“Perspective!” Dan said, and grinned. “I was just thinking how lucky we were to get anything as big as the Triad out of sight, on a world like Narsai that’s either wide open spaces or crowded cities and not much in between.”
“I don’t understand why she hasn’t been detected by now.” Rachel reached out a hand to caress the ship’s hull, with a look of wonder on her face that her companion understood well. How often was it possible to touch a ship from the outside, with one’s bare skin? Not often, unless the ship was a minuscule shuttle or a lifeboat like the one that had sheltered Rachel for months while she and her unborn children lay suspended and awaiting rescue.
“If this were Terra or Kesra, or even one of the Sestus worlds, she would have been,” Dan answered. “I’m not sure about Mortha, I don’t know as much about how things work there. But on Narsai, you don’t scan someone else’s farmstead from a ship or satellite in orbit to find out exactly what equipment’s in the maintenance barns and what crops are growing and how many people are in the farmhouse. It’s not just impolite, it’s not allowed.”
“So our safety right now depends on Narsatians being polite to each other?” Kane cocked her head, and the humor she’d learned from her classmates during her Academy days curved her mouth for a moment.
“You could put it that way, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be quite accurate. It’s not just a question of courtesy, Ms. Kane; it’s a question of respect for custom that has the force of law. And if a visiting ship is detected making intrusive scans, its owners are invited to take their trade elsewhere.” The voice that answered her wasn’t Dan’s voice, it was that of Reen Romanova. The silver-haired farm woman had come into the barn quietly, but not quietly enough to startle the two former military officers. If she had done that, one of them might have hurt her before realizing who she was—and Reen knew that. She wasn’t familiar with many such people, but her cousin Katy was also her close friend.
“I can’t imagine how you make policies like that one work here,” Kane said. “But then, I can’t imagine being a civilian.”
“Well, you are one now!” Dan patted her shoulder, in a gesture that might have been a lover’s caress or a comrade’s reassurance but that he probably intended as both. “So, Reen. Narsai Control thinks they found us?”
“I believe so,” Reen answered. “Katy just got condolences on your death from official sources, anyway. And the caller wanted to know why they found an extra person’s DNA traces in the wreckage.”
“Let me guess,” Archer said, and he grinned. “An extra human female? Age about 30, which made her younger than any of the three human females who were supposed to be aboard the Triad?”
“Yes.” Reen looked directly at Rachel Kane. “Odd DNA, too. If they didn’t know better, they would have thought that trader had a gen aboard. But that would be impossible, of course, because gens are too valuable to be sold as slaves or as indentured servants.”
Archer laughed aloud. Kane looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to give him a hug, or hit him. After a moment she inquired dryly, “What did you use, Dan? To give them a nice clean sample of my DNA without making them realize you planted it?”
“Oh, that was easy. I just kept the stasis capsule from your lifeboat when I sold the boat itself back to the Star Service as salvage.” Archer was still amused, although less ebulliently so now. “Had to get it off there anyway. We could sterilize the rest of the boat to conceal that you were ever aboard, but that capsule we’d have had to destroy. And that seemed like a hell of a waste, since I knew the time might come when we’d want to convince someone you weren’t just missing but good and dead.”
“When can we get off Narsai? And who was it that set us up, anyway?” Kane’s sense of humor was stiff, even after years of practicing its use. On one level she admired and enjoyed her lover’s mirth, but on another level she found it unsettling. Even downright annoying, sometimes.
“While I was off the ship getting you hooked up with the Matushka, the Archangel showed up in orbit and they sent over an inspection party. Triad’s a Commonwealth trader, not registered out of a particular port of origin, so unfortunately they had a perfect right. They went everywhere—and if Hansie and the others hadn’t gone right along behind them, she tells me, that surprise package would have gone up without us having any warning at all. When I found out Fralick was aboard the old Angel, when Maddy showed up, it started to fall into place. I already had the politics right—he’s the Isolationists’ main standard bearer, and one of the things they need most right now is to prevent ex-Service officers like us scramblers from joining up with the Rebs to provide them with trained leadership.” Dan passed a hand over his jaw.
He continued, “I wouldn’t expect Captain Giandrea to order assassinations, but probably all he actually did was go along with the inspection to humor Fralick. That bastard’s slippery as hell, there’s not much I’d put past him—and he hates me almost as much as he hates Linc. He blames Linc for the Matushka leaving him, me for not having the decency to die when Ewan did, and both of us because we’re in her life and he’s out of it. So maybe I overshot when I made sure you got reported dead along with the rest of us, Rachel, but we didn’t know Fralick was anywhere near Narsai when Hansie and I had to make that judgment call. And we did think it might be connected to you, at the time that was an assumption we had to make.”
“So how long are we stuck here for?”
That some hosts might have thought her speech a rude one, did not enter Kane’s mind. Fortunately Reen Romanova understood her real meaning, and notified Archer with a quick glance that she wasn’t taking offense. The Narsatian farm woman said, “You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like, Ms. Kane. Dan knows that, he’s been here many times. But since Narsatian laws and customs don’t protect out-worlders in any way, I suggest that you may be safer if you do leave as soon as you can. Hiding you is the only way we have of protecting you. If you are located here, there’ll be nothing I can do to help you afterward.”
