No Other Love (12 page)

She still had sense enough to seal the hatch
behind her so Herne could not enter to disturb her without using
special security clearance. Calling up all of her Oressian
discipline to keep herself erect, she pulled off her soiled coif
and ripped away the torn and dirty treksuit and tossed both into
the recycling bin.

She battled rapidly weakening knees and a
growing nausea to stand for the necessary one minute in the sonic
cleansing chamber. That made her feel a little better, since it was
narrow and close, like the cubicles she had known as a Young One.
But when she emerged into her cabin again the ringing in her ears
blotted out the vibration of the ship. She could no longer focus
her eyes, nor would her knees hold her upright. But she did make it
to her bunk before her Oressian training finally gave way, allowing
her to do one more thing that she had never before done in her
life.

Merin fainted.

Herne watched Merin come onto the bridge. She
was pale, a little strained about the eyes, but otherwise she
looked normal. He wanted to put his arms around her, to hold her
close and protect her from all harm.

It had taken him hours to repair the bulkhead
he’d torn to pieces in his desperate attempt to rescue her. He
could only imagine what her thoughts must have been when she
realized that she was almost certainly doomed to a terrible death.
But she had not given up. With incredible determination she had
worked her way back to safety. He was still fighting his own rage
and frustration at his inability to help her through that
ordeal.

Before replacing the grate in the restored
bulkhead he had climbed up on the ladder to shine his handlight
into the shaft. He’d seen the scrapes her boots had made in the
metal during her slow, backward, uphill progress, and he had seen
the bloodstains. Shaking his head in admiration of her courage and
anger for what she had endured in that shaft, he had slammed the
grate across the opening with a savage gesture.

Now he saw her looking cool and distant in a
fresh orange treksuit, her clean white coif neatly in place and
strapped beneath her chin, and he wanted to shake her. She was so
determined to conceal her feelings, no matter what happened, yet
Herne was convinced that she would prove to be a woman of passion,
if only he could reach her deeply repressed emotions.

“I trust you slept well?” he said, watching
closely for any sign that she was trying to hide illness or a
delayed reaction to her trials in two different shafts.

“I always sleep well.”

Herne doubted that, but he made no comment on
her claim. “I’m glad you are safe,” he told her.

“Why would I not be?” She sounded
surprised.

“You were far from safe in that shaft.”

“But I am safe now.”

Herne thought he would go mad if she did not
soon change that quiet, unemotional voice and those idiotically
neutral responses. He held his arms tight at his sides, clenching
his fists. He wanted to kiss her, to beat her, to hold her in his
arms and tell her he’d never let anything hurt her again, to shake
her and scold her until she cried – and he wanted to do all of
those things at the same time. Most of all, he wanted desperately
to make love to her, to hear her cry out his name as she dissolved
into rapture.

“May I have your report on your watch,
please, Herne?”

Now he wanted to strangle her. His fingers
itched to feel her slender neck. He had torn half the ship apart
trying to reach her when he believed she was in danger, then he had
put the entire mess back together again, and the only reward he got
for all his trouble was her cool little voice asking for a
star-blasted report. If she said one more word he was going to kill
her and send her body into deep space through the decompression
hatch the Cetans had once used for disposal of their unwanted
prisoners.

He’d be damned to everlasting torment if he
ever did anything for her again. She could fall through any blasted
shaft she wanted and burn to a cinder in the propulsion system and
he wouldn’t care. If she were wounded, he’d let her bleed to death,
physician’s oath or no. He wanted nothing more to do with a
stubborn, cold-blooded Oressian who wouldn’t even say thank
you.

“Is something wrong?” She turned the full
power of her purple-flecked brown eyes on him. She was almost
smiling. There was a definite upward tilt to the corners of her
lovely mouth. Herne’s frustrated wrath began to drain away.

