Matushka

by Nina M. Osier

  “He’s Maddy’s father,” Casey repeated, as he put up a hand and gently brushed at the tears on his wife’s cheeks. “And you did what you had to do, to protect her and to protect your relationship with her. But that’s all it was, Katy. Wasn’t it?”

  She hid her face against him then, and she sobbed. The pain and humiliation and outrage of thirteen years past spilled out with her tears; and with them also came the grief for the love that had still been present—wounded and starved, but lingering—and had died at last, in those moments when Fralick had taken final advantage of that tenderness and in doing so had battered it out of existence forever.

  Sally Greenberg felt the hair rising on the back of her neck, but the cause of that phenomenon wasn’t the transmission she had just received from Narsai Control. What she had been told had astonished her, there was no doubt about that. But being able to surrender assumptions when they were proved false was one skill a starship captain couldn’t live without; so she was already adjusting to idea that “Misties” (as the Narsatians with their fondness for name-shortening had already christened them) from Mistworld had come sailing in here yesterday, and had started negotiating successfully with the local authorities. Misties who were somehow allied with those renegade humans who until today Greenberg had referred to as “Rebs” right along with the rest of her associates, but whom she now had been forcefully reminded had committed no offenses to earn that nickname unless one counted fighting back when a Star Service ship had fired on them without warning.

  She still found it hard to accept that as fine an officer as Paolo Giandrea had done that, but she was obliged to accept it because there were too many trustworthy witnesses to yesterday’s events—Giandrea’s chief medical officer among them. And she did know that every captain was human, herself included, so although it was hard to grasp it certainly was not impossible to believe.

  She had allowed Ambassador Fralick to sit with her in her office while she talked with Narsai Control, and she had given him a ferocious glare every time he had been about to butt in. Now the transmission was over, and he was the one who was glaring at her. So she opened hostilities by asking, “What are you thinking, Ambassador?”

  She wondered whether he still deserved that title or not, since she had heard sector-wide news more recently than he had heard it and he probably didn’t yet know that Kesra had finally evicted its small number of human residents. So although she hadn’t heard specifically that Fralick was included in that expulsion, she rather expected that he had been—and that either the Kesrans were going to let their always lackadaisical participation in the Commonwealth lapse entirely, or they were finally going to appoint someone of their own species to represent them.

  In any case she concurred with the label the freighter captain had used for Fralick. She’d read her history, she knew that once this man had been a valuable diplomat; but now he was just what Angstrom had called him, a stuffed shirt.

  If that wasn’t being too kind. Fralick said, “You’re taking your ship into a trap, Captain.”

  “I don’t think so.” Greenberg’s eyes narrowed. “But I appreciate your concern, Ambassador, and I promise you we’re going to use caution.”

  “Caution? Against creatures that can take over human beings’ bodies?” The diplomat’s voice rose a notch. Plainly that notion frightened him, with a fear that was genuine and not worked up in an effort to convince her she ought to feel it too.

  “That isn’t what the Morthan healer, that Marin fellow, said.” Mentally Greenberg made a note to check with Fleet Command to see whether she really was going to be required to replace her ship’s own staff of Morthan medics when she returned to base at the end of this patrol. She did not want to do that, she couldn’t imagine a sickbay that was stuck using human doctors. “He said that the Misties—”

  “‘Misties’! Give them a cute nickname, and suddenly they’re as safe as pets to have around!” Fralick exploded, then. “Captain, my sons died at Mistworld. All three of them. I never blamed the natives there half as much as I blamed the captain who was playing at being a commodore, who lost them—”

  “Your wife, at that time, as I recall.” Greenberg was too young to have fought in that battle, but it had been required study in command school by the time she’d landed there. “And the thing that amazed me was that after she understood what had really happened, she was able to take charge of the negotiations in spite of her personal losses. And of her physical condition at the time, I might add.”

