“Who are you?” She asked the most natural question first, before she was even sure that questions from her would be welcomed. She had to know that, she had to have a frame of reference or she could not participate in this process in any meaningful way.
“Who are we would be a better question, Admiral Romanova.” The being was amused that she had thought changing her body’s coverings would conceal her identity. But that amusement was surprisingly gentle, it had no flavor of scorn as her mind tasted it.
She was “tasting” amusement? Senses for this being were rather different than the five she had always experienced, or even the sixth one with which she had made so many split-second decisions and had so often kept herself and her people alive when her five normal senses by themselves would have failed her.
“I am not like you, no. Your mate feels the need to assign me a gender, but I cannot classify myself in that way.” More amusement, followed by a brisk desire to proceed with business. “I am speaking for everyone aboard the vessels that survived your warship’s effort to destroy us, but my species is not the only one present here. As your mate has already learned, there are Morthan hybrids like him among us; and I do mean like him, and not like the Morthan that thinks of itself as ‘Marin.’”
“You mean Morthan hybrids whose telepathic abilities are limited? And who are capable of fighting?” Katy grasped that immediately, because she had always felt certain that Linc couldn’t be the only one of his kind. The first, maybe; but not the only one. And now that was being confirmed.
“Yes. Exactly so. Also we have full humans whose fellows have rejected them for reasons beyond their control. There are some who think of themselves as ‘scramblers’; I sense that this term has meaning for you, also, and that it is not a negative meaning.”
“Not at all!” Katy answered, and thought deliberately of her foster son.
“Excellent. And this one of whom you think with such affection, on whom you place such value, is also a member of an additional despised human sub-grouping. The Sestian female we have taken aboard would consider him a beast, would she not?” This amusement was different. Clearly the being did not approve of the Sestian’s attitude—although for some reason it had thought saving her life was worthwhile, when the Archangel was about to die and only a relative few of those aboard could be rescued.
“Yes. Dan’s grandparents were miners on Sestus 4, and you seem to understand exactly how it is for humans who are stuck with having to live there.” Romanova knew that her body had sighed, and she hoped she wasn’t alarming Maddy. But she could do nothing now to communicate directly with her daughter, not without breaking this communion that absolutely must not be disrupted.
“Just so. There are others like him here with us. Not only from his particular group, but a variety of other humanoid creatures whom your mind and that of your mate think of collectively as ‘rebels.’ That term I do not quite comprehend; who gave the government of a far away world authority over all of you here? I understand that individuals who claimed to represent you may have made such assertions on your behalf, but has any of you affirmed this personally?”
“That wouldn’t be possible,” Romanova said, and was surprised to think that she was defending Terra’s right to govern the Outworlds via the Commonwealth even though her Star Service oath obliged her to do exactly that. Never in her life had she been more aware of the dichotomy between Admiral Romanova and Katy, the girl who had once been female heir to the Romanov Farmstead.
She wondered in a tiny, uncontrolled corner of her mind whether Johnnie and Reen were all right, and remembered that Marshal Vargas had left them where he’d found them. So they, at least, should be safe now—although no doubt they were at least as frightened as any other civilians on Narsai, and maybe more so because they were so much better informed than were their more typical contemporaries.
“To be locked alone within a body; how terrible that must be!” There was genuine sympathy in the voice that no longer seemed alien to her. “But that is true for all of you, even for those called Morthans who have some telepathic abilities. But we digress, and there is no time for that just now.”
“Who else did you rescue besides the Archangel’s healer? And why did you make this alliance with the Rebs?” Along with the strangeness, Katy’s fear was abating. Like just about every other living creature she’d ever encountered, this one was capable of destroying other living things if it was given the right (or the wrong, as it were) conditions to require or justify doing so; but it wished her no harm. She was certain of that, to her very core.
“The humans who were brought into existence to be used by other humans, the ‘gens’ as you think of them who were aboard the warship, we had a duty to free if we were able,” came the answer to her first question. “And we do not know any Kesrans or any Sestians, so we claimed the opportunity that was offered to us. But you have known us before, Catherine Romanova; and you also, Lincoln Casey. And when you recognize us, then you will realize why we have made this ‘alliance’ as you call it—although to us the concept is not the same thing that it is to you, because we are not locked up alone in corporeal bodies. But you will remember that we had difficulty with this concept before, although after many rotations of accepting and caring for individuals cast out by your ‘Commonwealth’ we now understand you much better than we could understand you then.”
Long-unvisited memories surged up now to fill Katy with re-created pure terror, until Linc’s mind wrapped hers in loving reassurance. And although she had asked him to keep Maddy out of this, and he had agreed and at the time had acted to accomplish that exclusion, she now felt her child’s consciousness with her as well.
“It’s okay, Mum,” came the girl’s thought. “Even though they’ve changed a lot, I can still remember these people from before I was born. They can’t scare me the way they’re scaring you.”
It should have been humiliating, to have her thirteen-year-old take her mentally by the hand and lead her. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was a profound relief.
“Papa doesn’t need to bring back a fleet protect us from them,” Maddy added, with both wonder and assurance in her tone. “They didn’t come to hurt us. They wouldn’t have destroyed the Archangel if it hadn’t attacked them the minute they arrived. And they got rid of the comm satellite only so that they’d have time to talk to us, because they knew if they didn’t do that people here would do whatever the Commonwealth told them to do instead of thinking for themselves about what’s best and what makes the most sense.”
A child’s clear vision could be the most useful thing in the universe, Katy thought as she felt herself being steadied by these two who were holding her so lovingly. Linc on one side, Maddy on the other, just as if they had been standing together physically instead of Linc’s being seated in a flight controller’s chair several klicks away across the city; while she and her daughter sat in a medical center’s emergency waiting area amid the unnatural hush of a hospital that right now wasn’t admitting anyone, because not a soul dared to venture out of whatever shelter it had found.
“I knew the cloud-beings on Mistworld,” Katy said at last, after she had calmed enough to be coherent again. “They’re the only species I’ve ever even heard about that are sentients without corporeal forms.”
“Then you recognize us now, Katy?”
“Yes!” Of course she did—although what the sentient, but noncorporeal, life forms of Mistworld’s upper atmosphere were doing aboard starships off Narsai baffled her completely. And Maddy was right that they were not exactly as she remembered them, either; but after more than a decade of associating with the colonists who lived on their planet’s surface, she supposed it would be ridiculous for her to expect them to be unchanged.