Matushka

by Nina M. Osier

  But Maddy didn’t look or sound tired, and her question was exactly the one that was in the mind of each adult. Cabanne Romanova asked quietly, “Is she right, Katy? Can’t you refuse, especially if you have a personal crisis that needs your attention right now?”

  “Retirement doesn’t cancel my service oath, Mum.” Katy shook her head. “Only resignation would have done that, and frankly I don’t know whether it’s possible to resign after accepting retirement. That’s one issue I’m sure the Judge Advocate General has never had to rule on!”

  “But didn’t you just try to tell us that something’s happened to Linc, that you don’t know where he is?” Long ago, when Lincoln Casey had been simply her daughter’s comrade, Cabanne had liked the man and had enjoyed talking with him about Morthan culture and biology. She had found him far less inhibited about such matters than were most members of his species, and with that frankness he had more than made up for his lack of knowledge in some areas. The old woman found she did not like hearing that Casey was missing, no matter how many times during the past twelve years she had thought she wished he would disappear from her daughter’s life. “Surely you won’t be expected to drop everything and take passage to Terra, they certainly ought to give you time to arrange your affairs here. And if you have a family concern, for gods’ sake if your husband is missing….!”

  “Surely nothing, Mum,” Katy said, in a way that just missed rudeness. “Linc is gone, yes. He vanished from our home sometime while Maddy and I were away from it today, and I know damned well he didn’t just disappear because he wanted to! But even if I had him right here beside me, I’d still be wondering what in hell I’m going to do now. I feel like that Terran general must have felt, the one in the North American civil war—what was his name?”

  She looked automatically toward her father, who although his professorship was in philosophy had forgotten more Terran history than many scholars had ever studied. Kourdakov supplied, “Robert E. Lee, Katy. A graduate of the old United States of America’s equivalent of our Star Service Academy; a general in his country’s army, who finally decided to side with the rebels because he found that he couldn’t take up arms against soldiers from his home district. Or his home state, as they called it then.”

  “Yes. Anyway, I know just how he must have felt!” Katy sighed. “Whichever side I come down on, if the worst does happen I’ll be fighting against people I care about. I wonder if that General Lee person ever considered just running away to live in some other nation-state?”

  “Well, Katy-love, you won’t have to do that.” The old paternal endearment slipped out on its own. Not that Kourdakov had been trying very hard to hold it back, of course. He was interacting with his only living child again, and remaining cold and formal with her was something he had known at the conversation’s start he would not be able to do for very long. “There’s a new Commonwealth accord we’ve been able to obtain for Narsai, that you probably don’t know about because there hasn’t been time to publicize it since it was finalized. None of our citizens can be accepted into the Star Service now without the Council’s consent. So although in your case there’s obviously room for interpretation—you’re a retiree being recalled to duty, not a prospective cadet about to take the oath—we may be able to block that recall, at least temporarily. If you want us to. And that’s why the order came to you through me as Senior Chairholder on the Council, instead of being routed directly as such a comm would have been before the new accord.”

  Katy was glad she was sitting down. She stared at her father, and then she shook her head. She said, “Let me understand this, Dad. That’s a new ‘right’ that you’ve ‘obtained’ for Narsatian citizens? Which will make sure that no other eighteen-year-old can do what your daughter did, and sign up at the Academy against her or his family’s wishes. Very good! It took you forty years but you finally fixed the problem.”

  “Your mother said you’d take it this way when you found out about it.” Kourdakov had braced himself, and now he knew it had been with reason. “Actually we on the Council were thinking about Narsatian sailors on merchant ships, running up against Terran press gangs.”

  “That was how you sold the other members the idea? I’ll retract that ‘very good,’ then, Dad. I’ll have to make it ‘spectacular,’ instead.” Katy smiled, bitterly and crookedly. “I came here to see if the captain of the Archangel had the Council’s consent when he ordered my husband kidnapped, because I’m damned certain that’s what has happened to him. I also wanted to know if Narsai Control knew more than what their grief counselor told me about the explosion of a trade-ship called Triad, in orbit this morning. But I guess coming to my father was the wrong thing for me to do! You’d think I might have learned that by now, though, even if I haven’t been paying attention to every puff of hot air that the Council blows.” She rose from the chair, nodded to her mother, and reached for her child. “Come on, Maddy. Visit’s over.”

  “Are you going to answer the recall order, Katy? Or are you going to stay here and resist it, or leave Narsai to join the Rebs while you still can?” Cabanne Romanova did not leave her husband’s side as her daughter headed for the door, but she spoke quickly in hopes of getting an answer.

  “She won’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Trabe Kourdakov said, his voice suddenly the ringing one of a philosopher in debating form. “Katy, give me that hard copy. I’ve already ‘lost’ the message itself; it’s been erased from university computer storage, even the record that it came in is gone from the relay at the orbital comm station. Now let’s lose that hard copy.”

  “This won’t solve it, Dad.” But Katy’s eyes were stinging as she turned back. She gave him the sheet of flimsy fiber-based material, and she watched as it turned into fine gray ash. “When I don’t answer, they’ll just go around you and contact me directly after all.”

