Matushka

by Nina M. Osier

  Once on Terra, he would deal with this Captain Giandrea and with whoever had made that stupid bastard think he could get away with turning gens—and thieves who stole them—over to sentimental idiots like the Narsatian authorities. Not that Fralick personally gave a damn about this so-called Rachel Kane, and that Daniel Archer had survived the Triad’s destruction was an error he meant to see corrected. Fralick detested that pet junior of Katy’s, whom she had adopted as if having another young man around could somehow make up for the sons she had lost with her incompetence at Mistworld, nearly as much as he hated Lincoln Casey. But he did give a damn, considerably more than that in fact, about Giandrea’s allowing Casey to escape after the Morthan pervert had invaded little Maddy’s thoughts and had come so terribly close to causing the child’s death.

  How to make Casey pay for that? Fralick was going to find a way, but not right now. Right now getting Maddy as far away from the mindfucker as possible was her father’s top priority.

  CHAPTER 20

  “I knew it,” Romanova said softly. “I knew no corporate marshal would ever obey an order to give up a prisoner to anyone except the business that commissioned him.”

  She and Casey, and the two Narsatian officials who had taken on the job of assisting them, were at Narsai Control now. She had spent considerable time, longer than she had wanted to devote to that business, on comm to far-off Luna talking first to Fleet Admiral Tanaka and then also to Tanaka’s boss. And then she had listened while Captain Paolo Giandrea spoke to the Terran Ambassador to Narsai, and had smiled as she heard another transmission coming in from Luna (incredible, considering the power it took to punch through at this distance! How many real-time transmissions did that make, within the past standard day?) confirming what Giandrea had said.

  The people inside that compound had their own sovereignty to uphold. If they permitted Marshal Vargas to bring his prisoners into their sanctuary, their little bit of legal Terran soil here on Narsai, then they would be honor-bound (or at least legally bound) to release the two “Narsatian citizens” at the heart of this messy situation; but they would have to do it in defiance of the Marshal, and that they did not want to do. So someone inside had commed to the approaching vehicle, and had told Vargas he would not be allowed to land on embassy property.

  Vargas had come about, of course. And now the corporate marshal’s long range shuttle was landing, on the plain outside MinTar, and the in-atmosphere vehicle was meeting it there to transfer Vargas and his captives. To hell with orders given by Terra to its ambassador here, the marshal was responsible only to those who had hired him—and he did not dare go back to them empty-handed.

  “He’ll do what Hansie Braeden did with the Triad, if Giandrea tractors him,” Casey said quietly now. “He’d rather immolate himself and his prisoners along with him, than give them up.”

  “I know,” his wife answered. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the back of a flight controller’s chair, and leaned over the man’s shoulder and watched the screen on which all in-atmosphere traffic in this district was being tracked. On other screens were all the satellites and habitats and trade-ships that orbited the planet, and among them was one blip that was the Archangel.

  Like the being for which it was named, the starship could easily have reached down and snatched anything as tiny as an aircar from Narsai’s surface. But no aircar was built to stand vacuum, so that wasn’t a solution; and Linc was right about what Vargas would do once he had his captives aboard his shuttle. He would tear the small ship apart before he would allow it to be tractored up to Archangel, knowing that once there he would lose custody of his prisoners and they would be sent back down to Narsai as free people.

  He would probably give up Archer, if someone suggested that possibility. But giving up the gen he had been commissioned to reclaim wasn’t an option. Losing her, let alone surrendering her willingly, would be professional suicide.

  And Katy wasn’t going to risk having him immolate himself, because her child was aboard that shuttle and Maddy would die too if it was destroyed.

  Maddy. It all depended, now, on a little girl of thirteen and on her connection to a man who was not her father in the biological sense—who hadn’t raised her, either—but who was connected to her, mind to mind. With a bond that would have been fading at this stage in her life if he had been her parent, but that instead was asserting itself with the power of something that had been denied expression for far too long a time.

  “Let me see the control panel, Maddy.” Lincoln Casey’s physical eyes were closed, the better to focus on what he was seeing via Madeleine Fralick’s eyes. “Can you reach everything?”

  “Of course I can, I’m as tall as Mum now if I’m not a little bit taller.” The girl’s mental tone was tart. She sounded very much like Katy when Katy was annoyed.

  “Good.” Linc smiled inwardly. He knew just how to handle that irritation; having the child behave as the mother would have was incredibly convenient for him right now.

  He was aware that Katy was leaving him, because for him to quarterback what Maddy needed to do it was best that he stay right here at Narsai Control. (Where had that term come from, anyway? He knew what “quarter” meant, both as the fourth part of a whole and as a word meaning “mercy.” “Back” was a body part, and a direction. But how had the compound of the two words come to mean “to give direction to others”? He was going to have to check that out in a linguistics database, the next time he thought of it while he wasn’t trying to do it.)

  Katy would be boarding a shuttle, this one sent down to her from the Archangel. Nowhere on or near Narsai was there such a thing as an armed vessel, small or large. There were civilian ships in orbit that carried arms, of course, but none of them had a role to play in this situation. So Admiral Romanova required, and was being given, backup from the Star Service to implement the orders of the Defense Ministry concerning the release of two civilian citizens of this world.

