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  Or she had regretted it until George had come along, of course. By then she was a grown woman emotionally, not just physically; and from the first time he had put his arms around her and touched her lips with his, she had realized that she’d missed the whole point with Johnnie. She had known passion with George, real passion that she remembered with amazement now when looking at him disgusted her completely.

  He had accused her of being a mother who couldn’t be trusted not to prostitute her daughter if she were allowed custody, or even unsupervised visits with the little girl on her own native world; and that accusation had been one of the most infuriating aspects of their messy parting. But then a relationship as volatile as theirs could not have ended less violently, she supposed. Only as she’d explored her bond with Linc afterward, had she finally made the wonderful discovery that it was possible to know both the tender security of her first love with Johnnie and the physical rapture of her union with George in a relationship with one man.

  With Linc, who had been her friend for so long before he became more than that; and who now knew how to make her feel things in his arms that no George Fralick could ever make any woman feel. Morthan males had to wait until they were at an age where human males often were slowing down sexually, before they even noticed the opposite gender was there—but then they made up for it. Oh, how they made up for it!

  She put all those thoughts aside now, even as she felt Linc’s touch within her mind and responded to his silent question with reassurance. To George Fralick’s image in the holoscreen she said, “I want her, George, of course I do. I always have, since the night we made her.”

  Only Linc knew it when she added inwardly, and in despair, “But what in hell am I going to do with her now?”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Having a child around right now is going to be difficult, but I don’t know what else I can do.” Romanova voiced her doubts to her husband anyway, as soon as the commlink to George Fralick was broken. “I’ve waited too many years for this, Linc. The only way I could have passed it up would be if I thought I’d be putting Maddy in danger—and I may even be doing that, but I still couldn’t say ‘no.’”

  “You’d have been putting other people in more danger if you refused,” Casey said positively. “George knows you, Katy. Better than anyone else knows you except me, now. If you turned down a chance to have Maddy with you, he’d want to know why; and he’d find out, too.”

  An excuse for doing what she wanted with all her soul to do anyway? Maybe. Hell, undoubtedly. Yet Linc had never in all the years they’d known each other given her false comfort, and he wasn’t doing that now.

  And Linc also knew George Fralick, the man had been his first captain just the same as he’d been Katy’s. In those days Fralick had liked the young Morthan hybrid, had taken Casey under his wing and had taught him just as willingly as he had taught Romanova. To be fair, Katy reminded herself now, she had to admit that George deserved a large measure of the credit for the officers both she and Lincoln Casey had eventually become. The first captain a green ensign served under had an influence like no one else’s, before him or after him.

  Or her, as the case might be. George’s example had also taught Katy how to nurture her own junior officers, years afterward when she herself became a captain.

  Cab Barrett appeared in the bedroom doorway, emerged and shut that door behind her as soon as she was sure she was not interrupting one or more comm conversations. The Narsatian doctor said with satisfaction, “She’s sleeping, and that’s what she needs now. Stasis isn’t sleep, even though people usually find it comforting to think about it that way.”

  “Can you tell me how she is, Cab? Or is that going to bother your ethics?” Romanova had moved from her chair to Linc’s side, and she was not surprised when he put an arm around her waist. Even after twelve years of physical intimacy, he never passed up an opportunity to touch her.

  Nor did she want him to do so, but she was growing very sick of being clad in nightclothes as the morning wore on. She needed to get dressed now, she’d have to hustle and get to the public teleport station so that Maddy wouldn’t arrive there alone. It was safe for that to happen, of course; no world was safer for a young girl than was Narsai, contrary to the foolishness George had sold the Kesran authorities. But Maddy Fralick had lived her whole life cloistered within a household that most of the time consisted of a pair of neutered Kesrans, with a father who came and went on diplomatic business and with a visit from her mother once in each two years. So Romanova had to assume that even after the trip from one world to another aboard the starship Archangel, thirteen-year-old Maddy would still find the public teleport station a confusing and possibly intimidating place. She certainly wouldn’t do what Katy would have done at the same age, and confidently summon local transportation and finish the trip to her destination on her own.

  Barrett said, “I made sure she didn’t mind my sharing my findings with both of you, or with Dan. She didn’t understand why I was asking, poor thing; medical privacy’s a concept she’s never been exposed to, at least not as a right for her to claim.”

  Of course, she’s a gen. She doesn’t think of her body as her own, not even now that she’s run away from her owners.

  Romanova and Casey had shared that thought, for the life of her she didn’t know which of them had originated it; and it didn’t matter. They both nodded, and Barrett continued speaking. “Anyway! Her fetuses haven’t suffered from the time she spent being undernourished, it didn’t go on that long and she went into it in perfect health. She needs to rest now, and eat, and feel safe. With any multiple pregnancy there’s more need for proper care than with a singleton, but the children should be born normally—although probably a bit early. Again, that’s normal with triplets. Where is she going to be living, Katy? I assume you’re going to hide her.”

