by Diana Palmer
He closed his eyes and searched for her thoughts. “Ruszel,” he called silently. “Ruszel, answer me. Where are you?”
There was a hesitation that he actually felt. “Sir?” Her thoughts were disoriented and layered in intense pain. But she was alive! He hated the intensity of relief that he felt. His overreaction to her danger was disturbing.
“Where are you?” he persisted.
Madeline’s head was splitting. She sat up and caught her breath. She was in a Rojok camp atop a mesa, overlooking the battlefield. The ranking officer of the Rojok squad was staring down at her with an expression that made her want to kick him.
“So you wake,” he said. “You are Ruszel,” he added surprisingly. “We have heard of you. The Holconcom has caused the deaths of many of our comrades. How fitting that we should now cause yours.” He gave an order. Two of his men jerked Madeline to her feet, worsening the headache.
The Rojok gave her a scrutiny that, if she had been herself, would have propelled her fist into his thin-lipped, slit-eyed face.
“You are comely, for a human female,” the Rojok purred. He reached out a six-fingered hand and ripped her tunic open. “Such white skin,” he laughed, gripping her soft flesh in his fingers.
She kicked him as hard as she could and was trying to land another blow when the Rojok’s hand connected with her cheek. She took the blow without flinching and used a Rojok word she’d heard from Komak. It made the officer furious.
“Here,” the small, muscular Rojok called to them as he poised on the edge of the cliff. “Bring her! We will show this bad-tempered, worthless female how we reward bad behavior among our own people!”
The taller aliens half dragged her to the precipice. Below, she could see the red uniforms of her colleagues. Her eyes weren’t focusing. She could barely think for the pain.
“Where are you?” Dtimun demanded again.
She blinked. “I’m on the edge of a cliff,” she thought to him. “Above one of our units. My head is killing me. These two-legged lizards must have hit me on the head. Which is nothing to what this little tyrant just tried to do...” She pictured it in her mind.
“Holconcom!” the small Rojok officer interrupted her, calling down to her comrades. “Can you hear me?”
Dtimun looked up. There was Ruszel, in the grasp of two tall Rojoks. A smaller one was posed there, his hands on his hips.
“We have your warwoman!” the Rojok officer yelled down. “Retreat, or we will throw her down to you!”
Dtimun felt the others group around him. Hahnson moved to his side. The husky blond medic was tense, still. His concern was almost physical.
“The Holconcom do not bargain. Return our crewman, or face the consequences,” Dtimun called back, in a tone like steel hitting rock.
The small Rojok only laughed. “I did not think you would bargain. But this one is much known among soldiers. Even our commander in chief has respect for her,” he spat. “She is nothing special. Just a female.” He caught Madeline’s arm and dragged her closer to the edge of the cliff. “But you will not replace her easily, Commander of the Cehn-Tahr,” he added. He laughed again. “What a shame, to kill her! You should obey me, and quickly, if you wish her to live. Which would break first when she landed, I wonder—her back or her skull? Perhaps we should remove her brain before we toss her down to you!”
“Dear God,” Hahnson whispered, his voice barely audible as he saw the certainty of what was going to happen next. “He’s crazy.”
Dtimun tensed. “Be still,” he shot at his comrade. He closed his eyes. “Madeline,” he called silently, using her name almost unconsciously. “Do you trust me?”
“With my life, sir,” came the quiet reply.
“You must close your eyes, hold your breath and throw yourself over the cliff.”
She didn’t question him, or argue. She knew it would be a leap to her death. No being in the galaxies could possibly save her without a force net, and she knew that her unit carried none of those. He wasn’t going to let the Rojoks have the satisfaction of causing her death. He expected her to die like a soldier, and bring honor to her command. And she would. Lack of courage had never been one of her faults.
“Now?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Malenchar!” she yelled, giving the battle cry of the Holconcom. At the same moment, throbbing head and all, she jerked out of the shocked Rojok’s grasp, took a breath and dived headfirst over the edge of the cliff. She closed her eyes. Free fall was exciting. Of course, there would be a sudden stop, she thought with gallows humor. Hopefully, she wouldn’t feel it.
About halfway down, she felt something warm and solid wrap itself around her. She opened her eyes, startled, and found the commander enveloping her. He made leaps against the face of the cliff that her mind told her were impossible. She’d seen great cats bound from high place to higher place, liquid with grace and strength, but she’d never seen a Cehn-Tahr do it.
With grace and elegance, holding her easily against him, he flew like the wind, finding a foothold, using it to leap to another foothold. Claws extended on one hand, and he used them to help keep his balance as he jumped. He made his way down the cliff in a matter of seconds, his strength unbelievable. Belatedly, Madeline wrapped her arms around his neck and held on for dear life. She was dead of course, but her mind had somehow lapsed into dreams before she hit bottom. None of this was real. No species in the universe could do what her mind told her that Dtimun was doing.
With a soft thud, he hit the ground at the bottom of the cliff, still holding Madeline close in his arms. The momentum cost him his footing. He rolled with her, protecting her with his body, so that the hard ground didn’t bruise her too badly. His grip was painful, like steel, and the genetically engineered claws that his hands produced in combat had come out involuntarily with the stress of the rescue. She flinched as they bit into her back like knives.
