Mistworld

by Nina M. Osier

  “Who told you it was partly your fault that Ambassador Fralick died, Madeleine?” Doctor Cab's voice had an edge, now. A dangerous edge. And nothing good had ever come to Maddy Fralick, in all her short lifetime, as a result of someone calling her by her actual given name instead of by its diminutive.

  The girl answered the question anyway. “No one said that to me exactly. Not that I remember. But I helped Mum and Linc get me away from Papa, when he wanted to take me with him and leave for Terra. I helped kill Marshal Vargas, when he and Papa were trying to take Rachel and Dan and their babies away, too.... “Oh, no. She wasn't going to cry, was she? Not again, and especially not here! Not where everyone who would love that, who would simply adore that, could see!

  “Maddy.” The doctor's voice got firmer, but it also regained its kindness. “I helped do those things, too! Don't you remember? They were things that had to be done. And as hard as they were for you, because Ambassador Fralick was your father and you loved him very much, they were the right things to do. Besides which,” the edge came back into Barrett's voice, “he didn't die while all that was going on, and I hope you aren't feeling guilty about ridding the universe of scum like Vargas! Your father died of a cerebral hemorrhage, an artery bursting in his brain, a long while after he'd left Narsai on the corporate jackal's shuttle. You had nothing at all to do with that. So you've no reason to blame yourself, and if anyone else has they've been wrong. Just plain wrong. You do see that, don't you?"

  “Yes.” Maddy sniffed, and felt vastly thankful that she wasn't going to break down after all. She'd done so much crying, since Mum insisted on enrolling her in the Lycée and then made her attend it—and she hated to cry. Always, this child of two starship captains (George Fralick who'd gone on to become Kesra's ambassador to the Commonwealth, and Catherine Romanova who'd become the Star Service's Fleet Admiral) despised herself when she lost control.

  “It would have been easier for you here if you'd registered as ‘Madeleine Romanova.’ I can't tell you otherwise, and it's what you know already.” Doctor Cab's tone gentled still more. “But by now I don't have to tell you that children can be cruel to each other for all sorts of reasons. Who knows if it was because you use your father's name, that Benny chose the words he did to make fun of you just now? If all he wanted to do was get you off the field for the rest of the match, he probably said whatever he thought had the best chance of upsetting you."

  “That's probably just what he did,” Maddy admitted. She sat up straight, pulled away from the one-armed embrace in which she'd found a few moments of comfort, and stared at the pileup of adolescent bodies that some confusion or other had caused near one of the goal lines. Narsatian “games” tended, she thought (she'd always thought, even when she knew about them by vicarious means only!), to be far more violent than sports on other Human-settled worlds. Which made them a fascinating contrast to the rest of this orderly, peaceable, eminently civilized society. Did such free-for-alls serve Narsatians as a sort of safety valve?

  She must ask Linc, since her stepfather was a fellow outsider who liked his adopted home's people in general and who loved one Narsatian—Maddy's mother—more than anything or anyone else in the universe. She couldn't ask Mum, whose feelings might be hurt, and she certainly couldn't ask either of Mum's parents. And as for her brothers, Ewan and Marcus and Bryce—they knew less about Narsatian life than she did, and would understand only that they didn't like having their little sister hurt.

  Linc would tell her what he thought, though, and Linc would be honest. Using the ability she'd acquired from being touched by his mind while she developed in her mother's womb, in the days when Catherine Romanova commanded a ship called Firestorm and part-Morthan Lincoln Casey was her first officer and close friend, Maddy reached without words—sought her stepfather's thoughts—and found them.

  She forgot all about Narsatian sports, and about the pain of being ridiculed by her classmates, too. Her long-limbed body went rigid in terror, just as MinTar's civil emergency sirens (a relic from Narsai's colonial era, last used to warn of a never-repeated alien invasion and recently reactivated as one of the city's many preparations for possible interstellar hostilities) started to blare.

