In the privacy of the bedroom that was Dan Archer’s one settled home in the universe, Catherine Romanova sat on the edge of the bed and talked with Rachel Kane through the open bathroom door. Narsai’s sun was fully up now, and its golden light filled the house. They were at the edge of park land here, so taller structures didn’t surround this little building and block it off from the sky and the sun and the stars.
Kane sounded more relaxed now, as if being alone with another woman meant that she could stop thinking about how she sounded or what appearance she gave. Which meant, Romanova thought as she prepared herself to listen to the younger officer’s story, that the relationship between this woman and Dan Archer might not be one of solidly committed intimacy. They had been lovers, obviously; they were friends and had been comrades, clearly. But Katy herself had stopped putting up any kind of a front for the man who had been her husband long before she first needed to tell him that she was pregnant, and such niceties in Linc’s presence had gone by the board while they were still cadets together.
But then, Rachel Kane was a gen. Romanova couldn’t imagine what it had been like to be reared in an institution, to be part of an on-going experiment in resurrecting a forbidden technology instead of a child in the home of parents whose love had called her life into being.
“Are you sure it’s safe for Captain Casey to be calling anyone and talking about my being here?” was how Kane began, nevertheless, as soon as the shower was off and conversation between bath and bedroom could be heard. “And what about the healer you called, will I be able to trust her not to contact the Terran Embassy and tell them where I am?”
“His name is Lincoln, not ‘Captain,’” Romanova answered, and smiled to herself. “The man he’s calling is my cousin, and Linc isn’t going to mention anything about you over a communications link. Not that Johnnie would say a word to anyone about something I asked him to keep quiet, but it makes sense to be careful even though we don’t sanction monitoring of private comms here on Narsai. Linc will just find out whether it’s safe for us to send you to the Farmstead, if you need a place to live quietly for awhile. If Johnnie has guests, we’ll have to think of something else. And as for Cab Barrett—doctors on Narsai don’t turn their patients in! Again, we’ll do things discreetly just for the sake of common sense; but she won’t care who you are or what interest any civilian or military authorities may have in you. To her you’ll be a pregnant woman in need of medical care, nothing more than that.”
“It sounds like a dream to me,” Kane said as she moved around in the small bathroom, putting on some of Romanova’s own night wear since she had arrived with nothing of her own except that uniform which had never been intended to be a maternity garment. “At least I can’t be identified as a gen on sight, I’m one of the first group that didn’t have a visible marker put on my face soon after birth. Mine only shows up under a personnel scanner. Of course every public building on Terra has a scanner at its entrance, though…is that true on Narsai, Admiral Romanova?”
“Katy.” Romanova sighed. “No, it isn’t. Never has been, never will be! We’ve had our share of social and political difficulties here, we’re a long way from being perfect; but that kind of intrusion on our citizens’ privacy is something we just wouldn’t dream of tolerating. A Terran-owned business tried doing that at its Narsatian outlet a few years ago, and they were forced to either take the damned scanner out or close down.”
The younger woman came out of the bathroom, clad now in a winter-weight bathrobe (although this autumn morning was rapidly warming toward a beautiful day) and looking comfortable at last. She sat in a chair, clearly joining Romanova on the edge of the bed didn’t enter her mind. She said, “All right. You want to know how it happened, don’t you, uh—Katy?”
Better, Romanova thought. She nodded, smiled gently and said, “Yes. Not that you have to tell me a single thing, Rachel; it’s enough that Dan wants us to help you. He’s like a son to both Linc and me. We love him that way, and if you matter to him that’s all we need to know. But I am curious, and of course the more I do know about this the better able I’ll be to help.”
The woman who had been the Archangel’s executive officer drew a long breath. She started talking, slowly and almost haltingly at first; then more rapidly and more naturally, until finally she almost forgot Catherine Romanova was there.
“Dan left the Archangel at Savgorod, when the order came down from Fleet Command throwing all the scramblers out of the Service,” Kane said, staring down at hands that were clasped in her lap. “From what the standard calendar says, that was eighteen months ago. For me it was ten weeks ago. He didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to me, or to anyone else for that matter. The order was waiting when we reached port, Captain Giandrea implemented it immediately just the way he was required to, and the next thing I knew someone was reporting to my office and telling me she was the ship’s new chief engineer. Damned if Fleet Command hadn’t even set us up with a replacement for Dan, they did that with all the scramblers who were department heads on starships or at frontier bases. At least they had sense enough to realize that if they didn’t do that, they were going to have a lot of furious captains and base commanders on their hands. As it was we lost four more officers off Archangel in addition to Dan, and Giandrea was rushing around filling those berths before we had to sail again.”
