And if she leaned over him, if she touched his shoulder in the way she had a habit of doing, other things happened. He woke at night, and knew he had dreamed about her, and was embarrassed at what those dreams had caused his body to do.
She was nearing the place in her career when she would be considered for promotion to flag rank, and he was wondering whether the time might not have come when he should separate his life from hers—for both decency’s sake, and for that of his own sanity—when she came back from a leave spent with her husband, she embraced her friend in welcome, and Casey immediately sensed a new life within her.
He hadn’t sensed her sons’ presence while she had carried them, twenty and more years earlier. He had only just learned to follow the working of Katy’s own mind, in those days. But he had known small Madeleine was alive inside Catherine Romanova’s womb for several weeks before Katy herself had become aware of the changes in her body’s rhythms, had sought medical advice (thinking she was simply entering menopause, since she had been in her middle forties by that time), and had been told that she was carrying the daughter she’d wanted for so long.
Still he hadn’t told her the truth. He had stayed with her, though, because leaving her then was unthinkable. Somehow he had known she was about to need him in a way she had never needed him before—and that premonition had come horribly and spectacularly true, far above Mistworld, when two ships in Romanova’s battle group had become balls of flame and when Casey had finally reached out to her mind-to-mind without even thinking about holding back.
After that he no longer had to touch her covertly, he always did it openly. Her pregnancy with someone else’s baby had fortunately kept his sexual interest under control, she hadn’t had to deal with that potentially alarming aspect of being in mental and emotional contact with the friend she had thought she knew so well. He had comforted her while her marriage to George Fralick, rocky in its later years at best, had disintegrated even as she grew huge with Fralick’s daughter. And then he had had to let her go off to Kesra with Fralick, to give birth to the baby to whose mind he already felt powerfully connected. He had remained on duty, and had not been able to decide whether he hoped that for Katy’s sake her marriage might be revived by the new child’s arrival—or if he hoped instead that she would finally break with Fralick, once she had borne and weaned the baby.
Even he hadn’t expected Fralick to do what the man had done, though. He had not thought that any man who claimed to love his wife would show that “love” by using her baby to try to hold her in a marriage she no longer wanted. Katy had arrived back on the Firestorm after her maternity leave not sad about the separation but glowing with pride in her new child, as he had seen her arrive back from bearing first Ewan and then the twins so many years earlier; instead she had been barely holding herself together, and as soon as the formalities of her return were over and they were alone she had broken down in his arms.
He had wanted her so desperately that day, but to take her then would have been beyond excusing. He had held her, mentally and emotionally as well as physically; he had comforted her, supported her, loved her. But not until a full year afterward, when she was about to assume her new rank as a flag officer and he was about to take on the role of her adjutant, had they become lovers.
She was ready for it, by then. Fralick was in her past, she was used to the mental intimacy that she and her friend and long-time professional partner now shared, and adding the physical dimension to their existing closeness had only seemed natural.
Katy had been sharing her body in that way from the night of her thirteenth birthday. Linc had never done so before. It had been awkward, at first—but it had also been beautiful. Intensely, incredibly beautiful, and the wonder of it hadn’t faded as time had passed and as their physical union had become a thoroughly familiar act.
He was thinking about that now, as he came back to consciousness, because someone was touching his thoughts and whoever it was wanted him to think about his relationship with Katy and how it had developed over the years. But once he realized that was the case, he shut off those thoughts in horror.
“So you’re awake now, cousin.” A golden-eyed man about half Casey’s age was looking at him and smiling when he opened his own eyes. “I’m sorry we had to hurt you, but it was either that or take control of your mind against your will. And that would be against ethics, as I’m sure you know.”
“So shooting me with a stunner was a better idea.” Casey looked beyond the young man’s shoulder, and saw something very familiar. He was in a starship’s sickbay. The young man wore a Star Service uniform, that of a physician who held the rank of lieutenant commander.
Which meant he probably was the ship’s chief medical officer. But which ship? And since when did the Star Service kidnap one of its own retired senior officers, from the sanctuary of his home?
“Captain? Our guest is awake now,” the physician said into a comm unit. Then to Casey he added, “Captain Casey. That’s going to get confusing.”
“‘Mister’ Casey will do.” Reaching out for the doctor’s mind was pointless. To this day, Linc could touch only two minds uninvited. His wife’s mind, and—as he had discovered what he thought was still not very long ago—little Maddy Fralick’s mind. The fact that this physician was a fellow Morthan hybrid was of no help to Casey whatsoever. His old failing, to which he hadn’t given a thought since settling down on Narsai with Katy, confronted him again; and it annoyed him just as much now as it had when he was a little boy visiting his mother’s family. The other Morthan children talked without speech, and they left him out…and later, at the Academy, another cadet would see his golden eyes and try to touch thoughts with him and be disgusted when that was possible only if the other Morthan was willing to do all the work.
It had been easier once he became an officer who had some seniority. But from time to time the same thing had gone on happening to him, so he was not the least bit surprised to find it happening to him again now. Everything else about this situation astonished him—but not that.
“Which ship is this? And what in hell am I doing on it?” Casey inquired now, sitting on the edge of the medical bed where he had awakened and putting up a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. He felt the typical post-stunning tightness of his scalp, a sensation which was not quite a headache but that felt uncomfortably close to the start of one.
“I’d like to be able to answer all your questions, Captain Casey, but for now at least that won’t be possible.” A slender, dark-skinned human man had entered the compartment while the Morthan hybrid had been speaking. A man who wore four stripes on his uniform sleeves, and who was poker-faced in a way that Casey had long ago learned usually masked feelings that must be put aside for duty’s sake.
He did not have to be able to touch humans’ minds to know what they were feeling. Many times that was obvious to him, just by observing them.
“At least I can tell you which ship you’re on, anyway,” the dark man continued. “Archangel. And I can tell you my name, Paolo Giandrea—but that’s going to be about it.”