by Speer, Flora
She saw his hands tighten into fists over the gloves when she said that, and she shut her ears to the curse he uttered. Afraid to look directly at him, she glanced around the chamber instead. Surprised and a little dazed at the sight, she noted the neat pile of all the ship’s medical supplies at one side, and the almost total destruction of the bulkhead into which the shaft opened.
“Did you tear all of this away to try to reach me?”
“It was the only thing I could think of to do.”
She wished she could burst into tears and throw herself into his arms. She wanted to beg him never to let her go. But even at such an emotional moment she found she could not disgrace herself in that way. Instead, to cover her feelings, she took refuge in a cool, professional manner.
“It’s really too bad you did so much damage. Now you will have to put it all back together again or Tarik will be angry.”
“Are you all right?” He was frowning, as if he expected some wild, emotional reaction from her.
“Perfectly,” she answered.
“I envisioned you falling into the main propulsion duct,” he said in a tone that suggested he was trying to frighten her into an emotional response. “How did you get out?”
“I crawled.” She paused to take a breath while he repeated her words, staring at her again. “You may report to Tarik that the cable is reconnected and the dial reset. I am certain the repair will hold.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked, gazing hard at her.
She wasn’t, and she knew he knew it, but she wasn’t going to admit it to him.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?” She was finding it increasingly difficult to speak clearly.
“Let me see your hands.” He took them in his. “Merin, these are serious cuts.”
“Then repair them, please. I notice you have your supplies handy.” She found she had to choose each word with great care. Her tongue was unexpectedly thick and slow. “I would like to clean up and put on a fresh treksuit and coif.”
“Merin.” He was holding tightly to her wrists.
“I am off-duty now, am I not?” He seemed so far away to her. There was a ringing in her ears. Merin fought to keep her voice steady. “Would you please repair my hands so I can go to my cabin? I am a bit tired.”
“So you should be. Sit here.” He led her to the ladder, where he made her sit on one of the steps. She could not relax. If she did, she might not be able to stand up again. She sat at rigid attention while he cleaned the torn flesh on her hands, used the sonic regenerator to repair a ligament or two, closed the wounds, and covered each palm with plastiskin. As she had expected, he gave her two injections against infection, then scanned her with the diagnostic rod to be sure she had no other injuries.
“You need rest,” he said, his hand on her elbow to help her rise.
“As soon as I am clean again, I shall endeavor to sleep,” she replied, moving toward the hatch with care so he would not see her stagger.
“I don’t think it’s going to be much of an endeavor.” He was smiling at her, but his eyes were serious. “You are suspiciously calm and controlled.”
“Why should I not be? Isn’t your usual complaint against me that I am always well-controlled and disciplined?” It was taking more and more effort for her to speak coherently.
“If you want anything, if you feel unwell,” he began, his smile fading.
“I know where to find you. Thank you, Herne. My hands feel better already.” With that, she left him.
She had not gone two steps into the passage leading away from the propulsion chamber before she had to hold onto the railings along the bulkhead to keep herself from falling. Brilliant, multicolored spots whirled before her eyes and the ringing in her ears was now accompanied by an insistent buzzing in her mind. Wavering and stumbling, she slowly made her along the passages to her cabin.
She still had sense enough to seal the hatch behind her so Herne could not enter to disturb her without using special security clearance. Calling up all of her Oressian discipline to keep herself erect, she pulled off her soiled coif and ripped away the torn and dirty treksuit and tossed both into the recycling bin.
She battled rapidly weakening knees and a growing nausea to stand for the necessary one minute in the sonic cleansing chamber. That made her feel a little better, since it was narrow and close, like the cubicles she had known as a Young One. But when she emerged into her cabin again the ringing in her ears blotted out the vibration of the ship. She could no longer focus her eyes, nor would her knees hold her upright. But she did make it to her bunk before her Oressian training finally gave way, allowing her to do one more thing that she had never before done in her life.
Merin fainted.
Chapter 8
Herne watched Merin come onto the bridge. She was pale, a little strained about the eyes, but otherwise she looked normal. He wanted to put his arms around her, to hold her close and protect her from all harm.
It had taken him hours to repair the bulkhead he’d torn to pieces in his desperate attempt to rescue her. He could only imagine what her thoughts must have been when she realized that she was almost certainly doomed to a terrible death. But she had not given up. With incredible determination she had worked her way back to safety. He was still fighting his own rage and frustration at his inability to help her through that ordeal.
Before replacing the grate in the restored bulkhead he had climbed up on the ladder to shine his handlight into the shaft. He’d seen the scrapes her boots had made in the metal during her slow, backward, uphill progress, and he had seen the bloodstains. Shaking his head in admiration of her courage and anger for what she had endured in that shaft, he had slammed the grate across the opening with a savage gesture.
Now he saw her looking cool and distant in a fresh orange treksuit, her clean white coif neatly in place and strapped beneath her chin, and he wanted to shake her. She was so determined to conceal her feelings, no matter what happened, yet Herne was convinced that she would prove to be a woman of passion, if only he could reach her deeply repressed emotions.
