Matushka Read online

  Matushka

  Nina M. Osier

  MATUSHKA

  by Nina M. Osier

  CHAPTER 1

  The morning sky over Narsai’s northern continent was streaked with pink and gold dawn. It was unlike Catherine Romanova to wake this early on a day when she didn’t have to, on a morning when she could have stayed beside her husband’s warmth until he was ready to rise; but here she was on the terrace overlooking her garden, and she was as alert as if it were already mid-day.

  She reached for Linc’s mind, and felt nothing but rest and contentment. That was good. When the two of them had finally come back here to live, in this comfortable little house on the home-world to whose citizenship Romanova had clung so stubbornly through more than forty years as a Star Service officer, he had been exhausted in every way that a sentient being could become weary. She had wondered for a time whether he would ever be himself again—but he was fine now, the same Linc she had met one day when they were both eighteen years old and had stood at a passenger liner’s lounge viewport and had looked out in wonder at their first sight of Terra’s blue-green globe.

  Two kids from the colonies, Catherine Romanova a human girl from prosperous Narsai and Lincoln Casey a part human, part Morthan boy who had grown up on the far less hospitable world of Sestus 3. Two adolescents who had journeyed to Earth for their plebe year at the Star Service Academy, discovering each other’s presence in that liner during their last few hours aboard and regretting that they had both endured weeks of loneliness when they might have been preparing together for the gauntlet they were about to enter.

  She had been amazed to meet a male Morthan hybrid who wasn’t planning to become a healer. He had been just as surprised to encounter a land heiress from Narsai who was preparing herself for an off-world career. They had talked excitedly about the new lives both were just beginning, they had commiserated about the difficulty each had faced in choosing a pathway that had seldom (if ever) been chosen before by persons from their respective backgrounds; and then the “prepare for arrival” announcement had been made.

  She hadn’t seen Casey again until she was a cadet second class, the equivalent of a junior at a traditional Terran university, and she had been put in charge of a company that was headed out for a field exercise. Her first command! Although she knew some of those for whom she had just become responsible, most she did not. In a class of five hundred it wasn’t possible to know everybody, for these exercises the cadets were deliberately juggled to place them among as many strangers as possible—and she had looked into the young Morthan man’s calm golden eyes, had remembered the day they arrived together on Earth, and had chosen him as her co-leader.

  That had been their real beginning together. It occurred to Romanova now, as she sipped the hot chocolate that was her one dietary vice, that if one went by standard dating and ignored all other calendars it had been precisely forty years from that day to this one.

  The garden was fragrant at this early hour. She had made a point of filling it with plants that had discernible perfumes, and the heavy dew from last night’s autumn coolness was bringing those perfumes out in a way that she seldom experienced them because she was usually out here at the day’s end instead of at its beginning.

  A single-family house with a private garden, created for pleasure’s sake alone. On Narsai that was almost the definition of material success, but that was not why Catherine Romanova had insisted on having space for a garden when she had been shopping for this house as a place of refuge from her rocky first marriage. She had simply wanted to put her hands into soil that she could call her own, and Linc had laughingly told her that her ancestors’ genes were asserting themselves at last.

  Which might have been true; she had certainly been coming home sore and bruised and in need of healing at that time in her own life, and acquiring this haven had been part of the process by which she’d sought to mend herself.

  He was stirring now, in the bedroom that was separated by a few meters of distance and by several bulkheads (no, Katy, they’re walls!) from the terrace where she was sitting. She could feel him starting to think in his usual controlled fashion, realizing she was not beside him physically and wondering where she had gone and why….

  And then, of course, his mind touched hers and he relaxed again. She felt morning desire rising in him, stronger in the Morthan male than in the human male; and she smiled as she finished her chocolate, and drew her robe tighter around her in a shiver that was partly from the morning’s autumn chill and partly anticipation of what would happen to her when she returned to the bedroom and took that robe off and lay down to be held in her husband’s arms.

  It was a mutual gratification that would have to be delayed, because the front door opened while she was padding through the living room to dispose of her empty cup in the kitchen. Two people entered.

  One was a red-haired but swiftly balding man, large and broad-shouldered and human. The other was a tall woman, her body shrouded in a cloak and her face obscured by a scarf that was beaded with Narsai’s morning mist.

  “Dan!” Romanova said, and let her thoughts touch her mate’s mind with a mixture of apology that their intimacy couldn’t happen as usual this morning—and of pleasure that someone they both loved was here, unexpected but always welcome.

  “Hello, Matushka,” the man said, and gave his informally adopted foster mother a tired grin. “Are you and Linc ready for some trouble? Because I’m afraid I’m bringing you plenty of it.”

  “This is Rachel Kane,” Daniel Archer said, as he sat beside the woman who when she removed her cloak proved to be wearing a Star Service uniform that was tight in the front to a ludicrous degree. That had to be uncomfortable. Yet the woman’s face was expressionless, which matched the way she moved—mechanically, and as if every use of muscle required a conscious effort. “You remember me talking about her, don’t you, Matushka?”

