Matushka

by Nina M. Osier

  “Thank you,” Rachel thought, and closed her eyes as the bright light of a Narsatian sunrise blinded her when the lift reached the surface at last. “I do wish you’d told me, Doctor, but I don’t wish you’d gone ahead and harvested me. I can’t explain it, it doesn’t make a bit of sense, but even right now I’m glad something happened to me that was drastic enough to make me run away. Just a few minutes ago I thought I was ready to die, rather than go back!”

  “You won’t have to do that.” The Morthan healer’s thoughts were as gentle as his remembered voice. “The Matushka is back in command, Ms. Kane. She knows what’s happening down there, and I’m sure she must have a plan.”

  “Are you saying this to Dan, too?” Archer had also been Marin’s patient, so that ought to be possible. And as she forced her eyes open and looked at her lover, Kane knew it was the case.

  What even a full admiral could do to help either of them out of this situation, Rachel didn’t know. Especially when that admiral was herself a party to their crime, when any move she made to help them might seal her own doom. Yet this was the first time Kane had ever heard of a Morthan healer involving himself in any situation outside of his sickbay, and the Matushka was the Matushka—not just any flag officer, but one who had earned her reputation for acting unconventionally in her personal life and unpredictably in both her leadership strategies and her battlefield tactics—so once again, however unreasonably, Rachel Kane was allowing herself to feel hope.

  Madeleine Fralick woke to find herself in a place she did not recognize. She had been in Mum’s house, had fallen asleep while Mum was talking to someone. Cousin Johnnie had been with her, and she was sure she remembered him picking her up in his arms and carrying her outside. The air had been cool, and it had been dark.

  Then from time to time she had almost roused, and had realized she was aboard a vehicle and that Mum and Johnnie were talking. The next thing she remembered was not being able to breathe.

  She could do so now, though, and the fear she’d felt then was only a memory. That she had been teleported from Narsai’s surface to a ship in orbit had to have been a dream—yet when she looked around her now, she realized that part too had actually happened.

  Where was this? Not the Archangel, a huge ship with commodious compartments and (unless you were unlucky enough to live among the ordinaries) a decent amount of privacy. She lay on a bunk in a tiny sleeping compartment, and she saw that this cabin was intended for double occupancy.

  She sat up, and swallowed to ease her dry throat, and realized further that this cabin didn’t have a private head. And why had she been left alone to recover from whatever it was that had happened to her? That she really, truly thought had come close to killing her?

  Her legs were a trifle rubbery, so she stayed beside the bunk and held onto its edge after she eased herself onto her feet. She heard a voice in her mind as she did so, and instead of being startled or frightened she welcomed it with vast relief. “Linc!”

  The day before yesterday, she had not met her mother’s second husband. Today she felt as if an additional father had entered her life—no, more as if he had always been part of her life—and the touch of his thoughts comforted her as nothing else could have done just now.

  “Maddy, do you know where you are?” The question was gentle. Yet she sensed urgency, and there was also apology in Casey’s mental tones.

  He felt responsible for what had happened to her. But he could not have been, and besides that she understood that this was not the time to ask for explanations. She answered, “On a ship. In orbit around Narsai, I hope, because I’m by myself in a bunkroom and I just woke up. Where’s Mum?”

  “She’s here with me, on the Archangel. Your father took you with him when he left, Maddy. It’s a long story—one I don’t even want to be the person to tell you, in fact—but your mother decided to go back on active duty, and when she took over command your father decided he didn’t want to be on the ship anymore. So he ported you over to a long-range shuttle that belongs to the Corporate Marshal Service.”

  “But everybody hates them! They’re horrible people, they track down slaves and make them go back to where they escaped from!” Maddy remembered what her Kesran caregivers, the female neuter P’tara and her neutered male counterpart K’lor, had told her about the marshals—specifically, that misbehaving children should be careful of them!—and she shuddered. She was much too old now to believe that the marshals were a threat to disobedient little girls, but she still believed they were evil because the two people who had loved her and cared for her the most had told her that was true.

  Papa loved her, and it was because of Papa that K’lor and P’tara had worked in the Fralick household, of course; but Papa was so busy with so many other things. And until yesterday, she had seen Mum only in alternate years—and then only during visits on a few successive days for a few hours each session, with carefully regulated and monitored communications substituting for direct contact the rest of the time. Yet right now she wanted with all her soul to go back to Mum and to Linc, and when she heard her father’s voice outside the half-open hatch she did not feel the relief that she knew she ought to be feeling.

  The man whose mind was touching hers sensed both her distress, and its cause. He said in his silent way, “Don’t be scared, Maddy. He thinks he’s doing what’s best for you, and he’ll take good care of you if he can. Stay with him for now, and whatever you do don’t let him know you’ve talked with me. That’s going to make him angry. Very, very angry.”

  “I know it will. And I won’t do it.” Maddy almost nodded, because communicating in this way was so new to her. But she was glad she hadn’t done that, because the hatch opened fully just then and her father stepped through it.

