“Reen.” Dan Archer spoke softly to the farmstead woman, as the old railcar moved closer and closer to the place where they knew their would-be captors waited. “You don’t know Rachel’s a gen. You don’t know anything about her, except that I brought her to your home and asked you to take her in. Do you?”
“Dan, getting the truth out of me is going to be the easiest thing in the universe. You know that, you have to know that.” Reen Romanova gave him a tired smile. “I’d love to keep Katy and her little girl out of this, and Johnnie too—but I don’t see how.”
“You and your husband, and the Matushka and her daughter, are all civilians and citizens of Narsai,” Dan reminded her. “The Star Service can’t do a thing to you unless your government agrees to give you up to them. I’d be wondering how your government was going to react to what’s happened to your property, except that I suppose I get the legal blame for that; I’m the only surviving owner of the Triad, and it was the ship resisting a tractor beam that actually did all the damage.”
“I wonder if anyone’s going to remember my citizenship, or care about it,” Reen replied. But Dan was right, and she felt herself sitting up straighter as she gathered her resources to face whatever was waiting for them when they reached the underground chamber where the railcar’s course terminated.
Rachel Kane dragged herself to wakefulness, because someone was telling her she had to do so. Dan. Dan, whose voice had been her anchor during the hours since she had awakened from the pseudo-slumber of stasis.
She was so heartily sick of having to be taken care of, and she was even more weary of having to base every decision she made on the welfare of the three small lives inside her. Until now everything had been so simple, compared to this.
She had spent her childhood, or what passed for a childhood among gens, learning at a rate that she now realized was at least twice as rapid as that of a bright but typical naturally conceived human child. Learning, exercising, practicing her skills; that had been her life, until the Academy.
There she had been placed among what she and her fellow gens had contemptuously called “wildlings” for the first time, and she had found out what unhappiness felt like. And because no one could become an officer without learning how to lead—even though all cadets would not eventually reach command status, still every one of them must be capable of giving orders and creating strategies—for the first time she had been required to think independently and creatively. Behavior that in the gen-creche had earned her correction, here was expected from her.
And young Rachel had discovered that she was not simply able to do that, she excelled at it. Although she was still required to report regularly to those HR Solutions scientists who were her creators and managers, although she knew she was unlike her classmates because even those whose parents were dead or estranged from them still knew who those parents had been, she tasted personal freedom for the first time; and that balanced the unhappiness of being different. That made up for the uncertainty of having to learn all over again where the limits on her behavior should be placed, and which of her personality traits she should squelch and which she should nurture.
The other way in which she was different from her classmates was that each of them, with a very few exceptions, had some plan—however vague, at that age—for eventually mating and reproducing. Rachel could not expect to do that. She was allowed, was even expected, to be sexually active; but her capacity to produce offspring did not belong to her. It belonged to the company, to HR Solutions, just as did her own life.
If a superior officer ordered a “wildling” human to his or her death, that individual experienced conflict in obeying. But in this way Rachel Kane was like her fellow gens who inhabited the crew quarters of starships instead of Officers’ Country, like those who worked in mines and factories where the tasks were particularly dangerous or particularly boring. When she was given an order, her instinct was to obey it. Period.
Or it had been, until she was encouraged to begin thinking creatively. Until fear that for her had been a purely animal reaction to physical danger, began to be the same as for the wildlings she once had scorned; until one day she realized, shaking in the aftermath of a particularly nasty brush with the end of her own existence, that she wanted to go on living just as much as did any of the wildlings who were now her daily associates. They, too, were willing to give their lives up in response to duty; but their instinctive drive to live was coupled with a longing for all the future’s imagined experiences, and that had always been a foreign concept (indeed, almost an unknown concept) for the gen called Rachel.
To be sorry you might die today, because a year from now you expected to return to a home where a civilian spouse waited? To realize that an elderly parent or a sibling would grieve for your loss, and hope not to be the cause of that pain? To think about the offspring you might have created, and never would if you died now?
Rachel Kane had never known parents or siblings, and of course she never would. But it had slowly dawned on her, as the years of her young womanhood slipped by, that it was not impossible that she might someday want one of her sexual liaisons to become more than just a safety valve. It had occurred to her that if she had not been geningeered to ovulate only when medically stimulated to do so, she might have had a child like any other female human being.