  “And now my last child is down there on Narsai with her, and her mindfucker of a second husband. And the woman’s selling her own people out all over again!” Fralick’s face was flushed now, dark red with anger. “Captain, the people you just talked to admit that she’s at the heart of this mess too. You have to go in ready to fight, in fact the smart thing would be to—”

  Greenberg cut him off. “I’ll decide what’s the smart thing for me to do, thank you, Mr. Fralick,” she said crisply, and she stood up. “Dismissed.”

  The last time a Star Service officer had said that to him, George Fralick had been a young captain honorably resigning his commission in order to accept his first diplomatic assignment. He had proudly returned his commodore’s salute, and he had left the man’s office with his head held high.

  Now Fralick stormed out of Sally Greenberg’s office, reflecting as he went that she was a lowly commander and an idiot and…

  And forty years of carefully controlled anger, used rather than released even while he had taught his wife her place by forcing her to yield to him that one last time before she had left his house—even when he had snatched Madeleine from sickbay aboard the Archangel, and had taken the ungrateful child away from that mindfucker Casey to safety on the corporate marshal’s shuttle—yes, even during the incredibly infuriating moment of humiliation he had just endured from Sally Greenberg—spilled over. Inside George Fralick’s brain, the pressure became too much and an artery exploded.

  He was dead before his body hit the deck outside Captain Greenberg’s office hatch, and even the Morthan surgeon who examined him less than five minutes later could do nothing to change that fact.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Mum, what’s going to happen?” Maddy Fralick was choosing, for now at least, to go back to using her father’s surname even though she understood that was not consistent with Narsatian customs. And Katy Romanova had not protested that decision, she still had no intention of doing anything that would diminish her former husband in their young daughter’s eyes.

  “I don’t know, love. Except that whether or not I get approval of my request to return to retirement status, I’m not going to leave you and Linc and go back to Terra.” Katy smiled, and reached out to ruffle her child’s coppery hair.

  Maddy made an undignified face. She was beginning to think of such caresses as childish, after only a few days of allowing herself to enjoy them fully now that she was with her mother full time and finally could have such maternal attentions without a disapproving presence such as her father had always been.

  She was still grieving for him, of course. That was natural, it was only to be expected. But she was coping with a thirteen-year-old’s considerable resilience, and she was both an intelligent girl and an unusually realistic one for her age. She realized that life as anything but Kesra’s ambassador would have been a tremendous loss of status for her father, and if he’d had to die at least he had done so without being required to face that particular awful news.

  She said now, “I meant about the Misties. I know it’ll take about four weeks before the Raven makes it to New Orient and either they come back, or some other ship does, to bring us a new comm booster relay so we can talk to Terra again. What’ll happen if they tell us then that we can’t trade with the Misties after all, that we’re supposed to be fighting them instead of helping them learn how to get enough food out of their land?”

  Again Katy said, “I don’t know, love. But I do know that Narsai is an
independent world, that our participation in the Commonwealth is just as voluntary as Kesra’s was. As long as our people believed there were ‘Rebs’ out there getting ready to attack us, we thought we needed the Commonwealth to protect us; but we may not think that way now. Not if it’s put to the test, which I hope it won’t be.”

  “What about the Morthan doctors that the Commonwealth doesn’t want anymore? And what about the gens?”

  Katy sighed. Thirteen was in its way as bad an age for questions, as three had been! But she said patiently, glad to have her girl here to pester her on this quiet evening while they sat inside their little house because it was now too cold outside on the terrace, “The Morthan doctors will find other places to work, Maddy. The Star Service may succeed in eliminating them from its ranks, but I really doubt that official xenophobia is going to extend to every single world in the whole Commonwealth. And even if it does—we’re only just learning this, but the Commonwealth isn’t the galaxy.”

  “And the gens? Will they all be freed someday, like Rachel and her babies?”

  “I hope so, but I’m afraid that may take a lot longer,” Katy said. From being a haven for just herself and her husband, this tiny home had gone to being filled to its capacity. Although it would be months yet before the three little lives now sheltered by incubation fields at MinTar Medical could come home, their parents already had. Dan’s bedroom was occupied now by both Dan and Rachel, who would stay there until their family was “born” and grew old enough to travel safely. Then they had ideas about going to Mistworld, although right now those were only ideas. Time would tell. At any rate Rachel was starting to recover, was beginning to behave like the starship exec she had been—and Katy had decided that she liked her.

