Nina Osier: Matushka

Dan Archer moved his chair closer, and put both arms around the woman and held her close. He said in a voice that was as fierce as his manner was gentle, “God damn that bioengineering company that supplies the Service with gens, Matushka! I hope we do go to war against the Commonwealth, if the Outworlds form up our own service I’ll join it. The way the government we’ve got now treats people like Rachel isn’t human. Oh, hell, I’m sorry, Linc—but you know what I mean, don’t you?”

Casey smiled, and set a mug of hot coffee at his foster son’s elbow. He answered, “I’m part human, kid. Remember? And I know what you’re trying to say, yes. But suppose you tell us just what happened to your friend here, and suppose while you’re doing that we all try to get some food into us. She’s never going to warm up until she eats, and she’s much too thin for a woman who’s carrying children.”

“How did you know it’s ‘children’?” Rachel Kane asked in a voice that was steadier now. She had eaten a bowl of hot cereal laced liberally with sweetening, she had downed two cups of steaming chocolate, and although she kept the afghan held snugly about her she was no longer shivering.

The four former officers had stopped talking during the brief meal, in accordance with a strict military custom that Romanova and Casey and Kane had all learned during their Academy days and that Archer had learned after he had signed onto a ship as an ordinary crew member. He had done that as a boy of sixteen, desperate to escape life in the mines of Sestus 4; and with a talent for handling both machines and computers that had made it possible for him to be field promoted into a junior officer’s berth. That had happened to him long ago, when he was still less than twenty years old and when his talents had come to the notice of Catherine Romanova’s firstborn son Ewan.

Romanova loved Dan Archer for his own sake now, but her attachment to him had deep roots in his connection to her long-dead child. She looked at him this morning, as he sat in her kitchen beside the unlikely guest he’d brought home, and she thought of the first time Ewan Fralick had presented that gawky red-haired kid to her in her office aboard the old Firestorm—and she smiled at the memory. Bringing home yet another human or part-human stray was the best means she could imagine to honor Ewan’s memory.

She felt a gentle inner tug, and looked up and heard her husband saying, “There wasn’t any Morthan empathy involved, I’m afraid, Commander Kane. I know that you’re a gengineered being because Dan already mentioned that. I also know from what I’ve heard and read about gengineered females that when your owners are ready for you to reproduce, it’s done in batches. And you’re about to burst out of that uniform, which means that you’re either well along in your pregnancy or you’re carrying more than one child.”

“Very good, Captain Casey!” The young woman laughed, only a trifle harshly. “I’m a bit of an experiment, you know. Until me, female ‘gens’ were considered too valuable to risk in the Service and no gen had ever made it all the way through the Academy. And if I could get my hands on that damned ship’s surgeon who started getting me ready to breed without bothering to tell me about it…!”

She shuddered then, and Archer put his arm around her again. He said softly and very gently, “Rachel, I’m sorry. If I’d had any idea! I always took responsibility myself, when I was with a woman that I knew I could make pregnant. But that wasn’t supposed to be possible for you, dammit all!”

“It’s not your fault,” Kane answered him. She turned in the shelter of his arm, and she put her head down onto his shoulder.

Oh, gods. They’re Dan’s babies.

Romanova honestly wasn’t sure whose thought that was, her own or Casey’s. It didn’t matter, in any case they shared both the realization and the horror that went with it; but she was the one who said practically into the silence that now filled the little house, “First things first! Why don’t we drop the rank, Dan was booted out of the Service months ago and Linc and I are both retired. And it looks as if you’re out of it now, too, Rachel. I should take you to see a healer right away—but I don’t suppose that would be very smart, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Kane did not lift her head off her lover’s shoulder, but she relaxed there and turned enough so she could regard Romanova with those startling green eyes of hers. “I know I ought to see a medic, I haven’t been able to do that since I realized I was pregnant. But you’re right, I deserted. And that means Dan and I are putting you at risk just by being in your home. So seeing a doctor right now is out of the question, the only way I could do that would be to turn myself in.”

“And if you did surrender to the Terran Embassy here on Narsai, what would happen to you?” That was Casey again, using what Romanova in one of her more acerbic moods was apt to call his bedside manner. His parents had both been medics—his father a traditional Terran-born allopathic physician, his mother a Morthan empathic healer—and although he had never had the least inclination to follow in either’s professional footsteps, he could and did adopt a healer’s mannerisms sometimes.

That had been part of what made him a superb executive officer, Romanova remembered with a smile that she quickly hid. He’d known instinctively when, as she had inelegantly expressed it, “to pat shoulder or kick butt.” This was his shoulder-patting mode, and Rachel Kane was responding to it just as scores of junior officers had done during the years when Lincoln Casey had stood at the head of a starship’s crew and had managed that crew on his captain’s behalf.

“Nothing except the end of my Service career, probably, if I went back to Terra now like a meek little lamb and let the creche-doctors take my fetuses out of me and do whatever they wanted to with them. I’m a valuable piece of property, I wouldn’t be executed like a regular deserter.” Kane’s eyes hardened, and so did her tone. “If I’d gone right to sickbay as soon as I realized what was happening to me, the ship’s surgeon would have just aborted the pregnancy and that would have been that. But now that I’m carrying three twelve-week-old fetuses that as far as I know are healthy and developing normally—I don’t trust the bastards who run my creating lab not to experiment with these babies for awhile first, before they’d actually dispose of them. What they wouldn’t do is let me go on carrying my children until they’re ready to be born, or transfer each of them to an incubation field. That’s what they would have done with embryos made from my ova and a male gen’s sperm, if I’d been harvested as I should have been instead of getting pregnant the old-fashioned way.”

“Nice, huh?” Dan Archer asked, with a twisted little grin. “An ordinary bastard like me has no business contaminating a gen like Rachel with his inferior offspring!”

Lincoln Casey winced, and so did Catherine Romanova; but each did so for a different reason.

“Inferior offspring?” Casey knew what those words meant, because he had been called by them times enough when he was a boy and his mother’s family had visited Sestus 3 or she had taken him to Mortha for one more disastrous visit. Half human, born after his mother had left Mortha with one of the young human physicians who came there to study each year… but that by itself was in no way unusual, because almost every young Morthan woman preferred taking a human husband who was her contemporary to mating with a male of her own species (who would necessarily be much older, because Morthan males took many more seasons than did their females to attain sexual maturity).