  “Well! Awake finally, are you, Madeleine?” Sometimes he used her formal given name, usually when he was feeling especially sentimental and didn’t want to express that feeling. He came to her now, and took the kind of med-scanner that was in any modern household’s bathroom and checked her vital signs with practiced swiftness. “And you’re fine now. Good, I thought if I got you far enough away from that mindfucker Casey you’d recover.”

  “That what?” Maddy asked. Not that she didn’t recognize the vernacular term for sexual intercourse, even she had not been that sheltered; but hearing it used in a compound word with “mind” was completely new to her. And whatever it meant when used that way, she suspected it was no compliment.

  “Sorry, love. But he almost killed both you and your mother, and you at least I could protect. So I did.” Fralick sat down on the edge of one bunk, and pushed her toward the other so that she automatically sat down too. “It’s time for you to understand what he is, Maddy. And that’s why I never left you alone with your mother until yesterday, and now I’ll never do that again. I’m sorry, I made a terrible mistake when I brought you to Narsai; but I had no idea Casey could get at you, too, and I figured you were safe from Romanov.”

  “Papa?” Maddy was thoroughly confused now. But this was her familiar father, and although he clearly was angry his venom wasn’t directed at her; so she sat still, and waited for him to explain himself.

  “Mads, we don’t allow Morthans to set foot on Kesra and we have good reasons. Do you know what they can do to other people’s minds?” Fralick paused, clearly expecting an answer.

  “They can feel other people’s emotions, and sometimes they can read other people’s thoughts. That has something to do with how they heal, the Morthans that leave Mortha and work as doctors.” Maddy chose her words carefully. Even though she could not believe that her father would, or even could, really do anything to harm Lincoln Casey, she still knew instinctively that Casey had been right when he’d instructed her not to let Fralick know they could speak mind to mind.

  “Yes, they can. And that’s not natural, Maddy. That’s not right, it shouldn’t be allowed. I’ve always thought so; but when Lincoln Casey first knew your mother, and then when they both first kne
w me, he wasn’t supposed to be like other Morthans. He was supposed to be no different than a full human, except for those eyes of his. If I’d known that through all those years, while he and your mother were serving on ships together and I was off somewhere else in the Diplomatic Service, she was letting him do whatever he wanted to her in private…!” Fralick flushed. He was not used to talking about such matters with his female child, and doing so now embarrassed him. But clearly he thought it was important, clearly he was making himself do this because he felt that he must.

  “Papa, you don’t mean Mum made love to Linc while she was your wife.” Maddy, by contrast, was not the least bit embarrassed. But she was surprised, because however many times George Fralick might have thought about his ex-wife’s suspected unfaithfulness he had never once mentioned such a possibility to their daughter. He had not said much of anything to her about Katy, one way or the other, because he knew that if he did so and if the family arbitration authorities on Kesra found out about it his extremely favorable custody and visitation arrangements were very apt to be altered to give Katy more access.

  “I think she must have,” Fralick said now, with brutal honesty. “She let him into her mind, anyway, and that’s as bad as letting him bed her—or worse. Which is why I used the word I did. Even though it’s not a polite word, it’s certainly an accurate one for Lincoln Casey and for every other Morthan male who dares to touch a human woman.”

  “But they’re married now,” Maddy said. She could think of nothing else to say, and now she wanted her father to stop. Even for an inquisitive girl of thirteen, there were some things that plainly it was better not to know—or at least, it was better not to find out from one’s father.

  “That’s disgusting, but true. And somehow when Casey had a medical problem a little while ago, when something made it hard for him to breathe, his condition made you and your mother both have similar difficulties. I understand why, with her; when a human woman sleeps with a Morthan, she lets him inside her mind at the same time she—well, you know how that works, Maddy.” Again, Fralick blushed.

  “Yes. P’tara told me, and she showed me pictures of how humans do it because she’s Kesran and they don’t do it the same way. With them it takes—”

  “I know what it takes.” Fralick cut his daughter off. “Anyhow! I wasn’t surprised your mother got the spillover from Casey’s problem, and I can’t be sorry for her because she’s spent years getting herself into that kind of attunement to him. But I was scared to death I was going to lose you, and the only connection you’ve got to the man—if I can call him a man—is that he was around your mother almost all the time she was pregnant with you. You’re my child, I had that checked a long time ago and he had nothing to do with conceiving you physically; but I guess he must have had some kind of prenatal influence on your mind. Something that never would have showed up, never would have affected you through your whole lifetime, if I hadn’t been stupid enough to bring you to Narsai.”

  Maddy sat very still. Her papa had checked, to see whether or not she was his biological child?

  He no doubt meant that to reassure her, as it had reassured him when he had done it; but for Maddy that act had the reverse connotation. Papa’s love for her depended entirely on her being of his siring? If she had been made from some other man’s genetic material, he would not have taken care of her through her babyhood and would not be looking at her now with that jealous fervor shining in his eyes?

  Although putting words to her feelings now was beyond her, Maddy knew the difference between protectiveness and possessiveness. What she saw in her father’s familiar gray gaze now was not something that comforted her. Instead, it scared her.

