Mistworld

by Nina M. Osier

  “I told Granma I was glad I'd stayed here, after all. But that was before I knew enough about Farren to realize what I was getting myself into. Now I wish you'd let me go with Mum.” The girl saw no point in offering words of false comfort. “Doctor Cab...."

  “Just ‘Cab,’ now that you'll be living with me. For awhile, at least. Until we find a way to get you back with your mum, and Linc.” Barrett stepped out of the lift onto the building's thirtieth floor. “You've never been here before, if I remember right? I think you'll be comfortable. I've got a room for you, and tomorrow I'll see that someone gets your things. Tonight you can borrow from me. It'll be too big, but with a nightgown that's not much of a problem."

  “Do you think Farren is going to keep Mum's house?” Maddy hadn't thought about that before, and now the idea infuriated her. She'd been feeling nothing, since she ran into Barrett's arms and knew she was safe there; but the image of Farren permanently taking over her mother's home, on the strength of his status as Granma's heir (not to mention as her own betrothed husband), shocked the self-protective numbness from her soul. She wished she hadn't left so quickly. She wished (however irrationally, with a pair of armed guards present who answered to Farren!) that she'd thrown him out, instead.

  “That's an interesting question. I doubt if he cares about it for its own sake at all.” Barrett opened the outer door to her flat. “But he strikes me as a selfish enough little twerp, so that he'd be quite capable of holding onto it for no better reason than because he knows you've got a stronger moral claim. Is it family property, Maddy?"

  “No. It's Mum's. She bought it. And after she married Linc, she added him as tenant ... tenant in...."

  “Tenant in common. Yes. That means they own it together now, and when one dies the other immediately becomes full owner. That's good news. Farren's trespassing tonight, so tomorrow I can talk to a solicitor about making him get out. Whether or not we dare to let you move back in afterward."

  Maddy felt better at that news. She said softly as she took her first look around Cab Barrett's living room, “I wish I could tell Mum and Linc about what Farren did to Granma and Granfer. D'you suppose I'll always think about them dying there, whenever I go in and out through that door?"

  “You'll think about it sometimes. I know some people might not want to live there, or even go back at all, because of that memory. But this is Narsai, Maddy. Our farmhouses are centuries old, and a lot of people have died in them. Not always pleasantly, either. That's not a reason, as most of us see things, for abandoning what's ours.” Barrett walked past the girl, toward the kitchen. “Your room's through here. I'm not sure how you feel about trying to eat something, but if you can—you should."

  The girl started to follow. As she walked past it, the apartment's comm whistled. Her hostess sighed, indicated that Maddy should proceed through the kitchen to inspect her new quarters, and went to silence the whistling. “Barrett,” she said, in the voice of a tired doctor anticipating an emergency summons. One that she would need clearance from Heaven Almighty itself to answer, if it required her presence and not just her advice, thanks to that damnable curfew.

  “Hello, Cab.” The comm's screen resolved itself into the image of a woman wearing the uniform of Narsai Control, with its highest possible rank insignia on her collar. “I'm calling all my fellow commissioners, and the new senior chair's calling all the councilors. We've got a situation going on with the damn Commies."

  “When haven't we had a situation with them, since they decided they could just come flying into our system and occupy us?” Barrett's face went from weary to gray with alarm—yet fully alert, too. Maddy, watching from the kitchen door instead of going along to investigate her new bedroom, stood still. Something important was happening, or about to happen. Something that she didn't want to miss ... why, she couldn't miss it. She, thirteen-year-old Madeleine Romanova, was a Councilor of Narsai herself now!

  “Cab—we don't know why, and we don't know for how long—but Benedon's ships have left orbit. All of them. Every last one.” Dr. Barrett's fellow commissioner delivered the news as if she thought repeating it using different words was the only way she could hope to be believed. “A few minutes ago the Aragon, and after her the cruisers, got underway. The strangest part is how they did it. One at a time, as if every ship had its own separate set of orders. The smaller ones followed. As if they'd been surprised by the big ones leaving, and started pursuit."