“I trust you slept well?” he said, watching closely for any sign that she was trying to hide illness or a delayed reaction to her trials in two different shafts.
“I always sleep well.”
Herne doubted that, but he made no comment on her claim. “I’m glad you are safe,” he told her.
“Why would I not be?” She sounded surprised.
“You were far from safe in that shaft.”
“But I am safe now.”
Herne thought he would go mad if she did not soon change that quiet, unemotional voice and those idiotically neutral responses. He held his arms tight at his sides, clenching his fists. He wanted to kiss her, to beat her, to hold her in his arms and tell her he’d never let anything hurt her again, to shake her and scold her until she cried – and he wanted to do all of those things at the same time. Most of all, he wanted desperately to make love to her, to hear her cry out his name as she dissolved into rapture.
“May I have your report on your watch, please, Herne?”
Now he wanted to strangle her. His fingers itched to feel her slender neck. He had torn half the ship apart trying to reach her when he believed she was in danger, then he had put the entire mess back together again, and the only reward he got for all his trouble was her cool little voice asking for a star-blasted report. If she said one more word he was going to kill her and send her body into deep space through the decompression hatch the Cetans had once used for disposal of their unwanted prisoners.
He’d be damned to everlasting torment if he ever did anything for her again. She could fall through any blasted shaft she wanted and burn to a cinder in the propulsion system and he wouldn’t care. If she were wounded, he’d let her bleed to death, physician’s oath or no. He wanted nothing more to do with a stubborn, cold-blooded Oressian who wouldn’t even say thank you.
“Is something wrong?” She turned the fu
ll power of her purple-flecked brown eyes on him. She was almost smiling. There was a definite upward tilt to the corners of her lovely mouth. Herne’s frustrated wrath began to drain away.
“I’ve been worried about you.” He took a step toward her, and she did not move backward. Herne’s heart began to pound with a heavy, unsteady beat. He was going to kiss her. Before he left the bridge he was going to feel her slender frame in his arms.
“It is kind of you to concern yourself with my welfare,” she said, “but as you can see, there was nothing wrong with me that could not be cured by a few hours of rest. Now, the report, if you please.”
“Solar flares have increased during the last eight hours. The air circulation system stopped for a few minutes. I’m not sure exactly what was the matter with it, but I turned a few dials for a while and it came back to normal. The heating system also went out, but that’s back, too.” He went on, speaking as if he were a perfectly sane man, when in fact he was drowning in her eyes and slowly going mad with wanting her. “Obviously, the violent storms on the sun’s surface are affecting the Kalina. I have relayed all of the pertinent information to Tarik and have made appropriate entries in the ship’s log.”
“Thank you, Herne. Relieving you of duty.” Merin moved toward her usual seat at the science officer’s console.
“Not yet.” He caught her arm. “I still have a few minutes left on my watch.”
He transferred his grip to her wrist, holding her hand up so he could see it. With a practiced motion of his other hand, he stripped off the plastiskin. The lacerations on her palm were healing nicely with only a slight pink swelling to indicate how much damage had been done.
“Let me see the other one; then I’ll put on fresh dressings.” It was as good an excuse as any other he could think of and it gave him a legitimate reason to touch her. He got out the medkit that was always kept on the bridge and found the plastiskin. After he finished with her hands she stood rubbing the piece of plastiskin on her right palm. He nodded, understanding. “It will itch for another day or two, until it is completely healed.”
“I do appreciate everything you have done for me,” she said. “Everything.”
He touched her right cheek, where she still bore the tiny scar from her last injury. To his surprise, she turned her head a little, leaning her face into his hand. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, as if to stop it from trembling, but she did not move away from him as he expected she would. She stayed as she was, with her cheek against his hand. He heard the soft catch of her breath.
“Oh, Merin.” The words left his lips like a sigh. Her eyelids fluttered, then lifted, and once again he was lost in the depths of her purple-brown gaze.
She raised her face to him, parting her lips to accept his kiss. He gathered her closer and she did not protest. She was slim yet strong in his arms, and he felt her hands on his back, holding on to him, caressing his shoulders and down along his spine. Herne let one of his hands wander down her back to catch her hips and pull her hard against him, letting her feel his hot need of her.
She moaned a bit, but did not pull away. Surprise and delight filled him. While he could still think, he began to consider where the nearest bunk might be. Her lack of protest made him think she wanted him as much as he wanted her. They would give each other such joy. He would see to it that she was completely fulfilled, and as for himself, she was everything he had ever wanted.
He touched the pressure sensitive strip at the neck of her treksuit, pushing it open down to the gentle valley between her breasts. He slid his hand beneath the orange fabric to touch the high, round sweetness, and felt the tip of it spring into instant hardness. His lips found the hollow of her throat.
“Don’t. Please stop.” Merin pulled back.
“I thought you wanted this.”
“I do. You’ll never know how much I do. But I can’t. Whatever you were planning to do to me, it is forbidden.”
