their manner of dress denoting their Clan status, would speak. “I can heal him.”
“You speak...Jibbet,” the woman exclaimed. “No human speaks Jibbet!”
Edris smiled as she went to work. “I speak several very rare dialects,” she said without conceit. “Yours is quite beautiful.”
The woman touched her fingers to her mouth and then to the center of her chest, where the Altairian heart was located. She smiled. It was a gesture of perfect trust, perfect acceptance. Edris smiled again and began to heal the burned flesh of the woman’s spouse.
He relaxed as her pain meds eased the anguish of the wound. “I am farmer,” he said in halting Terravegan. “I will lose leg...”
“You will not,” she replied. “You honor me, by speaking my tongue.”
He managed a terse smile. “As you honor we, by speaking that of us,” he replied brokenly.
“You will not lose your leg,” she replied. “I will regrow the tissue.”
“You can do such?!” he exclaimed.
She nodded, and continued to probe the damaged cells with a regenerative gel. Soon, the horrible gash that had almost amputated his leg began to close, cleaning itself of necrosis as it healed, until the skin was as blue and as perfect as it had been before he’d been wounded.
He cried out, delighted. He got to his feet and stood up, without pain or loss of function. His purple eyes had great tears in them. “Thank you! Many gratitudes! You are great female,” he choked. “My Clan is your Clan, forever.”
She put her hand to her lips and then to her own heart. “You give me great honor.”
The woman hugged her. “You are Web Clan. Never forget.”
Edris smiled. “Thank you. I promise, I won’t forget.”
* * *
SHE WENT FROM patient to patient, doing whatever she could to mend the horrible effects of the radiation the pirates were using in their plasma weapons.
“Somebody should shoot them,” she muttered as she finished the last suture on an elderly man.
“Are you finished?” Rhemun asked curtly. “We must move on.”
“I am, sir.” She smiled at her patient and fell in, behind the other Holconcom, as they advanced to the next pivotal point in the assault.
* * *
SHE FELL A little behind, stumbling over a piece of ship wreckage, and as she started to run to catch up with her comrades, a man stepped out of nowhere, one of the cold-eyed Rigellian pirates with a stolen chasat leveled at her chest.
Without thinking, she pulled her Gresham and fired. She gasped as she realized that she’d forgotten to lock the setting on stun. The pirate looked at her with wide, disbelieving eyes as he clutched his chest, groaned harshly and fell backward.
“Oh, no!” She ran to him, bent on saving him. But his eyes were open and dust was already settling on the pupils. They were dilated. Fixed. He was dead. One quick check with her wrist scanner confirmed that catastrophic damage had been done to his internal organs. Nothing could have been done for him, even on the ship.
Her face contorted. She shivered. She’d killed a humanoid. She’d killed someone!
“Mallory! Fall in!”
She heard Rhemun’s deep voice, but as if in a dream. She was on her knees, staring helplessly at the man she’d just killed. She couldn’t seem to move, to drag her eyes away.
“Come on!” Rhemun snapped.
She looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes that held a horror he’d never seen in them before. “I killed him,” she said in a husky whisper. “I killed a man.”
“Mallory...”
“I killed a man,” she repeated. “I took an oath, ‘Do no harm.’ But I killed him. The setting was wrong. I’ve never killed anyone in my whole life,” she added, her face contorted as she looked up at him.
He ground his teeth together. “You must do your duty, madam,” he said curtly. “Other lives are at stake! Hurry!”
She swallowed. Her eyes went back to the dead man. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Now!” Rhemun snapped.
She gathered her wits and got to her feet. She straightened into a salute. “Yes, sir,” she said formally.
He took off at a speed she couldn’t imitate, but she ran as fast as she could to the next bunch of victims.
* * *
SHE WORKED MECHANICALLY, nodding as people confided their fears, their broken lives, their losses to her. She healed wounds and comforted the grieving. But her mind held the image of the dead man.
Rhemun was rarely concerned about the mental or physical health of a woman who reminded him so savagely of his son’s death, but even he began to notice how Mallory was acting.
He paused beside her when she finished working on her last patient. The rest of the pirates had been routed, the colonists rescued. They were ready to lift. But Mallory was obviously not herself.
Hahnson had noticed it first and alerted Rhemun. It was up to the commander of the Holconcom to deal with her. He wished he could leave it to Hahnson, but the doctor was far too fond of Mallory to manage any harshness.
Pity and compassion would do no service here, he thought, as he contemplated her mental state. He’d seen this in battle, combatants who faced the horror of war for the first time and broke under the strain. They called it battle fatigue. But it was more severe in a woman of this sensitivity. It could not be allowed to continue. He needed her. There was no replacement available until the following year, until the next graduates in Cularian medicine.
“Mallory, we must lift,” he told her curtly.
The woman she was treating, a little old Altairian woman, looked up at the Cehn-Tahr who had assumed his most human aspect—the woman was neither family nor Holconcom, so his true form was hidden from her.
“She is wounded, here.” The old woman touched her own heart.
“That may be,” he replied in Altairian, “but we must leave.”
The woman stared at him. It was a little unnerving. “You have suffered a great loss,” she said in a monotone. “But you will suffer a greater one. Your life contains another tragedy of your own making.”
“Madam,” he began, chilled by her perception.
She held up a hand. “The tragedy will lead to great joy,” she continued, her eyes blank as she recited what she saw. “And to a place in history for your branch of the great Clan.” She blinked. She frowned. She looked up at him as if she didn’t recognize him. “What did I say?”
He gaped at