  “That is strange,” Barrett agreed, and glanced at Maddy. After which she waved the girl back to her side, so that the visual pickup would show them both to the woman on the communication's other end. “Councilor Romanova's here with me, so you needn't waste time trying to locate her. Does this mean that the ground troops attached to the Terran Embassy are all that's standing between us and being free again?"

  “As of this minute—yes. The decision we've got to make now, as I see it, is whether or not we want to do what it'll take to reclaim that freedom. Knowing the fleet may come back anytime."

  “Or another one may arrive!” Maddy, Councilor Romanova, spoke up. She was glad, now, that she didn't have a little girl's voice. No matter how much teasing her gravelly tones, those of Granma and Mum, had earned from her classmates during her weeks at the Lycée. Which could reopen now, if she and her world's other leaders could muster the courage to reclaim their liberty ... suddenly she wanted to laugh. How ridiculous, that a schoolgirl should hold the power she now did! And should think, while wielding it, about how much she would love to use it to stay away from the school she so cordially hated.

  But she wouldn't do that, of course. She added, “We can't just sit around and wait for them. We all know that, don't we?"

  “I suppose we do.” The head of Narsai Control stared at the youngest and newest member of the Narsai Council. “Ms. Romanova. Do you know what's become of your husband? I've tried to reach him, and so far I can't."

  Maddy frowned. “The comm network ought to be able to find him,” she said. “I left him at my mum's house, just a little while ago. Do you really have to bring him in on this?"

  “He's a councilor, Madeleine. Just as you are.” Barrett answered that question. Tartly. “He's entitled to his say. Traitor and fool though he is!"

  The woman in the holo-screen turned her head, as raised but unintelligible voices from somewhere out of pickup range distracted her. Then there were other noises. Loud ones. After that, the screen went blank and the audio silent.

  Maddy and her hostess stared, then, at each other. Until all of the apartment's lights went out—along with, a look out the window soon informed them, every other light in the great city of MinTar.

  * * * *

  Farren Kourdakov sighed as the military flitter dropped into the protected courtyard of the Terran Embassy. Part of him knew that racing to safety here wasn't the best way to lead his people, in this renewed (and so far mysterious) crisis. But he'd found it easy to silence that inner voice, when his two guards bundled him into their vehicle and headed here at top speed. He stepped out without speaking to them, just in case he needed—at some point later on—to be able to say honestly that he'd been an unwilling, angry passenger on that ride. He demanded of the uniformed woman who ran the embassy's tiny shuttle port, “Where's Paré?"

  “The Ambassador's occupied, Mr. Kourdakov,” came the crisp answer.

  “Of course she is! But I've got to see her, and she must be expecting me.” Farren pulled himself up to his full height, a slim youth finding himself at an unexpected disadvantage as he faced a master sergeant of the Star Service Marines; who weighed kilos of solid muscle more than he did, and who was tall enough to look him in the eye without having to tilt her head. Which she was doing right now, and those gray orbs of hers held not a spark of friendliness.

  “She ordered you retrieved, Mr. Kourdakov. But that doesn't mean she wants to see you right now. My orders are to let your escorts,” the sergeant's eyes flicked toward something or someone behind Farren, “take you
to your quarters. Where you're to remain, until further notice."

  The guards had climbed out of the flitter, and were flanking him once more. Not doing a thing; just standing there, and waiting. But now their presence felt ominous.

  Farren drew a breath, intending to use it for additional bluster. To go on protesting, until this militarized bureaucrat remembered that his proper title was now “Governor” and that the Terran Ambassador could do nothing on Narsai without his consent. Especially not with Admiral Benedon gone ... the comm call telling him about that had damn near stopped his heart.

  Before the young man could get another word out of his mouth, the sergeant nodded briskly to the pair of guards. Each of whom promptly wrapped a steely-gripped hand completely around one of his upper arms, lifted him off his feet, and carried him bodily out of the courtyard shuttle port and into the nearest lift.

  * * * *

  “I have to go home. I have to get back to Maddy.” She'd come to Mistworld reluctantly in the first place, and now Catherine Romanova could barely stand being here. Weeks of top-speed traveling time away from her endangered, suffering home-world, and much too far away from the only one of her children still young enough to need her protection and care.

