War Games (7 page)

A safe zone had been cleared a hundred meters on both sides of the roadway. Yellow light glared from pulverized crystals. A force-field crackled green fire at the margins of the safe zone. Beyond that was virgin forest glittering in the diffuse glow of Saturn-light. Laughing elves glided among trees of glass.

More than once, the force-field had been penetrated somewhere along the hundred kilometers of road between the base and the spaceport. It had always happened at night. Elves were more devious in darkness.

I was a little nervous as I drove the skimmer back to base. I gripped the steering handle tightly. Sometimes they managed to slip airbears through the barrier and let them wander about the road. Skimmers weren’t armored. They didn’t provide much protection from the explosion that resulted from a collision with an airbear. I kept glancing from one side of the road to the other. But I wasn’t so nervous I didn’t look at the chimera every chance I got. She was worth looking at. I hoped she’d let her cape fall open a little now that we were in the skimmer, but she didn’t play the game and kept herself demurely covered. My gaze lingered on her hands. I couldn’t help but look at them. I’d heard rumors. She had long, supple fingers. Their pads were formed into tree-frog suction cups, like those of sailors, the better to cling to polished surfaces. She didn’t have fingernails. Instead, each finger had the retractable claw of a cat. I couldn’t help but wonder if the stories told about those claws could be true.

She must have sensed my interest, for she bared her claws quickly, then retracted them again. But before they disappeared, I saw a wet, blue gleam. Nights could be dull at a combrid garrison. Those claws could make them interesting. She smiled, showing her teeth. They shone like cut sapphires. Then she laughed. Viper heat organs glowed from ridges above her eyebrows.

“Where are you from?” I asked, hoping idle conversation would distract my thoughts. From dark forest. And her hands.

She smiled. “A place called Telluride. Have you been there?”

“Once,” I answered. “A long time ago.” Eight months seemed a long time if you were a combrid on Titan. And I’d been most everywhere on Earth once. Especially places the beautiful and rich considered chic. How well I remembered Telluride. Telluride was very chic. I wondered what a resident of there was doing here. But you didn’t ask that kind of question in the Corps. Because you wouldn’t want to answer it. Everyone had his reasons. Some were more solid than others, but all were valid. “An interesting place, Telluride,” I said.

“Do you think so? I suppose. I was a Lady there. Married to a Lord.” She stopped speaking briefly. “Do you know what that means?”

I did, but I didn’t have a chance to answer.

Ahead, shadows moved. I stomped on the accelerator and banked into a hard right turn. Ten G’s pushed against me, pinning my flesh against wombskin cushions. I heard Peppardine gasp in surprise, as her breath was squeezed from her lungs.

“Toad!” I said with my own exhalation.

A pulse of red light flashed through a momentary gap in the road’s force-field, Pavement bubbled into vapor where the skimmer would have been if I hadn’t goosed it.

I thumbed the firing stud of the quad-50 mounted on the roof of the skimmer. A computer sight was already aiming it. Before the breach in the field closed again, four 50mm pulsar beams of a nanosec duration fanned through it. Spent photonuclear cases streamed into the air behind the skimmer. In the forest, crystal trees exploded into millions of sharp fragments. I knew the unseen elves were dead, impaled by tiny slivers of glass. They didn’t wear combat armor. They couldn’t fly with the extra weight. Their mistake.

I eased off the accelerator and let the skimmer coast to a more maneuverable speed. The lights of the garrison glowed on the horizon. We were almost home.

I looked at the chimera. Ten claws gripped the arms of her seat. But she was smiling.

“You saw?” I asked.

“Of course. More than you imagine.” She licked her lips with blue saliva. “Did you have to kill them that way?”

“No. We could have eluded them, anyway.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Then why?”

“Because I wanted to. I like killing elves. There’s no way they can claim to be civilians if they’re dead.”

“I see.” She touched my leg. Her fingers puckered my skin. Her cape had opened along its slits. I glimpsed smooth pectus muscles, adolescent breasts, pubic hair fine as spun carbon.

Excitement swirled inside. It had been days since we’d had a new player in the outfit. That was a long time in the bush. Everyone had bedded everyone else. And there’d never been anyone like this chimera. I thought of the blue fire carried in her claws. Peptide could warm up the night. I knew peptide was dangerous. My own parents bad been addicted to it. But I would be more careful than they. Scenarios flashed in my mind. I smiled to myself.

I put my hand on her leg. Her skin was soft to the touch, but with a firmness underneath due to intradermal polymer mesh reinforcement. She moved my hand along her thigh. Sharp claws scratched the back of it. I saw promise hidden in her eyes.