She had almost been glad the latter wasn’t going to be possible for her, though. And the former had been just an idle fantasy, really not something she ever expected to fulfill. She was lucky, and she knew she was lucky, just to have the freedom that she did; her life had much more scope than did that of her one-time creche-mates. She was fond of telling herself (although she had never dared voice the thought to anyone, not even to those she shyly began to refer to as her “friends”) that she had the best of both lives. She had a gen’s freedom from family entanglements, a gen’s absolute assurance that a massive economic power would take care of her all her days; yet she had a wildling’s ability to create, mentally if not physically, and she had a life of excitement and variety that even the gens who lived on a starship’s crew decks never tasted. The “ordinaries” who were gens rather than wildlings never left their ships, unless it was to go to a new assignment or to be cycled out of service when they grew too old to be useful and had to be disposed of.
That she had refused to anticipate. The chances were that she would die somewhere with honor, in the performance of her duty, long before she was a feeble old woman who could no longer perform as a command officer. She had hoped for that outcome, anyway; but only after she had lived as full and as long a life as possible, because life was something she had learned to savor.
And then had come this pregnancy. Not the familiar routine in which ripened ova were harvested from her body, to be taken away and used as the gengineers of HR Solutions saw fit; but three actual embryos, implanted and developing inside her womb.
Three creatures that while she understood they were not yet “babies,” nevertheless were lives that combined her characteristics with those of the man whose union with her body had called these zygotes into being.
She had been frightened, but far more than that she had been awed. And she had known, in those first moments after she astounded herself with the discovery of those new lives within her, that she wasn’t going to give them up without a fight.
Was what she felt for Daniel Archer what wildlings called “love”? She didn’t know, wasn’t even sure she was equipped to know. But she did understand that he felt something for her, something that went further than responsibility for what they had conceived together. She hadn’t led wildling humans (and assorted aliens and hybrids, as well) for a full decade, hadn’t become a heavy cruiser’s executive officer, without learning a thing or two about those wildlings’ emotions.
Duty might have made Dan Archer take care of her, but duty would never have caused him to hold her in the curve of his arm as he was holding her now. Gently, protectively, as the ancient railcar halted; and at the last moment before they were pulled bodily out of its cabin by people wearing Star Service uniforms, Dan murmured something she could not hear and swiftly touched his lips to her cheek.
A male human did that because he was emotionally attached to a female, not because he felt obligated toward her.
Now, what was her duty in this situation? To have her out of his way might make it possible for Dan to escape from the trap that was closing around them, and it would certainly be better for the lives she was carrying to die quickly than for them to be taken out of her (now, or when they had developed into viable infants) and used for the company’s purposes. What had not disturbed her at all on her own account, somehow horrified her on her children’s.
Yet she had not been trained to give up, not as a small gen in the creche nor as a Star Service cadet nor as a command officer. And although she had the capacity, as did all gengineered beings, to end her life swiftly and painlessly if she needed to do so—in fact, that was what she was supposed to do if the alternative was to let the technology that had made her fall into unlicensed hands—she was not ready to do that, not just yet anyway.
She let herself go limp in the hands that grasped her, and when shackles closed around her wrists she allowed it to happen. She lifted her head, though; she opened her eyes, and saw that the old Narsatian woman who had been so kind to her was gone already. Dan Archer was being shackled by the uniformed people who held him, and the lift to the surface was coming down for a second load.
They must have taken the woman called Reen up first. Hopefully that meant she was thought to be innocent, a civilian caught unknowingly in someone else’s intrigue.
“Move, you gen-whore!”
She hadn’t been called that in a long time, although she knew that civilian women who were gens received that abusive form of address quite routinely. Why did it make a female a prostitute, she wondered, to be egg-harvested instead of impregnated as the result of a sex act? The insult was stupid, and its use said very little for the intelligence or the creativity of any person who uttered it.
She saw Dan’s jaw clenching, and was thankful when that was his only reaction. He had sense enough to know that getting himself injured was not going to help her, and that hearing that epithet one more time was not going to do her any real harm.
Would it really be giving up, to just go to sleep now? She hadn’t felt like herself since leaving the stasis tube, and now she wondered almost forlornly what had become of the energetic woman she had been before. Did every expectant mother feel this way?
“Hold on. Help’s coming, Commander Kane.”
