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  After Kohbi slithered out, I went to find Mercy. Despite Cat’s assurances, I still felt that I should apologize for how I had spoken to her, if not for what I had said. One of the girls directed me to try looking in a place she called “the solitude room.”

  “Sometimes when Mercy gets angry, she spends a couple of minutes getting some feedback in the ’sizer,” the prostitute told me. “It’s quiet and helps her work out her frustrations.” She bumped her hip against mine. “Ask her if you can have a turn with my mindset. You’ll love it.”

  I didn’t understand half of what she told me, but followed her directions to the room. I found it empty. As frustrated as I felt, I could use the benefits of the ’sizer, whatever that was. All I saw in the room was an upholstered chair, privacy screens on the viewers, and several pairs of shades designed for different types and numbers of eyes.

  I sat down on the chair and examined the eyeshades made to fit a Terran. Sensors of a type I had never seen before lined the interior frame as well as the lenses. Curious, I slid them on.

  I felt something tickling the back of my neck, and smiled as I came fully awake. “You have two months to stop doing that.”

  Prehensile gildrells slid around my throat and into my hair like a bunch of long, white snakes, while three muscular pink arms tugged me back against an equally hard body.

  “In two months, the contract will be signed,” Cat said. “You’ll be my wife. Then I can do anything to you that I desire.”

  The idea that we would marry was still something of a shock, and a thrill. Thrilling because I wanted it as much as he did. Shocking because there was no record of an Omorr ever taking a human for a spouse.

  That I had once been a professional pleasure-giver, and now was a brothel owner, and that he had been the son of a preacher and now ran my brothel factored in there, as well.

  “Hmmm.” I wriggled my hips, adjusting to the interesting changes in his lower anatomy. The genitalia of Omorr males remained within a pelvic recess, extruding only when they felt an undeniable need to mate. Cat definitely had some needs. “Where are you taking me for the honeymoon?”

  The tip of one gildrell tickled the rim of my ear. “Terra?”

  I giggled like a young girl. “Oh yeah, they’d love us.”

  Two of the delicate membranes on the ends of Cat’s arms spread over my breasts, while the third stroked down over my bare belly to slip between my thighs. What he did with those dexterous webs of flesh was the reason more Terran women should get over their alien prejudices, I thought. Because they were really missing out.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Mercy said as she snatched the eyeshades off my face and checked the inside. “This is my mindset.”

  Being jolted out of dream and back into my own body so abruptly made me fall off the seat.

  “What was that?” I rubbed my hands over my face and looked at my palms; sweat covered them. “One of the girls sent me here, and I just . . .” I didn’t know how to describe the experience.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Did you have fun with my boyfriend?”

  “Mercy, when I put those shades over my eyes I was you. I was in your body. Thinking your thoughts. Feeling . . . I was . . .” I looked up at her in horror. “Those aren’t eyeshades, are they?”

  “Uh, no, they’re not.” She reached down and helped me back onto the seat. “It’s okay, Cherijo. You didn’t actually do anything with Cat. I did. You watched.” She exhaled heavily as she reached over and picked up the now-smashed shades. “This is a mindset.” She pointed to the chair. “And this is a fantasizer. The two of them create neurosimulations recorded from actual experiences. We use this room to relax, and for tricks who prefer to have sex by themselves.”

  “But how do they . . . oh.”

  “Exactly.” She pocketed the broken mindset. “I shouldn’t have left the ’sizer on, but I got called away. Your husband is looking for you. Cat routed his signal to the exam room console. Do you know how red your face is?”

  As hot as it felt, I could only imagine. “I’m so embarrassed. Please believe me, I would never have touched this equipment if I had known what it does.”

  “You didn’t strike me as the voyeur type.” She went to leave and then hesitated and looked back. “You’re still blushing. I didn’t think a doctor could do that. So what did you think of Cat?”

  “He was, uh . . .” I tried to think of a diplomatic phrase. I settled for the truth. “Amazing.”