Then we were gliding into base. I was being tossed about by a testosterone storm—you know, hot to trot. I stopped the skimmer and dilated its doors. I carried Peppardine’s duffel this time, leading the way to her hut. But at the door, she turned. Nictitating membranes had closed. She was different; something had changed.

“Let me show you to your quarters,” I said, my voice intimate.

“That won’t be necessary.” Her voice had become flat. Something was wrong.

“OK.” But I was, desperate. “After you’ve unpacked your gear, come over to the noncom club. I’ll buy you a mnemone stick.”

“I think I need to be by myself.”

“Maybe I can help?”

“I don’t think so.” She looked at me in a way I remembered.

But I was too tight with sex steroid to care about my pride. “You’ll come later?” I knew she wouldn’t. I knew that look. I knew that game. But why?

She turned and entered her room. She paused inside the door and looked back. “I was once a Lady of Telluride,” she said, and her voice told me she’d lost more than I would ever have. Because my nobility had not been taken from me. I had run away from mine. I was an orphan by choice. They couldn’t hurt me anymore.

The door hissed shut.

* * *

I waited by myself at a corner table in the club. A mnemone stick fumed from a bong sitting in front of me. I’d only taken one hit. My thoughts were disturbed enough already. I kept thinking about the sudden change that had come over Peppardine—one minute she was teasing me like a Venusian in heat and the next she was as frigid as an Antirecombinant fanatic. I was feeling sorry for myself. It wouldn’t have mattered except she’d thrown me into a testosterone crisis. All that sex steroid had to be dissipated some way, I knew Peppardine wasn’t going to show up. But I wanted her in the worst way. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to desert from the Corps until I had her.

Someone sat down at my table. Mnemone fumes blurred my vision. For an instant, hope flared. Then my nictitating membranes blinked away the film. Vichsn sat across from me. She picked up the bong and sucked mnemone deep into her lungs.

She exhaled slowly. Blue eyes appraised me. “What’s she like?” Vichsn asked. “Though it appears you’ve struck out. “

“Who?”

“Who? Who do you think? The new medic. The X-M-R. Didn’t you pick her up at the spaceport?”

“Sure.”

“Is what they say about them true?” Her smile was a leer.

“What do they say about them?” But I thought of her wonderful claws.

“You’ve heard the stories. They say they have the kiss of death now. Each finger can inject a different neuropeptide hormone. They hold a hundred electric eels between their hands. They can kill in a dozen ways now. And they were killers before. What’s she like?” A bare foot stroked my leg under the table. “Is she a killer?”

“She seems OK.” But I thought of her fingers, each with a long, curved claw, hollow, connected to a modified venom sac in its pad. And a blue gleam. Her peptides could bring unimaginable euphoria—the ultimate natural high. Of course there was a certain risk. Peptides were the most addictive substances known. My own parents had been pepheads. I knew all about peptide psychosis—that was why I’d had to kill my own parents. But a little peptide couldn’t hurt. I’d stop before I got hooked. Again I glimpsed her body, with smooth muscles rippling. I’d hoped I was going to receive her blue joy. Again testosterone fire flared.
Corpus cavernosum
engorged with blood. I hoped Vichsn wouldn’t notice the bulge in front of my pants. “She says she was a Lady of Telluride,” I added as an afterthought.

“You know what else they say?”

“What?”

“The ones who become chimeras all have something in common.” She smiled in a sly, sinister way. “They were given a choice—the Corps or the cyborg factories.”

“A lot of us were given that choice.” But a scenario flashed in my mind: a glimpse of something nasty, something that would disturb even the jaded sensibilities of the wealthy Lords and Ladies of Telluride; craziness, raging passion, fury in the dark of night. And an idea began to form: I pushed it away.

“They say they killed their lovers. They each committed a crime of passion, destroying a loved one. Something about a particular personality pattern being necessary to engram the X-M-R patterns. But then genosurgeons always double-talk. What do you think about her?”

“What about her?” I was on the defensive. Without a need to be.

“Did she do it? Did she tell you about it? Did she kill her lover?”

“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t ask.” But I saw a mutilated body sprawled amid sonic sculpture and mutable holograms. Singing jewelry adorned his nose, ears, fingers, and toes. A spider-silk cape was tattered and bloody. His genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth. Every fax in the system had carried the holo. Even on Titan. Scandal was news. A murdered Lord was scandal.
Alabaster faces smiled at me. Water steamed witli red mist.

