by Diana Palmer
But Taylor himself had no real agenda that could be discovered. He attached himself to whatever cause brought him the most prestige. He was a radical with power, one of the most fearsome of opponents. Madeline couldn’t fight him, and she couldn’t afford to let the commander become involved, for his own sake. Pretty soon, she was going to be out with a combat unit and her stint with the Holconcom would be a warm memory to take out on cold nights during deployment. She wondered at her own docility. The human medic who’d dared Dtimun’s hot temper on Terramer had let the Terravegan ambassador walk all over her. It was out of character; but, then, she’d had a hard few weeks. She had no more heart left for a fight. Dtimun had said that distance might provide a solution. They could see if he was correct, when the distance was far greater than Trimerius. She had already decided not to ask the old fellow for help. He, like Madeline and Dtimun, was a soldier, and he probably had a great deal more to lose than either of them, considering his age. She would soldier on, as she always had, and take the blows as they came.
As she thought it, she suddenly remembered Caneese’s words, that she would face a grave danger and make a decision that she didn’t want to make, a sacrifice. Was this it?
For an instant she recalled the old fellow’s invasion into her thoughts and was afraid that he might mention the tangle of problems her involuntarily emotions had created for Dtimun. It was a violation of the Species Act for Dtimun to even touch her, must less react to her the way he did. But if the old one had meant to cause trouble, he would have already done it, surely, and he wouldn’t have offered to help her. She had to trust that he wouldn’t betray her commanding officer.
At least she had sidelined Ambassador Taylor by misdirecting him about Flannegan’s comments. The commander would be safe enough, for now. She really would have to plant her fist in Flannegan’s face one day, to pay him back for his gossiping. The thought gave her real pleasure.
Two days later, her orders came through. She was to report within the week to Admiral Mashita in the forward lines of the Amazon Division for reassignment. She donned her copper-colored Amazon armor, settled her Rema—or short ceremonial sword—in its sheath at her trim waist and went to war.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TWO WEEKS LATER, Madeline was in charge of a company of girls in the forward division, charged with search and rescue of a downed Jebob ship on one of the planets in the Meg-Warren sector, which was several parsecs’ distance from the front. It wasn’t a choice assignment. The planet on which the ship went down was Akaashe, as the Cehn-Tahr called it, the home planet of the fearsome Nagaashe, the giant serpents who had once been the terror of the three galaxies. Their numbers were reduced now, and no one believed that any were left even on their home world. Madeline, who had seen both adult and child of the species, and knew of the Cehn-Tahr hopes for a treaty with them, knew better.
“No one’s seen a Nagaashe in decades,” Madeline’s EXO, Darmila, mused. “They’re probably extinct. This is just a milk run, ma’am, something to get you back into the rhythm of the job.”
“I’ve seen a Nagaashe in the past six standard months,” Madeline said solemnly. “And you have no idea of the size or ferocity of the adult of the species.”
“Where did you see one?” she asked, excited.
Madeline almost bit her tongue. On Memcache, but she couldn’t admit that. It had been a dangerous slip. She struggled for a reply that wouldn’t get her in more trouble. “That’s classified, sorry,” she said, and smiled.
Darmila bought it. “Oh. Sorry.” She frowned. “Then, what if they’re not extinct after all? You know, a shipload of children went down on Akaashe during the Great Galaxy War,” she added. “They were survivors of an attack by the Rojok/Jebob Alliance, pitifully crippled. They were never heard from again.” She shuddered. “Nobody high up ever commented, but gossip was that the giant serpents killed them all, every one.”
Madeline had to repress a shudder of her own. She was familiar with the giant serpents from Memcache, but she’d been terrified when the parents of the small Nagaashe she’d rescued had coiled and spread their great hoods and hissed at her. Imagine a whole planet of them, and a shipload of children at their mercy. It was a sickening thought.
“Maybe there aren’t any on this continent,” Madeline said. She smiled. “But even if there are, we’re still going down to investigate. We have a fix on their last known position.”
“How are we going in?”
“It’s a standard S&R until we know it isn’t,” she replied. She moved to the navigation console occupied by a blonde Terravegan ensign. “Position?”
“We’re one A.U. and closing, Captain,” she replied. “I’ve got a grid with the position enhanced over a holotope. It’s lush, there. Green and subtropical. Lots of water.”
“We should take some vids of it for the files,” Darmila said.
“We’ll reconnoiter first,” Madeline said firmly. “Then we’ll do recordings and sensor logs.” She frowned as she looked at the interpretive overlays. There were no files of vids on this planet. Odd, she thought, because the history textdiscs referred to a surveying party sent here centuries earlier. Only one adventurer actually returned, but he had the vids in his possession when he was rescued in space. Yet, the vids were now nonexistent. Rumor was that they’d disappeared out of a top secret vault.
“How do we deploy?” asked one of the new women, still in her teens.
“We’ll send out a single recon unit.” She glanced at the woman, who was eagerly watching her. “I suppose we can use Rema One Platoon on the reconnoiter,” she added.
“Yes!” the woman enthused. She caught herself and stood at attention. “Yes, ma’am, I mean.”
