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  Kanthor got to his feet, all four of them, and padded back to Madeline. “I may not reveal all that I know,” he told her with a glance at Dtimun, who was scowling at him. “But you should not be so concerned with possibilities, especially those which may not occur.”

  She smiled at him. “I try not to dwell on them.”

  “I would have liked a cub of my own,” Kanthor said surprisingly. “But my mate died of a fever. I have never wanted another. She was, like you, unique.”

  Madeline was touched. She reached out a hand to stroke his mane and immediately withdrew it, for fear of offending.

  He chuckled. “You may stroke me, if you like. I learned to tolerate it many years ago, from him.” He indicated the commander, who chuckled. “The Cehn-Tahr are still very humanoid in some respects.”

  Madeline touched the thick, soft fur, and smiled. “On my peoples’ homeworld, Earth, there were ferocious cats only a little smaller than you. There was a word that would apply quite well to touching them this way: suicide.”

  “So it is the lure of the forbidden,” Kanthor chuckled.

  “You could put it that way, I suppose.” She withdrew her hand. “It was an honor. Thank you.”

  His eyebrows lifted. He looked at Dtimun with affection. “Yes,” he said. “She is worthy of you. And the cub.” He growled. “You should not permit tradition to exact such a price from you.”

  Dtimun’s chin lifted. “I have been thinking this.”

  “Would anyone care to explain what you’re talking about?” Madeline asked.

  They both looked at her. They didn’t speak.

  She threw up her hands.

  “We will meet again,” Kanthor told Madeline.

  She smiled. “I’ll look forward to...to...” She looked around, aghast. He was gone. She stared at the commander. “How did he do that?”

  He moved to her and smiled. He didn’t answer the question.

  She recalled that the Nagaashe could jump through time and space and that Kanthor had said the Nagaashe shared tech with his species. She had questions, but she saved them for another time. “I would never mention it to any researcher, but I can understand now why they risk their lives trying to learn about the galots. They’re absolutely incredible.”

  He studied her with affection. “Yes.” He looked around at the high platform, carved from the rock, where he often found Madeline sitting. “This is not your first sight of the rock. I have seen you here, sitting,” he said. “How did you find this place?”

  “Wandering around,” she said. “I like walking. It helps with the pain.” She studied him through narrowed eyes. “I can’t read your mind, exactly, but I get impressions, emotions. This place makes you sad.”

  He sighed. “My elder brother and I played war here, as boys. Our father supplied us with holographic projectors, so that we could build armies and fight, learn to command. We spent many happy hours here.”

  “Something happened to him. Something tragic.”

  He nodded. He leaned against the smooth face of the rock, reminiscent of terrestrial marble, and stared toward the distant mountains. “He did not like the policies of the emperor, what he thought of as the enslavement of other species. He was also violently opposed to the genetic manipulation. He refused to let his son be a subject of such manipulation, which put him in conflict with the emperor. He joined a renegade political organization and paired with an Altair commando group, to effect the rescue of a colony of Cehn-Tahr who were scheduled for genetic manipulation.” His eyes grew turbulent with colors. “I was sent, as the new commander of the Holconcom, to stop him.”

  She grimaced.

  He glanced at her and felt the empathy in her thoughts. “I tried to reason with him, but his mind was full of plans to kill the emperor. He had already employed assassins in that endeavor. He thought that it was the only way to stop the genetic manipulation.” He paused. “My brother’s fate would have been a public execution,” he said tersely. “He would have been shamed, humiliated, and his family along with him. Clan is everything to us. We live and die to spare it dishonor.”

  She recalled that the commander never referred to his own Clan, ever.

  He read the thought, but didn’t reply to it. He was still lost in memory. “He knew what his fate would be. He told me that he would spare my mother and younger brother and sister, and me, the pain of his shame. Without warning, he attacked the Holconcom, with his ragtag followers.” He drew in a sharp breath. “It was over in seconds. You know from serving with us that if we are attacked, for any reason, we retaliate immediately and mercilessly, as a unit.” He averted his face. “I killed my brother. The emperor knew that I would have to, but he sent me, anyway. That is one reason we have not spoken for decades.” He didn’t mention the other reason. His jaw tautened. “Your Tri-Galaxy Council offered me a medal for it,” he said harshly. “The Legion of Merit. I threw it in Lokar’s face and walked out of the council chambers. It was a long time before I spoke to him again.”

  She moved in front of him and looked up. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what it would be like to have siblings,” she said quietly. “I mean, I might have them, there might be others like me grown from the same basic biological material. But I wouldn’t be allowed to know.” She smiled sadly. “My society doesn’t tolerate familial ties, as you already know. My father broke rules to maintain contact with me. He risked his life, in fact.”

  He touched her cheek gently and smiled. “Caneese is fond of him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He came home with me when he was wounded, during the last days of the Great Galaxy War, shortly after we rescued you and some other Terravegan children from terrorists,” he recalled. “He and Caneese had a conversation to which I was not allowed access.” He frowned. “But I believe it had something to do with the reason you chose medicine as a career alternative while you were in the Amazon Division.”

  She was surprised. “It was my choice...”

