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  While I made the adjustments to my vocollar, the Omorr instructed the nurses to begin moving the patients, and then came over to give me an earpiece.

  “This will allow for two-way communication,” he advised me. “I have summoned Torin security to surround the facility. What should I tell Reever?”

  “Tell him that I am working,” I said as I injected the patient with neuroparalyzer and secured her body with motion restraints. I rolled the berth over to the surgical suite, but I didn’t transfer her onto an operating platform. I couldn’t take the chance of jarring her and possibly triggering an explosion.

  Squilyp stayed with the patient while I donned a surgical shroud, and then stopped me as the drone surgical assistance unit rolled its instrument tray past us and into the suite. “I cannot allow you to do this alone. I will stay and assist.”

  The Omorr could be very male when it came to situations like this. He would also die along with the patient if the round exploded while I was operating. Thanks to my bioengineered physiology, I would not.

  “You’ll get out of here and keep me on remote monitor, or I’ll signal your mate and tell her what you’re doing,” I told him as I fastened a surgical mask over the lower part of my face. “Then I’ll signal mine.”

  “You would not dare.”

  I looked at him over the edge of my mask and let Cherijo’s words answer him. “Try me.”

  “Of course you would.” He sighed. “Very well, Doctor. If you change your mind—”

  “I won’t.” I swept a hand toward the ward exit panels. “Get out.”

  When Squilyp had left, I grasped the edge of the gurney and eased the patient through the air lock and into the main surgical suite. The drone had followed its programmed instructions and set up for an intestinal laparotomy while I scrubbed.

  “Initiate sterile field.” As the containment generators created an envelope of clean air around us, I administered the appropriate prophylactic antibiotics and instructed the drone to commence anesthesia before I spoke to Squilyp. “Senior Healer, is the channel clear?”

  “It is,” the Omorr said over the earpiece as I used a lascalpel to make the midline incision. “This is madness, you know.”

  “It is a routine procedure with potentially hazardous complications,” I corrected. “Cherijo’s first surgery after leaving Terra was much like this.”

  “You remember that bowel obstruction?” Like everyone who knew my former self, Squilyp still hoped I would recover the memories of that life.

  “No, I read about it in her entries on Kevarzangia Two. And it was a strangulated colon.” I did not personally recall the procedure, but thanks to Cherijo’s journals and my husband’s telepathic abilities, I knew many details of my former life. “She did not mention if the surgery was a success.”

  “It was, barely,” Squilyp said. “Another physician named Rogan had misdiagnosed the patient, you told me, and you had to remove the entire bowel, which had turned putrid. She nearly died.”

  I felt an odd shift in my mind as learned memories blended with my own. “Strangulation obstruction carries a twenty-five to thirty percent mortality rate if surgery is delayed more than thirty-six hours after onset of symptoms. The patient lived. Did I clone a new colon for her?”

  “She was an Orgemich,” Squilyp said. “That species has twin bowels.”

  I could just imagine what Cherijo would have said: I should have strangled Rogan with the gangrenous one.

  Once I had cut the patient’s abdomen open, I performed a visual inspection of the stomach and small intestine. Jorenians had the same basic digestive system as most humanoids, with a few exceptions caused by adaptive evolution, such as their dualchambered stomach, which allowed them to digest their food in stages.

  “Color is normal, with some arterial pulsation. I see a considerable amount of distention in the valve, but the tissue appears viable. Thermal scanner.” I used the noninvasive instrument to pinpoint the exact location of the mass. “The obstruction is still partially lodged in the pyloric sphincter adjunct to the secondary chamber. That is causing the bulge.” I noticed an unusual, dull yellow discoloration around the insertion point in the sphincter, and felt my heart skip a beat.

  “Use an isotonic lavage,” the Omorr suggested. “You can introduce it through the esophagus and force the blockage to move down into the small intestine.”

