Matushka Page 6

  He had kept that from her for far too long. For years he had been careful, so careful, not to intrude when her thoughts and feelings were private ones. Yet he had known it before she did when she fell in love with George Fralick, since Fralick was captain to both of them at that time. He had been glad then that he lacked a human man’s sexual passions, because if he had possessed them it would have been damnably difficult for him not to intrude on her mentally many times when she and Fralick were nearby and had not the slightest clue that it was possible for him to listen.

  More than listen, to perceive whatever Katy perceived. Fortunately the idea of intimate contact with George Fralick hadn’t just been unattractive to Casey; it had revolted him, on the few occasions when he had accidentally let his barriers down while Katy was with her husband.

  Homophobia? No, it was no more that than it was jealousy. It was simply an instinctive drawing back from a powerful and elemental something that he was not yet ready to manage, that he could no more savor as Katy was savoring it than an infant of three months could chew and digest a piece of raw fruit.

  He had been terrified that if she realized he could touch her in this way that was so easy for him, by the time they were command officers in their thirties and she was the mother of Fralick’s growing sons, that she would turn on him in horror. Which she might have…he still felt a bit guilty for having deceived her for so long, but he could not repent of it.

  And then his body had starting waking up, and he had begun to understand why fully human males behaved in the impossibly strange ways that they sometimes did.

  Being near her made him ache. Watching her had always been a pleasure, Katy was lovely even though she had no great confidence in that fact (and Fralick, damn the bastard, never let her forget it when each pregnancy left her a bit less slender than she’d been before—did the man not have brains enough to realize that it was bearing and nursing his children that had put those few additional kilos onto his wife’s frame?). Yet until he was nearing forty, Linc Casey appreciated Katy Romanova’s femininity exactly as he had appreciated that quality in his mother. The sight of her was pleasing, in a way that the sight of another man wasn’t; there was a special kind of comfort in having her nearby. But by the time his fortieth birth-anniversary had come and gone, if she simply stood close beside him on the bridge he could feel his breathing begin to change.

  And if she leaned over him, if she touched his shoulder in the way she had a habit of doing, other things happened. He woke at night, and knew he had dreamed about her, and was embarrassed at what those dreams had caused his body to do.

  She was nearing the place in her career when she would be considered for promotion to flag rank, and he was wondering whether the time might not have come when he should separate his life from hers—for both decency’s sake, and for that of his own sanity—when she came back from a leave spent with her husband, she embraced her friend in welcome, and Casey immediately sensed a new life within her.

  He hadn’t sensed her sons’ presence while she had carried them, twenty and more years earlier. He had only just learned to follow the working of Katy’s own mind, in those days. But he had known small Madeleine was alive inside Catherine Romanova’s womb for several weeks before Katy herself had become aware of the changes in her body’s rhythms, had sought medical advice (thinking she was simply entering menopause, since she had been in her middle forties by that time), and had been told that she was carrying the daughter she’d wanted for so long.

  Still he hadn’t told her the truth. He had stayed with her, though, because leaving her then was unthinkable. Somehow he had known she was about to need him in a way she had never needed him before—and that premonition had come horribly and spectacularly true, far above Mistworld, when two ships in Romanova’s battle group had become balls of flame and when Casey had finally reached out to her mind-to-mind without even thinking about holding back.

  After that he no longer had to touch her covertly, he always did it openly. Her pregnancy with someone else’s baby had fortunately kept his sexual interest under control, she hadn’t had to deal with that potentially alarming aspect of being in mental and emotional contact with the friend she had thought she knew so well. He had comforted her while her marriage to George Fralick, rocky in its later years at best, had disintegrated even as she grew huge with Fralick’s daughter. And then he had had to let her go off to Kesra with Fralick, to give birth to the baby to whose mind he already felt powerfully connected. He had remained on duty, and had not been able to decide whether he hoped that for Katy’s sake her marriage might be revived by the new child’s arrival—or if he hoped instead that she would finally break with Fralick, once she had borne and weaned the baby.

