They had slept now, until both were rested. When Linc reached out into another of the house’s three small bedrooms and sought Maddy’s mind, he discovered that the little girl was still slumbering soundly.
He let his wife know that. And then, very gently, he reached into her thoughts and he touched painful old memories.
This time she let him. She was ready now, she wanted that last barrier between them to come down at last. And although he was just as outraged as she had known he would be, just as angry with Fralick and just as hurt for her sake, the disgust she had feared never manifested itself in his thoughts.
“You really were scared that I wouldn’t want you anymore, if I knew George forced himself on you and you didn’t kill him for it?” Linc was holding her, her head tucked against his shoulder and their naked bodies pressed as close as if they had just made love. But they hadn’t, and this morning that might not be going to happen as usual—not because of any distaste for the idea on Casey’s part, but because right now Katy Romanova didn’t want even this man to touch her in that most intimate of ways.
She whispered with her voice as well as with her thoughts, “Of course I was. I was a starship captain, for gods’ sake! I should have been able to protect myself, that shouldn’t have happened to me! But it did—and if I’d fought back in the only way that would have worked, I’d have lost Maddy completely. And probably my own life, too, because while a human’s never been ritually executed on Kesra killing my mate would have been apt to make me be the first.”
“And do you really think I wish you’d taken that risk? Either of those risks?” Linc’s hand cradled her head, and his lips brushed tenderly against her hair. “Katy, the only reason I’m the least bit upset with you is that you didn’t tell me about this a long time ago. But Fralick, on the other hand…! The bastard. How could the skipper I looked up to when I was twenty-two years old, have done that to you? Or to any woman, for that matter?”
“He thought because I was his wife, he had that right. I know it sounds crazy, but from the way he acted afterward—as if it was nothing, as if he couldn’t figure out why I was so hurt and so shaken up—I’m sure he really didn’t believe he’d done anything wrong.” Katy sighed, and shifted in her husband’s embrace so that she could look up at him. “‘Just one more time, after hundreds of other times,’ he said.”
“He had to know he’d hurt you.” The golden Morthan eyes that met her human brown ones were grim.
“Yes, he knew that. But he thought it was my own fault, because I fought him when I should have cooperated. Linc, he’d been a good lover; it may not be decent for me to tell you that, but it’s true.” Katy blinked back tears that until now she hadn’t shed. “When we were young he made me think I was in heaven, and even later on the physical part usually gave me just as much pleasure as it did him. That had nothing to do with why I wanted to divorce him, that last night before I left was the only time in more than twenty years together that he ever took me by force.”
“But that time he did,” Linc answered. “And there’s no excuse, Katy. None. I don’t want to hear about his culture, I don’t want to hear that he blamed you and you bought at least a little piece of that argument. He should have been executed, not you, and you know that as well as I know it even if you don’t want to admit it to me.”
“But I still didn’t want to see him dead.” She shook her head, and the tears spilled over at last although they did so in silence. “I can’t explain it in a way that you’ll understand, Linc. He’s Maddy’s father, he’s someone I once loved almost as much as I love you. I wanted him where he could never hurt me again—but I didn’t need revenge. And if I was going to go on being part of my daughter’s life, even the small part of it that was all the Kesran authorities would allow, I couldn’t have it even if I did want it.”
And that was at the heart of the bargain she’d made with perdition. She had not seen it before, but as always when she laid a problem out before Linc and looked at it with him she saw things that had eluded her while she did the analysis alone.
“He’s Maddy’s father,” Casey repeated, as he put up a hand and gently brushed at the tears on his wife’s cheeks. “And you did what you had to do, to protect her and to protect your relationship with her. But that’s all it was, Katy. Wasn’t it?”
She hid her face against him then, and she sobbed. The pain and humiliation and outrage of thirteen years past spilled out with her tears; and with them also came the grief for the love that had still been present—wounded and starved, but lingering—and had died at last, in those moments when Fralick had taken final advantage of that tenderness and in doing so had battered it out of existence forever.
Sally Greenberg felt the hair rising on the back of her neck, but the cause of that phenomenon wasn’t the transmission she had just received from Narsai Control. What she had been told had astonished her, there was no doubt about that. But being able to surrender assumptions when they were proved false was one skill a starship captain couldn’t live without; so she was already adjusting to idea that “Misties” (as the Narsatians with their fondness for name-shortening had already christened them) from Mistworld had come sailing in here yesterday, and had started negotiating successfully with the local authorities. Misties who were somehow allied with those renegade humans who until today Greenberg had referred to as “Rebs” right along with the rest of her associates, but whom she now had been forcefully reminded had committed no offenses to earn that nickname unless one counted fighting back when a Star Service ship had fired on them without warning.
She still found it hard to accept that as fine an officer as Paolo Giandrea had done that, but she was obliged to accept it because there were too many trustworthy witnesses to yesterday’s events—Giandrea’s chief medical officer among them. And she did know that every captain was human, herself included, so although it was hard to grasp it certainly was not impossible to believe.
She had allowed Ambassador Fralick to sit with her in her office while she talked with Narsai Control, and she had given him a ferocious glare every time he had been about to butt in. Now the transmission was over, and he was the one who was glaring at her. So she opened hostilities by asking, “What are you thinking, Ambassador?”
She wondered whether he still deserved that title or not, since she had heard sector-wide news more recently than he had heard it and he probably didn’t yet know that Kesra had finally evicted its small number of human residents. So although she hadn’t heard specifically that Fralick was included in that expulsion, she rather expected that he had been—and that either the Kesrans were going to let their always lackadaisical participation in the Commonwealth lapse entirely, or they were finally going to appoint someone of their own species to represent them.
In any case she concurred with the label the freighter captain had used for Fralick. She’d read her history, she knew that once this man had been a valuable diplomat; but now he was just what Angstrom had called him, a stuffed shirt.
If that wasn’t being too kind. Fralick said, “You’re taking your ship into a trap, Captain.”
“I don’t think so.” Greenberg’s eyes narrowed. “But I appreciate your concern, Ambassador, and I promise you we’re going to use caution.”