  “That he is.” She grinned for a moment. “But if you ever touch him in real life I’ll kick your uptight little ass all over this dome.”

  Once she left, I hurried back to the exam room and answered the relay from Reever.

  “Waenara,” his voice greeted me, but the relay remained blank on my display. “I am out at the crash site with Drefan’s engineers. You must adjust your vid feed.” He gave me the code for an upload connection, which allowed me to patch into his envirosuit monitors and view what he was seeing. An image of Trellus’s rough, rocky surface coalesced onto my screen, and moved up and down slightly as Reever walked.

  I didn’t see engineers, Moonfire, or any of the domes. “What are you doing out there?”

  “There is an impact crater several hundred meters from the scout,” my husband replied. “I am walking out to have a look at it.”

  Through the feed I saw the curved rim of the crater. It didn’t seem large, but the blackness of its interior area indicated that it might be very deep.

  We couldn’t link through a machine, so there was no way I could tell if what he had told me was truth or a convenient excuse. “You do not have enough to do with the ship?”

  “I thought I saw something.”

  More reason not to go near it, I thought, but held my tongue as he approached the edge. His gloved hand appeared in the screen, and he directed an emitter into the crater.

  “Can you see what it’s doing to the light?” Reever asked.

  A thousand tiny prisms with jagged bands of purple, blue, and green filled up the screen. I described them to him and added, “Your suit or the channel must be distorting the feed.”

  “No. I see them, too. They’re everywhere.” His voice changed, became almost dreamy. “So beautiful. “

  A dark crater reflected sparkling light, but in the wrong colors. Sudden, nameless panic seized me.

  His helmet isn’t shielded.

  “Duncan, show me Moonfire.” When he didn’t respond, I shouted, “The reflected light is hypnotizing you. Look at the ship. Now.”

  Slowly the image on my screen changed, and I heard my husband drag in a deep breath. “Cherijo, the crater is filled with black crystal.”

  “Don’t look at it again,” I warned. “Walk away from it and go back to Moonfire.” The image on my screen remain fixed on the scout but began to shake. “You don’t have to run. It can’t chase you.”

  “It can’t,” Reever said, turning his head to show me four surface terrain vehicles barreling toward the scout. “But those STVs can.”

  Static crackled over the audio as pulse fire shot out from gun turrets on top of the STVs. The beams smashed into the ground all around Moonfire, sending the engineers scrambling for cover. The four vehicles split apart, moving to surround the scout as they continued to fire on the helpless engineers.

  My screen image turned to a forty degree angle as Reever dove behind a pillar of crumbling basalt and landed on his side.

  “We are not armed,” he said over an open channel. “Cease fire.”

  Several Gnilltak dressed in battle gear jumped out of the vehicles and seized one of the cringing engineers.

  “I claim this ship as my property,” a familiar, pleasant voice said. “You will repair it now.”

  Posbret.

  I used my wristcom to send a signal to Cat. “Posbret and his raiders are attacking Reever and some of Drefan’s engineers out on the surface. They want our ship, and they’re prepared to kill them to take it. Can y
ou send help out to the crash site?”

  “Drefan’s dome is closer,” Cat replied. “I’ll relay an alert to him.”

  I felt helpless as I watched the raiders pull the engineers out from their hiding places while Posbret boarded Moonfire. No one had seen Reever yet, but the raiders fanned out around the crash site, obviously searching.

  “Duncan, we’re alerting Drefan,” I told him. “But you have to get out of there.”

  “There is no place to go,” he said, “except the crater.”

  “No, stay away from it.” I saw the red flash of a tracer beam move across the screen. “Incoming.”

  A pulse rifle fired, and the screen image went wild as Reever rolled to avoid the blast. A second blast sent a slow-moving shower of rock and dust over the screen, and I heard a distinctive hissing sound.

  The sound of his air supply, escaping the envirosuit. “Duncan, are you hit? Did they breach your seals?”

  “No. I landed on a sharp stone, and it pierced one of the suit seams.”