  * * * *

  The sirens penetrated to the interior of the aircar carrying Daniel Archer and Rachel Kane home from MinTar Medical, and set their trio of tiny babies wailing. Neither parent (a bachelor who'd never held an infant until his own arrived, and a female gen who was the first of her kind to attempt the task called motherhood) felt entirely secure, even after six weeks of practice, at diagnosing their infants’ cries and correcting the most probable cause. But this time, as the adults glanced at each other in consternation, they didn't worry at all about how to quiet their children.

  “Gods,” Archer muttered, instinctively scanning overhead although the former starship engineer knew (as did his wife, a former starship XO) that what threatened Narsai now lay far beyond its skies. “So it's finally happening, is it? The Matushka hoped it wouldn't come to this, but I always knew damn well it would!"

  “So did I,” Kane answered, her tone equally hushed. Her face white, and her hands on the aircar's controls as she told the hub that guided in-city traffic to let her pilot manually instead of bringing the communally owned craft to safety at the nearest public garage. “Katy thought the government and military people she knew had enough power to make everyone else see reason, but I always agreed with you. Even though this is one time I'd have loved to be wrong!"

  “Not even the Matushka,” Dan repeated the nickname that he'd given to his foster mother, which the entire Star Service had subsequently adopted for her, “can work that kind of miracle, love. How close are we to home?"

  “Just a couple of minutes more. We'll be there before we know it.” His wife bit her lip, tuned out the sirens as well as the babies, and concentrated fully on her piloting. Not because it required unusual skill (compared to conning the Archangel, it took almost none); but because if she didn't force herself to focus on the mundane task, she might not be able to keep from adding her own frustrated screams to the aircar's interior din.

  * * * *

  The Matushka, whose imperial Russian ancestors were often called “little mother” and “little father” by their subjects—and whose advanced state of pregnancy at the Battle of Mistworld had saddled her with that title forever, apparently!—stared at her home's primary comm screen while Ewan/Ishi stared at its secondary one. The first shrieks from the emergency sirens, almost hurtfully loud even in this neighborhood away from MinTar's center, brought her out of the trance and onto her feet. She barked, “Get everyone to the University, Ewan! As soon as they arrive here! Can you send me there now? To Dad's office? That's where I'd better be, when he has to hail that dreadnought. It's almost within ordinary comm range already. Gods, that fleet's moving fast!"

  She'd thought that her world would have a day's worth of grace. Of time to prepare, emotionally as well as strategically, for the Commonwealth battle group's arrival. But she'd obviously been wrong.

  * * * *

  Moving matter via a conventional teleporter required units at both ends, just as did any wireless communication or power transmission. Unless you were using a teleporter on board one of the ships that the Human colonists on Mistworld had located in subterranean hiding places, at the direction of their disembodied fellow residents, after those natives decided that appealing to “their” Humans’ more prosperous cousins on worlds like Narsai was the best method (and maybe even the only one) of ensuring survival for those on the planet's surface.

  They'd come a long way, Ishi Sanibello thought as he and Ewan Fralick sent their combined thoughts skyward and felt an answering touch from someone aboard the only one of those ships that remained in orbit. The others, eight out of the nine (seven of which were alien-built) to survive their battle with the Archangel, had started homeward loaded with foodstuffs. Sanibello could remember when Humans like his parents feared their planet's lo
ng established residents—who were “natives” in that sense only, since they, just as much as the Humans, had come from somewhere else originally. Too long ago to remember from where, or why, though; and Misties didn't seem bothered by the lost of their history.

  In his boyhood he'd been scared to death of the Cloud-Folk, mostly because his elders told him that was how they felt about the strange beings. But now, the young man Ishi Sanibello shared flesh and consciousness with one of the Cloud-Folk's adopted children. He had traveled all the way to Narsai aboard one of their ancient, reactivated starships, and he reached out to ask for remote transport as easily and as naturally as if he were speaking to Katy Romanova again. Yet the person to whom he made the silent request was kilometers away, in orbit.