  “True. But now you have some time before that happens, and now you have forewarning. And if you can’t think of something to do with those advantages, then I’ll be damned if I can imagine why you ever were given command of a lifeboat—let alone command of the whole Star Service.” Kourdakov grinned tautly. “Face it, Katy, it’s a preemptive strike on the Commonwealth’s part and it’s a brilliant one. They’re scared to death the Rebs will tap you and you’ll agree to help them, so they’re pulling you back before that can happen.”

  “You’re right about that, Dad.” The former Fleet Admiral gave her father back an exact duplicate of his own grin. “I had it figured that way myself.”

  She paused in the university’s coffee shop and bought two sandwiches, and ate hers without tasting it. She gulped coffee, and made sure Maddy had a beverage that was familiar to a child who had spent her entire lifetime on another planet.

  Should she have left the little girl with her grandparents? One would think that the home of the Senior Chairholder of the Narsatian Council would be a safe place for anyone…. But one would also have thought that the home of the former Fleet Admiral of the Star Service would be a safe place for her husband, who was also an officer of many years’ experience. And it hadn’t been safe there for Linc, not at all.

  She would have to keep Maddy with her. In her sight at all times, and preferably within her reach.

  Damn. She had loved her boys, but she had felt encumbered by their presence when they had been under her command as officers on other ships. To have a little girl of thirteen on her hands was galling, now when she needed desperately to be free to move swiftly and do whatever it took to go after the Archangel and get Linc back.

  CHAPTER 11

  Daniel Archer was trying not to pace the control room of his ship, because there really was not enough deck space to permit such an activity. He had been able to pace in the engine room of the Archangel, and Rachel Kane had been able to pace on the starship’s bridge; but here they did not have that luxury, even though they were the compartment’s only occupants.

  Archer’s co-shipowners were not happy, to
the extent that even his old friend Hansie Braeden was deliberately avoiding him right now. Hansie had known there was an occupied stasis tube on the lifeboat they’d salvaged, but that it had contained a gen? They were in this much trouble because their captain and senior partner had been sleeping with a goddamned gen, and then hadn’t been willing to surrender her to the authorities when she turned up pregnant and in stasis? Because they were sure, every one of them, that it was for sheltering that gen—however briefly—their ship had been targeted for destruction. And Archer was choosing to let them think that, since no one else aboard Triad was likely to believe what he had deduced as the real reason.

  “You shouldn’t have tried to help me,” Rachel Kane said softly to her lover, as she sat in the navigator’s chair and watched Archer’s face as he sat in the pilot’s seat. “Even now, you should leave me behind when you make your run for open space. Tell your friends you didn’t realize you were putting them in so much danger, get them out of this mess, and then they just may forgive you.”

  “You don’t sound much like a command officer!” He reached for her hand, and once he’d captured it he squeezed it tenderly. “That won’t work, Rachel. Even if I was willing to leave you, which I’m not, I’d be lying if I told them I didn’t realize I was putting them at risk. I knew—I kept them in the dark, about some things I’m still keeping them there—and they’re right to be mad as hell.” With that the ex-engineer reached out to the comm, which was beeping for attention. “What the hell? Oh, Reen, I’m sorry. I don’t know when I’ve been this jumpy! What is it?”

  “Get everyone off that ship, now,” Reen Romanova said bluntly from somewhere inside the farmhouse. “The Archangel’s back in orbit, and I’ve just decided not to respond to a call from her captain asking if anyone down here knows what’s in the barn that doesn’t belong there. Quick, there’s no time!”

  Archer slapped the emergency alarm, the civilian vessel’s ear-piercing equivalent of a military starship’s “red alert.” He bellowed into the comm pickup, “Abandon ship! Everyone out, now!”

  He reached up and steadied his pregnant companion on the access ladder’s final rungs, since lowering a ramp would have taken time that they did not have. Once her feet were on the barn’s floor, they turned together and they dashed out through a forcefield that prevented cold and bad weather from entering the building without keeping solid objects such as humans from moving in and out of it.

  A moment after they were clear of the barn, the ship started to move. It took the structure’s roof along, it ascended slowly and almost painfully—as if it were fighting not to rise.

  Reen called from the farmhouse’s door. “Get in here! We’re going underground, hurry!”

  Her two guests obeyed her. They dashed inside the farmhouse’s kitchen, and followed Reen into a lift that took them far underneath that room.

  Even from the shaft’s lowest reaches they felt the explosion. Hansie had made it to the Triad’s control room and had brought the engines on line, she had fought to break the Archangel’s tractor beam with everything the trade-ship had…the farmhouse was rubble, and a crater yawned where the maintenance barn had been, when the three people who had fled to safety underground returned to the surface. Not at the point from which they had descended, but half a klick away.

  There had been a time in Narsai’s history when another interplanetary war had threatened. Most farmsteads still possessed a network of underground tunnels and shelters dating from that time, so that if their residents were forced downward they would not be obliged to re-emerge in a predictable spot where an enemy could be waiting to pick them off.

  People in Star Service uniforms were already on the ground scanning the rubble when the three survivors looked out of the remains of a small outbuilding where they had come back to the surface, and the sight made Dan Archer’s stomach contract sickly.

