He was a decent person, who if he had to face her on a field of battle would kill her without hesitating but who would never dream of looking her in the eye and lying to her while they were still supposed to be comrades. So she asked him openly, “What’s going on, Bill? You say the Service isn’t accepting any new Morthan officers, but Linc was the only one the Service ever had that wasn’t a medic of one kind or other. Are you getting rid of those, too?”
“Yes.” Tanaka nodded, heavily. “It’s taking time, of course, because we can’t do with them what we did with the scramblers and just hand them bonuses and their walking papers all on virtually the same day. Doctors are hard to replace, and harder to do without! But if we go to war with Mortha on the other side, Katy, we simply can’t have hundreds of them—thousands of them—in our starship sickbays and our base hospitals, with access to the minds of the people whose tactical decisions are going to direct that war. I know, except for Linc Casey there’s never been a case of a Morthan or a Morthan hybrid who did anything violent except in self-defense. Immediate defense against an immediate threat, at that. But having them living among us is a risk we can no longer afford to take, so they’re being mustered out of the service and sent back to Mortha. And those who work in civilian health care are going to follow, I expect, although of course that’s not my policy arena and I’m speculating a bit now.”
“And just how is Mortha supposed to react to this idea?” Katy wanted to close her eyes. They were burning with fatigue, and now they also stung with angry tears. Damn! I can see a piece of errant stupidity coming at me four-square, and there’s probably not a thing I can do to stop it, she thought with sadness so deep that it made her recently abused chest ache all over again. “Where are the people there supposed to put these thousands of refugees? All of whom are trained for a profession for which there’s damned little demand on Mortha, because only the full humans there get sick with any regularity?”
“You know, I’ve always wondered about that.” Tanaka’s reply had the flavor of an attempted diversion about it, yet the remark was obviously a sincere one. “If they never get sick, how come their world isn’t overpowered by its own population? I mean, what do they die of?”
“They die when they’re ready, because they will themselves to do that. For a Morthan who’s mated to a human, that happens when the spouse dies unless there are young children left behind who need a surviving parent’s care.” This was something Linc had told her early in their friendship, without the least self-consciousness. So Katy had honestly thought most people knew it, yet now she believed it was news to Bill Tanaka.
Damn, that piece of stupidity was getting more errant by the second!
“Do you really expect me to believe that a perfectly healthy Morthan just shuts him or herself off, because of being widowed?” Tanaka was genuinely incredulous. “What happens when they divorce, for pete’s sake?”
“They don’t. Oh, sometimes a human spouse leaves a Morthan mate; but the reverse never happens. And what I just described isn’t unvarying, there are such things as Morthans who stay unmated and Morthans who prefer their own gender. But even for them there comes a time when they know they should leave, and then they do exactly that. It’s not suicide, Bill; not in the way you and I understand that word as humans.” When Linc had first told her about that particular aspect of his maternal heritage, Katy herself had been just as shocked and disturbed as the man in the holoscreen was now. But that was long ago, and now this was just one more thing about Linc that she accepted and had trouble remembering another human might not.
“All I can tell you, Katy, is what’s happening from the Service’s point of view. I can’t tell you why the Defense Minister is making the decisions she’s making, except that I do know the Diet has been voting in a pattern that practically forces her hand on some of these points.” Tanaka checked his chrono. “Enough Fleet politics! Report, Admiral. That’s your rank now, by the way.”
“I assumed that,” Romanova said, and grinned a sardonic grin. There could only be one Fleet Admiral. She had given up that post voluntarily, and now she was looking at her successor without any expectation that he would step aside (or be pushed aside by his civilian bosses) to make way for her return.
She told him what had happened—except for the arrival at her home the previous morning of Dan Archer and Rachel Kane, and those events afterward that would have made him aware of her involvement in that situation. Her aircar flight to the Romanov Farmstead she presented as Maddy’s introduction to her mother’s ancestral heritage, and when she spoke of her return to the Farmstead with Johnnie she treated the events there as a tragic surprise.
Which they really had been, after all. That HR Solutions wanted its property returned was not surprising, but that the corporate marshal pursuing the runaway gen had had the incredible luck of being able to intercept the Archangel and compel the starship’s return to Narsai amazed her. The Archangel would probably not have come into port at Narsai at all on its run from Kesra to Terra, providing VIP transport to Ambassador Fralick, if George hadn’t wanted to bring Maddy to her mother for safekeeping. Even then, if the starship had departed just a few hours earlier she might have missed making contact with the marshal’s shuttle.
But on such pieces of luck, good and bad alike, was all of history based. Right place, right time; wrong place, wrong time; or any variable combination of those critical factors, oftentimes decided who lived and who died. Not just which individuals, but which worlds and which civilizations and which species.
But Katy Romanova had nevertheless always believed in making her own luck whenever she could, and she was going to attempt to do that one more time. She watched Tanaka carefully while she gave him her report, and she noticed that he did not glance at his chrono even once.
