“Hello, Dad.” Most Narsatian children used that form of male-parent address. Maddy’s “Papa” to George Fralick was very much a Kesran-human speech pattern, although her “Mum” to Katy was typically Narsatian.
The Standard language was spoken recognizably on all the Outworlds just as much as it was on Terra, but it did have its varying accents and permutations. Dan Archer to this day could barely open his mouth without identifying himself as a miner’s grandson from Sestus 4, for example; and Lincoln Casey had worked hard to eradicate the last traces of Sestus 3 country-folk inflection from his speech.
“Catherine.” Trabe Kourdakov addressed his daughter that way when he thought it necessary to be formal with her, and after so long a separation he could scarcely be anything else. They had lived just a few kilometers apart for the past seven months, but had not seen each other; and through all the years since her divorce from Fralick, they had not spoken once.
Until now. She was standing in his office’s doorway, with her mother at one of her shoulders and with a brown-eyed girl at the other.
Damn Cabbie, she could be sentimental at times. Which was why Kourdakov was glad he occupied the Senior Chair of the Council just now, because although Cabbie had done a good job of leading Narsai while the role was primarily that of a ceremonial parent-figure the present was a time when hard decisions must be made.
He’d never understood how Katy could do the job of a starship commander, and later that of a fleet admiral. Katy could be just as sentimental as her mother. But perhaps he hadn’t seen her in action when the situation required that she be as pragmatic as Trabe himself was capable of being; maybe, just maybe, what he had always thought of as her willfulness was that kind of strength coming out in her after all.
At any rate she was taking a gamble by coming here right now, and she had to know that. She wasn’t a stupid woman, he knew that much about her for sure.
“This is Maddy,” his daughter said now, and gently pushed her own daughter forward into the room. “Her father wants her to stay with me until the possibility of war is over.”
The possibility of war was never going to be over. Not as long as food grown on Narsai had to be shipped to Terra or one of the other Inner Worlds, even in years when it was needed more by lean-rationed colonies such as Farthinghome or Claymore. Not as long as Outworld people like Katy Romanova were welcome to give their lives in service to the Commonwealth’s defense force, but their home-worlds’ delegations on the Diet consisted of a single ceremonial representative from each planet (or incredibly, in the case of Sestus 3 and Sestus 4 which were so drastically unlike even though they orbited the same star, a single representative from one system!). A representative who could make speeches and give advice, but who could not vote; while from every ancient nation-state on Terra itself, and from every identifiable region of each of the Inner Worlds, came a representative who had full voting powers.
Having Katy as Fleet Admiral of the Star Service had given Narsai more potential for power than it had ever possessed in the past. From time to time during her tenure in that post she had come close to speaking with one or the other of her parents on official business, but she always chose to have an adjutant make the contact for her (an adjutant who was not her husband, since by then Casey had been given command of the Academy). So neither Cabanne Romanova during her Senior Chairship of the Council, nor Trabe Kourdakov after that Chair became his, had used their relationship to the Fleet Admiral as they might have been expected to utilize it.
It had been almost amusing, sometimes, to hear other philosophers singing his praises for practicing such unbending ethics. How little those admiring colleagues knew about how things really were!
But now she was here, and Kourdakov was involuntarily reaching out a hand that had grown thin with time’s passing to take the firm young hand of his grandchild. The girl was looking at him with typical brown Romanova eyes, eyes just like Cabbie’s; and she was saying softly and in perfect accentless Terran Standard, “Hello, Granfer. Mum says that’s what I should call you.”
“Hello, Madeleine.” He used the full name, not to be formal this time but to make himself get used to it. He had never called his own Madeleine “Maddy.” “So you’ve finally come to see us, have you?”
“Papa didn’t want me to before, but he said it was all right to come now,” the child said, and she smiled. Not shyly, but nevertheless with a certain reserve.
“Dad, do you know where my husband is?” Katy had waited to ask that as long as she could. In battle she was capable of waiting out an enemy forever, if that was what she had to do in order to win; but now her adversary might be the man who had held her hands while she had learned to toddle, the man in whose arms she had learned how to dance. It was possible that the same voice she could remember reading her bedtime stories had offered Narsai’s support if George Fralick took her husband away to be imprisoned and threatened in order to control her actions, and that possibility was so horrible that she had to know whether or not it was true.
