That had been her last night aboard the ship which was her final command as a captain, before she moved up to flag rank. She had waited for that night before she extended an invitation to her long-time executive officer, to the man who was her closest friend and dearest love, to share that berth with her.
Just why it had seemed so important to consummate the change in their relationship before they left their old lives behind them forever, she could not have said then and was no better able to say now. Linc had been nervous about that night, terribly and understandably so; maybe it had been for his sake that she’d wanted their first lovemaking to happen in familiar surroundings, but telling herself that was the only reason felt very much like an excuse.
Maybe she had needed to go into her career’s next phase with that particular change behind her, and not ahead. And he had waited so long and so patiently for her to be ready; they had both known, almost from the day she came back aboard after leaving George Fralick’s home on Kesra once she had borne and weaned Maddy, that Linc would be her husband now. But she had come back to him after that battle with George broken and hurting, her soul raw from the deaths of her sons—from their father’s verbal brutality in blaming her for those deaths—and from having been made to choose either a continued life with a man who’d managed to kill her love for him, or separation from her baby daughter.
Staying and turning into the bitter, crippled thing that she knew such a life would make her, could never have benefited Maddy. So Katy had made the decision, the most painful one of her entire life, to let George raise their last child without her when what passed for a family court on Kesra would not consent to letting her take the baby to live even part of the time with her family on Narsai.
And then after one last outrage, she had reported for her final tour of duty aboard the Firestorm knowing that she had no business to be in command of anything just then.. Not even of a lifeboat, because she had been functioning only by reflex. Like a ship no longer under power but moving steadily through space until something interfered with its progress, she had let the momentum of years spent in training and of far more years spent practicing her profession carry her along. Linc had stood between her and the tasks for which those automatic responses would not have been enough; for weeks after she came “home” he had gone on commanding the ship in fact, although not in name.
His love had given her the priceless gift of the time she needed to grieve and to heal; and when she was herself again (an altered self, of course, but that fact did not surprise her—and fortunately it did not seem to disappoint him), the mental and emotional intimacy of that grieving-time remained between them. And he needed her now, as man needing woman; and she needed him, in exactly the same way.
And so they came to that night, when they no longer had to maintain the professionalism of captain and executive officer but had not yet launched their new on-duty relationship. They had held each other many times before, sharing comfort as friends and comrades; but they had never kissed, had never touched in any other way but as friends.
He was shy and gentle, and she was astonished at just how much that gentleness aroused her. Not that George had handled her roughly, because except on one occasion he certainly had not; but something profoundly moved her about seeing this big man, whose courage she knew better than anyone else in the universe could have known it after two decades as his commanding officer and even more years than that of serving beside him as his comrade, so eager and needing—and so uncertain.
The connection between their minds had been that night’s salvation, she still believed that was true with all her soul. He hadn’t had to wonder how she felt about his first clumsy kiss, he had known for certain that the taste of him intoxicated her in a way no one else’s touch ever had. And he had known, from the thoughts that kiss called up within her mind, how to alter the alignment of his mouth against hers; just where she needed the gentle probing of his tongue, just when she wanted him to stop for a moment and give her time to make her own explorations.
She had taken his hands and had put them on her body, and had guided him while she let him feel the pleasure those touches gave her. Many times since that night she had been the one to caress him, but that first time she had known without having to be told in words that what he needed most of all was to prove to himself that he could please her—and so she had lain back in the bed, had squirmed and whimpered under his touch, and when the right moment came had spread her thighs and lifted her hips and guided him tenderly into her warmth.
After that he needed no more guidance, he was thoroughly male and his body knew what to do. And the newness of the experience for him made it new for her as well. She had known two previous lovers and had given birth to four children, but she had never before been touched exactly like this—on every level where it was possible for two sentient beings to communicate, until there was no sense of being separate left.
Those few brief moments of time had changed her, had made her part of him forever in a way she never could have become part of Johnnie Romanov or of George Fralick. Neither her girlhood lover nor her husband of more than twenty years was able to make love to her as Linc could, forging a union in which sheer physical pleasure was overwhelmed by an ecstatic oneness of spirit that might subside after release came and they were obliged to separate—but that never again would be entirely absent.
Wherever he was now, and whatever had been done to him to make their connection useless on a conscious level, that bond still existed. Katy could still feel it, and while right now it was giving her more discomfort than pleasure it nevertheless consoled her just because it was still there.
Because he was still there, still living even though he could not speak to her nor she to him.
“Katy?” Johnnie spoke just a trifle more loudly, but still tried not to raise his voice enough to wake the little girl behind them.
Katy opened her eyes at last, and then had to reach up and wipe tears from her cheeks. She said softly, “It’s like it was a couple of times when Linc and I had to be separated by so much physical distance that we couldn’t find each other. I know he’s out there someplace, I know he isn’t dead; but I can’t touch him. And I’m so used to touching him, Johnnie!”
