Matushka

by Nina M. Osier

  He wasn’t going to let this little girl down, any more than he would have let Katy down. He no longer felt embarrassed or cheated because he was physically sheltered at Narsai Control. The two females out there on the winter plains were relying on him, and his very physical safety was going to make it possible for him to focus exclusively on them at a time when his being able to do so might make every difference.

  But something was wrong. The people here were agitated, they were talking to each other in raised voices and they were afraid. He wished he had sought a private room, now, and that he hadn’t chosen to sit in a vacant controller’s chair so that if he needed to see what was going on in Narsai’s skies he could do so.

  What was going on in Narsai’s skies wasn’t a problem, but what was happening in space within the planet’s star system decidedly was. He told Maddy, silently, that he must shift his attention away from her for just a moment; he reminded her that she could regain that attention at any time, she only had to let him know what she needed. He knew that Katy was already aware of whatever was going on, and that his mind was only following hers as he refocused.

  No longer did he see the instrument panel in front of Madeleine Fralick. He saw the viewscreens at Narsai Control, and in their holo-imaged depths moved sixteen predatory shapes.

  One of them, the largest, was Archangel. Fifteen of them varied in size, but those fifteen maneuvered with deadly precision.

  The heavy cruiser lasted longer than Casey would have expected. Giandrea was a good captain, damned good. But with those odds, the Matushka herself might not have been able to get out in one piece; and Giandrea, to his credit or his folly, wasn’t trying to do that. He had attempted to get far enough clear of Narsai so that the planet’s orbiting infrastructure would not be damaged, but outright flight from the battle clearly was not his intention—that he might have pulled off.

  No, he was only trying to get clear enough to fight back. Trying to defend the world below against this flock of raptors, which was all Casey could think of as he watched them dipping and swirling and seeking an opening in the Archangel’s defenses.

  There were birds like that on Sestus 3, where he had grown up. They were carrion-birds, primarily; but from time to time a flock of them would attack a living animal, and when they did that it looked just like this.

  Just as ugly, and just as hopeless. Except that animals cried out when they were hurt, and the Archangel couldn’t do that. Not as she appeared in the viewscreens of Narsai Control, anyway.

  Such a terrible silence. Giandrea, the captain who had risked not just his career and his own life, but also his family’s future, to give Rachel Kane a chance at her freedom. Kerle Marin, the healer who was Linc’s own cousin by clanstribe reckoning as well as in species; who had kept him alive, and who had encouraged Dan Archer when Casey’s foster son had been under the surface of the Romanov Farmstead and awaiting capture by the corporate marshal by giving Archer the simple knowledge that someone knew what was happening and that help was being planned. Those were the only two people Linc knew for sure on board that ship, but considering how many officers he’d known during his career—and especially how many he had trained, during his tenure as commander of the Academy—the odds were that if he ever saw this particular casualty list, he was going to recognize many more than just two of the names on it.

  Archangel took six of her tormentors with her. But finally she died, in a burst of released energy that even when translated through a holo-screen was almost blinding.

  Linc felt Katy’s bitterness, and knew that she had witnessed it also from wherever the Archangel’s shuttle was located at this moment. There had been no time to get it back to its mother ship, Giandrea hadn’t issued a recall order and whoever had command of the shuttle had had brains enough not to attempt that on his own.

  But Fralick didn’t know what had happened, because Maddy did not know. Casey realized that as soon as he thought to direct his attention back to her, and he carefully screened out all that he had just seen as he did so.

  Fralick was concentrating on going to the Marshal Service shuttle’s hatch, to assist as the two prisoners were transferred from the civilian aircar. And while he was doing so, Casey saw to it that little Maddy quietly transferred control of all the shuttle’s systems—starting with its helm—to the co-pilot’s panel.

  Good; there was no provision for the helm to ask who was giving it commands. The Marshal Service was seldom guilty of raw hubris, but Casey almost grinned when he realized that in this one thing they were sadly over confident. Anyone could operate this shuttle, it requested no I.D. whatsoever! It allowed a thirteen-year-old to take control, and then to lock that control in.

  The trick would be to keep the damnable corporate jackal from killing his prey rather than risk surrendering it alive to someone else, Katy thought as her pilot brought the Archangel’s shuttle down almost on top of the larger craft. They were too close to be fired upon, literally; and as the belly doors retracted a tangle-net dropped into the space between the Narsatian aircar and the Marshal Service shuttle.

  It surrounded the small man who had to be Vargas, and of course it also enveloped his two prisoners. Designed to restrain a prisoner from committing self-harm as well as from lashing out at others, the net tightened only in response to struggling within its strands; but it did that relentlessly. And it knew the difference between living flesh, which it would not crush or even compress dangerously, and a weapon.

  Vargas lost the blaster rifle he had been holding, it was flattened. But the web did not crush the rifle’s power pac, it also “knew” that to do so would cause an explosion.

  Vargas uttered one curse. He did not fight; he let the web take him, relaxed within its strands.

  He had never been more dangerous than he was at this moment, a predator caught in a trap but still conscious and physically unharmed. Just restrained, and furious, and ready to fight the instant he once again became able to do so.