Madeline chuckled. She was beginning to feel at home with her unit. It was like old times. Almost. She forced a memory of the commander, as he’d been the last time she saw him, to the back of her mind.
“That’s odd,” Darmila said aloud as she pored over the screen.
“What is?”
“There’s something ahead, some sort of distortion. See it?” She indicated a broad area of sensor verga on the screen, wavering like a white ripple in front of the ship.
“It can’t be a storm,” the pilot murmured. “Not this high in orbit. And we’re...hang on!”
The warning came too late. The whole ship was stopped as if it had slammed into a wall. There were explosions aft, toward the main engines. Smoke began to fill the cabin.
“All hands, abandon ship!” Madeline called over intership comms. She dragged the pilot out of her chair and herded her and Darmila out of the compartment toward the little drop ships affixed to the fuselage to port and starboard of the swept-back wings.
“We won’t make it,” Darmila shouted. “There’s no time...!”
An explosion like red death washed over them with a sound as final as an emerillium blast in a hydrogen field. Madeline felt the ship shudder and start to go down, but she was too badly injured to react. The pain was excruciating, and soon she lost consciousness. Just before she blacked out, she felt the ship, incredibly, slow down as it entered the planet’s atmosphere. She must be hallucinating, she decided. She remembered whispering Dtimun’s name, a facsimile of its pronunciation, as the darkness overtook her.
* * *
SHE CAME TO in waves of pain, so excruciating that she couldn’t move at all. She was lying on the ground. The smell of acrid smoke was in her nostrils. It was hard to breathe. Something was broken inside her. It was bad.
She opened her eyes and caught her breath. Standing, coiled, around her were several towering Nagaashe, the intelligent white serpents with blue eyes who populated this remote planet. They were watching her. Not moving. Not threatening. Just observing.
Her chest rose and fell painfully. “We were sent...to rescue...Jebob nationals...who crashed here,” s
he managed weakly.
The Nagaashe looked at each other.
She smiled faintly. The Nagaashe on Memcache didn’t speak to her; they’d only hummed and rubbed up against her after she’d saved their child from the galot. They probably couldn’t speak...
“On Memcache...It was you?” came an odd sound into her mind. “You saved the infant?”
It wasn’t exactly Standard, but it was understandable. “Yes,” she thought back.
The tallest, and apparently the eldest, of the serpents undulated forward and bent his neck down so that his huge, bright blue eyes were looking right into hers. Oddly, they had rounded pupils, instead of the slit ones of most reptiles. “You called Meg-Ravens to chase the galot away,” he said in her mind.
“Yes.”
The bright blue eyes searched hers. There was a smile in the voice that came into her head. “A novel solution. You can speak to Meg-Ravens?”
“Yes. An elderly Cehn-Tahr taught me, after I rescued him from a Rojok on Ondar.” She had the picture of the old fellow in her mind.
There was a pause. The giant serpents swayed and hummed to each other uneasily. “That one is more dangerous than all the other Cehn-Tahr put together,” the eldest thought to her. “We have great fear of the Cehn-Tahr. We will not trade with them. They are animals.”
Madeline was shocked. She thought of Dtimun saving the Altairian child, rescuing Madeline from the cliff when the Rojok was ready to throw her over it. She thought of him with Caneese, that gentle touching of foreheads. She thought of him holding her in the rain...
The serpent’s head turned to one side as he saw those thoughts. “The younger Cehn-Tahr. He leads the Holconcom.”
“Yes,” she thought back.
“You were his medic. Why are you here, in battle armor?”
She managed a sigh. It hurt. “It’s a very long story.”
The serpent settled down into its coils with grace. “May I hear it?”
What the hell, she thought. She was certainly going to die. She might as well spend her last minutes reliving her happiest moments. After all, who would the serpent tell? These Nagaashe, if memory served, had never left their own planet. And nobody would come after them in a rescue attempt. A small ship carrying crippled children had gone down here during the lengthy Great Galaxy War, and they were never recovered.
“They lived happily here,” the giant serpent thought to her. “We healed them as best we could. They were very afraid of us at first, but we brought them food and water and mended the injuries that we could. Many injuries we could not heal. Eventually, they welcomed us. We gave them...” He turned his head and hummed to the others in tones that sounded almost musical. One of the others hummed back in different tones. The elder serpent turned back to Madeline. “We gave them fantasy which was like reality. They could walk again. They could run. They could fly. In their minds, they could live as never before.”
She was impressed. “Are any of them still here?”
“No. All dead now. Could not reproduce. But died happy.”
Madeline shifted. She blinked. “My girls,” she said suddenly. “My command crew...?”
The serpent bent its head. “We thought it was invaders. We caused the engines to overload. We are sorry. We did not know.”
She bit her lip. “All...all dead?”
“Not all. Two others live. They have injuries. But not as bad as yours.” He paused. “We protected the ship when it came down, so that it would not crash. We wanted survivors because we were curious about the creatures inside.” He felt her pain. “You are injured. Can you treat the injuries?”
“I could, if my wrist unit still functioned.” She had tried it, but the unit was dead. Dead, like me, she thought blackly, with nothing to treat what felt like catastrophic injuries.
