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and down one of the access lanes that radiated like wheel spokes from the hub of the station, his eyes never leaving the horizon. The hand that gripped the wheel was white-knuckled; the other lay clenched in his lap.
    Tatya stayed below with her patients, sitting on her heels on the deck between the bunk where the male lay and the stretcher that held the female. Now that she knew, or thought she knew, what they were, the idea of touching either of them made her quail.
    You’re going to have to touch them sooner or later, she told herself. You’re a paramedic; it’s your job. When you get them back to the station, what then?
    She’d plunged her bloodstained hands into seawater up to the elbows, trailing them over the side until Yoshi started the foil again and it lifted out of the water. Her skin still tingled with the shock of it; she couldn’t seem to get her hands clean. Now she forced herself to take a wad of sterile gauze from the medikit, dampen it with cool water from the galley, and swab the blood off the female patient’s face, making sure none of it got on her hands. When they got back to the station, she’d have a proper scrub and put on her gloves and—
    She finished what she was doing and tossed the gauze in the disposal, trying not to look too long at the strange female’s face, which disturbed her deeply. The alien’s nose was shattered, several of her teeth were loosened and the gums bleeding, at least one cheekbone was broken, the surrounding tissue bruised and beginning to swell. She must have impacted against the helm console during splashdown to do that much damage. It wasn’t anything Tatya hadn’t seen before. What disturbed her was not the extent of the injuries, but the alien’s response to them.
    The alien, Tatya thought. Well, all right, what else am I supposed to call her? She’s the alien, until someone tells me otherwise.
    The alien, unlike her male counterpart, was at least semiconscious most of the time, and the broken facial bones, along with second- and third-degree burns similar to those the male had sustained, must have been excruciating. But except that the broken nose forced her to breathe through her ravaged and swollen mouth, she made no sound. Only her eyes moved. And those eyes…
    The swelling had reduced them to slits, but they remained open as long as she was conscious—the color of jet, as sharp as lasers and, to Tatya, positively chilling. They fixed themselves on some distant point beyond Tatya’s shoulder, and they made her insides quiver. If they ever looked right at her…
    Tatya shivered, turned her attention to the male, whose eyes, mercifully, were closed. Fingertips tingling, Tatya forced herself to reach over and gently slap his face several times, bringing him up to a less profound level. When he’d stabilized, she sat back on her heels and studied him.
    She had to admit he was beautiful. Even with burns covering a third of his face (further burns on his hands and visible through the charred fabric of his uniform), he was more beautiful, God help her, than Yoshi—his face all planes and angles beneath golden skin, his eyelashes thick and black and centimeters long, his dark hair silky to her tentative touch. She could almost forget that the blood beneath that golden skin was green, so mesmerized was she suddenly by the exotic upsweep of those alien eyebrows, and those ears.
    Those ears. She’d thought at first they were the result of some form of cosmetic mutilation, like the custom of piercing on Earth, but on closer examination she could find no surgical scars, and the pinnal curve was simply too natural. They were supposed to be that way.
    Tatya sat back on her heels and tried to imagine a whole race of beings like him. Perhaps a whole planetful, a solar system, a galaxy. She wondered what they would think of humans, red-blooded, stunted-eared, bizarre.
    With a sudden thrill up her spine she realized that the female, still gasping for air through