  If Dan Archer had possessed the power to kill Vargas at that moment, he would have done exactly that. And he would have felt he was doing the universe a service, because the look Vargas sent in Rachel Kane’s direction was the most intense look of hate that Archer had ever seen on an otherwise human face. The corporate marshal was helpless, in a sense it would have been a cowardly thing to shoot him while a tangle-net held him fast; but that was probably the only time when it was going to be possible to kill a creature as ruthless as this one, and Archer knew it.

  From the shuttle above them a widely dispersed stun-beam flashed blue. Archer had just time enough to wonder whether Rachel Kane and her unborn babies could absorb that energy safely before he lost consciousness.

  Bringing a physician—a civilian one, anyway—along on this sort of a ride was definitely a first for Katy Romanova. But although she had gone through three pregnancies resulting in four healthy babies while on active duty status, retreating to Kesra only when in her final trimester (with Maddy, in her last month actually), she hadn’t been subjected to the kind of physical battering that she knew Rachel Kane might be in for before this day’s work was over. So she had asked for Cab Barrett’s company, and her friend and doctor had joined her immediately while the Harbormaster and the Chief Constable had been left behind.

  Stunning, a good idea? Of course not, Barrett said when asked, but neither was the stasis that had saved her patient’s life earlier; and one thing was certain, getting Kane away from that damned jackal was the top priority right now. Whether or not anyone else wanted to come out and say so, keeping the children she was carrying alive had to be secondary.

  Katy nodded, and when the time came to use the wide-dispersion stun beam she did so. There was no better way, not unless she wanted to try to hit Vargas only with something more deadly—and she wasn’t about to attempt to work that closely with three people inside the same tangle-net.

  The hatch of the marshal’s shuttle was still open. On the monitor she saw George Fralick coming to
its edge, which placed him inside the airlock but did not expose him to fire from the larger ship that still hovered overhead, gently suspended on its antigravs until it could retract the net with its three passengers.

  Fralick had a blade in his hand. He was going to cut the marshal loose, and Romanova was sure he knew how to calibrate that blade’s settings so that it would be effective against a tangle-net.

  She said within her mind, “Linc! Have Maddy shut the hatch, now!”

  Her husband was still reeling from what had just happened out in space, and all around him at Narsai Control people were scrambling to try to figure out how to defend their world against the incoming Rebel ships. She, too, was profoundly distressed by the Archangel’s loss—and how Narsai thought it was going to do anything, since it was a world without weapons, she did not know—but halting what they’d begun here was not going to help those larger events one bit. So she made that demand, and felt Linc gathering his resources and relaying it, and knew that he was deliberately and successfully shielding Maddy from the knowledge they both had of what was happening far beyond Narsai’s northern hemisphere winter skies.

  The hatch slammed shut at Fralick’s back. Katy could not see it happening, of course, but she could see her ex-husband’s reaction. He turned, and stopped trying to free Vargas.

  “Retract net!” she ordered her own people, and then gave Cab Barrett a grin. The Narsatian doctor was pale under her skin’s natural olive darkness. If Katy who had fought so many other battles had been disturbed by the one that had just been lost in space above them, then Barrett must have been flabbergasted by what she had seen; but somehow she still managed to smile back.

  Lives were being saved, and that was what Cab Barrett’s existence was all about.

  “I’m going down to the other shuttle now,” Romanova announced. Suddenly that seemed to be her job, somehow George Fralick down there alone with Maddy seemed to be her responsibility. Her unfinished business, that needed to be resolved right now before she had to start dealing with the new crisis that was inbound from space.

  “Incoming teleport,” the shuttle’s copilot announced. The two crewpeople from Archangel had gone on doing their jobs here, in spite of what they knew had happened to their ship and to their comrades; and Romanova thought as she watched them that she had never seen more complete professionalism in the face of terror and loss.

  “Linc? Is it—”

  Romanova’s thought was answered instantly. “Yes. After you wanted her to slam the hatch, the next thing seemed to be to get her out of there before Fralick can get it open. Which ought to give him a good reason not to fire on you while you’re heading back here, I think?” Her husband sounded quite pleased with himself.

  The person who materialized on the shuttle’s small porter platform leaped down from it the moment she had control of her limbs, and she threw herself against Katy. And with all thoughts of going anywhere right now banished from her mind, Romanova gathered her daughter in and held her as gratefully as she had in the first moments after Maddy’s birth.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Ma’am.” The shuttle pilot spoke softly to Romanova, after she had finished hugging her child and as she was about to leave the cabin for the cargo bay where the three people in the tangle-net were reposing in unconsciousness.

  “I know,” Romanova said, just as softly. “But he’s committed no crime in the legal, provable sense, Lieutenant; and he’s my little girl’s father.”

  It did seem like a gross tactical error, to fly off and leave George Fralick in possession of a warp-capable shuttle at the start of what promised to be either a hostile occupation or—what? This was a situation unlike any of the others Romanova had faced during her career, though; and she could tell herself without stretching her credibility that destroying or disabling that shuttle in order to kill Fralick would be a stupid waste unless it was the only way to prevent him from killing someone else. Which it wasn’t, not yet anyway.

