by Diana Palmer
The kelekom, now robbed of two linkeds Cehn-Tahr companions by death, had gone into depression and had finally shut down all over again. Months had passed with no interest from it as Dtimun presented it with new candidates, none of whom seemed to be acceptable. Now, it seemed possible that it would die. That, Dtimun could not allow to happen. He had to find a replacement operator, but none of his men aboard ship had inspired any interest in the declining bionic machine. So the ship had had to operate with only three units. He thought that perhaps Lawson might have a human computer technician to spare, one whose very strangeness might appeal to the depressed living machine. It was a long shot, but it might work.
His second problem had to do with a complement of ambassadors who were holding an emergency meeting on Ondar, a neutral planet in the nearby Cerelles system. They were discussing the unexpected death of Rojok tyrant Mangus Lo while he was in Tri-Galaxy Fleet custody, pending a retrial in his conviction on war crime charges, and the latest incursion by his nephew and successor, Chan Ho, who had seized another star system in the New Territory with the help of Chacon, his respected field marshal.
Apparently, Chacon had managed to explain his part in Mangus Lo’s arrest on Ahkmau. He had permitted the Morcai Battalion to escape from the horrors of Ahkmau, but no one outside the unit had been privy to that knowledge. Presumably, even if the explanation was sketchy, the Rojoks’ new emperor was afraid to test his own power as commander-in-chief by attempting to try the people’s favorite soldier, Chacon. There was interspace chatter, however, that Chan Ho favored his late uncle’s terror policies and had gone head-to-head with Chacon about their renewal. It was worrying.
The Tri-Galaxy Council was working on a diplomatic solution to the Rojoks’ latest appropriation in the New Territory, claimed by member planets of the Tri-Galaxy Council. The Rojoks had already seized Terramer and its system, now they were spreading out to another nearby system, which contained abundant natural resources. The ambassadors were on Ondar to vote on sanctions against the so-called neutral member-worlds of the Rojok dynasty, as well as a modified budget to fund the war against the Rojoks. It was a controversial meeting. The Rojoks might attempt a kidnapping.
Dtimun had word from a spy in his circle of acquaintances who said that a contingent of Rojoks was planning to establish a covert base within skimmer distance of the council chambers. He’d taken that information to Lawson, who advised patience. Dtimun had none. Despite the Holconcom’s alliance with the Tri-Fleet, it was autonomous. Dtimun could ignore Lawson’s dictates and do what he pleased.
Since the chambers were on neutral ground, in a neutral system, the Tri-Galaxy Fleet had been ordered to stand down while the diplomats debated.
Just to annoy Dtimun, the Cehn-Tahr emperor, old Tnurat Alamantimichar, had sided with Lawson on the issue and insisted that the Holconcom stay away from Ondar. He interfered frequently. It was ongoing payback for his Holconcom commander’s deliberate provocation of his chauvinistic policies by allowing a female—and a human female at that!—in the Holconcom. The old emperor had been outraged at the news. He and the Imperial Dectat had tried to have Ruszel arrested and executed. Dtimun and Lawson had spiked his guns with the Tri-Galaxy Council. Over the years the emperor had been making the Morcai’s commando raids more difficult. His word carried weight with the Council. Most of the member worlds were terrified of him. Dtimun was not. Nor was the old emperor going to keep him planetside if he had intel that the delegates on Ondar were in immediate danger. But for the time being, Dtimun sought more confirmed intel.
Meanwhile, he’d grounded Ruszel, forbidding her to leave her medical unit planetside as well as her office on his flagship until further notice. He would have put her in the brig, but grounding her, along with the threat of the brig, might be enough to keep her in line. For the time being, at least.