  “Not this time,” I said as I studied the scanner readout, although the yellow discoloration already told me exactly what had been shoved into the gut of this female. “The obstruction is a pulse grenade, modified with a contact trigger.”

  “That’s impossible,” the Omorr snapped. “Jarn, if she had that sort of grenade in her belly, she would have exploded the first time she took a deep breath or bent over.”

  “The grenade is encased in an organic material that quickly decays and dissolves once it’s placed inside the body,” I explained. “The process creates a significant echogenic arc of air around the grenade.” I didn’t bother explaining the trigger. If I did, he would insist I leave.

  “If you bleed the air pocket or touch the grenade with any instrument, it could blow,” Squilyp said.

  “No.” Memories from the rebellion rushed through me. Acrid smoke hanging in frigid clouds. Wet, red ice. Kneeling beside a rebel who had bitten through his lips to keep from screaming. Like all Iisleg men, he believed that if he showed bravery, he would be given a second chance to live. He had died three minutes later. “I know what this is. What it does.”

  “Then you know you can’t remove it,” he added. “Close the patient and get out of there.”

  “I don’t have to touch it.” I held out my glove. “Mesentery clamp.”

  “Jarn.”

  “We’ll have to think up a new name for this procedure, Senior Healer,” I said as I clamped off the segment of bowel I intended to vivisect. “What do you think of gastric grenade bypass?”

  “I think I should be addressing you as Cherijo,” Squilyp said sourly. “You’ve become as reckless as she was.”

  “Gastric suction tube. This is not reckless. You should have seen how often we were forced to remove live ordnance from the wounded during the war. Sometimes we had to use blades and our hands, right there on the battlefield.” I made a tiny incision, inserted the tube, and constricted the upper chamber of the stomach. That evacuated the contents of the lower chamber. “The patient should be scheduled for gastric reconstruction as soon as she is stable. I will perform the procedure.”

  “Stop her from blowing us all to the moons,” Squilyp said. “Then we will worry about who rebuilds her stomach.”

  “Indeed. Bypass setter.” I applied the large, viselike instrument to the division between the divided stomach, and tightened the grip until it effectively clamped off the lower chamber. “Fill the specimen container with suspension gel,” I told the drone as I brought down the lascalpel and adjusted the beam. Before I made the final cut, I asked Squilyp, “Has everyone left the facility?”

  “Everyone but us.”

  I quickly changed my gloves and sterilized the outside surfaces to remove any possible trace of my DNA. “I am removing the grenade now.” I cut the stomach in half, and then did the same to the clamped-off section of bowel on the other side of the bulging valve. Once I had resolved the severed vessels on either end, I carefully extracted the vivisected section in which the grenade remained lodged. Dull yellow streaked the entire section, and silver-blue, viscous liquid streaked the green blood dripping from either end. “Specimen container.”

  The drone presented the open container to me, and I carefully lowered the section and immersed it in the suspension gel. The smell of the device made my eyes water and sting.

  “I’m sending out the drone,” I told the Omorr. “Advise security that the grenade is leaking heavily.”

  “Arutanic fluid?”

  “Yes. They must take it to be detonated immediately. “ With the drone gone, I had to pick up my own instruments, an
d I groped for a hemostat. “Can you come and assist me now, Senior Healer?”

  The Omorr didn’t reply, but hopped into the suite a few minutes later, properly scrubbed, gowned, and masked. “How is she?” he asked as I momentarily lowered the sterile field for him.

  “Young and strong. If there are no complications from the vivisection or the arutanic fluid, and we can grow her another lower stomach chamber, she will survive. Clamp.” I stopped the resection as a muffled blast from outside the facility caused a shimmer in the curtain of energy around us. “Security?”

  “Militia.” Squilyp eyed the view panel. “They sent in a combat munitions unit with a blast-absorption dome.”

  Since the building still stood, I assumed they had deliberately detonated the grenade. “How often do Jorenians present as living bombs?”