  “Mum, you know that isn't possible.” Ewan chose the wrong moment, the spectacularly worst possible moment, to stare at her with his father's “patient look” while using his father's “this woman must be an idiot” tone. “We can do a lot of things, but running a SHIP without an adequate crew complement isn't one of them. And we can't do it without enough, well, real Mistworlders on board to handle fast getaways and those special teleporters, either. Not unless we've got plenty of Morthans who've had time—like the ones who grabbed Lieutenant Kane—to learn how to use their minds that way."

  “I didn't ask you to take me home, Ewan!” The Matushka snapped at her firstborn, as she might have at any other junior who made the mistake of condescending to her. “But I'm going to find a way to get there, just the same. I wish now I hadn't accepted it so damn tamely when they told me I had to leave!"

  She could feel Linc's agitation, from his place beside her at the table. Love, concern, desperate desire to help—bafflement as to how he, or anyone else in the universe, might do that. And then, she felt a wave of triumph.

  He made the suggestion aloud. He sounded excited, and (in a curiously shy way) proud. As he had on the first night they made physical love together ... when he finally discovered that the long-delayed maturing of a Morthan male's sexual interest had its compensations. As if something that had puzzled him, and shamed him with a profound sense of self-inadequacy over many years, was suddenly turning out to be an asset after all.

  “Katy, I can find out how Maddy is,” he said, looking directly into his wife's eyes and not bothering with anyone else. “I'd need others to work with me, because of the distance. But what Astin could do with Admiral Tanaka, I ought to be able to do with Maddy. Would that help?"

  Would it help, to know for sure how safe her daughter was on a Narsai from which Lita Benedon's gen-commandeered fleet had just departed? A Narsai that was probably still firmly under the ground troops’ control, and governed by (Katy shuddered at the thought) Farren Kourdakov? To know how well her old parents were coping, and all the others for whom she felt varying degrees of love, and concern, and responsibility?

  “Of course it would!” she told her long-ago command partner and present-day husband. Then she turned toward her sons, and asked in a tone that held more command than entreaty, “Can you get enough of the Mistworlders to help him? They've done a lot for us already, I realize, and I know I don't have the right to demand anything. But Linc and I helped them survive, fourteen years ago. So I'm asking for this now. Because I need it. More than I've needed anything, I think, in a very long time."

  * * * *

  Ewan Fralick and Ishi Sanibello had coexisted in Ishi's body with remarkable near-synergy before, and being separate again for a few days after the SHIP brought them home to Mistworld had proved a curious mixture of relief and discomfort. Ewan remembered the exhilaration of roaming the part of what was now his home-world that lay on the very borders of space, and honestly wished he could be back there right now ... but being where he could see his loved ones’ faces, and having flesh with which he could touch theirs, held satisfactions at least as important to him as his disembodied state's pure freedom. Yet he wondered, honestly, whether or not it would be worth the trauma of adjusting to a different host-body, when the time came that Ishi must either accept Ewan's residence with him as permanent or refuse to “carry” the adopted Mistworlder any longer because of the way it was changing him.

  The same thing was happening, of course, to his brothers and their hosts. The Humans were getting so accustomed to their psychic passengers that soon they would adjust to the companionship fully, and after that they would need it. Would need it so much, that having it withdrawn—so the Fralicks could return to the upper atmosphere—would constitute a threat to their sanity.

  He couldn't regret having the chance to survive, fourteen years earlier when his Star Service raider blossomed into a fireball, and the body his mother once bore disintegrated into microscopic particles. Yet now, the tension between the two “new lives” he was living—and the knowledge that continuing to visit his still mortal loved ones in corporeal form might one day trap him in that state—made him react to his stepfather's suggestion, and his mother's plea, a great deal differently than the Ewan Fralick of long ago. Or even the Ewan/Ishi of ten days ago, when the SHIP had just brought them home. Before they'd separated, and Ewan flew back to the region where beings without fleshy shells must live.