  He chuckled. “Caneese can, shall we say, influence choices.” He frowned. “Strange, I had never considered her part in all this.”

  “That prophecy,” she said slowly.

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s rather unnerving. Prophecies, I mean.”

  “Especially when they seem to be valid.” He drew her against him and enveloped her with his arms. “You are chilled.”

  “Just a little.”

  He laid his cheek against her hair and closed his eyes. She had surprised him, both with her acceptance of Kanthor and her revelation of unsavory human traits. For the first time, he felt a whisper of hope for the future. Perhaps Kanthor was right, and political considerations were less important than he supposed. He could continue in the military, if it came down to that choice.

  “Since you’re being forthright about hidden issues, can you tell me why you hate physicians so much?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I do not hate you.”

  “Not me. Your own physicians.”

  He hesitated. “There was an incident, long ago, with a faction of humans. It was a tragedy, provoked by them but perpetrated by ourselves. I ordered our medics to attend to the survivors, and they refused. They said that it would foul their instruments to use them on an inferior species.”

  She drew back and looked up at him. “You have court physicians who would never make such a statement. I’ve known other Cehn-Tahr medics with the same devotion to duty, who would treat anyone, regardless of race or species.”

  “Yes, I have been intolerant,” he agreed. He smiled at her. “Perhaps all it needed was the influence of a fire-haired human physician to remove my prejudices.”

  She grinned. “Exactly!”

  He bent and rubbed his face against hers with gentle affection. She closed her
eyes, aware of an odd sensation where his hair was, as if he had a mane there. She laughed, although she thought she perceived a faint stiffening in his posture as she processed and then dismissed the stray thought.

  “I have never heard you laugh as much as you have, since we have been here,” he commented after a minute.

  “I could say the same thing.” She pulled back and looked up at him with a grin. “My dignified commanding officer, romping with a galot.”

  He chuckled. “We play like cats. Quite often, among ourselves.” His eyes twinkled with mischief. “And, at times, even with outworlders.”

  As he spoke, he lifted her in his arms and ran like the wind, prompting a wild laugh from her as she clung to him to avoid being dropped. He went up and down rocks, over fallen tree trunks, over hills and valleys. Finally he stopped, just at the foot of the steps that led up to the fortress and looked down into her flushed, radiant, laughing face.

  He felt a jolt of emotion as he stared at her with tenderness. These emotions were new and disturbing. They were completely unlike those he had felt, so long ago, for the Dacerian woman.

  He realized that it would tear his soul to give up his mate, to say nothing of the child she carried. It had been a shadowy concept when they discussed the mission to save Chacon. Now it was something else.

  Her smile faded as she perceived his unease. “What is it?” she asked.

  He drew in a long breath. “It is not as I expected, this bonding.”

  She cocked her head and stared at him. “It isn’t?”

  His eyes burned gold as they met hers. His arms tightened just perceptibly. “It will be...difficult—” he chose the word carefully, and bit it off, as if it were distasteful “—to return to the life we knew.”

  Sadness washed over her. “Yes,” she said quietly. “At least, I won’t remember any of it. But Strick said that it would be impossible to wipe your memory.”

  “That is true.” His eyes narrowed. “And you might not realize it, but you will retain vestiges of memory that will disturb your thoughts from time to time, like shadows that are seen, but not clearly.”

  She nodded. “That isn’t common knowledge.”

  He put her back on her feet. “It was necessary to use the memory wipe on Caneese, just after she lost her eldest son,” he said quietly. “Only in a limited way, and only to dull the impact of the grief. She became suicidal.”

  She grimaced. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know...!”

  “She does not speak of it. The wipe was unsuccessful, although it had the advantage of smoothing the more difficult aspects of the tragedy. Since, there have been other tragedies in her life.”

  “No wonder she lives among religious people.”

  He nodded. “She says that it is the only peace she has known in decades.” His expression became less somber, and his eyes flashed green. “The old fellow has been in contact with her. That is a new, and surprising development, since they have not spoken for many years.”

  “Really?” she exclaimed, smiling.

  “I think they may meet, at some point,” he added. “That is because of you. The old fellow was rigid in his beliefs and his prejudices. None of us could approach him, even if we had been amenable to it.”

  “He seemed quite formal when I first met him on Ondar,” she agreed. “And hostile, as well.” She frowned. “He had some very odd ideas about what human females were like.” She pursed her lips and her green eyes twinkled. “Women in short skirts running and screaming from terrifying ‘space monsters,’” she added with mock fear. “Did you think we were like that, too, when you first encountered us?”

  He chuckled. “Not after I saw you fight during our escape from the Rojok prison camp at Ahkmau,” he told her. “But he was familiar with the old Terran vids, and he thought human females were docile and fearful of violence of any sort. What a shock it must have been for him when you attacked the Rojok and saved his life.”

  “He wasn’t too thrilled about it, at first,” she recalled. “But when he learned that I wrecked bars protecting the reputation of my CO, his attitude changed abruptly,” she laughed.

  His eyebrows arched.

  She told him about the conversation she had with the old fellow.

