Nina Osier - Matushka

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Matushka

MATUSHKA

by Nina M. Osier

CHAPTER 1

The morning sky over Narsai's northern continent was streaked with pink and gold dawn. It was

unlike Catherine Romanova to wake this early on a day when she didn't have to, on a morning when she

could have stayed beside her husband's warmth until he was ready to rise; but here she was on the terrace

overlooking her garden, and she was as alert as if it were already mid-day.

She reached for Linc's mind, and felt nothing but rest and contentment. That was good. When the

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two of them had finally come back here to live, in this comfortable little house on the home-world to

whose citizenship Romanova had clung so stubbornly through more than forty years as a Star Service

officer, he had been exhausted in every way that a sentient being could become weary. She had wondered

for a time whether he would ever be himself again - but he was fine now, the same Linc she had met one

day when they were both eighteen years old and had stood at a passenger liner's lounge viewport and had

looked out in wonder at their first sight of Terra's blue-green globe.

Two kids from the colonies, Catherine Romanova a human girl from prosperous Narsai and Lincoln

Casey a part human, part Morthan boy who had grown up on the far less hospitable world of Sestus 3.

Two adolescents who had journeyed to Earth for their plebe year at the Star Service Academy,

discovering each other's presence in that liner during their last few hours aboard and regretting that they

had both endured weeks of loneliness when they might have been preparing together for the gauntlet they

were about to enter.

She had been amazed to meet a male Morthan hybrid who wasn't planning to become a healer. He

had been just as surprised to encounter a land heiress from Narsai who was preparing herself for an off-

world career. They had talked excitedly about the new lives both were just beginning, they had

commiserated about the difficulty each had faced in choosing a pathway that had seldom (if ever) been

chosen before by persons from their respective backgrounds; and then the "prepare for arrival"

announcement had been made.

She hadn't seen Casey again until she was a cadet second class, the equivalent of a junior at a

traditional Terran university, and she had been put in charge of a company that was headed out for a field

exercise. Her first command! Although she knew some of those for whom she had just become

responsible, most she did not. In a class of five hundred it wasn't possible to know everybody, for these

exercises the cadets were deliberately juggled to place them among as many strangers as possible - and

she had looked into the young Morthan man's calm golden eyes, had remembered the day they arrived

together on Earth, and had chosen him as her co-leader.

That had been their real beginning together. It occurred to Romanova now, as she sipped the hot

chocolate that was her one dietary vice, that if one went by standard dating and ignored all other calendars

it had been precisely forty years from that day to this one.

The garden was fragrant at this early hour. She had made a point of filling it with plants that had

discernible perfumes, and the heavy dew from last night's autumn coolness was bringing those perfumes

out in a way that she seldom experienced them because she was usually out here at the day's end instead

of at its beginning.

A single-family house with a private garden, created for pleasure's sake alone. On Narsai that was

almost the definition of material success, but that was not why Catherine Romanova had insisted on

having space for a garden when she had been shopping for this house as a place of refuge from her rocky

first marriage. She had simply wanted to put her hands into soil that she could call her own, and Linc had

laughingly told her that her ancestors' genes were asserting themselves at last.

Which might have been true; she had certainly been coming home sore and bruised and in need of

healing at that time in her own life, and acquiring this haven had been part of the process by which she'd

sought to mend herself.

He was stirring now, in the bedroom that was separated by a few meters of distance and by several

bulkheads (no, Katy, they're walls!) from the terrace where she was sitting. She could feel him starting to

think in his usual controlled fashion, realizing she was not beside him physically and wondering where

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she had gone and why....

And then, of course, his mind touched hers and he relaxed again. She felt morning desire rising in

him, stronger in the Morthan male than in the human male; and she smiled as she finished her chocolate,

and drew her robe tighter around her in a shiver that was partly from the morning's autumn chill and

partly anticipation of what would happen to her when she returned to the bedroom and took that robe off

and lay down to be held in her husband's arms.

It was a mutual gratification that would have to be delayed, because the front door opened while she

was padding through the living room to dispose of her empty cup in the kitchen. Two people entered.

One was a red-haired but swiftly balding man, large and broad-shouldered and human. The other was

a tall woman, her body shrouded in a cloak and her face obscured by a scarf that was beaded with Narsai's

morning mist.

"Dan!" Romanova said, and let her thoughts touch her mate's mind with a mixture of apology that

their intimacy couldn't happen as usual this morning - and of pleasure that someone they both loved was

here, unexpected but always welcome.

