Prime Obsession(3)
She shook her head, causing the room to spin around her. Damn, Parker had hit her harder than she’d thought. The puzzle of the Prime’s reaction to her and their effect on her already unusual psychic gifts would have to be solved later. Right now, she needed to get the diplomacy handled so her men could take her to a hospital. Nowicki was right—
she needed medical attention—and soon.
“Excuse my lack of dress, gentlemen, but I was on leave.” And why she felt the need to explain herself, she’d never know. And why weren’t they saying anything?
Capturing their gazes, she all but dared them to continue scoping out her body. To a man, they smiled and shifted their perusal to her face. Smug amusement was the emotion of the moment. Damn them. Men! She foresaw issues with the all-male Prime military fighting alongside Alliance female soldiers, and she made a mental note to send a memo to the Admiral about that.
“Here, Captain!” Nowicki thrust a shirt at her. “Put this around you while I check on your injuries.”
“Never mind, Nowicki, I’ll take care of her injuries.” Captain Warten took her arm and sat her in chair.
Finally her fellow captain had decided to make his presence felt. Jerk. If she hadn’t needed to sit down so badly, she’d have yelled at him for being the reason she was in this situation to begin with.
“Mel, are you okay?” Garth stared into her eyes. “Damn, your whole right side is one big bruise. What the fuck were you thinking, taking on Parker in your condition? Give me that kit, Nowicki.”
He snagged the kit from her second-in-command and found an ice gun and applied it to her right side. She shuddered as the cold treatment numbed the throbbing bruise.
“Parker is out of the service. He should never have been here.”
“I totally agree,” she said with a hiss as Warten swept the ice treatment over her bruise once more, jabbing a rib in the process. After which, he stuffed her into the shirt Nowicki had provided. “Where’d you learn your first aid? From the Marquis de Sade?”
“Sorry.” Warten’s lips tilted up at the edges, then thinned with concern as his gaze swept over her face. “Ensign J’ar, call over to the hospital and have them send a vehicle for your Captain. Stat.”
Touching her colleague’s arm, she said in a low tone, “Garth, I can find my own way to the hospital. I’m fine. Really.”
Nowicki yelled over her shoulder, all irate alpha-male. “Dammit, Mel! Parker all but killed you on that last mission and now he’s had another chance. Let us take care of you!”
“Captain Dmitros.” The oldest of the three Prime approached her, a troubled smile on his strongly hewn face. “I believe your fellow officers are concerned because you are as pale as the sands on the Tooh 2 beaches. If we could be of assistance, our vehicle is outside. We can take you to the hospital so that you can be checked over, thus assuring all of us that you are truly well.”
“Thank you, Ambassador … I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.” She smiled at the man who reminded her a lot of her scholarly father, only a lot bigger and assuredly more deadly. His eyes—while smiling at her—hid a stronger will behind them. He would not desist until she agreed to go to the hospital. Again, reminding him of her father.
“Ambassador Tor Maren.” He bowed his head to her, then gestured to the other two men with him. “Allow me to present Huw and Iolyn Caradoc, number two and three sons to the leader of the Prime, Ilar Caradoc.”
The two dark-haired males bowed their heads in greeting.
Caradoc? Rifling through her memory, she finally placed the name. Caradoc was the most prominent family on Cejuru Prime from a royal line that went back to the beginning of Prime history. Her mother and father, space archaeologists and historians who specialized in ancient Prime sites, would be thrilled to hear she’d met them. The Caradocs were featured prominently in most of the historical documents her parents had found and catalogued on their digs. She’d grown up on the dig sites and practically learned Prime as she learned English and her parents’ native Greek. She knew their planet’s history as well as or even better than Earth’s.
Mel tried to stand.
“No, Captain,” Huw said. “Please do not rise. We no longer are treated as royalty.
Now, our family is just part of the Prime leading council. We are mere politicians, here to help finalize the formal alignment of our planet with the Gallactic Alliance.”
“Why did you fight that man?” Iolyn asked, his brow creased in puzzlement. “You know we are warriors; we could have handled the situation.”
