bodyguard. Anyway, he took exception to having an object thrown at him, so he turned a whole pot of soup over on my head.” She sighed. “It took forever to get the grease out of my hair.”
“Did he get in trouble?”
She grinned and nodded enthusiastically. “Dtimun raked him over the coals and threatened him with the emperor. It was...”
“Nothing to do, Dr. Mallory?” a deep, irritated voice came over the intership frequency. It was almost purring.
She swallowed. She’d forgotten the damned AVBDs, the devices that were always listening, watching, aboard ship, to discourage potential spies.
“Sorry, sir.” She stood at attention, as if he were actually physically present.
“Back to work.” The circuit closed.
She rolled her eyes at the others, who gave her a thumbs-up and went back to their jobs. They were still grinning.
* * *
EDRIS SLEPT BADLY. There was a mission the following day, or what passed for a day in space. The unit was to rescue a pod of colonists on an outlying planet who had barely withstood an attack from Rigellian pirates bent on conquest. The colony was located on a princely node of emerillium, which the pirates wanted badly. They planned to drive away the largely unarmed colonists and claim the mines for their personal wealth.
However, the Cehn-Tahr Empire had sent the colonists there, and it took a dim view of pirates, in any case. So the Holconcom were requested, as the nearest vessel, to protect the settlers and solve the problem.
“Probably, it will only take a glance at us to send them running,” Edris told her medics, “and I doubt we’ll be needed.”
“Considering how the Holconcom fight, I agree,” Tellas said quietly.
Edris had rarely seen the Holconcom fight, and there were rumors that no human except Engineer Higgins had ever seen the way they went into combat before the Cehn-Tahr were combined with Terravegan humans from the lost SSC ship Bellatrix. She’d once asked Higgins about it. He’d excused himself on the matter of urgent business. He’d been very pale.
She did at least know the true form of her alien colleagues. Dr. Ruszel had persuaded Dtimun, after they bonded, to share it with the humans of the Holconcom. He’d done that, with great reservations. He’d been afraid that the humans would no longer want to serve with them, if they knew the truth.
But no one had been afraid. Their service with the Cehn-Tahr in the prison camp at Ahkmau had made them more family than comrades, removed all the intangible barriers of custom and behavior. So the true appearance of the Cehn-Tahr, who had some decidedly feline characteristics from the centuries of genetic tampering, had hardly created a ripple in them.
Personally, Edris thought Rhemun was the handsomest creature she’d ever seen, of any species. His nose was a little broader than a human male’s, and he was immensely larger and more powerful, but in a crowd of humanoids, he would hardly have stood out except for his impressive presence. The differences were minor and not immediately noticeable, and the Cehn-Tahr had no tails or fur. Well, there was the strip of fur that lay alongside the spine, and which was never spoken of with outworlders, but that was the only real fur on their bodies. Edris only knew because of something Ruszel had once let slip, but she’d been sworn to secrecy.
She turned over in her narrow bunk, wishing her mind would go to sleep so that she could. She dreaded the confrontation. She was used to combat medicine, or as used to it as an overly sensitive woman could ever get. When she’d joined the military, after washing out as a breeder, she’d washed out of combat school with the lowest grade in the history of the Academy. She’d been given a berth in a degree program in Cularian medicine instead, which had kept her mostly on Trimerius. She’d worked for years to get her certification after a minor accident had caused some small loss of motor function. She’d never expected to end up in a combat unit like the Holconcom. She wasn’t expected to actually fight, but her profession did occasionally put her on the front lines.
It wasn’t what she wanted for her life. Her hunger for a child had led her to apply to a government breeder colony, where she’d tried desperately to be accepted. But she had recessive genes—obvious in her blond hair and blue eyes—and recessive genes were right out of fashion at the moment. The bureaucrats in the Familial Requisitions Ministry decided from generation to generation which traits should be passed down and which suppressed. In this generation, only dark-haired, dark-eyed children were wanted. Edris would mess up the works with her sloppy recessive genes. So she’d been turned down, and the only venue left to her was medical service attached to the military.
She wasn’t a military sort of person, really, but she was a physician. So she became a frontline consultant in Cularian medicine, and agreed to the mental neutering, which was usually done at the age of six. While Edris had been in medical school, and not serving in active military, it had been deferred. But once she went into a combat position, the neutering was requisite. It was dangerous in a woman of twenty-two, and sometimes ineffective, but she’d faced it bravely. She had two strikes against her already: she’d failed to be chosen as a breeder and she’d washed out of combat school. One more mistake and she’d face Reboot, the most secret and terrifying fate possible to a Terravegan. She couldn’t think about that. She didn’t dare.
She could manage this assignment. Dr. Ruszel had trained her well. If only Edris didn’t have the painful lingering legacy of an incident in medical school that had caused minor brain damage. Dr. Hahnson knew, and Dr. Ruszel. They’d shielded her from discovery, which would have meant washing out of medical school, and again facing the reality of Reboot. Fortunately, the doctors assessing her for breeding status hadn’t bothered with her neurology, except a cursory look at its base cellular structure, because her coloring had already cost her any real consideration. They hadn’t told her at the time, of course. She’d found out only later, when Dr. Ruszel had asked for her records and told her the truth.
The brain damage was very minimal, but she was slow. She would always be slow. Rhemun had already called her onto the carpet for it, during a rescue hop. She’d taken the punishment, days of detention and black marks on her record, without argument. But he was watching her, always watching, waiting for her to make a mistake so that he could punish her by having her decommissioned, thrown out of the Holconcom. It would be the end of everything. He didn’t know what the consequences would be for her. Probably, she thought sadly, it wouldn’t bother him in the least if he did.
She rolled over, closed her eyes and forced her mind to shut up. Soon, she was finally asleep.
* * *
SHE’D EXPECTED TO be put down in a combat zone; she thought she was prepared for it, but her wildest imaginings of horror hadn’t prepared her for what she saw.
Most of the victims were children. The anguish almost paralyzed her when she saw the small victims tossed into a common grave, uncovered, because the fighting was still going on. She stared at them with anguish on her face.
“Mallory!” Rhemun’s deep voice called. “Get to work!”
She turned, the pain so intense that he hesitated when he saw it. He knew about her history, her child-hunger. It disturbed him, so he didn’t dwell on it. He motioned her toward the action with a curt gesture and averted his eyes. The sight of the children bothered him, as well. It brought back the pain of losing his son.
Edris ran toward him, dodging bursts of gunfire from plasma weapons, and rolled to the ground near a couple
