“Caution? Against creatures that can take over human beings’ bodies?” The diplomat’s voice rose a notch. Plainly that notion frightened him, with a fear that was genuine and not worked up in an effort to convince her she ought to feel it too.
“That isn’t what the Morthan healer, that Marin fellow, said.” Mentally Greenberg made a note to check with Fleet Command to see whether she really was going to be required to replace her ship’s own staff of Morthan medics when she returned to base at the end of this patrol. She did not want to do that, she couldn’t imagine a sickbay that was stuck using human doctors. “He said that the Misties—”
“‘Misties’! Give them a cute nickname, and suddenly they’re as safe as pets to have around!” Fralick exploded, then. “Captain, my sons died at Mistworld. All three of them. I never blamed the natives there half as much as I blamed the captain who was playing at being a commodore, who lost them—”
“Your wife, at that time, as I recall.” Greenberg was too young to have fought in that battle, but it had been required study in command school by the time she’d landed there. “And the thing that amazed me was that after she understood what had really happened, she was able to take charge of the negotiations in spite of her personal losses. And of her physical condition at the time, I might add.”
“And now my last child is down there on Narsai with her, and her mindfucker of a second husband. And the woman’s selling her own people out all over again!” Fralick’s face was flushed now, dark red with anger. “Captain, the people you just talked to admit that she’s at the heart of this mess too. You have to go in ready to fight, in fact the smart thing would be to—”
Greenberg cut him off. “I’ll decide what’s the smart thing for me to do, thank you, Mr. Fralick,” she said crisply, and she stood up. “Dismissed.”
The last time a Star Service officer had said that to him, George Fralick had been a young captain honorably resigning his commission in order to accept his first diplomatic assignment. He had proudly returned his commodore’s salute, and he had left the man’s office with his head held high.
Now Fralick stormed out of Sally Greenberg’s office, reflecting as he went that she was a lowly commander and an idiot and…
And forty years of carefully controlled anger, used rather than released even while he had taught his wife her place by forcing her to yield to him that one last time before she had left his house—even when he had snatched Madeleine from sickbay aboard the Archangel, and had taken the ungrateful child away from that mindfucker Casey to safety on the corporate marshal’s shuttle—yes, even during the incredibly infuriating moment of humiliation he had just endured from Sally Greenberg—spilled over. Inside George Fralick’s brain, the pressure became too much and an artery exploded.
He was dead before his body hit the deck outside Captain Greenberg’s office hatch, and even the Morthan surgeon who examined him less than five minutes later could do nothing to change that fact.
CHAPTER 26
“Mum, what’s going to happen?” Maddy Fralick was choosing, for now at least, to go back to using her father’s surname even though she understood that was not consistent with Narsatian customs. And Katy Romanova had not protested that decision, she still had no intention of doing anything that would diminish her former husband in their young daughter’s eyes.
“I don’t know, love. Except that whether or not I get approval of my request to return to retirement status, I’m not going to leave you and Linc and go back to Terra.” Katy smiled, and reached out to ruffle her child’s coppery hair.
Maddy made an undignified face. She was beginning to think of such caresses as childish, after only a few days of allowing herself to enjoy them fully now that she was with her mother full time and finally could have such maternal attentions without a disapproving presence such as her father had always been.
She was still grieving for him, of course. That was natural, it was only to be expected. But she was coping with a thirteen-year-old’s considerable resilience, and she was both an intelligent girl and an unusually realistic one for her age. She realized that life as anything but Kesra’s ambassador would have been a tremendous loss of status for her father, and if he’d had to die at least he had done so without being required to face that particular awful news.
She said now, “I meant about the Misties. I know it’ll take about four weeks before the Raven makes it to New Orient and either they come back, or some other ship does, to bring us a new comm booster relay so we can talk to Terra again. What’ll happen if they tell us then that we can’t trade with the Misties after all, that we’re supposed to be fighting them instead of helping them learn how to get enough food out of their land?”
Again Katy said, “I don’t know, love. But I do know that Narsai is an independent world, that our participation in the Commonwealth is just as voluntary as Kesra’s was. As long as our people believed there were ‘Rebs’ out there getting ready to attack us, we thought we needed the Commonwealth to protect us; but we may not think that way now. Not if it’s put to the test, which I hope it won’t be.”
“What about the Morthan doctors that the Commonwealth doesn’t want anymore? And what about the gens?”
Katy sighed. Thirteen was in its way as bad an age for questions, as three had been! But she said patiently, glad to have her girl here to pester her on this quiet evening while they sat inside their little house because it was now too cold outside on the terrace, “The Morthan doctors will find other places to work, Maddy. The Star Service may succeed in eliminating them from its ranks, but I really doubt that official xenophobia is going to extend to every single world in the whole Commonwealth. And even if it does—we’re only just learning this, but the Commonwealth isn’t the galaxy.”
“And the gens? Will they all be freed someday, like Rachel and her babies?”
“I hope so, but I’m afraid that may take a lot longer,” Katy said. From being a haven for just herself and her husband, this tiny home had gone to being filled to its capacity. Although it would be months yet before the three little lives now sheltered by incubation fields at MinTar Medical could come home, their parents already had. Dan’s bedroom was occupied now by both Dan and Rachel, who would stay there until their family was “born” and grew old enough to travel safely. Then they had ideas about going to Mistworld, although right now those were only ideas. Time would tell. At any rate Rachel was starting to recover, was beginning to behave like the starship exec she had been—and Katy had decided that she liked her.
Before she had pitied her for her situation, and had been awed by her courage; but she hadn’t been able to pin down the other woman’s real personality enough to be sure just what she was like. She had trusted Dan, though, and now she could see that her trust had been well-placed. Rachel Kane might have begun her adult life with only a rudimentary idea of what being human really meant, but she had learned.
Learned well enough so that tonight she and Dan were out making up after a genuine fight, the kind of quarrel every couple had from time to time but that they had never before experienced. It wasn’t fun, but it was normal. And while “normal” was not a good thing in and of itself, in this case it was profoundly reassuring.
The front door opened and closed. Katy looked up from her daughter, who of course was the other cause of this home’s being filled to capacity—she had been installed in the third bedroom, and it was already a typically adolescent mess!—and then she rose so quickly that she almost leaped up, like a girl again herself, to embrace her husband as he came through the living room and into the kitchen. “Linc! You’re late.”