War Games (22 page)

No one rose to challenge her.

Maizay touched my shoulder. He was smiling. “Why don’t you give it a try? You surely remember how to fence? Let’s see if a Terran can beat an elf in a fair contest.”

“Why not’?” I answered. “A little exercise would do me good.” Someone handed me an ion stick. It fit my hand well and was properly balanced. I swung a few practice strokes; sparks cracked in the air and smoke rose in curlicues from the blade.

I glided down to where the elven maiden waited, and pulled up in the air to face her. We touched swords. Fire leaped between our blades, causing my hair to tingle with static. We withdrew.

The duel began.

She attacked, I parried to remise, thrust and parry, reremise, break to counter. Sparks showered around us. Standard fencing. Except we were in midair. Movement of your arm was translated to movement of your wing, which changed your position in the air. If you thrust too vigorously, you might cause yourself to spin, exposing your back to a disabling blow. Follow-through was likewise exaggerated. Footwork had to occur in three dimensions—you circled your opponent from side to side or from above or below. We performed aerial ballet with swords.

Physically, I should have been superior in both speed and strength. But I was out of shape and a little out of practice. I could hardly overwhelm her. And she was more adept at maneuvering in the air with wings, having been born with them. I had a tendency to overcompensate, making me a little off balance most of the time. The result was that we were fairly evenly matched.

Attack, parry, remise ... break to counter. The air between us glowed with stray sparks. Smoke formed a cloud around us. Each strategy of one was thwarted by the other. I enjoyed the fight immensely. I admired her skill—she was good. I was also having more fun than I’d had in a long time. Combat was a hard habit to kick. Maybe even harder than peptide.

Under other circumstances, I might have defeated her. I was learning how to control my wings more proficiently. But I was out of shape. Months of peptide addiction had weakened me. I started getting tired. It became harder to parry her attacks. She realized I was fatiguing, and intensified the pressure.

She feigned an overhand attack, then came in from the weak side. My parry came a little too late. Her blade bounced off mine, but also glanced across my upper arm, paralyzing it. My sword hand had lost both feeling and strength, but before my saber could drop I grabbed it with my other hand. I attacked left-handed, to keep her from pressing her advantage. I was equally skilled with either hand—combrid cybersurgery mixed synapses enough to produce ambidexterity—so fighting left-handed was not a particular disadvantage. But I was still dog tired. And I couldn’t maneuver very well with one wing limp.

I decided to take a chance. I didn’t have much choice—it was either that or surrender.

So I double-feinted, low then high—a neat trick in midair. She parried, exposing her legs. I slashed down and across them, feeling my blade strike muscle. Then I tried to get my sword blade back up. I was too late. Her tail swung, blocking my arm. Her sword touched my shoulder. My other arm was paralyzed. There was no way I could stay in the air—neither wing functioned. I began to drop. Using only my legs, I slowed my descent. I settled to the ground, standing on my feet.

The elf was in no better shape. She could still hold a sword, but could hardly fly. She glided erratically toward me, with sword raised. I stood my ground, wondering briefly if she intended to strike me when I was disarmed. She didn’t. As she reached me, she dropped her blade and wrapped her arms around me. Limp legs brushed against mine.

“You fight well, Earther.” Black lips parted to show a pink tongue. Her eyes looked into mine. “I think there was no winner.”

I recognized her. “Aleel?” I asked.

“Of course.” She smiled, “But I think there was no loser, either.” She pressed her face through my oxygen bottle, kissing my lips. Her tongue touched mine.

The elven crowd cheered.

I didn’t mind either the kiss or the applause.

* * *

That evening, Aleel joined Grychn, Maizay, and me for dinner in Maizay’s house. Again there were only standard rations for Grychn and me. The elves ate crystal fruits and vegetables, being obligate vegans as there was no crystalline fauna. There was more wine with the food, and later mnemone sticks for Grychn and me.

We sat around a thermonuclear crystal that glowed in the center of the house.

Outside, the temperature dropped to around a hundred below. Inside it stayed around zero. Any warmer and the elves would have been uncomfortable. Grychn wore a body stocking of space polymer. I was as naked as the elves. More naked. I had no fur.

I’m afraid I inhaled too much of the mnemone fumes. They and the wine went to my head. While the others talked and laughed, I drifted into a pleasant reverie. I fell asleep.

Someone carried me to another elf-house. This one had a Terran bed of wombskin and an oxygen atmosphere. My oxygen bubble was removed. I lay on the bed in darkness. Fingers stroked my skin, massaging my muscles. Lips kissed my ears, my neck, my eyes. I let my penis slip out of its niche. A tongue stroked stiffness into it. A tail brushed my cheek.

