been

it. You were hoping Don would come home. It's for him—and for me and for the Colonel, there's a lot of us who owe Don—it's for him I came here. We pay our debts. But what did you have in mind for him, for your—brother-in-law?"
Marilee continued to face her visitor. Her hand crept up unconsciously to caress the trophy skull above her. The cranium between the two eyesockets had been punched away by the shot which killed the creature. It had been a 10 cm bolt from a gun like those on the drones in the courtyard, anti-tank weapons really and the only medicine that could dependably put paid to the monsters which disputed the Settlement. Nothing like them threatened the Council Islands anymore. The beasts bred and hunted elsewhere, now, the progeny of the creatures which had survived. Natural selection had proved to the most savage natives of Tethys that Man was still more savage.
Marilee thought of herself and of her son. The awareness was not a happy one.
"I thought perhaps if they saw him," the tall woman said aloud. She was trying to find words to answer a question she had herself avoided asking. "I thought, they can ignore me, ignore Teddy. They could even ignore Tom because he was too good, too curst good to treat them the way his grandfather would have done. Maybe even his father."
Marilee took her hand from the skull and laced her