Romanova nodded, and said nothing because she sensed that to do so would break the quiet spell that Kane was weaving for herself to help her remember easily and speak freely. But the former fleet admiral remembered that order well, because it had been issued by her own office—after she had bitterly and passionately, but unsuccessfully, fought against it when her civilian superior had told her it must be done.
Retirement had first entered her thoughts on that day, and when she had come home to their apartment on the grounds of the Academy and had found its commanding officer—her husband, Captain Lincoln Casey—actually in tears after having had to disband the separate college-within-a-university at which newly promoted “scramblers” were given accelerated training before being confirmed in their field promotions to officer status—that had done it. In forty years, she had never seen Linc cry like that. It had taken some time for them to extricate themselves gracefully from their combined commitments and responsibilities, but from that moment on there had been no question they must do so. Especially when Linc, who like other Morthan hybrids had always been immune to human ailments, began suffering a series of relatively minor but debilitating illnesses—and crushing fatigue, a weariness that had not lifted until after they had arrived here.
The institution to which both had given their lives had betrayed them, and she could listen now to Rachel Kane’s tale of a similar betrayal with understanding even though Kane’s situation had been a far more personal one.
The young woman continued, “Of course I didn’t know I was pregnant then. If I had…oh, I don’t know what I would have done! Savgorod’s not Terra, I wouldn’t have been scanned for a gen every time I moved around there, but it’s a small place and I’d have been recognizable just by sight. Anyhow, I didn’t realize anything was wrong until we were back out in space. I’d noticed before Dan left that I felt funny. Almost like I did the other times the medics were getting me ready for an ova harvesting session…but that always happened while I was on Terra, before; and I was always told in advance, so I wouldn’t have sex with anyone and risk in-body fertilization. It always was a pain, the preparation phase made me horny as hell and then I had to be celibate.”
She said that casually—clearly procreation, and the powerful feelings that prompted it, had different connotations for her than they had for Romanova. Not that sex was anything dirty or shameful on Narsai, or on Kesra where Katy had spent most of her married life (her first married life, that was); but in both places it was a private and even rather sacred matter, and most women didn’t talk about their desires to strangers in the earthy way that Kane was doing now.
“I sure wasn’t celibate that time!” Kane said, and smiled to herself reminiscently. “The last week Dan was aboard, I couldn’t get enough of him. We’d been lovers before that, he approached me for the first time months earlier; but until that week it was just a typical shipboard pairing. Junior officer makes the first move on senior officer, so there’s no question of the more powerful person exploiting the less powerful one. Senior officer likes the idea, and they bed together whenever their shifts allow it. So you’d have thought the CMO would have known he needed to warn me to either knock it off or have Dan take a contraceptive, that’s the kind of thing that everyone on board knows is happening! But it was just my luck to draw a doc who didn’t pay any attention to ship’s gossip, and I don’t suppose I could have expected him to realize all the implications of treating me the way the medics at my creating lab did.”
Probably that poor starship chief medical officer hadn’t known what to make of being instructed to bring a female gen to fertility and then harvest her, Romanova thought with grim amusement. That would have put him between the proverbial rock and hard place ethically—which wasn’t all that unusual a spot, of course, for health professionals whose loyalty to their patients as people must always be balanced against their greater loyalty to the Service to whom those patients belonged body and soul for as long as their oaths were on record. But Kane had been right when she had remarked, a little while ago, that female gens on starships were unheard of. So it was likely that the medic who had been treating her hadn’t known how to regard her, as a human woman with all the normal reproductive rights and responsibilities that went with that status or as a sort of walking egg farm.
Who was simultaneously his ship’s executive officer. If that medic had been a confused soul who had made an enormous mistake, Romanova found it hard to blame him for it.
Kane was speaking again. “We’d been underway for a few days when I realized I needed to see the doc about why I was feeling the way I was. I did that self-scan in my quarters first just on general principles; I’d noticed that something about taking care of me was making him uncomfortable, and I guess I was hoping I could self-treat if it was just some kind of cycle problem. And then I was sitting there on my berth, looking at three little somethings inside me. And I felt…I don’t know what I felt. Not anything I ever expected to feel, anyway!”
Wonder was in Kane’s voice, mixed with remembered disbelief. Catherine Romanova recalled a day long ago, when she was still Ensign Romanova and when she had scanned her abdomen in her quarters to diagnose the cause of a missed period—and what she heard in Rachel Kane’s tone was familiar. But Romanova had been solidly partnered to George Fralick then, all she’d had to do was tell him and hours later they had been logging themselves as a married couple. And if anything he had been more delighted than she was by that news of impending parenthood. In all their years together after that she couldn’t recall seeing him look more proud than he had looked in the moment after she had said to him, “We’re going to have a baby, George. A little boy, about eight months from now.”
Ewan, who had been followed not quite a year later by twins Marcus and Bryce. And then, after a gap of twenty-two years—when Katy was in her middle forties, and had failed to conceive for so long that the possibility no longer entered her mind when she made love with George—Madeleine had come along. The daughter she had always wanted, but hadn’t been allowed to raise after she gave birth to her.
