No Other Love (10 page)

She was free as far as her knees when a loud
popping sound behind her head reverberated through the metal
bulkhead. Immediately, the shaft was filled with grey smoke. She
felt the urgent pressure of Herne’s hands on her thighs, pulling
hard at her, sliding her through the shaft as fast as he could. An
instant later she was out of the narrow shaft and Herne, who had
been kneeling across her legs as he worked her body forward, was
holding her in his arms, crushing her against him while smoke
billowed out of the hole where she had been. When she put up one
hand to adjust her coif, he gave a shaky laugh.

“That cursed thing never comes off, does it?
Blessed stars, I was frightened for you! Are you hurt? Merin, can
you say something?”

“I’m not hurt.” He didn’t seem to realize
that he was still straddling her thighs and that she could not
move. He did release her from the tight embrace of his arms, but
only to take her face between his hands while he kissed her. And
she, thoroughly shaken by the explosion in the shaft, lowered her
defenses enough to put her arms around him and kiss him back. Then
they were down on the cool metal of the deck, Herne sprawling on
top of her, pressing hard on her, holding her there, while his
hands at either side of her head kept her immobilized through a
wild, deep kiss. Still she clung to him, trying to pull him closer,
reveling in the unfamiliar pleasure of masculine hardness and taut
muscles.

“Merin, Merin, I thought I had lost you.” He
held her gently now, pulling her partly off the deck so they were
side by side as he rocked her.

It was sweet, so very sweet, to be held like
that, to know he cared enough to fear for her. No one had ever
cared for her before. No one. Merin buried her face against his
shoulder.

His hands touched her coif, trying to
unfasten the strap beneath her chin, trying to push away the
fabric. That brought her back to reality. Breaking apart from him,
she sat up.

“We need to attend to the ship,” she
said.

“For a while there, I forgot about it,” he
told her. “I forgot everything but you, and whether or not you were
hurt.”

“You must never forget your duty for my
sake.”

“When we have the ship repaired,” he began,
“when we are back safe on the planet, at Home again—”

“Then all will be as it was before.” She had
regained her usual self-control. “Nothing has changed.”

“Nothing?” He stared at her, then reached out
to pull her close again, but she stood up and moved away from him.
He followed her, a hard-muscled hunter stalking his prey. His next
words sounded almost like a threat. “I want you, Merin. I dream
about you at night.”

So he dreamed, too. Did he imagine her
unclothed, walking toward him, as she had dreamed of him coming to
her? He had never seen her without her treksuit and coif, but he
was a doctor; he would know how a woman was made. Did he dream of
putting his hands on her bare skin, of pulling her against his
naked body? Merin ran her tongue across her dry lips.

Herne. Oh, Herne.
They were looking
into each others’ eyes and, like the mesmerized prey she imagined
herself to be, she could not tear her own gaze away from the hunter
who would destroy her. But she must. She must.

“Stop this,” she said, fighting for calmness
through her fear and through that other emotion she refused to
acknowledge. “We have a faulty cable that needs correction. Since I
have failed in my amateur attempt to fix the malfunction, I suggest
we contact Tarik and ask what he recommends. We should do it at
once, before the problem is compounded by any more errors on our
part.”

“How can you do that?” he asked. “You change
so easily from deep passion to complete coldness and control.”

“It was not passion. As usual, you have
misunderstood me, Herne. I was only a little startled by the
explosion.”

“I know when a woman is responding to
me.”

“Will you call Tarik, or shall I?”

He could tell she had closed him out of her
mind for the present, so he started back to the bridge, to contact
Tarik. He was not at all downhearted. After the embrace they had
just shared he felt certain that Merin’s withdrawal – her prim
claims to feel nothing, her insistence on rigid standards – were
merely a disguise for her emotional nature. Sooner or later there
would come another moment of surprise or of danger when she would
forget her strict rules of behavior and open herself to him again.
He would be better prepared when it happened the next time, and the
time after that. Eventually, with patience on his part, he would
learn what she was really like beneath all the conditioning and the
rules. Then he would understand how to make her his. For he knew
now that she would be his, when the time was right.