  He and Hansie had managed to get away with their swift switch of ship’s I.D. codes, and with the Triad’s descent into hiding, because even though someone on the Archangel’s inspection party almost certainly had planted the explosives Captain Giandrea and his officers hadn’t been looking for Dan and his partners then.

  But they were now, and that was for damned sure.

  “Thanks for waiting so long, Johnnie.” Katy found her cousin still there when she returned to her home as twilight became full darkness, and that didn’t surprise her.

  Maddy had done what she ought to have remembered a young adolescent was very likely to do, and had suddenly fallen sound asleep in the aircar. Her mother was untroubled by lifting the girl’s weight—she might have put on a couple of kilos since she’d stopped taking full combat training, but she had remained active enough so that she could handle Maddy easily. But what she was supposed to do with a sleepy child, when she was smack in the middle of a crisis, she had no idea.

  Johnnie took the girl from Katy’s arms, and put her on the sofa and covered her with an afghan. And inquired softly after he had done so, “Did you think I’d leave you until I knew what you’re going to do next, Katy? I take it things didn’t go very well with Uncle Trabe.”

  “They did and they didn’t,” she answered. But before she could say anything more, before she could start to tell him about her first conversation with her parents in as many years as Maddy had been alive, she felt something she had not hoped to feel again any time soon.

  She stiffened, and closed her eyes. She swallowed, hard. And without words she cried out.

  “Linc! Oh, Linc, it is you.”

  “Yes, Katy, it’s me. Listen fast, if anyone up here realizes we can do this they’re apt to put me under sedation or into stasis. I’m in the brig aboard the Archangel. I’m not sure—”

  Love had enveloped her, she had clearly perceived a familiar masculine strength and tenderness. And then the loved presence was gone, thankfully not in a burst of fear and physical pain like the one she had felt some hours before—but in an abrupt vanishing of the connection. One second he was with her, they were touching as intimately as if she had been holding his body in her arms; and the next instant he was completely absent from her universe.

  Then she heard Maddy’s startled cry.

  “Mum?” The girl was sitting up on the edge of the sofa when Katy turned toward her. She had the afghan tangled around her, and she was struggling sleepily to get free from it. Her eyes were wide open, though; and she looked as frightened as she sounded. “Mum, was that a dream I just had? I thought I heard Linc’s voice, but he’s not here.”

  Katy gently brushed Johnnie’s comforting hand aside. She went to her child, sat down beside her and unsnarled the afghan. She said, “You did hear him, Maddy. Just for a minute, then someone stopped him from being able to talk to us.”

  “Do you mean they killed him?”

  Oh, gods, the directness of the young! But Katy meant it with all her soul when she answered firmly, “I won’t believe that. They did something to make him unconscious, and that’s certainly not good; but anyone who’s gone to the trouble of kidnapping him and keeping him alive for this long, isn’t likely to kill him unless they absolutely have to.”

  “I heard him say Archangel.” Maddy yawned, and reached up to scrub a hand across her eyes. “I thought I heard ‘brig.’”

  I wonder what you’d have heard if Linc and I had been making love? Katy thought, and then was ashamed of herself. Not that marital privacy wasn’t a completely legitimate concern, but right now it was one that did not matter. One that might never matter again…. She crushed that thought by asking, “Maddy, is your father the only civilian passenger on the Archangel?”

  She hated to ask even that innocent a question; she, at least, had vowed never to use her daughter as a source of information about her ex-husband’s activities. Nor had she ever deliberately said or written anything to Maddy that would have reduced her father’s standing in her eyes—but that kind of fair play might now be on a very short course toward becoming an unaffordable luxury, becau
se finding a way to leave Maddy safely out of it while she went after Linc was not going to be possible.

  “I think so,” the girl answered, her drowsiness returning as fatigue reasserted itself. What was the difference between the Greenwich Mean Time that was followed by all starships, and local time in the Narsatian city of MinTar? Lord knew how long it had actually been since the child’s “day” had started. “I was lonesome on the way here, Mum. Papa didn’t want me to talk to the officers, and there wasn’t anyone else on board I could have talked to.”

  The comm’s announcer signal sounded then, and Katy moved toward it. She was aware of Johnnie taking her place at Maddy’s side, putting his arm around the child and saying something to her in a soft paternal voice; and in spite of everything, Katy smiled to herself. How would that sight affect George Fralick if he could see it, she wondered? The Johnnie Romanov who had been Katy’s own lover, from the time she was thirteen until she had left Narsai at eighteen, sitting on a sofa with his arm around thirteen-year-old Maddy.

  Fralick would probably have a stroke. Which right now didn’t bother Katy one bit, even when it was her former husband’s face that greeted her when she accepted the transmission.

  “Katy? Where’s Maddy, is she all right?” was the first thing Fralick said, his voice a tense demand.

  “She’s here with me, she’s tired out but otherwise she’s fine.” Romanova glanced toward her daughter, and saw that Maddy had roused again at the sound of her father’s voice. “Do you want to talk to her?”

  “Papa?” Maddy sounded puzzled, and sleepy.