Eternity Row (19 page)

Fifteen hours later, I left my sleeping daughter in the care of my staff and went to take care of the last of the day’s business.

Qonja didn’t seem surprised to see me his time. “Yes, Healer? Are my services needed?”

I walked past him into his quarters and pointed to a chair. “Sit.” After a moment, he sat. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know-”

“You’ve been watching me since I came on board. Following me. Taking notes. Trying to insinuate yourself into my life. Today you saved my daughter.” I tapped my foot on the deck. “Why?”

He seemed tired, and wouldn’t look at me. “I admire you.”

“I’ve had other people admire me. They don’t put recording drones in my quarters.”

His head snapped up. “You found them?”

“Uh-huh. I checked Jorenian law. I can have you imprisoned for what you’ve done. And I will, so convince me not to.”

A minute of silence passed, then he said, “I cannot.”

“All right.” I went to the door. “As soon as your wounds heal, report back to Medical.”

Then came the confrontation I wasn’t looking forward to. I was exhausted as much from the marathon of patching and suturing as from the emotional overload, and the bizarre calm I’d enjoyed for the last shift seemed to be dissipating fast. Duncan and I had been through plenty, and I was prepared to trust him with my life.

My daughter’s life was another matter.

He seemed to be waiting for me, I saw as I walked in, as he sat on the chair facing the door panel. Jenner was in his lap, but not for long.

My darling pet took one look at me, and sat up.
Uh-oh
. He jumped down and hightailed it back to Marel’s room.
I’m outta here
.

I said the first thing that came into my head. “You didn’t come to Medical to see how our kid is. What, you were too busy checking on the lizards?”

He just sat there and watched me. “I signaled one of the nurses to apprise myself of her status, several times.”

“You’re such a good daddy.” Hands clenched, I went over to the prep unit and briefly rested my brow against the polished alloy upper cabinet. “This isn’t going to turn into yet another screaming match between us.”

“I never scream.”

“True.” My fingers jabbed the console, and something hot and liquid poured into my empty server. “I’d feel better if you would, once in a while, but then, one can’t pick one’s destined life mate.”

“I agree.” He made a casual gesture. “Will you hear what I have to say, or would you prefer to vent your frustrations first?”

I was a surgeon, a mother, a survivor. I could be a mature adult. For a few minutes. “Oh, please, be my guest.”

“RrissVar and I served the Faction together. He is an honorable soldier who deserved better than to be slain by some disgruntled incompetents embittered by their own failure.”

“Those failures you’re talking about would be the League soldiers, I hope.”

He ignored that. “You have always been prone to act first and think later. It is not an attractive quality, but one I accept. That I think first and act later is equally unattractive to you. I ask only that you do the same and accept me as I am.”

He had yet to get acquainted with some of my other unattractive qualities, but I let it slide.

“I can do that.” I nodded and sipped some of what had to be the worst tea I’d ever made in my life. “That it?”

“I was trying to protect her, as much as you were. The fact that I was rational and you were not makes no difference. My choice not to signal the Jorenians was the logical one, as you saw when they later arrived.”

“Yep.” My fingers tightened around the server handle. “Rational. Logical. You’re right. Is
that
it?”

He got to his feet and made a careless gesture. “Go ahead and vent. Doubtless you need to.”

“Got me all figured out now, don’t you? That’s nice.” I set the server down carefully and folded my arms. “We’ve done some stupid things to each other in the past, Duncan. I admit, I’m as guilty of that as you are. We didn’t communicate well and we still have problems in that department.”

He gave me an uncertain look. “And?”

“And I’m your wife. I know we have a long way to go before we work out all the kinks of what constitutes
us
. We need to talk more about our different attitudes about parenting and protecting our child.”

Now he seemed mesmerized. “You mean that?”

I gave him a gentle smile. “Of course, I do. I love you. I love Marel. I want us to be a family. Can we do that, together?” I waited for his slow nod, and took a deep breath. “Excellent. I look forward to making that work.” He started to walk toward me, but I held up one hand and reached down for my server. “All I want to say is one more thing.”

“What is it?”

I threw the server at him, deliberately missing his head by an inch. It smashed into the far interior wall of our quarters and burst, sending a shower of terrible tea all over the deck and furniture.

“I don’t care how many alien pals you’ve got wandering around this galaxy. Protecting our baby is more important than all of them. You think about that, because you’re a father now and you’re damned well going to act like one.” I was shouting, but no one ever said I was perfect.

He stood his ground. “I did what I thought was best.”

“It wasn’t. And here’s another little news flash for you, just so that we’re communicating openly and clearly: If you
ever
put our child at risk again like you did today, I won’t think twice. I’ll take her and I’ll leave you and you will
never
see us again.”

Then he said what I didn’t expect at all. “I know you will.”

It should have taken me aback, but my anger was boiling every other emotion I possessed. “Good. Now, I’m going to take a walk around the ship a few times and punch a couple of walls. You find a way to get these damn soldiers out of here, and do it fast.”

