“Who do you mean, Marshal?” Giandrea felt cold. He knew already, of course, but asking the question at least made Vargas tell him baldly.
“Admiral Catherine Romanova, who although she is a citizen of Narsai is now on active duty with the Star Service and therefore subject to the laws of Terra. And her spouse, one Lincoln Casey, who holds dual Terran and Morthan citizenship.”
“Let me get this straight. You want to arrest my superior officer?” Withholding Casey from this vulture wasn’t going to be possible, but if anything could be done to keep the Matushka out of his hands then Giandrea planned to do it.
He wished he could bring the admiral into this conversation now, but knew that if he did so Vargas would realize where his loyalty lay. And that would be pure folly.
“No. But I’m telling you I intend to do that, and I expect you and your people to give me full cooperation.” With that, the corporate marshal cut off the transmission.
Giandrea was wide awake now. And even though he knew he was doing exactly what Vargas expected him to do, it was no crime and it was necessary. He tapped his comm again and said, “Giandrea to Romanova.”
Silence. Then ops, inquiring in puzzlement, “Captain? Were you trying to contact Admiral Romanova?”
“Yes. Where the hell is she?” That commlink should have found her, anywhere on board the Archangel.
Which meant she was not on board any longer. Giandrea’s fierce relief was mixed with a rush of fear, because he could not guess at the consequences of whatever action the Matushka had taken—but if she had smelled the proverbial coffee and had put herself out of the corporate marshal’s reach, he only hoped she’d taken her spouse along with her. Even though he suspected things might get unpleasant as a result, he was still glad when ops answered just as he had hoped.
“She and Mr. Casey ported down to MinTar, Captain. She said something about a meeting with an official of the Narsatian government.”
Right. As Vargas had just so helpfully pointed out, Catherine Romanova’s father held the senior position on the Narsatian Council and her mother held one of its other chairs.
She had taken herself and her husband to safety, and in this case there was nothing cowardly about that action. It was nothing else but smart.
What in hell was Tanaka going to say about this, though, when the Fleet Admiral called back looking for Romanova a few hours from now as he was scheduled to do? And if she wasn’t going to return to the ship, how was the Matushka planning to avoid being charged with desertion—an offense for which even the Narsatian senior councilor would have difficulty blocking her extradition—as well as with the simpler capital crime of being an accessory to theft?
The Council of Narsai assembled not in an ornate chamber of an official government building, but in a conference room at the university library. That was in keeping with the colony’s traditions, because just about every structure was made to serve as many purposes as it could. Like keeping vehicles which on any other world would have been privately owned in constant, communal use, refusing to give control over public buildings to one organization or another made it possible for Narsatians to conserve more of their lands for agriculture—and to use all of their planet’s other resources with equal efficiency.
Catherine Romanova sat quietly beside her father, in the circle of chairs that was the meeting’s standard structure. Only today that circle was a large one, because the Council’s members had been joined by the Commissioners who ran Narsatian industry (such as it was) and operated Narsai’s commerce and oversaw its professional guilds.
There had never been a combined meeting like this one before, although it had often been proposed. If there had been time to debate its wisdom beforehand, Katy was sure, it would not have been happening now. But Trabe Kourdakov had acted decisively, and so both Councilors and Commissioners were now assembled together in response to his summons.
On Katy’s other side sat a person who had no business to be present at any official proceeding on Narsai, but she had refused to attend without her husband. Since without her this meeting would be pointless, her father had consented; and no one else in the room seemed particularly surprised to see Lincoln Casey.
But then she knew all the others who were present, and during the years since her second marriage they had had time to become accustomed to seeing her with her Morthan spouse. Her own parents were the only Narsatians of any real status who had refused to have anything to do with her after that marriage. Others here had thought less of her for forming this union, some had even had the nerve to chide her because of it; but gradually they had accepted that union’s reality, and at least (as she had heard one of the commissioners saying in supposed confidence to her mother, just before today’s proceedings had begun) Casey was willing to live with his wife on Narsai.
It was odd, how much respect that had gained for him among the members of both groups combining here.
“Are you all right, love?” She sent that thought to her husband now, without turning to look at him. She herself was weary, but except for a couple of naps during the past full standard day—one in the aircar with Johnnie at its helm, the other on a sofa in the captain’s office aboard the Archangel—she had not slept. And would not be sleeping any time soon, from the way this second day of crisis was shaping up.
“I’m fine, Katy.” And he was. She felt all his familiar strength, physical and emotional, and allowed herself to luxuriate for just a moment in that mental embrace before she turned her attention back to the gathering in which she must play her part.
If he hadn’t had a fellow Morthan providing his medical care last night, he would not have been this fortunate. It was unlikely that Casey could have survived his brush with stasis if Marin had not been there, because a non-telepathic doctor might not have realized what was happening to his patient until the situation became irreversible. Katy knew that she was lucky, so very lucky, to have him beside her today at all.
