Kane was speaking again. “I was in shock, that’s the only excuse I’ve got for what I did next,” she said. “My captain was my friend, and I put him in the worst position a sentient being can put a friend into. I told him something in confidence that he couldn’t keep secret, something he was duty-bound to act on in a way that I knew damned well he wouldn’t want to act.”
“You told him you were pregnant,” Romanova said softly. She had been silent until now, but Kane was looking in her direction; and it was clear that she was expected to say something.
“Uh-huh. Rotten of me, wasn’t it? But my other choice was the damned doc, and since he had to be the reason I’d wound up that way….” Kane’s mouth twisted. “Poor Paolo! He’d always treated me just the way he would have treated any other officer, my being a gen didn’t matter to him at all. And it still didn’t matter when I told him about my babies, he didn’t even seem to understand that they were the lab’s property—for that matter, I was too—and that I had no right to make any decisions about what to do next. He talked about contacting Dan and telling him he was going to be a father, he talked about scheduling me for a maternity post as soon as we hit our next base call. Good gods, the man gave me a hug and congratulated me!”
“Of course he did, you just said you were his friend as well as his exec; and if you had been pregnant and hadn’t wanted to be, you wouldn’t have been telling him that,” Romanova observed, and although she felt bitter amusement at the younger woman’s naivetй she didn’t smile. It wasn’t funny, not in that sense. “You’d have aborted, and unless for some reason you lost work time the ship’s healer wouldn’t have informed anyone—the captain included. So of course Captain Giandrea thought you wanted to be congratulated. Having a baby is a joyful thing, for most women.”
“So I realized, after I saw how he reacted.” Kane nodded. “Gods, I was stupid about that! He has three kids of his own and he worships them, of course that’s what he thought. And there I was, looking for someone to help me get out of the worst mess I could imagine being caught in. But after awhile I made him understand that, and I managed to do it before he told anyone else.”
“So what did he do to help you, that compromised his oath as an officer and his duty as your captain?” Romanova felt cold now. She wondered, suddenly, if Kane’s chilled state on arriving here had been entirely physiological after all.
“He didn’t pursue me when I stole a lifeboat,” Kane answered. “We planned it together. I shouldn’t be telling you this, because if you’re ever questioned—”
“I won’t be, child. You’re on Narsai now, not Terra.” The older woman cut the younger one off, crisply. “Continue, your story’s safe with me. And you’re safer for telling it to me in its entirety, instead of holding back something I may need to know in order to help you properly.”
“He handled the weapons array himself, he shoved the tactical lieutenant out of his way when I came on scanners after I launched the boat,” Kane said, and now there was a trace of genuine humor in her tone. “And I threw out a field of debris, and between us I hope we made it look to the autolog as if I’d been destroyed. But he took another chance and he contacted Dan, as soon as he was able. Supposedly to tell Dan that I was dead. What he really did, of course, was tell Dan the whole story including the coordinates where Paolo had left me behind.”
“How long were you out there in that lifeboat, by yourself?” Romanova felt sick now. She had all too good an idea of what it must have been like for this strange mixture of experienced starship officer and innocent girl, to be all alone between the stars in a frail little shell of a craft that could barely travel at warp speed.
“I didn’t put myself into the stasis tube until I had to,” Kane said, quite calmly. “That was after I realized that if I stayed awake I was going to run out of food sooner than I expected. My caloric requirements were way above what they normally would have been. I guess three babies will do that, even though it never entered my mind or Paolo’s while we were planning the whole thing! And I also realized that if I was going to make it to the nearest settled world alive, I had to put all the ship’s power into propulsion and not into keeping myself warm and breathing.”
Going into stasis was a wrenching enough experience when you did it under medical supervision, usually with your comrades or even your family beside you; when you knew how long you were going to be out, who would be watching over you while you slept that sleep that was the next thing to death, and when and where you could expect to awaken. To do what Rachel Kane had done, out there all by herself—where had she found the courage, anyway?
Until now Catherine Romanova had felt a certain sense of superiority in this interaction, although she hated having to admit it to herself as she recognized its passing. She was a naturally conceived human, not a gengineered being; she had always belonged to herself, she had experienced life fully for sixty and more years and this younger female had been denied much of that. But would she have done for Ewan, or for the twins, or for little Maddy, what Rachel Kane had done for her babies? When Kane didn’t even really know what having children meant—supposedly, at least?
Romanova shuddered. Then she said quietly and positively, “So Dan was able to find you before someone else did. Because of what Captain Giandrea had told him.”
“Yes. That’s how it happened.”
Romanova closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she asked, “Then Dan’s partners know about you?”
The Star Service had paid out a decent severance bonus to each ejected scrambler; that much, at least, the Defense Ministry had done at Romanova’s own urging. With that bonus many of the displaced officers had been able to start new lives. Dan Archer had combined his bonus with that of his comrades Johanna Braeden, Sean Tierney, Beth Croft, and Fiona Meredith. Together the five former service people, humans all as it happened, had purchased a surplus ship and set themselves up in business. In a sense it was a come-down, to go from proud Star Service officer to interplanetary trader; but it was better, as Dan said bluntly, than going back to Sestus 4 and grubbing in the mines there as his grandparents had done. His own parents had been traders, and if they hadn’t vanished with their ship one day while he was still a child he probably would have been one, too. And clearly his partners had agreed with him; whatever lives they would have gone back to weren’t anything that would be an improvement over the free life of the trade-ship.
But then, that was the nature of being a scrambler. They were people who had started with nothing, who had signed on as ordinaries during their youth and who had risen from there on merit alone. They hadn’t started with a Catherine Romanova’s land and money and genealogy behind them, nor with a Lincoln Casey’s highly educated (although always impoverished) parents.
They were exemplary officers in almost every case, and being obliged to send his favorite Academy College charges home to their old lives before they had had a chance to reap any of the benefits of their new ones had been what had broken Lincoln Casey’s health. Or so Casey’s wife still firmly believed, now that they were far from the storm center that was Fleet Command on Terra and now that her lover and best friend was himself again.
Was even a little bit bored, lately, although he hadn’t yet realized that himself. Nor had she chosen to bring that fact to his attention, there were some things you kept in your own thoughts even in the most intimate of telepathic relationships.