  There was another good reason for Casey to stay put, and it wasn’t one that made him proud. The last thing Katy needed right now was for him to wind up in enemy hands again. He had spent more than forty years as an active duty officer, from plebe to commander of the Star Service Academy; and that meant he should not feel the slightest need to prove his courage, that he should not be ashamed if this one time it was best for everyone if he kept himself out of harm’s way. Yet to stay here in this safe place, and work through the eyes and ears and hands of his wife’s young daughter while Katy herself flew off into what could swiftly turn into a combat situation, galled him to his core.

  You’re a civilian now, dammit. Accept that, and help Katy and be glad you have a means to do that instead of having to just sit on your ass and wait this out, Casey told himself sternly.

  A few months ago he had wanted to be a civilian. He had been appalled by the Star Service’s actions in expelling the scramblers, and he had been physically and mentally worn down by living as an atypical Morthan on Terra.

  Never until he took command of the Academy had he been required to go regularly into public places among civilians, and find himself the target of hateful stares because he had golden eyes but wore a command officer’s imposing braid instead of a healer’s innocuous insignia. During his years as a starship exec, and then as a flag adjutant, he hadn’t had to deal pleasantly with diplomats like that toad Fralick (how could he once have looked up to that man as his first captain, anyway?); hadn’t had to socialize with them. When he was obliged to talk to them, which had sometimes happened during his tenure as a flag officer’s aide, he had done so from what he now realized was a position of superior power—perceived superior power, anyway—and if they had scorned him personally, it hadn’t mattered.

  But it mattered very much, when he was in command of a service academy instead of a ship. Even though in theory the Academy was run no differently than any other base would be, even though he supposedly had the same absolute power as would any captain aboard his own command,
theory sometimes was just that. The fact was that he had loved “his” scramblers, and their adjunct training program, because while he was among them he knew that the respect he received belonged to him—and that it was respect, and not fear of his authority and of his power to punish. Not that the cadets and faculty members of the Academy’s standard programs did not respect him, too, because they did; but he was not at ease with them, and enduring almost daily doses of civilian contempt exacerbated his discomfort until the time he spent with the scramblers became his psychological relief valve.

  Then that safety valve had been taken away, a whole generation of officers who’d been smart enough and brave enough to merit field commissions had been betrayed (jettisoned like refuse, actually); and he had been given the task of telling them so. And something inside him had collapsed.

  A Morthan who could get sick. That was the final insult. Not only was he unable to touch the mind of anyone except his wife, which meant that he was crippled in his ability to use the gifts of his mother’s species; now he’d lost the one advantage that his heritage really had conferred upon him, his unfailing physical health.

  Yes, at the time when he’d come to live here with Katy he had wanted to be a civilian. But now it broke his heart that she was going out there, back in uniform (fetched from home when?) and with a blaster belt worn legally and openly because Star Service officers could carry arms even on Narsai, and he had to stay behind and wait for her.

  Linc, are you there? Don’t let go of me!

  A little girl’s thought, brave but frightened. In his moment of self-pity he had let his mind wander, and had almost failed in the one task he could perform right now.

  And this he could do precisely because of who and what nature had made him. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad to be Lincoln Casey, after all, because although any Morthan hybrid could have touched Maddy telepathically there was no other who could have guided her through what she might soon have to do.

  Healers didn’t know how to pilot, how to shoot, how to fight. He did know those things; they had been his life. And now that knowledge was going to be lent to young Maddy, and with any luck it would keep her alive at least—and hopefully, it would keep Dan Archer and Rachel Kane alive as well.

  Paolo Giandrea stretched out on his office sofa, a luxury that went with command of anything the size of a heavy cruiser or above. Roomy compartments were one of the percs that went with being assigned at this exalted level.

  In a few minutes things were going to come together down there on a northern plain of Narsai, and he had left instructions that he should be awakened when that was about to happen. Not that his exec, the fellow who had replaced Rachel Kane and who definitely wasn’t a gen, could not have managed very well on his own; but Giandrea would have felt that he was abandoning Admiral Romanova, and Dan Archer, and Rachel herself, if he had not made it his business to be on the bridge while what he suspected just might be the first-ever rescue of a piece of human “property” from the hands of a corporate marshal was being accomplished.

  Besides, he didn’t trust Fralick. And Fralick was in the middle of this, too.

  Apparently he himself had managed to get away with the role he had played in Kane’s escape from her owners. No one, Marshal Vargas included, seemed to suspect that the gen had had his assistance in her flight from the Archangel eighteen months earlier. Giandrea was vastly relieved about that, not only for the sake of his own hide (capital punishment for grand theft had been reinstituted on Terra a few centuries earlier); but also because being a thief’s children could bar his youngsters from higher education, and certainly would blackball their entrance into any of the major professions. He still wondered why he had taken that kind of a risk for Kane, but the fact was that he still had trouble forcing himself to believe that the finest executive officer he’d ever had was a gen and not just a rather poorly socialized young woman.

