FIRST VICTORY
Shadow Tree Tower,
City of Grendel,
Planet Beowulf,
Beowulf System,
March 1846 PD.
“Mother, I don’t think this is a discussion you want to have.”
“Really?” Jennifer Feliciana Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s tone was less than encouraging as she looked over her shoulder at her son.
“Really.” Captain Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou nodded. “I love you, and I love Allison, and I really don’t see this having a good outcome.”
“I’m her mother,” Jennifer pointed out. She turned to face him and crossed her arms, which was not, he thought, a promising change in posture. “This is the sort of conversation mothers and daughters are supposed to have.”
“Oh?” Jacques’ expression was skeptical. “And how well would you have reacted if Grandmother had decided to have the same conversation with you?”
“Your grandmother would never have needed to have this conversation with me.”
Jacques began a quick response, then paused. That might, he acknowledged, actually be true. In fact, he was sure his mother and grandmother would have been on the same page for this topic. Well, half of it, anyway. But . . .
“You may be right about that,” he acknowledged. “But you and Alley aren’t going to see eye-to-eye on this one. You and I both know that. And that was true long before Alfred ever appeared on the horizon.”
“I have absolutely nothing against Lieutenant Harrington,” Jennifer said a bit sharply. “In fact, I will be eternally grateful to him, and you know it! And I totally understand why she chose to move in with him afterward. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s remotely wise of her to be . . . tying herself down to just one man when she’s still so young. She can’t possibly know her own heart—know she’s not going to bitterly regret an obviously impulsive decision in the fullness of time. And, grateful to Lieutenant Harrington as I am, and as courageous and decisive as he may be in combat, he isn’t—and never will be—her equal as a physician. Nor is the Star Kingdom the place where her gifts can serve the most people! I refuse to stand by while her infatuation with him makes her throw away her entire life on a backwoods planet where winter lasts over a T-year and the snow is three meters deep! No, and despite what he did for her, he has no business enticing her into creeping off into obscurity that way so he can lock her into an exclusive relationship! She’s not some . . . some trophy for him to drag home and hang on his wall!”
“Mother—!”
Jacques stepped down—hard—on a solar flare of anger that would have been counterproductive, at the very least.
It wasn’t easy.
If there was a gene for stubbornness, his mother had inherited it from both her parents. Unfortunately, she seemed unable to recognize that . . . or the fact that she’d passed that same stubbornness along to her own offspring.
Especially to her daughter.
The occasional fireworks between those two personalities had been lively since the day Allison learned to talk. Over the past few years, they’d become downright spectacular, and he couldn’t understand how his mother had let things get to this point. Whatever else she might be, Jennifer was almost frighteningly intelligent, and she loved both her children dearly. So why couldn’t she see what she was doing to her relationship with her daughter? She’d been unhappy with his own decision to go into the Biological Survey Corps instead of medicine, but she’d accepted the inevitable with remarkably good grace in his case. Their family’s generations-long commitment to the fight against genetic slavery had probably had something to do with that, but how could she not realize that Allison’s determination to live her life on her own terms was at least as strong as his had ever been? Or not realize how disastrously any effort to browbeat Alley into submission had to fail?
And then there was Alfred. How could his mother not see how any attempt to force Allison to choose between family and Alfred Harrington had to end? Where it damned well should end? If there was a single man in the explored galaxy worthy of his sister, it was Alfred, and whatever his mother might think, Alfred would never see Allison as a “trophy”!
“Mother,” he said after a moment, gathering up his uniform cap, “everyone makes mistakes. If you push this, it’ll be one of the worst of your life. Yes, I care very deeply about Alfred, and that may color my own thinking. But the one thing Alley isn’t is ‘infatuated’ with Alfred Harrington, and there’s no way in hell he—or anyone else in the universe—could force her into a monogamous relationship. Trust me on this. And having said that, any decision she makes about where she goes in her life is up to her. You taught her that. Of course, at the time, you assumed she’d be smart enough to make the same decisions you would. But she’s not going to do that, and I’m afraid you’ll just have to live with who she grew up to be, however deeply you may disagree with the choices she makes. If you can’t see that, this isn’t going to end well.”
