Endurance

by neetha Napew

I wiped out the display record of what I’d typed, then sat with her and wondered how long “not soon” would be.

  Helen of Troy proved to be as tough as a thousand Terrans put together. She survived the beating and began to heal.

  It wasn’t going to be that easy for me. I put in extra shifts, sat beside her berth whenever I had a spare moment, and devoted most of my waking thoughts on how I could repair the damage I’d indirectly done. It didn’t erase the guilt I felt, but I wasn’t sure I wanted it to. I suspected it was one of the few things that kept me from jumping out of a pressure lock.

  Remember, you made this happen.

  Cloning Hsktskt cells proved something of a challenge. The inner malpighian layer secreted the outer scaly derma, and also developed bony osteodermic nodules during adolescence. Once destroyed as thoroughly as FurreVa’s had been, additional glandular boosters were necessary to simulate the appropriate hormonal changes required.

  My Saksonan intern sputtered as he read the med schedule. “Why must we create a state of artificial puberty?”

  “To regrow the subdermal nodules. She needs the support.” I pulled him over to a console and keyed up a dimensional image of the Hsktskt dermis. “See these osteoderms? They reinforce the skeleton and protect the spinal cord, especially around the occipital condyle, where the skull attaches to the first vertebra. Without them, she’s a walking bowl of jelly.”

  “She could wear an exterior brace instead,” the intern said.

  I raised my brows. “You want to be the one to suggest that to her?”

  Vlaav made no further objections.

  The trick was going to be administering the synthetic hormones without sending FurreVa into premature labor, I thought as I worked out the first phase of the grafting procedure. She had been so careful to hide her condition for months-but why? Surely violating one, rather unrealistic regulation prohibiting pregnancy wasn’t that big a deal.

  Yet I couldn’t discuss the details complicating FurreVa’s condition with my skeptical colleague, or anyone, for that matter. There was always the possibility that breaking a regulation meant more discipline, and she couldn’t go another round with the thresher and live.

  I’d done enough damage already.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  No More Rescues

  I got my answer as to why FurreVa was so determined to conceal her condition when I came off duty one evening a week later and found Reever waiting for me in his quarters. (I wasn’t calling them ours. Ever.) After a double shift in Medical, I was weary and in no mood to spar with my Lord and Over-Master.

  Naturally, he was in a chatty mood.

  “You have been on duty for sixteen stanhours. Why?”

  “I’ve been busy.” I poked at my meal and sipped from a server of strong orange pekoe. “FurreVa needed another four dermal flap transplants, some of Alunthri’s cuts have become infected and Shropana had to be dragged out of Detainment for his weekly cardiac scans.” I put down my utensils. “Guess I lost track of the time.”

  “I will allocate more League captives to work in Medical.”

  I snorted. “Please. I have enough problems as it is.” Then it occurred to me-this was the perfect op-portunity to get more data on the female Hsktskt’s dilemma. “FurreVa refuses to allow any of the male staffers to touch her, and she’s petrified most of the female nurses. Are there any other female Hsktskt I could borrow to deal with her?” And, possibly, shed some light on this pregnancy taboo.

  “Not on the Perpetua.”

  “There aren’t many females to begin with, are there?” He shook his head. “How come?”

  “Traditionally Hsktskt females remain in domestic roles on the homeworld, or serve in the civilian hierarchy.” Reever allowed Jenner to jump up on his lap and absently stroked him. My perfidious cat purred and butted against Reever’s hand, blissfully ignoring my frown.

  “I guess it would be a problem for them to be out with the raiders, considering the nature of their species’ childbirth.” I gave a very real shudder as I recalled the ordeal I’d gone through delivering TssVar’s young on K-2.

  Reever told me exactly what I wanted to know. “Females who serve as Faction forces are prohibited from any reproductive activity.”

  “No sex?” I forced a laugh. This was the last subject I wanted to discuss with Reever, but I had to know how much trouble FurreVa was in. “That’s pretty grim.” I thought of TssVar’s impromptu visit to K-2. “How did the OverLord’s mate get away with being a raider and having quints? He bend the rules for her?”