  Before she had pitied her for her situation, and had been awed by her courage; but she hadn’t been able to pin down the other woman’s real personality enough to be sure just what she was like. She had trusted Dan, though, and now she could see that her trust had been well-placed. Rachel Kane might have begun her adult life with only a rudimentary idea of what being human really meant, but she had learned.

  Learned well enough so that tonight she and Dan were out making up after a genuine fight, the kind of quarrel every couple had from time to time but that they had never before experienced. It wasn’t fun, but it was normal. And while “normal” was not a good thing in and of itself, in this case it was profoundly reassuring.

  The front door opened and closed. Katy looked up from her daughter, who of course was the other cause of this home’s being filled to capacity—she had been installed in the third bedroom, and it was already a typically adolescent mess!—and then she rose so quickly that she almost leaped up, like a girl again herself, to embrace her husband as he came through the living room and into the kitchen. “Linc! You’re late.”

  It wasn’t a complaint, it was a cry of relief. Linc wrapped his arms around her and held her close, kissed her as if Maddy wasn’t even there.

  Maddy didn’t mind. One thing about her that was not like most girls of thirteen, was that she was not embarrassed by her mother and stepfather displaying their affection for each other. That was something she’d always longed for in her first home, and had never been able to see there.

  Although for the life of her, Maddy thought now, she couldn’t imagine Mum kissing Papa like that—even though of course at one time in their lives they must have been in the habit of doing a great deal more than kissing. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here, nor would any of her three brothers have been conceived.

  Something, or rather someone, touched Maddy’s thoughts; and that someone was not Linc. She frowned, because although the touch wasn’t frightening it seemed strange to her.

  Her parents (she thought of them both that way, and in doing so had no sense of disloyalty to George Fralick’s memory) had finally finished kissing each other. They were standing still, with Mum’s head on Linc’s shoulder, and they were talking together so softly that even from just a couple of meters away Maddy could not make out their words. And of course she couldn’t hear their thoughts unless Linc wanted her to, and right now he did not.

  She almost hated to disturb them, but she had to. The question was going to burst out anyway if she tried to hold it in. She asked, “Mum, can dead people ever talk to live people?”

  Katy turned, and tucked her shoulder under Linc’s arm so she could face her daughter without moving away from her husband. She responded with a puzzled, “Why do you want to know that, Maddy?”

  “Because Healer Marin just told me that another ship’s come in from Mistworld, and the Others have a surprise for you on it. He asked me to tell you, because he was afraid it might be too much of a surprise if someone didn’t get you ready for it first.” Maddy frowned again. “People who lose their bodies on Mistworld—they don’t always ‘die,’ you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” Katy said, and she moved to a chair. She had a feeling she needed to be sitting for whatever she was going to hear next. She kept Linc’s hand in hers, and drew him with her until he was seated beside her with his arm once more draped protectively around her shoulders.

  Ample shoulders, but George was no longer around to know or care if she was “fat” by his reckoning. And Linc didn’t care in the least, Linc made love to her body but it was Katy herself with whom he was in love. And Linc, bless him, knew the difference.

  “Having trouble with the words, hon?” Linc asked Maddy now, using a typically human paternal endearment and taking tremendous pleasure in being allowed to do so.

  “Yes. I need you to help me, Linc.” The child looked at him with Katy’s eyes, and if he had intended to hesitate that look banished any such ideas from his mind.

  He let down the barriers. And somehow, incredibly, from Kerle Marin’s mind on a Mistworld starship to the three joined minds in the kitchen of Katy Romanova’s small home in MinTar, there flowed thoughts that two of those minds recognized.

  “Ewan! Marcus! Bryce!”

  Katy sagged, unaware that her body had to be supported against her husband’s arm to keep her from toppling out of her chair. It couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible…!

  But it was.

  THE END

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