I sat up.

“Grychn?” I asked, knowing she was not.

A furred body pressed against mine. “No. Aleel. Grychn’s busy. Do you mind?
”
Whiskers brushed my cheek.

I was too mellow with mnemone to mind anything. I kissed her face, finding her mouth with my lips. My tongue touched hers. I stroked her fur. It felt wonderful. Static sparked blue beneath my hands. Breasts pressed against my chest. I smoothed the fur around them with my tongue, then moved down her belly to apply my tongue to the softness between her legs. She took my penis in her mouth, working her tongue over it. Her tail wrapped around my neck. Muscles fasciculated. Skin quivered. Bodies undulated in passion.

Later she rested her head on my shoulder as we lay together.

“I liked that,” she said.

“So did I.” I smiled. “Now we can stop being polite. Tell me why Maizay sent you here.” I paused. “To keep me busy? So he can have Grychn?”

She laughed. “Certainly for that. But he didn’t send me. I asked to be the one. I like you. I like your swordplay.” At the double entendre, I felt her face smile next to mine. I smiled also. “I like being with other warriors,” she said simply, as if that was enough.

It was. But something still bothered me. “Why all the hospitality? Why you? Maizay doesn’t owe me anything.”

“You brought Grychn back. He’s quite fond of her.”

“What else?”

She paused. The tip of her tail traced circles on my belly. “You know where to find something he wants. Something Grychn told him about. He thinks he needs it to win the war. He wants to convince you to help us.”

So that was it. Maizay knew about the timestone and wanted it. Grychn had told him about it. “What about you?” I asked. “Do you want me to help you?”

Aleel laughed so low it was a growl in her throat. “Oh, yes. I want your help.” She rubbed her pelvis against my leg, then wrapped her legs around me. She lifted me into the air, climbing to the ceiling on glass rods. There she hung with both hands, swinging in the air. I wrapped my arms around her and held on tight. She spread her legs wide, letting me enter, then squeezed them together. I slipped back and forth inside her. Our swings increased.

“Is this the way elves do it?”

“One of the ways.”

“No hands?”

“We have something else.”

“Yes?”

“Tails.”

“How are they used?”

She showed me. I won’t say it wasn’t interesting.

I WOKE
when
something warm and naked crawled into bed with me, pulling a satin sheet of space polymer over us. She cupped her body next to mine, pressing her breasts against my back and pushing her pelvis into my buttocks. Bare skin felt good next to mine. Her hand went over my body and found my genitals. She fondled them.

I glanced up. Aleel slept elf fashion, hanging from a glass bar with one hand and her tail. Her legs dangled free, while her other arm was folded across her body.

“So the rumors were true,” I whispered.

“What rumors?” Grychn asked.

“About you and Maizay.”

“I suppose. But not like the tawdry speculation on the holos. He’s sweet.”

“I thought I was your lover.”

“You are. You always will be one of them.”

“How many more?’

“A few. Do you mind terribly?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Good.” She smiled. “Do you like Aleel?”

“Very much.”

“I thought you would.”

We both rolled over, so I cupped her as she nestled against me. My penis had stiffened to her caresses. I entered her from behind. She wiggled her bottom, settling into my lap. My hands caressed her breasts.

“That feels good. Oh my, yes.” She moaned.

“Try to be quiet.”

“Why?”

“We don’t want to wake Aleel.”

“Marc! You, a prude. I don’t believe it.”

“No, it’s not that at all.” I thought of the elf’s tail. “I just don’t think I could handle both of you. I’m not back to full strength yet.” My thrusts continued their rhythm against her bottom.

She laughed, low and delicious. But not loud enough to wake Aleel.

* * *

The sound of a battle gong was loud enough to wake all of us.

Instinct took over. I leaped out of the bed and was halfway into battle dress before I remembered I wasn’t a combrid anymore.

“What is it?” I asked Aleel as she swung down.

“The city’s under attack,” she said dispassionately. She picked up her weapon. “Hurry. We’ll need everyone to help fight them.” She dropped through the door opening.

Grychn’s battle dress hung near the door, along with the pseudowings we’d worn earlier. She quickly climbed into her combat armor and I finished getting into mine. We shouldered battle packs. Before Grychn closed her helmet visor, I turned her to face me.

“I’m not going to fight anymore,” I said.

“What, then?”

“I’m going to run.” I looked at her. “I’d like you to come with me, but you don’t have to. I can fly a trigee racer myself.”

“Where are you going?”

“Away from Titan. To Iapetus.”