  “Never in my experience.” His dark eyes narrowed as he inspected the abdominal cavity for a moment. “Jarn, this was not an accident.”

  “I agree,” I said as I began suturing again. “But who would do this, and why?”

  “That is what I would like to know,” the cool, unemotional voice of my husband, Duncan Reever, said over my earpiece.

  Two

  I expected my husband to feel angry over my decision to perform the grenade-removal surgery without his knowledge or consent. I anticipated a lengthy lecture about the risks I had taken and the potential harm that one mistake on my part might have inflicted on me. Reever loved me, and felt very protective of me; he would not accept my decision to operate on a living bomb with equanimity.

  As Cherijo might have said, I was in for it.

  I came out of surgery to find Reever waiting by the post-op cleansing unit. My husband wore his usual plain black garments, but had pulled his long golden hair back and folded it in a Jorenian warrior’s knot. His handsome features remained as expressionless as always, but I could feel waves of tension emanating from his lean, battle-hardened frame.

  “Duncan.” I considered embracing him, but the patient’s blood was spattered on the front of my surgical shroud. Also, he did not look as if he wished to be hugged.

  “Jarn.”

  Unlike most of my friends and allies, my husband thought of me as Jarn of Akkabarr, not Cherijo of Terra. He had fallen in love with me, just as he had with the woman who had occupied my body before me. At times I felt I was the better wife, for the Terran doctor had been too devoted to her work to give him the attention and affection he craved.

  At other times I wondered if Duncan had settled for me because he knew that he could never have Cherijo again.

  Reever’s eyes, which routinely shifted color between blue, green, and gray, now glittered as dark and threatening as snow clouds as he studied me. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “The work.” That seemed the safest response.

  “You were brought here to tour the medical facility, “ he said, “not defuse a bomb disguised as a patient. “

  I heard no emotion in his voice, but in his eyes I saw something that reminded me of dark ice cracking at the edge of an expanding chasm.

  Dævena Yepa. I was really in for it.

  “I had no choice but to operate,” I said as I removed my bloodied gloves. “There was no one else who knew how to remove the device.”

  Reever folded his arms. “Tell me what happened. “

  As I cleansed, I related my discovery of the grenade, my decision to operate, and my reasoning for working alone. “There was no time to do anything but clear the ward and operate,” I added. “I could not risk a detonation while waiting for assistance. Everyone around me would have died.”

  I could not be killed, or at least, not easily. My body had been engineered to be impervious to disease and injury by my creator, who had been determined to create the perfect physician.

  “As powerful as your physiology is,” my husband said, “you cannot regenerate disintegrated hands or limbs, Jarn. Did you first verify if the grenade possessed an internal timer, or a remote signal link?”

  “I did, and it did not.” Did he think me completely ignorant?

  He regarded me for a long moment, and then said, “Tell me the rest.”

  I had made a bargain with my husband: I would not lie to him, and he would not use his ability to read my mind without my permission. We had both kept our promises, but Reever could also read my expressions and body language. He knew me well enough to know when I was holding back information.

  “The grenade is not listed on the Jorenian weapons database,” I said, very reluctantly. “It is one that the Toskald developed only toward the end of the rebellion. The grenade is implanted inside a wounded but still-living rebel. The air insulates it against the victim’s tissues. It detonates only when the air bleeds out, or the trigger comes in direct contact with other human DNA.”

  He knew how desperately the Tos had fought in those last weeks; he had been caught and temporarily blinded during one of the worst surface battles. “Why would they use such a trigger, if it does not kill the victim immediately?”

  This was the part that I genuinely did not wish to relate to him. “To stop the healers who treated injured rebels. To kill the vral.”

  Reever’s jaw muscles tightened. “You are the only Iisleg healer in this quadrant, Jarn.”

  “Who would try to kill me here?” I asked him as I tossed aside the linen and stripped out of my surgical shroud. “The Toskald have been disarmed and exiled to the surface of Akkabarr. I cured the Hsktskt plague on their homeworld, and helped to end the war between them and the Allied League of Worlds. The Jorenians adopted me long ago and, in theory at least, I am one of their Rulers. Who else have I pissed off?”