Privately, he admired her fighting spirit and valued her in combat situations. Even though she frequently pushed his temper past the breaking point, she pulled her weight aboard ship, and she was popular with the whole crew, including the Cehn-Tahr element. She was capable, intelligent and afraid of nothing. She was also beautiful. He found himself watching her and had to work at controlling his impulses. It was fortunate, he considered, that she had no emotional attachment to him. There were dread secrets in the past of his people, scientific experiments, genetic tampering, which had resulted in terrifying behaviors beyond their control. The Cehn-Tahr were so ashamed of them that they never permitted any knowledge of their social patterns or mating rituals to be known by outworlders. Had Ruszel displayed any physical interest in him, the results might be lethal. It was a good thing, he decided, that the human military mentally neutered its crewmen and officers for duty.
He was more wary than most of his race about interspecies relationships. In his youth, his defiance of the rules had ended tragically. It must not happen again. However, he had to admit that Ruszel was the most interesting, and desirable, female he had ever known. If regulations forbidding it had not carried the death penalty in both their societies, and the difference in their species not so great, his reaction to her might have been very different.
As it was, he put her out of his thoughts and went back to work.
* * *
MADELINE RUSZEL WAS animated as she explained her confrontation with Dtimun to Holt Stern and Dr. Strick Hahnson in her office at the base medical center.
“He was furious!” she chuckled, her green eyes gleaming. “But he let me off with a lecture. I didn’t even draw brig time for the gun. Of course, it was Flannegan’s gun,” she added.
“Not really.” Dr. Strick Hahnson grinned. “Flannegan knocked out a Jebob tech and stole it from him to bash you in the head.”
“You’re going to get yourself in serious trouble one of these days, Ladybones,” Stern said somberly. “The old man won’t overlook these infractions forever.”
“He’s been overlooking them for almost three years,” she reminded him.
“Yes, but the casualty lists are growing longer, and he’s more somber than I’ve ever known him,” Hahnson put in. He sighed. “He’s worried.”
“Aren’t we all?” Stern agreed. “I thought capturing Mangus Lo would end the Rojok threat. Was that naive, or what?”
Madeline could have answered that he was naive, in a sense. His entire life span amounted to only a little under three years. Like Hahnson beside him, he was a clone. The Rojoks had killed their originals; Stern on Terramer during the rescue of the colonists, and Hahnson on Ahkmau in a bout of torture that still could make Madeline sick to her stomach. Stern had fought off his conditioning and helped save his comrades. Hahnson had been cloned and returned to them by Dtimun as compensation, as he put it, for pulling them out of the Terravegan military and into the Holconcom. The human clones of her friends still had most of the memories of their originals. So the bond between the three officers was as strong as it had ever been.
That was nonregulation, of course. All members of the Terravegan military were mentally neutered before they ever put on a uniform if they were slated for space duty. The authorities had decided that most conflicts were based on sexual or violent emotional issues. They simply used chemical means to remove the ability to bond from members of the military. But once in a while, a candidate fell through the cracks. Madeline was one. So was her father, Clinton Ruszel, a colonel in the SSC Paraguard Wing. Although she’d been reared in a government nursery, Madeline was one of the few children who actually knew one of her birth parents. Her father had contacted her when she was very small. In fact, he and Dtimun had saved her from terrorists in the Great Galaxy War. Dtimun didn’t look it, but he was eighty-nine human years of age. He could have passed for a human in his thirties. He was only in the middle years of his life, at that. He could look forward to another eighty-nine years or more before he died.
“You drifted off again,” Hahnson mused, tap
ping her on the hand.
“Oh! Sorry.” She smiled self-consciously. “I was thinking about...” She started to say Ahkmau, but that would have brought back really awful memories for all three of them. “I was thinking about how I ended up being the first woman on a Holconcom ship.”
Stern whistled through his teeth. “Now, there’s a story of legend.”
“You aren’t kidding,” Hahnson laughed. “Old Tnurat Alamantimichar, the Cehn-Tahr emperor, had a screaming fit about that.”
She grinned. “We heard that he sent the officer who reported my assignment to the brig for a standard month.”
