Free Dana Cartwright Mission 2: Lancer by Joyz W. Riter Page B

practice medicine,” she reminded.
    “Nonsense! I checked. All your credentials and EMT certificates are current. You could replace Patel with ease.”
    “Stars forbid!” Dana blurted out without thinking.
    “In an emergency…”
    “Never!” Dana insisted.
    “Yet, you tended Neville Brandt,” he reminded.
    “Had to…I was there…first responder.” She frowned and looked away, not wanting to admit to the empathetic reaction which resulted from that incident.
    “Have you read Alphan A&P?” he asked
    “Read and memorized, sir, but…” she carefully avoided a discussion of chapter ten.
    He laughed at some unspoken thought as Dana finished her meal.
    “Mister Cartwright, if I should give you a direct order to use your skills, I expect…”
    His voice-badge chirped before she could answer.
    “Macao,” he responded.
    “Gordie, sir, I have something.”
    “Excellent…I’ll be right there.” Macao ended the conversation by touching his voice-badge, and then looked to her.
    Dana silently urged him to go.
    He invited, “Come with me?”
    “We have a mission briefing at 0900.”
    Macao nodded and rose to leave. “See you then…”
    Dana watched after him, until the doors closed, self-consciously glancing about the lounge to see if anyone else had paid attention to their exchange.
    No one seemed to have noticed.  
    She wondered at the conversation and was extremely concerned with how personal it had become.
    Had Janz Macao sensed the wounds she’d treat on Neville Brandt? Or Alley Song? Or Kieran Jai? Through her?
    And what about the memory of Forever Pointe?
    Without the N-link, he could telepathically do more than that, as a Master of the Elect. With her wearing the device, could he still?
    She wasn’t ready to reveal all the secret things of her past relationships.
    The Eridani empath training promised to enable her to block out ‘all’ unwanted intrusions. It could not protect if she voluntarily allowed some access. There could be no relationship with Janz Macao, for that very reason. She didn’t dare let him get that close.
    No entanglements!
    Not that she didn’t long for intimacy with someone. Since her romance with an SSID colonel, some ten years ago, there’d been no one. More than once she wondered if the brief liaison had linked her to the Alphan forever. Alphans mated for life — forever and always. Kieran had given her memories — wonderful memories — just recalling them made her smile. He had given her the memory of soaring with a kite glider over Forever Pointe.
    Was that the memory Janz Macao was retrieving?
    Kieran had used the L-word so easily.
    She couldn’t, realizing her Enturian and Galaxean ancestry was cause for caution about relationships. All the more reason she needed to find her birth mothers and resolve the issue of mutations.  
    Dana finished her tea, mulling options.
    Maybe a year aboard Lancer would be okay. The ship would be decommissioned.   She could then put in a request for Scanlos.
    Davis/Xalier’s offer was extremely appealing, and joining SSID — the Star Service Intelligence Division — might grant her total access to her genetic records, even those sealed. It was definitely tempting. If he could be believed.
    SSID had made similar offers to cadets, only to assign them to backward worlds, and other remote locations, like Reslan, instead of at galactic hubs like Scanlos or Tritia, and with no recourse.
    Enlistment and assignment with SSID was permanent; there was no going back once you had that level of security clearance.
    What about entanglements? Well, she still had that fling with Kieran and the desire to see him again.
    No one could know.
    She left Starboard-Seven with about ten minutes to spare before the briefing, steeling herself for the ordeal, and not knowing exactly what to expect.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    Aboard Lancer less than twenty-four hours and already Dana felt homesick for Station Four. Worse than being the only hybrid aboard and the only