Jennifer glared at him. The dark brown, almond eyes she shared with both her children were agates, and her lips were a thin, unyielding line.
“I love you,” he said as he turned toward the door. “I love you both. So, please, listen to me.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” she told him in a liquid-helium voice.
He started to say something more, then shook his head and stepped through the opening door.
“So, Mom. To what do I owe the honor?”
Allison Carmena Inéz Elena Regina Benton-Ramirez y Chou was as slender and petite—and beautiful—as her mother. In fact, they looked far more like sisters than mother and daughter. Jennifer had been one of the galaxy’s very first prolong recipients when she was less than thirty, and prolong was more efficient with some genotypes than with others. She looked like a pre-prolong college sophomore, not a woman who’d just turned sixty, and Allison—who’d received the second-generation anti-aging protocols and shared the same genetic makeup—was only twenty-nine herself. She looked considerably younger, and at the moment, there was an undeniably flinty cast to the eyes she also shared with her mother.
“What do you mean?” Jennifer asked mildly.
“I mean you obviously have something on your mind. You usually do, when you suggest I ‘drop by for a cup of coffee.’” Allison picked up the cup in question, sipped, then set it down again very precisely. “I mean that from the tone of your ‘invitation,’ this is a command performance. And I also mean”—those dark, dark eyes bored suddenly into her mother across the breakfast nook table—“that I don’t think we’re likely to agree about the reason you wanted to talk to me. On the other hand, I know you’ll insist on talking about it, anyway. So, all things considered, I suppose we should get to it.”
Jennifer’s expression tightened. She knew that tone. In her more fair-minded moments, she admitted it had sprung from her own lips on more than one occasion, and her conversation with Jacques flickered through the back of her brain. For a moment, she hesitated. But this was too important. She couldn’t let Allison make the mistake she knew she was about to make. She just couldn’t, and she was running out of time.
“All right,” she said. “Yes, I do have something to discuss with you. And I’m afraid you’re right that we aren’t in agreement about it. But it’s still something you need to hear, Sweetheart.”
“I suspect your definition of ‘need’ and mine aren’t identical,” Allison replied. “In fact, I’m sure they’re not.” Her nostrils flared. “I know you’re doing this—or you think you are—only because of how much you love me, but I really wish you could just let this one go. Please, Mom. I’m old enough to know what I’m doing with my own life.”
“Alley, you may well be the most brilliant young woman I know, and I say that advisedly,” Jennifer said. “With all due modesty, I’m no dummy myself, and I think I’ve been a damned good doctor. But the truth? The truth is that you’re a hell of a lot smarter than I am. And you have an absolutely God-given gift where the practice of medicine is concerned. You’re not just a brilliant, compassionate physician or clinician. You have the touch, the gift, that will make you, in time, one of the top two or three genetic surgeons on Beowulf—one of the top half-dozen in the entire galaxy! You have a responsibility to the medical profession and all the countless patients waiting for you to change their lives for the better. Someone with your gifts, your abilities, and your awareness of your own heritage has to realize all of that!”
“No,” Allison said softly. “I don’t. Or not the way you want me to, anyway.”
Their eyes locked across the table, and silence hovered for a long, still moment. Then Allison inhaled deeply.
“Mom, I don’t think you realize how little interest I have in the ‘family legacy.’ God knows it’s not because I haven’t told you, but I think you genuinely can’t understand how anyone in my position could want to be anything other than a leading member of the Beowulf medical establishment. I don’t think you even begin to understand how close I came to not going into medicine at all, or to choosing maternal-fetal over genetics, expressly because I don’t want to be another notch on the Benton-Ramirez y Chou gunbelt.”
Jennifer sat back, hands clenched in her lap, and Allison shook her head.
“I need to be me, Mom. Maybe that will include becoming a top-notch genetic surgeon, and maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll just go practice medicine in a tiny clinic somewhere, because the truth is that I care one hell of a lot more about my patients—the people—I can help than I do about family names or shiny plaques or big offices or research grants. I’m like Alfred, Mom. I’m a doctor, and I need to be a doctor on my own merits, not my family name, and on my own terms.”
