by Diana Palmer
“The trap,” Mangus Lo shot at his tall advisor before the younger Rojok could enter the private chamber. “How does it progress?”
“All is well, your Excellence,” the advisor said smugly. “The Centaurian vessel is making for Benaski Port, but our ships are slowly closing in on it. It is only a matter of time.”
“Good. Good.” The crippled little dictator made a net of his six fingers and watched them, hypnotized. “The Spheres, have our scientists made any progress in deciphering them?”
“There…there is a problem. The Council of the Tri-Fleet took precautions against just such an eventuality,” the advisor stated nervously. “The Spheres have been recorded in a Terravegan dialect which is completely unknown to our people. It is taking a great deal of time to even begin to translate them.”
“We have no time!” The dictator glared at the younger alien. “Already I have word that the Tri-Galaxy Council has issued a war vote against us! Within a handful of time periods, we will find ourselves fighting a multitude of races besides the humans! We must have the genetic codes of those races so that we can infiltrate them as we have already infiltrated the humans!”
“I have already said as much to our scientific staff,” the other alien returned. “Also, when we capture the Holconcom ship, we will obtain clones of additional races which can be used for study in our experimental station at Ahkmau.”
“Clones will be of doubtful use,” Mangus Lo growled. “Clones are genetically altered in most cases for the duty they are created to perform. A screen is used, as well, to prevent tampering with the basic DNA.” He smiled coldly. “You see, I am not so stupid as you assume!”
“Your Excellence, I did not mean to insinuate…!”
“Shut up.” The dictator’s eyes narrowed even more. “The Centaurian princess. Why have you not brought her to me?”
The advisor cleared his throat. “At this point, your Excellence, we are not absolutely certain that she was taken along with the Spheres. The officer who told me of her capture has suffered an unfortunate amount of brain damage which might account for some fabrication. None of his men have reported seeing a Centaurian female aboard any of our vessels.”
“What?” The dictator came out of his seat like a striking serpent, his dusky complexion gone scarlet in anger. “You promised me that she was captive. You lied!”
The young alien paled. “Please, your Excellence, I imparted only the information I was given. If it was incorrect…!”
“Have your officer sent to Ahkmau, at once!”
“Yes, at once!”
Mangus Lo’s eyes narrowed. “And have your men search for the Centaurian princess. My instinct tells me that there is a plot underway. I will have the truth.”
“It will be done immediately!”
“And…”
“Yes, Excellence?”
“Send Commander Chacon to me.”
“At once! At once, your Excellence!” he echoed, his face drawn, his eyes brimming with terror. “By your leave…!”
Madeline’s senior medtech was waiting for her at the doorway of the makeshift exo sick bay, apprehension in his whole look.
“The last of the Altairian patients,” he said, not wasting words, following her to the ambutube that contained a small, blue-skinned girl with huge amber eyes. They were tortured, wet with tears of pain, looking up at her through the antiseptic green mist. She laid her wrist scanner over the small chest and engaged the nanodrive. Seconds later, the readings told a sad story.
“Myocardial infarction,” she muttered. “A massive one. Debucarbonal, stat!”
“There isn’t any, Doctor,” the medtech replied sadly. “The last of it went to the girl’s mother, before she died.”
“They’ll all die,” she murmured furiously, “unless we reach Benaski Port soon. All right, get me some of the Vegan touch-serum.”
“Gone,” he returned. “All of it, for the Cereboan child.”
“Well, how about…never mind, there’s no time. Get me the cardiovac!”
He handed it to her. She worked at the child’s thin chest with the pacer, trying desperately to stabilize the erratic heartbeat which was so faint as to be undetectable except with the scanner. But the pulse only increased. The child’s chest jerked, and a sharp cry passed her blue lips before she went unconscious.
“Defib!” she shot at her medic. “Get me a unit, stat!”
“Sir, there’s only one left and Hahnson has it…”
“Steal it! Beg, borrow. But get it!”
“On my way,” he said, rushing out.
She slammed the cardiovac onto the child’s chest and energized it again and again, feeling the uselessness of the action even as she took it. She was sweating with the effort, despite the maintained sixty-three degree Fahrenheit temperature in the compartment. Perspiration drained down her flushed face into her eyes, her mouth. Watching the child tortured her. The little girl’s face was twisted with pain, her skin ashen and drenched in cold sweat. Death was a sigh away. Never once did it occur to Madeline that this was a clone. She worked desperately to save the child.
Involuntarily she remembered Dtimun saving the little Jebob boy with nothing more than his touch. She wished that she had such a gift…!
A sound behind her brought relief. “Did you get the damned thing?” she shot over her shoulder. “Bring it here!”
But the face that moved into view had serene blue cat-eyes. “We will discuss your language presently,” Dtimun said calmly. “But for the moment, tell me the child’s condition.”
“If I don’t get a defib unit in twenty seconds,” she ground out, “her condition is going to be dead! What the hell kind of ship doesn’t have a medical department and even the most basic medical supplies…!”
