She let herself go limp in the hands that grasped her, and when shackles closed around her wrists she allowed it to happen. She lifted her head, though; she opened her eyes, and saw that the old Narsatian woman who had been so kind to her was gone already. Dan Archer was being shackled by the uniformed people who held him, and the lift to the surface was coming down for a second load.
They must have taken the woman called Reen up first. Hopefully that meant she was thought to be innocent, a civilian caught unknowingly in someone else’s intrigue.
“Move, you gen-whore!”
She hadn’t been called that in a long time, although she knew that civilian women who were gens received that abusive form of address quite routinely. Why did it make a female a prostitute, she wondered, to be egg-harvested instead of impregnated as the result of a sex act? The insult was stupid, and its use said very little for the intelligence or the creativity of any person who uttered it.
She saw Dan’s jaw clenching, and was thankful when that was his only reaction. He had sense enough to know that getting himself injured was not going to help her, and that hearing that epithet one more time was not going to do her any real harm.
Would it really be giving up, to just go to sleep now? She hadn’t felt like herself since leaving the stasis tube, and now she wondered almost forlornly what had become of the energetic woman she had been before. Did every expectant mother feel this way?
“Hold on. Help’s coming, Commander Kane.”
She knew the mind that touched hers. It took all her lifetime of discipline not to let her surprise and joy show on her face, or in her body’s posture; but she had felt mental contact with Lieutenant Commander Kerle Marin many times, because he had been on the Archangel with her for more than a year before she had fled in that lifeboat. Like all Morthan healers, he touched his patients with his thoughts far more often than with his hands; scanned them far more reliably with his mind that with his medical instruments. And Rachel Kane had been his patient, and in this moment she forgave him for having prepared her for egg harvest without telling her he had done so.
“I didn’t do that to you,” came the denial, in that soft voice inside her head. “I refused. So someone relayed the order from HR Solutions to the senior corpsman on my staff, and gave him specific instructions not to tell me about it. And he wasn’t trained as well as he should have been—and that’s why what he did, he did incorrectly. I’m sorry, Ms. Kane. If I had obeyed that order, you wouldn’t have been put into such a terrible position. But it wasn’t a directive from the Service, so it wasn’t binding on me as an officer—and I was damned if I was going to harvest a female’s ova like some kind of crop. That’s something no person reared on Mortha could ever do.”
“Thank you,” Rachel thought, and closed her eyes as the bright light of a Narsatian sunrise blinded her when the lift reached the surface at last. “I do wish you’d told me, Doctor, but I don’t wish you’d gone ahead and harvested me. I can’t explain it, it doesn’t make a bit of sense, but even right now I’m glad something happened to me that was drastic enough to make me run away. Just a few minutes ago I thought I was ready to die, rather than go back!”
“You won’t have to do that.” The Morthan healer’s thoughts were as gentle as his remembered voice. “The Matushka is back in command, Ms. Kane. She knows what’s happening down there, and I’m sure she must have a plan.”
“Are you saying this to Dan, too?” Archer had also been Marin’s patient, so that ought to be possible. And as she forced her eyes open and looked at her lover, Kane knew it was the case.
What even a full admiral could do to help either of them out of this situation, Rachel didn’t know. Especially when that admiral was herself a party to their crime, when any move she made to help them might seal her own doom. Yet this was the first time Kane had ever heard of a Morthan healer involving himself in any situation outside of his sickbay, and the Matushka was the Matushka—not just any flag officer, but one who had earned her reputation for acting unconventionally in her personal life and unpredictably in both her leadership strategies and her battlefield tactics—so once again, however unreasonably, Rachel Kane was allowing herself to feel hope.
Madeleine Fralick woke to find herself in a place she did not recognize. She had been in Mum’s house, had fallen asleep while Mum was talking to someone. Cousin Johnnie had been with her, and she was sure she remembered him picking her up in his arms and carrying her outside. The air had been cool, and it had been dark.
Then from time to time she had almost roused, and had realized she was aboard a vehicle and that Mum and Johnnie were talking. The next thing she remembered was not being able to breathe.
She could do so now, though, and the fear she’d felt then was only a memory. That she had been teleported from Narsai’s surface to a ship in orbit had to have been a dream—yet when she looked around her now, she realized that part too had actually happened.
Where was this? Not the Archangel, a huge ship with commodious compartments and (unless you were unlucky enough to live among the ordinaries) a decent amount of privacy. She lay on a bunk in a tiny sleeping compartment, and she saw that this cabin was intended for double occupancy.
She sat up, and swallowed to ease her dry throat, and realized further that this cabin didn’t have a private head. And why had she been left alone to recover from whatever it was that had happened to her? That she really, truly thought had come close to killing her?
Her legs were a trifle rubbery, so she stayed beside the bunk and held onto its edge after she eased herself onto her feet. She heard a voice in her mind as she did so, and instead of being startled or frightened she welcomed it with vast relief. “Linc!”
The day before yesterday, she had not met her mother’s second husband. Today she felt as if an additional father had entered her life—no, more as if he had always been part of her life—and the touch of his thoughts comforted her as nothing else could have done just now.
“Maddy, do you know where you are?” The question was gentle. Yet she sensed urgency, and there was also apology in Casey’s mental tones.
He felt responsible for what had happened to her. But he could not have been, and besides that she understood that this was not the time to ask for explanations. She answered, “On a ship. In orbit around Narsai, I hope, because I’m by myself in a bunkroom and I just woke up. Where’s Mum?”
“She’s here with me, on the Archangel. Your father took you with him when he left, Maddy. It’s a long story—one I don’t even want to be the person to tell you, in fact—but your mother decided to go back on active duty, and when she took over command your father decided he didn’t want to be on the ship anymore. So he ported you over to a long-range shuttle that belongs to the Corporate Marshal Service.”
“But everybody hates them! They’re horrible people, they track down slaves and make them go back to where they escaped from!” Maddy remembered what her Kesran caregivers, the female neuter P’tara and her neutered male counterpart K’lor, had told her about the marshals—specifically, that misbehaving children should be careful of them!—and she shuddered. She was much too old now to believe that the marshals were a threat to disobedient little girls, but she still believed they were evil because the two people who had loved her and cared for her the most had told her that was true.