He felt the pain in her and forced his claws to retract. But there was a more intense reaction, which he could not control, prompted by her nearness and the flood of pheromones suddenly exuding from her soft body at the almost intimate contact.
As they rolled to a stop, he lifted enough to see her face. He looked down into her wide, shocked eyes and fought to catch his breath and control his hunger. A low, dangerous growl echoed deeply from his throat, involuntarily, as he stared at her without blinking.
Madeline was shell-shocked. She was still alive; the pain told her that. Her head hurt. There were deep punctures where his hands had gripped her, in her lungs, making breathing painful. She felt the sudden tension in his body and was amazed not only at its strength, but at the weight of it above her. The Cehn-Tahr were feline in origin, or so the legends went, but cats were lightweights. The commander was as solid as a wall, and he was heavy. She stared into his eyes with mingled fascination and scientific curiosity. The growl was puzzling. She’d only ever heard it in combat. No, that wasn’t true. She’d heard it at the Altair embassy, when Ambassador Taylor had touched her...
“You...caught me,” she stammered. “But that’s impossible! I fell from over a hundred feet!”
“One hundred and fifty,” he corrected, slowly calming. He scowled. “Your body is cool.”
“No, sir,” she said unsteadily. “Your normal body heat is three degrees higher than that of humans. I only feel cool to you.” She swallowed. His nearness was producing some odd sensations. “You must weigh three times as much as you appear to weigh...”
“Genetic engineering,” he replied tersely, something else he was forbidden to tell outworlders, that he’d already shared with her at his embassy. He was disturbed by her, and not thinking logically. “Density and mass, a result of enhanced tensile strength in the muscle tissue and bone.”
She was only barely aware of the words. He smelled of
spices. He was very warm. She felt safe in the shelter of his strength. But the sensations were frightening to a woman who’d never felt them.
He searched her eyes quietly. “I damaged you in the process of saving your life,” he said curtly.
“Hahnson can heal the wounds,” she said simply, fighting to breathe. Claws had punctured her lung in one of the lower lobes. Still...”I would have been dead, had you not intervened. Thank you.”
He hadn’t blinked. “You obeyed me without question. Yet you thought I was commanding you to leap to your death.”
“Of course,” she said, puzzled. “I’ve never refused a command from you, sir. Well, not unless it involved carrying a firearm,” she added facetiously.
That was true. It touched him, at some deep level, that blind trust.
His eyes had darkened again and narrowed. His lean hands, propped beside her ears, tensed. The low growl came again.
“Sir?” she whispered, uneasy.
“We are predators,” he said in a rough tone. “There is a saying among us, that nothing in the known galaxies is as dangerous as a Cehn-Tahr male who is hunting.”
She wondered what that had to do with their present situation and what he meant by “hunting.” Did he mean the combat with the Rojoks? She started to ask. But even as she nursed the thought, the sound of footsteps, running, broke the tense silence.
Dtimun got to his feet in a quick, graceful motion and drew Madeline up with him, steadying her when she stumbled.
Hahnson came into view, huffing a little from the exertion. “We saw her fall!” he exclaimed. “Is she all right?”
Several human crewmen, and Dtimun’s Cehn-Tahr bodyguard, fetched up beside them. The humans were astonished.
“A tree broke my fall,” she lied with a laugh. She couldn’t admit that Dtimun had touched her. If anyone repeated the story, he could be spaced for breaking such a basic law among his own people as contact with a human female, even in the act of saving her life. “Well, several trees broke my fall,” she amended. “I’m fine, except for a hell of a backache,” she told Hahnson with a wan smile. She winced as she moved. The punctures were deep. “I got hit on the head, too. I need some patching up.”
Hahnson glanced at Dtimun, who was looking more dangerous by the second. “I can do that. We need to get you back aboard the scout ship.”
“That can wait,” she returned. “There’s a battle to win.”
“Indeed,” Dtimun said coldly. He whirled, shooting orders in his own language at his bodyguard. “The rest of you, wait here. And you will say nothing of what you see to anyone outside this unit. Is that clear?”
There was a chorus of affirmatives. Even as they died on the air, Dtimun and the four members of his bodyguard vanished like red smoke. The Terravegans had seen their C.O. move fast before, but never like this; not in almost three years.
Hahnson ran his wrist unit over Madeline while the other crewmen spread out, looking for survivors of the battle, along with a handful of medics.
Hahnson gritted his teeth. “These wounds are bad. One of them would have been fatal if I hadn’t been close by,” he added as he mended bone and muscle.
“He didn’t mean...to do it,” she panted, wincing as the pain bit into her. She’d hidden it from Dtimun, but she didn’t have to hide it from Strick. It hurt to breathe. “He saved me, Strick,” she said in a low tone. “He came up the cliff and caught me in midair, leaped from rock to rock to get me safely to the ground. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
“They have incredible strength and flexibility,” he said as he worked.
“You won’t mention this?” she worried and relaxed when he shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to land him in trouble with his own people. I’m not sure it’s safe to tell our own crewmates that he carried me down.”