“Others like you will come. Will find you.”
“Not in time,” she whispered.
“We will bring them,” he returned. “Tell me about the Cehn-Tahr. The one who commands the Holconcom.”
She hesitated, but only for a minute. It was nice, remembering. She told him about Memcache. It didn’t matter now, if someone else knew, too.
* * *
A COUPLE OF hours later, Madeline was fading in and out of consciousness. Going into shock, she thought. Talking about the past, keeping her mind alert, had helped keep the shock at bay, for a time.
“We must take you to shelter,” the serpent thought to her. “It is very cold here at night. But we have no hands. We must carry you in our mouths. This will frighten?”
“No,” she said gently. “It will not.”
There was more humming. Some of the serpents departed. The big one slid down onto his belly, up to Madeline. Heavens, he was huge! She would fit in his mouth like a fish in a barrel.
“A little discomfort,” he thought to her.
His mouth opened and he slid closer, scooping her up sideways, careful of his fangs, so that they didn’t threaten her skin. She relaxed, to make the process easier. It was so painful. She knew then that her injuries were extensive. The possibility of death loomed ever closer. His tongue was soft, she noted with some fascination, and it was warm. Because he was endothermic, like humans? Not a reptilian trait. Reptiles were ectothermic; they needed an outside source of heat to warm them up. Well, the Rojoks had traces of reptilian DNA, but they were also endothermic. Her mind rambled on.
The serpent rose up gently, with Madeline in his mouth. Two smaller Nagaashe had the other, unconscious, women in their mouths. The eldest serpent turned and undulated toward the base of the mountains the ship had flown over on its way here. In a matter of minutes, he deposited Madeline on a bed of soft, fresh grass inside a cave.
She had been surprised that the serpent’s breath smelled not of carrion or meat, but of pleasant herbs and legumes.
Laughter filled her mind. “We are vegetarians,” he thought to her. “We eat no carrion.”
“But the legends say that you are deadly poisonous.”
“Ah, yes, that is also true,” he said. “But we rarely bite. We have not needed to, for centuries.”
She turned her head and saw two of her girls, one of whom was Darmila. Madeline was glad that she’d survived. But only the three of them, out of so many. Her heart ached.
The serpent apologized yet again. This time she was in too much pain to answer. He settled her. Other serpents brought bags of water and strange smelling vegetables. Madeline was too sick to eat, but she was grateful for the water. She wondered how the bags had been made.
“We can discuss this at a later time. You must rest now.”
She felt sleepy suddenly. Amazingly, the excruciating pain diminished and her eyes closed.
* * *
THE OLDEST NAGAASHE tossed his mind far into space, all the way to Memcache, to the Imperial Dectat itself.
The old fellow was shocked when he heard the oddly accented voice in his head. And then he knew to whom it belonged.
“Ruszel is here,” the serpent said. “She is gravely injured. She does not know. Her medical device is broken. If she is not assisted, very soon, she will die. We can kill with thought, but healing one so delicate is another matter. Her injuries are extensive. It is beyond our abilities to save her.”
The old fellow felt a jolt of sorrow all the way to his feet.
“She is...of value to you,” the serpent tried to communicate the emotion.
“Of great value, and not only to me,” came the reply. There was a pause. He read the serpent’s thoughts. “You blew up her ship.”
“We thought it was invasion,” the serpent thought back. “We were told so, by a human comm beam, from the Terravegan embassy. Said invasion force was coming.”
“Who?” the old fellow demanded.
“Taylor.”
>
“I will kill him with my bare hands!”
The serpent was curious. “Not your ally, that one?”
“Not anyone’s ally.”
“I see.” There was a pause. “Red-haired female has feelings for Holconcom commander,” he said. “She told me much of him. I have...we all have...feared Cehn-Tahr since end of Great Galaxy War.”
“That was a fault of ours,” the old fellow said sadly. “We were given false information when we invaded your continent.”
“Yes. By same man who is now ambassador.”
The old fellow caught his breath. Yes. That was true, and he’d just now realized it.
“We have been wrong about you,” the serpent said. He paused. “You may send embassy to us. We will send representative to you. We may fix treaty.”
The old fellow’s surprise, and pleasure, was evident in his thoughts. “This is an honor.”
“For which you may thank Ruszel,” came the reply. “We know of prophecy, now. I found old woman at Mahkmannah on Memcache with my mind and read hers. She is right. Red-haired healer has made friends with serpent. But not ones the old woman thought of. Not little serpent on Memcache, but whole race of Nagaashe, for treaty.”
The old fellow smiled. “It must be the prophecy.”
“You must come quickly,” the serpent said. “No Ruszel, no prophecy.”
“I will have a ship come and bring me to you.”
There was a hesitation. “This would be great risk.”
“For Ruszel, I will take the risk.”
* * *
DTIMUN WAS READY to return to base. His scouting mission had gone badly. Mallory had accompanied the landing party and thrown up on the way down again. She couldn’t get used to the C.O.’s high-grav landings. The C.O. was coldly furious. Nobody said a word. Just lately, the commander had been more unapproachable even than he usually was. Even Komak was avoiding him.
