“I think he’s coming back,” Lincoln Casey said quietly, but with certainty in his tone. “I think someone needs to stay here, Katy.”
After the first overwhelming rush of sorrow, that was what Casey had begun saying of Dan Archer; and he was still saying it, now that his wife had summoned an aircar from the public garage and was preparing to board it with Rachel Kane and a small quantity of luggage. Whether he was denying something he didn’t want to accept, or whether he really had some kind of Morthan intuition about his foster son’s fate, even Katy couldn’t tell. She had never known Linc to refuse to face the truth, though, and in the first few minutes after the news of the Titan’s explosion had come he had been just as devastated by it as she was. So she had hopes that he might be right in his abrupt switch from despair to optimism—but the only difference those hopes could make right now was to keep him here at home, in case Dan somehow managed to come here, while she took Rachel Kane north to the already winter-bound farm. Sending Kane there alone would, Katy had decided, be far more likely to call attention to the trip than would a family member’s escorting her.
Trying to conceal their strange guest’s presence from her daughter never entered Romanova’s mind, at least not until they were aloft and it was too late for such thoughts. But if Maddy was anything like what she had been at thirteen, or like what her three brothers had each been like at just a little bit older than that (since girls unquestionably did mature more quickly than boys did), then attempting to conceal something from her would have been the most certain way possible to identify it as particularly interesting and worthy of investigation. All children were like that, and the bright ones were more so.
And Maddy was bright, no question about that. She also was far more outgoing than Katy had expected. Based on the girl’s almost cloistered life in the Fralick household on Kesra, where humans were a minority and where most Kesrans lived in family groups that were so large their functions were practically self-contained on their islands and floating habitats, Romanova had thought her daughter would be a shy creature whom she and Linc would have to gradually accustom to seeing strangers and to going out in public.
But that independent use of public transport to get herself to their home after the Archangel had teleported her down to the terminal had not, apparently, been a fluke success at dealing with strange situations or new people. Maddy was now sitting in the passenger seat behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs, which were occupied by her mother and by Rachel Kane, and she was asking a question about every thirty seconds.
Well, at least bringing her child to the ancestral property of the Romanov family was a perfectly believable excuse for visiting the farmstead right now! And she had always made the trip this way, not by using public teleporters to get from MinTar to the hamlet nearest the farm, so her hiring an aircar wasn’t going to raise a red flag with anyone who might be observing her movements today. Ever since she had gained control over her own finances, Katy had been hiring aircars and eschewing the public teleporters. She hated them.
No one kept logs of how many people rode in an aircar, or even of where that aircar went from the time it was checked out until it was returned. Not on Narsai, anyway. So as far as any observer might know, Catherine Romanova was taking her daughter for her first visit to the ancestral Romanov property as soon as was possible after the young girl’s arrival on Narsai; and that would not seem odd, not to anyone who either was Narsatian or who knew Narsatian customs and values well.
The extra person, if her presence should happen to be noticed? One of the dozens of young officers Romanova and Casey had nurtured during their years together, no doubt. Dan Archer was the only one who had been given a permanent place in their household, but they often had young people around them. Guests from their own generation were more the rarity, actually.
“So your name is Rachel, and you’re going to have a baby.” Maddy spoke as casually as if the three of them were chatting at a social gathering. “Do you have a husband?”
She hadn’t asked for Rachel’s second name. Whether that was because she realized that its not being volunteered had significance, or whether she was so used to one-named Kesrans that it didn’t occur to her that most humans had at least two names, Romanova couldn’t guess. Probably the latter.
“No,” Kane said calmly. “No husband. And I wasn’t planning to have a baby; it just happened.”
“Oh.” Young Maddy accepted that with perfect equanimity. “What do you do?”
“I was a starship officer. But I left the service, not long ago.”
Should Romanova tell her child that it wasn’t polite to ask so many questions? But none of them had been impertinently personal, asking whether a person had a partner and what occupation he or she followed were both just normal social inquiries. And Kane was handling it without difficulty, offering responses that were adequate but that didn’t reveal information which Maddy should not be given.
Ye gods, the child sounded like George making small talk at a diplomatic reception. He loved those things, while Katy had always despised them.
Yes. Of course, that explained why Maddy had such unexpected poise! She might have lived all of her short life in a human enclave on alien Kesra, but without Katy to insist on a measure of family privacy no doubt George had entertained a constant stream of official company. He could afford it, he loved it, and clearly it had been the salvation of his little girl.
I never thought I’d be glad about that part of George being George, Romanova thought with a carefully suppressed smile. During their time of residence on Terra she and Linc had hosted their young friends often, but their guests were people they could help instead of people whose political or economic influence could help them; so the lively conversations at their gatherings seldom amounted to polite small talk.
