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* * *
THEY HAD HOPED to land undetected, but the Rojoks had new state-of-the-art sensors and they worked. The minute the scout ships touched down, the Rojoks were waiting for them.
The onslaught was fierce. Two Rojok squads armed with kremoks, the new rapid-firing plasma rifles that fried internal organs, tore through the human infantry like fire through forests. Madeline saw two soldiers she’d served with since basic training go down, dead before they hit the ground. She checked them, anyway, but it was far too late for any medical technique to bring them back other than as clones, a living death in Terravegan society. She rose and moved quickly to the sound of plasma fire, forcing herself to be professional, not to let her emotions get the better of her. She had to tend to the living.
The medical research facility on Camcara was developing a counterweapon, a chemical screen that would be woven into the newest uniforms issued to the SSC. Madeline had adapted the technology for the Holconcom and Dtimun had authorized the addition and made it standard issue. But the uniforms were still in quality control tests.
Some of the commando squads were still using the older chasats, and one of those units had wedged itself between Dtimun and his bodyguard in the thick, muggy green jungle of vines and plants that covered this continent. Madeline cursed as she tried to move past a tangle that resembled a spiderweb. Then she remembered the illegal Gresham she’d tucked in the small away kit over one shoulder. She pulled it out and activated the power pack. With that, she cut through the vegetation in no time. She pressed ahead. The urgency grew as she heard the thum-thum sound of chasat fire close by.
“Ruszel!” She heard the ranking member of Dtimun’s four-man bodyguard unit in the tissue-thin monitor pasted just behind her ear.
“Yes!” she spoke into the matching monitor that rested like part of the skin at her lips.
“The commander has been hit!”
For an instant, the world went black. She was very still. “Critically?”
“Unknown. We saw him go down. Afterward, he did not move. We cannot get to him from our position. He has not answered our comms.”
“Where is he?” she asked tautly.
He gave coordinates. She didn’t speak to her comrades, who were mopping up the Rojok attack force. She motioned her medics toward three wounded Cehn-Tahr and then, with her heart racing at her throat, she sprinted toward the position where the commander was located. She didn’t dare think about his injury. With his greatly modified strength, if he was unconscious...!
Terror welled up in her. She didn’t see where she was going, she only ran, seeing the coordinates in the ether display that popped up from its concealment at the corner of each eye, produced by a film of circuitry which she wore over her corneas. She followed the blip, her illegal Gresham ready to fire. She wasn’t going to be captured. The C.O.’s life might depend on her, if he was still alive.
If he was still alive. She felt the words, like knives. He couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be! She realized suddenly that if he died, the light would go out of the world. There was nothing that would make up for his loss.
Forbidden thoughts, she told herself, and she must clamp down on them at once. She was a doctor, and a patient was waiting. That was what she needed to be thinking about.
She rushed through a cover of native vegetation and saw the commander flat on his back with two Rojok soldiers standing over him, chasats drawn.
She yelled, commanding their attention before they could fire. As they turned, surprised, she took them down in a heartbeat with two quick blasts and never even paused to check, to make sure they were no longer a threat. She was a dead shot, especially under combat conditions, having been battle-tested as a child.
“Sir!” She slid onto her knees at his side, her wrist scanner already busy, searching out clues to his condition. “Sir?”
The members of his bodyguard suddenly came running from the direction of the worst fighting. Their uniforms were torn and one had a bloody arm.
“Why did you leave him?” she raged at them from a face as red as her hair. “Your job is to protect the commander, not to act as regular combat troops!”
In her mind a familiar, furious voice made itself heard. “Remember who you are, madam!” it demanded.
Her eyes turned to his. They were open, brown with pain and anger, but open and alive. She was shaking. She hadn’t even realized it.
“Remember who you are,” the angry voice sounded again in her mind. “Pull yourself together! You disgrace the uniform with this display of hysterics.”