Trabe Kourdakov’s surprise was genuine as he asked, “What are you talking about, Katy? As far as I know your Morthan’s wherever he usually would be at evening first-hour. And I think you and your mother had better come in here and shut the door, because this comm I’ve just read through about six times without being able to decide how to answer it is about you.”
“Is it what you were expecting, Trabe?” his wife asked. She stepped into the office, pulled Katy in with her, and sealed the entrance with a light touch.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is.” Kourdakov held out the message, and watched as Katy took it and read it and tried to absorb it.
“Mum?” Maddy asked. She was standing between her grandparents now, and each of them was holding one of her hands. And although she had seen neither of these two old people until today, she looked comfortable; it was only the expression on her mother’s face that was troubling her, the way that Katy’s normally dusky rose cheeks had turned chalky white.
Katy sat down in the guest chair. She said quietly, “I’m being called back to active duty, Maddy. I guess that’s one way for the Service to make sure I won’t answer any Reb draft—but I’ve got to admit I wasn’t expecting this, even if your grandfather was.”
“If you refuse to do what they tell you, it’s treason. Isn’t it, Mum?” Young Maddy spoke first, ending the hush that had filled her grandfather’s office.
It was indeed coming on toward evening. The girl had eaten a swift meal at the Romanov Farmstead, hours ago; but she was just a child, she had to be tired and she must be getting hungry again. Katy found herself focusing on those maternal concerns, and realized as she did so that they were a way she could distract herself just as much as they were issues to which she truly must attend.
But Maddy didn’t look or sound tired, and her question was exactly the one that was in the mind of each adult. Cabanne Romanova asked quietly, “Is she right, Katy? Can’t you refuse, especially if you have a personal crisis that needs your attention right now?”
“Retirement doesn’t cancel my service oath, Mum.” Katy shook her head. “Only resignation would have done that, and frankly I don’t know whether it’s possible to resign after accepting retirement. That’s one issue I’m sure the Judge Advocate General has never had to rule on!”
“But didn’t you just try to tell us that something’s happened to Linc, that you don’t know where he is?” Long ago, when Lincoln Casey had been simply her daughter’s comrade, Cabanne had liked the man and had enjoyed talking with him about Morthan culture and biology. She had found him far less inhibited about such matters than were most members of his species, and with that frankness he had more than made up for his lack of knowledge in some areas. The old woman found she did not like hearing that Casey was missing, no matter how many times during the past twelve years she had thought she wished he would disappear from her daughter’s life. “Surely you won’t be expected to drop everything and take passage to Terra, they certainly ought to give you time to arrange your affairs here. And if you have a family concern, for gods’ sake if your husband is missing….!”
“Surely nothing, Mum,” Katy said, in a way that just missed rudeness. “Linc is gone, yes. He vanished from our home sometime while Maddy and I were away from it today, and I know damned well he didn’t just disappear because he wanted to! But even if I had him right here beside me, I’d still be wondering what in hell I’m going to do now. I feel like that Terran general must have felt, the one in the North American civil war—what was his name?”
She looked automatically toward her father, who although his professorship was in philosophy had forgotten more Terran history than many scholars had ever studied. Kourdakov supplied, “Robert E. Lee, Katy. A graduate of the old United States of America’s equivalent of our Star Service Academy; a general in his country’s army, who finally decided to side with the rebels because he found that he couldn’t take up arms against soldiers from his home district. Or his home state, as they called it then.”
“Yes. Anyway, I know just how he must have felt!” Katy sighed. “Whichever side I come down on, if the worst does happen I’ll be fighting against people I care about. I wonder if that General Lee person ever considered just running away to live in some other nation-state?”