  The kitchen was warm, and it was fragrant now with coffee and chocolate and sweet hot cereals. Yet the tall woman with the fair hair and the green eyes was shivering, and she continued doing so even after Lincoln Casey went back to the bedroom and got an afghan and deftly wrapped it around her shoulders.

  Unlike most Morthan hybrids, he could not sense the feelings of just any other sentient being who happened to be near him. There was only one other person whose emotions he could sense, and that connection had taken him years of constant and close association to develop. Nevertheless he had learned his Morthan mother’s habit of taking care of the people who surrounded him, so he was the one who saw to it that the new arrivals were fed and that the room was made warmer when he realized that Rachel Kane was still shivering even after he brought her the afghan.

  Catherine Romanova was nodding and answering her foster son, and relying on her mate to do the things he always did. “I remember,” she said, and reached out to take the younger woman’s hands between both of hers. The flesh she touched was cold. “You were the first officer on the Archangel, when Dan was posted to her as chief engineer.”

  “Yes. That was me.” Kane spoke at last, in a raspy voice and so softly that if Romanova hadn’t been leaning toward her already she doubted that she could have made out the words. “I’m sorry, I was alone for so long that I’m having trouble communicating now that I’m with people again. And it was so cold….” Her shivering turned into a shudder.

  Dan Archer moved his chair closer, and put both arms around the woman and held her close. He said in a voice that was as fierce as his manner was gentle, “God damn that bioengineering company that supplies the Service with gens, Matushka! I hope we do go to war against the Commonwealth, if the Outworlds form up our own service I’ll join it. The way the government we’ve got now treats people like Rachel isn’t human. Oh, h
ell, I’m sorry, Linc—but you know what I mean, don’t you?”

  Casey smiled, and set a mug of hot coffee at his foster son’s elbow. He answered, “I’m part human, kid. Remember? And I know what you’re trying to say, yes. But suppose you tell us just what happened to your friend here, and suppose while you’re doing that we all try to get some food into us. She’s never going to warm up until she eats, and she’s much too thin for a woman who’s carrying children.”

  “How did you know it’s ‘children’?” Rachel Kane asked in a voice that was steadier now. She had eaten a bowl of hot cereal laced liberally with sweetening, she had downed two cups of steaming chocolate, and although she kept the afghan held snugly about her she was no longer shivering.

  The four former officers had stopped talking during the brief meal, in accordance with a strict military custom that Romanova and Casey and Kane had all learned during their Academy days and that Archer had learned after he had signed onto a ship as an ordinary crew member. He had done that as a boy of sixteen, desperate to escape life in the mines of Sestus 4; and with a talent for handling both machines and computers that had made it possible for him to be field promoted into a junior officer’s berth. That had happened to him long ago, when he was still less than twenty years old and when his talents had come to the notice of Catherine Romanova’s firstborn son Ewan.

  Romanova loved Dan Archer for his own sake now, but her attachment to him had deep roots in his connection to her long-dead child. She looked at him this morning, as he sat in her kitchen beside the unlikely guest he’d brought home, and she thought of the first time Ewan Fralick had presented that gawky red-haired kid to her in her office aboard the old Firestorm—and she smiled at the memory. Bringing home yet another human or part-human stray was the best means she could imagine to honor Ewan’s memory.

  She felt a gentle inner tug, and looked up and heard her husband saying, “There wasn’t any Morthan empathy involved, I’m afraid, Commander Kane. I know that you’re a gengineered being because Dan already mentioned that. I also know from what I’ve heard and read about gengineered females that when your owners are ready for you to reproduce, it’s done in batches. And you’re about to burst out of that uniform, which means that you’re either well along in your pregnancy or you’re carrying more than one child.”

  “Very good, Captain Casey!” The young woman laughed, only a trifle harshly. “I’m a bit of an experiment, you know. Until me, female ‘gens’ were considered too valuable to risk in the Service and no gen had ever made it all the way through the Academy. And if I could get my hands on that damned ship’s surgeon who started getting me ready to breed without bothering to tell me about it…!”

  She shuddered then, and Archer put his arm around her again. He said softly and very gently, “Rachel, I’m sorry. If I’d had any idea! I always took responsibility myself, when I was with a woman that I knew I could make pregnant. But that wasn’t supposed to be possible for you, dammit all!”

  “It’s not your fault,” Kane answered him. She turned in the shelter of his arm, and she put her head down onto his shoulder.

  Oh, gods. They’re Dan’s babies.

  Romanova honestly wasn’t sure whose thought that was, her own or Casey’s. It didn’t matter, in any case they shared both the realization and the horror that went with it; but she was the one who said practically into the silence that now filled the little house, “First things first! Why don’t we drop the rank, Dan was booted out of the Service months ago and Linc and I are both retired. And it looks as if you’re out of it now, too, Rachel. I should take you to see a healer right away—but I don’t suppose that would be very smart, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” Kane did not lift her head off her lover’s shoulder, but she relaxed there and turned enough so she could regard Romanova with those startling green eyes of hers. “I know I ought to see a medic, I haven’t been able to do that since I realized I was pregnant. But you’re right, I deserted. And that means Dan and I are putting you at risk just by being in your home. So seeing a doctor right now is out of the question, the only way I could do that would be to turn myself in.”

