Mistworld

So of course they lived together; I took that for granted! But, yeah. She must have loved Papa an awful lot, at least when she married him, to get her to live anywhere else but on Narsai.

How come you can't talk to her mind to mind? Like a real Mistworlder would, and like the husband she's got now does? Sanibello had been wondering that, in the part of his consciousness that Fralick didn't share, ever since they'd arrived here.

Same reason I wouldn't have been able to talk to you that way, before we got paired for this voyage. Ewan sounded amused, not at all surprised, and-to Ishi's astonishment-more than a trifle frustrated, too. I need a native to carry me whenever I want to communicate by mind-talk. Just like Narsai needs that new interplanetary comm booster, before it can punch real-time transmissions through to other planets again.

Oh. Sanibello, like most of Mistworld's Human colonists, was a farmer. Not a star sailor, by training or even by inclination. So whenever his body commanded the ship that had brought him here, and that would take him home again, he "stepped aside" and gave Fralick full control. At first doing so had frightened him-but not half as much as thinking he must command that starship by himself would have, of course!

Ewan Fralick knew how. Clothed once again in a mortal body, he'd thrilled at the chance. And had he not been there, six months ago when the Mistworld-led Rebel fleet swept into Narsatian space and found itself facing a Star Service heavy cruiser determined to engage them in battle-with that cruiser's captain not a bit interested in pausing to ascertain the newcomers' actual intentions-Ishi Sanibello didn't doubt that the untried Rebels would have been obliterated, in spite of their technically superior numbers.

Instead the brief conflict ended with the Commonwealth vessel blown apart, and with minimal damage done to Narsai's orbiting infrastructure of habitats, communications satellites, and solar power collectors. It had cost the Rebel fleet six of its fifteen oddly assorted vessels, though...which didn't prevent Ewan Fralick from grieving for the civilian deaths he learned about later. As well as for everyone he'd known aboard those destroyed ships, because people who died while away from Mistworld were gone forever.

If our ship had been one of them, Ewan, neither of us would be anything right now except dead. Sanibello joined his hosting-partner in acknowledging that brutal fact, as they both looked at a comm screen in Catherine Romanova's living room. As a direct feed from Narsai Control showed them not one Star Service warship, but an entire battle group-everything from tiny raiders up to a trio of heavy cruisers and a dreadnought-approaching Narsai's star system, silently, from out of deep space.

Chapter 2

Madeleine Fralick threw her thin body down onto an empty bench beside the MinTar Lycée's main playing field, and glowered at the game from which she'd just been ejected. She loved living on Narsai with her mother, her mother's husband, her foster brother Dan Archer, and Dan's new family, but she hated this school with an adolescent girl's full and dramatic passion. The one thing she missed with all her heart about Kesra, and the Fralick compound that was her home before she came here with Papa on the starship Archangel, was having her lessons privately.

"Maddy?" She didn't expect to hear the familiar voice from farther back on the sidelines, reaching her easily despite the din from youngsters who were once again charging down the field. "Are you hurt?"

"No. Coach put me out of the game.