Dan nodded and said, “Reen’s right, you know. Now that the Archangel’s left orbit I’m only going to wait until I’ve touched bases with the Matushka again. After that we’re getting out of here. I thought letting you lie low on Narsai was a good idea, Rachel, but things are a hell of a lot different now than they were when I set this up.”
Trabe Kourdakov looked again at the hard copy communication on his desk, and then he looked out the window of his office. He could see the northern parklands from here, and to the city’s south lay one of Narsai’s very few mountain ranges.
He loved MinTar, he always had. His own parents had been professors at this university, and he had hoped that if his daughter could not reconcile herself to living full-time on the Romanov Farmstead that maybe spending part of her time on faculty here might solve the problem. But Katy had done what it pleased her to do, first as a girl of eighteen by entering the Star Service; then as a young woman, by marrying a man who called Kesra instead of Narsai home.
Still, Kourdakov had been fond of the grandsons Katy and her husband had brought here so long ago as babies. And it had been fun having three of them instead of the usual one, or at most (to great social disapproval) two children that Narsatian families were allowed to produce. He had been glad for Katy that on Kesra she hadn’t been pressured to abort one of her twins when she found out she was carrying not a second singleton, but both a second child and a third child simultaneously. That pressure would not be as great here on Narsai nowadays, of course; but Katy’s boys had been born a generation ago, when traditions were stronger.
And then those boys had died in battle, under their mother’s command. Little though he knew about warfare, Trabe Kourdakov was a descendant of people who had crossed light years of space to get here from Earth in an era when that had not been a safe and routine journey. He realized that in space people still died sometimes, and that in war they died often. He and his wife had grieved for their grandsons; he and Cabbie had bee
n ready to welcome Katy home and comfort her, as much as any parent could be comforted, because they knew what it felt like to lose a child. They had lost Katy’s sister, after all; and while Katy had filled the dynastic gap in the Romanov line and had blessed their home with childish sounds and activities once more, neither Cabanne Romanova nor Trabe Kourdakov had pretended—even to each other—that Katy replaced their lost Madeleine.
Katy had gone directly back to Kesra after the battle and subsequent negotiations at Mistworld, though, so her parents had had no chance to console her. They had waited, expecting that in due time she would come to see them with the new daughter she named for her sister whom she hadn’t known. For them to go to Kesra did not enter either of their heads, and that he could have done that did not cross Kourdakov’s mind now.
After little Madeleine’s birth Katy had once again done what pleased her, instead of her duty. She had left her husband—not to go back to her career (something her parents had learned to accept after more than twenty-five years of watching her do that again and again), but to become an unmarried woman once more. And she had not first brought her daughter home to Narsai, to be raised where a Romanova’s daughter certainly should have been brought up. Incredibly, she had bowed to an alien judge’s custody decision and had left the girl with her husband on Kesra.
Her formal union some months later with the Morthan man who had been her friend and comrade throughout her career was just one more unpleasant surprise for her parents. Human women sometimes did marry Morthan males; and while Kourdakov personally found the rumors about those hybrid creatures’ sexual prowess disgusting, he supposed what women who weren’t Narsatian heiresses did was their own business. But his Katy was a direct descendant of her world’s original settlers! She had a social position that was worth protecting; her ancestors’ dignity should have meant more to her than whatever it was her second husband did to her in bed, that could make her forget everything that was decent.
Fralick had to have been right, she’d probably been giving herself to the mindfucker all along. Only through genetic verification had the poor fellow even been sure that Madeleine was indeed his child, and not that pervert Casey’s.
Like most human males (George Fralick included), Trabe Kourdakov knew intellectually that matings between Morthan males and human females were sterile; but in his gut he was sure that sometime, somewhere, some human woman was going to become the first to bear a child from such a union. All of Kourdakov’s intelligence and scholarship could not overcome his instinctive reaction to the idea of his daughter lying in a Morthan’s arms; as far as he was concerned, Katy had allowed herself to be contaminated.
So he’d had no contact with his child since before her boys had been killed, until now. Until this moment, when he looked up from the message after perusing it one more time—and realized that he really was hearing his daughter’s voice, that after all this time he really was seeing her face.
CHAPTER 10
“Hello, Dad.” Most Narsatian children used that form of male-parent address. Maddy’s “Papa” to George Fralick was very much a Kesran-human speech pattern, although her “Mum” to Katy was typically Narsatian.
The Standard language was spoken recognizably on all the Outworlds just as much as it was on Terra, but it did have its varying accents and permutations. Dan Archer to this day could barely open his mouth without identifying himself as a miner’s grandson from Sestus 4, for example; and Lincoln Casey had worked hard to eradicate the last traces of Sestus 3 country-folk inflection from his speech.
“Catherine.” Trabe Kourdakov addressed his daughter that way when he thought it necessary to be formal with her, and after so long a separation he could scarcely be anything else. They had lived just a few kilometers apart for the past seven months, but had not seen each other; and through all the years since her divorce from Fralick, they had not spoken once.