While she cursed, he touched the child’s chest with long, golden-skinned fingers. The little girl took a sudden breath, let it out and her eyes opened, wide with surprise and delight. She smiled.
Dtimun smiled back.
Madeline snapped out of her trance long enough to check the little girl with the scanner. Her heart was perfect.
The door zipped up and the disheveled medtech ran in with the portable defibrillator in his hand. “I got it!” he panted victoriously.
“Take it back,” she murmured absently, her eyes still on the child.
“Back!” he exclaimed, his mouth open. “But I had to throw a punch at Hahnson’s medtech to get it…!”
“I’ll recommend you for a medal, too,” she agreed, glancing at him. “Give it back.”
He left, shaking his head.
Madeline stared at Dtimun with unconcealed curiosity. “That’s twice you’ve saved a patient for me, without drugs. How? Mental healing? Empathy?”
“Of a kind,” he said.
“Could you be a little more specific, sir?” she prompted. “I mean, I feel as if I’m practicing medicine with flint-knapped stone tools at the moment.”
He turned and looked down at her. “I would call that,” he said, “an apt comparison.”
7
Madeline barely heard the insult. She was paying attention to the relaxed breathing of the little girl in the ambutube, still amazed at the Centaurian’s mental abilities.
“Her heart was damaged by shrapnel,” she said. “Now it’s whole again.”
“Some few members of the Holconcom have healing abilities,” he replied quietly. “The basis of which we do not share with outworlders,” he added. He glanced down at her solemnly. “And which you will not discuss with your shipmates, save for Hahnson.”
Curious, she thought. It was as if he knew that she’d discussed him with her fellow medic. “Of course,” she replied. She drew in a long breath. “Well, thank you. Again.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “I said that we would discuss your language,” he continued. “A female does not use such words. It is a breech of custom for a female to curse and brawl and act as a warrior.”
“Sorry, sir, I forgo
t that your women are still living in the Dark Ages.”
His eyes widened, dark blue with curiosity. “Dark Ages?”
“Your sexes are unequal,” she explained. “Among Terravegans, all genders are treated equally in the military. We’re mentally neutered. I don’t have the slightest idea of how a female is expected to behave in a male-dominated society. I’ve never even seen a breeder.”
“Breeder?”
“Women chosen for specialized childbearing, outside the in vitro government baby mills. It’s difficult to explain.”
The alien studied the woman in the green uniform—the long auburn hair, the pale complexion with a tiny row of freckles just across her nose, the long-lashed green eyes. He shook his head. “To make a woman into a poor replica of a man while she retains the beauty of her gender is an abomination,” he said finally. “Your society is mad.”
Beauty? Unused to the kind of scrutiny she was being subjected to by those elongaged, alien eyes, she felt a strange tensing of her muscles. She turned away from him, suddenly breathless. “Yes, well, if you’ll excuse me, sir?” She went back to her patient, and she didn’t look at him again.
The mess hall that Madeline was using for a sick bay was one of the smallest compartments on the ship. Two Centaurian technicians passed by it in deep conversation about the growing tension between the human and alien crew members. Their guttural tongue was like a ripple of wind and song in its high and low tones, its odd nasalized consonants. Although they couldn’t know it, the language had an uncanny similarity to the tongues of nomadic dwellers on the ancient planet that spawned the Terravegan society.
Whatever words existed in that musical pattern of sound must have been more interesting than a human mind could grasp. Because the Centaurians never saw a soft shadow pass along the programming computers that ringed the engine room, or a white-skinned hand reaching for the panel which controlled one segment of the memory banks.
And before they noticed, much later, that one master unit was just slightly out of sync, the shadow had long since disappeared. So stealthy was it that even the alert kelekoms in the classified sector of the ship weren’t disturbed by the tiny, faint change of rhythm in the engines.
Holt Stern pressed his back hard against the bulkhead in the deserted food processing sector, his face an agony of conflicting emotions. He understood, finally, what was expected of him. He had no option, and perhaps it was a small price to pay for an end to the violent headaches that had plagued him from Terramer. But something deep inside him ached. A tiny bubble of guilt and regret blew up in his brain and he wanted to tell someone, anyone, that he was…sorry.
They wanted the commander. So he had to make sure they could take the Holconcom ship. First the slight adjustment of the ships engines. Then a sudden death to divert the crew. Afterward, a new clone to assist him when the Rojoks closed in. He hated himself for what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop himself. He was programmed, somehow, for these tasks. His meddling would mean the death camps for Madeline and Strick and the other humans; and the alien crew, of course. The Centaurians would be no sacrifice, he told himself, they were warriors. They expected death. But, oh, God, this kind of death…!
Madeline’s face was there, in front of his eyes, already haunting him. Why was this treachery necessary? What had been done to him that brought about such changes in his personality?
He held up his hands and looked at them, turned them over, studied them. He was Stern. There were lapses in his memory pathways, but he was Stern, and he was human, and he belonged to the Tri-Fleet. Why was he doing this? Who were they—how did he suddenly know what he had to do, and why hadn’t he refused to do it? Why couldn’t he refuse?