“No one’s trying to tell you you have to be anything but—”
“Yes, you are!” Allison interrupted. “Maybe you don’t think you are, but you are. You had my career mapped out about the time I learned to read, and up until college, I let you push me straight down that path. Maybe I should have started digging in sooner. Maybe then you’d understand it’s truly not what I want. And it’s not just what you want out of me—for me. It’s all the rest of the expectations coming at me. All the assurances from my professors and advisors that I’ll be such a credit to the family name. That I’ll be a ‘worthy upholder’ of the Benton-Ramirez y Chou legacy. But we’re not some sort of ruling dynasty. We’re not supposed to be the ‘gold standard’ of Beowulf genetics. We’re supposed to be doctors, and the whole time you talk about doctors and making a difference in people’s lives, what you’re really talking about is taking me out of that clinic, out of that hospital room—that patient practice. And it’s about slotting a neat little Allison-shaped piece into the Benton-Ramirez y Chou mosaic. But I don’t want to be fitted into that mosaic. And I don’t intend for it to happen.”
“Really?” Jennifer’s eyes flashed. “So that’s why you’re running away?”
“You can call it ‘running away’ if you want. It may even be fair. But from where I sit, I’m running toward something I want more than anything else in the universe.”
“Allison!” Jennifer blinked back an angry tear. “Sweetheart! I’m not trying to make you be anything. I’m just . . . I’m just trying to keep you from throwing away everything that you can be and do right here at home. Where people love you!”
“And where what I’ll end up being isn’t me,” Allison said almost gently.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you!” Jennifer threw up her hands. “You were never so . . . so . . . stubborn and touchy about this! Not before—”
She broke off, jaw tightening.
“Not before I was kidnapped and tortured by people who planned to kill me as agonizingly as possible?” Allison finished for her, and Jennifer flinched.
“Actually, I was exactly this stubborn before that happened, Mom,” Allison continued. “I just hadn’t drawn the line as openly as I have now. As I should have. Maybe that was because I knew how badly it would hurt you, or maybe because I just didn’t want to fight over it. But something like that changes you. It was the most horrible thing that ever happened to me, but it also . . . clarified a great many things. And the fact that it was so terrible put other things into perspective. Including how hard I’d tried to avoid this confrontation with you. I didn’t want it, and I still don’t want it, but I won’t avoid it any longer. I hope you can listen to me and understand that I mean what I’m saying and that you can’t change my mind.”
“But Manticore?” Jennifer almost wailed. “If you don’t want to follow the career you say I ‘mapped out’ for you, then don’t. But stay here, at home, where you can have all the other opportunities Beowulf offers. You don’t need to go running off to a backwoods planet where no one even knows you and you don’t have any family!”
“The Star Kingdom is scarcely the ‘backwoods,’ Mom. In fact, it’s the wealthiest star nation in the galaxy, on a per-capita basis. And while there may not be any Benton-Ramirez y Chous on Sphinx, there are a lot of Harringtons.”
“But they’re—”
Jennifer stopped herself again, but Allison’s eyes flashed.
“Yes, they are,” she said in a deceptively pleasant tone. “You can go ahead and say it. They’re ‘not our sort.’ They’re yeomen. Common, garden variety, ‘backwoods’ bumpkins. They’re not rich. Not famous. Not even related to anyone in the Star Kingdom’s government. Just the sort of unsophisticated people who go into the Marines and get promoted to sergeant. Who learn how to protect other people from exactly what happened to me.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Jennifer said, but she heard the truth in her own tone. “I only meant they aren’t . . . they aren’t the sort of people you grew up with. You don’t know any of them, or how well such a drastic move would work out. You should at least go and spend some time on Sphinx before you make up your mind about something this drastic.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve already been to visit Sphinx—several times—and I’ve met Alfred’s family. It’s only a one-day trip through the Junction, Mom.”
“That’s not what I mean. A daytrip’s not the same thing as actually spending time there! And, let’s be honest, Allison. I understand why you feel the way you do about Alfred, but you’ve known him less than a T-year! You can’t just . . . just tear up your entire life for a man you’ve known such a short time.”