“Well, the C.O. does do everything he can think of to tick off the emperor,” Hahnson commented. “They’ve had an ongoing feud for decades. Nobody knows what started it, but it’s heated up in the past few years. Your assignment to the Holconcom tied the old emperor up in knots. He can order people killed on Memcache, the home planet of the Cehn-Tahr,” he added, giving the true name of the race that humans in first contact had mistakenly called Centaurians, thinking they came from the star-system nearest old Earth.
“He’s an emperor,” Madeline pointed out. “Couldn’t he just order the C.O. to give me back to Lawson?”
“That’s a whole other story,” Hahnson mused. “You see, old Tnurat was the first commander of the Holconcom. He gave it, and its commander, absolutely autonomy during the Great Galaxy War and thereafter. He can’t command it. Neither can the Cehn-Tahr Dectat, their parliament. Dtimun has absolute authority.”
“I begin to see the light,” Madeline said, grinning. “Poor old emperor.”
“He is, sort of,” Hahnson said thoughtfully. “He only has one child left, a daughter, the princess we rescued from Ahkmau. All his sons are dead, including the one you tried to treat on Terramer, the day we met the Holconcom for the first time.”
“I’d forgotten that his son died that day. Does he have a wife?” She frowned. “Do Cehn-Tahr have wives, or do they have harems?” she continued absently.
“You’re our resident Cularian medicine specialist,” Stern pointed out. “Shouldn’t you know the answer to that?”
She gave him a droll look. “Cehn-Tahr social behaviors, and mating rituals, are forbidden knowledge. We aren’t even allowed to research them.” She had an angelic expression on her face.
Hahnson raised a blond eyebrow. “There are black-market vids that purport to explain them.”
She shifted some virtual paperwork. “I’ve heard about those.”
“Have you also heard that they’re filmed in a studio in Benaski Port by people who’ve never even seen a Cehn-Tahr?” Hahnson persisted.
She gasped. “They’re what? Those pirates!” she raged. “I paid two hundred mems for...for...” She broke off. They were giving her odd looks. She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “I mean, why would someone pay so much money for misinformation?” she corrected innocently.
Her comrades laughed.
“There’s a much easier way. Ask the C.O.,” Stern suggested.
Madeline actually flushed. “Are you nuts? They’d space him for even listening to such a question. They’d space me for asking it.”
“I was assigned to medical duty with the Cehn-Tahr during the Great Galaxy War,” Hahnson recalled. His eyes lowered. “There are things humans are never allowed to learn about them.”
Madeline was openly curious. “Such as?”
He looked up and smiled sadly. “Just things.”
“Didn’t you learn something you could tell me?” she persisted.
He hesitated, as if weighing his answer. “Well, Cehn-Tahr mark their mates in some ancient rite of passage.”
Madeline was taking notes. “Mark them. How?”
Hahnson shook his head. “Don’t know. But it does leave a scar.” He lifted his eyebrows again. “Does that help?”
“Not a lot,” she sighed. She leaned her chin on her elbow. “Rojoks are a lot more forthcoming. But their customs aren’t the same as Cehn-Tahr. I mean, what if I ever have to treat a social disease or give counseling to a Cehn-Tahr woman? I’d be useless.”
“They don’t have social diseases,” Hahnson said. “Because they don’t frequent brothels. They’re amazingly pristine in their intimate habits. They also don’t mate outside their own species, ever. It’s a capital crime.”
“I know,” Madeline said quietly. Her companions tried not to notice the hollow tone of her voice. Her covert glances at the Holconcom C.O. hadn’t gone unnoticed by her longtime friends.
“Dr. Ruszel?” A small, pretty blonde woman in a green SSC Terravegan medical uniform popped her head in the door. Bright blue eyes glanced from one officer to the other. They lingered on Holt Stern just a few seconds too long for polite interest. “We’ve got an Altairian diplomat with a nasty cellulitis. Do you want to treat it, or shall I?”