“I’ve been worried about you.” He took a step
toward her, and she did not move backward. Herne’s heart began to
pound with a heavy, unsteady beat. He was going to kiss her. Before
he left the bridge he was going to feel her slender frame in his
arms.

“It is kind of you to concern yourself with
my welfare,” she said, “but as you can see, there was nothing wrong
with me that could not be cured by a few hours of rest. Now, the
report, if you please.”

“Solar flares have increased during the last
eight hours. The air circulation system stopped for a few minutes.
I’m not sure exactly what was the matter with it, but I turned a
few dials for a while and it came back to normal. The heating
system also went out, but that’s back, too.” He went on, speaking
as if he were a perfectly sane man, when in fact he was drowning in
her eyes and slowly going mad with wanting her. “Obviously, the
violent storms on the sun’s surface are affecting the
Kalina.
I have relayed all of the pertinent information to
Tarik and have made appropriate entries in the ship’s log.”

“Thank you, Herne. Relieving you of duty.”
Merin moved toward her usual seat at the science officer’s
console.

“Not yet.” He caught her arm. “I still have a
few minutes left on my watch.”

He transferred his grip to her wrist, holding
her hand up so he could see it. With a practiced motion of his
other hand, he stripped off the plastiskin. The lacerations on her
palm were healing nicely with only a slight pink swelling to
indicate how much damage had been done.

“Let me see the other one; then I’ll put on
fresh dressings.” It was as good an excuse as any other he could
think of and it gave him a legitimate reason to touch her. He got
out the medkit that was always kept on the bridge and found the
plastiskin. After he finished with her hands she stood rubbing the
piece of plastiskin on her right palm. He nodded, understanding.
“It will itch for another day or two, until it is completely
healed.”

“I do appreciate everything you have done for
me,” she said. “Everything.”

He touched her right cheek, where she still
bore the tiny scar from her last injury. To his surprise, she
turned her head a little, leaning her face into his hand. She
caught her lower lip between her teeth, as if to stop it from
trembling, but she did not move away from him as he expected she
would. She stayed as she was, with her cheek against his hand. He
heard the soft catch of her breath.

“Oh, Merin.” The words left his lips like a
sigh. Her eyelids fluttered, then lifted, and once again he was
lost in the depths of her purple-brown gaze.

She raised her face to him, parting her lips
to accept his kiss. He gathered her closer and she did not protest.
She was slim yet strong in his arms, and he felt her hands on his
back, holding on to him, caressing his shoulders and down along his
spine. Herne let one of his hands wander down her back to catch her
hips and pull her hard against him, letting her feel his hot need
of her.

She moaned a bit, but did not pull away.
Surprise and delight filled him. While he could still think, he
began to consider where the nearest bunk might be. Her lack of
protest made him think she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
They would give each other such joy. He would see to it that she
was completely fulfilled, and as for himself, she was everything he
had ever wanted.

He touched the pressure sensitive strip at
the neck of her treksuit, pushing it open down to the gentle valley
between her breasts. He slid his hand beneath the orange fabric to
touch the high, round sweetness, and felt the tip of it spring into
instant hardness. His lips found the hollow of her throat.

“Don’t. Please stop.” Merin pulled back.

“I thought you wanted this.”

“I do. You’ll never know how much I do. But I
can’t. Whatever you were planning to do to me, it is
forbidden.”

“Of course.” In his voice was all the scorn
he felt for the Oressian strictures that kept her from accepting
him as her lover. “I should have known. You did warn me, didn’t
you?”

“I’m sorry. It’s my fault, Herne. I allowed
you to touch me, knowing I should not.”

She looked so forlorn that his heart melted.
The ever-present anger, which had been rising in him at her
refusal, was dissipated, and the passion that had roared in his
ears and his mind was muted into a controllable level of desire. He
tried to reassure her.

“We are both at fault. I instigated it. I
pursued it. You only allowed it.”

“Thank you for saying that, even though it is
not entirely true.”