  “UgessVa concealed her condition from TssVar. Upon learning she was in labor, he removed her from the ship and brought her to Kevarzangia Two. It saved her life.”

  He needed a little reminder. “Hey, I saved her life.”

  “Had her pregnancy been discovered, UgessVar would have been put to death.”

  “Just for breaking the no-sex rule?” The stakes just went from high to terminal. I tried my hardest to sound blasé. “It wouldn’t be that hard to come up with a few maternity uniforms, would it?”

  “If the female delivers a brood, she endangers herself and her entire command.” Reever set a disgruntled Jenner down and got to his feet. “However, if she evades detection and successfully delivers, by tradition she is accorded the rank of nurturer and will not be executed.” He came toward me. “Why do you ask?”

  I was ready for that. “Just wondering why TssVar’s mate wasn’t with him now. It must be difficult to be separated.” I got up and glided past him toward the prep unit.

  He followed me. “Hsktskt do not form emotional bonds with their mates.”

  “No wonder they adopted you,” I said as I programmed another server of tea. Reever’s hands settled on my shoulders, and I went immobile. “What?”

  His breath stirred the hair by my temple. “Do you want to have a child?”

  He’d totally misinterpreted me. Not a bad thing, under the circumstances, but it still made me instantly, irrationally furious.

  “Hardly.” I thumped my server down and scalded the back of my hand. “Ow!” I ran cold water over the red patch, conscious of the fact he had moved his hands from my shoulders to my waist. “Forget about it, okay?”

  “It is a natural, biological need.” His palms slid over the lower part of my abdomen. And that felt horribly good. “I could give you all the children you desire.”

  “Yeah, and you could get a broken jaw in the process.” I pivoted, trying to get out of his embrace, but that merely made matters worse. “Want one now?” I said, an inch from his face.

  “You like my touch well enough in the night.”

  My cheeks burned. It was true, I’d woken up nearly every night for the last week in Reever’s arms, my limbs twined around him. I rolled away each time, but not before feeling his arousal. He’d done nothing, said nothing about it, but I still felt supremely embarrassed.

  “Maybe that’s the only time I can stand to touch you. When I’m unconscious.”

  “I think not.” His long, clever fingers brushed up my throat and over my compressed lips. “I will make you pregnant, Cherijo.”

  For some reason, that was the most erotic thing Reever had ever said to me. And I was not going to whimper with pleasure, no matter how briskly my blood was pumping through my veins. “Thanks, but I’ll pass. I’m not the maternal type anyway.”

  His breath swept over my face, warm and fragrant from the tea he’d just finished. The edge of his thumb slowly traced a crescent over my cheekbone. “You want me to touch you.”

  It was so tempting. My body throbbed and ached with unrelieved needs. So easy to give in to that, to take what he offered. It had been so long...

  Something dug into my skin as he urged me closer, and I looked down to see what it was. The OverMaster insignia from Reever’s uniform. Reever’s Hsktskt uniform.

  Oh, God, what was I doing?

  Even when I lost Kao, it didn’t hurt like this.

  I wanted him. I hated him. I
also loved him. Still loved him, in spite of what had happened. Loved him desperately, passionately, hopelessly. Maybe I’d never told him how much, or how deeply, but the feelings were indisputable.

  And he was tearing what remained of my heart to shreds. Slowly. Ripping a little more out of it each time we were together. Each time I saw the real monster beneath the Terran skin.

  The monster was as cold and Hsktskt as if he’d been born with scales.

  I acknowledged the pain of that. I still loved the monster. I would always love him. For a moment I let myself grieve over that foolish, unwise choice that had never been my choice at all.

  “No.” Words from the past saved me. His words. “No more mindless seductions, OverMaster.”

  Reever had said the same thing to me, back on the Sunlace. Of course at the time we’d both been drugged with aggression-enhancers by a psychotic bent on seeking revenge, so naturally things had gotten out of hand.

