Rough Rider

By Nina M. Osier

"No! I won't leave him here! I can't do this - please don't make me do this!" It was her own frantic voice that woke her, not her companion's presence; but the moment Captain Joy Grant opened her eyes she was aware of not being alone, and she was grateful that she'd ignored protocol tonight and had allowed her chief medical officer to go sleep by her side instead of sending him back to his own quarters at evening's end.

He wasn't sleeping now, of course. No one could have slept through the racket she'd just been making, but John Woodlawn had waited patiently for Grant to rouse herself and now he was ready to gather her into his arms and hold her close while she trembled and fought down the last vestiges of her nightmare's panic. Only when she finally relaxed against him did he ask her gently, "The same dream, Joy?"

"Exactly the same. I've had it every night since we changed course, and each time I get a little further into it before I wake up." Grant shuddered, glad she'd been on intimate terms with this man for more than long enough so that she had no hesitation about being this honest (and this vulnerable) with him. He had come aboard the St. Petersburg with her when she had taken command of her most recent starship two years earlier, he newly widowed after a happy (although often absentee) twenty-year marriage; she in all ways but one the quintessential never-married-except-to-the-ship Star Guard captain, whose long-term relationship with an Arian civilian research scientist had just broken up and had left her feeling far more adrift than she'd expected (or than she'd cared to admit, even to herself).

They were old friends anyway, though, were Joy Grant and John Woodlawn. They'd been at the Academy at the same time, he serving as her senior mentor during her plebe year; they'd stayed in touch throughout their careers; and they'd served together on another starship that had also found its way to Zorti, nineteen years earlier when Woodlawn's marriage had been young and when Grant wouldn't have looked at him twice as anything but a friend because someone else had occupied the most special place in her heart and in her life.

Someone she'd just been dreaming about, again. Someone she'd left behind on Zorti, the first human to die there on the world where the second Earth colony on a true M-class planet had been established during the years since then.

"I'm your doctor, you know," Woodlawn reminded his captain now, but his tone was mild rather than insistent. He let her go without trying to hold her when she moved out of his arms and lay back against her pillow, the bedclothes clasped over her breasts by arms that were still faintly moist with the perspiration of dream-inspired panic. "I could insist that you tell me about it...."

"The hell you could," Grant answered him; and although her lips twisted into a wry grin, no warmth made it as far as her blue-gray eyes. "But do I really have to tell you, Woody? You were there nineteen years ago. You know what I'm reliving whenever I have that dream. What's the point of putting us both through my telling it to you like some kind of badly written horror novel?"