She forced her mind to work, her body to relax. Her face reverted to its usual serene expression. “I beg your pardon,” she told his bodyguard in her usual, measured tones. “I spoke out of turn. We lost some of the Terravegans in the first wave, two of whom I had served with for years. It...affected me.”
“No apology is necessary, Ruszel,” the ranking bodyguard officer spoke for all of them. “We were pinned down in a gulley and could not get to the commander in time. Had you not been armed, the Rojoks would have killed him.”
“What...Rojoks?” Dtimun gritted as she opened his tunic and revealed a penetrating chest wound. “And what do you mean, had Ruszel not been armed?” he demanded, his angry voice gaining strength.
Madeline, busily working on his wound, tried to look invisible.
“Two Rojoks were in the act of killing you when Ruszel fired on them,” the officer said respectfully.
“You were armed?” he demanded of her.
She ground her teeth together as she pulled out another tool and began to repair the cellular damage. “So court-martial me.”
“I intend to!” he shot back. “How many times must I tell you that medics are not permitted weapons in combat? It draws fire from the enemy directly to you!”
“She saved your life, sir,” the eldest of his bodyguard interjected solemnly.
“Yes. And that’s twice...” Madeline began with defiant humor.
“Silence!” he growled. He tried to sit up while she was still working on him.
She pushed him back down. “Stay there!” she grumbled. “I can’t mend tissue on a moving target!”
The bodyguard stood rigidly, waiting for the explosion. To their amazement, the commander only made a sound in his throat and lay back down in the grass while Ruszel’s deft hands reduced the wound.
“After all the time and effort I put into saving your life at Ahkmau, I’m not letting some stray Rojoks take you out,” she muttered as she worked.
“We have already agreed that you most likely repaired me in such fashion that I will never function properly again,” he reminded her.
She made a face. “You could look for years in the Tri-Fleet and not find another Cularian medicine specialist who could operate on you under combat conditions.”
He didn’t answer. The rigid lines of his face began to relax. Madeline realized belatedly that he had been concealing the extent of the pain. It must have been horrific, she reasoned, considering the extent of the damage.
She finished the sutures and applied a sterile bandage. “You’re lucky that the Rojok hit your lung and not your heart,” she said absently.
“Your misfortune,” he replied, touching the invisible bandage with the tips of his fingers. “You have been warned repeatedly about flouting the regulations forbidding weapons to medics. This time you will pay the price.”
She got to her feet, trying not to notice the broad, muscular chest with its thick wedge of black hair confronting her as he followed suit.
“You’ll file charges,” she said nonchalantly, “the board will ask for my side of the story, I’ll call your bodyguard as witnesses and everybody will note that you would be dead if I hadn’t disobeyed orders. You’ll lose your case, I’ll get a commendation, and the Tri-Fleet will foot the bill for all the legal wrangling.” She gave him a smug look from twinkling green eyes.
“We would be required to tell the truth under oath,” the chief of Dtimun’s personal bodyguard interjected. “Sorry, sir.”
Dtimun closed his uniform shirt. “Get back down there and check the Rojok camp for intel,” he growled at the officer.
The other Cehn-Tahr saluted, grinned at Madeline and led his unit back to the dwindling sounds of combat from above.
Madeline knew she was in trouble. She didn’t even have to note the color of his eyes. It was bad enough that she’d carried a Gresham. It was worse that she’d forgotten herself so completely that she’d shown her fear for the danger he was in. She toyed with complex mathematical computations, hoping they might prevent him from seeing too much.
He didn’t say anything at first. He checked his virtual combat array to see how the mopping-up was proceeding, and he noted the position and strength of the remaining Rojok troops.
“Well, I couldn’t let them kill you,” she said defensively when he finally glared down at her. “I’m a doctor. I took an oath to save lives.”
His eyes narrowed. He seemed deep in thought. Something dark and painful made shadows under his eyelids.