  “I'll pass the idea on,” he said, getting to his (or rather, Ishi's) feet and putting down the coffee mug that Ishi's hand still held, on the table where Ishi had eaten his meals during childhood and adolescence. “I don't know how they'll respond to it, Mother. And I think I'd better ask them to talk to Linc directly, if they are willing; because I've had Ishi in the middle of this just a little bit too long. Is it like that for you, too?” Still speaking out loud, he asked the question of Marcus and Bryce. “And for Chad, and Dram?"

  His brothers nodded their hosts’ heads. They got up, too. Without saying anything more, all three Fralicks walked their borrowed bodies out of Ishi Sanibello's boyhood home and left Katy and Linc still seated at the dining table.

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  “What's the word from Fleet Command?” Lucien Douglas was only a lieutenant commander. Just thirty years old, captain of an escort vessel whose crew included only a few lower deck gens (he was damned if he'd call them “tars"!)—or rather, his crew had included those gens. Until the attempted mutiny, that a few hours ago he and his officers had barely managed to put down.

  That was how Lieutenant Commander Douglas went from being one of Rear Admiral Benedon's most junior captains, to the battle group's highest-ranking officer still alive. By simply retaining control of his ship, while everyone else in command of larger or similarly sized vessels died at the hands of their gengineered crew members.

  “Sir, I'm sure I've been getting through to them. But so far there's no reply—wait just a minute.” Douglas's comm officer, a skinny kid just a few months out of the Academy, screwed up her face. Then she turned ghost-white. “Captain, I have Fleet Admiral Tanaka for you."

  “What? Who?” Douglas knew he sounded like an idiot, and didn't care. He'd started trying to raise Luna, since New Orient wasn't answering, as soon as he finished dealing with his own ship's crisis and ordered it (along with smaller ones that hadn't been assaulted from within, because they carried no gens) to pursue the battle group's fleeing behemoths. Soon, he knew, they would be out of range of Narsai's interplanetary comm boosters. So this had to be his last chance to report the disaster to Fleet Headquarters, and to ask his superiors if he'd chosen the right course of action.

  “You heard your ensign correctly, son.” He recognized the face
on his command console's tiny viewscreen. Every member of the Service knew their ultimate commanding officer by sight, although mighty few of Lucien Douglas's rank had met the man. Let alone taken orders from him like this, directly. Did Willard Tanaka always look this tired? This, well, old?

  “Hello, sir.” The young captain gulped. “We've got a mess out here.” His words sounded inane, but how should he preface the sort of report that he must now give?

  “We've got one of our own right here, Commander.” Tanaka's black eyes looked out of a sunken face, and his tone carried graveyard humor. “You've caught me on my way to my transport. I just gave the order to abandon this base."

  “Abandon Headquarters?” Douglas shook his head, because he must surely have heard wrong. If there was one thing more impossible than a fleet-wide mutiny such as he'd just lived through, it had to be what the Fleet Admiral had just told him. “Why?"

  “Because the gen rebellion's that bad, son. Or, from their viewpoint, that successful.” Something exploded near Tanaka's position, which appeared to be inside an office. A sooty office, with scars on its walls and its furnishings in wild disarray. Everything on the screen vibrated, and the Admiral glanced to one side and spoke to someone beyond pickup range. “Yes, I'm coming, Gray! No, you don't need to worry about Minister Fothingill. She's been dead for hours. You were saying, Commander Douglas?"

  “The lower deck gens took over every ship in Admiral Benedon's command that was cruiser-sized or larger, sir. I've rallied all of the smaller vessels, and we're pursuing. The mutineers have left Narsai orbit, and they're following a course that should take them to Mortha. I suppose they must be planning to find the rebel fleet, and join it. Sir, am I doing the right thing? Now that I'm the senior officer, and I've got to choose between going after them—or returning to Narsai, and trying to, well, hold the fort there until help comes?"

  “Help's not coming, son. I hate to tell you that, but it's the truth.” Tanaka hesitated for only a moment before uttering the blunt words, and he stared directly into the younger officer's eyes as he said them. “And as for holding the fort at Narsai, there's no need to bother now. Narsai's the least of anyone's worries. Come about, and let the damned tars go wherever they like! You bring your crew, and those other ships and their crews, to safe harbor wherever you can find it. Which won't be Mortha, or anything beyond. And which sure as hell won't be Narsai, either!"