  Dammit all, he couldn’t have let his friend—his friend!—be forced to submit to a medical procedure she didn’t want, be deprived of children she had never expected she’d be able to bear. Giandrea’s children meant more to him than he knew how to articulate, so he had had no trouble at all comprehending that Kane was willing to risk dying rather than give hers up.

  That was a no-brainer. And therefore, helping her had also been a no-brainer.

  He neither particularly liked nor disliked Morthans, but treating a retired officer the way Captain Casey had been treated was also a repulsive thing. And he hoped that as part of whatever was about to happen, Admiral Romanova would get her daughter back; he understood that Ambassador Fralick’s custody of the girl had been perfectly legal, and no doubt the man did love the child, but to keep her from her mother all these years was another thing that just wasn’t right.

  A lot of things weren’t right, and like so many other officers Paolo Giandrea was proud that as a member of the Star Service he could sometimes fix a few of them. Not as many as he wished, but some; and that was more than most people were able to say.

  His comm whistled. His exec’s voice said, “Captain, the Marshal’s shuttle has landed on Narsai. And our shuttle has picked up Admiral Romanova, and they’re going in.”

  There was commotion on the bridge, where Commander Tarag should be waiting politely for Giandrea to acknowledge so he could sign off. Instead his voice carried sharply through the commlink even though he wasn’t speaking into its pickup. “What? How long, and how many ships?”

  Giandrea knew. He swung himself off the sofa, glad he hadn’t given himself the indulgence of loosening his uniform or removing his boots while he rested, and he dashed out of his office.

  He needed to be on the bridge now, all right, but what happened to a few people down on the winter plains of Narsai no longer seemed very important to him. When he got to the bridge his exec was staring at a viewscreen that showed fifteen incoming bogeys.

  Impossible. The Rebs had ships, some of them bought at those damn fool surplus auctions when it would have made better sense to scrap any outmoded vessel or weapon for its components than to sell it to someone who might turn around and throw it back at the Commonwealth’s own forces someday; some of them refitted civilian vessels, some of them strange alien rigs that they’d acquired through alliances that no sane group of humans would ever have made. But what were they doing at Narsai, in force? Because fifteen ships was a fleet, in anyone’s language, and those had to be Rebs.

  Damn. Tanaka had argued for placing just such a fleet of their own here at Narsai, and he had been told that the locals would not like it—which was true, but irrelevant—and that the resources were needed elsewhere.

  Well, the verdamtig resources were needed here today for sure. And Paolo Giandrea had just his one ship, which even though it was probably more powerful than any four of those Rebs was nevertheless incapable of fighting using fleet tactics while it was by itself.

  He was going to make his one ship count for all it could, though. Giandrea moved to his command chair, and said to Tarag in a calm voice that was meant to soothe his own apprehension fully as much as everyone else’s, “Report, if you please, Mr. Tarag.”

  This was why they trained. No one could ever truly be ready for a moment like this one, but Paolo Giandrea and his people were as near to it as any band of warriors had been since humans first began escalating the quarrel of one man with another into organized battles of group against group.

  The first concern was to get clear of Narsai, both so he could maneuver freely and so that the planet would be spared any inadvertent damage from the coming conflict. Taking out satellites and habitats on which civilians depended was a tactic for terrorists, not something he would do and he hoped not something the Rebs would do. After all, their whole problem was that they needed what Narsai and Sestus 4 and other such worlds produced, wasn’t it? So it would make no sense, aside from being completely immoral, for them to damage Narsai’s ability to go on growing and exporting crops or Sestus 4’s ability to mine and ship ores.
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  Someone needed to tell the Rebs that, though. They came in too fast, so that it was not possible for the Archangel to get completely clear of Narsatian space before the shooting started.

  CHAPTER 21

  “I won’t have to do anything to hurt my papa, will I?”

  Maddy Fralick sounded like the child she still was. Linc focused his thoughts on her, with Katy there too but at a separate level—right now there was no need for him to cause mother’s and daughter’s minds to touch, and if he did so he suspected that both would be confused.

  Neither of them needed that. Katy had to concentrate, and so did Maddy.

  “I won’t ask you to,” he assured the little girl. “And remember, Maddy, I can’t make you do anything and I’m not going to try. All I’m going to do is guide you, and I won’t even do that if you’d rather I didn’t.”

  “I don’t want Papa to take me to Earth on this ship,” the child said, with a firmness that was all Katy. “I still love him, but he’s not like he was on Kesra. I’m scared, Linc. I want to stay on Narsai with Mum, and with you.”

  “And we want you to do that.” He sent the assurance back with all of his mind’s warmth, and realized that for the first time in his life he had an idea of what it might mean to be a father. He’d called Dan his foster son, and he had nurtured more young officers than he could remember during the years of his service career; but this was different. This was being a father in the sense that a Morthan was, that so few males of his kind had been able to experience since humans had first found their world and the interbreeding among the two species had begun.

  It was something he was glad he hadn’t missed. To hell with being able to touch just anyone’s mind, as his fully gifted cousins could do. It was likely that none of the males among them would ever understand what this felt like, to have a young mind known during its coming to self-awareness in its mother’s womb turn to him in love and recognition and cling to him in trust.