“I won’t say ‘I know,’” her cousin answered, his voice still very gentle. “But I am sorry, Katy-love. We’re almost in, I just talked to the officer who’s in charge of the Archangel’s landing party and—they haven’t found them. Not Reen or Dan or the Kane woman, anyhow; the rest they did find, in what was left of the ship.”
“Oh, Johnnie, I’m the one who should be sorry!” Katy sat up, and ran a swift hand through her hair by way of making herself presentable. “Here I am fussing and crying because my husband’s in the brig up there, and you’re wondering whether your wife is alive or dead.”
“I’m betting she’s alive. But I don’t want those bastards from the Service to know it, not right now anyway.” Romanov flashed his cousin a taut grin. “There are things you never learned about the Farmstead, Katy, because you never did actually marry me.”
“I won’t ask you what that means,” Katy decided after a moment of looking at him carefully and thinking that maybe she did not know him that well after all. Never once in staid, straitlaced, calm Johnnie had she seen an echo of their space-exploring ancestors’ wild blood—but she was seeing it now.
Yes, George, I said straitlaced. We may believe in starting our unions early here on Narsai, but you’d be amazed at just how exclusive those unions are and at just how we despise people who break their marriage vows once they’ve taken them. But I’ve never talked with you, have I, about how my parents ignored me after I left you? As far as they’re concerned I’m still your wife, and every time Linc touches me I’m committing adultery.
She put those thoughts aside, and glanced over her shoulder to see how George’s daughter was doing. Maddy was cuddled up on the passenger seat, her eyes closed, breathing with the light regular breaths of
a sleeping child.
Which changed even while Katy watched her. Maddy’s eyes opened, she sat up so quickly that the safety harness clutched at her as if it had detected a crash in progress, and she uttered a cry that Katy heard herself echoing.
“What the hell?” Johnnie wanted to know. He was setting the aircar down as he asked that question, and then he was speaking over its comm. “Lieutenant, this is Romanov again. I told you I have my cousin and her daughter aboard with me? Well, something’s wrong with both of them. Have you got a medic in your shore party? No? Well, someone better do something damned quick! They’re both having all they can do to keep breathing, and I don’t have a clue about why.”
CHAPTER 13
The teleporter the landing party had brought down from the starship, so that their people could move back and forth to the surface with ease instead of making constant shuttle trips, took Catherine Romanova and her daughter from the Romanov Farmstead to the Archangel in less than a second of elapsed time. She knew what was happening, because she could hear the voices around her and could feel the hands that touched her; but she was helpless, she could not respond in any way. She could not even open her eyes; she perceived Johnnie’s worried voice and the landing party commander’s exclamations and then the warmth of the teleporter washing over her, but she paid them little heed. It was taking all her concentration to make her chest rise and fall, as she persisted in breathing even though she could feel a terrible hand trying to grasp her lungs and hold them still forever.
Maddy was probably in a similar state, if indeed the little girl was still alive. After that one startled cry, she too had clutched at her throat and had started fighting for air. But this was one time when Katy could spare no attention even for her child, because if she did not keep herself alive then she could do nothing more for anyone.
Linc, where was Linc? Her distress was shared, just as the sensations of their lovemaking had always been shared. He, too, was fighting against that invisible hand. He, too, was breathing only out of sheer cussedness…out of pure determination to go on living until someone made that hand release him.
Sickbay. She had been rushed there from the teleport platform, a journey she had made many times before on other starships. She was aware of Maddy near her, in a way very much like that in which she was aware of Linc. That should have been frightening, to feel her child’s mind in addition to her husband’s—and for both of them to be as scared and as close to dying as she was—but at least they were together.
Three beings. Woman, man, and child; the little girl who was George Fralick’s by biology and upbringing, but who had learn to recognize Lincoln Casey’s mental touch in the days when she was developing from zygote to infant within the shelter of her mother’s womb.
How funny that was, hilarious really, that Fralick was so jealous of Casey’s intimacy with his ex-wife—but he hadn’t a clue that his child was, in this vital sense, also Casey’s child. In the last stages of oxygen deprivation before unconsciousness would claim her, when she knew she was losing the battle to live, Katy Romanova wanted to laugh and could not do so.
And then quite suddenly she could breathe again. The hand inside her chest was gone, and she was gulping air so enthusiastically that she soon felt a mask being pressed to her face and heard a voice instructing her, “Breathe slowly, Admiral. You’ll hyperventilate, you’ll make yourself ill. That’s it, that’s better. Relax, you’re going to be all right now.”
“Maddy?” she asked, as soon as the mask was taken away. It had been there only to break the frantic cadence of her breathing, to help her slow down before she did indeed go abruptly from starving for oxygen to flooding her system with too much of that precious gas.
A man with golden eyes was standing beside her, but he wasn’t Linc. He said, “She’s all right, Admiral. But you both had a close call. Ambassador!” And he turned away from his patient, and spoke in no-nonsense medical tones to someone she could not see. “That settles it, I think. Putting Captain Casey into stasis isn’t just a death sentence for him; somehow it’s also a death sentence for Admiral Romanova here, and for your daughter.”