“Of course.” In his voice was all the scorn he felt for the Oressian strictures that kept her from accepting him as her lover. “I should have known. You did warn me, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault, Herne. I allowed you to touch me, knowing I should not.”
She looked so forlorn that his heart melted. The ever-present anger, which had been rising in him at her refusal, was dissipated, and the passion that had roared in his ears and his mind was muted into a controllable level of desire. He tried to reassure her.
“We are both at fault. I instigated it. I pursued it. You only allowed it.”
“Thank you for saying that, even though it is not entirely true.”
“I suppose you want me to leave the bridge now.” She nodded, her face closed and tight. He had the oddest feeling that if he stayed a little longer she would begin to cry, and he thought she would not want him to see her tears.
At the hatchway into the passage that led from bridge to cabins, he paused to look back. Merin’s gaze was fixed on the deck, her hands twisted together in the way he had seen before, as though she would try to wring out all her problems and her forbidden needs through her fingers. “Merin, you know, don’t you, that one day we will finish what we started here?”
“It was finished here, a moment ago,” she said.
“You are wrong. It hasn’t really begun.”
He was gone and she could catch her breath again. Twisting her hands together, Merin sank into the captain’s chair. She was still unsettled from her experience in the shaft eight hours earlier. Upon regaining consciousness after fainting onto her bunk, she had engaged in a fit of emotional tears most unseemly for one who claimed Oressian origins. During her off-watch hours she had slept badly, her rest interrupted by dreams in which she was falling down an almost vertical shaft and out into the wide nothingness of the main propulsion duct. Those nightmares had been followed by sensuous dreams in which Herne was touching her legs and her hips. The waking embrace they had just shared had seemed like a continuation of those dreams, until he opened her treksuit.
Valiantly, Merin faced the debacle in her mind, the ruin of all her childhood conditioning. The recent perils she had undergone and her close brush with death had propelled her far beyond her previous rule- and law-limited existence to a new mode of thought in which she could accept Herne’s desire for her, and even her own growing tenderness toward him.
But there was one barrier between them that could never be destroyed. It was clear to Merin that she could never tell Herne how important he had become to her, for if they grew close, he would inevitably learn the truth about her. And when he knew, he would turn from her in revulsion.
She sat rubbing her still-aching arms and shoulders while she planned the performance she must carry out from the present moment into the future, until she died or left Tarik’s colony. She could not let Herne see how much she had changed. It was essential that he believe she was still the rigid Oressian-trained woman she had been when they first met. Only in that way could she hope to maintain his respect for her and, perhaps, just perhaps, salvage a modicum of friendly feeling on his part.
* * * * *
The solar flares had risen to levels that repeatedly interfered with instruments on the Kalina, and with messages between ship and Home. It seemed likely that Tarik would soon order Herne and Merin to take the Kalina out of orbit and away from Dulan’s Planet. Because they were expecting the order, they were not surprised to hear Tarik’s voice break through the static on the communicator. It was the overlapping hour of the watch, so both of them were on the bridge. Herne had just begun to eat from a plate he had brought in from the galley.
“You are to leave the Kalina and return to headquarters at once,” Tarik said.
Herne paused with a piece of bread halfway to his mouth.
“Are you saying you want us to leave the ship unattended?” he asked. “That’s contrary to your original directive when we first landed on the planet.”
He was answered by a crackle of loud static.<
br />
“…return to headquarters at once,” Tarik’s somewhat broken voice repeated.
Herne pushed his plate aside. Merin caught it just before it would have fallen off the console. She watched him working at the communicator, trying to clear the sound.
“Tarik,” Herne shouted into the mouthpiece, “there is a lot of interference, and I can’t hear you clearly. Repeat again, please. Do you want us to abandon the Kalina?”
There was another burst of static before Tarik’s voice sounded again.
“Leave the Kalina. Return at once.” The communicator went silent.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Herne insisted. “We are safer here than on a shuttlecraft; the Kalina hasn’t sustained any serious damage; we are not under attack. Why does he want us to leave?”
“Could he have received a communication that we don’t know about?” Merin suggested.
“It’s unlikely, but then, Reid and Carlis, who are the official communications officers, are at Home with Tarik. I suppose they could have picked up a low-level message that we missed.”
“Or perhaps Osiyar is aware of some danger to the ship.” Merin set the plate she was still holding down on the captain’s chair and went to another panel of lights to check an abnormality she suddenly noticed.
“I guess Osiyar’s telepathy is always a possibility.” Still Herne sat at his console, pushing buttons. “Now the communications equipment is totally dead.”
“Herne, look.” Merin pointed to the panel in front of her. “Air circulation has stopped. The heat just went off, and the water reconditioning machinery, too. The entire ship is shutting down, one system after another.”
“That squares it. Tarik knows something we don’t.” Herne stood, caught Merin’s arm, and pulled her toward the hatchway. “I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of staying on a ship with no functioning life systems. If one system went down, we could fix it, but we can’t fix everything at once, and we can’t stay here with no air or heat and no communications. We are going to obey Tarik’s orders right now, without further discussion.”