Yes, that gesture had been a ruse. A means of convincing her to stop asking inconvenient questions, when in actuality Tanaka was willing to spend whatever time was necessary to bring Romanova up to speed.
None of the information she was giving him was even half as valuable as what he had just told her, without saying a word.
CHAPTER 16
“Reen.” Dan Archer spoke softly to the farmstead woman, as the old railcar moved closer and closer to the place where they knew their would-be captors waited. “You don’t know Rachel’s a gen. You don’t know anything about her, except that I brought her to your home and asked you to take her in. Do you?”
“Dan, getting the truth out of me is going to be the easiest thing in the universe. You know that, you have to know that.” Reen Romanova gave him a tired smile. “I’d love to keep Katy and her little girl out of this, and Johnnie too—but I don’t see how.”
“You and your husband, and the Matushka and her daughter, are all civilians and citizens of Narsai,” Dan reminded her. “The Star Service can’t do a thing to you unless your government agrees to give you up to them. I’d be wondering how your government was going to react to what’s happened to your property, except that I suppose I get the legal blame for that; I’m the only surviving owner of the Triad, and it was the ship resisting a tractor beam that actually did all the damage.”
“I wonder if anyone’s going to remember my citizenship, or care about it,” Reen replied. But Dan was right, and she felt herself sitting up straighter as she gathered her resources to face whatever was waiting for them when they reached the underground chamber where the railcar’s course terminated.
Rachel Kane dragged herself to wakefulness, because someone was telling her she had to do so. Dan. Dan, whose voice had been her anchor during the hours since she had awakened from the pseudo-slumber of stasis.
She was so heartily sick of having to be taken care of, and she was even more weary of having to base every decision she made on the welfare of the three small lives inside her. Until now everything had been so simple, compared to this.
She had spent her childhood, or what passed for a childhood among gens, learning at a rate that she no
w realized was at least twice as rapid as that of a bright but typical naturally conceived human child. Learning, exercising, practicing her skills; that had been her life, until the Academy.
There she had been placed among what she and her fellow gens had contemptuously called “wildlings” for the first time, and she had found out what unhappiness felt like. And because no one could become an officer without learning how to lead—even though all cadets would not eventually reach command status, still every one of them must be capable of giving orders and creating strategies—for the first time she had been required to think independently and creatively. Behavior that in the gen-creche had earned her correction, here was expected from her.
And young Rachel had discovered that she was not simply able to do that, she excelled at it. Although she was still required to report regularly to those HR Solutions scientists who were her creators and managers, although she knew she was unlike her classmates because even those whose parents were dead or estranged from them still knew who those parents had been, she tasted personal freedom for the first time; and that balanced the unhappiness of being different. That made up for the uncertainty of having to learn all over again where the limits on her behavior should be placed, and which of her personality traits she should squelch and which she should nurture.
The other way in which she was different from her classmates was that each of them, with a very few exceptions, had some plan—however vague, at that age—for eventually mating and reproducing. Rachel could not expect to do that. She was allowed, was even expected, to be sexually active; but her capacity to produce offspring did not belong to her. It belonged to the company, to HR Solutions, just as did her own life.
If a superior officer ordered a “wildling” human to his or her death, that individual experienced conflict in obeying. But in this way Rachel Kane was like her fellow gens who inhabited the crew quarters of starships instead of Officers’ Country, like those who worked in mines and factories where the tasks were particularly dangerous or particularly boring. When she was given an order, her instinct was to obey it. Period.
Or it had been, until she was encouraged to begin thinking creatively. Until fear that for her had been a purely animal reaction to physical danger, began to be the same as for the wildlings she once had scorned; until one day she realized, shaking in the aftermath of a particularly nasty brush with the end of her own existence, that she wanted to go on living just as much as did any of the wildlings who were now her daily associates. They, too, were willing to give their lives up in response to duty; but their instinctive drive to live was coupled with a longing for all the future’s imagined experiences, and that had always been a foreign concept (indeed, almost an unknown concept) for the gen called Rachel.
To be sorry you might die today, because a year from now you expected to return to a home where a civilian spouse waited? To realize that an elderly parent or a sibling would grieve for your loss, and hope not to be the cause of that pain? To think about the offspring you might have created, and never would if you died now?
Rachel Kane had never known parents or siblings, and of course she never would. But it had slowly dawned on her, as the years of her young womanhood slipped by, that it was not impossible that she might someday want one of her sexual liaisons to become more than just a safety valve. It had occurred to her that if she had not been geningeered to ovulate only when medically stimulated to do so, she might have had a child like any other female human being.
She had almost been glad the latter wasn’t going to be possible for her, though. And the former had been just an idle fantasy, really not something she ever expected to fulfill. She was lucky, and she knew she was lucky, just to have the freedom that she did; her life had much more scope than did that of her one-time creche-mates. She was fond of telling herself (although she had never dared voice the thought to anyone, not even to those she shyly began to refer to as her “friends”) that she had the best of both lives. She had a gen’s freedom from family entanglements, a gen’s absolute assurance that a massive economic power would take care of her all her days; yet she had a wildling’s ability to create, mentally if not physically, and she had a life of excitement and variety that even the gens who lived on a starship’s crew decks never tasted. The “ordinaries” who were gens rather than wildlings never left their ships, unless it was to go to a new assignment or to be cycled out of service when they grew too old to be useful and had to be disposed of.
