"Nina Osier - Matushka" - читать интересную книгу автора (Osier Nina M)

Matushka



MATUSHKA




by Nina M. Osier




CHAPTER 1


The morning sky over Narsai's northern continent was streaked with pink and gold dawn. It was
unlike Catherine Romanova to wake this early on a day when she didn't have to, on a morning when she
could have stayed beside her husband's warmth until he was ready to rise; but here she was on the terrace
overlooking her garden, and she was as alert as if it were already mid-day.
She reached for Linc's mind, and felt nothing but rest and contentment. That was good. When the

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 Matushka

two of them had finally come back here to live, in this comfortable little house on the home-world to
whose citizenship Romanova had clung so stubbornly through more than forty years as a Star Service
officer, he had been exhausted in every way that a sentient being could become weary. She had wondered
for a time whether he would ever be himself again - but he was fine now, the same Linc she had met one
day when they were both eighteen years old and had stood at a passenger liner's lounge viewport and had
looked out in wonder at their first sight of Terra's blue-green globe.
Two kids from the colonies, Catherine Romanova a human girl from prosperous Narsai and Lincoln
Casey a part human, part Morthan boy who had grown up on the far less hospitable world of Sestus 3.
Two adolescents who had journeyed to Earth for their plebe year at the Star Service Academy,
discovering each other's presence in that liner during their last few hours aboard and regretting that they
had both endured weeks of loneliness when they might have been preparing together for the gauntlet they
were about to enter.
She had been amazed to meet a male Morthan hybrid who wasn't planning to become a healer. He
had been just as surprised to encounter a land heiress from Narsai who was preparing herself for an off-
world career. They had talked excitedly about the new lives both were just beginning, they had
commiserated about the difficulty each had faced in choosing a pathway that had seldom (if ever) been
chosen before by persons from their respective backgrounds; and then the "prepare for arrival"
announcement had been made.
She hadn't seen Casey again until she was a cadet second class, the equivalent of a junior at a
traditional Terran university, and she had been put in charge of a company that was headed out for a field
exercise. Her first command! Although she knew some of those for whom she had just become
responsible, most she did not. In a class of five hundred it wasn't possible to know everybody, for these
exercises the cadets were deliberately juggled to place them among as many strangers as possible - and
she had looked into the young Morthan man's calm golden eyes, had remembered the day they arrived