Mistworld

He'd spent most of his military career nurturing young officers-first as Romanova's XO, and later (after spending the intervening years as his by then wife's adjutant, when she'd made flag rank but hadn't yet risen to Fleet Admiral) commanding the Academy. So he'd grieved both personally and professionally for the three promising youngsters called Ewan, Marcus, and Bryce Fralick, and having them back-even in these altered forms-delighted him in ways that had nothing at all to do with his love for their mother.

For Katy who was reaching out to him now, through the telepathic bond they shared (as did any mated pair, when one partner was of Morthan or part-Morthan ancestry). Letting him know that Narsai's Harbormaster and Chief Constable had just run out of time for drilling their units in the accurate use of personal firearms, and for the other defensive preparations that were planned or already underway.

Peaceful Narsai, where possessing weapons had been against the law for so long that neither Harbie nor Mara had ever needed them to enforce the planet's laws, would soon be either a conquered planet under enemy occupation or a world at war. Casey looked out over the floor of the vast indoor arena that in better times had served as MinTar's main recreational center-a floor that was still marked off for the playing of Narsai's favorite team sport, a vague descendant of the ancient North American one called "basketball"-and shook his head before he bent to the broadcast booth's commlink. From here he could address everyone on the floor, half a dozen meters below this enclosure that was tucked between banks of spectator seats on the narrow end of the arena's trapezoid. Keeping the three formally trained and off-world born coaches out of sight, to avoid undermining Harbie's and Mara's authority with their militia recruits.

I got used to giving people bad news back when we were still junior officers, he told his wife via their own most private of commlinks, as he gathered breath and steeled his nerves to say what must be said. But I'm damned if I've got any idea how to tell people like yours-people like ours, Katy!-what we both know they'll almost certainly be facing, by this time tomorrow.

* * *

Ewan Fralick and Ishi Sanibello both watched Ewan's mother as Catherine Romanova sat at one of her home's two comm terminals and stared, with her face turned away from its screen, toward the garden. Her firstborn son had no idea, until he came to know her as one adult to another during the last six months, how much she loved that garden...and this house...and her home-world itself, for that matter.

She must have found it hard to leave, and live on Kesra all those years with your father, Sanibello observed to Fralick, in one of the thousands of silent thoughts they'd exchanged since (as a Mistworld-manned Rebel ship's commander) he'd found himself paired with a disembodied Human "battle survivor" instead of being chosen to host one of the planet's natives. Initially Sanibello felt disappointed that he must lend his flesh to Fralick, when he'd hoped for the honor of embodying a true Mistworlder. But now, after months of having Ewan so close to him that each felt like part of the other, Ishi Sanibello sometimes wondered what it would be like one day when the ship now orbiting Narsai took them back to Mistworld. When Fralick, no longer needing physical form, would slip free and once again join the planet's natives in its atmosphere's upper reaches-leaving Sanibello alone, inside this body that they' d shared for so long.

I never thought about it at the time, Ewan answered his companion, because I was a kid and they were my parents.