“They wouldn’t tell.”
“They wouldn’t mean to tell,” she corrected. The pain eased as he mended the punctures. “The Cehn-Tahr keep so many secrets.”
“More than I can ever tell you,” he returned solemnly.
She studied him curiously. “He said an odd thing.”
“What?”
“That there was nothing in the galaxies more dangerous than a Cehn-Tahr male who was hunting.”
He let out a breath. His eyes met hers and concern was in them. “Oh, dear.”
“What do you mean, oh...?”
Suddenly, in the distance there were horrible screams. They were coming from the top of the mesa. Everyone looked up.
Bodies erupted from the bare rock and, falling heavily from the mesa, came to rest in the forest, breaking tree limbs as they careened down toward the canyon floor. Seconds later, Dtimun appeared with the small Rojok officer who’d taunted him with Madeline. The humans gathered close, fascinated. They’d never seen such speed.
Dtimun had the alien by the collar of his uniform. He shook him and threw him at Madeline’s feet while the nearby humans gathered closer.
“I...apologize,” the Rojok said in a thready voice.
“Again!” Dtimun prompted.
“I...am...sorry,” came the obliging reply.
The little alien had rips all over his uniform, and lacerations on every visible inch of skin. It occurred to Madeline that he was much like a mouse that had been caught by a cat.
“An appropriate analogy,” Dtimun thought to her.
She looked at him with surprise. “You were playing with him,” she thought back, shocked.
He cocked an eyebrow. He still spoke only in her mind. “It is not a game. He would have allowed us to watch him cut you to ribbons before he killed you. He is a sadist who enjoys torturing his victims. He has killed females who did not please him.”
She blinked. “There are still laws. Even a prisoner is entitled to trial...”
He closed his eyes. The Rojok arched. There was a loud, violent snap. He lay still. Dtimun’s eyes opened, stormy and cold, and looked, defiantly, right into Madeline’s.
No one spoke. Their commanding officer had killed an enemy combatant with the power of his mind alone. For the first time, Madeline realized what he could have done at Ahkmau if the dylete hadn’t caught him unaware. Perhaps it was also why Mangus Lo had been so desperate to capture him. Had the Rojok tyrant known the power of Dtimun’s mind?
“That is not a question I will permit you to ask,” came the terse reply, but only in her mind.
The humans had unconsciously moved closer together in the wake of their commander’s violent response to the Rojok. He glanced at them, slowly calming.
“There are things Holconcom never share with outworlders,” he told them quietly. “We have genetic enhancements which give us great advantage in combat, far beyond our natural strength. In addition to the enhancements, I can kill with my mind. Of this, you will never speak.” He had broken another taboo. But, then, they were his people, these humans. He was protective of them.
Higgins, the engineer, moved forward. He was pale, but not intimidated. “Sir, we are Holconcom, too,” he said with dignity. “It would never occur to any of us to betray any confidence you share with us.”
“Exactly,” Lieutenant Jennings, the communications officer, agreed somberly.
A chorus of affirmatives ran through the small unit.
“We’d follow you right into hell, sir,” Stern agreed, his dark eyes steady on the alien’s.
“Without hesitation,” Higgins said.
“Absolutely without hesitation,” Jennings seconded.
Dtimun managed a faint smile. “I chose well, when I requested your transfers. Search the casualties for any hidden tech or communicators. We must lift before their reinforcements arrive.”
Stern grinned. “Yes, sir!”
He and the others
moved off.
Madeline, meanwhile, bent over the dead Rojok officer. She was still trying to reconcile what she knew of the commander with what she’d just learned about him. It was a fascinating lesson, to a Cularian specialist who’d been taught that the Cehn-Tahr had nothing more formidable than superior strength produced by microcyborgs.
Dtimun joined her. His eyes, as he studied the Rojok, were merciless.
Madeline got to her feet. The alien’s neck and back were broken. The violence of the attack had stunned her. She lifted her eyes to Dtimun’s. It wasn’t like him to single out a combatant for attack.
His eyes narrowed on her. He stepped closer, so that she had to look up to see his face. She felt the heat of his body with fascination. He made a faint sound, deep in his throat, the same sound she recalled from the embassy reception when Taylor had tried to humiliate her, the sound she remembered after her tumble down the cliff when they were lying on the ground. It sounded for all the world like a low growl.
“So many secrets,” she said hesitantly.
“More than you can ever know,” he replied, and his tone was bitter. His eyes moved over her lovely face with a delicate touch. He was experiencing sensations that he thought never to know again in his long life. His concern for her, his fear for her, had manifested in violent action. He had gone through the Rojoks like a firestorm as he searched for the officer who had toyed with Madeline’s life. When he found him, there had been no thought of capture or mercy. There was only revenge.
Madeline frowned as she read the violent emotion in him. “Your species is so mysterious,” she said absently. “We study you, we fight alongside you in battle, but we know almost nothing about your social structure, your behavioral patterns. We know only the physiology, and not a great deal of that. We know far more about Rojoks.”
“Be thankful,” he said, his voice harsh. “What you learned would give you nightmares.”