Madeline smiled. Lieutenant (J.G.) Edris Mallory was a sweet woman. She’d actually started out in Cularian medicine on a military scholarship. But just after graduation from medical school, she’d wanted to become a breeder. In fact, she’d come back to the medical unit from a breeder colony after tests had found her ineligible as a host parent. Any slight defect in genetics could disqualify a candidate and Mallory had recessive genes whose inheritable traits—light eyes and hair—were out of fashion the year she applied. She’d been devastated by the rejection. She’d gone back to the military and been assigned to combat training. She’d even agreed to the mental neutering, dangerous in a woman of twenty. But she flunked out of combat school with the lowest score in academy history. After that, she landed in the SSC medical corps. Madeline liked her. She was a hard worker and she never shirked a task, even the unpleasant ones. She was only twenty-two. Ruszel, approaching thirty, found her shy presence comforting, in some odd way. She and Hahnson had conspired to protect Mallory from a Three Strikes provision, a covert and shaming law that could land an offender in stasis, to be used for medical experimentation. Mallory had two strikes already, and they kept a secret that could make it three. She was a sweet, kind woman.
“Go ahead, Edris,” she said. “I’ll be around if you need me.”
She grinned. “Thanks, Dr. Ruszel,” she said. “Hello, Doctor,” she greeted Hahnson warmly. She flushed a little as she glanced at Stern and then quickly away. “Captain.” She darted back through the door.
“She knows I’m a clone, doesn’t she?” Stern asked a little irritably. She’d barely looked at him.
“Oh, it’s not that.” She leaned toward him. “She’s shy. But she thinks you’re hot.”
He frowned. “It’s cool in here.”
“She thinks you’re desirable,” she corrected.
He flushed. “That’s not allowed.”
“She wanted to be a breeder,” she reminded him with a wicked grin. “But her genetics disqualified her to produce a child for the state, so when they expelled her from there, she decided to try combat medicine. She already had her degree in Cularian medicine.”
Stern glared. “How nice for her.”
Madeline shook her head. She knew it was the memory of Mary, his only love, that prompted that response. The original Stern, too, had come out of the neutering basically unaffected. He’d loved a woman named Mary who sacrificed her own life to save the lives of children. He carried a piece of blue velvet ribbon that had been attached to the posthumous medal they’d given her. He and Hahnson and Madeline passed it around between them as an accolade for heroic deeds. It was one of their best-kept secrets.
Hahnson’s wrist unit alarmed at the same time Madeline’s did. They looked at each other and grimaced.
“New medical transports are coming in from the occupied territories,” Madeline explained to Stern. “I guess we’ve got work again, Dr. Hahnson.”
“I guess we have, Dr. Ruszel,” he
agreed. “Good thing we’re in port for a few days. Medical is overwhelmed already.”
“Mallory, casualties coming in!” Madeline called to Edris. “Call in all off-duty personnel, if you please.”
“Right away, Dr. Ruszel,” she replied.
“She and I are the only two Cularian specialists on the base until the graduates from the Tri-Fleet Medical Academy arrive,” Madeline commented. “I suppose we’ll do double duty again. Not that we get many wounded Rojok prisoners to treat.”
Stern was somber. “Good thing. Three cadets who were in the last firefight tried to break into sick bay and hang a wounded Rojok when the last medical transports came in.”
“Sadly for them, the commander was here reading me the riot act for another bar brawl when it happened,” Madeline recalled with a faint chuckle. “You never saw cadets run so fast. Pity they bothered. He had all three of them before they made the front door. They were so shaken up that the military police didn’t even have to cuff them.” She shivered with mock fear. “The C.O.’s pretty scary when he loses his temper.”
“To everybody else except you,” Hahnson mused, tongue-in-cheek. “He could space you if he wanted to. But all he ever does is ground you.”
She leaned forward. “He’s not sure that I didn’t sew up a boot or a glass of synthale inside him when I operated on him at Ahkmau,” she said with malicious humor. “He wouldn’t dare space me until he’s positive that I didn’t.”
“He keeps you for a pet,” Hahnson said with a chuckle.
“Eat worms, Hahnson.” Madeline made a face at him before she followed Mallory into sick bay.