  “Do you really want me to tell you that, Cab?” Romanova asked the question gently. As a citizen of Narsai the doctor could not be prosecuted for aiding an escaped gen, because Terran laws and Commonwealth treaties were not applicable to Narsatians on their own world; but the Corporate Marshal Service deserved its reputation for ruthlessness, and if one of its operatives did learn Rachel Kane’s whereabouts life could be become perilous for those who had helped her.

  “Yes. Because if I possibly can, I want to go on taking care of her. I’d like to think that none of my fellow physicians would betray a patient like Ms. Kane, but I can be damned sure I’m not going to—and right now the greatest threat to her health is from her so-called ‘owners,’ if they get their hands on her again.” Barrett’s mouth thinned.

  “I hoped you’d feel that way,” Romanova said, and she smiled as she felt her husband’s arm tightening around her. “We’re sending her to Johnnie and Reen, Cab. They’re both your patients, too, so there won’t be anything odd about your going out there to take care of our gen. In fact I should wake her up and get her out of here as soon as I can, but….”

  The door buzzed. Casey rose to answer it, and Romanova walked toward their bedroom with Barrett following her. She would get dressed, and talk more with the doctor, while Linc was getting rid of whoever had such poor timing.

  “You must be Captain Casey,” said a feminine voice that stopped Katy in her tracks. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was that early on this part of Narsai. Did I get you out of bed?”

  Lincoln Casey had never seen Madeleine Fralick, who by rights should have been called Madeleine Romanova, even though he had been the first person to become aware of her existence inside her mother’s womb. At the time when Katy came back from a furlough spent with her husband he had kept that piece of information to himself, because he had feared she would send him away if she ever became conscious of the telepathic bond that had grown between them over their years together. She had not done that, though, when in the middle of her life’s worst crisis he had finally risked deliberately reaching out to her mind to mind. On that day he had held her and steadied her
by a means that no one else on their bridge could detect, and by doing so he had brought her through the one moment in all her years of starship command when she had come close to breaking.

  Afterward she had gone to her husband’s home on Kesra to give birth to Maddy, just as she had done with her boys; and when she was about to wean the little girl and return to duty, she had told George Fralick that she was leaving him. George had kept Maddy, so this was Casey’s first sight of the girl and her first sight of him.

  In spite of never having fathered a child of his own, Casey liked youngsters and knew how to talk to them. He said now, with plain amusement, “You caught us being lazy, I’m afraid. It’s the middle of the morning, Ms. Fralick, and your mother was just about to get dressed and come to meet you.”

  “I found my way, it wasn’t hard.” The young girl was both taller and slimmer than Katy had been at thirteen. In that she was George’s child; but she had her mother’s coloring, the same coppery hair (as if had been before Katy’s had silvered) and the same expressive brown eyes. It was hard to say which parent was more responsible for her self-possessed manner, because that she probably had received from both sides. “Ms. Fralick sounds nice, but I guess you’re supposed to call me Maddy. Everyone does. Where’s Mum?”

  The comm interrupted them, this time. Katy had been standing still, watching the interaction between her daughter and her husband and not daring to rush forward because she wanted what she saw happening. Cab Barrett moved to answer the comm without being asked, and now Romanova went toward her child with her arms held out.

  She had just gathered Maddy in, and had discovered that her thirteen-year-old was as tall as she was now, when Barrett spoke up with uncharacteristic sharpness. “Linc, take this,” the doctor commanded.

  Casey did what Romanova would never have advised him to do if he had asked her; on his way past, he put a hand on young Maddy’s shoulder and squeezed it gently.

  Oh, no. Would the little girl be calling her father before the Archangel could leave orbit, scared to death that every evil thing he must have told her about Narsai in general and about her mother’s second husband in particular had just been proved true?

  “I know him!” Maddy said, stepping back from her mother’s embrace and frowning with puzzled recognition. “Mum, I know him. How? When did he come to see me, that I don’t remember?”

  While I was carrying you inside me, Romanova thought, and almost said. But while she was still opening her mouth her husband called to her from the comm.

  “Katy, the Triad just exploded in orbit. No one at Narsai Control seems to know who was aboard her, no one seems to know what in hell happened. But whoever was aboard, they’re gone. There’s nothing left but space junk.”

  Triad. Dan Archer’s trade-ship, his new life and that of his partners, gone.

  And Dan with it, too? Hansie, Sean, Beth, and Fiona? Both Casey and Romanova had known all of them, that entire group of scramblers had been among their junior officers at one time or another in the old days aboard first the Titan and then the Ariadne.

  “Mum?” Romanova had turned toward Casey, but hadn’t moved. Young Maddy was tugging at her arm now in puzzlement. “What ship was it that exploded? And who was aboard her? I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, love,” Romanova said softly. Her eyes were stinging, and she wasn’t sure where her own pain stopped and where her husband’s began as she crossed the room swiftly to take him into her arms.

