CHAPTER TWO
Zade
Zade Baru-Nok, high physician of the Raplan-B, had been given two tasks by his Saar-king. First, to save the life and, hopefully, the leg of the human woman who had been transported to him, and second, to discern what had attacked her, slaughtering the rest of her party.
There was no saving the leg.
He didn’t have to run a test to know that. It was all but dissolved, including the bone.
Her life, on the other hand, was less of a lost cause.
She had a sixty-eight percent chance of survival.
If the swelling in her brain went down at the rate he expected, her chances rose to eighty.
He had already repaired the fracture to her skull.
Whatever had thrown the female possessed great strength.
He crossed the room to add that detail to his report.
No equipment cluttered his primary treatment room, where only his highest priority patients were kept.
The space was large and dull gray and mostly empty except for the reju table holding the female.
the table itself, with its thick gel mat, imbedded with thousands of tiny sensors, monitored every body system.
The walls, on the other hand, were covered in screens for readouts and imaging of patients present.
The lower half was a grid consisting of ports, scanners, and instruments that could extend from the walls when needed and retract flush to the wall when not in use.
A thick glass wall separated this space from his personal lab and work chamber, which contained far more equipment.
It had been adapted for him over many cycles.
A full-body sanitizer in a washroom had been upgraded to accommodate all of his needs, including various types of showers, a body moisturizing system, as the membrane films could be very drying to the skin after a while, and a full closet of clothing.
He had a reju engineered and built specifically for him.
It induced sleep at the touch of a sensor and could be set for a timer or synched to the reju on the other side of the glass.
This way he could awaken when his patient did so.
He found it efficient to program in restorative sleep on his schedule and not waste time trying to fall asleep naturally.
Zade could find no fault in an efficient system.
This female was incredibly fortunate to have survived, when the other four females she had been with had not. There had been little left of them.
As for the second part of his assignment, he was not as confident.
The samples were degraded, making it difficult to identify the creature.
The components of the venom had reacted with the human tissues and were proving difficult to separate out enough to analyze.
There were fifty-five species from the known universe that could be the one loose in the state of Colorado, on the planet Earth.
None of them would be easy to find. Worse, twenty-two of them were on strict protection lists, meaning that it would be violating intergalactic law to kill them.
That was not his problem.
His problem was the female lying on the reju with a melting leg.
He noticed little about her other than the things he had to fix.
She had a pleasing form, though. Her bones were strong and her muscles well developed.
Her breasts were large enough to be a handful—why did he think of that? Zade shook himself from the thought.
He slid his hands into a machine that covered them in a thin, but impermeable membrane and set about removing the female’s calf.
Her knee could be saved, and it would not be difficult to graft a new leg and foot to the existing bone.
He just needed permission from her people to do so.
That request had been issued almost instantly after he laid eyes on her.
He tapped a device on his ear. He had to alter his usual methods to include a voice transcription of his diagnosis and treatment because everything he did with this patient was being translated to English and sent back to Earth.
It would be amusing, if it were not slightly irritating.
Zade listed the medications and treatments he’d administered, knowing the human doctors would have no idea what they were listening to.
He waved off an assistant who entered holding up a clear tablet.
They could wait. The patient’s leg could not, and he could not begin the removal of her diseased tissue until he documented everything to the letter.
The assistant stood there, clutching her tablet until he finished, then stepped forward, with a hard swallow.
He looked at her, brow raised. “Proceed.”
“Permission has been granted to begin leg restoration of patient 33-H,” she said.
Relief moved through Zade. He had wanted to get to work on this as soon as she arrived, but transplanting lab-manufactured Baylan tissues into a human patient was something that required serious debate on Earth, apparently.
He had sent everything he could to them, without sharing technology that was forbidden by the Baylan Elder Council.
His father was on the council dedicated to medical research and there was no argument from Zade regarding how ill-equipped the humans were for an influx of alien influence.
As it was, Zade had issued a list of demands that needed to be met from Earth before he would treat the human woman. First and foremost was a promise that she would not be taken apart for reverse engineering purposes. You never could tell with humanity.
His two favorite assistants moved about the room, quickly preparing the space for Zade’s procedure.
He would be building this woman a new leg.
It was the closest thing he came to being an artist, he liked to think.
Rebuilding what was broken in someone, making them as good or better than before, was one of the most rewarding parts of his position.
Yoli and Pruk, had earned their places as his top assistants and would work alongside him.
With everything in place, Zade sat between the woman’s legs, gazing at the intact one.
He traced the lines of her bones from her knee to the arch of her foot.
She had beautiful feet: small and high-arched with pretty little toes.
He frowned at his own subjectivity. All he needed to do was replicate those toes on the other foot, not form an opinion about them.
“Are you ready, Zade?” Yoli asked. He did not need to look at her to know she was tired, but alert and ready. She was the best. Of the two of them, Yoli was the first he called on. Pruk was newer, but showed remarkable promise.
Zade took a deep breath. He cleared his head and focused on the screens above him. “Begin.”
