The Morcai Battalion: Invictus Part 3

"Wouldn't it be easier just to remove the ceramics from the room, sir?" Madeline asked him cheekily.

"Sir?" Caneese echoed. "Madeline, you must refrain from addressing him so."

"Sorry," Madeline replied with a smile. "Habit."

"You must consider that this is the lesser of two evils," Dtimun agreed. "She has, at least, refrained from saluting me."

"Oh, I rarely do that," she said. "In fact, we have this new guy, the kelekom tech, Jefferson Colby, that the commander stole...excuse me, borrowed," she added when Dtimun glared at her, "from Admiral Lawson.

Colby saluted the C.O. so often that he was getting a crick in his neck. So we told him that we never salute the C.O. because it affects his ego. Right, sir?" she asked Dtimun with a grin.

He glared at her. "When we are at Benaski Port, if you refer to me as 'sir' in front of possible spies, even your pregnancy will not be enough to ward off suspicion that we are enemy agents."

"Point taken. Sorry, sir. I mean..." She hesitated. "Well, what the h.e.l.l am I supposed to call you, then?"

she asked.

"Madam!" he gritted.

"Madeline!" Caneese echoed.

Madeline threw up her hands. "I give up. I'm never going to be able to pull this off. I mean, look at...?"

She stopped, fascinated, as Rognan came das.h.i.+ng toward her as fast as his injured leg would allow.

"You must deal with this," Caneese told Dtimun helplessly. "He has been told that he will not be permitted at the ceremony. He is very upset."

"But why can't he be?" Madeline asked.

"Because he considers you his mate," Dtimun said with a flash of green eyes. "We would never make it past him into the mating chamber."

"And when she becomes pregnant, there will be no place where she can go without him," Caneese groaned, missing Madeline's flush. "He will consider the child his as well."

"Meg-Ravens are quite fascinating to study," Dtimun mused as the bird came closer. "It is best to do it at long-range however," he sighed.

Rognan paused in front of them and flapped his wings angrily. "Rognan must come to ceremony. Rognan is family!" he muttered.

Madeline reached out and stroked his feathered head, scratching it gently. He calmed at once.

"Yes, Rognan is family," she agreed gently. "But there will be many people, and you don't like strangers around you. Yes?"

He hesitated. He ruffled his feathers. "Strangers make Rognan nervous," he agreed.

"So you can watch from a closed vid screen," she suggested, pointedly looking at Caneese.

The elder Cehn-Tahr nodded. "That will be possible."

Rognan sighed. "Very well."

Impulsively Madeline hugged him. "You must stop worrying so much about things. It isn't good for you."

He enveloped her with a huge black wing. "Rognan will try. Rognan is happy that you will be family," he added in a hesitant tone.

She drew back and smiled at him. "Thank you. That's very nice of you to say."

"You have amazing skills in diplomacy," Caneese remarked when Rognan had hobbled away. "They may be quite useful one day."

"They already are, when dealing with some individuals," she said, and glanced wickedly at her commanding officer.

He chuckled.

"What sort of witnessing are we talking about?" Madeline asked suddenly. She hadn't wanted to bring it up, but it was disturbing.

"We require proof of parentage in, shall we say, our aristocratic circles," Caneese explained solemnly.

"The first mating requires witnesses."

She gaped at the aliens. "You mean people are going to stand around and WATCH us...?"

Dtimun burst out laughing at her expression.

"No, of course not," Caneese a.s.sured her quickly. "There will be a closed chamber with guards at the single entrance, to ensure that everything is correct and that only the two of you enter the room. So that there is no doubt of the child's parentage."

"But I thought that was a tradition only in royal families, when an heir was involved," Madeline said thoughtfully. "And besides," she added solemnly, "this child is temporary." She didn't add that she was quite uncertain if a child was even possible, unless Komak had put something quite unusual into that injection he'd given her. Even her Medicomp was unable to a.n.a.lyze its contents.

"We must follow the law, even in covert circ.u.mstances," Caneese said gently.

Madeline sighed. "I suppose so."

Dtimun walked along with them back toward the fortress. "Sfilla has arranged transport and facilities on Benaski Port. We will wait only until the pregnancy is sufficiently visible to leave." He glanced at Madeline, who looked as uncomfortable as he felt. "There is another matter. What if it is impossible for us to breed?"