“You know my daughter,” Trabe Kourdakov was saying, addressing the room without bothering to stand. There was no need, and indeed it would have been impolite for him to put his head above those of the others who were present because on Narsai all citizens were equal. The Senior Chair was a concept necessitated only because someone had to call meetings, someone had to be responsible for seeing that decisions were carried out once reached, and someone had to keep records.
“Right now she’s once again officially an officer in the Star Service,” Kourdakov continued. “That was necessary when she received an official recall order, which was binding on her as a retiree. However, there’s now a window—which may prove to be a brief one!—during which she could tender her resignation, since as of this moment we’re still at peace. She hasn’t done so, not yet, and if she does she’ll be sacrificing all benefits earned during her career. It breaks tradition for a member of the Commonwealth’s military to address this body, but it also breaks tradition for Councilors and Commissioners to share a meeting. So I trust you’ll listen what she has to say. Katy?”
That was typical Narsatian informality; for Kourdakov to style his child “Admiral Romanova” would have been an insult to everyone else in the room. Katy had to remind herself not to rise, as she would have been expected to do when addressing a body with this much power in any other setting, before she began to speak.
“How I handle my choices about serving, or not serving, wouldn’t normally be anyone’s problem but my own,” she said, in the quiet but powerful voice that she had learned to use when she needed to make herself heard but did not want to intimidate the people who were listening to her. “I was debating whether to answer the recall order or to protest it, under the Council’s new policy concerning Service entrance by Narsatian citizens; but then my husband was taken aboard the heavy cruiser that’s now in orbit, and since our law doesn’t shield him I was forced to reclaim my rank in order to gain his release.”
“What was he charged with, Katy?” The concept of parliamentary
procedure was barely remembered on Narsai. While no one would have dreamed of trying to take the floor away until she was through speaking, it was entirely acceptable—indeed, it was expected—that anyone could break in and ask her a question, at any time.
Those old ways were coming back to her now, more easily than she had thought they might. She answered, “There weren’t any charges. My former husband, the ambassador from Kesra to Terra, was aboard and the ship had been placed at his disposal. He wanted to guarantee that I wouldn’t answer the recall, so he had my husband kidnapped from our home. And now instead of my husband, Mr. Fralick has our daughter to hold hostage against me.”
She did pause then, to allow the breaths of outrage that she heard drawn all over the room. A woman’s daughter was her heir, and by the reckoning of these Narsatian leaders George Fralick had done something beyond defending in keeping a mother and her girl-child apart.
Katy added, “But then, I would have brought her home with me after she was born if her father hadn’t prevented me from doing that. He wouldn’t let me have her, not even for a visit, because he told the legal arbitrators on Kesra that if she grew up here I’d force her go to a cousin’s bed when she came of age.”
That was a decided sore spot with Narsatians, to be reminded of how other societies sometimes viewed their marriage customs. Things were different now than they had been nearly fifty years earlier, when Katy Romanova had gone to her cousin Ivan on the night of her thirteenth birthday; but any suggestion from an outsider that Katy’s parents had been neglectful of her welfare, that her first lover had been a pervert to take her that young, or that her society had encouraged her to sell her body to seal a land claim, was a suggestion that was calculated to infuriate any one of these people. Even those who had supported dynastic reform most passionately, still would bristle if their elders who had followed those customs were condemned for doing so.
“George finally brought my daughter to me not because he’d changed his mind, but because as everyone here knows there’s a good chance we may be looking at war between the Outworlds and the rest of the Commonwealth,” Katy continued. “He was on his way to Terra, and he didn’t want to risk taking her there; and even he realized that if war did come, Madeleine would be safer here with me than alone on Kesra. No one ever knows when the Kesran government may suddenly decide to kick a long-resident human or other ‘alien’ family out. They have a history of doing that without warning and without reasons that make any sense to us.”
More nods. Some of these people had traveled and some had not, but all of them were sufficiently educated to know that her assessment of Kesran xenophobia was on target.
“The starship was on its way to Terra when it was turned back toward Narsai by a corporate marshal’s hail. All of you have heard, I’m sure, about the destruction of the buildings at my family’s farmstead yesterday?” Katy drew a breath. She suspected that was the only reason her father had been able to put this historic meeting together, because commissioners and councilors alike had been outraged by that event but hadn’t known how to respond to it. Narsai had no weapons. It had depended on Terra’s fleet for its defense ever since the earliest days of settlement, and its internal law enforcement mechanisms made no provision for dealing with an off-world organization committing offenses on Narsatian soil. Could the actions of a Terran corporate marshal even be considered criminal here, or were those actions just as legal on Narsai as on Terra? That was a question on which Commonwealth law had never been tested, because this was the first time a marshal had come to Narsai—on an enforcement action, anyway.
“The marshal had sense enough not to try to arrest my cousins, the farmstead’s proprietors. He took the gen, a gengineered woman escaped from service, that he’d been sent to track down and recover; and he also took my foster son, the Sestian human man who’s lived in my household even since my own sons were killed. And he had a right to do that, because our legal system offers Dan Archer no more protection than it offers to my husband.”
