The Morcai Battalion: Invictus Part 2

"But, if there is a child, as I feel certain there will be..." he began hesitantly.

"The child can be regressed. It's a gentle process. He'll be absorbed back into the tissues of my body." She didn't look at him. "n.o.body must know. It would hurt his career, if it became known that he'd fathered a child onto a human female. It would...disgrace him."

"Surely he did not say that to you!"

She didn't speak. He hadn't. Not in so many words. But she knew he must have thought about their differences in status. Her jaw tautened. "I'll do whatever I need to do, for this mission to succeed. Then he'll go back to his command, I'll go back to mine. We'll be quits."

Komak looked devastated. This was not the history he had read. Surely the timeline was not so corrupted already?

"We don't always get what we want in life," she said thoughtfully. "I would have liked to keep the memory." She drew herself up to her full height. "But I'll do what's best."

He stood up, too. He moved close to her, his eyes wide and quiet and tender. "I will never forget these years with you," he said softly. "It has been an honor, to know you as a comrade."

She smiled sadly. "It has been for me, too, Komak." She s.h.i.+fted. "I feel...odd."

"Odd, how?" he asked, but he was smiling.

She reached impulsively for a metal sphere on the desk and closed her fingers around it. No human could have made a mark on it. She crushed it in her hand. She gasped.

He chuckled. "So. We need not ask if the experiment was a success."

She looked at the misshapen lump on her palm and laughed with delight. "No. We need not ask!"

CHAPTER TWO.

Madeline was a combat surgeon. She certainly knew about the reproductive process, in animals and humans, even in Rojoks. But trying to get any information about Cehn-Tahr matings was like pulling stones out of a vacuum.

She thought Caneese was the obvious person to ask. Although Caneese was very polite, she was almost mute on the subject.

"You will cope," she told Madeline gently. "The thing to remember is that you must...yield, and let nature take its course," she said finally, after searching for just the correct word.

"Yield."

"Exactly! I am so glad that we had this talk. You will feel better about the encounter, now, yes?" And she walked away, smiling.

Madeline ground her teeth into her lower lip. "Smoke and mirrors," she said to herself, nodding.

In the end, there was only one person she felt comfortable talking about it with and that was her partner for the event.

She found him standing on a stone patio, his hands behind him, watching the sun set over the distant mountains.

He heard her footsteps and turned. In the robes he wore at Mahkmannah, he was like a stranger. She wore robes, too, of course, but was less comfortable in them.

"You have concerns," he mused as she approached.

"Yes. n.o.body will talk to me about it," she said irritably. "They talk around it."

He gave her a long look. "You must remember that women in my culture are not as self-possessed and independent as you are. We have traditions that have existed for millennia."

"I'm not denigrating your culture," she said. "I just want to know what's going to happen."

He raised an eyebrow and gave her a look of mock astonishment.

She actually blushed. "I wish you wouldn't do that," she gritted.

He laughed softly. "It is irresistible. The brawling, insubordinate medical chief of staff who sends her underlings running for cover, reduced to blushes and confusion about a process so basic that it is familiar even to children."

She glared at him. "I might remind you that I've spent the past twenty-nine years of my life as a neuter, basically without gender," she said curtly. "I've never felt...well...the sort of things women feel with men. With males. I mean..." She couldn't find the words.

He turned and moved closer, so that he could look down at her face. His hand came up and touched her red-gold hair lightly. "Madeline, you are making much work of a natural process."

She sighed. "Sir, can't you just tell me, soldier to soldier, what I'm expected to do? Caneese is the only Cehn-Tahr woman I could have asked, and she said that it was only necessary to yield and endure it." She shook her head. "Is that what the women of your culture do? Simply...yield?"

He c.o.c.ked his head. "You have seen few young Cehn-Tahr women, but you spent some time with Princess Lyceria. You have also been exposed to Dacerian women. Do you notice a similarity in comportment?"

"Yes," she replied. "They're very docile, gentle females. Intelligent, but not a.s.sertive."

"Exactly."

"Then they...simply submit."

"Yes."

She frowned. It troubled her. "Wouldn't such a docile sort of female tend to exaggerate the violence of an encounter if she didn't, well, partic.i.p.ate in it so much as endure it?"

One eyebrow went up.

She grimaced. "I'm sorry. I'm finding it difficult to explain what I mean. It's complicated to discuss something so intimate with you."

"Indeed. You and I have engaged in many verbal battles over the years, but our encounters have been non-physical. This one will be."

She searched his eyes, looking for any sign of what he was thinking. "What do you expect of me, sir?"

she asked in a soft, uncertain tone. "What is it like?"

The question, added to the sudden burst of pheromones exuding from her body when he stared at her, kindled a helpless reaction. His face tautened. Like a snake striking, his hand shot out and suddenly grasped her long hair at her nape and jerked, pulling her face up to his. The eyes stabbing into hers were jet-black. "It is like this," he said in a voice which sounded so alien that at first it was barely recognizable.

It was similar to the sound a cat might make when it was angry, except with words instead of hisses. His head bent, so that his eyes filled the world, and the pressure of his hand forced her body close to his in an arc, thrilling and frightening at the same time.

Her heart jumped up into her throat. He seemed, for the first time in their long relations.h.i.+p as commanding officer and subordinate, so alien that she almost didn't recognize him.

"You begin to understand," he whispered, in that same odd tone, and for a split second, in a flash of presence like the blinking of a light, he seemed to be taller, far more ma.s.sive than he looked. She must be hallucinating, she thought.

Her hands flattened against his robes, feeling the strength and warmth of his chest under them.

"I am not what I seem," he said.

