Edris finished the last precious drop of her coffee. “I’m just glad it’s you and not me serving aboard the Morcai.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Madeline told her. “Since Holmes and Watts shipped out, you and I are the only experienced Cularian specialists on base right now. There are twenty in graduate school, four of whom are due to be assigned to Trimerius when they graduate. But if something happens to me, you’re the only backup around.”
“Nothing will happen to you, ma’am,” Edris assured her with a smile. “You’re one of the bravest people I know.”
Madeline hesitated. “Anyone can die. The Holconcom can’t function without a medic who can operate on Cehn-Tahr soldiers in an emergency. The commander hates medics as a rule, and he won’t permit the Dectat to assign physicians to him. He’s reluctant to have me aboard, but Ahkmau convinced him that it was lunacy not to carry a Cularian specialist into battle.”
“He scares me to death,” Edris commented, wrapping her arms around her slender figure. “I don’t know what I’d do, if I ever had to substitute for you in the Holconcom.”
“That’s just the point. The commander agrees with me, that we need to start letting you come with us on certain missions aboard the Morcai so that you can get used to the routine aboard ship.” She deliberately didn’t meet Mallory’s eyes as she lied to her. It was in a good cause.
Edris lost two shades of color. “No,” she said at once. “Oh, no, I can’t do that. I can barely manage here, when you’re away with the unit. I could never...I mean, I can’t...”
“You can,” Madeline said, and in a tone that didn’t brook argument. “You got through medical school. You’ll adapt to the Morcai.”
Edris bit her lower lip. She looked hunted.
“They’re just men,” she said, exasperated. “Alien men, but males are pretty much the same anywhere.”
“Not the Cehn-Tahr,” Edris argued. “I’ve heard stories.”
Madeline raised both eyebrows.
Edris hesitated, but the gossip was too juicy not to share. “They say,” she said in a conspiratorial tone, “that a Cehn-Tahr soldier ate a young Jebob recruit during the Great Galaxy War...ma’am?”
Madeline was doubled over, laughing. That story had gone through the ranks over the years like a fever. Some people did actually believe it.
“Well, they said,” Edris said defensively.
“Edris,” Madeline replied, wiping away tears of near hysteria, “I can give you proof that no Cehn-Tahr has ever eaten another soldier.”
“You can?”
“The C.O. has never eaten me,” she reminded her colleague. “And nobody over the years has given him more cause.”
“You do wear on his nerves, I hear.”
Madeline laughed. “His nerves, his temper, his patience. He’s dressed me down, grounded me, brigged me on occasion,” she recalled. “But he’s never taken a bite out of me.”
That was true. The battles between the commander of the Holconcom and his chief medic had assumed the mantle of legend. Once, Madeline had followed Dtimun off the ship raging about his refusal to let her suture a bone-deep wound in his leg. He trailed blood out the airlock and just kept walking, even when she threw a cyberclamp after him in impotent rage.
“Isn’t it amazing that he never busted you in rank?” Edris mused.
“He did try,” Madeline assured her. “But my father is a colonel in the Paraguard Wing and best friends with Admiral Lawson. They ganged up on the commander and refused to let the demotion go through.” She grinned. “The C.O. was livid! And did he get even! He requisitioned my billet for storage and I had to sleep in the cargo hold for a solid week. He only relented when I borrowed a player from Hahnson and flooded the hold with ancient human drum and bagpipe music.”
“I heard about that,” Edris chuckled. “Didn’t he break a Gresham in half...?”
“With his bare hands, and lucky for him that the power pack was drained.” Madeline nodded enthusiastically. She pondered that. “You know, they really are incredibly powerful.”
Edris toyed with her java cup. “Do I have to go?”
Madeline nodded.
Edris sighed. “Okay, then.”
Madeline smiled. “Good girl,” she said affectionately, as she would have to a younger sister; if she had one. The government restricted information about the parents of children raised in government nurseries. It was one of many laws that she simply accepted, because she was educated to accept it, without question. But after serving with the Holconcom, her attitudes about her government were undergoing some serious alterations. Not that she could speak of them to Edris. Not now, anyway. She went back to work.
* * *
EDRIS MALLORY HAD never been aboard a Cehn-Tahr ship before. Everything about it fascinated her, from the way personnel ran to and from positions down the wide corridors to the temperature, which was several degrees cooler than SSC ships.
“Their core body temperature is three degrees higher than our own,” Madeline reminded her as they jogged toward the Cularian medical sector. “They cool the ship to make them more comfortable.”
Edris was looking at the alien script on the compartment hatches as they passed them. She shook her head. “I don’t know how anybody ever reads that.”
“It’s not so hard,” came the amused reply. “It’s a lot like old Asian languages on Terravega, mostly symbols. Pronouncing it, though, that’s hard.”
“They pronounce names differently according to kinship and relationship status, too, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
Edris frowned. “Why are they so secretive? I mean, we know a lot about their physical makeup, but nothing about their culture or even their behavioral patterns.”
“They don’t volunteer information,” Madeline said, still smarting about her black market vids that had been a scam. “I’ve spent years trying to dig it out of Komak. He won’t tell me anything.”
“You could ask the C.O.,” Edris suggested.
“Only with a good head start,” Madeline assured her. “You just don’t bring up those topics with him.”
“I suppose not. I wonder if...”
“Who authorized you to bring Mallory aboard?” came a terse, angry deep voice from behind them.
Madeline stopped with easy grace and turned. Edris was frozen in place, her blue eyes like saucers as she stared uneasily at Dtimun.
“If I go down sick, you have to have a Cularian specialist aboard,” she said simply.
“You are never unwell,” Dtimun pointed out.
“I could catch that Altairian flu and be laid low for a week,” she replied. “We have to have backup, and there isn’t anyone else.”
“Holmes,” he began.
“Holmes shipped out to the Algomerian sector last week,” Madeline told him. “Besides, he wasn’t comfortable aboard the Morcai.” She said it with a hint of reproach.
Dtimun’s eyes narrowed and his jaw firmed. “I have competent physicals on my own planet, given by my own physician,” he replied. “I do not require the services of a Terravegan Cularian specialist!”
Madeline pursed her lips and smiled.