George Fralick’s voice answered, “That doesn’t make a damned bit of sense, Marin. I know Casey’s a mindfucker like you, but he always said he was a defective one. Couldn’t do a thing, according to his medical files when he was serving as a junior officer under my command—”
“How many years ago?” The medical officer called Marin, which should make him part of Linc’s own clanstribe on Mortha, spoke harshly now. “Ambassador, this woman may be your former wife; but she’s Captain Casey’s mate now, and when he went into respiratory failure in that stasis field she went right along with him. That doesn’t always happen to a Morthan’s mate, but it’s a phenomenon I’ve seen before. And when the partner’s a human it’s worse, because she has no skills to help her resist experiencing her husband’s physical distress.”
“Why in hell was my daughter affected, then? What has Maddy got to do with that damned mindfucker Casey?” Fralick wanted to know.
“I hope she can’t hear you, George.” Katy’s voice was thick, because her throat was raw from her battle to live. But she had a little strength now, enough so she could turn her head at least and search for him with her eyes.
“She can’t. She’s recovering, but she lost conscious and hasn’t regained it yet.” That was Marin cutting in, his tone even more severe. “But Admiral Romanova is right, Ambassador. However it is that her daughter, your daughter, was affected by Captain Casey’s condition, hearing your anger at him is only going to frighten the child.”
“Linc,” Katy said. She directed the single word at Marin, and her tone made it into a Fleet Admiral’s demand.
“I removed him from the stasis field just as you and your daughter were being brought into sickbay, Admiral. He started breathing normally immediately, and if it wasn’t for the sedatives still in his system he’d be fine now. Just as you and Madeleine will be, after a few more minutes to recover.” The medical officer scanned Romanova’s body, and nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, you’re fine already. You just need to rest, you’ve had a hell of a shock.”
“I don’t have time to rest.” She struggled to sit up now, and was not surprised when Marin grumbled but helped her. If he’d been a starship physician long enough to rise to the rank he now held, then he had seen this type of behavior many times; he knew the only way to keep her prone would have been to restrain her, physically or chemically, and he was prepared to do neither just now. “George! You know Morthans often die in stasis. Dammit, what kind of cooperation did you think killing him was going to get you from me?”
She was mad now, and a glance toward her daughter’s gurney made her more so. The girl lay completely still, except for the rise and fall of her chest. Her dusky little face was pale underneath its natural skin tones, and her body was completely limp.
“Damn you, answer me,” she said to the child’s father, and she bit off each word as if he were the greenest ensign she’d ever seen and quite possibly also the stupidest.
“No, Katy. You answer me.” That command voice would have worked for her with just about any fellow human she’d ever encountered, and with most nonhumans as well. But it wasn’t going to work with George Fralick, not with the man who still thought of her as the woman whose body had no secrets from his and whose womb had carried his children. To Fralick, she had discovered at the end of two decades and more of responding to him with eager passion—even after the rest of their relationship had become alternately tense and distant—a woman who had lain beneath him in bed was and would always be someone he had proved he could dominate, could “possess” in the sense she had heard that word used in certain annoying old novels and stage plays.
What to her meant the sharing of love and the giving and receiving of pleasure, to him conferred a certain contempt on the partner whose body was invaded in the act of union and who for nine months afterward became increasingly ruled
by the new life that his invasion could so easily begin. She had learned that to her cost, and seeing that knowledge confirmed now did not surprise her in the least.
But it made her angrier still, so that now the heat of her fury turned cold. And that was good, because that was when her intellect kicked into high gear and Catherine Romanova became a truly dangerous opponent.
George Fralick did not know that. He had been her captain, long ago at the start of her career; but he had never gone into battle with her in command, and in their private disagreements she had always held back the part of her nature that was ascendant now.
Always she’d had the children to think about, first their three boys and then small Maddy. Always, even that last night in his home on Kesra when his parting gift had been to take her against her will, Katy had held back from using her full fighting capacity against George Fralick. On that night she had known the only way to escape him was to kill him, or hurt him so badly that the Kesran authorities would have condemned her just as if she had killed him; and she had also known that on Kesra marital rape was a legal oxymoron, and the fact that she had been present in his house voluntarily while still his wife would have been all the defense Fralick needed for his actions. She had known he could be vain, she had known that where she was concerned he could be both irrational and possessive; but that he would deliberately hurt her, physically hurt her, had not entered her mind before then.
In order to live—so that baby Maddy would not have to begin her life with one parent being executed for having murdered the other while she lay in her crib in the next room, and while the Kesran house-servants pretended to hear nothing because what happened behind a married couple’s bedroom door was not their business—Katy had stopped fighting at the moment when she knew what it would cost her to continue. And now she saw the same look on her former husband’s face that she had seen on it then.
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