"Hello, Matushka," the man said, and gave his informally adopted foster mother a tired grin. "Are

you and Linc ready for some trouble? Because I'm afraid I'm bringing you plenty of it."

"This is Rachel Kane," Daniel Archer said, as he sat beside the woman who when she removed her

cloak proved to be wearing a Star Service uniform that was tight in the front to a ludicrous degree. That

had to be uncomfortable. Yet the woman's face was expressionless, which matched the way she moved -

mechanically, and as if every use of muscle required a conscious effort. "You remember me talking about

her, don't you, Matushka?"

The kitchen was warm, and it was fragrant now with coffee and chocolate and sweet hot cereals. Yet

the tall woman with the fair hair and the green eyes was shivering, and she continued doing so even after

Lincoln Casey went back to the bedroom and got an afghan and deftly wrapped it around her shoulders.

Unlike most Morthan hybrids, he could not sense the feelings of just any other sentient being who

happened to be near him. There was only one other person whose emotions he could sense, and that

connection had taken him years of constant and close association to develop. Nevertheless he had learned

his Morthan mother's habit of taking care of the people who surrounded him, so he was the one who saw

to it that the new arrivals were fed and that the room was made warmer when he realized that Rachel

Kane was still shivering even after he brought her the afghan.

Catherine Romanova was nodding and answering her foster son, and relying on her mate to do the

things he always did. "I remember," she said, and reached out to take the younger woman's hands between

both of hers. The flesh she touched was cold. "You were the first officer on the Archangel, when Dan was

posted to her as chief engineer."

"Yes. That was me." Kane spoke at last, in a raspy voice and so softly that if Romanova hadn't been

leaning toward her already she doubted that she could have made out the words. "I'm sorry, I was alone

for so long that I'm having trouble communicating now that I'm with people again. And it was so cold...."

Her shivering turned into a shudder.

Dan Archer moved his chair closer, and put both arms around the woman and held her close. He said

in a voice that was as fierce as his manner was gentle, "God damn that bioengineering company that

supplies the Service with gens, Matushka! I hope we do go to war against the Commonwealth, if the

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Outworlds form up our own service I'll join it. The way the government we've got now treats people like

Rachel isn't human. Oh, hell, I'm sorry, Linc - but you know what I mean, don't you?"

Casey smiled, and set a mug of hot coffee at his foster son's elbow. He answered, "I'm part human,

kid. Remember? And I know what you're trying to say, yes. But suppose you tell us just what happened to

your friend here, and suppose while you're doing that we all try to get some food into us. She's never

going to warm up until she eats, and she's much too thin for a woman who's carrying children."

"How did you know it's 'children'?" Rachel Kane asked in a voice that was steadier now. She had

eaten a bowl of hot cereal laced liberally with sweetening, she had downed two cups of steaming

chocolate, and although she kept the afghan held snugly about her she was no longer shivering.

The four former officers had stopped talking during the brief meal, in accordance with a strict

military custom that Romanova and Casey and Kane had all learned during their Academy days and that

Archer had learned after he had signed onto a ship as an ordinary crew member. He had done that as a boy

of sixteen, desperate to escape life in the mines of Sestus 4; and with a talent for handling both machines

and computers that had made it possible for him to be field promoted into a junior officer's berth. That

had happened to him long ago, when he was still less than twenty years old and when his talents had come

to the notice of Catherine Romanova's firstborn son Ewan.

Romanova loved Dan Archer for his own sake now, but her attachment to him had deep roots in his

connection to her long-dead child. She looked at him this morning, as he sat in her kitchen beside the

unlikely guest he'd brought home, and she thought of the first time Ewan Fralick had presented that

gawky red-haired kid to her in her office aboard the old Firestorm - and she smiled at the memory.

Bringing home yet another human or part-human stray was the best means she could imagine to honor

Ewan's memory.

She felt a gentle inner tug, and looked up and heard her husband saying, "There wasn't any Morthan

empathy involved, I'm afraid, Commander Kane. I know that you're a gengineered being because Dan

already mentioned that. I also know from what I've heard and read about gengineered females that when

your owners are ready for you to reproduce, it's done in batches. And you're about to burst out of that

uniform, which means that you're either well along in your pregnancy or you're carrying more than one

child."

"Very good, Captain Casey!" The young woman laughed, only a trifle harshly. "I'm a bit of an

experiment, you know. Until me, female 'gens' were considered too valuable to risk in the Service and no

gen had ever made it all the way through the Academy. And if I could get my hands on that damned ship's

surgeon who started getting me ready to breed without bothering to tell me about it...!"