  Even he hadn’t expected Fralick to do what the man had done, though. He had not thought that any man who claimed to love his wife would show that “love” by using her baby to try to hold her in a marriage she no longer wanted. Katy had arrived back on the Firestorm after her maternity leave not sad about the separation but glowing with pride in her new child, as he had seen her arrive back from bearing first Ewan and then the twins so many years earlier; instead she had been barely holding herself together, and as soon as the formalities of her return were over and they were alone she had broken down in his arms.

  He had wanted her so desperately that day, but to take her then would have been beyond excusing. He had held her, mentally and emotionally as well as physically; he had comforted her, supported her, loved her. But not until a full year afterward, when she was about to assume her new rank as a flag officer and he was about to take on the role of her adjutant, had they become lovers.

  She was ready for it, by then. Fralick was in her past, she was used to the mental intimacy that she and her friend and long-time professional partner now shared, and adding the physical dimension to their existing closeness had only seemed natural.

  Katy had been sharing her body in that way from the night of her thirteenth birthday. Linc had never done so before. It had been awkward, at first—but it had also been beautiful. Intensely, incredibly beautiful, and the wonder of it hadn’t faded as time had passed and as their physical union had become a thoroughly familiar act.

  He was thinking about that now, as he came back to consciousness, because someone was touching his thoughts and whoever it was wanted him to think about his relationship with Katy and how it had developed over the years. But once he realized that was the case, he shut off those thoughts in horror.

  “So you’re awake now, cousin.” A golden-eyed man about half Casey’s age was looking at him and smiling when he opened his own eyes. “I’m sorry we had to hurt you, but it was either that or take control of your mind against your will. And that would be against ethics, as I’m sure you know.”

  “So shooting me with a stunner was a better idea.” Casey looked beyond the young man’s shoulder, and saw something very familiar. He was in a starship’s sickbay. The young man wore a Star Service uniform, that of a physician who held the rank of lieutenant commander.

  Which meant he probably was the ship’s chief medical officer. But which ship? And since when did the Star Service kidnap one of its own retired senior officers, from the sanctuary of his home?

  “Captain? Our guest is awake now,” the physician said into a comm unit. Then to Casey he added, “Captain Casey. That’s going to get confusing.”

  “‘Mister’ Casey will do.” Reaching out for the doctor’s mind was pointless. To this day, Linc could touch only two minds uninvited. His wife’s mind, and—as he had discovered what he thought was still not very long ago—little Maddy Fralick’s mind. The fact that this physician was a fellow Morthan hybrid was of no help to Casey whatsoever. His old failing, to which he hadn’t given a thought since settling down on Narsai with Katy, confronted him again; and it annoyed him just as much now as it had when he was a little boy visiting his mother’s family. The other Morthan children talked without speech, and they left him out…and later
, at the Academy, another cadet would see his golden eyes and try to touch thoughts with him and be disgusted when that was possible only if the other Morthan was willing to do all the work.

  It had been easier once he became an officer who had some seniority. But from time to time the same thing had gone on happening to him, so he was not the least bit surprised to find it happening to him again now. Everything else about this situation astonished him—but not that.

  “Which ship is this? And what in hell am I doing on it?” Casey inquired now, sitting on the edge of the medical bed where he had awakened and putting up a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. He felt the typical post-stunning tightness of his scalp, a sensation which was not quite a headache but that felt uncomfortably close to the start of one.

  “I’d like to be able to answer all your questions, Captain Casey, but for now at least that won’t be possible.” A slender, dark-skinned human man had entered the compartment while the Morthan hybrid had been speaking. A man who wore four stripes on his uniform sleeves, and who was poker-faced in a way that Casey had long ago learned usually masked feelings that must be put aside for duty’s sake.

  He did not have to be able to touch humans’ minds to know what they were feeling. Many times that was obvious to him, just by observing them.