“I know Alfred Harrington better than I’ve ever known anyone else in my entire life,” Allison said flatly. “And before you say it, no, I’m not infatuated with the white knight who saved me from a fate worse than death, even though that’s exactly what he did. They’d’ve killed me in the end, but not before they’d had their ‘fun,’ and I know exactly how horrific that would have been. How horrific it had already been. Mom, I’d have been grateful when they finally killed me. That’s how terrible it was, and Alfred walked into the middle of that—alone, against sixteen men—and got me out alive.”
“I know,” Jennifer said softly. “And, believe me, I’ll never be able to thank him enough for that. But I think you are a little ‘infatuated’ with him because of the way he came to save you.”
“I’m not infatuated with him because he came. I’m in love with him because Hell itself couldn’t have stopped him from coming. I know that, with absolute certainty. He’d have come for anyone in that situation, because that’s who he is, but he came for me, and he came knowing he was a lot more likely to die with me than get me out. That’s the man I love. The man who will always come for someone—anyone—who needs him. And that’s also the man I’ve been incredibly lucky enough to know loves me. Please, Mom. Don’t make me choose between him and you. Don’t.”
“I’m not trying to make you choose between—”
“Yes, you are. Maybe—no, certainly—because you think I’m making a terrible mistake. But you’re trying to make me choose between a backwoods doctor’s monogamous life with a nobody with no family history and no medical legacy, and a life here on Beowulf being who you need me to be, not who I need me to be. And much as I love you, and much as it would grieve me, if you force me to choose between those two lives, you’ll lose.”
Jennifer stared at her, cheekbones flushed, and Allison looked back unflinching.
“Is that really what you think I’m doing?” Jennifer snapped after a moment. “Do you really think I’m that shallow, Allison?”
“It’s not a matter of ‘shallow,’ Mom. It’s a matter of . . . flexibility. It’s a matter of living up to the standard you taught me. The one that says people have the right to be what they aspire to be. Be anything they’re willing to work to become. Whatever they choose to invest themselves and their lives in accomplishing. That’s what you taught me. Are you saying it didn’t apply to me?”
“I’m trying to prevent you from making a terrible, terrible mistake! One you may not see is a mistake now, but which will haunt you when you finally realize everything you’ve thrown away!”
“If it does, I’ll live with it.”
“Damn it, Allison!” Jennifer thrust up out of her chair to stalk around the sunny kitchen. “How can you be so stubborn, so blind! You need to . . . to step back. To clear your head! The one thing you don’t need to do is to plunge headlong into this wonderful fairytale world you’ve imagined! It’s not real, Allison. This”—she threw out her arms in a broad sweep that took in the entire Beowulf System—“is what’s real. What you were born to be part of! What you’re throwing away like it was nothing.”
“Is this really concern for me, or is it about being pissed off because I refuse to see things your way?” For the first time there was genuine anger in Allison’s tone. “I’m not throwing away anything ‘like it was nothing,’ Mom. I’m simply choosing what’s most important to me. If you can’t see that, if you can’t understand that, I don’t see any point to continuing this conversation.”
“What?” Jennifer stared at her in consternation, and Allison pushed back her own chair and stood, eyes blazing with a fury hotter than anything Jennifer had ever before seen in them.
“I said there’s no point continuing the conversation,” she said flatly. “I’ve made up my mind, and that’s obviously unacceptable to you. So I suppose I’ll just have to live with that, won’t I?”
“Sit back down!”
Jennifer realized her mistake almost before the barked command was out of her mouth. She half-raised one hand, but Allison’s lips had turned into a straight, iron line.
“No, Mother.” Her eyes were cold, now, and her voice was carved from a glacier’s heart. “I won’t sit back down. In fact, it’s time for me to leave.”
“No! I mean, you have to—”
“I don’t ‘have to’ do anything, Mother,” Allison told her in that same frozen voice. “I hope you come to the wedding next week. I’ll miss you if you don’t. Goodbye.”
She strode from the kitchen, heels like tack hammers on the ceramic tile, and Jennifer watched her go.
“God, I’m sorry, Sweetheart,” Alfred Harrington said quietly. “I never wanted anything like this to happen.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Allison lay with her head on his shoulder, one arm stretched as far across his deep, powerful chest as it would reach. “I still don’t have a clue what this . . . thing between us is, but of course I know.”