“I meant no insult to your fighting prowess. But Parker is—was—an Alliance military problem. If you had defended yourselves and killed him, then there would’ve been a political disaster.”
The three Prime nodded, acknowledging the truth of her conclusion.
Ambassador Maren said, “Ah, yes, a definite consideration. Thank you for aiding us in avoiding a diplomatic nightmare of universal proportions. We are in your debt. By the way, where did you learn your fighting techniques? You are quite effective for a female.” Mel gritted her teeth against a knee-jerk response to the man’s unabashed male chauvinism. Instead, she said, “My military training encompassed all sorts of hand-to-hand and street fighting techniques. You will find that all Alliance military personnel are proficient in some form of hand-to-hand combat.”
“But you used other, shall we say, more unusual techniques,” the Ambassador said.
“Oh, you mean the maneuver with the wrist? Caught that, did you?” She smiled, then grimaced as a wave of dizziness swept over her. Haltingly, she explained, “I found the technique on a very old data disk discovered in an underground Prime site on Obam IV.”
“Obam IV?” Huw asked.
“It was where I spent most of my childhood and where my parents still live,” she grasped the arm of the chair, but her surroundings continued to swirl. “Uh, they supervise a dig there. They are Prime site experts in the Alliance Space Archaeology Institute.”
“We must meet your parents some day,” the Ambassador said as he gently covered her hand with his. “They have raised a very strong and lovely daughter. May we escort you to the hospital? You are extremely white, and I sense your colleagues are very upset.”
“Thank you. I do feel a little shaky.” And sick to her stomach.
Nowicki snorted and mumbled “About damn time.”
Mel threw her second-in-command a nasty look, and regretted the quick movement almost as soon as she’d done it.
Using the chair arm and the Ambassdor’s strong hand, she levered herself into a standing position. As he assisted her toward the exit, the world began to reel. Hot and cold shivers raced over her body as white, yellow and red flashes and dots swept across her line of vision.
As she fainted into the arms of the Prime Ambassador, Nowicki swore colorfully in the background. She’d have to remember to cite him for language unbecoming an officer when she felt better.
* * * *
Maren stood outside the private hospital room he’d insisted upon for Melina Dmitros. He couldn’t call her by her military title, because she just didn’t seem like a military officer—despite the fact she’d single-handedly taken out a large Terran male while recovering from what her fellow officers had assured him had been a life-threatening laser blast.
“She is a Prime female. How did she end up on Obam IV and then in the Alliance military?” Huw asked. “She should be on the home planet, safe and protected as all our women are.”
“She is one of the Lost Ones,” concluded Maren. “She has her gemate sign. All the female evacuees, even the infants, were exposed to potential mates prior to the exodus.
You know most never returned when the planet’s security was once again ensured. They were thought dead. Now, we know at least one survived.” A feeling of contentment, hope and sheer joy at her discovery swirled through Maren. Huw and Iolyn would be thinking and feeling the same as he. They had found a mate for one lucky Prime male. Melina Dmitros’s discovery raised the possibility that there could be more gemate in the galaxy, cut off with no way to return to Cejuru Prime.
Why had they never considered such a possibility? But he knew why. It was a well-known fact that as long as a Prime breathed they would find a way to return home. But now, he realized, the youngest Lost Ones would not know who they were—or where they really belonged. It was obvious that Melina had been raised as, and considered herself, Terran.
“There could be others out there,” Iolyn stated Maren’s thought out loud, a tinge of hope in his voice.
Iolyn and Huw, along with their eldest brother Wulf, were just a few of the Prime males with no mates. Their world had lost so many women from attacks by their mortal enemies the Antareans and a declining birth rate among the surviving females. The population growth on Cejuru Prime was less than zero. Without enough Prime females, there would be no future for their species.
This lack of fertile females had been the main reason the Prime Council agreed to end centuries of isolation from the rest of the galaxy.
Their race was on the verge of extinction. By joining the Alliance, the Prime could mingle and learn of the other humanoid races, many of which had Prime DNA from the millennia of space exploration by their ancestors. The mateless Prime males might be able to find compatible females and create a new generation of Prime.