Mistworld

Now that they'd become "Misties" themselves (a whimsical nickname bestowed by Katy's diminutive-loving fellow Narsatians), they might wear borrowed flesh in order to visit other worlds; but afterward they would always return to a home that wasn't Kesra.

Again Ewan nodded. "I wonder what they're up to?" he asked, and this time the question really was rhetorical. It had to be, because not even the former Fleet Admiral Romanova-who'd worked directly for the Defense Minister, and commanded the entire Star Service-could answer it.

* * *

"Linc, they are hopeless." Bryce Fralick, utilizing the vocal cords of Mistworld colonist Chad Thorne, leaned hard on the sentence's final word. He indicated Narsai's Commissioner of Aquaculture, whose secondary title of Harbormaster gave the man law enforcement powers. Which therefore meant that "Harbie," along with Chief Constable Mara Ling, must lead this formerly pacifist world's recently formed militia-to the despair of the former military officers who had the job of coaching them in their new responsibilities.

Captain Lincoln Casey, one-time commander of the Star Service Academy, rolled his golden Morthan hybrid eyes in agreement with his stepson. But he schooled his voice to say firmly, "They'll get it eventually, Bryce. They've got to, for their people's sake. And if there's one thing I've learned since I started living here full time with your mother, it's that Narsatians are loyal to their world and to each other! So the least we can do," he glanced at Marcus Fralick (as embodied by Mistworld colonist Dram Andersen) to make sure both younger men were hearing and understanding him, "is stay with them for as long as they're willing to keep trying."

They ought to be how old by now? In their thirties, since the Fralick twins were green ensigns when the ship aboard which they'd been serving together vanished in a fireball over Mistworld. Along with Ewan, a very junior captain who'd turned off his comm-the better not to hear when the battle group's commodore, his mother (the very senior Captain Catherine Romanova) ordered him not to take his own small ship down into the planet's upper atmosphere, to aid the doomed one carrying his brothers.

They no longer looked a bit alike, these two who'd been born physically identical, because their hosts weren't related. And because their hosts were men barely on the high side of twenty, they looked as if they hadn't aged during the years their mother (and their mother's husband, who'd been her executive officer at the time of their deaths) thought them gone forever.

The impression that time hadn't passed for the three younger men, Lincoln Casey knew now, was false. Whether or not the Fralick brothers had "grown up" in the sense they would have if they'd continued living in their own bodies for the past fourteen or so years, they had definitely gained both experience and maturity from their lives as adopted members of the noncorporeal species inhabiting Mistworld's upper atmosphere. The species that started fighting back, by the only method they could use, when combat between the Star Service battle group under Catherine Romanova and invaders attempting to dislodge Commonwealth homesteaders on the planet's surface inadvertently began killing them-the native beings whose existence neither side in that conflict suspected.

Casey still found it incredible that the Mistworld folk should-even as they defended themselves-have attempted to salvage the essence of each individual being whose body they destroyed. Their efforts hadn't worked for everyone on board the incinerated starships, of course. But Casey was vastly grateful that it had worked for all three of his wife's sons, and not just because he loved her.