“God!” he cried huskily, his hands crushing at his temples. “Who am I? Who am I?”
But no answer came. The moment of weakness began to pass. He straightened with a hard, heavy sigh. There was work to be done, and quickly. And, fight it mentally as hard as he might, his feet turned him to the passageway and carried him relentlessly down it. A voice in the back of his mind told him, too, that from now on he must do his damnedest to convince his comrades that he was back to normal. He was normal. What had possessed him to make him think otherwise? He was having fantasies about betraying his crewmates, but surely they were only fantasies. No doubt they were caused by the concussion. His nostrils extended in distaste as he passed by a group of humans, but he controlled a grimace and grinned at them instead. He was playing a part. He had to play it well. It wasn’t so hard after all.
Madeline was eagerly trading insults with Hahnson when Stern joined them in the mess hall.
“Hi, gang,” he said cheerfully, flashing a convincing smile in their direction as he flopped into a chair and ordered a steaming cup of horrible-tasting imitation java from the small oval synthesizer. “You two look like prospective Vegan organ donors at the Emergency Surgical Sector,” he remarked. “You’ll trip over your lower lips in a minute.”
“Stern!” Madeline exclaimed. “You’re back to normal!”
His eyebrows went up over dancing ebony eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of that. But the headaches are gone, and I’m beginning to get my memory back.”
“I told you it was the blow to the head,” Hahnson told Madeline with a smug look.
“Remind me to recommend you for promotion, Doctor,” she replied. “Not on my staff, of course, but…”
“How come,” Stern asked Hahnson, “you’re older than she is, but she outranks you?”
Hahnson shrugged. “Easy. She’s two centimeters taller than I am.”
Stern sipped his java with a chuckle. It was easier to fool humans than he’d thought.
Lyceria found the quarters Chacon had provided for her more to her taste than the rude dungeon. But captivity was slowly draining her spirit. And for some reason of his own, Chacon had allowed no one near her save himself. The loneliness had an almost tangible feel. It was as consuming as her fear of Ahkmau.
She touched the sleek fabric of the dress he brought her on his last visit. It was more comfortable than the Rojok armor she’d been required to wear in the beginning of her captivity, and infinitely more lovely. Its pale golden color shimmered in a delicate variety of patterns as the chemicals imbedded in its composition reacted to the heat of her body. The colorful gift had pleased her, although she was careful not to let the pleasure show.
A footstep at the door made her heart shudder. She stood like a fragile statue, a study in feline grace, as she began to rise.
Chacon moved into the room and stopped, his slit eyes drawn like electromagnets to the portrait she made. The silence was long and unbroken except for the soft whisper of the door sliding down again.
“You flatter the dress,” he said.
She lowered her eyes before he could read the warm brown shades that touched them. “You flatter me.”
She felt his gaze cling to her even as he spoke. “I bring unpleasant news. I had thought your capture was the doing of one of my men—whom I saw punished for the act. But it was more. Mangus Lo himself ordered the death of your young brother, and your capture. The knowledge was carefully concealed from me, until now.”
She raised her face and met his level gaze with eyes the pale gray shade that denoted curiosity. Behind the question was a fear that she dared not show. “Why? Why?” she asked.
“I do not know. The only information I was able to obtain was that it had something to do with another goal—the capture of the Holconcom commander. Even now, I fear that goal is being accomplished. And I know all too well what treatment will be given my old enemy.”
“There speaks compassion in your voice,” she said, surprised.
“A warrior can hold respect for even an enemy who warrants it. But now my concern is for you. It is only a matter of time until Mangus Lo learns where you are being kept. The threat of Ahkmau has loosened many a tongue, and my confidants are not immune.”
She barely heard him. Capture Dt
imun? Maliche, they might as easily paint cloud pictures on the wind. But if Mangus Lo by some dark power accomplished that end—her hands trembled involuntarily.
Her wide, graceful eyes wore the blue color of deep concern. She looked into his. “You cannot protect me further without jeopardizing your own life. This, by custom, I cannot allow. I do not fear death.”
“Nor I,” he replied with a tiny smile. “Madam, I cannot condone the murder of a female. It is a breech of my own honor. I will take you to a place of safety.”
“There are no places of safety,” she said gently. “They exist only in the mind.”
“There is one which even Mangus Lo would not think to search. My harem.”
A faint pink tinge washed over her pale, golden complexion. “I should prefer Ahkmau,” she said proudly.
An expression came and went in the glittering depth of his slit eyes, but his expression remained untouched. “I mean you no insult. I offer you the only protection I am capable of giving, and it is good only so long as Mangus Lo does not guess my involvement. Will you trust me?”
“Trust carries with it an awesome responsibility, Commander Chacon,” she said. Her eyes studied his face, dusky, masculine, rugged with the years of combat and command. There was no softening there, no weakness that could be perceived. She sensed a deep sadness, a loneliness, however, that had no echo in his expression. She weighed the legend against the man—and found a balance. “I…will trust you,” she said after a minute. She felt an odd sensation from him, although his expression never wavered. “But why will you risk so much for an enemy of your people?”
