Battleground Read Free Page B

Maya Selig.”
    On reflection, though, the people of Dwar had done the best they could with damn little to start with. In fact, they had done an excellent job.
    It was late. Hanna made a quick meal in her office and went home.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    There were three people in Jameson’s study when she went in, one of them Jameson. The second was three months old going on four; he lay on his stomach on the floor, pushing at it to get his head up in the air so he could look around in a wobbly way, his eyes huge with pleasure and surprise. The third was Thera August. She loved lecturing adults on the minutiae of infant development, and since Hanna was not much interested, and Jameson was, he would do.
    Thera was arguably the best child companion in human space. She had lived in the homes of the rich and powerful for a hundred and twenty years, and had been on the point of comfortable retirement when she agreed to come to Jameson for reasons lost in an obscure skein of family and political relationships. In her long career she had heard more secrets than an entire espionage network could have gathered, and she had never divulged one of them. She was not a friend and she was not a servant. Although paid (well), she was not exactly an employee, either. She was an independent, completely liberated planet. She was not the tribe of relatives and neighbors who would have helped care for a baby on Hanna’s homeworld, but she was not (the option Hanna had violently rejected) a perfectly programmed, humanlike servo, either. She was one of the rewards that came with the kind of old wealth Jameson had inherited with the family estate on Heartworld, and Hanna had been in no position to turn this favor down.
    She went straight to the baby and dropped to the floor and picked him up. He chuckled and reached for her face, and she covered his with kisses. He smelled sweet and fresh and it was some time before she paid attention to the adults in the room.
    â€œI can take him with me tomorrow,” she said to Thera, “for the morning at least. There’s a holo conference with F’thal in the afternoon. Not that he’d be disruptive. Just distracting—last time they started bragging about their own young and we never got back to the agenda.”
    â€œI doubt he’ll ever be deliberately disruptive,” Thera said. “You can tell a lot about personality by this stage. This one is going to be sunlight.”
    Like his father,
Hanna thought.
    She kissed her son again and looked at him, determined to focus only on his own, individual face. How unfair it would be to seek resemblances! He was not Michael Kristofik all over again; he was Michael Bassanio, unique, himself, and Hanna would not even call him by his formal name. He was Mickey: the future, not the past.
    Hanna held herself to this standard by an effort of will because the past was still close as her breath. Mickey’s father had died a little more than twelve Standard months ago, though the anniversary itself, blessedly, had meant nothing to her. A year of twelve Standard months was not a year on her native world; it certainly was not a year on Gadrah, where seasons stretched through far more days than in other places where humans lived. The preceding fall in this hemisphere on Earth had been harder, because it had been autumn in the place where Michael had left her. He had not meant to die, it was true. But sometimes that did not seem to make a difference.
    Perhaps
, she still thought sometimes,
I will take Mickey and flee always ahead of fall, spend my life in springs and summers.
    But it would be wrong to do that to him. I must give him a lasting home, if I can.
    She looked at her son’s happy face and thought that Michael must have been an infant like this. She knew his childhood had been secure and safe, full of work but full of love. Until he was about ten.
    Then came the rest of it.
    She whispered, “That will