Which changed even while Katy watched her. Maddy’s eyes opened, she sat up so quickly that the safety harness clutched at her as if it had detected a crash in progress, and she uttered a cry that Katy heard herself echoing.
“What the hell?” Johnnie wanted to know. He was setting the aircar down as he asked that question, and then he was speaking over its comm. “Lieutenant, this is Romanov again. I told you I have my cousin and her daughter aboard with me? Well, something’s wrong with both of them. Have you got a medic in your shore party? No? Well, someone better do something damned quick! They’re both having all they can do to keep breathing, and I don’t have a clue about why.”
CHAPTER 13
The teleporter the landing party had brought down from the starship, so that their people could move back and forth to the surface with ease instead of making constant shuttle trips, took Catherine Romanova and her daughter from the Romanov Farmstead to the Archangel in less than a second of elapsed time. She knew what was happening, because she could hear the voices around her and could feel the hands that touched her; but she was helpless, she could not respond in any way. She could not even open her eyes; she perceived Johnnie’s worried voice and the landing party commander’s exclamations and then the warmth of the teleporter washing over her, but she paid them little heed. It was taking all her concentration to make her chest rise and fall, as she persisted in breathing even though she could feel a terrible hand trying to grasp her lungs and hold them still forever.
Maddy was probably in a similar state, if indeed the little girl was still alive. After that one startled cry, she too had clutched at her throat and had started fighting for air. But this was one time when Katy could spare no attention even for her child, because if she did not keep herself alive then she could do nothing more for anyone.
Linc, where was Linc? Her distress was shared, just as the sensations of their lovemaking had always been shared. He, too, was fighting against that invisible hand. He, too, was breathing only out of sheer cussedness…out of pure determination to go on living until someone made that hand release him.
Sickbay. She had been rushed there from the teleport platform, a journey she had made many times before on other starships. She was aware of Maddy near her, in a way very much like that in which she was aware of Linc. That should have been frightening, to feel her child’s mind in addition to her husband’s—and for both of them to be as scared and as close to dying as she was—but at least they were together.
Three beings. Woman, man, and child; the little girl who was George Fralick’s by biology and upbringing, but who had learn to recognize Lincoln Casey’s mental touch in the days when she was developing from zygote to infant within the shelter of her mother’s womb.
How funny that was, hilarious really, that Fralick was so jealous of Casey’s intimacy with his ex-wife—but he hadn’t a clue that his child was, in this vital sense, also Casey’s child. In the last stages of oxygen deprivation before unconsciousness would claim her, when she knew she was losing the battle to live, Katy Romanova wanted to laugh and could not do so.
And then quite suddenly she could breathe again. The hand inside her chest was gone, and she was gulping air so enthusiastically that she soon felt a mask being pressed to her face and heard a voice instructing her, “Breathe slowly, Admiral. You’ll hyperventilate, you’ll make yourself ill. That’s it, that’s better. Relax, you’re going to be all right now.”
“Maddy?” she asked, as soon as the mask was taken away. It had been there only to break the frantic cadence of her breathing, to help her slow down before she did indeed go abruptly from starving for oxygen to flooding her system with too much of that precious gas.
A man with golden eyes was standing beside her, but he wasn’t Linc. He said, “She’s all right, Admiral. But you both had a close call. Ambassador!” And he turned away from his patient, and spoke in no-nonsense medical tones to someone she could not see. “That settles it, I think. Putting Captain Casey into stasis isn’t just a death sentence for him; somehow it’s also a death sentence for Admiral Romanova here, and for your daughter.”
George Fralick’s voice answered, “That doesn’t make a damned bit of sense, Marin. I know Casey’s a mindfucker like you, but he always said he was a defective one. Couldn’t do a thing, according to his medical files when he was serving as a junior officer under my command—”
“How many years ago?” The medical officer called Marin, which should make him part of Linc’s own clanstribe on Mortha, spoke harshly now. “Ambassador, this woman may be your former wife; but she’s Captain Casey’s mate now, and when he went into respiratory failure in that stasis field she went right along with him. That doesn’t always happen to a Morthan’s mate, but it’s a phenomenon I’ve seen before. And when the partner’s a human it’s worse, because she has no skills to help her resist experiencing her husband’s physical distress.”
“Why in hell was my daughter affected, then? What has Maddy got to do with that damned mindfucker Casey?” Fralick wanted to know.
“I hope she can’t hear you, George.” Katy’s voice was thick, because her throat was raw from her battle to live. But she had a little strength now, enough so she could turn her head at least and search for him with her eyes.
“She can’t. She’s recovering, but she lost conscious and hasn’t regained it yet.” That was Marin cutting in, his tone even more severe. “But Admiral Romanova is right, Ambassador. However it is that her daughter, your daughter, was affected by Captain Casey’s condition, hearing your anger at him is only going to frighten the child.”
“Linc,” Katy said. She directed the single word at Marin, and her tone made it into a Fleet Admiral’s demand.
“I removed him from the stasis field just as you and your daughter were being brought into sickbay, Admiral. He started breathing normally immediately, and if it wasn’t for the sedatives still in his system he’d be fine now. Just as you and Madeleine will be, after a few more minutes to recover.” The medical officer scanned Romanova’s body, and nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, you’re fine already. You just need to rest, you’ve had a hell of a shock.”
“I don’t have time to rest.” She struggled to sit up now, and was not surprised when Marin grumbled but helped her. If he’d been a starship physician long enough to rise to the rank he now held, then he had seen this type of behavior many times; he knew the only way to keep her prone would have been to restrain her, physically or chemically, and he was prepared to do neither just now. “George! You know Morthans often die in stasis. Dammit, what kind of cooperation did you think killing him was going to get you from me?”
She was mad now, and a glance toward her daughter’s gurney made her more so. The girl lay completely still, except for the rise and fall of her chest. Her dusky little face was pale underneath its natural skin tones, and her body was completely limp.
“Damn you, answer me,” she said to the child’s father, and she bit off each word as if he were the greenest ensign she’d ever seen and quite possibly also the stupidest.
“No, Katy. You answer me.” That command voice would have worked for her with just about any fellow human she’d ever encountered, and with most nonhumans as well. But it wasn’t going to work with George Fralick, not with the man who still thought of her as the woman whose body had no secrets from his and whose womb had carried his children. To Fralick, she had discovered at the end of two decades and more of responding to him with eager passion—even after the rest of their relationship had become alternately tense and distant—a woman who had lain beneath him in bed was and would always be someone he had proved he could dominate, could “possess” in the sense she had heard that word used in certain annoying old novels and stage plays.