The teleporter the landing party had brought down from the starship, so that their people could move back and forth to the surface with ease instead of making constant shuttle trips, took Catherine Romanova and her daughter from the Romanov Farmstead to the Archangel in less than a second of elapsed time. She knew what was happening, because she could hear the voices around her and could feel the hands that touched her; but she was helpless, she could not respond in any way. She could not even open her eyes; she perceived Johnnie’s worried voice and the landing party commander’s exclamations and then the warmth of the teleporter washing over her, but she paid them little heed. It was taking all her concentration to make her chest rise and fall, as she persisted in breathing even though she could feel a terrible hand trying to grasp her lungs and hold them still forever.
Maddy was probably in a similar state, if indeed the little girl was still alive. After that one startled cry, she too had clutched at her throat and had started fighting for air. But this was one time when Katy could spare no attention even for her child, because if she did not keep herself alive then she could do nothing more for anyone.
Linc, where was Linc? Her distress was shared, just as the sensations of their lovemaking had always been shared. He, too, was fighting against that invisible hand. He, too, was breathing only out of sheer cussedness…out of pure determination to go on living until someone made that hand release him.
Sickbay. She had been rushed there from the teleport platform, a journey she had made many times before on other starships. She was aware of Maddy near her, in a way very much like that in which she was aware of Linc. That should have been frightening, to feel her child’s mind in addition to her husband’s—and for both of them to be as scared and as close to dying as she was—but at least they were together.
Three beings. Woman, man, and child; the little girl who was George Fralick’s by biology and upbringing, but who had learn to recognize Lincoln Casey’s mental touch in the days when she was developing from zygote to infant within the shelter of her mother’s womb.
How funny that was, hilarious really, that Fralick was so jealous of Casey’s intimacy with his ex-wife—but he hadn’t a clue that his child was, in this vital sense, also Casey’s child. In the last stages of oxygen deprivation before unconsciousness would claim her, when she knew she was losing the battle to live, Katy Romanova wanted to laugh and could not do so.
And then quite suddenly she could breathe again. The hand inside her chest was gone, and she was gulping air so enthusiastically that she soon felt a mask being pressed to her face and heard a voice instructing her, “Breathe slowly, Admiral. You’ll hyperventilate, you’ll make yourself ill. That’s it, that’s better. Relax, you’re going to be all right now.”
“Maddy?” she asked, as soon as the mask was taken away. It had been there only to break the frantic cadence of her breathing, to help her slow down before she did indeed go abruptly from starving for oxygen to flooding her system with too much of that precious gas.
A man with golden eyes was standing beside her, but he wasn’t Linc. He said, “She’s all right, Admiral. But you both had a close call. Ambassador!” And he turned away from his patient, and spoke in no-nonsense medical tones to someone she could not see. “That settles it, I think. Putting Captain Casey into stasis isn’t just a death sentence for him; somehow it’s also a death sentence for Admiral Romanova here, and for your daughter.”
George Fralick’s voice answered, “That doesn’t make a damned bit of sense, Marin. I know Casey’s a mindfucker like you, but he always said he was a defective one. Couldn’t do a thing, according to his medical files when he was serving as a junior officer under my command—”
“How many years ago?” The medical officer called Marin, which should make him part of Linc’s own clanstribe on Mortha, spoke harshly now. “Ambassador, this woman may be your former wife; but she’s Captain Casey’s mate now, and when he went into respiratory failure in that stasis field she went right along with him. That doesn’t always happen to a Morthan’s mate, but it’s a phenomenon I’ve seen before. And when the partner’s a human it’s worse, because she has no skills to help her resist experiencing her husband’s physical distress.”
“Why in hell was my daughter affected, then? What has Maddy got to do with that damned mindfucker Casey?” Fralick wanted to know.
“I hope she can’t hear you, George.” Katy’s voice was thick, because her throat was raw from her battle to live. But she had a little strength now, enough so she could turn her head at least and search for him with her eyes.