  For a moment his hands tightened; then he let go of me and moved away. “Eventually you will yield.”

  It sounded as though he was talking to himself, not me. “I’m going to bed.” And, just in case he had any ideas, “To sleep.”

  He left me alone for some time, and when he did come to bed, I didn’t crawl all over him-but only because I laid awake for hours, contemplating the upper deck. Reever had a very restful night, and was still sleeping peacefully when I left for work.

  I bet he wouldn’t wake up with a migraine, either. Men.

  My headache escalated as soon as I walked into Medical and confronted a semihysterical cluster of nurses. Once I ordered them to stop babbling and pull themselves together, one calmed enough to inform me about what had happened. Somehow, right smack in the middle of swing shift, two seriously injured patients had mysteriously vanished.

  “They couldn’t have walked out of here, Doctor,” the nurse told me as she handed me their charts.

  I reviewed the case notes. One had been in a suspension rig for spinal injuries, the other immobilized to prevent dislodging impacted bone ends in his fractured leg.

  “No, not in their condition.” I’d performed a surgical reduction on the second male, whose badly set femur had resulted in partial osteonecrosis. “This one’s hip would have crumbled, he’d have fallen on his face after the first step.” I switched off the last chart and regarded the distressed staffers. “Well? Were they removed by the Hsktskt?”

  No one made a peep.

  “Come on, someone had to see something. You weren’t stuffing your faces or taking a nap, were you?”

  One of the residents slithered away. The nurses scuffled their footgear and looked humiliated.

  I got loud. “You were all sleeping?” They didn’t have to say a word. My hands slammed the charts down on the nearest available surface. “I don’t believe this. What is the matter with you people?” I didn’t wait for an answer, but went to the main console to signal my Lord and Keeper. Only to discover that all signals were routed through a centuron first.

  “What do you want, slave?”

  To have you under my lascalpel for five minutes, I thought. “I want to speak to Reev- OverMaster HalaVar.”

  “Stand by.”

  I stood by, seething. The staff got suddenly very busy. Good for them, because I was ready to detonate. Seeing the image of Reever in uniform at the Command Center only turned the screws boring into my temples.

  “Cherijo.” He was pondering some data pad in his hand and didn’t look at me. “Assemble on level eighteen,” he said to some lizard standing there, then glanced at the screen. “I am rather busy at the moment.”

  Like I worried. “Too bad, OverMaster. Two of my patients are missing. What are you going to do about it?”

  He glanced up. “Were they male?”

  Were they? I glanced at the charts. “Yeah, they are.”

  “Report to level eighteen at once.”

  “I don’t have time to- He terminated the signal.

  Level eighteen was a remote storage area, seldom accessed by the crew except during loading and unloading procedures. Seven open-paneled sections had been filled with crates of redundant tech, stanissue crew gear, and other nonessential equipment. A team of centurons lead by Reever intercepted me as I got off the lift.

  “Did you find them?” I paced Reever as he headed toward the end of the level access corridor.

  “I don’t know.” He handed me the data pad he was carrying, then gave the guards orders to search every section. Only the last compartment had a closed door panel, I noted. “Do you recognize the chemical composite listed there?”

  I read the list: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous. Since the elements were listed in minute, trace amounts, they could have represented anything from a bowl of soup to hunk of plastic. The levels of hydrogen and nitrogen registered higher than the other three signatures, that was all.

  “Where did you take this reading?”

  “A higher concentration of the composite registered on the ship’s enviromonitors.” Reever activated the light panel for the last section and looked inside the panel viewer. “From in there.”

  Dusty and packed with junk, the storage compartment was completely silent. I would have hit the access panel and gone in to have a look, but Reever held me back. “Wait for the centurons.”

  “Why?” I didn’t like the look in his eyes. “What are you so worried about?”

  He didn’t respond, and two guards came up to flank us. With a frustrated exhalation, I opened the panel and stepped inside the compartment.