I didn’t go back that night, but spent three miserable hours sleeping on the incredibly uncomfortable seating unit in the games room. A few crew members came in and out, but wisely left me alone. I went back to Medical for primary shift, feeling like a wrinkled rag, and caught a swift shower there before checking on my daughter, then going back to work.

After all the fireworks, Squilyp had refused an exam, and I’d been too upset with Reever to argue with him. Now I made him hop onto an exam table and scanned his face.

“You look about as good as I feel,” I muttered as I checked the condition of his ruptured gildrells. All but one were healing, and I applied a topical anesthetic to the one that had become slightly stiff and inflamed. “Have the girls been behaving?”

He looked over at the isolation chamber, where Marel and Fasala were playing bentaka, a complicated Jorenian board game that was sort of like chess and Chinese checkers, with a little poker thrown in. “For the most part, yes. Marel seems incapable of sitting still for very long intervals.”

“That’s her job.”

As we performed rounds, I felt Squilyp giving me these speculative looks. Finally, I said, “What?”

“Duncan was here earlier.” He handed me one of the League soldier’s charts. “He sat with Marel until he had to report for duty.”

“How sweet.” I hummed under my breath as I studied the chart’s display. “There’s a buildup of fluid around the upper limb wound. We’d better have one of the nurses aspirate the joint before he goes edemic.”

“Duncan said you were furious with him.”

Now my husband was confiding in my boss. Since they were both male, they’d probably gang up on me or something.

“Furious, no. I got all that out last night.” I noted my prognosis on the chart and handed it back to the Senior Healer. “Now I’m hovering an inch between leaving him and not leaving him. Let’s go see the girls.”

Although they were low priority on the rounds schedule, seeing to Marel and Fasala went a long way toward soothing my frazzled temper. My daughter could barely contain herself long enough to sit on her berth so I could remove her patient gown.

“You see kiddies, Mama?” She pointed to a small container in the corner of the room, where the abducted trio were napping, exhausted no doubt from playing with my kid. “Dey bedder now.” One hand latched on to the edge of my tunic as she scratched at her dressing with the other. “Off?”

“What’s the matter with it, sweetie?” I tugged her hand away and checked the bandage adhesive to make sure it wasn’t irritating her skin. “This bothering you?”

She nodded. “Off?”

“Let me have a look first.” I carefully peeled back one edge of the dressing. Beneath it, what had been raw gashes were now rapidly shrinking rows of pink skin. I removed the bandage and examined it. On the inside of the dressing were a couple of scab fragments that Marel must have dislodged with her scratching.

I glanced across the berth. “Squilyp, look at this.”

He nodded, then scanned Marel’s torso and showed me the display. “Healed completely.”

“Good news, baby, you don’t need this anymore.” I discarded the dressing, then helped her down from the berth. “You keep Fasala company for a few minutes, okay?”

“Okay, Mama.”

The Omorr and I went into his office, and stood there in silence for a few seconds, before I dropped down in the chair and rubbed my aching head with my fingers.

“It’s good she heals fast. Little kids are always scraping and bumping themselves, aren’t they?” I removed a syrinpress from my tunic pocket and toyed with the calibrator. “So she won’t ever have to suffer pain. Not for very long, anyway.”

“You knew when you became pregnant the child would have an equal chance of inheriting your genetic characteristics as well as Duncan’s.” Squilyp touched my shoulder. “We will test her and determine exactly how she differs from a standard Terran.”

“No, we won’t.” Sudden, hot rage flashed through me. “No tests. Erase the scan-erase
all
the scans. From this point on, we falsify her records.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary-”

“Oh yeah? What happens if the League finds out my daughter has the same immune system as I do? You think they’re going to pass up the chance to capture the second-most valuable lab rat of all time?” I took Marel’s chart from the stack and set the controls to erase all records. “Nothing goes into the permanent database about her from here on out.”

“Wait.” He reached for the chart, and did something to it. When he turned it around, I saw the patient name and information had been changed to that of a Jorenian child. “We’ll encode the real data behind the false readings. That way, we can keep track of her development.”

“Just what do you think she’s going to develop into?”

“Someone wonderful.” He smiled. “Like her mother.”

CHAPTER EIGHT Rendezvous Round

“We must make the transfer quickly,” I heard my husband say as I walked into our quarters. Greeting me were my extremely nervous cats, two of the kittens and the delightful sight of Reever and RrissVar working together on our personal console.

“Hello, Duncan. RrissVar, you can leave.”

“I need him here,” my husband said.

“For what, other than making the cats paranoid?”

“We are in the midst of negotiations.” He turned back to the terminal.

Knowing his concept of negotiations had been formed while serving as a slave to the lizards, I went over to have a look. On the screen was the image of a trader with a tattooed, dark face, similar to the mask Reever had used to disguise himself as Noarr on Catopsa. The trader was uttering something in his species’ whirring, tonal language, one my vocollar didn’t translate.

“Let me guess.” I gestured to the screen. “Another of your friends.”

Reever gave me a bland look and hit a few keys on the console. The trader’s language abruptly transitioned into stanTerran.

“-I will want guarantees filed before one of them steps foot on my vessel.”