“She can’t. She’s recovering, but she lost conscious and hasn’t regained it yet.” That was Marin cutting in, his tone even more severe. “But Admiral Romanova is right, Ambassador. However it is that her daughter, your daughter, was affected by Captain Casey’s condition, hearing your anger at him is only going to frighten the child.”
“Linc,” Katy said. She directed the single word at Marin, and her tone made it into a Fleet Admiral’s demand.
“I removed him from the stasis field just as you and your daughter were being brought into sickbay, Admiral. He started breathing normally immediately, and if it wasn’t for the sedatives still in his system he’d be fine now. Just as you and Madeleine will be, after a few more minutes to recover.” The medical officer scanned Romanova’s body, and nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, you’re fine already. You just need to rest, you’ve had a hell of a shock.”
“I don’t have time to rest.” She struggled to sit up now, and was not surprised when Marin grumbled but helped her. If he’d been a starship physician long enough to rise to the rank he now held, then he had seen this type of behavior many times; he knew the only way to keep her prone would have been to restrain her, physically or chemically, and he was prepared to do neither just now. “George! You know Morthans often die in stasis. Dammit, what kind of cooperation did you think killing him was going to get you from me?”
She was mad now, and a glance toward her daughter’s gurney made her more so. The girl lay completely still, except for the rise and fall of her chest. Her dusky little face was pale underneath its natural skin tones, and her body was completely limp.
“Damn you, answer me,” she said to the child’s father, and she bit off each word as if he were the greenest ensign she’d ever seen and quite possibly also the stupidest.
“No, Katy. You answer me.” That command voice would have worked for her with just about any fellow human she’d ever encountered, and with most nonhumans as well. But it wasn’t going to work with George Fralick, not with the man who still thought of her as the woman whose body had no secrets from his and whose womb had carried his children. To Fralick, she had discovered at the end of two decades and more of responding to him with eager passion—even after the rest of their relationship had become alternately tense and distant—a woman who had lain beneath him in bed was and would always be someone he had proved he could dominate, could “possess” in the sense she had heard that word used in certain annoying old novels and stage plays.
What to her meant the sharing of love and the giving and receiving of pleasure, to him conferred a certain contempt on the partner whose body was invaded in the act of union and who for nine months afterward became increasingly ruled by the new life that his invasion could so easily begin. She had learned that to her cost, and seeing that knowledge confirmed now did not surprise her in the least.
But it made her angrier still, so that now the heat of her fury turned cold. And that was good, because that was when her intellect kicked into high gear and Catherine Romanova became a truly dangerous opponent.
George Fralick did not know that. He had been her captain, long ago at the start of her career; but he had never gone into battle with her in command, and in their private disagreements she had always held back the part of her nature that was ascendant now.
Always she’d had the children to think about, first their three boys and then small Maddy. Always, even that last night in his home on Kesra when his parting gift had been to take her against her will, Katy had held back from using her full fighting capacity against George Fralick. On that night she had known the only way to escape him was to kill him, or hurt him so badly that the Kesran authorities would have condemned her just as if she had killed him; and she had also known that on Kesra marital rape was a legal oxymoron, and the fact that she had been present in his house voluntarily while still his wife would have been all the defense Fralick needed for his actions. She had known he could be vain, she had known that where she was concerned he could be both irrational and possessive; but that he would deliberately hurt her, physically hurt her, had not entered her mind before then.
In order to live—so that baby Maddy would not have to begin her life with one parent being executed for having murdered the other while she lay in her crib in the next room, and while the Kesran house-servants pretended to hear nothing because what happened behind a married couple’s bedroom door was not their business—Katy had stopped fighting at the moment when she knew what it would cost her to continue. And now she saw the same look on her former husband’s face that she had seen on it then.
Only now she wasn’t lying naked under him in a bedroom in his home on Kesra. Now she was in a starship sickbay, she was (damn and blast it!) the former commander of this and every other ship in the whole Star Service fleet, and that meant he was on her turf whether or not his vanity would allow him to see that.