Vichsn leaned over to kiss me. Her tongue probed my mouth. I felt taut nipples pressing against my chest.

I let her lead me out of the club, through swirling clouds of hydrocarbon fog, across the commons past parked hoverbuses, and into her barracks with its waiting bunk of pulsating wombskin, She pulled privacy curtains around us, telling her roommates they were not welcome to join us tonight. She’d been doing that a lot lately. She didn’t used to be so jealous of our lovemaking. Her protectiveness disturbed me. Besides, I loved an orgy.

But I didn’t feel like arguing. I had a testosterone storm brewing. I extended my genitals from their pouch. Our clothes came off quickly. My mouth took hers, accepting her tongue. Her body rubbed against mine; skin slick with sweat slid back and forth. Her lips left my face and nibbled down my body. My mouth found a breast and sucked on its nipple momentarily, before it was pulled out of my lips as she went farther down my body. Her mouth took my penis; her fingers stroked my scrotum. She straddled me on her knees. I put my arms around her and pulled her buttocks to my face. As her legs spread, her own protective sphincter opened, letting my lips nibble her clitoris while my tongue probed her vault. In less than a minute, muscle spasms gripped my tongue while warm secretions wet my face. I drank her drippings. Then she switched positions. “I want you inside me,” she said. That was fine with me. She sat on my penis. We coupled. I entered her deeply, striking her cervix. She closed her genital sphincter, gripping my shaft tightly, while vaginal peristalsis milked it. With her sphincter squeezing tight, my penis stayed tumid for a long time.

Later, when our androgen rush had subsided, we lay together in the quiet. I stroked the hollow of her back. I let childhood memories surface again.

“You’re thinking of that chimera,” Vichsn said accusingly.

She was almost right. “Are you hurt?” I asked. I was also thinking about all I’d told her. Which was too much.

She thought for a moment. “No,” she laughed. “Because I have you. You’ll never leave me. I know too much about you. And you know you can’t trust a lover scorned. Think about her all you want. And think about her lover.” She laughed again.

There was something unpleasant about that laugh.

I WOKE
to the clang of the battle gong calling general quarters.

Cursing under my breath, I leaped out of bed and ran buck naked out of Vichsn’s barracks, across the commons, and into my own barracks. You’d be surprised if I told you how many other combrids were doing the same thing. Running naked back to their own baracks, I mean. But after being at the garrison for a week, you wouldn’t be surprised at all. Because it happened routinely every time general quarters was called first thing in the morning. The Lord Generals had learned a long time ago it was better to allow fraternization among their troops. Horny combrids tended to be insubordinate. Chastity led to mutiny.

I quickly pulled on my combat armor and boots. I shouldered my battle pack, grabbed my assault rifle and a bandolero of ammo, and trotted out of the barracks.

Vichsn fell into step beside me. She’d been waiting outside my barracks. I should have minded, but I didn’t. She looked splendid in her battle dress: body armor fit her as tight as a soft exoskeleton, boots barely made contact with the ground, ammo belts crisscrossed her chest. A layer of camofilm covered everything. You could barely see her–her image wavered like a mirage dancing in the desert. She could have been a dim holographic projection–a suit of armor brought to life by a wizard’s chants. Her face was hidden behind a visor. There could just as easily be no face behind the visor. Yet I knew it was her. I knew her moves. She flipped up her visor. Her face peered out of a glimmering hole in the air. I saw the mouth that had kissed me the night before. Her lips were smiling.

We joined a stream of other combrids running across the commons.

A hoverbus waited, hatches open.

We climbed aboard and strapped ourselves into our harness. Other combrids filed past, Except for the whine of turbines warming, it was quiet. Combat armor was as flexible as satin cloth and made no noise as it moved; a polymer coating deadened any sound produced on its surface. Elves’ ears were very good. Even a little noise could be fatal. The same polymer changed color to blend into any background. Elves’ eyes were also pretty good.

No one spoke. There was nothing to say. Later, when speech was necessary, it wouldn’t be audible–there was a network of vitalium wires buried beneath our scalps. Their proximal ends terminated within cerebral cortex. Neuropotentials generated within our speech centers would be picked up by transducers in our helmets and transmitted on microwaves. Though we were limited to line-of-sight communication, the elves had not yet devised a way to jam the frequencies we used. Other cerebral centers controlled the servos in our armor, boots, helmets, and battle packs.

The hatch closed and the hoverbus lifted into the air. Overhead, the garrison’s force-field winked as we flashed through a breach produced by phase generators in the hoverbus. Then we settled into smooth flight, skimming the treetops. Two gunships flew escort.