Merin reached the bridge first and opened
communications with headquarters, explaining their problem with the
cable and what had happened when she tried to reconnect it.

“Hold on, let me confer with Gaidar,” said
Tarik. “He knows the ship as well as I do, perhaps better.”

The receiver went silent except for
occasional static. Herne looked down at Merin. A wave of tenderness
swept over him. Her usually crisp white coif was wrinkled and
soiled. There was a streak of dust across the shoulders of her
treksuit. Her back was held stiffly, her shoulders squared. When
she turned her head to watch one of the lights on the control panel
he put out his hand, then drew it back, certain that if he were to
touch her now she would be deeply offended and would withdraw even
more from him. He contented himself with a mildly teasing
comment.

“There is a smudge on your cheek. And another
on your nose.”

“Time enough to worry about cleanliness after
that cable is repaired.” Her voice was cool, unemotional, a little
abrupt. “Ah, here is Tarik.”

“Gaidar and I agree that you will have to go
back again to repair that connection,” Tarik said. “I’m going to
let him give you the instructions.”

“Listen carefully, Merin,” The Cetan’s deep
voice rumbled out of the receiver. “Go in by the shaft on the
opposite side of the propulsion system from the one you used
before. That way, you will have more room to move your arms. That
way, it will be easier to make a firm connection.”

“She will be crawling at an angle that will
put her almost upside down by the time she reaches the cable and
the terminals,” Herne objected. He had called up the diagram of
that section of the ship and was studying the screen where it
appeared.

“Let her wear one of the harnesses from the
cargo bay of your shuttlecraft,” Tarik ordered, “the ones we use to
lower people through the cargo bay doors when we can’t land the
shuttlecraft.”

“There is a length of metoflex rope stored in
a locker on the docking deck. Attach it to the harness.” Gaidar
gave them instructions on where to find the rope, adding, “Herne,
you will have to keep Merin from sliding down into the main
propulsion duct, and when she has finished her work, you will have
to pull her out again. It would be all but impossible for her to
crawl backward out of that shaft.”

“I’m sorry about this, Merin,” Tarik said.
“There is so much solar activity right now that it would be
dangerous for us to send anyone else by shuttlecraft beyond the
protection of the atmosphere to help the two of you.”

“I understand,” Merin replied. “I’m not
worried about my personal safety, only about my ability to make a
successful repair.”

“I will rehearse you again,” Gaidar offered.
In fact, he went through the entire procedure three times, making
Merin repeat his instruction back to him twice before he announced,
“What you have just learned will have to do. Good luck, Merin.”

After adding his own good wishes, Tarik
signed off. When Merin turned from the communications console,
Herne was watching her with a worried expression.

“I wish you didn’t have to go in there. I
would gladly do the job myself,” he said, “if only I could fit into
that confounded shaft.”

“While you find the rope Gaidar told you to
use,” she said, ignoring the sentiment implicit in his words, “and
bring the harness from the shuttlecraft, I will locate the second
shaft and remove the grate so we need waste no time. The repairs
grow more urgent with every hour that passes.”

“You are absolutely fearless, aren’t you? You
don’t mind going into those cramped shafts at all. I admire your
courage, Merin.”

“If I am not afraid,” she responded, “there
can be no courage in what I do. As I understand it, to achieve
courage, one must first overcome fear.”

“I wish I knew what you really are,” he
whispered. “Sometimes I suspect you aren’t human at all.”

After he had left her, Merin slumped a
little, shaking her head at the irony of her present situation. She
had gone into the first shaft indifferent to her own safety.
Indeed, at one level of her mind, she would have been pleased to
die in there, so that the torture of her recent existence might end
in a place similar to the Cubicle where her earliest life had been
spent.