“To look for the timestone.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes shimmered wet. “OK,” she said. “I let you leave once. I’m not going to make that mistake again. I’ll go. I’ll even help you find that damned stone.”

“Now you’re talking sense. You’ll like being my consort—we’ll have our own little empire.” Then I had an idea. In armor, we might be mistaken for combrids. Which would be OK, if it was a combrid who made the mistake. But if it was an elf, we might get shot. I handed Grychn her pseudowings and strapped mine on. Now the elves should recognize us as friends.

We lowered our visors and picked up our weapons, then stepped through the door and dropped ten meters to the ground.

Elves swooped all around. Each was carrying a weapon. Grychn and I took off, flying toward the east. We dodged around the trees of the city. As I had hoped, the elves didn’t bother us. They had more to worry about.

From the mountains above the city, optical pandemonium raged. Pulsar beams stabbed out from fortified elven batteries. Gunships screamed past overhead, making strafing runs at the placements. Troop buses hovered farther out, waiting for the gunships to secure a landing zone for them. One hoverbus circled high above.

I turned my sensors to max gain. Just as I’d suspected, I “saw” the infrared smudges of combrids dropping from the bus. A cyrine HALO company. They would free-fall as long as possible, then hit their thrusters at the last possible moment, just before impact. Their job would be to create a diversion, so Ghost Cavalry units could make conventional landings.

Pulsar lightning ricocheted from trees of glass. Detonations cracked like continuous thunder. Chunks of rock and ice were blasted from the cliffs and showered down on the city, shattering both elf-houses and trees. Fragments struck my back. Luckily none tore the fabric of our wings.

A gunship was hit as it made a strafing run. The pilot was unable to pull out of his dive and the ship rammed the cliff and exploded. Rock really flew then. But we were far enough away to avoid being struck by any of the larger pleces.

For a moment, I thought we’d get away cleanly. I started to congratulate myself on our luck. But there’re two kinds of luck.

All of a sudden, a crashing came from the trees overhead. We were buried under shards of crystal, enough weight to carry us to the ground. I knew without looking what had happened—we’d blundered into the landing zone of a HALO squad. In a second, a bunch of burly cyrines would be landing on top of Grychn and me.

I stood up, flinging off crystalline debris. I dug Grychn out of a pile of jagged fragments. Our wings were torn to shreds. But there was no time to worry about that.

“Quick, we’ve got to move.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her along with me. We hadn’t gone fifty meters before the first of the cyrines landed. I knew they had seen us. I was hoping they would ignore us. No such luck.

A burst of pulsar fire fanned out through the trees. Crystal matrix sizzled. Oxide vapor puffed, then ignited in balls of flame, as a second salvo of quanta zipped past. The resulting smoke shielded us briefly. We kept running. Again came the forlorn hope that the cryines would lose interest. That was not to be. My magnetometer detected six disturbances in the field. They were following us. A grim suspicion came to me—maybe the cyrines had been sent after Grychn and me. Maybe a spook vendetta had begun.

There wasn’t much we could do except run for it.

I sprayed a ten-second burst back through the smoke, hoping to slow the pursuit a little. I flipped open my visor and signaled Grychn to do the same. That way we could talk as we ran.

“Are they coming after us?” she asked.

“Looks that way to me.”

Grychn laughed. Inappropriately, I thought. “What’s so funny?”

“Just like old times. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Got any ideas?”

“Several. I haven’t been playing guerrilla for two years for nothing. Combrids have chased me all over Titan. Maizay planted some nasty little surprises up ahead, just in case something like this should happen.”

“Can we get through?”

“I think I remember the way. We’ve got to try anyway, don’t we?”

“Yeah, we’ve got to try.”

“Marc?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t let them take me this time. I don’t want to go back to Kramr, OK?”

I knew what she meant. I didn’t answer.

“OK?” she asked again.

“OK.”

“You promise?”

“I said OK.” I shot another clip behind me. May as well give them something to think about.

We flipped down our visors. I let Grychn lead the way. I hoped she knew where she was going.

