He was a decent person, who if he had to face her on a field of battle would kill her without hesitating but who would never dream of looking her in the eye and lying to her while they were still supposed to be comrades. So she asked him openly, “What’s going on, Bill? You say the Service isn’t accepting any new Morthan officers, but Linc was the only one the Service ever had that wasn’t a medic of one kind or other. Are you getting rid of those, too?”
“Yes.” Tanaka nodded, heavily. “It’s taking time, of course, because we can’t do with them what we did with the scramblers and just hand them bonuses and their walking papers all on virtually the same day. Doctors are hard to replace, and harder to do without! But if we go to war with Mortha on the other side, Katy, we simply can’t have hundreds of them—thousands of them—in our starship sickbays and our base hospitals, with access to the minds of the people whose tactical decisions are going to direct that war. I know, except for Linc Casey there’s never been a case of a Morthan or a Morthan hybrid who did anything violent except in self-defense. Immediate defense against an immediate threat, at that. But having them living among us is a risk we can no longer afford to take, so they’re being mustered out of the service and sent back to Mortha. And those who work in civilian health care are going to follow, I expect, although of course that’s not my policy arena and I’m speculating a bit now.”
“And just how is Mortha supposed to react to this idea?” Katy wanted to close her eyes. They were burning with fatigue, and now they also stung with angry tears. Damn! I can see a piece of errant stupidity coming at me four-square, and there’s probably not a thing I can do to stop it, she thought with sadness so deep that it made her recently abused chest ache all over again. “Where are the people there supposed to put these thousands of refugees? All of whom are trained for a profession for which there’s damned little demand on Mortha, because only the full humans there get sick with any regularity?”
“You know, I’ve always wondered about that.” Tanaka’s reply had the flavor of an attempted diversion about it, yet the remark was obviously a sincere one. “If they never get sick, how come their world isn’t overpowered by its own population? I mean, what do they die of?”
“They die when they’re ready, because they will themselves to do that. For a Morthan who’s mated to a human, that happens when the spouse dies unless there are young children left behind who need a surviving parent’s care.” This was something Linc had told her early in their friendship, without the least self-consciousness. So Katy had honestly thought most people knew it, yet now she believed it was news to Bill Tanaka.
Damn, that piece of stupidity was getting more errant by the second!
“Do you really expect me to believe that a perfectly healthy Morthan just shuts him or herself off, because of being widowed?” Tanaka was genuinely incredulous. “What happens when they divorce, for pete’s sake?”
“They don’t. Oh, sometimes a human spouse leaves a Morthan mate; but the reverse never happens. And what I just described isn’t unvarying, there are such things as Morthans who stay unmated and Morthans who prefer their own gender. But even for them there comes a time when they know they should leave, and then they do exactly that. It’s not suicide, Bill; not in the way you and I understand that word as humans.” When Linc had first told her about that particular aspect of his maternal heritage, Katy herself had been just as shocked and disturbed as the man in the holoscreen was now. But that was long ago, and now this was just one more thing about Linc that she accepted and had trouble remembering another human might not.
“All I can tell you, Katy, is what’s happening from the Service’s point of view. I can’t tell you why the Defense Minister is making the decisions she’s making, except that I do know the Diet has been voting in a pattern that practically forces her hand on some of these points.” Tanaka checked his chrono. “Enough Fleet politics! Report, Admiral. That’s your rank now, by the way.”
“I assumed that,” Romanova said, and grinned a sardonic grin. There could only be one Fleet Admiral. She had given up that post voluntarily, and now she was looking at her successor without any expectation that he would step aside (or be pushed aside by his civilian bosses) to make way for her return.
She told him what had happened—except for the arrival at her home the previous morning of Dan Archer and Rachel Kane, and those events afterward that would have made him aware of her involvement in that situation. Her aircar flight to the Romanov Farmstead she presented as Maddy’s introduction to her mother’s ancestral heritage, and when she spoke of her return to the Farmstead with Johnnie she treated the events there as a tragic surprise.
Which they really had been, after all. That HR Solutions wanted its property returned was not surprising, but that the corporate marshal pursuing the runaway gen had had the incredible luck of being able to intercept the Archangel and compel the starship’s return to Narsai amazed her. The Archangel would probably not have come into port at Narsai at all on its run from Kesra to Terra, providing VIP transport to Ambassador Fralick, if George hadn’t wanted to bring Maddy to her mother for safekeeping. Even then, if the starship had departed just a few hours earlier she might have missed making contact with the marshal’s shuttle.
But on such pieces of luck, good and bad alike, was all of history based. Right place, right time; wrong place, wrong time; or any variable combination of those critical factors, oftentimes decided who lived and who died. Not just which individuals, but which worlds and which civilizations and which species.
But Katy Romanova had nevertheless always believed in making her own luck whenever she could, and she was going to attempt to do that one more time. She watched Tanaka carefully while she gave him her report, and she noticed that he did not glance at his chrono even once.
Yes, that gesture had been a ruse. A means of convincing her to stop asking inconvenient questions, when in actuality Tanaka was willing to spend whatever time was necessary to bring Romanova up to speed.
None of the information she was giving him was even half as valuable as what he had just told her, without saying a word.
CHAPTER 16
“Reen.” Dan Archer spoke softly to the farmstead woman, as the old railcar moved closer and closer to the place where they knew their would-be captors waited. “You don’t know Rachel’s a gen. You don’t know anything about her, except that I brought her to your home and asked you to take her in. Do you?”
“Dan, getting the truth out of me is going to be the easiest thing in the universe. You know that, you have to know that.” Reen Romanova gave him a tired smile. “I’d love to keep Katy and her little girl out of this, and Johnnie too—but I don’t see how.”
“You and your husband, and the Matushka and her daughter, are all civilians and citizens of Narsai,” Dan reminded her. “The Star Service can’t do a thing to you unless your government agrees to give you up to them. I’d be wondering how your government was going to react to what’s happened to your property, except that I suppose I get the legal blame for that; I’m the only surviving owner of the Triad, and it was the ship resisting a tractor beam that actually did all the damage.”
“I wonder if anyone’s going to remember my citizenship, or care about it,” Reen replied. But Dan was right, and she felt herself sitting up straighter as she gathered her resources to face whatever was waiting for them when they reached the underground chamber where the railcar’s course terminated.