Alfred nodded. He could no more describe the bond between them than she could, but he knew it was there. He could literally feel her glowing in the back of his brain, just as he could in the center of his heart—a presence he could never walk away from, never mistrust. And never betray.
“I hate to say this,” he stroked the column of her spine with feather-gentle fingers, “but she may not be entirely wrong.” Allison stiffened and raised her head to look him in the eyes, and he grimaced. “I’m not saying she’s right, Honey. I’m just saying she may have a point about the difference between Beowulf and the Star Kingdom. There’s no point pretending you wouldn’t be giving up one hell of a lot if we move to Sphinx.”
“I realize she doesn’t believe this, but I not only understand that I’d be ‘giving up one hell of a lot,’ I want to give up one hell of a lot. This isn’t just about how you and I feel about each other. Oh, that’s a huge part of it.” She pressed a quick kiss against his bare chest. “And so is your commitment to the Navy. But she’s simply constitutionally incapable of grasping that I don’t want to be Allison Benton-Ramirez y Chou. Especially not here on Beowulf!”
She laid her head back on his shoulder and snorted.
“You know, every Beowulfer I know prides herself on how open-minded she is, how totally prepared she is to let everyone else live however they choose. And as far as I can tell, they all mean it. But only because they assume everyone with a working brain will choose from the same options they would. If you don’t, then something’s obviously very wrong with you.”
Alfred considered disputing that point, but not very hard. After all, she was right. And until he’d come to know and love her, he’d never realized what a prison family expectations could become.
“So, what, exactly, do we want to do?” he asked, instead, and she hugged him tightly, because he’d meant that “we.”
“We do what we’ve planned all along,” she replied. “We get married on the nineteenth. And, yes, Mom will be furious. She’s going to think I’m deliberately putting a thumb in her eye by ‘rushing ahead’ with the very thing she warned me against doing. And much as I hate to admit it, there may be some truth to that.” Alfred tasted the painful honesty of that last sentence. “But what’s more important is that it’s what I want—need—to do, and it’s the first concrete step into building the life—the shared life, Alfred—that I want more than anything else in the galaxy.”
“Hey, I’m an ex-Marine, and we’re tough. If you’re ready for the shit storm, so am I, Honey!” he told her with a chuckle.
“It really may be . . . spectacular. And the fact that we’re declaring a monogamous bond will only reinforce her belief that I’m thinking with my heart and certain other body parts, rather than my brain!”
“Well, thank God for ‘other body parts,’” he murmured, raising his head from the pillow to nuzzle the back of her neck, and she gurgled a laugh.
“And then, once we’re married,” she continued, “you finish your internship under Dr. Mwo-chi at ISUH while I finish at the university. And after that, we move to Sphinx.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “About the timing, I mean. I may not agree with your mother about everything, but there’s a reason the Navy sent me here. Doing your own internship and residency at ISUH would put your credentials about a light-year ahead of anything on Sphinx or Manticore.”
Ignaz Semmelweis University Hospital was the Solarian League’s most prestigious medical school’s teaching hospital. Doctors who’d interned there were the galaxy’s medical elite.
“Two thirds of that’s just name recognition,” Allison said flatly. “In Dr. Mwo-chi’s case, it’s a valid distinction, but Queen Elizabeth’s is as good as any hospital anywhere. I can ‘make do’ just fine in the Star Kingdom.”
She was right about Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital’s quality, Alfred thought, although an internship and residency there wouldn’t carry the cachet of a Semmelweis residency. But, he realized, that was part of her thinking, another step in her determination to escape the Benton-Ramirez y Chou niche into which everyone seemed so determined to cram her.
“All right, if that’s the way you want it,” he said simply. “Do you think your mother will ever speak to Jacques again when he stands up as my best man?”
“I’m sure she will . . . eventually.” Allison shrugged. “She’ll probably blame the entire wedding on your insidious influence on my poor, mushy, infatuated brain, not him. So I’m pretty sure she’ll forgive him sometime before the energy death of the universe. Now, you, on the other hand—?”