That she had refused to anticipate. The chances were that she would die somewhere with honor, in the performance of her duty, long before she was a feeble old woman who could no longer perform as a command officer. She had hoped for that outcome, anyway; but only after she had lived as full and as long a life as possible, because life was something she had learned to savor.
And then had come this pregnancy. Not the familiar routine in which ripened ova were harvested from her body, to be taken away and used as the gengineers of HR Solutions saw fit; but three actual embryos, implanted and developing inside her womb.
Three creatures that while she understood they were not yet “babies,” nevertheless were lives that combined her characteristics with those of the man whose union with her body had called these zygotes into being.
She had been frightened, but far more than that she had been awed. And she had known, in those first moments after she astounded herself with the discovery of those new lives within her, that she wasn’t going to give them up without a fight.
Was what she felt for Daniel Archer what wildlings called “love”? She didn’t know, wasn’t even sure she was equipped to know. But she did understand that he felt something for her, something that went further than responsibility for what they had conceived together. She hadn’t led wildling humans (and assorted aliens and hybrids, as well) for a full decade, hadn’t become a heavy cruiser’s executive officer, without learning a thing or two about those wildlings’ emotions.
Duty might have made Dan Archer take care of her, but duty would never have caused him to hold her in the curve of his arm as he was holding her now. Gently, protectively, as the ancient railcar halted; and at the last moment before they were pulled bodily out of its cabin by people wearing Star Service uniforms, Dan murmured something she could not hear and swiftly touched his lips to her cheek.
A male human did that because he was emotionally attached to a female, not because he felt obligated toward her.
Now, what was her duty in this situation? To have her out of his way might make it possible for Dan to escape from the trap that was closing around them, and it would certainly be better for the lives she was carrying to die quickly than for them to be taken out of her (now, or when they had developed into viable infants) and used for the company’s purposes. What had not disturbed her at all on her own account, somehow horrified her on her children’s.
Yet she had not been trained to give up, not as a small gen in the creche nor as a Star Service cadet nor as a command officer. And although she had the capacity, as did all gengineered beings, to end her life swiftly and painlessly if she needed to do so—in fact, that was what she was supposed to do if the alternative was to let the technology that had made her fall into unlicensed hands—she was not ready to do that, not just yet anyway.
She let herself go limp in the hands that grasped her, and when shackles closed around her wrists she allowed it to happen. She lifted her head, though; she opened her eyes, and saw that the old Narsatian woman who had been so kind to her was gone already. Dan Archer was being shackled by the uniformed people who held him, and the lift to the surface was coming down for a second load.
They must have taken the woman called Reen up first. Hopefully that meant she was thought to be innocent, a civilian caught unknowingly in someone else’s intrigue.
“Move, you gen-whore!”
She hadn’t been called that in a long time, although she knew that civilian women who were gens received that abusive form of address quite routinel
y. Why did it make a female a prostitute, she wondered, to be egg-harvested instead of impregnated as the result of a sex act? The insult was stupid, and its use said very little for the intelligence or the creativity of any person who uttered it.
She saw Dan’s jaw clenching, and was thankful when that was his only reaction. He had sense enough to know that getting himself injured was not going to help her, and that hearing that epithet one more time was not going to do her any real harm.
Would it really be giving up, to just go to sleep now? She hadn’t felt like herself since leaving the stasis tube, and now she wondered almost forlornly what had become of the energetic woman she had been before. Did every expectant mother feel this way?
“Hold on. Help’s coming, Commander Kane.”
She knew the mind that touched hers. It took all her lifetime of discipline not to let her surprise and joy show on her face, or in her body’s posture; but she had felt mental contact with Lieutenant Commander Kerle Marin many times, because he had been on the Archangel with her for more than a year before she had fled in that lifeboat. Like all Morthan healers, he touched his patients with his thoughts far more often than with his hands; scanned them far more reliably with his mind that with his medical instruments. And Rachel Kane had been his patient, and in this moment she forgave him for having prepared her for egg harvest without telling her he had done so.
“I didn’t do that to you,” came the denial, in that soft voice inside her head. “I refused. So someone relayed the order from HR Solutions to the senior corpsman on my staff, and gave him specific instructions not to tell me about it. And he wasn’t trained as well as he should have been—and that’s why what he did, he did incorrectly. I’m sorry, Ms. Kane. If I had obeyed that order, you wouldn’t have been put into such a terrible position. But it wasn’t a directive from the Service, so it wasn’t binding on me as an officer—and I was damned if I was going to harvest a female’s ova like some kind of crop. That’s something no person reared on Mortha could ever do.”
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