  That's not the biggest mystery about all this, Ewan Fralick told the man whose body he shared, in a thought that held genuine amusement despite the approaching danger on the comm screen. My mother hates teleporters. She always has, and she goes out of her way to avoid using them. So I have trouble believing that I'm hearing her right, every time she asks us to do this!

  Mistworld teleporters could do what Commonwealth units could not. In answer to Sanibello's request, Catherine Romanova's body—the solid one of a physically strong and active, but by no means slender Human woman in her early sixties—disappeared from the living room of her home. A moment later her face appeared on the comm screen (replacing, mercifully, the images of the onrushing battle group), with a different room visible behind her. “I'm here, Ewan,” she said. And then added, “Thanks, Ishi. Pass that thought along to whoever did it for me, will you? I'll see you when you get here, after you've sent Dan and his family—Cab Barrett's bringing Maddy from the Lycée—and—oh, damn. I need one more thing! Check on Johnnie and Reen, please, before you do anything else. I'm not sure they'll be willing to come into the city, but someone should at least make sure they know what's going to happen. And when. Romanova out!"

  Her image vanished, and that of the battle group returned. After which Ishi Sanibello asked Ewan Fralick, in his driest mental tone: Doesn't that feel strange? Having your mother talk that way, to you, on a comm call?

  Nope, Fralick answered, still sounding remarkably cheerful. Right now she's not being my mother. She's being my old commanding officer. The Matushka!

  Oh. I see. Sanibello didn't, of course. Not really. But right now it didn't matter, because right now he—or rather they—had more important things to do.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  Trabe Kourdakov, current holder of the senior chair position on the hereditary Narsai Council, watched with relief as each member of his daughter's family arrived at MinTar University. The aging philosopher thought about all the years when his only living child and her offspring had stayed away, and then marveled at how natural it felt to have them here with him now. Not just Katy and her children (four times as many as a Narsatian woman normally produced!), but Katy's second husband, too. And her foster son and his wife, with their three infants; which, if Kourdakov reckoned them to himself as great-grandchildren, put him over the allowable limit already. Before Catherine's proper heir, Trabe's granddaughter Madeleine, was even betrothed.

  Ah, here was Maddy now! Dashing down the University Admin Building's hallway as she and Cab Barrett got out of the lift, throwing her arms around him, and saying, “Granfer! What's happening? Why is everybody acting so scared?” in the voice she'd inherited from Katy, that Katy had inherited from her own mother. From Cabanne Romanova, MinTar University's president and a Council member in her own right, whose husky tones (not changed a bit by entering her nineties) came to him from the nearby door of the conference room where their family would wait out the crisis.

  “Come inside, Madeleine, and we'll tell you everything. Granfer and your mother have their own work to do right now. In his office, not in here where the rest of us are going to wait for them."

  Madeleine. The name of Trabe and Cabbie's first child, the daughter who'd died in girlhood—obliging them, since they were thankfully still young enough, to conceive a second heir. Katy.

  That kind of draconian population control, enforced mostly by overwhelming social pressure, was one of the reasons why Narsai remained prosperous centuries after its settlement. Another, in Trabe Kourdakov's opinion, was keeping the real political power in the hands of the original land-grant settlers’ descendants, instead of allowing latecomers and tradesfolk to make decisions on their world's behalf. The Commissioners, elected heads of a short list of the planet's most vital trades and professions, governed their own members and advised the Council as necessary; but no one could speak for Narsai except the Councilor who held senior chair. And right now, that would be Trabe Kourdakov.

  “Go with your Granma,” he said to young Maddy, after returning the girl's embrace and wishing he could go with her into that conference room. He truly felt better qualified than anyone else on Narsai to speak for his people now, to whoever commanded the Commonwealth fleet which would soon come within ordinary hailing range; but that didn't mean he wanted to do it. He certainly did not. It was simply part of his duty, one of the obligations to which he'd been born.

