She sighed. “I’d like to be able to do more with animals. It seems that might actually be possible, and I’ll work at it, but right now, I have to stand by what I said before. I don’t know what happened here or if anything happened. I certainly can’t supply an explanation.”
“I’m not challenging that.”
“What are you challenging?”
“Nothing. I just want to put a few questions to rest.” The gray eyes gripped hers. “What happened to you in the Red Garnet?”
Her breath caught, and she started to frown, but she stopped herself. Ali and the others were this man’s shipmates and subordinates. They would have described the whole incident in detail for him even if they had kept quiet about that part of it in front of the Patrol-Colonel. “I panicked.”
“Aye. Why?”
Her eyes wavered. “I felt. . . something in there. What, I don’t know, though believe that I’ve tried to figure it out. Maybe it was the rats’ collective hunger, maybe some afterglow of the victims’ horror and pain. Maybe it was something filthier, the eagerness of the subbiotics who could run an operation like that. They probably saw every stranger who walked into their lair as potential prey.” She shuddered. “It was all over the place, choking and draining me. I— I had to get out of there!”
She regained command of herself. “I figured, too, as much as I could reason, that the others’d follow if I ran. Of course, a fight almost erupted instead . . .” Her lips tightened into a hard line. “I’ve got no excuse. I blew it badly, and you’d have been within your rights to boot me off the ship.”
“None of my lads asked for that,” he responded quietly.
Her eyes, which had been fixed on her clasped hands, lifted. “Would . . . would you have done it?”
“No. I’d have upheld your contract. Your term of service is almost out, and you’re not going back into space with us.”
She just nodded. Jellico watched her for a moment. If he was ever going to hear the rest, it would have to be now, while she was thoroughly demoralized. “How can you function as a Medic?” he asked bluntly. Her answer to that could break her story, and it could give him some of the insight into her that he ever more strongly wanted to have.
“I don’t have a problem with that,” the woman responded without hesitation.
Her brows came together as she sought words to convey her meaning. “I’m definitely not what is usually thought of as an empath. I don’t experience another’s pain or emotions, but I do feel—uneasy when someone nearby is ill or injured. It is not a pleasant feeling. It’s horrible, in point of fact, but it’s not debilitating.”
For a moment, anger drove back her pallor. “That’s how I found the poor apprentice on the Mermaid. I knew something was wrong and hunted until I discovered him. If I hadn’t, he’d probably have died where he lay. Slate certainly wouldn’t have bothered looking for him even if he were missed in time. The bastard never even came to see him when he was dying.” Her voice cracked. “Oh damn . . .” she muttered as she was forced to fall silent.
Miceal’s fingers brushed hers. “It’s all right to care, you know,” he told her gently. “Space, you’re a Medic. You’re supposed to care.”
Cofort withdrew her hand. “The effect isn’t cumulative,” she went on, her tone steady and impersonal once more. “I was afraid it might prove so when I started my emergency room rotation, but I had no difficulty. I was able to set the discomfort aside the same as if I were dealing with a single patient and get on with my work.”
“Your gift has no real effect, then?” he asked thoughtfully.
“It might in a sense. I proved remarkably able at triage, and I could single out the most serious cases present, the heart attacks as opposed to the bad sprains.”
“What about during the plague?”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t conscious of anything particular then except for the constant fear and grief, but I was only a child, and we were all scared. I may have been picking something up, and I suppose I might have developed some inborn ability for handling the pressure, but I can’t recall anything of the sort. I know the rest, such as it is, developed as I grew. It was a major factor in my choosing medicine as my specialty.”
Rael seemed to slip into her own thoughts and said nothing more for several seconds. She roused herself abruptly and faced him. “What now. Captain?”
“We head back to the Queen.” His hands rested On the controls, but he did not activate them immediately. “I don’t know what life is like in the Cofort organization, but the Solar Queen welcomes whatever talents her crew has. That extends to passengers and temporary hands. Bear that in mind if yours start working on you again.”
Miceal brought the machine to a halt again just before they reached the outskirts of Canuche Town’s suburbs.
Rael was surprised, but when she looked to the Captain for clarification, she found him staring straight ahead, his gaze apparently fixed on some point in the far distance. “Is something wrong?” she inquired anxiously.
“Wrong, no, but the Queen will be lifting tomorrow.”
“Aye. By midafternoon if nothing delays delivery of the last Caledonia shipment.”
“Are you going to accept Macgregory’s offer?”
“No.”
“Think carefully, Rael. He meant every word of it. You’re not likely to run into a chance like this again.”
“Do you want me to accept it?” she asked carefully.
“What I want’s irrelevant. It’s your life, and this is a major decision.”
The woman shook her head. “No, I’m not going to accept. I don’t like Canuche of Halio. She’s Adroo Macgregory’s homeworld, and he naturally loves her. I’m not going to tell him how I feel about her, but of all the Federation’s habitable planets on which I might eventually choose to settle, this one’s pretty near the bottom of the list. Besides, I don’t want to leave the starlanes. That’s where I was born, and that’s where I belong.”
Jellico’s eyes dropped. He realized he had been gripping the controls so tightly that his knuckles glistened white under the stretched skin and hastily eased his hold. “I think that’s the wiser choice, though maybe not the most financially sound one,” he told her.
She studied him gravely. “I answered your question. Now answer mine. Did you wish me to accept Mr. Macgregory’s offer?”
“No. No, I did not. It would’ve been a disaster. Macgregory’s every inch an autocrat—benevolent maybe, but a despot all the same. A Free Trader’s too independent to stay under the thumb of someone like that long-term.”
“You’d have let me go ahead despite that?”
“I had no right to stop you, Rael, though I would’ve raised the question for your consideration and stressed it pretty strongly had you given me a different answer.”
His eyes were somber. “That’ll leave you at loose ends once we lift. Do you have anything particular in mind?”
Cofort nodded. “I was planning to approach Deke Tatarcoff. I’ve never known him not to be shorthanded, and I’ve given him good reason to respect my abilities. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll just hang around for a while. This port’s busy enough that I’m bound to pick up a berth in fairly short order, even if it’s just another single-voyage hop to some backwater hole.”
She saw him start to frown and shrugged delicately. “If it looks like there’s going to be a delay, I have no objection to taking on-world work for a time to keep body, soul, and store of credits together. Some of the hospitals in Canuche Town can probably use a part-time Medic, and should worse come to worse, I might even try to wrangle a temporary job out of Adroo Macgregory.”
“It sounds reasonable,” he said without looking at her. “I have to confess that I had some reservations about just leaving you here.”
“I’m not one who’s ever likely to let herself starve.”
“No.”
Her voice softened. “Thank you, Miceal Jellico,” she said. She sat a little straighter. “Let’s go back and develop those tri-dees. I’m dying to see what we gained for our efforts.”
Jellico shivered. Even this far from the shore, the sea breeze was sharp and cold and would remain so for a while yet, until Halio had warmed the land sufficiently to reverse the thermal currents and bathe the city in dry, hot, inland currents.
That alteration in the flow of the breeze, quite independent of the predominant prevailing winds, which moved parallel to the land, was a real blessing to the inhabitants of the city during the blistering months of the summer. A heat haze might shimmer over Canuche Town’s streets by day, but at night, people slept well beneath light blankets.