  “At least I can tell you which ship you’re on, anyway,” the dark man continued. “Archangel. And I can tell you my name, Paolo Giandrea—but that’s going to be about it.”

  The hatch to the passageway opened again, and two humans wearing security uniforms came through it. Casey realized that the Morthan doctor had moved away from him, and knew that although he could not see it a forcefield had been erected between them. He had ordered that done to a potentially dangerous prisoner many times, when he had been the one in command.

  “I’m sorry,” Captain Giandrea said again. “But I guess I don’t have to tell you that sometimes I don’t like my orders, Captain Casey. I never served with you, but I’ve heard plenty about you from Dan Archer—so I know you’ll understand there’s nothing personal about what I have to do now.”

  The guards moved forward, stepping through the forcefield where gaps of precisely the necessary size opened to allow them to pass.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Dan!” Romanova was met at the farmhouse’s door not by her silver-haired cousin, but by someone she had not expected to see again unless there really was some kind of afterlife. She respected Linc’s intuition, but when it came to someone he loved as much as he loved their foster son she had honestly doubted him. She had been waiting for the results of Narsai Control’s investigation into the trader Triad’s explosion, which of course would include a scan of the debris for the smallest traces of organic remains—which almost always, except in cases where a gargantuan military carrier or a thousand-passenger civilian liner had suffered disaster, could confirm the identities of those who had died when a ship was lost and the debris was accessible for such scanning. Only if that had been completed without finding Dan would she have let herself begin believing that Linc might be right.

  Yet here Dan was in front of her, and much as she wanted to throw her arms around him she could not allow herself that luxury. She could only draw in a breath of startled joy, and exhale it as his name.

  “Better get inside, Matushka,” Archer said, and stood back from the door to invite the three females to enter.

  Once the door had closed behind them, while Romanova was still hearing it seal itself, she found herself gathered into someone’s arms; but not Dan’s. Ivan Romanov was holding his cousin tightly, with a possessiveness she hadn’t felt in his touch since the days almost fifty years ago when she had been a barely-nubile girl and his intended bride. “Oh, Katy. I wasn’t expecting you, but after what almost happened to Dan I’m so glad to know you’re safe,” he said, and gave her a squeeze that took her breath before he kissed her forehead and let her go.

  She’d stuffed her blaster back where it belonged, just in time. Now she stepped back from Johnnie’s arms, and saw that nearby Rachel Kane was being held close by Dan Archer.

  Just for a moment. Then Archer was turning to Romanova, although he kept the female gen’s shoulders in the circle of one big arm. He asked tautly, “Were you told about the Triad yet, Matushka?”

  “Yes.” Katy was aware of her daughter standing beside her, taking the whole scene in with enormous brown eyes but saying nothing. She had to be frightened, yet Maddy was more poised at the moment than Rachel Kane was with all her years of service experience. She put out a hand and touched the girl’s arm in reassurance as she continued to Archer, “Narsai Control called us, Linc and I are listed as your next of kin. But he didn’t believe you were dead, so when we came out here he stayed behind in case you tried to contact home.”

  “Oh, damn,” Dan said. “I’m sorry. How in hell did Maddy wind up on Narsai, Matushka? Now of all times?”

  “Papa has to go to Terra, and he asked Mum to keep me with her while he’s gone this time,” Madeleine Fralick announced, answering for herself with that calm confidence that so far nothing had been able to shake. “Who are you, and how do you know my name?”

  “This is Dan Archer, sweetheart,” Romanova said, almost absently as she looked around the huge kitchen—traditionally an enormous room in Narsatian farmsteads, a leftover custom from colonial days where families had been large instead of strictly limited and when it had taken many hands to operate a farmstead like this one—and wondered with coldness in her chest why Lorena did not appear. And where Dan’s shipmates were, also. “You’ve heard me mention him before. He was your brother Ewan’s best friend, and now he lives with me and with Linc. So you should think of him as your brother, too, all right?”