Why hadn’t she seen it, until this moment? What in hell had happened to her eighteen months ago on Earth, anyway, when the order ejecting the scramblers from the Service had come down from civilian authorities above her and Linc had started getting sick for the first time since she had known him? He’d been wounded in battle before, of course; but her husband had never once been ill. Morthans, the species that healed others, did not get sick.
And that had scared her, that had made her helpless. In just the same way, in spite of the drastically differing contexts, that being physically violated by George Fralick had temporarily robbed her of all that gave her personal power and self-confidence even though her yielding to him had been a conscious choice.
A terrible choice, but one she knew that thousands—hell, more likely millions—of other human women had made before her, when trapped by circumstances that made yielding a lesser evil than the consequences of offering resistance.
She wasn’t helpless now. But Linc was, and Maddy was, and she was the only person in the universe who could protect them. She said to Marin, “Comm, if you please, Commander!” And then when he held one out to her, with shock in his golden eyes, she said into it in the same tone: “Captain Giandrea. This is Fleet Admiral Catherine Romanova, Retired. I want to lodge an official complaint against George Fralick, citizen of Kesra. I’m charging him with attempting to kill three citizens of other Commonwealth Accord worlds. Myself and my daughter, Madeleine Romanova, citizens of Narsai; and Lincoln Casey, a citizen of Terra by his father’s birth and a citizen of Mortha by his mother’s birth.”
“Admiral Romanova! You made it, you’re alive!” Giandrea answered her promptly, and his relief carried plainly over the comm. “Ma’am, that’s wonderful news. But I have to tell you that this ship was placed at Ambassador Fralick’s disposal by the order of my superiors, and that even the diversion back here to Narsai to cooperate with the Corporate Marshal—”
“He wouldn’t have acceded to that if he’d had the kind of authority that he seems to think he has,” Romanova said sharply. She lifted her eyes, and looked straight into Fralick’s eyes.
And knew she was right. She went on, “If he couldn’t say ‘no, we’re not going back’ to a Corporate Marshal, that means he’s still expected to obey all the normal laws of the worlds that are part of the Commonwealth. And it also means that if you’ve allowed him to bully you into cooperating while he’s violated the rights, and the person, of a civilian who has neither been charged with a crime nor made any threats against anyone you’re supposed to be protecting—”
“It’s my understanding, ma’am, that I’m under Mr. Fralick’s orders. If he had told me to ignore the Marshal’s hail, I would have done that.” Giandrea had hesitated, but now he was plainly making up his mind and digging in his heels. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. So I’ll record your complaint, but until we reach a Star Service base or until I receive other orders….”
“That does it,” Romanova said, much too quietly now. This she had not wanted to do, this she probably was going to regret five minutes after she did it; but under these circumstances that hardly mattered. If she failed to use the one weapon she had at her disposal now, Linc was going to die—she probably was, too—and although she did not believe George Fralick would deliberately harm his own child, the man plainly didn’t understand the implications of his actions well enough for her to have confidence that he wouldn’t wind up killing Maddy, too. So to hell with it, she would sort out the moral issues later; and in the meantime she would use everything she had to protect those for whom love had made her responsible.
She said, “Get me a yeoman, Captain Giandrea. And you get down here, too, because I need a command officer to witness what I’m about to do. Which is respond officially, on the record, to a ‘recall to duty’ order that reached me a few hours ago in my father’s office. I’m going to accept that recall, and then I’m going to countermand the order you were given that puts you under Mr. Fralick’s control. And don’t try to tell me I can’t do that, because I know Archangel’s home port is New Orient and that means your orders were issued by a commodore. So I goddam well can do that, or anything else I see fit to do, unless you want to contact Fleet Command on Terra and let me make my complaint to my successor there! And I would love to do that, Captain. I almost hope you’ll let me.”