Nina Osier - Matushka

“Do you really want me to tell you that, Cab?” Romanova asked the question gently. As a citizen of Narsai the doctor could not be prosecuted for aiding an escaped gen, because Terran laws and Commonwealth treaties were not applicable to Narsatians on their own world; but the Corporate Marshal Service deserved its reputation for ruthlessness, and if one of its operatives did learn Rachel Kane’s whereabouts life could be become perilous for those who had helped her.

“Yes. Because if I possibly can, I want to go on taking care of her. I’d like to think that none of my fellow physicians would betray a patient like Ms. Kane, but I can be damned sure I’m not going to—and right now the greatest threat to her health is from her so-called ‘owners,’ if they get their hands on her again.” Barrett’s mouth thinned.

“I hoped you’d feel that way,” Romanova said, and she smiled as she felt her husband’s arm tightening around her. “We’re sending her to Johnnie and Reen, Cab. They’re both your patients, too, so there won’t be anything odd about your going out there to take care of our gen. In fact I should wake her up and get her out of here as soon as I can, but….”

The door buzzed. Casey rose to answer it, and Romanova walked toward their bedroom with Barrett following her. She would get dressed, and talk more with the doctor, while Linc was getting rid of whoever had such poor timing.

“You must be Captain Casey,” said a feminine voice that stopped Katy in her tracks. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was that early on this part of Narsai. Did I get you out of bed?”

Lincoln Casey had never seen Madeleine Fralick, who by rights should have been called Madeleine Romanova, even though he had been the first person to become aware of her existence inside her mother’s womb. At the time when Katy came back from a furlough spent with her husband he had kept that piece of information to himself, because he had feared she would send him away if she ever became conscious of the telepathic bond that had grown between them over their years together. She had not done that, though, when in the middle of her life’s worst crisis he had finally risked deliberately reaching out to her mind to mind. On that day he had held her and steadied her by a means that no one else on their bridge could detect, and by doing so he had brought her through the one moment in all her years of starship command when she had come close to breaking.

Afterward she had gone to her husband’s home on Kesra to give birth to Maddy, just as she had done with her boys; and when she was about to wean the little girl and return to duty, she had told George Fralick that she was leaving him. George had kept Maddy, so this was Casey’s first sight of the girl and her first sight of him.

In spite of never having fathered a child of his own, Casey liked youngsters and knew how to talk to them. He said now, with plain amusement, “You caught us being lazy, I’m afraid. It’s the middle of the morning, Ms. Fralick, and your mother was just about to get dressed and come to meet you.”

“I found my way, it wasn’t hard.” The young girl was both taller and slimmer than Katy had been at thirteen. In that she was George’s child; but she had her mother’s coloring, the same coppery hair (as if had been before Katy’s had silvered) and the same expressive brown eyes. It was hard to say which parent was more responsible for her self-possessed manner, because that she probably had received from both sides. “Ms. Fralick sounds nice, but I guess you’re supposed to call me Maddy. Everyone does. Where’s Mum?”

The comm interrupted them, this time. Katy had been standing still, watching the interaction between her daughter and her husband and not daring to rush forward because she wanted what she saw happening. Cab Barrett moved to answer the comm without being asked, and now Romanova went toward her child with her arms held out.

She had just gathered Maddy in, and had discovered that her thirteen-year-old was as tall as she was now, when Barrett spoke up with uncharacteristic sharpness. “Linc, take this,” the doctor commanded.

Casey did what Romanova would never have advised him to do if he had asked her; on his way past, he put a hand on young Maddy’s shoulder and squeezed it gently.

Oh, no. Would the little girl be calling her father before the Archangel could leave orbit, scared to death that every evil thing he must have told her about Narsai in general and about her mother’s second husband in particular had just been proved true?

“I know him!” Maddy said, stepping back from her mother’s embrace and frowning with puzzled recognition. “Mum, I know him. How? When did he come to see me, that I don’t remember?”

While I was carrying you inside me, Romanova thought, and almost said. But while she was still opening her mouth her husband called to her from the comm.

“Katy, the Triad just exploded in orbit. No one at Narsai Control seems to know who was aboard her, no one seems to know what in hell happened. But whoever was aboard, they’re gone. There’s nothing left but space junk.”

Triad. Dan Archer’s trade-ship, his new life and that of his partners, gone.

And Dan with it, too? Hansie, Sean, Beth, and Fiona? Both Casey and Romanova had known all of them, that entire group of scramblers had been among their junior officers at one time or another in the old days aboard first the Titan and then the Ariadne.

“Mum?” Romanova had turned toward Casey, but hadn’t moved. Young Maddy was tugging at her arm now in puzzlement. “What ship was it that exploded? And who was aboard her? I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, love,” Romanova said softly. Her eyes were stinging, and she wasn’t sure where her own pain stopped and where her husband’s began as she crossed the room swiftly to take him into her arms.

He had been fond of the three young men who had died at Mistworld, but they had been Katy’s and George’s sons and his sadness over their deaths had been mostly for Katy’s sake. But Dan had belonged to both of them; so if Dan really was gone now, it was fully as much his loss as it was hers.

“Mum?” Maddy Fralick asked again, standing alone and mystified just inside the door.

“Come into the kitchen, child,” Cab Barrett said, and went to the girl and took her by the arm and led her out of the room.

Barrett knew what ship the Triad was, and who had almost certainly been aboard her. And after practicing family medicine on Narsai for more than thirty years, she also knew when it was time to leave a mated pair alone with their grief.

“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.