  Obligations that he would one day pass on to his daughter, who was waiting for him in his office on the opposite side of the hallway. That Katy, in her turn, would bequeath to Madeleine—since the boys, Katy's sons, belonged to Mistworld now in ways that no power in the universe could hope to alter. All of which should have coincided, of course, with Katy's co-inheritance of the Romanov Farmstead as “resident holder,” in life partnership with her cousin Ivan—but she'd refused to take that pathway. So another Romanov woman, Ivan's next-closest female cousin Lorena, held that honor now.

  “Are Johnnie and Reen coming?” he asked his daughter, as he stepped into his office and closed its hallway door behind him.

  “No, Dad. They're riding this out at the Farmstead.” Katy sat at the comm terminal, with her lips pursed whenever she wasn't speaking and her eyes fixed on the screen. Right now it displayed a long-range visual of what looked to Trabe Kourdakov like a whole damned star fleet. How could he have been so naïve as to imagine that the Commonwealth might let Narsai and the other Outworlds go without a fight?

  “I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else does right now.” Kourdakov thought about the Farmstead as he'd visited it so often with Cabbie, especially during their daughter's adolescent years while Katy was betrothed to Johnnie Romanov. He'd truly believed that his girl and her unavoidably older (since Madeleine, the first Madeleine, ought to have been Johnnie's bride) husband-to-be were learning how to care for each other, that love was starting to grow between them ... so he'd been more surprised than anyone else, when she called from Terra shortly after arriving there for advanced schooling at age 18. To say that she'd gone not to the Sorbonne, where Trabe and Cabbie were allowing her to spend several years of study despite the resulting delay in formalizing her union with Johnnie, but to the Star Service Academy instead.

  She'd applied there secretly, months earlier, while still on Narsai. She'd known what she was going to do, surely, the last several times she spent a weekend or a school vacation with Johnnie at the Farmstead—in the ancestral house that was gone now. Destroyed, along with everything else but a few small (and severely damaged) outbuildings, when the starship Archangel put a tractor beam on Dan Archer's freighter Triad as it lay concealed in the Farmstead's cavernous equipment barn. A tractor beam that the Triad's pilot fought with all the power the smaller vessel possessed, until its overloaded engines blew and took out the Farmstead along with the ship itself.

  Johnnie and Reen had been compensated for the damage to their property, and now they were rebuilding. Trabe Kourdakov hadn't yet steeled himself to go out there and see the prefabricated cottage in which they were living while they got the equipment barn and other structures vital to the Farmstead's operation reconstructed, though. Everyone else—Cabbie, Katy, even Katy's youngsters—had gone, and had come
back with reports on the rebuilding's progress. But Trabe found that he simply couldn't bear to think about seeing the Farmstead without the home that had sheltered so many generations of Romanovs, and Kourdakovs as well, sitting stalwart and solid and apparently eternal at its heart.

  Which only proved that as he led his people now, the current holder of the Council's senior chair must watch himself to make certain he focused his thoughts on the future instead of looking backward; instead of worshiping Narsai's past. Their ancestors had had the guts to leave all they knew behind, to strike out across space and set down roots in a new world's soil—and when a still mysterious alien assault destroyed much of what they'd built during their first years here, they'd found the courage to build it again. The courage to stay here, instead of gathering up their children and going back whence they'd come.

  We need that kind of nerve now! Trabe Kourdakov told himself sternly, as he pulled a chair to Katy's side and sat down. And it's my job to set the example. Just the way my daughter's doing already.

  “Trabe, this is Shannandore Neilsen at Narsai Control.” Except for using titles when speaking to one's older relatives, informal address ruled in this culture. Trabe Kourdakov was “Professor” or “Doctor” only on the University's faculty roster, and the title page of each of the papers and books he'd published. “We can get through to them now, if you want us to hail them. Or we can wait for them to open communications first. Which would you rather?"

  Father and daughter traded a small, grim pair of smiles. Shannandore, whose given name was a local corruption of the Terran word “Shenandoah,” had a habit of putting Standard words together in ways no one else ever thought of. Katy nodded, and Trabe said to the pickup, “Hail them, please. After they've left us without interplanetary communications for the past six months, they show up with a whole battle group? I think it's only reasonable for me to ask them why."