  But Linc was right, she could not let him see that. After a moment she said, with her mother’s sure sense of tactics and with all of George Fralick’s own careful diplomacy, “Papa, you weren’t stupid to bring me here. You didn’t know, and I don’t think Mum knew either. But what are you going to do now? You didn’t tell me yet what ship this is, even.”

  “I didn’t, did I?” Fralick’s face had been rigid with hate. It relaxed now, and he smiled as he became Maddy’s beloved father once more. “We didn’t get far underway yesterday, aboard the Archangel, before we were hailed by a corporate marshal. He’d come all the way from New Orient, looking for a gen who ran away. He had orders from the commodore at New Orient instructing Captain Giandrea to cooperate, so we had to come about and return to Narsai since that was where he expected to find the gen.”

  “Did he?” Maddy remembered not to say specifically, “Did he find her?” Because that would have revealed that she knew the missing gen’s sex, and that would have been disastrous.

  She felt no guilt at all about this deceit. She had seen her father in action at enough parties to realize that he would have done the same thing, and would have regarded it as a neat bit of verbal footwork rather than as even the most innocuous of lies.

  And although she already knew enough about Mum to realize that Mum did not like lies in any way, shape, or manner, she also knew that Mum would want her to protect that woman who had three babies inside her belly and who had looked so tired and thin and scared. And she knew what a marshal was, her Kesran caregivers P’tara and K’lor had told her often enough when she was small that if she misbehaved the marshals would come and take her away.

  “He just did,” Fralick told his daughter, with a satisfied grin. “He needs to get instructions from her owners now, whether they want her returned to their gen labs or just what they do want done with her; and he needs to determine whether the man who was with her when she was caught is the only person who should be charged, or if she had other help. So it’ll be awhile before he heads this shuttle back toward New Orient, and then on to Terra; but he’ll have to take us, because I’m not putting you back aboard the Archangel while your mother’s aboard it. And you’re certainly not going back down to Narsai, or anywhere else where you might get within Casey’s reach again. I’m lucky I got you back alive once. I can’t risk letting him near you again.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Vargas to Archangel.” The voice that Paolo Giandrea had been dreading to hear again was the first thing the captain did hear, as he dragged himself into wakefulness from much-needed sleep.

  He rolled out of his berth, and sat on its edge to palm the comm. And he mentally damned the ops officer who had put the corporate marshal through to his quarters without asking, and as he did so knew that he was being unreasonable. Corporate marshals were people to whom even starship officers were conditioned from childhood to give deference, at least starship officers who weren’t Outworld-reared humans or aliens.

  He had one Kesran neuter among his juniors, one who should have become male if his family’s breeding requirements hadn’t caused him to have that development halted just before puberty began. The fellow could breathe nearly as well with gills as with lungs, and was a decided asset at times for that reason alone; but he was going to leave the ship as soon as his term was up, unless war came and everyone’s commitments were extended indefinitely, because he found being the only one of his kind here a very lonely business. (Or, of course, unless he and every other nonhuman officer in the Service got walking papers at the conflict’s declaration.) There was also one Sestus 4 native aboard right now, a female whose several rows of sharp teeth were even more frightening for being the crimson hue of human blood.

  The young woman’s own blood was an almost colorless fluid, and she was a usually gentle creature whose lavender eyes became the maroon of anger only when someone who was supposed to obey her did not do so quickly enough. That was the nature of Sestians, as Dan Archer had explained to his captain when he had been the Archangel’s chief engineer and that first Sestian officer had arrived on board. They saw themselves as superior to every other species, as the natural rulers of the universe; and they had a great deal of difficulty coping in situations where they could not enforce their perceived mastery by corporal means.r />
  Archer knew about that, his people were among the humans who mined under Sestian supervision and who were the sorriest group of Homo Sapiens in the whole galaxy. But they were supposed to be living on Sestus 4 voluntarily, and that made them subject to its laws; so unless they left as Archer had done in his adolescence, there wasn’t a thing other humans could do to help them.

  Still, Giandrea was hoping that this one Sestian officer would also depart from his ship very soon now. Ejecting all aliens, not just Morthan hybrid healers, from the Star Service was something he was hoping for with pleasure.

  Actually he was going to miss the Morthans. They were the only nonhumans he had ever liked or trusted. He much preferred Marin, for example, to this creature named Vargas whose voice was ruining his rest now.

  “Captain Giandrea, are you there?” Calm and almost courtly, but with the steel of absolute demand underneath its surface, the voice spoke again.

  “Here,” Giandrea said, and swallowed the “dammit” that wanted to follow.

  “I have the gen, Captain. And the trader who gave her aid. I’m electing not to prosecute the Narsatian family on whose property, and in the company of whose matriarch, she was found; because unfortunately the local laws are most protective of Narsatian citizens, and because requesting over-ride of those laws would hardly be feasible when the family in question includes the head of the current government. However—” Vargas changed his tone, suddenly allowing a predatory note to creep into it —“there are two accessories to this crime aboard your ship who can be prosecuted, and I intend to take them into custody as soon as possible.”