The Morcai Battalion

by Diana Palmer

  As she motioned, Stern threw himself down at her side and feigned sleep. Let the guard think they were huddled together for warmth, she thought. Perhaps they wouldn’t consider it too odd to find two Centaurians and two humans in such physical proximity. Jaws would fall anywhere in the SSC at such a sight.

  Stern could almost feel the eyes of the Rojok guards on the occupants of the domed cell as they paused outside it to study the occupants. So could Madeline. She closed her eyes tightly and prayed that none of the other prisoners would betray them; especially Stern. She still didn’t quite trust him. At her side, she felt Komak’s powerful body tensing, as well.

  Stern felt the sweat beading on his swarthy forehead. If Madeline had been in a crucial stage when interrupted, the Holconcom commander could be dying even now while the arrogant guards pointed to the human/alien group on the floor and laughed. Apparently they did find the arrangement unusual and amusing. He felt a surge of rage as he considered what was going to happen to all of them, if they didn’t find a way to escape. Damn the Rojoks, he thought furiously, and damn Ahkmau!

  Madeline was counting her own heartbeats and monitoring Dtimun’s with her hand buried in the thick black hair over the golden skin of his bare chest. She was mentally neutered for military service, so of course she felt nothing sensual from the contact. Except that her own heart skipped and she felt an odd warmth in the pit of her stomach. Fear, she told herself. It was only fear. It was impossible for her to be attracted to any male, especially this arrogant, strutting Centaurian son of a…

  There was an odd smothered laugh from Komak; almost as if he read her thoughts. That was ridiculous and only highlighted the extent of her silent hysteria, because it was a known fact that Centaurians weren’t telepathic.

  Just as she was considering drastic action, the guards spoke to each other again, laughed again and slowly started away from the cell to patrol further. She spoke just enough Rojok to understand one phrase—something about the drugs working unusually well, so that the Centaurians didn’t find the repulsive humans bad company.

  She counted the seconds until they were out of sight and earshot. “Barbarians,” she muttered in Old High Martian, which was the only language they dared use among themselves now. “That was just too damned close. I’d only finished sealing what passes for his damaged left ventricle in the new heart! Stern, better check and make sure they’re really gone,” she added.

  He got carefully to his feet, leaving the other three in their positions on the pallet. The other prisoners in their cell, including Hahnson and Higgins, were awake now and aware of something odd in the positioning of their cell mates. They darted quick, apprehensive glances toward the makeshift surgical suite nearby, then at Stern. It seemed to surprise them that he hadn’t alerted the guards.

  It surprised him, too, because that’s what his conditioning dictated that he should have done. But for some vague, barely discernible reason, he simply couldn’t. He felt a sensation of belonging among these people. It was new, and precious and fragile. He wasn’t about to risk it for those bloodthirsty mental defectives who ran this place.

  He took up his position near the synthesizer, looking out into the compound again, his eyes growing slowly accustomed to the reddish glow of the cell block in the darkness. Above the main dome, in the night sky where the clearly outlined jagged mountain peaks met the sky itself, a dark red band from the long-set two suns swept across the stars. In its beauty, it was as alien as the Centaurians in the cell with Stern, and his human comrades.

  Something made his skin tingle, and he turned his head to meet the glowing eyes of a Holconcom officer in a nearby cell. He shivered involuntarily. The alien’s eyes were like a cat’s in the dark, glowing a surreal green. Most humans reacted similarly to their first sight of it.

  He realized after a minute that the alien was watching him, reading his face, in what precious light there was in the dome. Two other Holconcom joined him, also watching.

  “We’re under observation,” Stern murmured.

  “By the Holconcom?” Komak asked in a strangely weak tone.

  “Yes.”

  “They will help, if they can,” the alien sighed. “But most of the other cells are too far away to know what we are attempting.”

  Stern pursed his lips. He began signaling to the humans, a quick and staccato sentence that said only, “We’re trying to save the C.O.” The humans understood. They gave the message to the Centaurians. They nodded and turned, gesturing to other cells, mindful of the guards.