But in the shock of the explosion in the
shaft she had made a frightening discovery. As Herne had pulled her
out, as he held her and she clung to him, she had suddenly wanted
to go on living, not because her life was valuable, or even because
she hoped for anything pleasant in the future, but because she did
not want to leave Herne. He had become so important to her that the
thought of never seeing him again, or hearing his voice, or perhaps
occasionally being touched by him, was intolerable. If she died,
she would leave him for all eternity. Thus, she would enter the
second shaft in fear for her life, an emotion entirely new to
her.

Perversely, she savored the fear while she
made her way back to the propulsion controls chamber to locate the
shaft Gaidar had told her to use. There she called up a diagram
screen and double-checked the shaft location, then began to remove
the grate covering its outlet. This second shaft ended high in the
bulkhead instead of at deck level like the first one. By the time
she pulled the grate off and was lowering it to the deck, her hands
were shaking so hard she dropped it.

“Watch that!” Herne reappeared, carrying the
harness and the rope. “Keep your mind on what you’re doing or
you’ll botch this attempt, too!”

Through the fear that threatened to stifle
her breath, Merin was able to see that he was seriously concerned
about the repairs, and rightly so. Both their lives might depend on
the work she did. Summoning all her Oressian training, she asserted
control over her fear as she would over any other emotion,
banishing it to a small, dark corner of her mind, commanding it to
stay there until she was finished with the work she must do.

With no outward show of feeling, she let
Herne fit the harness around her chest and shoulders and fasten it
at the back. Next he attached the narrow metoflex rope, a
combination of plastic and strands of metal.

“Centuries ago,” he told her, his fingers
busy on the rope, “surgeons used to cut their patients open with
knives and then sew them up again after the surgery was completed.
I once saw diagrams of the knots they used, in an old book. I used
to practice tying the knots, just in case I should ever need to
know how to make them. Now, here I am, remembering that book and
tying surgical knots in a rope. There, that should hold.”

“It won’t come undone until I’m out again?”
Merin twisted her head around but could not see what he had done.
It was hard to reach behind her back to feel the knot with both
hands. She tried once more. The knot felt firm and tight. “You are
sure it will hold?”

“If that particular knot hadn’t held,” Herne
told her, smiling a little, “then over the course of almost a
century, a lot of patients would have bled to death. Of course,
surgeons didn’t use sutures for very long. Better closures were
invented. But until they were, the knots held. So will this
one.”

His smile faded. He looked hard at her. She
kept her gaze on the flexlight he had once more strapped to her
wrist. She adjusted the brightness with fingers that trembled a bit
in spite of her efforts to control her fingers.

“Merin, are you frightened? You needn’t be
ashamed if you are.”

“Certainly not.” She made her voice as crisp
and calm as she possibly could. “Oressians are never afraid.”

“Is that also one of your laws?” In contrast
to her voice, his was gentle, and as tender as the large hand that
stroked across her cheek. Merin fought the urge to catch his hand,
to kiss it and hold it against her face. Instead, she bent to pick
up her tools. Still not looking directly at him, she fastened the
tools to her shoulder harness so she would have both hands
free.

“I will need the steps to reach the
entrance,” she said, nodding toward a nearby rolling ladder.

“They’ll just be in the way. I’ll boost you
up. Remember, I’ll be right here, with the other end of the rope
wrapped around my waist. It may go slack at times, but even if you
slip, you won’t go far. I know how long that shaft is and I can
always pull you back.”

“I am ready,” she said.

Herne made a step of his hands and Merin put
one foot into it. He lifted her with easy strength until her face
was level with the shaft opening. She put her arms and head inside.
Herne pushed her a little higher, and now her waist was in, too.
She felt him lifting her legs so that her entire body was on a
slant, head down, face toward the floor of the shaft. There was
more room in this shaft than there had been in the first, so she
could maneuver her arms more easily. She began a squirming,
slithering crawl at a downward angle, stopping when she felt the
tug of rope at her back, then inching forward when Herne played out
more rope.