Therein lay the truest hazard.
She reached third deck and entered the infirmary, greeting Zheng’s assistant with a nod. Zheng stood just inside the door of the ward, studying the monitors suspended above the berth on which her patient lay. The screens indicated body functions within normal range: pulse, blood pressure, lung function, pupil response. Every attribute of an extremely fit and healthy young human male.
That made his appearance all the more shocking. Zheng had left VelKalevi unclothed save for a light blanket covering his lower body. He lay quietly with his back to the doctor, and as Cynara joined Zheng, she found herself gazing at a chronicle of horror.
On the bridge he had been wearing a shipsuit that covered him from neck to wrist and ankle. She hadn’t seen the scars—layer upon layer over back and shoulders and hips, creating of his flesh a corrugated resume of punishment and countless skirmishes with teeth and claws.
Shaauri teeth. Shaauri claws. No, not claws, but curved nails their warriors kept sharpened to dagger points as deadly weapons of close combat, just as they filed their teeth to resemble those of primitive ancestors.
If Ronan VelKalevi turned to face her, she knew she would find similar records on his chest and arms. They continued the length of his legs and tattooed even his feet and hands.
Only his face was relatively clean, or so she remembered. Perhaps the shaauri had spared him obvious disfigurement. She knew nothing of shaauri notions of beauty. It might be that such scars were marks of honor.
Or perhaps he had merely suffered until he had learned to bear pain as other men bore the insignificant bites of sea-midges.
Barbarians, Janek called the shaauri. Natural killers who murdered any human caught intruding in the Shaauriat, who were raised communally and never knew their fathers, who chose their leaders and meted out justice through trials of physical violence.
But Kinsmen were allied to the shaauri. They were not treated so. The very truth of Ronan’s story was imprinted on his flesh; he had been a prisoner, and he had known incalculable pain at the hands of humanity’s greatest enemies.
“It isn’t pretty, is it?” Zheng remarked. “I would have doubted that any unenhanced human could survive such an ordeal.” She consulted the diagnostic screen and called up a holoscan of Ronan’s body. All the organs were healthy, spine straight and muscles well developed, but nearly every major bone of his arms and legs had been broken in young adulthood. “Some shaauri physician did an excellent job of repairing the breaks so that no lasting deformation occurred.”
Barbarians. Cynara fought the urge to stroke that ravaged back, as if she had the power to offer comfort with a gentle human touch. A typical, deeply conditioned Dharman female sentiment that she had never quite abandoned.
At least the shaauri regard males and females as equal in every facet of their society, unlike my own people. Who are the greater barbarians?
The answer eluded her, and even the question left her mind as Ronan VelKalevi groaned and rolled onto his back. The blanket slid across his waist and snagged under one knee. She had been right about the scars over the rest of his body, and about his face. His profile was unmarred save for a single line across his temple, ending at the dark edge of his hair.
Human. Utterly human. And most definitely male in a sense she could not ignore, no matter how much her family regarded her as tainted and forever ruined as a woman and childbearer.
“He’s coming out of sedation,” Zheng said. “He should be able to talk within a few minutes.”
“There’s no danger of relapse?”
“Not by my judgment, but I counsel restraint until we’re sure.” Zheng studied Cynara with narrowed eyes. “Are you all right?”
Trust Zheng to notice that her captain’s skin had flushed and her pulse had jumped from walk to gallop. “A great deal rides on what we discover about our guest,” Cynara said. “Leave me alone with him, Bolts. One way or another, he’s lost in a strange land. He’s going to need someone to trust, and I intend to be that person.”