  “Don’t pull it out.”

  “I have nothing to patch it.” His voice sounded thin, and he panted his next words over a peculiar rumbling. “Something’s coming.” The images shifted as he sat up, and I saw one of Drefan’s massive drednocs coming up fast behind the raiders. “Jarn. Prepare for multiple casualties.”

  The drednoc’s mode halo widened, and then sent a strange arc of purple light sweeping through the crash site. As it passed over the raiders, the power cells on their weapons turned black, as did the emitters on all of their vehicles. The energy wave had almost dissipated by the time it reached Reever, but then the image on the screen vanished, along with the audio.

  I ran out of the treatment room and into Cat, who caught me with all three arms, and pinned me against his nearly bare chest.

  “Hey, where’s the fire?”

  For a dreadful moment I thought I would blurt out what had happened in the solitude room. But I had not meant to intrude on his and Mercy’s privacy, and I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed, anyway.

  “I need to get to the crash site,” I told him. “I’ll need a pulse weapon, the fastest surface vehicle you have, and some spare O2 tanks.”

  “It’s all right,” the Omorr assured me. “Drefan’s drednoc stopped the raiders.”

  “Reever’s suit is damaged and leaking oxygen. I have to get to him now or he’ll suffocate.” I slipped out of his grip and ran in the direction of the exterior air lock.

  By the time I reached the suit lockers someone was already coming through the air lock. I saw it was Drefan’s battle drone. It carried two limp bodies under each extensor arm. One of them was wearing a raider’s gear.

  “Duncan? Duncan.“ I pounded on the plas panels separating us, and then the control panel, but the locks would not release. None of the bodies the drednoc carried moved.

  “It won’t until the pressure equalizes and the biodecon is complete,” Mercy said as she joined me. She studied my face. “Well, at least you’ve stopped blushing. That’s progress.”

  “Bypass the decontamination cycle.” When she hesitated, I added, “Or I will.”

  Mercy heaved out a breath and began reprogrammingthe air lock controls. “If I lose my skin because we didn’t scan them, I’m going to come back and haunt your scrawny little ass forever.”

  “Whatever.” I shifted my weight from foot to foot until the panels finally opened and I could get inside. I began yanking off helmets until I found Reever, unconscious, his face covered in frozen blood. I felt a sluggish pulse beneath his jaw. I covered his nose and mouth with a portable breather. “Mercy.”

  “Right behind you.” She rolled an enormous, flat-topped cart into the air lock. To the drednoc, she said, “Put them on here.”

  The drone carefully lowered all four bodies onto the cart, and then gripped the handle as it pushed them into the suit chamber.

  “Follow me,” I told it, and hurried down the corridor toward the treatment room.

  Mercy kept pace with me. “Cat is setting up some beds for them. What else can I do?”

  “You can assist me.” I glanced back to see if the drednoc was keeping up. “I’ll need a clean, empty space that I can isolate and use as an operating room.”

  “I’ve got an air lock for cargo deliveries on that side of the house,” she said. “You can do ten or twenty surgeries in there, all at the same time, if you want.”

  I was hoping I wouldn’t have to perform any. “In here,” I said to the drednoc as I rushed into the treatment room. Cat was waiting, along with Ekatarana and four of the beds from the pleasure rooms.

  At that point I would have put Reever on the floor. “Transfer the men to the beds,” I ordered the drednoc. “Carefully, one at a time.”

  The drone complied, and as soon as the first one was transferred I took out my scanner and began triage.

  “Unconscious, mild concussion, vitals are stable, “ I recited as I read the results displayed. “This one can wait.” I moved to the next body, one of Posbret’s men. The raider had taken a severe blow to the abdomen, and was slowly hemorrhaging. “This man needs surgery. Mercy, get that cargo air lock ready for me.”

  The third man was Reever, and I ripped his suit open to find the source of his bleeding. I knew that if his injury was not as severe as the raider with the ruptured spleen, I would have to delay his treatment. If it were equally serious, I would have to choose between them. Among the Iisleg it was a matter of rank: The male most important to the tribe was given preference. Among Terrans, the male judged most likely to survive had priority.

