.
    "I asked if that was understood," he said in a very soft voice that sounded bizarrely quiet and calm even to him in the wake of the unexpected thunder. He had no idea where that self-control-if that was what it was-was coming from, but whatever his voice sounded like, something in his expression had Skirvon nodding with sudden, spastic speed.
    Chan Baskay gave him one more glance, then looked up as Chief-Armsman chan Hathas stepped up beside him.
    "I've got these bastards, Platoon-Captain," the chief-armsman grated, covering the Arcanans with his heavier, longer-barreled H amp;W.
    "Thank you, Chief."
    Chan Baskay slid his pistol back into its holster and stood. He turned his back on the two Arcanan diplomats … and on the almost overwhelming temptation to simply shoot them out of hand. Everything around him was absolutely crystal-clear, yet all of it also seemed to be much further away than he knew it actually was. He glanced down at his hands and discovered that they were completely steady, despite the quivering tingles running through them. Then he drew a deep, cleansing breath before he looked at Arthag.
    "How bad?" he asked.
    "About as bad as it could have been," Arthag replied, sounding preposterously matter-of-fact to chan Baskay. Then the Arpathian gave his head a little twitch. "Actually, that's not really true. We could all be dead. Short of that, however, I don't see how it could be much worse."
    Chan Baskay looked past him to Rokam Traygan's contorted, broken body. The dead Voice's face was twisted in a final grimace of agony, and chan Baskay swallowed the foulest curse he could think of as he saw Chief-Armsman chan Treskin's body ten yards from Traygan's.
    "How did they know?" the Ternathian officer demanded in a crushed-gravel voice. "How could they know to kill both of them?"
    "I don't know. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure they did know," Arthag said.
    "They must have. They went for Rokam first. That means he was their primary target all along. And that means they must have realized not only that he was a Voice, but what a Voice could do, in the first place."
    "Maybe. No," Arthag shook his head, "not 'maybe.' You're right about him, at least. But chan Treskin wasn't even the intended target of the … whatever the hells it was they used. He just caught the very fringe of one of those blasts, and the bastard who killed him was already going down when he fired. I think it was simply a wild shot that just happened to take him out."
    Chan Baskay gazed at the Arpathian for a moment, then shook his own head. Not in disagreement, but to clear it. They still didn't know how long Shaylar had lived after she was wounded, but obviously it had been long enough for the Arcanans to have learned at least a little about Talents and how they worked. It was the only way they could have realized just how vital the Voices were, and they obviously had. On the other hand, if Arthag was right about what had happened to chan Treskin, then the Arcanans hadn't realized how important the Flicker was. It was only sheer, incredibly bad luck that they'd gotten him, too.
    Not that it mattered.
    "We can't tell Company-Captain chan Tesh or Company-Captain Halifu about this." Chan Baskay knew he was stating the obvious. "So, the question is, what do we do?"
    "They didn't just do this on the spur of the moment," Arthag replied. "And