Kane was speaking again. “I was in shock, that’s the only excuse I’ve got for what I did next,” she said. “My captain was my friend, and I put him in the worst position a sentient being can put a friend into. I told him something in confidence that he couldn’t keep secret, something he was duty-bound to act on in a way that I knew damned well he wouldn’t want to act.”
“You told him you were pregnant,” Romanova said softly. She had been silent until now, but Kane was looking in her direction; and it was clear that she was expected to say something.
“Uh-huh. Rotten of me, wasn’t it? But my other choice was the damned doc, and since he had to be the reason I’d wound up that way….” Kane’s mouth twisted. “Poor Paolo! He’d always treated me just the way he would have treated any other officer, my being a gen didn’t matter to him at all. And it still didn’t matter when I told him about my babies, he didn’t even seem to understand that they were the lab’s property—for that matter, I was too—and that I had no right to make any decisions about what to do next. He talked about contacting Dan and telling him he was going to be a father, he talked about scheduling me for a maternity post as soon as we hit our next base call. Good gods, the man gave me a hug and congratulated me!”
“Of course he did, you just said you were his friend as well as his exec; and if you had been pregnant and hadn’t wanted to be, you wouldn’t have been telling him that,” Romanova observed, and although she felt bitter amusement at the younger woman’s naivetй she didn’t smile. It wasn’t funny, not in that sense. “You’d have aborted, and unless for some reason you lost work time the ship’s healer wouldn’t have informed anyone—the captain included. So of course Captain Giandrea thought you wanted to be congratulated. Having a baby is a joyful thing, for most women.”
“So I realized, after I saw how he reacted.” Kane nodded. “Gods, I was stupid about that! He has three kids of his own and he worships them, of course that’s what he thought. And there I was, looking for someone to help me get out of the worst mess I could imagine being caught in. But after awhile I made him understand that, and I managed to do it before he told anyone else.”
“So what did he do to help you, that compromised his oath as an officer and his duty as your captain?” Romanova felt cold now. She wondered, suddenly, if Kane’s chilled state on arriving here had been entirely physiological after all.
“He didn’t pursue me when I stole a lifeboat,” Kane answered. “We planned it together. I shouldn’t be telling you this, because if you’re ever questioned—”
“I won’t be, child. You’re on Narsai now, not Terra.” The older woman cut the younger one off, crisply. “Continue, your story’s safe with me. And you’re safer for telling it to me in its entirety, instead of holding back something I may need to know in order to help you properly.”
“He handled the weapons array himself, he shoved the tactical lieutenant out of his way when I came on scanners after I launched the boat,” Kane said, and now there was a trace of genuine humor in her tone. “And I threw out a field of debris, and between us I hope we made it look to the autolog as if I’d been destroyed. But he took another chance and he contacted Dan, as soon as he was able. Supposedly to tell Dan that I was dead. What he really did, of course, was tell Dan the whole story including the coordinates where Paolo had left me behind.”
“How long were you out there in that lifeboat, by yourself?” Romanova felt sick now. She had all too good an idea of what it must have been like for this strange mixture of experienced starship officer and innocent girl, to be all alone between the stars in a frail little shell of a craft that could barely travel at warp speed.
“I didn’t put myself into the stasis tube until I had to,” Kane said, quite calmly. “That was after I realized that if I stayed awake I was going to run out of food sooner than I expected. My caloric requirements were way above what they normally would have been. I guess three babies will do that, even though it never entered my mind or Paolo’s while we were planning the whole thing! And I also realized that if I was going to make it to the nearest settled world alive, I had to put all the ship’s power into propulsion and not into keeping myself warm and breathing.”
Going into stasis was a wrenching enough experience when you did it under medical supervision, usually with your comrades or even your family beside you; when you knew how long you were going to be out, who would be watching over you while you slept that sleep that was the next thing to death, and when and where you could expect to awaken. To do what Rachel Kane had done, out there all by herself—where had she found the courage, anyway?
Until now Catherine Romanova had felt a certain sense of superiority in this interaction, although she hated having to admit it to herself as she recognized its passing. She was a naturally conceived human, not a gengineered being; she had always belonged to herself, she had experienced life fully for sixty and more years and this younger female had been denied much of that. But would she have done for Ewan, or for the twins, or for little Maddy, what Rachel Kane had done for her babies? When Kane didn’t even really know what having children meant—supposedly, at least?
Romanova shuddered. Then she said quietly and positively, “So Dan was able to find you before someone else did. Because of what Captain Giandrea had told him.”
“Yes. That’s how it happened.”
Romanova closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she asked, “Then Dan’s partners know about you?”
