“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.”
CHAPTER 6
Lincoln Casey had learned late in life, by the standards of his mother’s people, how to touch another adult’s mind and spirit. It was an ability with which Morthan hybrid children were born, first manifesting itself in the bond between mother and infant. Casey had experienced that quite normally; like most non-humans he could recall his own gradual awakening to consciousness within his mother’s womb, could remember the mixture of trauma and delight that was birth, and could not really imagine what it must be like to be a full human and have no recollection of any part of life that preceded walking and the use of language. But although Sestians and Kesrans and other nonhumans recalled prenatal existence, infancy and toddlerhood (or its developmental equivalent, for those species that swam or flew or crawled throughout their lives), only Morthans of those species humans had encountered thusfar possessed the fabled gift of being able to communicate with other beings on a mind-to-mind basis.