Suddenly, she saw shapes. Humans. No, Cehn-Tahr. And Dacerians. Rojoks, too. There was sand; a village in the deep desert of Dacerius. There was a beautiful woman with jet-black hair that fell to her hips, and eyes like almonds. She wore the thinnest of black lace veils over her nose and mouth. She was smiling. Then she was yelling, held firmly by Cehn-Tahr soldiers in royal blue uniforms. A shadowy figure was raging at a younger version of Dtimun as he held the female by the arm. She whirled, moved toward him aggressively. The shadowy figure raised his hand and grabbed something from a nearby wall. A razor-sharp golden sword sliced downward. There was an anguished shout, a short scream, blood...!
She had to sit down. The images were horrifying, even to a physician who’d worked under combat conditions.
Dtimun was scowling. “Impossible,” he said harshly, visibly shocked. “You have no psi abilities. I checked your medical records!”
She was still trying to catch her breath. That beautiful, helpless woman. The barbarians! She shivered.
“Only six other minds in the three galaxies have ever penetrated mine, and they were of my own Clan!” he bit off.
The telling reference went right over her head.
“She was so beautiful,” she murmured, feeling sick.
He turned away from her. “We must go.”
She knew she should never have spoken aloud. Now she was going to catch hell for that, too. She got back to her feet, shaky and unsettled. She checked the medical banks in her wrist scanner for something to do.
“You will never repeat what you have seen,” he said, but his lips didn’t move.
She heard him in her mind. “Of course I won’t,” she replied, and her lips didn’t move, either. “I never repeat anything you tell me in confidence.”
They stared at each other for one long moment while the realization penetrated. Now it worked both ways. He was reading her mind; but she could read his as well. She wondered how Cehn-Tahr learned how to block probing minds. Before she could ask the question, even silently, the bodyguard came down the hill with a hostage.
Madeline left the commander with his bodyguard and rushed back to the rest of the command, to see what she could do for the wounded. Hahnson was directing his own medics among the humans of the unit. Madeline motioned to her medtechs and started toward another small section of the jungle battlefield. The sound of weapons firing seemed unusually loud.
Her contretemps with the commander had unsettled her, or she might have noticed the ambush. She’d gone ahead to search for more casualties when she heard the snap of a fallen limb just behind her. As she turned to see who was following her, there was a sharp pain in her head and then, darkness.
* * *
“WHERE IS RUSZEL?” Dtimun asked Hahnson as he and his bodyguard joined the rest of the unit.
“Maddie?” Hahnson looked dazed. “Sir, I haven’t seen her.”
“She came this way. She must be here.”
Hahnson called one of his assistants over. “Have you seen Dr. Ruszel?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” the younger man acknowledged. “She went ahead to look for any casualties we might have missed. She’s only been gone for a few minutes...”
Dtimun was a blur of red, moving so fast that his own bodyguard was hard-pressed to close the distance between them. He looked for her in his mind. But he couldn’t find her. The lack of communication was...disturbing. His red-haired medic tended to overshoot her mandate in battle, often rushing into trouble. He recalled Chacon’s timely interference at Ahkmau during the escape of the Morcai Battalion from imprisonment, when Madeline had been treating a wounded comrade and didn’t see Rojoks creeping up on her with deadly intent. Her courage was legendary. But she sometimes had poor impulse control. He didn’t like this. It was very unusual that he couldn’t touch her mind when he liked. He did it more often than he cared to admit lately, and often without her knowledge.
He tossed a curt order to his men, insisting when they were reluctant to leave him. He had no basis for his concern, but he felt somewhere inside him that Ruszel was in trouble. She got on his nerves, she irritated him, she frequently made him furious. But if he lost her...
He put on another burst of speed as he looked for any sign of her. He found her boot prints in the soft dirt. They were joined by two larger pair. Rojoks! Her footprints vanished and those of one of the Rojoks deepened. She’d been carried out of here. But to where? If he couldn’t access her mind, he couldn’t find her!
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.