  “Back on ancient Earth,” Stern murmured, “they’d call that the jungle telegraph.”

  “Excuse me?” Komak asked.

  “They’re passing it along.”

  Komak’s chest rose and fell slowly. “They would do anything for the commander. As I would. But your human comrades…”

  “They’ll do anything to find out about the…secret I promised them,” Stern said.

  “Without their microcyborgs, they’re not much more powerful than the humans,” Madeline murmured while she worked. “It will give them points in common while we need them.”

  “A likely summation,” Komak agreed.

  Stern turned toward him, frowning. “Komak, do you think…” He stopped and grabbed his head. Amazingly, he saw a rolling montage of pictures running through his mind, alien and strange. Frightening beasts who fought like galots, the Centaurian jungle cats, tearing and ripping their prey; a woman, a beautiful Centaurian woman, weeping. Warriors slashing at their arms with sharp implements. Then, as the pictures merged, there were others; the Commander, but years younger, on a desert planet, riding a huge furry yomuth; a young alien woman in silks lying dead, blood around her. Then there was an old Centaurian yelling, the Holconcom filing into the Morcai at a Centaurian spaceport. There were flashes of Madeline, not as she was now, but older and more beautiful, wearing elegant robes, and her belly faintly distended…

  “No!”

  The sudden command from Komak, the brown threat in his eyes, brought Stern back to the present. He blinked, drawing in a long breath. “What the hell…!” he burst out.

  Komak stared at him, narrowed his eyes, pinned him with them. Seconds later, Stern couldn’t remember anything he’d seen. He blinked. “Boy, do I need a brain scan,” he said aloud.

  “Shut up and get me another small sterile towel out of that damned synthesizer,” Madeline muttered, working. “This cyberscalpel isn’t fully charged. God, I hope it doesn’t fail!”

  “Bite your tongue,” Stern said.

  He got the towel and gave it to her, his eyes alert to any new threats. He watched Madeline, noted that she was sweating wetly. He could hear her ragged breathing. She, like the rest of them, was stressed almost to breaking point. She was a good battlefield surgeon, but she’d been mostly administrative in recent years. The strain was telling on her.

  Hahnson was snoring. He’d almost come to earlier, now he’d relapsed. Pity, Stern thought, the surgeon could have been a lot of help to her.

  “Can I do anything to help?” Stern asked.

  “If you’re offering, get back to the ship and fetch my emergency kit…”

  “Anything I can do in here,” Stern corrected.

  “Sure. Grab one of those sponges and get this sweat out of my eyes, will you?” she asked, breathing raggedly.

  He picked up a worn, orange-red sponge and soaked off the beads of perspiration on her forehead. “How’s it coming?”

  “Barbaric conditions,” she muttered. “No oxygen ampules, anesthetic or even another bank of morphadrenin. No nanobytes, endomorphins, no cell regenerators…” She stopped, shaking her head. “If it weren’t for the scattering of microcyborgs I concealed under his scalp before we were captured, I’d already have killed him. How he’s enduring this without adequate anesthetic is fascinating. It’s almost as if he can control pain itself, even unconscious.” She leaned back to flex her shoulders. “I must have had my brain baked when I agreed to this half-gass
ed piece of idiocy.”

  “Don’t give up now, Ladybones,” he replied. “Think what fun we can have throwing this up to him when he recovers. It might even spare us a court-martial when we escape.” He grinned, and when his dark eyes sparkled like that, he was just like the old Stern.