"Komak a.s.sured me that it was not," Caneese interjected. "And that this first mating will bear fruit. Now let us worry no more about it," she told them firmly. "I have had a meal prepared. We can discuss the details of your journey while we eat."

Madeline followed them inside, more confused than ever. She hoped she wouldn't disgrace herself.

She glanced at the commander with a slight frown, her mind full of his behavior earlier. She was just beginning to realize that she didn't know him at all.

CHAPTER THREE.

Madeline was impressed by the number of guards and the obvious wealth and prestige of the guests who attended the ceremony. She wore simple robes in a pale blue gossamer fabric, her hair left long and clean and flowing in red-gold waves down her back.

Beside her, Dtimun also wore robes, similar to the ones he'd worn to the Altair emba.s.sy when he'd blackmailed her into accompanying him. She had to restrain a smile, remembering some of their earlier battles.

He glanced down at her with twinkling green eyes, amused at her thoughts. She curbed them. It really wasn't a time to be humorous.

Caneese herself officiated at the brief ceremony. She welcomed the guests, who seemed to be shocked about some aspect of the affair, and joined Dtimun and Madeline at a small altar at one end of the s.p.a.cious chamber.

She instructed them to join hands. Then she read the ceremony in High Cehn-Tahr, the ancient tongue of her people. Madeline barely understood a word of it. She was far more aware of her surroundings and the experience to come, apprehension having kept her sleepless. She had taken Caneese's advice and used a small bit of sedative. But it wasn't doing much good.

In a heartbeat, the ceremony was over and Caneese was smiling at them. She nodded.

Dtimun glanced at Madeline and indicated the back of the room. She followed him, aware of the silence as they left the guests behind.

He didn't look at her as they approached a door guarded by two Cehn-Tahr soldiers in full dress uniform.

The guards stared straight ahead, their eyes never deviating to the bonded pair.

One guard touched a switch and the door to the suite opened. Madeline went in, followed by Dtimun, and the door closed behind them. It was pitch-black inside. The only sound was a sudden, deep growl emanating from her companion. It was reminiscent of the cry Cehn-Tahr made when in battle, the death cry called the decaliphe. But this one had a more ba.s.s pitch.

She couldn't see him in the darkness, but the growl was slowly escalating. She felt hands suddenly grasp her from behind. She felt his teeth on her shoulder, his claws digging into her rib cage. His teeth moved to the back of her neck. She recalled, with growing unease, his comment that if she bent her neck to his teeth he would make her pay for it. Her heart jumped into her throat. He was her commander. She'd known him for three years. But this creature was alien in a way she'd never expected and as threatening as a charging galot.

He felt taller and more ma.s.sive than he appeared. The growls and the brutal grip of his hands would have been enough to frighten any woman not battle-hardened. She wasn't certain whether or not to fight at this point. He wasn't really hurting her.

While she was considering her options, he suddenly lifted her and literally tossed her across the room.

Gasping at the shock of movement, and the raw strength that had propelled her such a distance, she landed on her back, thankfully on a soft surface. The impact still knocked the breath out of her. Before she could catch it, Dtimun had pinned her, facedown, so that she could not escape. There was a cry, much more like the decaliphe, that chilled her to the bone. Behind her, the growl grew louder. She felt a crus.h.i.+ng weight as sharp teeth bit into the back of her neck. To that pain was added, quite suddenly, another pain. Shocking. Humiliating. Infuriating! She clenched her teeth in fury.

"Like...h.e.l.l...you...do!" she raged at him. Her head whipped around and she caught the muscular forearm beside her and bit it as hard as she could. She tasted blood.

He growled again, and his teeth bit in harder.

She cried out furiously, struggling as the pain increased. She lashed out with one leg and connected with his s.h.i.+n. While he was reacting to that attack, she launched another on his arm with her teeth. He pinned her with ridiculous ease and brought his teeth to her neck again, pus.h.i.+ng her down with his formidable weight in a surge of pure aggression.

"How dare you!" she rasped indignantly. All her imagining hadn't prepared her for this sort of domination. When she got her hands free, she was going to pay him back royally!

There was a louder growl, unrelated to her resistance, and then a brief lessening of aggression.

She increased her struggles, sensing weakness, but with all her combat training, she couldn't budge him.

She groaned furiously, all her resentments combined in the angry sound.

