“I hope you’re right,” Linc answered, and carefully did not allow his smile to reach his face. “But I never could do that with another Morthan, not since I was young enough to link with my mother.”
“That may be because no other Morthans helped you develop your abilities,” his cousin answered, thoughtfully but with painful bluntness. “I think you’ve been denied a lot of interaction that the rest of us just expect to have, and I wouldn’t be recognizing that now if I hadn’t been the only telepath on this goddamned floating city for the past three months. I can’t tell you how good it feels to touch someone else’s mind and not have to do every single bit of the work!”
With that the doctor put his scanner away into its belt pouch, and stepped out through the forcefield and said loudly, “Guard! He’s fine, I can tell Ambassador Fralick that he isn’t going to suicide unless something changes to make him want to do that. Now let me out of here, I’ve got patients to take care of who really do need care and I want to get back to them.”
Linc lay back on the bunk in his cell, and still did not permit himself to smile. It was likely that he was being watched, at this and every other moment throughout the starship’s artificially scheduled twenty-four hour day. But there was bittersweet amusement in his thoughts, nevertheless, as he realized that his newly discovered cousin had used his exit to remind Casey that a Morthan hybrid was capable of turning his body off and dying at will.
CHAPTER 9
“At least neither you nor Maddy needs to be afraid,” Ivan Romanov told his cousin as they stood together inside her home. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s another reason why Fralick sent her down here, so that she’d be out of the way and anything she might witness wouldn’t be an issue after he got hold of Linc.”
The house was so terribly, unbelievably empty. “I bought this place because I thought I needed somewhere to be alone,” Katy Romanova said, in a voice that was needlessly hushed. “That even more than so my sons could have a place to stay on Narsai, a place that could be another home for them. But now I realize I’ve hardly ever been here by myself, and I don’t want to be!”
Johnnie put his familiar arm around her, and she leaned into him and absorbed comfort from his touch. There was a lot to be said for relationships that went back to a time when she had not been Fleet Admiral Romanova, not yet even a lowly cadet. It sometimes was wonderful to be held by someone who had been an adult while she was still a child, someone who had loved her then and who still loved her now.
He turned his head and kissed her, his lips pressing against her temple through her hair. It was a gesture that the few times George Fralick had seen it, had sent him into one of his prolonged sulks. But Linc never minded when Johnnie caressed her, Linc understood what the old bond meant.
What it really meant to a pair of Narsatians, not what it appeared to mean to a human male of Kesran upbringing or to a Morthan hybrid who’d grown up in exile on Sestus 3. But Linc didn’t have to rely on appearances, Linc knew what went on in his wife’s mind and in her heart.
“Mum?” Maddy sounded like a little girl, now. But that was a normal thing at thirteen, to ricochet wildly between child and adult and to do so without warning. Even if the girl hadn’t had what must surely have been the strangest day of her short life…and it was going to get stranger, Katy thought as she put out the arm that wasn’t around Johnnie and drew her daughter close.
“The only Star Service ship in orbit when we both felt Linc leaving us, was the one your father and you came here on, Maddy,” Katy said in her gentlest voice. “I’m not saying George is responsible, after all he’s a civilian diplomat. But I do have to think that Linc is aboard the Archangel, I just don’t see what else could have happened to him now that I’ve got the background straight.”
“I think so, too,” Maddy said, just as seriously and with adulthood back in her tone. “Are we going after him, Mum? Or are you going to call Papa and ask him to make Captain Giandrea bring Linc back?”
So simple, that solution. So easy and so obvious. If her father had done something to hurt her mother, it had to be a mistake; once he understood that, he would fix it. Even though the girl couldn’t help knowing that George Fralick detested Lincoln Casey, she clearly did not realize that her beloved “papa” was capable of harming the woman who had been his wife and had given him his children.
But Katy knew just how much he was capable of injuring her, that although he would not allow anyone else to do her harm he had no compunctions whatsoever about hurting her himself. And he hated Linc, far more than even Linc himself could suspect.
Katy cuddled her daughter close, and said softly, “I’m not sure what we’re going to do next, love. But your papa’s not going to be able to help us with this, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.”
Not able? A falsehood, perhaps. Or perhaps not, because returning Romanova’s husband to her unharmed was something George Fralick probably was genuinely incapable of doing now that he had finally managed to separate them after so many years of wanting to do so.
In the cavernous equipment barn at the Romanova Farmstead, Daniel Archer shook his head as he looked at his little trade-ship and marveled that Hansie had been able to set it down so precisely. But then, Hansie had been the finest pilot in the Star Service; any order that had taken away her commission for reasons unconnected with her behavior was a stupid order conceived (although not given) by a pack of fools.
“I never can believe that anything valuable can be moved from one world to another in such a small ship,” came Rachel Kane’s soft voice from Archer’s elbow. Executive officer of a starship she might once have been, but for the first time in her life this woman was experiencing what it felt like to have her fate in her own hands. She was accustomed to being responsible for other lives, for a powerful ship, for choices that could affect millions of other people’s futures; yet she was completely new at deciding how to spend any of her own time except for a few hours of “relaxation,” because until now her whole life had been mapped out and all she had done was her duty.
“Perspective!” Dan said, and grinned. “I was just thinking how lucky we were to get anything as big as the Triad out of sight, on a world like Narsai that’s either wide open spaces or crowded cities and not much in between.”
“I don’t understand why she hasn’t been detected by now.” Rachel reached out a hand to caress the ship’s hull, with a look of wonder on her face that her companion understood well. How often was it possible to touch a ship from the outside, with one’s bare skin? Not often, unless the ship was a minuscule shuttle or a lifeboat like the one that had sheltered Rachel for months while she and her unborn children lay suspended and awaiting rescue.
“If this were Terra or Kesra, or even one of the Sestus worlds, she would have been,” Dan answered. “I’m not sure about Mortha, I don’t know as much about how things work there. But on Narsai, you don’t scan someone else’s farmstead from a ship or satellite in orbit to find out exactly what equipment’s in the maintenance barns and what crops are growing and how many people are in the farmhouse. It’s not just impolite, it’s not allowed.”