“I suppose you want me to leave the bridge
now.” She nodded, her face closed and tight. He had the oddest
feeling that if he stayed a little longer she would begin to cry,
and he thought she would not want him to see her tears.

At the hatchway into the passage that led
from bridge to cabins, he paused to look back. Merin’s gaze was
fixed on the deck, her hands twisted together in the way he had
seen before, as though she would try to wring out all her problems
and her forbidden needs through her fingers. “Merin, you know,
don’t you, that one day we will finish what we started here?”

“It was finished here, a moment ago,” she
said.

“You are wrong. It hasn’t really begun.”

He was gone and she could catch her breath
again. Twisting her hands together, Merin sank into the captain’s
chair. She was still unsettled from her experience in the shaft
eight hours earlier. Upon regaining consciousness after fainting
onto her bunk, she had engaged in a fit of emotional tears most
unseemly for one who claimed Oressian origins. During her off-watch
hours she had slept badly, her rest interrupted by dreams in which
she was falling down an almost vertical shaft and out into the wide
nothingness of the main propulsion duct. Those nightmares had been
followed by sensuous dreams in which Herne was touching her legs
and her hips. The waking embrace they had just shared had seemed
like a continuation of those dreams, until he opened her
treksuit.

Valiantly, Merin faced the debacle in her
mind, the ruin of all her childhood conditioning. The recent perils
she had undergone and her close brush with death had propelled her
far beyond her previous rule- and law-limited existence to a new
mode of thought in which she could accept Herne’s desire for her,
and even her own growing tenderness toward him.

But there was one barrier between them that
could never be destroyed. It was clear to Merin that she could
never tell Herne how important he had become to her, for if they
grew close, he would inevitably learn the truth about her. And when
he knew, he would turn from her in revulsion.

She sat rubbing her still-aching arms and
shoulders while she planned the performance she must carry out from
the present moment into the future, until she died or left Tarik’s
colony. She could not let Herne see how much she had changed. It
was essential that he believe she was still the rigid
Oressian-trained woman she had been when they first met. Only in
that way could she hope to maintain his respect for her and,
perhaps, just perhaps, salvage a modicum of friendly feeling on his
part.

* * * * *

The solar flares had risen to levels that
repeatedly interfered with instruments on the
Kalina,
and
with messages between ship and Home. It seemed likely that Tarik
would soon order Herne and Merin to take the
Kalina
out of
orbit and away from Dulan’s Planet. Because they were expecting the
order, they were not surprised to hear Tarik’s voice break through
the static on the communicator. It was the overlapping hour of the
watch, so both of them were on the bridge. Herne had just begun to
eat from a plate he had brought in from the galley.

“You are to leave the
Kalina
and
return to headquarters at once,” Tarik said.

Herne paused with a piece of bread halfway to
his mouth.

“Are you saying you want us to leave the ship
unattended?” he asked. “That’s contrary to your original directive
when we first landed on the planet.”

He was answered by a crackle of loud
static.

“…return to headquarters at once,” Tarik’s
somewhat broken voice repeated.

Herne pushed his plate aside. Merin caught it
just before it would have fallen off the console. She watched him
working at the communicator, trying to clear the sound.

“Tarik,” Herne shouted into the mouthpiece,
“there is a lot of interference, and I can’t hear you clearly.
Repeat again, please. Do you want us to abandon the
Kalina?”

There was another burst of static before
Tarik’s voice sounded again.

“Leave the
Kalina.
Return at once.”
The communicator went silent.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Herne
insisted. “We are safer here than on a shuttlecraft; the
Kalina
hasn’t sustained any serious damage; we are not under
attack. Why does he want us to leave?”

“Could he have received a communication that
we don’t know about?” Merin suggested.

“It’s unlikely, but then, Reid and Carlis,
who are the official communications officers, are at Home with
Tarik. I suppose they could have picked up a low-level message that
we missed.”