“Maddy, look down at the ground,” she said now, deciding it was time to divert her daughter before any inadvertent harm could be done. “We’re over the plains now. If you watch carefully, soon you’ll see our farmstead’s boundaries.”
“Is it really ours, Mum? I thought it belonged to our cousins, to Ivan and Lorena.” Maddy frowned with puzzled interest.
“They like to be called Johnnie and Reen,” Romanova said. “Small properties, like the house back in MinTar, can belong to individuals here on Narsai. But farms belong to whole families, Maddy, and that means the Romanov Farmstead is just as much yours as it is theirs. Only they have proprietors’ control over it, and a correspondingly larger share of its income, because they earn that with the work they do there.”
“That’s not like on Kesra.” Maddy’s frown deepened. “But on Kesra there aren’t that many humans, and on Narsai there aren’t any real Narsatians.”
Romanova had been calling herself a “Narsatian” all her life, but she responded to the term in the way that her daughter had meant it and not in the way that she had always interpreted it. She said, “True. Narsai has no native sentient species, nor does Sestus 3. Of the five most habitable Outworlds, two were unoccupied when humans first arrived and two—Kesra, and Sestus 4—have accepted us only as immigrants, and only on a limited basis. Mortha’s the only Outworld where humans and native sentients been able to intermarry, to start to meld together into one people.”
“We own our house on Kesra, but most human families don’t,” Maddy admitted thoughtfully. “Most human residents are temporaries, and the government makes sure they leave when they’re supposed to. But Papa’s ancestors were given citizenship because they kept Kesra from being taken over by Terran colony-agents, over a hundred years ago.”
“I know.” Romanova smiled now, with both amusement at her daughter’s pedagogical tone and with honest reminiscence. “I lived in your father’s house on Kesra for more than twenty years, Maddy. I gave birth to all four of my babies there, and it was where your brothers grew up just as you have.”
The child knew that, perfectly well. But their visits on Kesra had always taken place in George Fralick’s presence. Today was the first occasion since her daughter had been a baby too small to walk or talk that Romanova had been allowed to spend time with her without that constraint, and it seemed that they now must talk about all the things that had gone unspoken before—that even as she introduced her child to the Narsatian half of her heritage, she must deal with the Kesran-resident half that was all Maddy had known until today.
“It’s so big,” Maddy said now, gazing at the expanse of land below them and seeing how tiny the farmhouse and the equipment barn and the control complex seemed by comparison. “And just two people run all of it?”
“Most of it’s automated. But in growing season we bring in hired hands, machines can’t do everything.” Romanova adjusted the controls, expertly. “We’re going down now.”
Down, in a graceful descent that she reversed when the readings on the aircar’s instrument panel did not jibe with those she had come to expect after having flown into this place a hundred times and more over the years since she had acquired her very first civilian pilot’s license.
What the hell…? She didn’t say it, because she didn’t want to alarm Maddy; but the young woman beside her realized something was wrong, and quietly brought the co-pilot’s seldom used control panel on line.
There was a vehicle under cover down there, and its readings didn’t belong to the Farmstead’s equivalent of the common-garage aircar that they were riding in now. Nor were those readings coming from the type of farm transports that at this season should not have been present, because Narsatians believed firmly that all vehicles should be utilized as continuously as possible in order to keep the numbers of them that must be built and kept operating down to a minimum. While the North Continent farms and ranches were resting under a blanket of winter snow, their vehicles were flown to the two southern continents and were put to use there until spring.
“Mum?” Maddy already knew something was wrong. Of course she did. “We aren’t going to land, after all?”
“Yes, we are,” Romanova decided, her mouth thinning as she initiated a new approach. “But we’re going to be careful. It looks as if our cousins may already have company.”
She wasn’t surprised when Rachel Kane quietly moved a concealed blaster holster from inside her trouser waistband to a more normal location against her hip. Her own civilian clothing would have been ridiculously loose on this slim young woman if Kane hadn’t been pregnant, but given her current condition the trousers and loose overshirt fit quite well.
Romanova had a small blaster in a holster inside her tunic, concealed under one arm. It was illegal on Narsai, of course, but she got away with carrying it no matter where she went because her native world did not allow any type of routine scanning of its citizens. Only when she entered a military or diplomatic compound did she have to leave her personal weapon behind.
Its shape was comforting now, pressed between her arm and her breast where all she had to do was reach across her body and snatch it from under her clothing. Never once had she been obliged to draw it on Narsai, yet she never went out of her home without it. She would have felt naked—an old clichй, but in this case a completely accurate one.