  Her eyes went back to Dtimun’s chest, barely visible in the automatic light from the retractors she was using to keep his rib cage open. Incredible, she thought, that even with all its advances, heart surgery still demanded this ancient butchery of opening the ribs to access the heart. It was more controlled in sick bay with robotic operators, of course, and pain screens overlaid with the other tech that controlled breathing and blood pressure. “We both know that I never quit,” she murmured to Stern. “Okay. I’ve sealed the damaged artery in the new heart, along with the damaged nerve receptors that were impeding changeover. But I’ll have to do the changeover manually. That means I have to transfer the load from the failing heart to the new one, but the second heart is unusually weak, and the old one is damaged beyond my present ability to repair.” She tossed her sweaty hair out of her eyes. “Once that’s done, if the regenerated heart can be strengthened, I have to regress the old heart back into tissue.” She shook her head. “This is a job for a specialist, Stern. I’m doing my best, but the transfer may kill him if I can’t stimulate the action of the new heart in time. This is what kills most of them, you know,” she told him with somber eyes. “They don’t allow medical intervention in their own culture.” She hesitated. “Now there’s a cheerful thought. If I save him, I’ll be court-martialed. Maybe the Rojoks will save my career by killing me here.”

  “Stop that,” Stern said firmly. “You’re just tired. Don’t think past this minute. Go to work. Repair the commander so that he can get us the hell out of here!”

  Her eyebrows arched. She grinned. “Nice motivation,” she nodded. “I’ll recommend you for promotion.”

  That really was a joke, considering that clones had no status in the Tri-Fleet. But he didn’t say it aloud. He laid down the sponge and went back to his vigil at the outside of the dome.

  The guards came into view on patrol again, and Stern stiffened. His eyes drifted to the cell nearest him, where several of the Holconcom seemed to be waiting…

  As the guards came close, a quarrel suddenly broke out in that nearby cell, loud and threatening even through the Plexiglas.

  The two guards spared the conflict only a glance, unimpressed. They continued straight for the cell where Madeline was trying to save the alien commander.

  “Watch it!” Stern hissed to Madeline. “They’re coming straight for us!”

  “I can’t,” she bit off, her face contorting as her hands flew with the instruments inside the open chest. “If I don’t finish this suture, he’s dead!”

  Stern’s heart froze like water thrown on dry ice. The guards were moving quickly toward the cell, and there was no hope that they wouldn’t see what was happening this time. No hope at all. Desperate, Stern looked for a way, any way, to divert them. If only he had a Gresham; even a novapen! God, they couldn’t do this, they couldn’t!

  Suddenly a loud, nerve-scraping wail broke the silence in the compound. The guards whirled, wild-eyed, and broke into a run toward the nearby cell where three Holconcom were starting their attack on the humans in the cell with them. It looked, on the surface anyway, as if a massacre was taking place. Those wails, like the sound an angry cat made, were nightmarish. The humans in Stern’s cell tensed and looked hunted as they heard it, as they saw the slow, graceful, deadly motion of the Centaurians nearby.

  Stern didn’t know if prayers got answered or not, but he was grateful for the intervention, whatever the cause of it. “We’ve only got a few seconds before they come back,” he called to Madeline. “Make them count!”

  “Stand back and watch me,” she said tersely.

  The Rojoks had opened the cell now and they were taking two Holconcom and three bruised humans out of it.

  “You will cause less trouble in our interrogation sector, I think,” one of the burly Rojok guards sneered at the prisoners, “and be of more use to our cause. The first fifty of your complement to be interrogated have been sent to the ovens already. You should have made better use of the synthesizers. The ovens would not have been so appealing that you became eager to test them, had you consumed more water.”

  “We cherish freedom above all,” one of the Holconcom prisoners spat at the guard. “Freedom, Rojok. It is more potent than all your neurotranquilizers, more precious than all your pleasure drugs!”

  “You tell him, buddy,” one of the bruised humans seconded as he moved to stand beside the Centaurian and glare hellishly at the two Rojoks.

  The Centaurians and the humans straightened proudly into a tight, military line. They turned in one body and marched off toward the mysterious interrogation sector, their backs as straight as geometric lines, humans and Centaurians together. If Stern had any doubts about the brawl being staged, they were now erased.

  A wild, booming cheer broke out in the cell complex for the departing prisoners in a queer combination of Terravegan Standard and Centaurian. The uproar grew and spread, from one cell to the other, so that the Plexiglas walls couldn’t contain the sound. It burst out like a crude song into chants of “Freedom! Freedom!” that twined into a deep, strong chorus in many voices. It didn’t begin to die down until the five prisoners were completely out of sight. Seconds later, the complex was deathly quiet.

