The Morcai Battalion: The Rescue

It wasn’t what she wanted for her life. Her hunger for a child had led her to apply to a government breeder colony, where she’d tried desperately to be accepted. But she had recessive genes—obvious in her blond hair and blue eyes—and recessive genes were right out of fashion at the moment. The bureaucrats in the Familial Requisitions Ministry decided from generation to generation which traits should be passed down and which suppressed. In this generation, only dark-haired, dark-eyed children were wanted. Edris would mess up the works with her sloppy recessive genes. So she’d been turned down, and the only venue left to her was medical service attached to the military.

She wasn’t a military sort of person, really, but she was a physician. So she became a frontline consultant in Cularian medicine, and agreed to the mental neutering, which was usually done at the age of six. While Edris had been in medical school, and not serving in active military, it had been deferred. But once she went into a combat position, the neutering was requisite. It was dangerous in a woman of twenty-two, and sometimes ineffective, but she’d faced it bravely. She had two strikes against her already: she’d failed to be chosen as a breeder and she’d washed out of combat school. One more mistake and she’d face Reboot, the most secret and terrifying fate possible to a Terravegan. She couldn’t think about that. She didn’t dare.

She could manage this assignment. Dr. Ruszel had trained her well. If only Edris didn’t have the painful lingering legacy of an incident in medical school that had caused minor brain damage. Dr. Hahnson knew, and Dr. Ruszel. They’d shielded her from discovery, which would have meant washing out of medical school, and again facing the reality of Reboot. Fortunately, the doctors assessing her for breeding status hadn’t bothered with her neurology, except a cursory look at its base cellular structure, because her coloring had already cost her any real consideration. They hadn’t told her at the time, of course. She’d found out only later, when Dr. Ruszel had asked for her records and told her the truth.

The brain damage was very minimal, but she was slow. She would always be slow. Rhemun had already called her onto the carpet for it, during a rescue hop. She’d taken the punishment, days of detention and black marks on her record, without argument. But he was watching her, always watching, waiting for her to make a mistake so that he could punish her by having her decommissioned, thrown out of the Holconcom. It would be the end of everything. He didn’t know what the consequences would be for her. Probably, she thought sadly, it wouldn’t bother him in the least if he did.

She rolled over, closed her eyes and forced her mind to shut up. Soon, she was finally asleep.

* * *

SHE’D EXPECTED TO be put down in a combat zone; she thought she was prepared for it, but her wildest imaginings of horror hadn’t prepared her for what she saw.

Most of the victims were children. The anguish almost paralyzed her when she saw the small victims tossed into a common grave, uncovered, because the fighting was still going on. She stared at them with anguish on her face.

“Mallory!” Rhemun’s deep voice called. “Get to work!”

She turned, the pain so intense that he hesitated when he saw it. He knew about her history, her child-hunger. It disturbed him, so he didn’t dwell on it. He motioned her toward the action with a curt gesture and averted his eyes. The sight of the children bothered him, as well. It brought back the pain of losing his son.

Edris ran toward him, dodging bursts of gunfire from plasma weapons, and rolled to the ground near a couple of refugees, one of whom had third-degree burns on his arm.

“Not to worry,” she told him in Jibbet, the dialect of Altairian that these people, with their manner of dress denoting their Clan status, would speak. “I can heal him.”

“You speak...Jibbet,” the woman exclaimed. “No human speaks Jibbet!”

Edris smiled as she went to work. “I speak several very rare dialects,” she said without conceit. “Yours is quite beautiful.”

The woman touched her fingers to her mouth and then to the center of her chest, where the Altairian heart was located. She smiled. It was a gesture of perfect trust, perfect acceptance. Edris smiled again and began to heal the burned flesh of the woman’s spouse.

He relaxed as her pain meds eased the anguish of the wound. “I am farmer,” he said in halting Terravegan. “I will lose leg...”

“You will not,” she replied. “You honor me, by speaking my tongue.”

He managed a terse smile. “As you honor we, by speaking that of us,” he replied brokenly.

“You will not lose your leg,” she replied. “I will regrow the tissue.”

“You can do such?!” he exclaimed.

She nodded, and continued to probe the damaged cells with a regenerative gel. Soon, the horrible gash that had almost amputated his leg began to close, cleaning itself of necrosis as it healed, until the skin was as blue and as perfect as it had been before he’d been wounded.

He cried out, delighted. He got to his feet and stood up, without pain or loss of function. His purple eyes had great tears in them. “Thank you! Many gratitudes! You are great female,” he choked. “My Clan is your Clan, forever.”

She put her hand to her lips and then to her own heart. “You give me great honor.”

The woman hugged her. “You are Web Clan. Never forget.”

Edris smiled. “Thank you. I promise, I won’t forget.”

* * *

SHE WENT FROM patient to patient, doing whatever she could to mend the horrible effects of the radiation the pirates were using in their plasma weapons.

“Somebody should shoot them,” she muttered as she finished the last suture on an elderly man.

“Are you finished?” Rhemun asked curtly. “We must move on.”

“I am, sir.” She smiled at her patient and fell in, behind the other Holconcom, as they advanced to the next pivotal point in the assault.

* * *

SHE FELL A little behind, stumbling over a piece of ship wreckage, and as she started to run to catch up with her comrades, a man stepped out of nowhere, one of the cold-eyed Rigellian pirates with a stolen chasat leveled at her chest.

Without thinking, she pulled her Gresham and fired. She gasped as she realized that she’d forgotten to lock the setting on stun. The pirate looked at her with wide, disbelieving eyes as he clutched his chest, groaned harshly and fell backward.

“Oh, no!” She ran to him, bent on saving him. But his eyes were open and dust was already settling on the pupils. They were dilated. Fixed. He was dead. One quick check with her wrist scanner confirmed that catastrophic damage had been done to his internal organs. Nothing could have been done for him, even on the ship.

Her face contorted. She shivered. She’d killed a humanoid. She’d killed someone!

“Mallory! Fall in!”

She heard Rhemun’s deep voice, but as if in a dream. She was on her knees, staring helplessly at the man she’d just killed. She couldn’t seem to move, to drag her eyes away.

“Come on!” Rhemun snapped.

She looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes that held a horror he’d never seen in them before. “I killed him,” she said in a husky whisper. “I killed a man.”

“Mallory...”

“I killed a man,” she repeated. “I took an oath, ‘Do no harm.’ But I killed him. The setting was wrong. I’ve never killed anyone in my whole life,” she added, her face contorted as she looked up at him.

He ground his teeth together. “You must do your duty, madam,” he said curtly. “Other lives are at stake! Hurry!”

She swallowed. Her eyes went back to the dead man. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Now!” Rhemun snapped.

She gathered her wits and got to her feet. She straightened into a salute. “Yes, sir,” she said formally.

He took off at a speed she couldn’t imitate, but she ran as fast as she could to the next bunch of victims.

* * *

SHE WORKED MECHANICALLY, nodding as people confided their fears, their broken lives, their losses to her. She healed wounds and comforted the grieving. But her mind held the image of the dead man.

Rhemun was rarely concerned about the mental or physical health of a woman who reminded him so savagely of his son’s death, but even he began to notice how Mallory was acting.

He paused beside her when she finished working on her last patient. The rest of the pirates had been routed, the colonists rescued. They were ready to lift. But Mallory was obviously not herself.