  He had been fond of the three young men who had died at Mistworld, but they had been Katy’s and George’s sons and his sadness over their deaths had been mostly for Katy’s sake. But Dan had belonged to both of them; so if Dan really was gone now, it was fully as much his loss as it was hers.

  “Mum?” Maddy Fralick asked again, standing alone and mystified just inside the door.

  “Come into the kitchen, child,” Cab Barrett said, and went to the girl and took her by the arm and led her out of the room.

  Barrett knew what ship the Triad was, and who had almost certainly been aboard her. And after practicing family medicine on Narsai for more than thirty years, she also knew when it was time to leave a mated pair alone with their grief.

  CHAPTER 5

  “I think he’s coming back,” Lincoln Casey said quietly, but with certainty in his tone. “I think someone needs to stay here, Katy.”

  After the first overwhelming rush of sorrow, that was what Casey had begun saying of Dan Archer; and he was still saying it, now that his wife had summoned an aircar from the public garage and was preparing to board it with Rachel Kane and a small quantity of luggage. Whether he was denying something he didn’t want to accept, or whether he really had some kind of Morthan intuition about his foster son’s fate, even Katy couldn’t tell. She had never known Linc to refuse to face the truth, though, and in the first few minutes after the news of the Titan’s explosion had come he had been just as devastated by it as she was. So she had hopes that he might be right in his abrupt switch from despair to optimism—but the only difference those hopes could make right now was to keep him here at home, in case Dan somehow managed to come here, while she took Rachel Kane north to the already winter-bound farm. Sending Kane there alone would, Katy had decided, be far more likely to call attention to the trip than would a family member’s escorting her.

  Trying to conceal their strange guest’s presence from her daughter never entered Romanova’s mind, at least not until they were aloft and it was too late for such thoughts. But if Maddy was anything like what she had been at thirteen, or like what her three brothers had each been like at just a little bit older than that (since girls unquestionably did mature more quickly than boys did), then attempting to conceal something from her would have been the most certain way possible to identify it as particularly interesting and worthy of investigation. All children were like that, and the bright ones were more so.

  And Maddy was bright, no question about that. She also was far more outgoing than Katy had expected. Based on the girl’s almost cloistered life in the Fralick household on Kesra, where humans were a minority and where most Kesrans lived in family groups that were so large their functions were practically self-contained on their islands and floating habitats, Romanova had thought her daughter would be a shy creature whom she and Linc would have to gradually accustom to seeing strangers and to going out in public.

  But that independent use of public transport to get herself to their home after the Archangel had teleported her down to the terminal had not, apparently, been a fluke success at dealing with strange situations or new people. Maddy was now sitting in the passenger seat behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs, which were occupied by her mother and by Rachel Kane, and she was asking a question about every thirty seconds.

  Well, at least bringing her child to the ancestral property of the Romanov family was a perfectly believable excuse for visiting the farmstead right now! And she had always made the trip this way, not by using public teleporters to get from MinTar to the hamlet nearest the farm, so her hiring an aircar wasn’t going to raise a red flag with anyone who might be observing her movements today. Ever since she had gained control over her own finances, Katy had been hiring aircars and eschewing the public teleporters. She hated them.

  No one kept logs of how many people rode in an aircar, or even of where that aircar went from the time it was checked out until it was returned. Not on Narsai, anyway. So as far as any observer might know, Catherine Romanova was taking her daughter for her first visit to the ancestral Romanov property as soon as was possible after the young girl’s arrival on Narsai; and that would not seem odd, not to anyone who either was Narsatian or who knew Narsatian customs and values well.

  The extra person, if her presence should happen to be noticed? One of the dozens of young officers Romanova and Casey had nurtured during their years together, no doubt. Dan Archer was the only one who had been given a permanent place in their household, but they often had young people aroun
d them. Guests from their own generation were more the rarity, actually.

  “So your name is Rachel, and you’re going to have a baby.” Maddy spoke as casually as if the three of them were chatting at a social gathering. “Do you have a husband?”

  She hadn’t asked for Rachel’s second name. Whether that was because she realized that its not being volunteered had significance, or whether she was so used to one-named Kesrans that it didn’t occur to her that most humans had at least two names, Romanova couldn’t guess. Probably the latter.

  “No,” Kane said calmly. “No husband. And I wasn’t planning to have a baby; it just happened.”

  “Oh.” Young Maddy accepted that with perfect equanimity. “What do you do?”

  “I was a starship officer. But I left the service, not long ago.”

  Should Romanova tell her child that it wasn’t polite to ask so many questions? But none of them had been impertinently personal, asking whether a person had a partner and what occupation he or she followed were both just normal social inquiries. And Kane was handling it without difficulty, offering responses that were adequate but that didn’t reveal information which Maddy should not be given.

  Ye gods, the child sounded like George making small talk at a diplomatic reception. He loved those things, while Katy had always despised them.