LITMIR.BIZ

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of my intense feelings. I have to do whatever I can to save him. Whatever the cost. I can’t go back to the Holconcom,” she added quickly, conspiratorially. “Don’t you see? Even with a memory wipe, I might feel the same for him, all over again, and trigger the same behavior. I won’t put him at risk a second time.”

      Komak’s face was grim. “You care so much?”

      “I care so much,” she said huskily.

      “But, if there is a child, as I feel certain there will be…” he began hesitantly.

      “The child can be regressed. It’s a gentle process. He’ll be absorbed back into the tissues of my body.” She didn’t look at him. “Nobody must know. It would hurt his career, if it became known that he’d fathered a child onto a human female. It would…disgrace him.”

      “Surely he did not say that to you!”

      She didn’t speak. He hadn’t. Not in so many words. But she knew he must have thought about their differences in status. Her jaw tautened. “I’ll do whatever I need to do, for this mission to succeed. Then he’ll go back to his command, I’ll go back to mine. We’ll be quits.”

      Komak looked devastated. This was not the history he had read. Surely the timeline was not so corrupted already?

      “We don’t always get what we want in life,” she said thoughtfully. “I would have liked to keep the memory.” She drew herself up to her full height. “But I’ll do what’s best.”

      He stood up, too. He moved close to her, his eyes wide and quiet and tender. “I will never forget these years with you,” he said softly. “It has been an honor, to know you as a comrade.”

      She smiled sadly. “It has been for me, too, Komak.” She shifted. “I feel…odd.”

      “Odd, how?” he asked, but he was smiling.

      She reached impulsively for a metal sphere on the desk and closed her fingers around it. No human could have made a mark on it. She crushed it in her hand. She gasped.

      He chuckled. “So. We need not ask if the experiment was a success.”

      She looked at the misshapen lump on her palm and laughed with delight. “No. We need not ask!”

      CHAPTER TWO

      Madeline was a combat surgeon. She certainly knew about the reproductive process, in animals and humans, even in Rojoks. But trying to get any information about Cehn-Tahr matings was like pulling stones out of a vacuum.

      She thought Caneese was the obvious person to ask. Although Caneese was very polite, she was almost mute on the subject.

      “You will cope,” she told Madeline gently. “The thing to remember is that you must…yield, and let nature take its course,” she said finally, after searching for just the correct word.

      “Yield.”

      “Exactly! I am so glad that we had this talk. You will feel better about the encounter, now, yes?” And she walked away, smiling.

      Madeline ground her teeth into her lower lip. “Smoke and mirrors,” she said to herself, nodding.

      In the end, there was only one person she felt comfortable talking about it with and that was her partner for the event.

      She found him standing on a stone patio, his hands behind him, watching the sun set over the distant mountains.

      He heard her footsteps and turned. In the robes he wore at Mahkmannah, he was like a stranger. She wore robes, too, of course, but was less comfortable in them.

      “You have concerns,” he mused as she approached.

      “Yes. Nobody will talk to me about it,” she said irritably. “They talk around it.”

      He gave her a long look. “You must remember that women in my culture are not as self-possessed and independent as you are. We have traditions that have existed for millennia.”

      “I’m not denigrating your culture,” she said. “I just want to know what’s going to happen.”

      He raised an eyebrow and gave her a look of mock astonishment.

      She actually blushed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she gritted.

      He laughed softly. “It is irresistible. The brawling, insubordinate medical chief of staff who sends her underlings running for cover, reduced to blushes and confusion about a process so basic that it is familiar even to children.”

      She glared at him. “I might remind you that I’ve spent the past twenty-nine years of my life as a neuter, basically without gender,” she said curtly. “I’ve never felt…well…the sort of things women feel with men. With males. I mean…” She couldn’t find the words.

      He turned and moved closer, so that he could look down at her face. His hand came up and touched her red-gold hair lightly. “Madeline, you are making much work of a natural process.”

      She sighed. “Sir, can’t you just tell me, soldier to soldier, what I’m expected to do? Caneese is the only Cehn-Tahr woman I could have asked, and she said that it was only necessary to yield and endure it.” She shook her head. “Is that what the women of your culture do? Simply…yield?”

      He cocked his head. “You have seen few young Cehn-Tahr women, but you spent some time with Princess Lyceria. You have also been exposed to Dacerian women. Do you notice a similarity in comportment?”

      “Yes,” she replied. “They’re very docile, gentle females. Intelligent, but not assertive.”

      “Exactly.”

      “Then they…simply submit.”

      “Yes.”

      She frowned. It troubled her. “Wouldn’t such a docile sort of female tend to exaggerate the violence of an encounter if she didn’t, well, participate in it so much as endure it?”

      One eyebrow went up.

      She grimaced. “I’m sorry. I’m finding it difficult to explain what I mean. It’s complicated to discuss something so intimate with you.”

      “Indeed. You and I have engaged in many verbal battles over the years, but our encounters have been non-physical. This one will be.”

      She searched his eyes, looking for any sign of what he was thinking. “What do you expect of me, sir?” she asked in a soft, uncertain tone. “What is it like?”

      The question, added to the sudden burst of pheromones exuding from her body when he stared at her, kindled a helpless reaction. His face tautened. Like a snake striking, his hand shot out and suddenly grasped her long hair at her nape and jerked, pulling her face up to his. The eyes stabbing into hers were jet-black. “It is like this,” he said in a voice which sounded so alien that at first it was barely recognizable. It was similar to the sound a cat might make when it was angry, except with words instead of hisses. His head bent, so that his eyes filled the world, and the pressure of his hand forced her body close to his in an arc, thrilling and frightening at the same time.

      Her heart jumped up into her throat. He seemed, for the first time in their long relationship as commanding officer and subordinate, so alien that she almost didn’t recognize him.

      “You begin to understand,” he whispered, in that same odd tone, and for a split second, in a flash of presence like the blinking of a light, he seemed to be taller, far more massive than he looked. She must be hallucinating, she thought.

      Her hands flattened against his robes, feeling the strength and warmth of his chest under them.

      “I am not what I seem,” he said.

      She was a little intimidated, but she didn’t let it show. She nodded. “I know. My instruments and my senses don’t coincide.” His eyes changed color yet again, to a burnished

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