  He chuckled. “It amuses me that he unbent long enough to speak to you at all,” he said. “His contempt for humans was far-reaching just after the Great Galaxy War.”

  “Why?”

  “His...” He stopped. “My brother,” he corrected, “had as his advisor a human general,” he said curtly. “My brother was gullible and the human had nothing but contempt for the Cehn-Tahr government. The old fellow hated him, and because of him, all humans.” His lips pursed. “At least, until you saved his life.”

  She had some serious suspicions about the commander’s relationship to the old fellow, but she kept them to herself, and disguised them with mathematics.

  He cocked his head. “You are attempting to hide things from me again,” he mused.

  “Just little things of no importance whatsoever,” she said, smiling. “When do we leave for Benaski Port?” she added seriously. She indicated her belly. “Even a blind man could see that I’m pregnant now.”

  “You and I and Sfilla will leave tomorrow,” he said. He drew her to him and rested his forehead against hers. He sighed. “I will enjoy the memory of this time,” he said surprisingly.

  She raised both eyebrows. “I thought you were brought into this relationship kicking and screaming, figuratively speaking,” she commented. “You were reluctant at best and angry that it required such subterfuge to save Chacon and the princess from being killed.”

  He grimaced. “Personal relationships are difficult for me,” he confided.

  She slid her arms up around his neck and smiled at him. “Not to worry, sir, I’ll take very good care of you and teach you everything you need to know about how to survive one.”

  He burst out laughing. “Which of us is the student here?” he asked outrageously.

  She made a huffy sound. “I’ve been watching vids about how to be graceful and diplomatic and nurturing,” she said. “I admit it was easier learning to pop enemy targets with a sniper kit, but never fear, I’ll get the hang of it before we get to Benaski Port. Sfilla’s a very good tutor.”

  He studied her, musing about how difficult it would be if she had to truly be his consort, instead of only pretending. Her life would be one endless round of diplomacy and détente.

  “You’re brooding again, sir,” she accused.

  He bent and brushed his cheek against hers. “You must learn not to call me sir,” he cautioned.

  “Many Cehn-Tahr women refer to their mates as ‘sir,’” she replied audaciously. “I’ll just be following protocol. Ask anyone.” She cleared her throat. “Well, ask Sfilla, she’s the one who told me.” She studied him. “You know, Sfilla doesn’t strike me as a cook.”

  He struggled not to let his face register anything except pleasant affection. “She is quite a good one.”

  She shrugged. “I guess so. There’s just something about her...”

  He hugged her tight. “You must not miss your lessons in High Cehn-Tahr,” he said, letting her go. “You will be required to speak it when we go out among crowds at Benaski Port.”

  She made a face. “It’s like talking with a mouth full of water.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  “Sorry. It’s an elegant dialect. But my tongue isn’t accustomed to making such sounds.”

  “You are quite adept at it,” he said with gentle praise. He smiled. “Sfilla is proud of your progress.”

  She laughed. “Good thing I only have to pretend to be obedient,” she said, lowering her eyes.

  “I must agree,” he retorted. “Obedience is a word not in your vocabulary
.”

  “I obey occasionally,” she protested.

  He was recalling that she’d leaped from a cliff, blindly, thinking she would certainly die, when he saved her from killing fall on Lagana, a planet which shared the same name as its principal continent. It had touched him deeply that she trusted him so much. He frowned.

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?” he asked.

  “Brooding.”

  He sighed. “Force of habit.”

  “I’ll obey when it’s necessary,” she promised.

  “When it suits your mood,” he returned.

  She flashed a grin at him.

  He shook his head and walked away. She watched him go with affectionate amusement. These were precious days. She was sorry that she wouldn’t remember them when the mission was over. On the other hand, she told herself, hope died hard.

  “It’s the last thing we lose,” she thought to herself. “The very last thing.”

  He heard the thoughts in her mind, but he didn’t speak. There was nothing more to be said. He knew that no power in the universe would make it possible for them to stay together. Even hope died when faced with an inheritance such as his.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DTIMUN WAS WORRIED about Madeline. Her health had been less than perfect since the pregnancy began, and she still had the aftereffects of the crash on Akaashe to deal with. Had the curious Nagaashe not wanted to understand the incursion into their space, and eased the damaged ship to the ground, there would certainly have been no survivors of the crash. But that damage, added to the pressure of trying to perform an undercover mission, with the stress of possible discovery and death, was always present. Even such a short time into her pregnancy, her belly was swollen and she was having some of the more debilitating symptoms of the condition. She tried to hide them from him, but he knew.

  Their accommodations on the civilian starcruiser were luxurious. They had two suites, one for Dtimun and one for Madeline. She shared hers with Sfilla. She had the best food and drink, the finest bed, the most elegant clothing that could be had in the civilized universe. But she was unnaturally quiet. Dtimun had become used to her flights of humor, her outrageous behavior, her lack of convention. But this pregnant human female was a different person altogether. He watched her when she was unaware; he accessed her thoughts carefully and covertly. Her outward calm was a front. She was frightened and sad. She wanted the child. He knew that this was, for her, an unforeseen complication. It had been her choice to regress the child and have the memory of her time with Dtimun, all of it, permanently wiped.