  “And if you did surrender to the Terran Embassy here on Narsai, what would happen to you?” That was Casey again, using what Romanova in one of her more acerbic moods was apt to call his bedside manner. His parents had both been medics—his father a traditional Terran-born allopathic physician, his mother a Morthan empathic healer—and although he had never had the least inclination to follow in either’s professional footsteps, he could and did adopt a healer’s mannerisms sometimes.

  That had been part of what made him a superb executive officer, Romanova remembered with a smile that she quickly hid. He’d known instinctively when, as she had inelegantly expressed it, “to pat shoulder or kick butt.” This was his shoulder-patting mode, and Rachel Kane was responding to it just as scores of junior officers had done during the years when Lincoln Casey had stood at the head of a starship’s crew and had managed that crew on his captain’s behalf.

  “Nothing except the end of my Service career, probably, if I went back to Terra now like a meek little lamb and let the creche-doctors take my fetuses out of me and do whatever they wanted to with them. I’m a valuable piece of property, I wouldn’t be executed like a regular deserter.” Kane’s eyes hardened, and so did her tone. “If I’d gone right to sickbay as soon as I realized what was happening to me, the ship’s surgeon would have just aborted the pregnancy and that would have been that. But now that I’m carrying three twelve-week-old fetuses that as far as I know are healthy and developing normally—I don’t trust the bastards who run my creating lab not to experiment with these babies for awhile first, before they’d actually dispose of them. What they wouldn’t do is let me go on carrying my children until they’re ready to be born, or transfer each of them to an incubation field. That’s what they would have done with embryos made from my ova and a male gen’s sperm, if I’d been harvested as I should have been instead of getting pregnant the old-fashioned way.”

  “Nice, huh?” Dan Archer asked, with a twisted little grin. “An ordinary bastard like me has no business contaminating a gen like Rachel with his inferior offspring!”

  Lincoln Casey winced, and so did Catherine Romanova; but each did so for a different reason.

  “Inferior offspring?” Casey knew what those words meant, because he had been called by them times enough when he was a boy and his mother’s family had visited Sestus 3 or she had taken him to Mortha for one more disastrous visit. Half human, born after his mother had left Mortha with one of the young human physicians who came there to study each year… but that by itself was in no way unusual, because almost every young Morthan woman preferred taking a human husband who was her contemporary to mating with a male of her own species (who would necessarily be much older, because Morthan males took many more seasons than did their females to attain sexual maturity).

  But Kalitha Marin’s son by Gladstone Casey had proved to be unlike the usual product of such a union, in that he lacked most of the gifts that made a Morthan hybrid—well, Morthan. His eyes were golden like hers, and his reaching the time of life when females interested him as females and not merely as people had come after almost forty standard years instead of after fourteen or so as was the norm for his father’s species; but otherwise he had nothing Morthan about him, except for the bond that gave him access to his wife’s thoughts and feelings and that gave her (full human though she was) access to his.

  Inferior offspring, that was both what his Morthan relatives had called him and how his parents had wound up regarding him in their different ways. And Catherine Romanova was reacting to what Rachel Kane had just said with another kind of unpleasant recognition, because she knew what it was like to have her reproductive potential regarded as someone else’s property.

  Thank goodness Narsai’s laws and customs had changed during the years since she had been young, since the time when she had defied th
ose who claimed to love her most and had accepted exile as the price of being able to have the children she wanted with the man she loved as their father.

  That man hadn’t been Lincoln Casey, who when Katy Romanova was ripe for childbearing had been an outwardly mature man—a fully competent Star Service officer, her comrade and her friend—but who hadn’t been aware of her in that way yet at all. At that time in both their lives Linc had still been as puzzled and as vaguely disturbed by the mention of sex as a fully human boy of perhaps eight or nine standard years.

  Now the two of them touched minds again, and again they separated after giving and accepting reassurance. Then Romanova asked in a mother’s gentle tone, “Rachel, you know how many babies you’re carrying and exactly how old they are. You did scan yourself, then, before you left your ship?”

  There was a great deal more she wanted to know about that. How had this young woman been able to desert successfully, anyway, from a Star Service vessel where she had occupied the executive officer’s post? Where had she been, and for how long, that she’d arrived here half frozen and starved and suffering the psychological effects of long-term isolation? And if Dan was the father of her children—now, there was the greatest puzzle of all; because Dan had been dismissed from the Star Service, along with every other “scrambler” (Service vernacular for those officers who had been elevated from ordinary crew member status), a full eighteen standard months earlier.

  But right now what mattered was figuring out how to keep this frightened mother-to-be safe and as healthy as possible. So Romanova listened with relief as Kane answered, “Yes, of course I did. I don’t have any idea how many eggs my body released, three would be an awfully small harvest; and I don’t know how many actually were fertilized and didn’t implant. But by the time I realized something was wrong and I did the scan, there were three embryos and they’d implanted and they were growing normally. And I still don’t have any idea why I didn’t just head straight for sickbay and get that corrected, it would have been so easy then. Except that—somehow, I just didn’t want to. I don’t know why, it still doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”