She knew the mind that touched hers. It took all her lifetime of discipline not to let her surprise and joy show on her face, or in her body’s posture; but she had felt mental contact with Lieutenant Commander Kerle Marin many times, because he had been on the Archangel with her for more than a year before she had fled in that lifeboat. Like all Morthan healers, he touched his patients with his thoughts far more often than with his hands; scanned them far more reliably with his mind that with his medical instruments. And Rachel Kane had been his patient, and in this moment she forgave him for having prepared her for egg harvest without telling her he had done so.
“I didn’t do that to you,” came the denial, in that soft voice inside her head. “I refused. So someone relayed the order from HR Solutions to the senior corpsman on my staff, and gave him specific instructions not to tell me about it. And he wasn’t trained as well as he should have been—and that’s why what he did, he did incorrectly. I’m sorry, Ms. Kane. If I had obeyed that order, you wouldn’t have been put into such a terrible position. But it wasn’t a directive from the Service, so it wasn’t binding on me as an officer—and I was damned if I was going to harvest a female’s ova like some kind of crop. That’s something no person reared on Mortha could ever do.”
“Thank you,” Rachel thought, and closed her eyes as the bright light of a Narsatian sunrise blinded her when the lift reached the surface at last. “I do wish you’d told me, Doctor, but I don’t wish you’d gone ahead and harvested me. I can’t explain it, it doesn’t make a bit of sense, but even right now I’m glad something happened to me that was drastic enough to make me run away. Just a few minutes ago I thought I was ready to die, rather than go back!”
“You won’t have to do that.” The Morthan healer’s thoughts were as gentle as his remembered voice. “The Matushka is back in command, Ms. Kane. She knows what’s happening down there, and I’m sure she must have a plan.”
“Are you saying this to Dan, too?” Archer had also been Marin’s patient, so that ought to be possible. And as she forced her eyes open and looked at her lover, Kane knew it was the case.
What even a full admiral could do to help either of them out of this situation, Rachel didn’t know. Especially when that admiral was herself a party to their crime, when any move she made to help them might seal her own doom. Yet this was the first time Kane had ever heard of a Morthan healer involving himself in any situation outside of his sickbay, and the Matushka was the Matushka—not just any flag officer, but one who had earned her reputation for acting unconventionally in her personal life and unpredictably in both her leadership strategies and her battlefield tactics—so once again, however unreasonably, Rachel Kane was allowing herself to feel hope.
Madeleine Fralick woke to find herself in a place she did not recognize. She had been in Mum’s house, had fallen asleep while Mum was talking to someone. Cousin Johnnie had been with her, and she was sure she remembered him picking her up in his arms and carrying her outside. The air had been cool, and it had been dark.
Then from time to time she had almost roused, and had realized she was aboard a vehicle and that Mum and Johnnie were talking. The next thing she remembered was not being able to breathe.
She could do so now, though, and the fear she’d felt then was only a memory. That she had been teleported from Narsai’s surface to a ship in orbit had to have been a dream—yet when she looked around her now, she realized that part too had actually happened.
Where was this? Not the Archangel, a huge ship with commodious compartments and (unless you were unlucky enough to live among the ordinaries) a decent amount of privacy. She lay on a bunk in a tiny sleeping compartment, and she saw that this cabin was intended for double occupancy.
She sat up, and swallowed to ease her dry throat, and realized further that this cabin didn’t have a private head. And why had she been left alone to recover from whatever it was that had happened to her? That she really, truly thought had come close to killing her?
Her legs were a trifle rubbery, so she stayed beside the bunk and held onto its edge after she eased herself onto her feet. She heard a voice in her mind as she did so, and instead of being startled or frightened she welcomed it with vast relief. “Linc!”
The day before yesterday, she had not met her mother’s second husband. Today she felt as if an additional father had entered her life—no, more as if he had always been part of her life—and the touch of his thoughts comforted her as nothing else could have done just now.
“Maddy, do you know where you are?” The question was gentle. Yet she sensed urgency, and there was also apology in Casey’s mental tones.
He felt responsible for what had happened to her. But he could not have been, and besides that she understood that this was not the time to ask for explanations. She answered, “On a ship. In orbit around Narsai, I hope, because I’m by myself in a bunkroom and I just woke up. Where’s Mum?”
“She’s here with me, on the Archangel. Your father took you with him when he left, Maddy. It’s a long story—one I don’t even want to be the person to tell you, in fact—but your mother decided to go back on active duty, and when she took over command your father decided he didn’t want to be on the ship anymore. So he ported you over to a long-range shuttle that belongs to the Corporate Marshal Service.”