  The man I loved, and a man who had tried to kill him. It was not going to be a hard choice to make.

  Reever’s eyes opened to slits. “Jarn.”

  “Be still,” I told him. “You are bleeding from somewhere.” Or he had been, for the blood on his skin was now half dried. Something hard and sharp brushed my hand, and I found a jagged rock lodged in the side seam next to his rib cage. “Here is the culprit.” I pulled it out to show him, but he had slipped into unconsciousness again.

  I passed my scanner over the area, but it showed no open wound or internal hemorrhaging, and only some minor bruising around the ribs.

  I dropped the scanner, tore apart his tunic, and wiped the congealing blood away, looking for the wound I knew had to be there. He had lost at least a pint of blood. Yet all I could find was a pink scar that slashed diagonally through a wide patch of contusions. The sight of it made me step back from the bed.

  I knew Reever’s body. The scar had not been there this morning.

  I passed the scanner over him twice more, but it showed no other injury. Somehow his wound had healed between the crash site and the dome.

  Reluctantly I put aside my shock and the rest of my feelings, and moved to the last man. This engineer had several proximity burns on his appendages, but none of them were life threatening. I moved back to the raider with the ruptured spleen.

  “This one needs surgery now, but the rest can wait.” I grabbed my case, took out a syrinpress, dialed a dosage for painkillers, and handed it to Mercy.

  She took it the same way she might a pressure grenade. “Why are you giving me this? I’m no healer.”

  “You’re my new ward nurse. If he wakes up”—I pointed to the engineer with burns—”give him an injection. Try to rouse the one with the concussion, and keep him awake if you can.”

  “What about your husband?” she asked.

  “He’s fine.” I looked at Cat, and tried not to remember how he had kissed Mercy/me. “Are you as good with your hands as . . . Mercy says you are?” He nodded. “Come with me. You’re my surgical assistant. “

  Eleven

  The cargo air lock proved to be an excellent emergency operating room. I used the biodecon to sterilize the air, me, Cat, and the patient, and then set up a manifest station as an instrument stand. I laid out everything I needed and identified each for Cat so he would know what to hand me when I asked for i
t. We gloved and put on two of the disposable surgical shrouds from my case, and I injected the raider with a powerful sedative that would have to serve as general anesthesia.

  “What if I drop something?” Cat asked.

  “I stop operating and stab you in the chest.” Why did Cherijo’s words burst out of me whenever I was operating? I glanced at him. “I apologize. I’m kidding.”

  He eyed the instrument stand. “I hope so.”

  I had no blood with which to transfuse the raider, so I rigged a syrinpress and some tubing to both provide suction and autoinfuse the patient with his own blood.

  “What is making him bleed like that?” Cat asked as I enabled a lascalpel and made the necessary incision to get under the patient’s ribs.

  “He took a hard blow to the belly,” I said as I used the rib spreader to open up the cavity, and several sponges to soak up the blood oozing out of the spleen. “Drefan’s drednoc must have hit him. The blow made a tear here, see?” I pushed aside part of the stomach loop to expose the rupture in the spleen. “In humanoids, this organ filters out old blood cells and produces lymphocytes, which make antibodies. It’s always filled with blood, and bleeds badly when damaged, so I have to seal the tear or it will kill him.”

  “He tried to kill your husband,” Cat reminded me. “Maybe you should return the favor.”

  “Doctors take an oath to do no harm,” I said. “It applies to all patients, not simply allies or the ones we like.”

  Cat squinted at the raider’s insides. “Do I have one of those?”

  I glanced sideways at him. “Omorr have two, as it happens. One on either side of your body.” I remembered how much of Cat’s body I/Mercy had seen and touched, and quickly turned back to the patient.

  “Your face is turning a strange color,” Cat said. “Should I adjust the air temperature in here?”