  “All right,” Maddy said, giving assent as if her mother really had intended for her to make a choice. “But why aren’t you dead, then, if that’s who you are? Your ship blew up, and you were supposed to be aboard her. Everyone said that, anyway.”

  “Everyone was wrong,” Archer answered the child, with a taut grin that paid her the compliment of taking her just as seriously as she was taking herself. “We found the explosive before it went off. So a salvage ship went up instead, with Triad’s I.D. code and with enough traces of each of us aboard it so that the debris ought to check out to Narsai Control’s satisfaction.”

  “And Triad is in the equipment barn here.” Romanova understood now, and it was so simple that she wanted to kick herself. But the little rented aircar carried no equipment for identifying a warp-capable ship’s I.D. signature. Its instruments had barely been able to tell her enough to make her come in with her suspicions aroused; so she really could not have known, and it was foolish to blame herself for not guessing. “But why, Dan? Who would try to destroy a trade-ship in orbit around a peaceful world like Narsai?”

  “I don’t know, Matushka.” Archer gave Rachel Kane’s shoulders a squeeze as he said that. “We’re all former scramblers, so getting rid of us wouldn’t make anyone at Star Service Command shed any tears now that every trained officer they threw away eighteen months ago is apt to be thinking about joining the Rebs. But taking that much trouble to get rid of just five of us, for that reason only? I don’t think so. And that leaves Rachel here as the only reason I can think of why anyone might be that mad at me, or at any of my partners—and even that doesn’t make complete sense, because blowing us up wasn’t going to get her back for her owners. I might have expected them to have one of us grabbed to try to find out her whereabouts, but I wouldn’t expect them to kill when it wouldn’t gain them a thing. The Corporate Jackals just don’t operate that way.”

  Romanova was barely hearing the second part of what her foster son had said. She was staring across the kitchen, and she was exhaling with profound relief because Lorena Romanova had entered the room from an inner doorway and was looking at her cousin with eyes that were just the same shade of brown as Katy’s.

  Reen was a bit younger than Katy was, and her blood
relationship to Ivan Romanov was one degree less close; but it hadn’t been possible for Katy’s parents to have another daughter to fulfill the marriage agreement that Katy had refused to complete, not when Johnnie had already waited an extra decade because Katy’s older sister had died in childhood and her parents had then conceived her to replace their lost heir. So the next branch of the Romanovs had been asked to contribute their daughter, and Lorena had acquiesced gladly.

  How odd it was, that Reen hadn’t known Johnnie throughout her childhood as Katy had known him—hadn’t gone to his bed on her thirteenth birthday, to tremendous celebration and warm parental approval, as Katy had done—and yet it was plain that now Reen loved Johnnie in much the same way that Katy loved Lincoln Casey.

  The human heart was the strangest of creatures, and no amount of discovering and settling new worlds and establishing new cultures was ever going to alter that simple fact.

  Reen came to her husband’s side now, and took his hand in a gesture that conveyed intimacy far more clearly than had Dan Archer’s embrace of Rachel Kane. She said softly, “They’re all battened down to wait it out aboard their ship, dear. They say they don’t want to come inside. Now, this must be our guest—but who’s the young lady?”

  Aboard the starship Archangel, Lincoln Casey found himself staring out of his cell in the brig at a person he hadn’t seen since the aftermath of Mistworld.

  George Fralick had come into Casey’s life on the same day he had entered Catherine Romanova’s, when the two green ensigns had been assigned to the small ship that was Fralick’s first command. He had been a good captain, Casey remembered. A trifle colorless, it had seemed to the romantic young Morthan hybrid; Fralick was a calm man, who gave orders in a matter-of-fact tone and who left the everyday operations of the ship mostly in his exec’s hands. That was of course just what a skipper was supposed to do, but how many commanders were able to resist the temptation to continually make themselves seen and heard?