“But everybody hates them! They’re horrible people, they track down slaves and make them go back to where they escaped from!” Maddy remembered what her Kesran caregivers, the female neuter P’tara and her neutered male counterpart K’lor, had told her about the marshals—specifically, that misbehaving children should be careful of them!—and she shuddered. She was much too old now to believe that the marshals were a threat to disobedient little girls, but she still believed they were evil because the two people who had loved her and cared for her the most had told her that was true.
Papa loved her, and it was because of Papa that K’lor and P’tara had worked in the Fralick household, of course; but Papa was so busy with so many other things. And until yesterday, she had seen Mum only in alternate years—and then only during visits on a few successive days for a few hours each session, with carefully regulated and monitored communications substituting for direct contact the rest of the time. Yet right now she wanted with all her soul to go back to Mum and to Linc, and when she heard her father’s voice outside the half-open hatch she did not feel the relief that she knew she ought to be feeling.
The man whose mind was touching hers sensed both her distress, and its cause. He said in his silent way, “Don’t be scared, Maddy. He thinks he’s doing what’s best for you, and he’ll take good care of you if he can. Stay with him for now, and whatever you do don’t let him know you’ve talked with me. That’s going to make him angry. Very, very angry.”
“I know it will. And I won’t do it.” Maddy almost nodded, because communicating in this way was so new to her. But she was glad she hadn’t done that, because the hatch opened fully just then and her father stepped through it.
“Well! Awake finally, are you, Madeleine?” Sometimes he used her formal given name, usually when he was feeling especially sentimental and didn’t want to express that feeling. He came to her now, and took the kind of med-scanner that was in any modern household’s bathroom and checked her vital signs with practiced swiftness. “And you’re fine now. Good, I thought if I got you far enough away from that mindfucker Casey you’d recover.”
“That what?” Maddy asked. Not that she didn’t recognize the vernacular term for sexual intercourse, even she had not been that sheltered; but hearing it used in a compound word with “mind” was completely new to her. And whatever it meant when used that way, she suspected it was no compliment.
“Sorry, love. But he almost killed both you and your mother, and you at least I could protect. So I did.” Fralick sat down on the edge of one bunk, and pushed her toward the other so that she automatically sat down too. “It’s time for you to understand what he is, Maddy. And that’s why I never left you alone with your mother until yesterday, and now I’ll never do that again. I’m sorry, I made a terrible mistake when I brought you to Narsai; but I had no idea Casey could get at you, too, and I figured you were safe from Romanov.”
“Papa?” Maddy was thoroughly confused now. But this was her familiar father, and although he clearly was angry his venom wasn’t directed at her; so she sat still, and waited for him to explain himself.
“Mads, we don’t allow Morthans to set foot on Kesra and we have good reasons. Do you know what they can do to other people’s minds?” Fralick paused, clearly expecting an answer.
“They can feel other people’s emotions, and sometimes they can read other people’s thoughts. That has something to do with how they heal, the Morthans that leave Mortha and work as doctors.” Maddy chose her words carefully. Even though she could not believe that her father would, or even could, really do anything to harm Lincoln Casey, she still knew instinctively that Casey had been right when he’d instructed her not to let Fralick know they could speak mind to mind.
“Yes, they can. And that’s not natural, Maddy. That’s not right, it shouldn’t be allowed. I’ve always thought so; but when Lincoln Casey first knew your mother, and then when they both first knew me, he wasn’t supposed to be like other Morthans. He was supposed to be no different than a full human, except for those eyes of his. If I’d known that through all those years, while he and your mother were serving on ships together and I was off somewhere else in the Diplomatic Service, she was letting him do whatever he wanted to her in private…!” Fralick flushed. He was not used to talking about such matters with his female child, and doing so now embarrassed him. But clearly he thought it was important, clearly he was making himself do this because he felt that he must.
“Papa, you don’t mean Mum made love to Linc while she was your wife.” Maddy, by contrast, was not the least bit embarrassed. But she was surprised, because however many times George Fralick might have thought about his ex-wife’s suspected unfaithfulness he had never once mentioned such a possibility to their daughter. He had not said much of anything to her about Katy, one way or the other, because he knew that if he did so and if the family arbitration authorities on Kesra found out about it his extremely favorable custody and visitation arrangements were very apt to be altered to give Katy more access.