  “I will find out,” he advised me.

  “That will not be easy.” The choice of weapon troubled me as much as who had implanted it. “The Toskald had many allies. Perhaps one of them seeks revenge for the outcome of the rebellion.”

  Reever glanced at the unconscious female. “She may know who did this to her.”

  “Or she may not.” I shrugged into my Jorenian healer’s tunic and began fumbling with the unfamiliar fasteners. “If the goal was to assassinate me, they should have chosen other means. There was no guarantee that I would come anywhere near this patient. “ I shook my head. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence. I didn’t decide to come here until this morning. No one could have known.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence.” Reever brushed aside my fingers, fastening my tunic as if I were no older than our daughter, Marel. Then he rested his hands on my shoulders. “The trigger was specific. You, Marel, and I are the only Terrans on Joren. This bomb was meant for one of us.”

  “It was meant for the one most likely to reach inside the female’s body and remove it,” I pointed out. “That would be me.”

  “Assassinating you would create worldwide outrage. “ Reever’s fingers tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear. “Every HouseClan on Joren would wish to retaliate.”

  Jorenians were a peaceful, happy species, until someone threatened a member of their HouseClans, the enormous familial collectives in which their society organized themselves and their kin. It was said that they would not rest until they captured and punished whoever had made the threat. The only punishment Jorenians dealt out for such transgressions was immediate execution.

  If one person had been behind this attempted murder, they would be found, declared ClanKill, and eviscerated alive.

  “We will not tell them about the trigger,” I decided. “They will not recognize it.”

  “It is not that simple. You are not only an adopted ClanDaughter of HouseClan Torin; you are Clan-Joren, “ my husband reminded me. “A member of Joren’s Ruling Council, and every Jorenian HouseClan’s named kin. Any threat to you is a threat to the entire planet. The assassins must have known this.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head as the possibilities whirled in my mind. “If what you say is true, and the Jorenians discover that the League or another gove
rnment is behind this attack—”

  “It could start a new war.” Reever rubbed his eyes, the way he did whenever he remembered the long months of searching for me on Akkabarr. He had joined the rebels, and had been temporarily blinded during one of the battles. That battle had brought us back together, although I had had no memory of him.

  I had seen too many battlefields myself. Thousands of faces from those ghastly places swarmed behind my eyes. Stiff, lifeless. Coated with white ice, blue ice, red ice. Torn, smashed, burned. Men and women. Children.

  So many had died. Too many.

  “No,” I said again, the word hurting my throat as it came out.

  My husband glanced through the view panel. “It may already be too late.”

  I looked past him to see Xonea Torin, captain of the Sunlace, leading a detachment of heavily armed Jorenian militia into the ward.

  “What say you, Duncan?” Xonea Torin asked after the militia had inspected every inch of the ward. Taller and broader than Healer Tarveka, Xonea had the same solid white Jorenian eyes, with which he could intimidate with a glance. “Was this female sent to kill Cherijo?”

  “She was admitted two days ago,” Reever said. “The Sunlace did not enter orbit until this morning. She could not have known Jarn was going to come here. No one did.”

  “Then she came here to kill another.” Xonea’s dark brows lowered. “Who?”

  “Her wounds prove that she did not implant the grenade in her own body,” I told him. “Nor did she have any external means of triggering the device. She is a victim, Captain, not an assassin.”

  Xonea didn’t appear convinced. “She must have been aware of what had been put inside her body. She could have warned the healers.”

  I detailed the patient’s incoherent condition at the time she had been admitted, and added, “Blood scans still must be performed, but it is likely that they drugged her. They would not want their bomb to talk.”

  Light from the overhead emitters caught a strand of purple in Xonea’s black hair as he turned to eye my patient. “She could have easily given herself the drugs.”