Until now. She was standing in his office’s doorway, with her mother at one of her shoulders and with a brown-eyed girl at the other.
Damn Cabbie, she could be sentimental at times. Which was why Kourdakov was glad he occupied the Senior Chair of the Council just now, because although Cabbie had done a good job of leading Narsai while the role was primarily that of a ceremonial parent-figure the present was a time when hard decisions must be made.
He’d never understood how Katy could do the job of a starship commander, and later that of a fleet admiral. Katy could be just as sentimental as her mother. But perhaps he hadn’t seen her in action when the situation required that she be as pragmatic as Trabe himself was capable of being; maybe, just maybe, what he had always thought of as her willfulness was that kind of strength coming out in her after all.
At any rate she was taking a gamble by coming here right now, and she had to know that. She wasn’t a stupid woman, he knew that much about her for sure.
“This is Maddy,” his daughter said now, and gently pushed her own daughter forward into the room. “Her father wants her to stay with me until the possibility of war is over.”
The possibility of war was never going to be over. Not as long as food grown on Narsai had to be shipped to Terra or one of the other Inner Worlds, even in years when it was needed more by lean-rationed colonies such as Farthinghome or Claymore. Not as long as Outworld people like Katy Romanova were welcome to give their lives in service to the Commonwealth’s defense force, but their home-worlds’ delegations on the Diet consisted of a single ceremonial representative from each planet (or incredibly, in the case of Sestus 3 and Sestus 4 which were so drastically unlike even though they orbited the same star, a single representative from one system!). A representative who could make speeches and give advice, but who could not vote; while from every ancient nation-state on Terra itself, and from every identifiable region of each of the Inner Worlds, came a representative who had full voting powers.
Having Katy as Fleet Admiral of the Star Service had given Narsai more potential for power than it had ever possessed in the past. From time to time during her tenure in that post she had come close to speaking with one or the other of her parents on official business, but she always chose to have an adjutant make the contact for her (an adjutant who was not her husband, since by then Casey had been given command of the Academy). So neither Cabanne Romanova during her Senior Chairship of the Council, nor Trabe Kourdakov after that Chair became his, had used their relationship to the Fleet Admiral as they might have been expected to utilize it.
It had been almost amusing, sometimes, to hear other philosophers singing his praises for practicing such unbending ethics. How little those admiring colleagues knew about how things really were!
But now she was here, and Kourdakov was involuntarily reaching out a hand that had grown thin with time’s passing to take the firm young hand of his grandchild. The girl was looking at him with typical brown Romanova eyes, eyes just like Cabbie’s; and she was saying softly and in perfect accentless Terran Standard, “Hello, Granfer. Mum says that’s what I should call you.”
“Hello, Madeleine.” He used the full name, not to be formal this time but to make himself get used to it. He had never called his own Madeleine “Maddy.” “So you’ve finally come to see us, have you?”
“Papa didn’t want me to before, but he said it was all right to come now,” the child said, and she smiled. Not shyly, but nevertheless with a certain reserve.
“Dad, do you know where my husband is?” Katy had waited to ask that as long as she could. In battle she was capable of waiting out an enemy forever, if that was what she had to do in order to win; but now her adversary might be the man who had held her hands while she had learned to toddle, the man in whose arms she had learned how to dance. It was possible that the same voice she could remember reading her bedtime stories had offered Narsai’s support if George Fralick took her husband away to be imprisoned and threatened in order to control her actions, and that possibility was so horrible that she had to know whether or not it was true.
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Trabe Kourdakov’s surprise was genuine as he asked, “What are you talking about, Katy? As far as I know your Morthan’s wherever he usually would be at evening first-hour. And I think you and your mother had better come in here and shut the door, because this comm I’ve just read through about six times without being able to decide how to answer it is about you.”
“Is it what you were expecting, Trabe?” his wife asked. She stepped into the office, pulled Katy in with her, and sealed the entrance with a light touch.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is.” Kourdakov held out the message, and watched as Katy took it and read it and tried to absorb it.
“Mum?” Maddy asked. She was standing between her grandparents now, and each of them was holding one of her hands. And although she had seen neither of these two old people until today, she looked comfortable; it was only the expression on her mother’s face that was troubling her, the way that Katy’s normally dusky rose cheeks had turned chalky white.
Katy sat down in the guest chair. She said quietly, “I’m being called back to active duty, Maddy. I guess that’s one way for the Service to make sure I won’t answer any Reb draft—but I’ve got to admit I wasn’t expecting this, even if your grandfather was.”
“If you refuse to do what they tell you, it’s treason. Isn’t it, Mum?” Young Maddy spoke first, ending the hush that had filled her grandfather’s office.
It was indeed coming on toward evening. The girl had eaten a swift meal at the Romanov Farmstead, hours ago; but she was just a child, she had to be tired and she must be getting hungry again. Katy found herself focusing on those maternal concerns, and realized as she did so that they were a way she could distract herself just as much as they were issues to which she truly must attend.
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