“I think she must have,” Fralick said now, with brutal honesty. “She let him into her mind, anyway, and that’s as bad as letting him bed her—or worse. Which is why I used the word I did. Even though it’s not a polite word, it’s certainly an accurate one for Lincoln Casey and for every other Morthan male who dares to touch a human woman.”
“But they’re married now,” Maddy said. She could think of nothing else to say, and now she wanted her father to stop. Even for an inquisitive girl of thirteen, there were some things that plainly it was better not to know—or at least, it was better not to find out from one’s father.
“That’s disgusting, but true. And somehow when Casey had a medical problem a little while ago, when something made it hard for him to breathe, his condition made you and your mother both have similar difficulties. I understand why, with her; when a human woman sleeps with a Morthan, she lets him inside her mind at the same time she—well, you know how that works, Maddy.” Again, Fralick blushed.
“Yes. P’tara told me, and she showed me pictures of how humans do it because she’s Kesran and they don’t do it the same way. With them it takes—”
“I know what it takes.” Fralick cut his daughter off. “Anyhow! I wasn’t surprised your mother got the spillover from Casey’s problem, and I can’t be sorry for her because she’s spent years getting herself into that kind of attunement to him. But I was scared to death I was going to lose you, and the only connection you’ve got to the man—if I can call him a man—is that he was around your mother almost all the time she was pregnant with you. You’re my child, I had that checked a long time ago and he had nothing to do with conceiving you physically; but I guess he must have had some kind of prenatal influence on your mind. Something that never would have showed up, never would have affected you through your whole lifetime, if I hadn’t been stupid enough to bring you to Narsai.”
Maddy sat very still. Her papa had checked, to see whether or not she was his biological child?
He no doubt meant that to reassure her, as it had reassured him when he had done it; but for Maddy that act had the reverse connotation. Papa’s love for her depended entirely on her being of his siring? If she had been made from some other man’s genetic material, he would not have taken care of her through her babyhood and would not be looking at her now with that jealous fervor shining in his eyes?
Although putting words to her feelings now was beyond her, Maddy knew the difference between protectiveness and possessiveness. What she saw in her father’s familiar gray gaze now was not something that comforted her. Instead, it scared her.
But Linc was right, she could not let him see that. After a moment she said, with her mother’s sure sense of tactics and with all of George Fralick’s own careful diplomacy, “Papa, you weren’t stupid to bring me here. You didn’t know, and I don’t think Mum knew either. But what are you going to do now? You didn’t tell me yet what ship this is, even.”
“I didn’t, did I?” Fralick’s face had been rigid with hate. It relaxed now, and he smiled as he became Maddy’s beloved father once more. “We didn’t get far underway yesterday, aboard the Archangel, before we were hailed by a corporate marshal. He’d come all the way from New Orient, looking for a gen who ran away. He had orders from the commodore at New Orient instructing Captain Giandrea to cooperate, so we had to come about and return to Narsai since that was where he expected to find the gen.”
“Did he?” Maddy remembered not to say specifically, “Did he find her?” Because that would have revealed that she knew the missing gen’s sex, and that would have been disastrous.
She felt no guilt at all about this deceit. She had seen her father in action at enough parties to realize that he would have done the same thing, and would have regarded it as a neat bit of verbal footwork rather than as even the most innocuous of lies.
And although she already knew enough about Mum to realize that Mum did not like lies in any way, shape, or manner, she also knew that Mum would want her to protect that woman who had three babies inside her belly and who had looked so tired and thin and scared. And she knew what a marshal was, her Kesran caregivers P’tara and K’lor had told her often enough when she was small that if she misbehaved the marshals would come and take her away.
“He just did,” Fralick told his daughter, with a satisfied grin. “He needs to get instructions from her owners now, whether they want her returned to their gen labs or just what they do want done with her; and he needs to determine whether the man who was with her when she was caught is the only person who should be charged, or if she had other help. So it’ll be awhile before he heads this shuttle back toward New Orient, and then on to Terra; but he’ll have to take us, because I’m not putting you back aboard the Archangel while your mother’s aboard it. And you’re certainly not going back down to Narsai, or anywhere else where you might get within Casey’s reach again. I’m lucky I got you back alive once. I can’t risk letting him near you again.”