“Well, Katy-love, you won’t have to do that.” The old paternal endearment slipped out on its own. Not that Kourdakov had been trying very hard to hold it back, of course. He was interacting with his only living child again, and remaining cold and formal with her was something he had known at the conversation’s start he would not be able to do for very long. “There’s a new Commonwealth accord we’ve been able to obtain for Narsai, that you probably don’t know about because there hasn’t been time to publicize it since it was finalized. None of our citizens can be accepted into the Star Service now without the Council’s consent. So although in your case there’s obviously room for interpretation—you’re a retiree being recalled to duty, not a prospective cadet about to take the oath—we may be able to block that recall, at least temporarily. If you want us to. And that’s why the order came to you through me as Senior Chairholder on the Council, instead of being routed directly as such a comm would have been before the new accord.”
Katy was glad she was sitting down. She stared at her father, and then she shook her head. She said, “Let me understand this, Dad. That’s a new ‘right’ that you’ve ‘obtained’ for Narsatian citizens? Which will make sure that no other eighteen-year-old can do what your daughter did, and sign up at the Academy against her or his family’s wishes. Very good! It took you forty years but you finally fixed the problem.”
“Your mother said you’d take it this way when you found out about it.” Kourdakov had braced himself, and now he knew it had been with reason. “Actually we on the Council were thinking about Narsatian sailors on merchant ships, running up against Terran press gangs.”
“That was how you sold the other members the idea? I’ll retract that ‘very good,’ then, Dad. I’ll have to make it ‘spectacular,’ instead.” Katy smiled, bitterly and crookedly. “I came here to see if the captain of the Archangel had the Council’s consent when he ordered my husband kidnapped, because I’m damned certain that’s what has happened to him. I also wanted to know if Narsai Control knew more than what their grief counselor told me about the explosion of a trade-ship called Triad, in orbit this morning. But I guess coming to my father was the wrong thing for me to do! You’d think I might have learned that by now, though, even if I haven’t been paying attention to every puff of hot air that the Council blows.” She rose from the chair, nodded to her mother, and reached for her child. “Come on, Maddy. Visit’s over.”
“Are you going to answer the recall order, Katy? Or are you going to stay here and resist it, or leave Narsai to join the Rebs while you still can?” Cabanne Romanova did not leave her husband’s side as her daughter headed for the door, but she spoke quickly in hopes of getting an answer.
“She won’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Trabe Kourdakov said, his voice suddenly the ringing one of a philosopher in debating form. “Katy, give me that hard copy. I’ve already ‘lost’ the message itself; it’s been erased from university computer storage, even the record that it came in is gone from the relay at the orbital comm station. Now let’s lose that hard copy.”
“This won’t solve it, Dad.” But Katy’s eyes were stinging as she turned back. She gave him the sheet of flimsy fiber-based material, and she watched as it turned into fine gray ash. “When I don’t answer, they’ll just go around you and contact me directly after all.”
“True. But now you have some time before that happens, and now you have forewarning. And if you can’t think of something to do with those advantages, then I’ll be damned if I can imagine why you ever were given command of a lifeboat—let alone command of the whole Star Service.” Kourdakov grinned tautly. “Face it, Katy, it’s a preemptive strike on the Commonwealth’s part and it’s a brilliant one. They’re scared to death the Rebs will tap you and you’ll agree to help them, so they’re pulling you back before that can happen.”
“You’re right about that, Dad.” The former Fleet Admiral gave her father back an exact duplicate of his own grin. “I had it figured that way myself.”
She paused in the university’s coffee shop and bought two sandwiches, and ate hers without tasting it. She gulped coffee, and made sure Maddy had a beverage that was familiar to a child who had spent her entire lifetime on another planet.
Should she have left the little girl with her grandparents? One would think that the home of the Senior Chairholder of the Narsatian Council would be a safe place for anyone…. But one would also have thought that the home of the former Fleet Admiral of the Star Service would be a safe place for her husband, who was also an officer of many years’ experience. And it hadn’t been safe there for Linc, not at all.
She would have to keep Maddy with her. In her sight at all times, and preferably within her reach.
Damn. She had loved her boys, but she had felt encumbered by their presence when they had been under her command as officers on other ships. To have a little girl of thirteen on her hands was galling, now when she needed desperately to be free to move swiftly and do whatever it took to go after the Archangel and get Linc back.