  Immediately the smell hit me. So sharp and dense my eyes watered and my lungs burned. I backed out, my hand over my nose and mouth.

  “Seal the room. Now.” Once the panel was secured, I spent a minute coughing to clear the horrible odor from my nose and throat. “There’s high levels of ammonia in there.”

  Reever programmed the room controls to discharge the poisonous air and replace it entirely, which took a few minutes. I wiped the tears away with my sleeve and swallowed against the searing sensation lingering in my throat.

  “We’ll need breathers if we go back in,” I said. “It could be leaking from a storage tank.” Although why the League would want to store liquid ammonia was beyond me. It had been used as an emergency coolant once, but had been replaced with much safer bio-freon gas nearly a century ago.

  One of the centurons produced the masklike units that would allow us to breathe without getting poisoned, and after we slipped them on, we went in. The interior lighting panel wasn’t working, so we had to depend on Reever’s emitter to illuminate the way. The stacks of crates formed a sharp-edged labyrinth, through which we walked slowly. I kept my eyes to the deck, looking for puddles, which is why I found the remains.

  “Hold it. Over here.” I shuffled back a step and dropped down, waving at Reever to aim his light toward my feet. A small pile of what looked like melted chalk lay in a solidified lump. I scanned it and came up with the same chemical composite. Only this time I registered something else-deoxyri-bonucleic acid. “There are a few viable DNA patterns in this. Reever. This was a person.”

  He told the centurons to search through the remainder of the compartment, then knelt down beside me. “Can you identify the victim?”

  My scanner couldn’t, but the main database array back in Medical might be able to. “I think so.” I signaled the shift resident and had him send a recovery kit down to us. The remains were in such a bizarre state that nothing in my experience explained how they’d gotten that way. “What kind of weapon does this to a living being?”

  “I don’t know.” Reever got up, and took an air sample before removing his breather. “The levels are within safety range now. Could the ammonia be used to do this?”

  I could still smell it when I took off mine. “Ammonia alone, no. A few species’ derma are highly sensitive to it, but not to the point of it melting them upon contact.”

  “Melting them?”

  “I’m
not sure how it happened, but that’s the result.” I gazed at the small, sad, white pile. “All that’s left here is skeletal residue.”

  My postmortem only revealed two facts. One, the DNA from the remains didn’t match the profile of either missing patient. Two, I was right; all that remained of the victim was a badly degraded lump of calcium and phosphorous that had once been solid bone.

  I made my report directly to Reever after cleaning up.

  “I want to know what happened to this person, and how the hell someone got two people out of Medical without anyone noticing,” I said after I’d gone over the particulars. He nodded. “And just how did you know the missing patients were both male?”

  He didn’t answer, and abruptly terminated the signal.

  Over the next week I spent what time I could scouring the database, but came up with no answers. Then I found myself with a whole new set of problems.

  FurreVa responded well to the various skin flap transplants and grafts I performed over her back, but the hormonal therapy was making her a bit difficult to deal with. Apparently Hsktskt adolescence is even more stress inducing than the same period in Terrans. She got loud, obnoxious, and routinely sent the nurses into panicked hysterics. Eventually I had to threaten to reveal my confidential knowledge to get her to settle down.

  Either you stop hitting and swearing at the nurses, I typed, or I’m going straight to TssVar and tell him I’m going to soon need seven crates of diapers-and why.

  “I should have snapped your spine when I had the chance,” FurreVa said, turning her face toward the wall panel.

  I adjusted her monitors and withstood the urge to slap her unscarred cheek. “I know exactly how you feel.”

  Alunthri’s condition had gone from pathetic to nearly normal. Whenever one of the staff came to check on it, it continued the wildcat act, roaring, spitting, and fighting its berth restraints. Restraints I had rigged so it could release itself whenever it pleased.

  Conscious that it needed more than a safe place, I had the nurse program the isolation console to play continuous loops of soothing Terran music, from classic Mozart to the B.B. King age of blues. I also altered the interior controls in order to bathe Alunthri in cool, pastel-tinted light.