  Suddenly every eye in the complex seemed to be on the cell that held Dtimun, and Stern could taste the tension. Those soldiers knew what was going on. But even the humans were now involved in the life and death struggle of the alien commander. The Rojoks’ vicious tactics had only served to create a bond of fellowship.

  Stern turned to Madeline. “How’s it going?”

  “Another couple of turns and a stitch…Finished!” She hunched her shoulders with a weary groan. Mending torn blood vessels was something best done under proper conditions, and with greater tech than she possessed. But it wasn’t a bad job, she told herself as she tidied up the sutures and prepared to stimulate the second heart.

  “I’m ready for the hard part,” she told him. “Stern, it’s going to take all three of us to handle this.”

  He slid across the floor to her side. “Okay. What do I do?”

  “Assist.” She handed him the small, heavy cardioprobe. “Komak, are you still with us?”

  “Yes, Madelineruszel,” he said.

  “Okay. Get your hand as close to that pressure point as you can without actually touching it. Good.” She leaned forward. “I’m going to force the old heart into cardiac arrest. When that happens, he’ll jump. I’m going to count on you to put him out as soon as you see the first sign of reflex action. If you don’t act in time,” she added, very somberly, “you can make up a suitable eulogy for Stern and me, because the shock will produce a fight-reflex in the commander’s brain and Stern and I will be dead very fast. When we make it to that point, Stern, if we survive it, I’ll need you to apply the cardioprobe to the second heart on the count of odd numbers while I massage the heart muscle manually. Got that?”

  He nodded. “How about sterilization, since you aren’t using the laserscalpel?”

  “I’ve already laid down a field with the retractors,” she replied. “Let me emphasize this—no matter what happens, come Rojok patrols, quasabeams, or fusion tissue bombs, don’t lose your concentration for an instant. Once we start, it’s a total commitment. One second of hesitation and the commander is so much raw meat.”

  “So are the rest of us,” Stern added.

  She nodded. “All right. Let’s go.” She leaned forward toward the blood-rimmed opening in Dtimun’s muscular chest, and looked at Komak. “Ready?”

  “I…am ready,” the boy said weakly, and Stern hoped he was stronger than he sounded. Madeline had tapped his veins already for quite a large amount of blood, transfused as she worked.

&
nbsp; Madeline’s slender, capable hands disappeared into the cavity, straddling the smallest of the alien’s two slick-tissued hearts, one very tiny, the other twice as large as the first. She began to massage the tissue. “Stern, ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on even numbers with the stimulator. Okay. One, two…” She applied pressure, made a turn and a hard jerk, and Dtimun sat straight up with open, black eyes. Black, in a Centaurian’s eyes, were the color of certain death. A faint, deep, menacing growl grew in his throat.

  “Komak!” Madeline cried.

  There was no answer, and the commander’s eyes turned, riveted to Madeline’s face. The growl grew more deadly.

  “Komak!” she called again.

  But there was no answer. Komak was unconscious.

  “Stern!” she called to him. “Get around behind the commander! Find the pressure point between the second and third cervical vertebrae and pinch it, hard! Hurry!”

  He moved faster than he could ever remember moving before. Catching the alien’s thrashing head, he dug his fingers in at the neck and held on for all he was worth. Even as he applied the pressure, he was aware that no normal human would have been strong enough to temporarily paralyze the nerve. For seconds that seemed like hours he was afraid it wasn’t going to work at all. Around them, Madeline’s instruments were doing a shimmy on the pallet as the commander fought Stern’s hold. Concentrating all his strength, Stern pressed harder. In a human, compressing the carotid artery would produce the same result, but Centaurian physiology was very different. Stern groaned. If any guards were within sight of the cell now, and they looked this way…!

  His heart froze as the sound of running footsteps echoed in the complex. Oh, God, he thought, even as he felt Dtimun’s body relax, it’s too late, it’s all over, they’ll see!