She took a zigzag course through the forest, making long, skimming jumps. I made sure my feet landed exactly the same place hers had. Even that wasn’t entirely safe. Sometimes elves put a time-delay fuse into their booby traps—she’d trip the trigger, but it wouldn’t blow for a few more seconds. Like until I was standing right on top. I scanned the surrounding forest, smiling at what my sensors detected. The area bristled with lethality: trip wires stretched like cobwebs between the trees, forming a gossamer labyrinth. Some of the wires were attached to needle mines stuck to the sides of trees. The slightest tug would detonate the mine, sending hundreds of microfission needles shooting into the area. Others were attached to photonuclear bombs—the resulting flash would cause temporary blindness, even through the visual filters of a combat visor. Some of the strands were not trip wires at all—they were cutting wires. A tensile field was generated along a monomolecular strand. The combination of tiny diameter and tremendous tensile strength meant the wires would cut through anything that touched them, including combat armor. More than one combrid had been decapitated, lost his legs, or been cut in half from walking into such a wire. Clear drops beaded on other filaments, like dew on a spider thread. My olfactometers confirmed the drops were surface-effect nerve agent—one drop on combat armor would spread out into a monomolecular film which could enter the tiniest chink in the armor to kill its occupant in seconds.

For the first time, I admired the ingenuity of elves. Clever toaders, they were.

Grychn seemed to know where she was going. I followed close behind. There were various ways to get through the maze. If you knew the right one, you hardly had to slow down. If you didn’t, you had to carefully work your way through, backtracking whenever you ran into a cul-de-sac. Your helmet sensors and computer helped, but to a limited degree, primarily showing you where you had been, to prevent repeating past mistakes. You constructed a grid on your datascreen. But you needed more data to fill in the blank places. That data could only be obtained by careful probing, walking meticulous patterns, and by trial and error. All that took time. The cyrines following us should be slowed down considerably. I could imagine the curses they were muttering. I could also imagine the tricks they would try. I would have tried them myself. I loaded a clip of ground-to-air minimissiles into my weapon.

The web-field was about a kilometer wide. Grychn either had a good memory or was lucky. I didn’t care which. She wound her way through the maze at a brisk run, never hesitating. I stayed right on her heels. We got through to the other side uneventfully. Our cyrine pursuers would have to take considerably longer. Unless they tried something tricky.

When I heard the whine of gravturbines, I knew they had thought of the same thing I had. A hoverbus was coming from the west. Dense forest prevented me from seeing it, as well as getting a clear shot from below. The plan would be for it to drop another squad of combrids on the other side of Grychn and me, thereby trapping us between them. They would fly a circular drop pattern to try to keep us from slipping around their flank. I would have thought of the same tactics. Maybe I could keep it from happening.

I plotted several vectors on my battle computer. I knew about where the cyrines were. They knew about where Grychn and I were. The hoverbus would fly a circular drop pattern roughly a half-kilometer in diameter, with our position as its center.

I plugged my weapon’s sight into my computer and fired a carefully spaced pattern of minimissiles, using radians and azimuths provided by the computer. I held it almost straight up and rotated in a semicircle, pressing the firing stud as LED’s flashed. The missiles arced high in the air. They would rise about three kilometers and hover on their own p-grav thrusters, while sensors scanned the area below for a target. They were programmed to seek p-gravity—hardly standard issue for Titan. They had cost a fortune on the black market. With luck, the hoverbus would be their target.

As soon as I fired the last minimissile, Grychn and I were on the run again. We paralleled the web-field, effectively putting more of it between ourselves and the cyrines. We really moved now. Grychn was quite adept at picking a path through the forest. I had trouble keeping up with her. I remembered chasing her through the same forest a long time ago. I hadn’t been able to catch her then. I suspected she could have left me behind now, had she wanted to.

A faint whine waxed louder in my auditory sensors.

Minimissiles had limited targeting capability. The bus would have to pass almost directly beneath one.

Other sensors told me the cyrines were working their way through the far edge of the web. Without help, they wouldn’t be able to catch us.

Still we ran full speed. Crystal branches shattered with our passage. Silence was not necessary now. Hydrocarbon fog sent wisps snaking between the trees. Fleeting images reflected from glass tree trunks, blurred and indistinct. Like ghosts rising from the mists.

I thought of combrids riding in a hoverbus. Maybe they were Ghost Cavalry. Faces flashed in my mind unbidden: Trinks, Vichsn, Sergeant Pepper. Obsidian skin gleamed with green battle light. Retinal reflections flashed. Ocular membranes shone like silver monocles. I pushed those images away. I was playing another game now. The rules had changed.

Gravturbines could now be heard plainly. Any moment, I expected to hear the thud of drop hatches opening. Then combrids would start floating to ground. The chase would begin anew.

Instead, I heard a mach-ten crack of thunder.

I grabbed Grychn, pushed her to the ground, then fell beside her.

A minimissile had found a target—the concentric cones of force spewing from a hoverbus’s gravturbines. Now it sought that target at 10,000 km/h. Positive p-grav was attracted to negative p-grav. The missile swam up a cone of force and rammed into a thruster tube, where + p-grav and - p-grav annihilated each other by becoming heat.