  She said, “Circle back, Lieutenant. But give me time to deal with what’s down in our cargo bay.”

  To Maddy she said firmly, “Stay up here, love. Cab, come with me.”

  A cornered animal, that was still what Marshal Vargas reminded her of when she saw him lying in the tangle-net’s mesh. She said to the doctor, “Scan him first. Stay out of his reach while you do it! If he’s not still dead to the world, I don’t want to find that out the hard way.”

  She herself deactivated the sections of the net that held Rachel Kane and Daniel Archer captive. She was no physician, but like most Service officers she was a trained field medic. She scanned Kane first, and was able to assure herself that the woman’s vitals weren’t shocky. And within her abdomen there were still three heartbeats, although Romanova’s knowledge base stopped her there. She could not tell whether those heartbeats sounded the way they ought to, or if they were too fast—too slow—?

  Whatever, they were alive anyway. And if Kane was getting ready to miscarry, Romanova thought, she ought not to have vitals within acceptable limits. So the admiral moved next to her foster son, and scanned his body and grinned with relief.

  Dan was fine. Healthy as the proverbial horse. Even as she finished the scan he stirred, and groaned, and tried to sit up.

  She wanted to help him and comfort him, but she did not dare to take the time. She turned toward the still-imprisoned marshal instead, and saw him moving within the tangle-net just in time.

  Cab Barrett, for all her brilliance as a doctor, knew nothing about self-defense. Vargas must have gone deliberately limp as soon as he gained enough awareness to feel the mesh around him, which meant he had some play inside it now. It would tighten as he tried to use that play, of course; but he could reach toward the Narsatian woman as she bent over him, and he was doing that.

  Romanova’s blaster left her belt without her giving it conscious thought. She brought the beam to its tightest possible focus, to avoid hitting Barrett, and she fired.

  “One less jackal in the universe,” she muttered as she stood there afterward, her breast heaving because the incident had taken her so completely by surprise. But she was pleased, in some corner of her mind, that her reflexes still were all that they should be.

  Barrett had uttered a shriek, and now she was shaking. But after a moment she took her hands away from her face and she said in a choked voice, “He would have killed me, wouldn’t he, Katy?”

  “Yes. Or if he thought he could make it work, he’d have used you for a shield to force me to release him. Anyway, he won’t do anything more to hurt anyone.” The moment those words were out of her mouth, though, Romanova sensed their wrongness.

  What was it she’d heard about marshals, through the Service grapevine that functioned across even the most unbelievable interstellar distances? They almost never died in the line of duty, but when they did….

  She grabbed Barrett and hauled her across the cargo bay. She hit two controls on the nearest panel, simultaneously. One to set up a forcefield that would keep everything on her side of it in place for the next few moments—herself, Barrett, and the two humans who were trying so hard to wake up. The other to open one of the belly doors again, the one on which the corporate marshal’s body rested.

  The explosion still made the deckplates quiver, but it was outside the shuttle and they were inside it. They were unharmed.

  “Matushka?” Dan Archer spoke the familiar title both interrogatively and shakily. He was sitting up now, and his eyes had found Romanova.

  “Mum!” That was Maddy, crying out to her mother via comm.

  “Katy?” Linc’s voice inside her mind, concerned and tender.

  “It’s okay, it’s over,” Romanova told all of them, and drew a breath to still her own body’s impulse to tremble. That had been close, much too close.

  Rachel Kane cried out, and drew her knees up. And that caused Cab Barrett to hurry to her patient’s side, her own recent terror forgotten.

  “Admiral, we’re almost back to
where we left the marshal’s shuttle.” That voice from the cabin had recalled Romanova from the cargo bay, after she had once again closed its belly doors. She could not stay with the young woman who was in such clear physical distress, she could only leave her in the hands of her lover and a very competent physician.

  They would probably prefer to lay her out down there, anyway, instead of trying to get her up into the cabin where there was no place for her to lie down and no room for anyone to work over her.

  George. What in hell to do about George? That was a question Catherine Romanova seemed to have spent far more of her life asking herself than really ought to have been necessary, and she’d never asked it with greater exasperation—or with more at stake—than she asked it now

  Linc’s mind said to hers, “Katy, if you need to kill him in order to be safe, do it!”

  “If I have to, I will,” she answered, and her mental tone was that of a promise. “But not unless it’s necessary, Linc.”

  He didn’t understand that. The image that had inadvertently passed from her thoughts to his a few hours ago, in a library conference room where an entire world’s leaders had been assembled, had made it impossible for him to comprehend why she hadn’t killed George Fralick long ago. And that was a matter that she and her husband would have to work out between them, when they had leisure again for a personal conversation; but right now it had no place in her thoughts, and allowing it to distract her could get everyone who was with her killed. So she pushed it away, out of her consciousness, and was relieved when after an instant’s rebellion Linc followed her lead and did the same thing.

  “What’s going on with the Rebs?” she asked him, and also asked the shuttle’s crew, as she came back into the cabin and took a moment to squeeze Maddy’s shoulder in reassurance.