Nina Osier: Matushka

She hadn’t done it then, and she wasn’t going to do it now. So as the lieutenant asked again, “Ma’am? Admiral Romanova?”, she gripped the back of his chair and she stared at the viewscreen from over his shoulder.

And at last she said, “He’s heading up toward orbit, Lieutenant. So let him go, we need to get back to Narsai Control while we still can make it there.”

She heard her daughter’s sigh of relief, and a moment later the girl butted her head against her mother’s shoulder like a leggy colt looking for its dam’s attention.

She did look just about like one, too, Romanova thought absently as she put her arm around the child and held her close. And then from the hatch leading down to the cargo bay she heard Dan Archer calling to her, “Matushka! How long until we can get to a hospital? Or can we port Rachel to one right now? Dr. Barrett says if these kids don’t go into stasis the second they come out of her, we’re going to lose them. We’re probably going to lose them anyhow, but in a hospital they might have a chance.”

There was something wrong about those ships. Lincoln Casey had been a starship command officer for most of his adult life, and he knew just by watching the blips. The peculiar readings that went along with them only confirmed it; of the nine ships that remained after the Archangel had taken six with her into oblivion, he was certain that seven had not come from any yard operated by human shipwrights.

Yet two definitely had, which made the puzzle even more baffling. Not that one space-going species could not appropriate and fly another’s ships, he himself had prize captained a few alien vessels during his junior officer days; but with every sense he possessed focused now on the actions of those holo-imaged blips, and on the thousand different readings that they were generating on Narsai Control’s tracking computers, he was certain that he was looking at a mixed fleet.

Morthans did not fight. As far as he knew, he was the only individual of his kind who had ever wanted to become a Star Service officer; so those ships out there could not be “manned” (ridiculous, inappropriate word!) by people from his mother’s home-world. Sestians, natives of Sestus 4, occasionally contributed a member of their species to the Service; but those individuals did not rise far, and they usually didn’t stay long, because they were notoriously unable to grasp the idea that they must take orders from humans. In other words, as they saw it, from animals. And Kesrans seldom deigned to leave their watery world at all, although Linc did know there had been one Kesran aboard the destroyed Archangel.

But it was beyond imagining, even for him, that an influx of crew members from the three nonhuman sentient species that inhabited the Outworlds as he knew them could account for the strangeness that emanated from the ragged formation in that holoscreen. It was just too alien, and although he did not like Sestians or Kesrans much he did not find them strange—just annoying. And Morthans, even when he had been a child and his cousins had taunted him, were still just as much part of what he was as were humans.

There was nothing familiar out there. The fleet wheeled, and came in toward Narsai in a fan formation that was clearly intended to place that world’s globe within its center.

The ships in orbit around Narsai included armed freighters, twenty-three of them just now; a passenger liner, which had a few defensive weapons but which really was not equipped to fight anyone or anything; and the usual assortment of shuttles, private yachts (rarely affected by Narsatians, though, so there were only a couple of them while an Inner World of similar population would have had dozens cluttering up its orbital pathways), and work-boats for the habitats and satellites that also accompanied Narsai in its annual journey around its sun. In other words, there really wasn’t anything out there that could even consider challenging the fleet of warships.

Maybe some of them could run, though, if their captains had brains enough to realize it was time for that. Yet Casey knew after decades of having protected civilian shipping that civvie officers weren’t trained that way. Heading for open space when they were in trouble was the exact opposite of what they were taught to do, so he was sadly unsurprised to see that although Narsai Control’s commlinks were crackling—alive with frightened voices transmitting questions, making demands for explanations that right now the controllers could not supply—the civvies were staying put.

One blip was not doing that, though. Even on a controller’s monitoring screen that particular blip generated a code all its own, a “top priority” indicator that was supposed to tell everyone who saw it (and every navigational computer that read it) that the vessel it represented was not to be challenged or interfered with in any way.

“Coming through!” was what that code said, and it was a rare circumstance under which anyone who recognized it would do anything else but give it full heed.

George Fralick aboard the Corporate Marshal Service’s long-range shuttlecraft. So small that the alien fleet probably wouldn’t bother to pursue him, so fast that he could be at New Orient—the closest Star Service base to Narsai—in two weeks’ time, easily, if he headed straight there at the shuttle’s maximum warp.

I never thought I’d be cheering for Fralick again! Casey thought, as an incredulous grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. But now I’ve got to. I guess Katy’s right, that guy who was our first captain still is inside that stuffed shirt someplace.

“Of course I’m right!” came his wife’s thought, acerbic and half-distracted. “He’s smart, he’s got guts, he can think on his feet. That’s why he was a good captain, and he hasn’t lost any of it.”

“He’s still a goddamn bastard,” Linc responded, as he gave himself a physical shake to break out of the near-trance that watching the monitors with such utter concentration had caused him to enter. “A sick bastard.”

“Yes. That, too, and someday it’s going to catch up with him. But right now every prayer I know how to say is going with him, because if he can get through and send help back to us he may be the only hope we’ve got.” Katy’s thoughts became even more distracted. “I’m going to get my parents, Linc, as soon as we drop our patient off at MinTar Medical. And I’m ditching this uniform, that may make me a coward but right now I don’t feel the least bit duty-bound to identify myself as a Star Service flag officer. I’m not sure whether Narsai Control is the worst or the best place you could be right now, because depending on that fleet commander’s strategy it could be his next target or it could be the facility he most needs to preserve for his own use later; but I’m going to bet my credits on that last option, it’s what I’d do. So I’ll see you there. Please tell the watch commander not to shoot when we come in low and fast and don’t announce ourselves first.”

“Your patient?” Linc realized he had missed some key events aboard the Archangel’s surviving shuttle, while he had stared in fascination at the alien fleet’s maneuvers. “And you know that fleet’s not under human control, Katy?”

“Of course it isn’t. It still may be the Rebs, though, if they’ve allied themselves with another space-traveling species. From what I’ve been hearing they are desperate enough to do that, and while I can’t imagine what alien species they could have hooked up with it’s clear that most of those ships weren’t built from any design we’ve ever seen before. Could be that it’s Rebs using ships they got from another species that actually has enough vessels so they can sell them cheap—but there’s something about the way they’re handling themselves that feels funny to me, something that makes me believe all those captains can’t possibly be Rebs and humans.”