Nina Osier: Matushka

“Too bad, but the Star Service shot first and the Misties just shot back,” Angstrom responded, not at all abashed to learn that the personage he had just maligned had heard him do so. “Don’t know who hit the habitat. For your information it wasn’t destroyed, although people on it did die—but if we did know whose shot went wild, that couldn’t bring any of them back. Damned shame, of course, but letting a war start over it wouldn’t help anyone either. Just more people dead, is all we’d get for doing that.”

Greenberg braced her shoulders. She was a pretty woman, Fralick had noticed that immediately; willow-slim in a way that Katy never had been, not even before three pregnancies and then retirement had put extra flesh onto her already rather large-boned frame. Yet Katy had always attracted him, she still did whenever he somehow wound up in the same room with her.

Why? He still didn’t know, not even after forty years.

Greenberg was saying, “So you’re telling me I don’t need to rush the rest of the way in and rescue the good people of Narsai, Captain Angstrom? You think they’re all right?”

“Well, ma’am, at least I’d suggest you might want to comm them at Narsai Control as soon as you get within range. They can tell you a lot more than I can, but when I left things seemed to be going along fine. No one tried to shoot at me or keep me from sailing, anyway, and in my experience keeping every ship in harbor is the first thing a real enemy does.” Angstrom gave Greenberg the confidential grin of one old salt to another, and to Fralick’s absolute disbelief Greenberg grinned back.

“Safe journey, Captain,” she said formally. “Ensign, end transmission.” Then without looking at Fralick she added, “Now start hailing Narsai Control. Let me know the minute you get through to them.”

In their bedroom in the little house at the edge of MinTar, Katy Romanova and Lincoln Casey were just waking. It was morning—the second morning since Katy had taken her peaceful walk out to the terrace and had savored the early-autumn beauty of her garden, and had come inside expecting to discard her robe and spend a passionate half-hour in her husband’s arms. Instead Dan Archer had brought Rachel Kane through the front door—George Fralick had called from orbit, demanding a haven for Maddy—and since then, there had been no more peace until just a few hours ago.

They had slept now, until both were rested. When Linc reached out into another of the house’s three small bedrooms and sought Maddy’s mind, he discovered that the little girl was still slumbering soundly.

He let his wife know that. And then, very gently, he reached into her thoughts and he touched painful old memories.

This time she let him. She was ready now, she wanted that last barrier between them to come down at last. And although he was just as outraged as she had known he would be, just as angry with Fralick and just as hurt for her sake, the disgust she had feared never manifested itself in his thoughts.

“You really were scared that I wouldn’t want you anymore, if I knew George forced himself on you and you didn’t kill him for it?” Linc was holding her, her head tucked against his shoulder and their naked bodies pressed as close as if they had just made love. But they hadn’t, and this morning that might not be going to happen as usual—not because of any distaste for the idea on Casey’s part, but because right now Katy Romanova didn’t want even this man to touch her in that most intimate of ways.

She whispered with her voice as well as with her thoughts, “Of course I was. I was a starship captain, for gods’ sake! I should have been able to protect myself, that shouldn’t have happened to me! But it did—and if I’d fought back in the only way that would have worked, I’d have lost Maddy completely. And probably my own life, too, because while a human’s never been ritually executed on Kesra killing my mate would have been apt to make me be the first.”

“And do you really think I wish you’d taken that risk? Either of those risks?” Linc’s hand cradled her head, and his lips brushed tenderly against her hair. “Katy, the only reason I’m the least bit upset with you is that you didn’t tell me about this a long time ago. But Fralick, on the other hand…! The bastard. How could the skipper I looked up to when I was twenty-two years old, have done that to you? Or to any woman, for that matter?”

“He thought because I was his wife, he had that right. I know it sounds crazy, but from the way he acted afterward—as if it was nothing, as if he couldn’t figure out why I was so hurt and so shaken up—I’m sure he really didn’t believe he’d done anything wrong.” Katy sighed, and shifted in her husband’s embrace so that she could look up at him. “‘Just one more time, after hundreds of other times,’ he said.”

“He had to know he’d hurt you.” The golden Morthan eyes that met her human brown ones were grim.

“Yes, he knew that. But he thought it was my own fault, because I fought him when I should have cooperated. Linc, he’d been a good lover; it may not be decent for me to tell you that, but it’s true.” Katy blinked back tears that until now she hadn’t shed. “When we were young he made me think I was in heaven, and even later on the physical part usually gave me just as much pleasure as it did him. That had nothing to do with why I wanted to divorce him, that last night before I left was the only time in more than twenty years together that he ever took me by force.”

“But that time he did,” Linc answered. “And there’s no excuse, Katy. None. I don’t want to hear about his culture, I don’t want to hear that he blamed you and you bought at least a little piece of that argument. He should have been executed, not you, and you know that as well as I know it even if you don’t want to admit it to me.”

“But I still didn’t want to see him dead.” She shook her head, and the tears spilled over at last although they did so in silence. “I can’t explain it in a way that you’ll understand, Linc. He’s Maddy’s father, he’s someone I once loved almost as much as I love you. I wanted him where he could never hurt me again—but I didn’t need revenge. And if I was going to go on being part of my daughter’s life, even the small part of it that was all the Kesran authorities would allow, I couldn’t have it even if I did want it.”

And that was at the heart of the bargain she’d made with perdition. She had not seen it before, but as always when she laid a problem out before Linc and looked at it with him she saw things that had eluded her while she did the analysis alone.

“He’s Maddy’s father,” Casey repeated, as he put up a hand and gently brushed at the tears on his wife’s cheeks. “And you did what you had to do, to protect her and to protect your relationship with her. But that’s all it was, Katy. Wasn’t it?”

She hid her face against him then, and she sobbed. The pain and humiliation and outrage of thirteen years past spilled out with her tears; and with them also came the grief for the love that had still been present—wounded and starved, but lingering—and had died at last, in those moments when Fralick had taken final advantage of that tenderness and in doing so had battered it out of existence forever.

Sally Greenberg felt the hair rising on the back of her neck, but the cause of that phenomenon wasn’t the transmission she had just received from Narsai Control. What she had been told had astonished her, there was no doubt about that. But being able to surrender assumptions when they were proved false was one skill a starship captain couldn’t live without; so she was already adjusting to idea that “Misties” (as the Narsatians with their fondness for name-shortening had already christened them) from Mistworld had come sailing in here yesterday, and had started negotiating successfully with the local authorities. Misties who were somehow allied with those renegade humans who until today Greenberg had referred to as “Rebs” right along with the rest of her associates, but whom she now had been forcefully reminded had committed no offenses to earn that nickname unless one counted fighting back when a Star Service ship had fired on them without warning.