“I know,” he managed, inadequately.
He was still sitting there, eyes closed, when Kafari opened the door, bringing their child home from the Nineveh Base daycare center, which was closing as of next week. Simon was not looking forward to the evening, with its own battles to be fought. To say that he hated Yalena’s daycare center was on a par with saying the Deng were irritating. What that daycare center was doing to Yalena would have constituted criminal abuse on most worlds. What would happen when she started school… Worst of all, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, short of forcing his wife and child onto the next freighter bound for Vishnu.
He wasn’t sure he could cope, tonight, with the hellion that his daughter had become. She was already shrieking at her mother.
“I wanna go back to play with my friends!”
The scathing emphasis on that final word demonstrated with piercing intensity that Yalena did not place her parents in that category. It appalled Simon that a five-year-old child could condense that much hatred in a single, simple word.
“You’ll see your friends tomorrow, Yalena.”
“I wanna see them now!”
“You can’t have everything you want, Yalena.”
“Oh, yes I can,” she hissed. “The law says so!”
That brought Simon out of his chair. “Yalena!”
She whipped around, rage contorting a face that should have been pretty. “Don’t shout at me! You’re not allowed to shout at me! If you shout at me again, I’ll tell Miss Finch how horrible you are! Then they’ll put you in jail!”
She ran into her room — the size of which was federally mandated — and slammed the door so hard photographs on the wall jumped on their nails. The bolt-lock — also federally mandated — slammed into place with an audible snap. Kafari burst into tears. Simon didn’t dare move for long, dangerous moments, aware with every atom in his body that if he took a single step in any direction, he wouldn’t be able to contain the violence of his emotions. Or the actions that would follow.
Doing any of the things he needed to do — kicking down the door, warming Yalena’s backside, shaking sense into her — would only precipitate disaster. And play right into the hands of Vittori Santorini and his minions. They were itching for an excuse to invade Simon’s house and finish destroying his little family. If he laid so much as a finger on his child, the resultant feeding frenzy would culminate in POPPA seizing Yalena to “safeguard” her from violent and dangerous parents and give them grounds to demand that the Concordiat cashier and expel him from Jefferson. It was a measure of his anger — and his dark foreboding about the future — that any excuse for leaving Jefferson was attractive.
Kafari, voice breaking with misery, said, “She didn’t really mean it, Simon.”
“Oh, yes, she did.” His voice came out flat and full of sand.
“She doesn’t understand—”
“She understands too well,” he bit out. “She understands so much, we’re naked over a barrel and she knows it. And it’s going to get worse. A lot worse.”
Kafari bit her lower lip. Her glance at Yalena’s bedroom door was full of misery and failure. “If we could just pull her out of daycare…”
“The only way to do that is to leave.” He didn’t need to add, And you won’t do that. They’d already fought that fight, more than once. His voice came out weary and bitter. “Kafari, you have no idea how much worse things are about to get. I’ve been ordered to shut Sonny down. Without him, I can’t possibly stay on top of what POPPA is planning and they know it. I can only see what they’re doing through his taps into security cameras. I can’t read fast enough to scan the entire datanet, much less track what’s on the computers connected to it. I can’t hear what’s being said through telephones, wireless voice transmissions, or computer microphones, not without Sonny. The minute he goes into inactive standby, I lose all of that.
“I’m the only check-and-balance still operating on this world and that’s changing, as of today. I can’t interfere unless I have direct evidence of activity that violates the treaty with the Concordiat. I can’t provide evidence if I don’t have the technical ability to look for it.”
She sat down abruptly, eyes glazed as the shock of it settled in. “You can’t refuse?”
“No.”
She lifted a stricken gaze to meet his. “I’m so sorry, Simon. It must be like losing your best friend.”
Her words took him completely by surprise. Quite suddenly his eyes stung. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. He blinked rapidly a few times. Said in a low voice, “You know I love you more than life, Kafari. But Sonny was with me…”
“I know,” she said in a whisper, when he couldn’t finish.
He just nodded. It was impossible to convey what combat was like to anyone who hadn’t been through it. Kafari had. She knew. Understood the reason for his rough silence. She hadn’t been on Etaine; but then he hadn’t been through combat between a Bolo and Yavacs without a Bolo’s warhull between him and the enemy. It was a different way of experiencing war, a different kind of terror, but the damage to the soul was the same. So was the deeper understanding that sometimes, the horror and shock if it were utterly necessary.
That she realized this, that she understood what it was doing to him, to lose the one companion who knew what had happened on that far-away world, left him humbled. She had chosen to love and live with him. And now… Jaw muscles tightened down against bone. Now they had new problems. New fears. A new kind of battle. And an enemy that twisted reality around to suit its aims and poisoned innocent minds to accomplish them. POPPA was on the verge of shattering everything that was — or had been — good and beautiful about this world. The question that slipped into his mind like silent misery had no answer that Simon could find.
What are we going to do?
He was a soldier. An officer. There was only one thing to do. Sometimes, duty was a bitch.
II
Yalena hated school.
She hadn’t wanted to leave the nursery class on Nineveh Base. She had loved playing with other children whose parents were soldiers, too. But there weren’t any soldiers any more, just police who didn’t have children, and she was old enough, at six, to have to go to a real school in Madison.
“There’ll be all kinds of wonderful things to do and learn,” her mother had told her, the first day.
Her mother was right. There were wonderful, fun things to do and learn. But only for other kids. Yalena didn’t get to do any of them. And everybody hated her. It had started the first, horrible day, when Mrs. Gould, the kindergarten teacher, called out everybody’s name and made them stand up and tell the class who they were and who their parents were.
“Yalena Khrustinova,” Mrs. Gould had said, with something in her voice that made Yalena’s flesh creep, like the teacher had said a naughty word or maybe stepped in something smelly.
She stood up, slowly, while everybody stared. She didn’t know any of the other kids. When the soldiers had left Nineveh Base, they’d all gone home and none of them had lived in Madison. Not this part, anyway. So she stood there, with everybody looking at her, and said in a shaky little voice. “My mommy is Kafari Khrustinova. She works at the spaceport. She makes computers do things. My daddy is Simon Khrustinov. He’s a soldier.”