He whipped her onto her back. His fingers locked into hers. In the darkness, she could see only the green glow of his eyes as he looked down at her.

"This is not as I wished it," he said in a voice that sounded odd, different, as if the Standard words were being formed in a throat unaccustomed to making the sounds. "The violence is our shame, the penalty we pay for daring to experiment with our own genetic structure. I would not hurt you for any reason, if the choice were mine. It is not. This is my nature," he ground out. "This violent, animal ferocity."

She was still trying to reconcile her anger with his guilt and find a balance. She had rarely been bested in combat, even by an adversary so superior. She swallowed, hard, and struggled for breath.

His head bent and he brushed his face against hers, tenderly. "Now you can understand why Komak's genetic mix was necessary," he whispered. "Without it, I would have killed you."

There was torment in his deep voice. She realized that he wasn't exaggerating. His claws would have punctured her lungs, as they had on Lagana even when he was in control of himself. His strength was so superior, even with her modifications, that she would have bruises. She recalled hearing him talk about Hahnson's broken back from only the preliminaries of his mating with an exiled Cehn-Tahr woman.

Dtimun had said that no method every discovered by science could lessen the aggression. As she had been three years ago, she could not have survived this.

She was realizing something more, as well. Her mental neutering was supposed to cause excruciating pain if she attempted to mate. It had not. Although, there had been another sort of pain...

"That could not be helped," he said at her ear. His voice was calmer now. "Something a physician should know."

There was almost a teasing note in his voice. She felt herself begin to relax, despite the discomfort. She would never admit that he had frightened her, of course.

"Of course," he murmured dryly.

"You stop that," she said firmly. "My thoughts are my own."

He drank in the scent of her. "My father said that my mother attempted to jump out a window at their first mating," he whispered.

That surprised a laugh out of her. "A window?"

"Yes, on the top floor of a very tall building." His tongue brushed her throat as he inhaled the floral scent of her hair. "My father was quick. He caught her as she fell."

His fingers felt odd. Thicker than they appeared. He was incredibly heavy. She also had the impression of ma.s.sive physical presence, strength, raw power. He seemed much taller, broader, than he appeared.

Despite her reengineered bone ma.s.s, he was many times her superior in strength. Was the darkness to hide him from her eyes, she wondered, so that she couldn't see what he really looked like?

"An astute guess," he said huskily. His fingers, strong and thick, speared into hers, sliding in between them. "We do not mate as humans do, but as the great galots do. Males dominate by pinning the female at the back of the neck. An undignified, shameful process, which we hide from outworlders. I told you that you might learn things about us which you would not like."

His deep voice was harsh with regret. She began to understand why the Cehn-Tahr were so secretive about their behaviors. Her body slowly began to relax. It wasn't fair to blame him for something that was inborn in him, in all his species. She had agreed to this. It was not against her will. Securing the timeline required sacrifice. Certainly, this episode was as difficult for him as it was for her.

"Yes," he answered the unspoken question somberly. "Intimacy requires a lowering of barriers which is difficult for me. I have always been alone, apart."

"So have I, really," she confessed. She moved and winced. There was a lot of discomfort.

"You must heal the damage, Madeline," he said softly.

"You said the physicians would have to examine me. Couldn't they...?"

His hands contracted. "You misunderstand." His tongue caressed her throat again, producing exquisite sensations. "I have not finished."

Her mind was fuzzy. "But...?"

"Do you think I wish to go through the rest of my life with a memory so brutal and unfeeling as what we just shared?" he asked at her ear. "You will forget. I will not." He stilled. "Heal the damage."

She hesitated, but only for an instant. She was curious about what he meant to do. She used the wrist scanner and activated its drug banks. For an instant, when the screen lit to calculate the dosage of nanocells, she got a glimpse of a huge hand with broad fingers which looked nothing like the commander's.

He put his hand over the screen, s.h.i.+elding the light. "You will not look at me," he said firmly. "And you will not touch me, regardless of what happens."

Now she was truly curious. She deactivated the unit. "Why?"

He moved down against her. His tongue rasped against softer flesh, creating sensations that overwhelmed her. She gasped and her fingernails bit into his muscular arms. Involuntarily her hands slid to his back and encountered a long, soft line of fur over his spinal column...

He pulled her hands away and smoothed them over his broad, hair-covered chest. "You will not touch me, except here," he whispered again.