She considered activating the comm, but did not do so. If something was wrong down there, she’d already indicated her suspicions by having broken off her first approach. She would not reinforce that impression by trying to contact Johnnie or Reen.
How best to protect Maddy? Leaving her daughter alone aboard the aircar wasn’t to be considered, she would not have done that even if she’d had a spare weapon to leave with the girl and even if Maddy had been trained to use it. Which she surely had not, not unless George Fralick had completely lost his mind.
Romanova was still considering that when she felt a stab of astonishment that had nothing to do with the current situation. It was an emotion that did not belong to her—a feeling that came from someone else’s mind. That mind was familiar, but the cause of its amazement was a mystery to her.
It remained so. Linc had no time to tell her, through the channel of consciousness that had briefly been opened between them, before she felt pain and the normal fear of any threatened sentient being—and then darkness, and the absence of all feeling.
She’d been standing beside the pilot’s chair, about to walk to the aircar’s exit ramp to disembark. Now she swayed, and had to clutch at the chair’s back to steady herself.
“Katy?” Rachel Kane had at last stopped trying to address the older woman as “admiral.” She reached out and touched Romanova’s arm inquiringly.
“What’s wrong with him, Mum?” Maddy wanted to know, her brown eyes wide and alarmed.
“What did you feel, Maddy?” Romanova shivered, and not because the aircar’s passenger compartment was too cold.
“The man I met at your house. Linc, Captain Casey. Someone hurt him just now. He was surprised, he felt scared—and then whatever it was that hurt him happened, and then I think he passed out. Anyway, I can’t feel him now.”
The implications of this development, Katy didn’t even want to consider. Did it mean that whenever Maddy was on the same world with them, she and Linc would not know a moment’s mental privacy? Gods, she hoped not. Yet this girl had been an unborn baby in her womb on that day above Mistworld, when Ewan Fralick’s little raider had raced to the aid of the light cruiser that was foundering and about to enter the planet’s atmosphere and be incinerated…the light cruiser that had been carrying both of Ewan’s brothers.
Both ships had gone down to their doom, and while Group Leader Catherine Romanova had watched from the Firestorm’s bridge all three of her sons had died. She had come as close to breaking at that moment as she ever had, ever would. But then the man who stood beside her had put his hand on her shoulder—and instead of a simple but completely inadequate gesture of comfort, he had given her the first true embrace of her entire life.
Or so it had seemed, although of course later—much later, long after Mistworld was behind them and her pregnancy had been completed and she had ended her marriage to George Fralick—she had discovered what full union with Lincoln Casey could encompass. But at that moment she had been overwhelmed by love, surrounded by someone else’s strength and support and tenderness, and she had been able to close her eyes and stand still and drink it all in.
To drink him in, the essence of the man who had been her friend for so long and whose love for her she had not even suspected until that day.
How could she have guessed that inside her body, the child she carried was also participating in that spiritual union? Even Linc hadn’t known that was happening, Romanova was certain that was true. Yet he had suspected something…she remembered the deliberate touch he had given Maddy earlier today, and she recalled that although she had been astounded at the girl’s resulting recognition her husband had experienced the pleasure of a scientist whose pet theory has just been confirmed.
“Mum?” Maddy was asking again. “Is he dead?”
“No, Maddy, he’s not dead.” Romanova shook herself, firmly and deliberately. “But something did happen to him, I felt the same things you felt.”
“Are we going back? Right now?” the girl wanted to know. Hopefully, as if she couldn’t imagine that her mother would do anything else.
“I want to, but first I have to know what’s happened here.” This was pure warrior’s instinct, something Katy Romanova had bred into her from her star-exploring ancestors and that she had honed through four decades of military training and experience. The wife and the woman wanted to rush back home as fast as this damned slow civilian aircar could take her, true enough; hell, right now she would welcome the use of a teleporter! But what had happened to Linc was connected to whatever was happening here, she knew that without being able to prove it; and besides, there was Rachel Kane still standing beside her and looking at her with puzzled concern.
Retirement hadn’t released her from the oath she had taken to protect civilians. And whether or not she could regard Kane that way, there was not doubt about the duty she owed to the three babies the younger woman was carrying.
Besides, Johnnie and Reen definitely were civilians and she also needed to know that they were safe. There should not be a ship with enough power to attain planetary escape sitting in a transport barn on their farm. Something was wrong here just as much as something was wrong back at her home in MinTar, and she couldn’t leave one place to return to the other until she had found out what.
“Come on,” she said to the young woman, and to the girl, “and keep behind me. Probably Johnnie and Reen are fine, probably everything’s just the way it should be; but let’s not take chances until we know that for sure.”