I stared out the window. Jagged mountains covered with dense forests of crystalline trees passed below. A century before, Titan had been lifeless, except for transplanted Terran life that lived under domes, such as at Chronus now. Yet of all the Outer Moons, Titan possessed a real atmosphere, composed of dense hydrocarbons and ammonia. Its crust was rich in silicates and other oxides. The conditions were perfect to grow living crystals. Terran ecoengineers devised an ecology of genetically engineered plants and animals, specifically adapted to the Moon’s environment, and all designed to support the growth of crystalline forests. Fifty years later the first colonists had landed. Someone had to tend the forests and harvest radiacrystal. They were of human stock, but had also been adapted to the native conditions of Titan. Their changes were more than cosmetic. They still called themselves men. We called them elves. They were tall with hollow, pneumaticized long bones. A flap of skin stretched between their arms and legs. They could glide for great distances in the weak gravity and heavy hydrocarbon atmosphere of Titan by extending their limbs to make a taut airfoil out of their skin flaps. By wearing a specially fitted cape of surface-effect polymer, their so-called pseudowing, they could even fly. They had large, pointed ears to collect ultrasonic pulses emitted by bat voice boxes, allowing them to maneuver through dense forest in complete darkness. Lemur eyes easily pierced the murk of hydrocarbon mists. Dense gray fur and brown adipose under their skin insulated them from the cold. Even their metabolism had been altered. They breathed hydrocarbon air; their lungs extracted substrate for oxidative reactions from the air. Oxygen was obtained by the digestion of oxides they ate. In short, respiratory and alimentary functions had been switched. Elves were completely at home in the forests of glass we passed over. A battalion of elven guerrillas could be concealed there–or only a ragged band.

That was the trouble with counterinsurgency. Guerrilla forces fought on their terms, revealing themselves only when it was to their advantage. Intelligence estimates of their numbers usually had an uncertainty factor to a power of three.

Chances were I’d lose another buddy before the day was over. One less bed partner would be in the pool. Of course, it might be me. You could never tell. The longer I hung around the garrison, the more likely my time would come. I should take care of my business and get the Frisco away. But there was the problem of Vichsn. I couldn’t take her with me. I had no room for excess baggage. And if I left her, she’d blab for sure. That left me one choice. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach for that. Maybe an elf would get her on the mission. That was possible.

We were going on a search-and-destroy mission. That’s what High Command called it, anyway. We grunts had another name for it–target practice. Only we were the targets.

Intelligence had located what they thought was a guerrilla camp, but they had been unable to get a spook chameleon onto the area to verify it. So our job was to confirm that intelligence and destroy the camp if it existed. Of course it was just as likely to be a dummy camp baiting a trap for us to walk into. Paid informants worked both sides of the street. Spy satellites were fallible. Someone had to investigate to know one way or the other. The someone was Ghost Cavalry. Like I said, target practice.

Even if this was an actual guerrilla camp, it would probably be abandoned by the time we arrived. The elven observers that constantly watched our base would have reported our departure and the direction of our subsequent flight would be monitored. They would have plenty of warning and lots of time to set their traps.

Titan was the elves’ world. They were adapted to it, not we. They could live off the land and fight with just the equipment they could carry on their backs. They knew the hiding places. We were forced to look for them. They could snipe at us from concealment and leave behind nasty booby traps. They could poison our food and contaminate our water. They tried to taint our oxygen converters. They mutated strains of venereal disease, then tempted us to bed pelts infected with it. They fed urchins liquid plastique and abandoned them for us to find, detonating the explosive by remote control. There was no safe place to step. Not one minute of the day was secure. The life of a combrid on an off-world garrison was one of constant anxiety.

No wonder we eventually went bonkers and had to be shipped Luna-side for rehypnotraining. Umess we were killed in the attempt to subdue us. Or umess we were bonkers in the first place and liked the constant threat of death. Being a combrid was a disturbing dichotomy. Nothing was more exciting. War was the most fun of anything you could do. Sex games after a firefight were the best way possible to get your rocks off. If only it weren’t for the fact you knew you’d buy your drawer eventually. I should be getting out now, while I still had all my parts in functional order.

Let’s just say I was in a grim and introspective mood as the hoverbus streaked through the methane fog of Titan.