The Star Service had paid out a decent severance bonus to each ejected scrambler; that much, at least, the Defense Ministry had done at Romanova’s own urging. With that bonus many of the displaced officers had been able to start new lives. Dan Archer had combined his bonus with that of his comrades Johanna Braeden, Sean Tierney, Beth Croft, and Fiona Meredith. Together the five former service people, humans all as it happened, had purchased a surplus ship and set themselves up in business. In a sense it was a come-down, to go from proud Star Service officer to interplanetary trader; but it was better, as Dan said bluntly, than going back to Sestus 4 and grubbing in the mines there as his grandparents had done. His own parents had been traders, and if they hadn’t vanished with their ship one day while he was still a child he probably would have been one, too. And clearly his partners had agreed with him; whatever lives they would have gone back to weren’t anything that would be an improvement over the free life of the trade-ship.
But then, that was the nature of being a scrambler. They were people who had started with nothing, who had signed on as ordinaries during their youth and who had risen from there on merit alone. They hadn’t started with a Catherine Romanova’s land and money and genealogy behind them, nor with a Lincoln Casey’s highly educated (although always impoverished) parents.
They were exemplary officers in almost every case, and being obliged to send his favorite Academy College charges home to their old lives before they had had a chance to reap any of the benefits of their new ones had been what had broken Lincoln Casey’s health. Or so Casey’s wife still firmly believed, now that they were far from the storm center that was Fleet Command on Terra and now that her lover and best friend was himself again.
Was even a little bit bored, lately, although he hadn’t yet realized that himself. Nor had she chosen to bring that fact to his attention, there were some things you kept in your own thoughts even in the most intimate of telepathic relationships.
“They only know he salvaged a Fleet lifeboat,” Kane said. “He didn’t retrieve me from it until just before he sold it back to the goddam Fleet. And Hansie was the only one who even knew there was a stasis tube aboard it, all the time the boat was under tow.”
Romanova sighed, because that bit of news was a relief to her. Johanna Braeden was the only one of Dan’s partners she knew personally, and the woman could be trusted. She and Dan went back to the days of Ewan Fralick together, Hansie would die slowly before she would do anything to hurt Dan or someone Dan loved.
Or at least cared about and felt responsible for. Did Dan love this gen, this woman who had been his bed partner and his superior officer during his final posting before the Service had thrown him out like so much garbage?
That didn’t matter. Kane was here now, Dan had chosen to honor his obligation to her, and he had a perfect right to expect his foster parents to share that obligation with him.
“Ad—I mean, Katy.” Rachel Kane was looking at Catherine Romanova with speculative eyes. “I’m curious. Dan calls you ‘matushka.’ What does that mean?”
Romanova shook herself, coming back from a brief reverie. She answered with a small grin, “It’s a bad joke from my field duty days, back when Dan was a kid in his twenties and he was part of the fleet I commanded at Mistworld. I was carrying my daughter then; I was about to go on maternity leave, and I couldn’t because we were diverted for that emergency. So I acted as commodore until that engagement was over, and then I hung around and handled the peace negotiations until the Diplomatic Corps could get their people all the way out there. By that time I was wearing civvies on the bridge, because I couldn’t fit into even a maternity uniform.
“‘Matushka’ means ‘little mother,’ in Old Earth Russian. And while I’ve never been all that interested in Terran history, so I’m just repeating what I’ve heard and not anything that I’ve bothered to verify, I’ve been told that my surname Romanov belonged to the Russian Imperial family that was last on the throne when there was a monarchy on that part of Terra. I do know that the ‘matushka’ was what those people called their empress, probably to be sarcastic; but my troops were being at least a little bit sarcastic themselves when they called me that! Anyhow, I liked it and I didn’t mind when it stuck. At least with people Dan’s age and older, with those officers who’ve been around long enough to remember Mistworld.”
She was about to add that when Ewan had started bringing Dan Archer home with him on every leave, she had grown annoyed at being addressed by her rank in the privacy of her residence. She had asked the young man to call her something, anything, that was comfortable for him that wasn’t “commodore” or “captain” or “group leader.” She’d somehow been sure he would not be able to handle “Katy,” not when he still had to make the transition back to formality when all of them returned to duty. But Dan hadn’t come up with anything at that time, not until they were in the thick of battle at Mistworld—not until after Ewan was dead, and with him Marcus and Bryce.
It was then that Dan had started calling her “Matushka,” and his comrades had been delighted with the nickname’s appropriateness. But no sooner did she start trying to explain all that to Rachel Kane than she realized this wasn’t the right time, that the younger woman didn’t need to hear it now and probably wouldn’t understand half of it if she did; and the front door’s gentle buzzing intervened anyway.
That would be Cab Barrett arriving, and Linc would let her in. Good, confirming Kane’s state of health and that of her unborn children definitely needed to be the next order of business.