She shuddered then, and Archer put his arm around her again. He said softly and very gently,

"Rachel, I'm sorry. If I'd had any idea! I always took responsibility myself, when I was with a woman that

I knew I could make pregnant. But that wasn't supposed to be possible for you, dammit all!"

"It's not your fault," Kane answered him. She turned in the shelter of his arm, and she put her head

down onto his shoulder.

Oh, gods. They're Dan's babies.

Romanova honestly wasn't sure whose thought that was, her own or Casey's. It didn't matter, in any

case they shared both the realization and the horror that went with it; but she was the one who said

practically into the silence that now filled the little house, "First things first! Why don't we drop the rank,

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Dan was booted out of the Service months ago and Linc and I are both retired. And it looks as if you're

out of it now, too, Rachel. I should take you to see a healer right away - but I don't suppose that would be

very smart, would it?"

"No, it wouldn't." Kane did not lift her head off her lover's shoulder, but she relaxed there and turned

enough so she could regard Romanova with those startling green eyes of hers. "I know I ought to see a

medic, I haven't been able to do that since I realized I was pregnant. But you're right, I deserted. And that

means Dan and I are putting you at risk just by being in your home. So seeing a doctor right now is out of

the question, the only way I could do that would be to turn myself in."

"And if you did surrender to the Terran Embassy here on Narsai, what would happen to you?" That

was Casey again, using what Romanova in one of her more acerbic moods was apt to call his bedside

manner. His parents had both been medics - his father a traditional Terran-born allopathic physician, his

mother a Morthan empathic healer - and although he had never had the least inclination to follow in

either's professional footsteps, he could and did adopt a healer's mannerisms sometimes.

That had been part of what made him a superb executive officer, Romanova remembered with a

smile that she quickly hid. He'd known instinctively when, as she had inelegantly expressed it, "to pat

shoulder or kick butt." This was his shoulder-patting mode, and Rachel Kane was responding to it just as

scores of junior officers had done during the years when Lincoln Casey had stood at the head of a

starship's crew and had managed that crew on his captain's behalf.

"Nothing except the end of my Service career, probably, if I went back to Terra now like a meek

little lamb and let the creche-doctors take my fetuses out of me and do whatever they wanted to with

them. I'm a valuable piece of property, I wouldn't be executed like a regular deserter." Kane's eyes

hardened, and so did her tone. "If I'd gone right to sickbay as soon as I realized what was happening to

me, the ship's surgeon would have just aborted the pregnancy and that would have been that. But now that

I'm carrying three twelve-week-old fetuses that as far as I know are healthy and developing normally - I

don't trust the bastards who run my creating lab not to experiment with these babies for awhile first,

before they'd actually dispose of them. What they wouldn't do is let me go on carrying my children until

they're ready to be born, or transfer each of them to an incubation field. That's what they would have done

with embryos made from my ova and a male gen's sperm, if I'd been harvested as I should have been

instead of getting pregnant the old-fashioned way."

"Nice, huh?" Dan Archer asked, with a twisted little grin. "An ordinary bastard like me has no

business contaminating a gen like Rachel with his inferior offspring!"

Lincoln Casey winced, and so did Catherine Romanova; but each did so for a different reason.

"Inferior offspring?" Casey knew what those words meant, because he had been called by them times

enough when he was a boy and his mother's family had visited Sestus 3 or she had taken him to Mortha

for one more disastrous visit. Half human, born after his mother had left Mortha with one of the young

human physicians who came there to study each year...but that by itself was in no way unusual, because

almost every young Morthan woman preferred taking a human husband who was her contemporary to

mating with a male of her own species (who would necessarily be much older, because Morthan males

took many more seasons than did their females to attain sexual maturity).

But Kalitha Marin's son by Gladstone Casey had proved to be unlike the usual product of such a

union, in that he lacked most of the gifts that made a Morthan hybrid - well, Morthan. His eyes were

golden like hers, and his reaching the time of life when females interested him as females and not merely

as people had come after almost forty standard years instead of after fourteen or so as was the norm for

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MatushkaMATUSHKAbyNinaM.OsierCHAPTER1ThemorningskyoverNarsai'snortherncontinentwasstreakedwi\thpinkandgolddawn.ItwasunlikeCatherineRomanovatowakethisearlyonadaywhenshedidn'tha\veto,onamorningwhenshecouldhavestayedbesideherhusband'swarmthuntilhewasreadytorise\;buthereshewasontheterraceoverlookingherg...

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