She was a little intimidated, but she didn't let it show. She nodded. "I know. My instruments and my senses don't coincide." His eyes changed color yet again, to a burnished gold, almost glowing. She didn't know what it meant.

His hand lessened its pressure on her hair and became oddly caressing. "Weakness is prey. It invites brutality. Do you understand that?"

Her lips parted. "The more a female yields control, the more a male exercises it."

He nodded. His gaze dropped to her throat, softly vulnerable at the angle. "We are a pa.s.sionate species,"

he whispered, bending his head. His mouth opened and slid over her throat. She felt the faint edge of his teeth. Even they felt different than they looked, different than her instrument readings described them.

The slow rasp of them against the vulnerable skin of her throat should have been frightening. It was only exciting. Her heart began to race.

His nostrils splayed as stronger pheromones rushed up into them. "Delicious," he rasped. And suddenly his tongue slid over the soft flesh, abrasive and stimulating.

Her nails stabbed into his chest and she gasped audibly.

He laughed.

She was alive as she'd never been alive, on edge, s.h.i.+vering with sensation and curiosity. He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. His own narrowed. His chin lifted arrogantly. He looked at her as if she already belonged to him. She recalled that expression from earlier, non-physical encounters and realized that he had been possessive of her for a long time.

"We are a warrior culture," he said in a deep, velvety tone. "We conquer. For generations, our women have been taught that submission to the violence is the only way to survive it."

Her breath was coming in little spurts. "Is that why they're so afraid of it?"

"Yes. They dread the onset of the mating ritual, because they fear the aggression of the male. They have been taught that it is not feminine to meet pa.s.sion with pa.s.sion."

She was seeing things she'd been blind to. His calm demeanor was a front. He could control his actions, except when he was exposed to Madeline's involuntary pheromones. What she was seeing now was the true male, the true creature, without the veneer of civilized conduct.

"That is essentially correct," he said curtly. His hand contracted again on her hair and brought her face very close to his, so that she could almost taste his clean breath in her mouth. "I have forced a change in the protocols. The mating will take place in total darkness."

Her senses were heightened, but the odd statement kindled her curiosity. "Doesn't it usually?"

"No," he said flatly. "It is an innovation." He couldn't bring himself to tell her why.

He stared down at her with mingled concern and hunger. Her taut features betrayed her fear, even as she tried to hide it from him in her mind. "You are already afraid of my eyes in the absence of light. Added to that, you will experience the violence that goes with the feline response to desire." His voice rasped. "I cannot control it."

"I know that. Your eyes startle me at night. But I'm not afraid of you. Not really."

"You know that I will not hurt you deliberately."

"Of course," she said simply.

His hand contracted harshly. "But remember this," he said in a harsh, alien voice. "If you bend your neck to my teeth, I will make you pay for it!"

Her neck. If she bent her neck to his teeth. She suddenly remembered something from her biology courses. The great male cats of the human planets mated from behind. Did the Cehn-Tahr as well?

His face lowered and his cheek rubbed hard against hers. At the same time, he lifted her and pushed her against the stone wall, pressing her there with the weight of his powerful body. She became aware of gigantic size and strength, despite her reengineered body. The familiar commander was suddenly someone else, something else.

"Submit," he whispered roughly at her ear, and pressed harder against her.

His mouth opened on her throat, warm and feverish and exciting. She caught her breath and s.h.i.+vered at the sudden rush of sensation.

He growled. The sound she made, involuntarily, sent him over the edge....

"What are you doing?" Caneese demanded belligerently. "You are not allowed to touch her before the bonding ceremony!"

He was so far gone that he growled at Caneese.

She cuffed him hard enough that the sound echoed. She growled, too. Madeline, almost mindless with her own responses, barely registered that Dtimun obeyed the older woman at once. He let go of Madeline and moved back, grasping at control and dignity.

"It is all right," Caneese told him gently. She touched his cheek lightly. "It is all right."

Madeline was getting her breath back. She was flushed. "I'm sorry," she told Caneese. "It was my fault. I only wanted to know what was going to happen."

Caneese smiled at her. "There is no need to apologize. I understand."

"The bonding ceremony is tomorrow anyway," Madeline began.

"Yes, but the mating must be witnessed, that is the law," the older woman said gently.

Madeline had heard that odd phrasing before, but never thought about it until now. Witnessed?

Dtimun had recovered. His head bowed slightly, in deference to Caneese's position. "We were discussing certain...aspects...of the ceremony," he said with a straight face. "Madeline was curious."

Caneese's eyes were wide and shocked. "And you were telling her?"

He moved forward, took Caneese's face in his hands and, smiling, touched his forehead to hers. "I was not," he lied. "She wanted rea.s.surance. Our customs are disturbing to her. I was attempting to explain them when things got out of hand."

"A little out of hand," Madeline said blithely. The look she gave Dtimun, unseen by Caneese, was wicked enough to make his eyes flash green.

Caneese melted. She touched Dtimun's cheek with her hand. "I had to interfere. But you must not tell her anything further. I do not want you to make her more frightened."

"Not to worry," Madeline quipped. "I've had all my shots, and I'm experienced in six martial arts."

Dtimun burst out laughing. Caneese stared worriedly from one of them to the other.

"We will not embarra.s.s you," Dtimun a.s.sured her. He hesitated. Madeline's reaction to him was extremely stimulating. "We will not deliberately embarra.s.s you," he corrected. "It might be...wise-" he considered his choice of words "-to double the mute screen in the mating chamber, however."

Caneese now looked horrified.

Dtimun held up a hand. "She has been known to throw things at me when she lost her temper," he said quickly, looking for an explanation that would not disturb Caneese.