I noticed Peppardine sitting alone toward the front. That seemed strange. Combrids were a randy breed. Normally all we thought about was fighting and sex. Or sex and fighting. Or just sex. It seemed unusual that someone wasn’t putting the moves on her. She looked just as good to me now as she had last night. Still gave my dingle a tingle. But Vichsn had me trapped in an inside berth. I knew she wouldn’t let me change places so I could reacquaint myself with the chimera. No big deal. I’d have time to get inside her tunic. I had to stay around until I figured out what to do about Vichsn, anyway. Maybe the two problems would take care of themselves. I thought I knew a way. I remembered the chimera had been a Lady of Telluride. Maybe I would tell her of my own nobility. That should open her legs for me. Ladies were trained to accommodate Lords. My time would come. Strange that no one was trying to beat me to her, though. Maybe we should have a few sex steroid levels checked.

Then the hoverbus descended.

It was a typical landing. The fishbait pilots figured the less time they spent motiomess close to the ground, the less chance they had of catching a minimissile, They had it figured right, of course. So they flew directly over the drop zone, fell a couple of thousand meters straight down, pulled ten G’s decelerating, then hovered a few meters over the ground. Our pilot was no exception. And all the time she was screaming in our heads for us to jump. The jump gong beat like a drum. She’d blown the rear hatch while we were still a thousand meters up. Now she squawked like a buggered hen for us to get our tails out. Two gunships, flew circles, blasting the forest with their pulsars, clearing out a drop zone.

By this time all us meat had crowded into an aisle and were shuffling toward the rear. The bus was already moving forward. As each line of four combrids jumped, four more followed closely behind, landing a few meters away on the ground.

Vichsn and I crowded toward the rear hatch, pushed from behind. Everyone knew the pilot’s nerve would soon fail. They were supposed to give you a full minute to evacuate the bus. But the pilots usually cheated by thirty seconds. You risked a sprained ankle if you were among the last to jump. So you didn’t let the ones in front of you dawdle too long.

The open hatch came closer.

We were standing on the edge. Vichsn and I jumped together. I bent my knees, but the shock after drifting ten meters in the weak Titanian field was negligible. We were too low to have to use gravtubes.

Overhead, the hoverbus whined.

The pilot’s nerve had broken. Already the bus accelerated upward. Even as it climbed, combrids continued to dribble from the hatch.

Catsucking pilots, anyway.

The chimera was the last to jump. When she did, the hoverbus was at least a hundred meters up. She leaped into the air, extending her arms and legs to create as much resistance as possible against the thick hydrocarbon atmosphere, thereby slowing her fall. I would have used thruster tubes, had it been me, despite our orders not to. Sometimes p-grav set off booby traps in the trees, so we weren’t supposed to use thrusters on routine jumps. But a hundred meters up was hardly routine. As she neared the ground, she doubled up, rolling when she struck. After two somersaults, she came up on her feet. Smiling. A nifty maneuver. She’d had a good take on her hypnotraining. She’d be all right.

The Gunny spoke softly in my mind. I checked off, then listened as the others did the same one by one. The last to report was Peppardine. All were present. There were no drop injuries. No thanks to our sheepdip pilot.

“Detrs,” the Gunny said, “you take the point. Azimuth zero-six -zero.”

Dog breath!
I thought. The point was the worst place to be. Well, usually the worst. You were the bait to get the enemy to reveal themselves. You were the target for target practice. Sometimes they let you pass, so they could blow away your buddies who followed. Either way, it was not a fun place to be. In a crossfire, it didn’t matter whether it was friend or foe who pressed the firing stud of the pulsar that fried you. You would be just as dead from one as the other.

We fanned out from the drop zone, walking in a half-crouch on the balls of our feet, weapons held ready. I glanced to the left. Trinks was there. He was a good man to have close anytime, but particularly when the shooting started. He’d saved my skin before. I owed him a few already.

The drop zone was a natural clearing in the forest a few klicks away from the suspected elf camp. That could mean trouble. Elves had a nasty habit of booby-trapping open areas around their real camps, knowing we’d probably use those clearings as landing areas. I walked slowIy and carefully, cautious of where I stepped, and watched the monitors along the top of my visor. Any metal would be detected by the variance it produced in the sensing electromagnetic field put out by the antennas of my helmet. Which was why elves seldom used metal mines anymore. Plastic explosive with sonic detonators was more difficult to detect. As were bug bombs and gas pots. But plastique, virulent bacteria, and enzyme poisons could be smelled. Olfactimeters sniffed thick hydrocarbon air for any telltale odor. Sonic triggers resonated to the sonar I put out, and hopefully would detonate to its pings before the sound of my footsteps tripped the mine.