As his assistants worked on the female’s diseased limb, Zade wrapped his hands around the healthy leg.
He closed his eyes and let his fingers press into her calf.
All of this would be committed to his memory.
The computers could replicate the shape and thickness of her muscles, tendons and skin, but he was the one who fine tuned it all. Who made it perfect.
But the membrane covering his hands was somehow causing him to miss something.
Maybe it was the texture, he thought. This was not Baylan flesh, but human, which he was not as familiar with.
With a grimace, he went back to the M-Clo machine and had the membrane removed.
He set it to sanitize his bare hands. Zade loathed touching the actual skin of patients.
There were simply too many pathogens to count, but he knew he would not get patient 33-H’s leg right any other way.
He returned to where she lay, still in her unconscious state and oblivious to the team of three bending over her.
Zade closed his eyes again. He focused on the gentle, scentless air that filtered from the vents.
On the blackness behind his eyelids. On the warm, smooth flesh beneath his fingers.
He could feel everything now, from the silkiness of her skin, to her smooth muscles, to the strong bones beneath it all.
A shiver tickled over his skin. He ignored it.
It had been a very long time since he had touched anyone’s skin.
He basically lived with the membrane on, since the vast majority of his waking hours involved him handling patients.
Of course, it was extra stimulation. He should have expected it.
His sense of touch was usually dulled, due to layers of skin protection.
But now, as he molded his fingers to this female’s calf, his senses became attuned to every contour of her.
Memorizing the shape of her leg became effortless.
He moved down to her foot and again, the bones of her ankles, the shape of her heel, the shape of her toes down to her delicate toenails, felt so familiar, it was as if he knew what they would feel like before he even got to them.
Records proved this female had never before been under his care, but his instincts told him differently. His body knew hers. The thought skittered through his mind that he didn’t need to do any of this—he already knew these bones and this skin, and the leg he made for her would be flawless.
His hands slid up to her knee and his fingers brushed the silken skin just above.
His pulse quickened and his mouth dried.
Just a small shift in his gaze and he was staring at her sex, peeking pink and ripe from neatly trimmed hair.
Full breasts rose above that, topped with nipples that seemed to harden and distend before his very eyes.
There was a wild impulse to know the rest of her, to learn if it all felt as familiar as this limb, to know her scent, and taste, and—stars!
He dragged his gaze from her body, horrified with himself.
How many naked females had he seen and touched since becoming a physician?
Thousands. Never had he felt attraction to one.
Never had he suppressed an urge to bury his face in the pussy of one.
He pulled in a deep breath, alarmed in a way he had never known. His heart pounded. Within the confines of his sterile gray operating suit, his cock stiffened.
Zade released her foot and stepped away. Confusion blurred his vision. He clenched his hands, more than alarmed now. This was full-blown lust, but why? Was he ill?
Another shiver slid down his back. Hands that had healed more patients than he could count, trembled.
His assistants had completed their work.
They stood to the side, watching him. Puzzlement showed in their features, but they said nothing.
Zade moved his gaze to the female’s other leg.
Yoli and Pruk had grafted new bones from a metal alloy that mimicked the feel of bone and was compatible with many tissue types.
They had been generated from a scan of her intact leg, and grafted to below the knee.
It could work as it was. The computer scan did an accurate job replicating the shape of all those bones.
They needed the waiting tissues to be grafted over it.
His assistants were more than qualified to perform these next steps, but Zade knew this was an art as well as a science.
There was some work left to do. His skills were needed to shape these bones perfectly, so when the patient stood up and walked, she would not feel a difference in her stride.
Despite this…unnatural response of his body, the female deserved his best work. She needed his best work.
He turned away from the curious eyes of his staff and placed his hands back in the M-clo machine to replace the membrane over his hands.
He hoped they did not see his erection, which was contained within the restrictive suit.
His palms still dampened beneath the thin covering.
Zade grimaced as the skin covering his ribs began to burn.
The sensation was set low, beneath his left arm and extending toward his abdominals.
Great stars, perhaps he was becoming ill.
He glanced at the female, lying there, naked and unconscious, and utterly beautiful, and another possibility entered his mind.
This one frightened him more than the prospect of any illness.
Zade gritted his teeth and strode back to the reju. He focused his mind only on the task before him. The female would wake up with two functioning legs. He would deal with his own issues—whatever they were—later. The patient came first. This patient, especially.
He knelt before her legs, purposefully not allowing his gaze to stray to her exposed sex. After they were done here, he would have her covered up. Doing so now would utterly confound his assistants, who were probably perplexed by his behavior as it was.
He placed a hand on the gray, metal bones before him and began making the small alterations that would perfect her new leg.
The raging attraction slowly eased away.
Two things aided in this: first, the membrane prevented skin-to-skin contact, and the second was a ruthless work ethic he had honed over many cycles as high physician of the Raplan-B.
He pinned his assistants with a firm gaze.
“Prepare for the next stage,” he said, and he gave himself to his work.