He was more wary than most of his race about interspecies relationships. In his youth, his defiance of the rules had ended tragically. It must not happen again. However, he had to admit that Ruszel was the most interesting, and desirable, female he had ever known. If regulations forbidding it had not carried the death penalty in both their societies, and the difference in their species not so great, his reaction to her might have been very different.
As it was, he put her out of his thoughts and went back to work.
* * *
MADELINE RUSZEL WAS animated as she explained her confrontation with Dtimun to Holt Stern and Dr. Strick Hahnson in her office at the base medical center.
“He was furious!” she chuckled, her green eyes gleaming. “But he let me off with a lecture. I didn’t even draw brig time for the gun. Of course, it was Flannegan’s gun,” she added.
“Not really.” Dr. Strick Hahnson grinned. “Flannegan knocked out a Jebob tech and stole it from him to bash you in the head.”
“You’re going to get yourself in serious trouble one of these days, Ladybones,” Stern said somberly. “The old man won’t overlook these infractions forever.”
“He’s been overlooking them for almost three years,” she reminded him.
“Yes, but the casualty lists are growing longer, and he’s more somber than I’ve ever known him,” Hahnson put in. He sighed. “He’s worried.”
“Aren’t we all?” Stern agreed. “I thought capturing Mangus Lo would end the Rojok threat. Was that naive, or what?”
Madeline could have answered that he was naive, in a sense. His entire life span amounted to only a little under three years. Like Hahnson beside him, he was a clone. The Rojoks had killed their originals; Stern on Terramer during the rescue of the colonists, and Hahnson on Ahkmau in a bout of torture that still could make Madeline sick to her stomach. Stern had fought off his conditioning and helped save his comrades. Hahnson had been cloned and returned to them by Dtimun as compensation, as he put it, for pulling them out of the Terravegan military and into the Holconcom. The human clones of her friends still had most of the memories of their originals. So the bond between the three officers was as strong as it had ever been.
That was nonregulation, of course. All members of the Terravegan military were mentally neutered before they ever put on a uniform if they were slated for space duty. The authorities had decided that most conflicts were based on sexual or violent emotional issues. They simply used chemical means to remove the ability to bond from members of the military. But once in a while, a candidate fell through the cracks. Madeline was one. So was her father, Clinton Ruszel, a colonel in the SSC Paraguard Wing. Although she’d been reared in a government nursery, Madeline was one of the few children who actually knew one of her birth parents. Her father had contacted her when she was very small. In fact, he and Dtimun had saved her from terrorists in the Great Galaxy War. Dtimun didn’t look it, but he was eighty-nine human years of age. He could have passed for a human in his thirties. He was only in the middle years of his life, at that. He could look forward to another eighty-nine years or more before he died.
“You drifted off again,” Hahnson mused, tapping her on the hand.
“Oh! Sorry.” She smiled self-consciously. “I was thinking about...” She started to say Ahkmau, but that would have brought back really awful memories for all three of them. “I was thinking about how I ended up being the first woman on a Holconcom ship.”
Stern whistled through his teeth. “Now, there’s a story of legend.”
“You aren’t kidding,” Hahnson laughed. “Old Tnurat Alamantimichar, the Cehn-Tahr emperor, had a screaming fit about that.”
She grinned. “We heard that he sent the officer who reported my assignment to the brig for a standard month.”
“Well, the C.O. does do everything he can think of to tick off the emperor,” Hahnson commented. “They’ve had an ongoing feud for decades. Nobody knows what started it, but it’s heated up in the past few years. Your assignment to the Holconcom tied the old emperor up in knots. He can order people killed on Memcache, the home planet of the Cehn-Tahr,” he added, giving the true name of the race that humans in first contact had mistakenly called Centaurians, thinking they came from the star-system nearest old Earth.
“He’s an emperor,” Madeline pointed out. “Couldn’t he just order the C.O. to give me back to Lawson?”
“That’s a whole other story,” Hahnson mused. “You see, old Tnurat was the first commander of the Holconcom. He gave it, and its commander, absolutely autonomy during the Great Galaxy War and thereafter. He can’t command it. Neither can the Cehn-Tahr Dectat, their parliament. Dtimun has absolute authority.”
“I begin to see the light,” Madeline said, grinning. “Poor old emperor.”
“He is, sort of,” Hahnson said thoughtfully. “He only has one child left, a daughter, the princess we rescued from Ahkmau. All his sons are dead, including the one you tried to treat on Terramer, the day we met the Holconcom for the first time.”
“I’d forgotten that his son died that day. Does he have a wife?” She frowned. “Do Cehn-Tahr have wives, or do they have harems?” she continued absently.
“You’re our resident Cularian medicine specialist,” Stern pointed out. “Shouldn’t you know the answer to that?”
She gave him a droll look. “Cehn-Tahr social behaviors, and mating rituals, are forbidden knowledge. We aren’t even allowed to research them.” She had an angelic expression on her face.
Hahnson raised a blond eyebrow. “There are black-market vids that purport to explain them.”
She shifted some virtual paperwork. “I’ve heard about those.”
“Have you also heard that they’re filmed in a studio in Benaski Port by people who’ve never even seen a Cehn-Tahr?” Hahnson persisted.
She gasped. “They’re what? Those pirates!” she raged. “I paid two hundred mems for...for...” She broke off. They were giving her odd looks. She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “I mean, why would someone pay so much money for misinformation?” she corrected innocently.
Her comrades laughed.
“There’s a much easier way. Ask the C.O.,” Stern suggested.
Madeline actually flushed. “Are you nuts? They’d space him for even listening to such a question. They’d space me for asking it.”
“I was assigned to medical duty with the Cehn-Tahr during the Great Galaxy War,” Hahnson recalled. His eyes lowered. “There are things humans are never allowed to learn about them.”
Madeline was openly curious. “Such as?”
He looked up and smiled sadly. “Just things.”
“Didn’t you learn something you could tell me?” she persisted.
He hesitated, as if weighing his answer. “Well, Cehn-Tahr mark their mates in some ancient rite of passage.”
Madeline was taking notes. “Mark them. How?”
Hahnson shook his head. “Don’t know. But it does leave a scar.” He lifted his eyebrows again. “Does that help?”
“Not a lot,” she sighed. She leaned her chin on her elbow. “Rojoks are a lot more forthcoming. But their customs aren’t the same as Cehn-Tahr. I mean, what if I ever have to treat a social disease or give counseling to a Cehn-Tahr woman? I’d be useless.”
“They don’t have social diseases,” Hahnson said. “Because they don’t frequent