Now Katy deliberately reached out and took Lincoln Casey’s hand. It was important for them to see her acknowledging her connection to him, for them to know that whatever happened she would never abandon her mate in favor of her ties to her birth family.
She said quietly, “Technically I’m just as guilty as they are. Dan brought that woman to my home yesterday morning, half starved from being stranded alone aboard a lifeboat for eighteen months—for so long that if she hadn’t finally made use of a stasis tube, she would have died. She left the ship she was assigned to, as the first gen to be used as a Star Service officer instead of as ordinary crew, because she was pregnant by a nongen. By Dan Archer. They were lovers, before he and all the other scramblers were thrown out of the Service.”
“I didn’t think a gen could have sex unless it was designed to be a courtesan,” remarked one of the older commissioners, who was chief operating officer of Narsai’s central communications system. Since his observation came closer to being a question, he was not out of order; and the looks on other faces around the circle clearly indicated that he was not alone in that belief.
“A gen is just a person like any other, except the DNA that went into that individual was chosen by a scientist in a lab instead of being part of a random conception. A gen isn’t an android, or an extra-smart animal, or a clone whose brain development is deliberately curtailed so that it’s ‘alive’ only to serve as a spare parts source.” Katy looked at each face in that circle, in its turn; and she held Linc’s hand tightly, on her knee where their entwined fingers could be seen by everyone. “Somewhere on our world right now, there’s a woman with three babies inside her who’s wondering whether she’ll be allowed to carry them or if they’ll be taken out of her by force because they have a ‘genetically inferior’ father. And whichever way it happens, she’s also wondering if those babies are going to be allowed to live and grow up—or if they’ll be killed mercifully—or used by the corporation that owns her and owns them, in ways she’s probably trying hard not to think about.”
Every woman in this room was a mother. Each Narsatian woman had her child, even if that required medical intervention to accomplish, because it was a cultural obligation. Most had carried their own pregnancies, and had known at least once the same moment that Katy had known four times over—when the scans that had been done while the baby was in the womb were finally confirmed, when a warm little body was put into her arms and she could inspect her child for the first time. Ten fingers, ten toes; lungs that drew breath, a voice strong enough to squall….
Relief, of the sweetest kind imaginable. And now each woman in this circle was shuddering at the thought of what it would have meant to have that little creature torn out of her arms, and taken away.
“I understand that our system doesn’t protect her, or her babies’ father, or the children she’s carrying,” Katy said now, and looked from face to face again. “And it’s true that if she were a Narsatian woman, she would be encouraged by her physician to have the extra fetus selected out; but we no longer insist on that, it’s optional now when the third child is part of a multiple pregnancy. Our law is silent on whether or not I did anything wrong by aiding her, but because I’ve accepted recall to the Star Service I’m accountable now to a different authority—and if I were to do what my duty says I must do, I’d be calling that corporate marshal and making arrangements to surrender. Not just myself, but my husband also, for whatever action the Terran courts or the Judge Advocate General might want to take against us.”
“You aren’t going to do that, I hope, Katy?” That was her mother’s voice, asking the question with concern but still managing to sound very much like a councilor.
“No. I’m not sure what I am going to do now, actually, because claiming Narsai’s protection for myself but letting my husband go if the marshal asks you to allow his arrest is completely unacceptable. So is just leaving that pregnant gen, and my foster son, where they are now. But all those issues involv
e only a few individual beings—and I’m sure each of you is very much aware that the fate of a few people isn’t all that important compared to everything else that’s happening right now.”
There were nods all around the circle. And when Romanova stopped talking, the commissioner who headed Narsai Control spoke up and claimed the floor.
“Many of us expected that the Rebs would tap you as one of their leaders, Katy,” she said bluntly. “I’ve never understood wanting to fight with anyone, about anything. That’s why we have the relationship with Terra, that’s why we make our payments to the Commonwealth. So that they’ll keep the Star Service operating, and people like you will be there whenever there’s an invader that has to be kept back from our space.”
Romanova nodded. Although Narsai had not faced the possibility of invasion in generations, other Commonwealth worlds had experienced such threats within her lifetime; and there had also been armed conflicts among former Terran colonies, located far away in other sectors. She and Linc had been in on many of those battles, from the time they were new-made ensigns serving under George Fralick’s command until she had attained flag rank. And even after that there had been several years when she was a rear admiral commodoring a starfleet, not a vice admiral stuck in an office.
She responded, “And as long as our people are content to let it be that way, Jangbu, Narsai won’t have a reason to join the conflict. The problem is that if the Rebs do start a war, Narsai is a natural base for Commonwealth forces just as Mortha is the natural base for the Rebs.”
“Mortha can’t be happy about that.” Cabanne Romanova spoke up for the second time, thoughtfully. As she did so, Katy’s mother looked at Katy’s husband.
Linc Casey had never lived on Mortha, he had only visited there a few times—briefly and unhappily, and long ago. His reaction to the implied question was a slight but visible shrug.
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