The Morcai Battalion: The Recruit. Diana Palmer

said respectfully.

      “You were armed?” he demanded of her.

      She ground her teeth together as she pulled out another tool and began to repair the cellular damage. “So court-martial me.”

      “I intend to!” he shot back. “How many times must I tell you that medics are not permitted weapons in combat? It draws fire from the enemy directly to you!”

      “She saved your life, sir,” the eldest of his bodyguard interjected solemnly.

      “Yes. And that’s twice...” Madeline began with defiant humor.

      “Silence!” he growled. He tried to sit up while she was still working on him.

      She pushed him back down. “Stay there!” she grumbled. “I can’t mend tissue on a moving target!”

      The bodyguard stood rigidly, waiting for the explosion. To their amazement, the commander only made a sound in his throat and lay back down in the grass while Ruszel’s deft hands reduced the wound.

      “After all the time and effort I put into saving your life at Ahkmau, I’m not letting some stray Rojoks take you out,” she muttered as she worked.

      “We have already agreed that you most likely repaired me in such fashion that I will never function properly again,” he reminded her.

      She made a face. “You could look for years in the Tri-Fleet and not find another Cularian medicine specialist who could operate on you under combat conditions.”

      He didn’t answer. The rigid lines of his face began to relax. Madeline realized belatedly that he had been concealing the extent of the pain. It must have been horrific, she reasoned, considering the extent of the damage.

      She finished the sutures and applied a sterile bandage. “You’re lucky that the Rojok hit your lung and not your heart,” she said absently.

      “Your misfortune,” he replied, touching the invisible bandage with the tips of his fingers. “You have been warned repeatedly about flouting the regulations forbidding weapons to medics. This time you will pay the price.”

      She got to her feet, trying not to notice the broad, muscular chest with its thick wedge of black hair confronting her as he followed suit.

      “You’ll file charges,” she said nonchalantly, “the board will ask for my side of the story, I’ll call your bodyguard as witnesses and everybody will note that you would be dead if I hadn’t disobeyed orders. You’ll lose your case, I’ll get a commendation, and the Tri-Fleet will foot the bill for all the legal wrangling.” She gave him a smug look from twinkling green eyes.

      “We would be required to tell the truth under oath,” the chief of Dtimun’s personal bodyguard interjected. “Sorry, sir.”

      Dtimun closed his uniform shirt. “Get back down there and check the Rojok camp for intel,” he growled at the officer.

      The other Cehn-Tahr saluted, grinned at Madeline and led his unit back to the dwindling sounds of combat from above.

      Madeline knew she was in trouble. She didn’t even have to note the color of his eyes. It was bad enough that she’d carried a Gresham. It was worse that she’d forgotten herself so completely that she’d shown her fear for the danger he was in. She toyed with complex mathematical computations, hoping they might prevent him from seeing too much.

      He didn’t say anything at first. He checked his virtual combat array to see how the mopping-up was proceeding, and he noted the position and strength of the remaining Rojok troops.

      “Well, I couldn’t let them kill you,” she said defensively when he finally glared down at her. “I’m a doctor. I took an oath to save lives.”

      His eyes narrowed. He seemed deep in thought. Something dark and painful made shadows under his eyelids.

      Suddenly, she saw shapes. Humans. No, Cehn-Tahr. And Dacerians. Rojoks, too. There was sand; a village in the deep desert of Dacerius. There was a beautiful woman with jet-black hair that fell to her hips, and eyes like almonds. She wore the thinnest of black lace veils over her nose and mouth. She was smiling. Then she was yelling, held firmly by Cehn-Tahr soldiers in royal blue uniforms. A shadowy figure was raging at a younger version of Dtimun as he held the female by the arm. She whirled, moved toward him aggressively. The shadowy figure raised his hand and grabbed something from a nearby wall. A razor-sharp golden sword sliced downward. There was an anguished shout, a short scream, blood...!

      She had to sit down. The images were horrifying, even to a physician who’d worked under combat conditions.

      Dtimun was scowling. “Impossible,” he said harshly, visibly shocked. “You have no psi abilities. I checked your medical records!”

      She was still trying to catch her breath. That beautiful, helpless woman. The barbarians! She shivered.

      “Only six other minds in the three galaxies have ever penetrated mine, and they were of my own Clan!” he bit off.

      The telling reference went right over her head.

      “She was so beautiful,” she murmured, feeling sick.

      He turned away from her. “We must go.”

      She knew she should never have spoken aloud. Now she was going to catch hell for that, too. She got back to her feet, shaky and unsettled. She checked the medical banks in her wrist scanner for something to do.

      “You will never repeat what you have seen,” he said, but his lips didn’t move.

      She heard him in her mind. “Of course I won’t,” she replied, and her lips didn’t move, either. “I never repeat anything you tell me in confidence.”

      They stared at each other for one long moment while the realization penetrated. Now it worked both ways. He was reading her mind; but she could read his as well. She wondered how Cehn-Tahr learned how to block probing minds. Before she could ask the question, even silently, the bodyguard came down the hill with a hostage.

      Madeline left the commander with his bodyguard and rushed back to the rest of the command, to see what she could do for the wounded. Hahnson was directing his own medics among the humans of the unit. Madeline motioned to her medtechs and started toward another small section of the jungle battlefield. The sound of weapons firing seemed unusually loud.

      Her contretemps with the commander had unsettled her, or she might have noticed the ambush. She’d gone ahead to search for more casualties when she heard the snap of a fallen limb just behind her. As she turned to see who was following her, there was a sharp pain in her head and then, darkness.

      * * *

      “WHERE IS RUSZEL?” Dtimun asked Hahnson as he and his bodyguard joined the rest of the unit.

      “Maddie?” Hahnson looked dazed. “Sir, I haven’t seen her.”

      “She came this way. She must be here.”

      Hahnson called one of his assistants over. “Have you seen Dr. Ruszel?” he asked.

      “Yes, sir,” the younger man acknowledged. “She went ahead to look for any casualties we might have missed. She’s only been gone for a few minutes...”

      Dtimun was a blur of red, moving so fast that his own bodyguard was hard-pressed to close the distance between them. He looked for her in his mind. But he couldn’t find her. The lack of communication was...disturbing. His red-haired medic tended to overshoot her mandate in battle, often rushing into trouble. He recalled Chacon’s timely interference at Ahkmau during the escape of the Morcai Battalion from imprisonment, when Madeline had been treating a wounded comrade and didn’t see Rojoks creeping up on her with deadly intent. Her courage was legendary. But she sometimes had poor impulse control. He didn’t like this. It was very unusual that he couldn’t touch her mind when he liked. He did it more often than he cared to admit lately, and often without her knowledge.

      He tossed a curt