by Manda Benson
“Stop running,” Verity willed him. “She wouldn’t know what to do if she did catch you.” She hoped the mare just wanted to mate but, without being interfaced to her, it was hard to tell. Sergeant Black’s face was inscrutable. What if the horses mated, and Verity couldn’t control herself again and she sexually assaulted Sergeant Black? A sweaty heat had built up inside her trousers. Blood pounded in her groin. The urge to get hold of someone else, no matter who, and force it down, squash out this itch on that other person, felt very strong. When she looked at Black, revulsion and dislike fought with the lust inside her. Was it bleed-back from her own fear that was making the stallion run?
Verity managed to persuade him to wait. The horses maneuvered carefully to stand neck to neck, and nosed at one another’s shoulders. Slowly, the stallion moved alongside, inevitably toward the mare’s back end, and started licking again. Verity grimaced at the taste. There was something that struck her as stealthy and devious about his tactic in this regard. She fancied it was the stallion’s own opinion that he was some sort of Lothario with an unusual talent for cunnilingus. The mare succumbed to his tongue, lifting her tail and squatting, and he turned into position and mounted. He entered her, shuffled for thirty seconds, finished, and dropped off, once again leaving Verity full of dissatisfaction and pent urges.
“I don’t feel too good,” said Sergeant Black as the mare came to her. Her pupils were dilated and a strange expression had taken hold of her face. “I’m going to put this horse away and go and lie down for a bit.”
As Verity took the stallion, following Black and the mare back to the stable block, she checked with the ANT on the location of Doctor James Standen, with whom she knew Black shared her quarters. He had just left the lab where he worked and was moving toward their billet. Lie down indeed! Lie down under him. The mare’s tail was still up as she walked beside Black and semen dripped from the dark skin of her vulva, but this didn’t seem to interest the stallion who had reverted to his placid Jekyll self, walking obediently beside her.
The horses back in their stalls, Verity stormed down the corridor to her quarters. This was his damn research. She hadn’t signed up to take on these extra responsibilities, to have her state of mind screwed about and thrown into disarray like this. It had been foisted on her by her employers, and she had accepted it dutifully because that was her work. This was Vladimir’s responsibility, and to shirk his obligations and hide, leaving her to cope with what he couldn’t handle alone, that was just utterly irresponsible. More than irresponsible: aresponsible, if that was even a word, and if it wasn’t then it should be. When she found Vladimir, she was going to...going to... She wanted to give him a piece of her mind. But more than that, she wanted to rip his clothes off and give him a piece of her body.
Vladimir’s name had been on that fragmented file she’d found, as had the Commodore’s, and she had not been able to find him since the first time she’d looked when she’d spoken to Lloyd. What if this was all to do with John Aaron?
In her billet, she switched the computer back on.
“My, you’re in a strop today!” exclaimed Anthony Cornelian’s ghost.
Verity picked up the spy’s Torrmede card, studying the picture. It didn’t match with the glimpse she’d caught of the real man, just before she’d killed him, nor the mangled head she’d seen in Lloyd’s lab. She could imagine the owner of the voice in her head shaking out his collar-length hair as he spoke, raising his chin in an imperious sort of way. She put the card down, face up, on the computer, and stuck it there with a torn off piece of transparent tape.
“My mouth tastes like a horse’s arse,” she thought as she filled a glass with water.
“Why, what have you been doing?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Verity downed the water and set the glass on the hand basin. She rubbed her eyes, running her hands over her face. From the bathroom mirror, her reflection stared back at her. In her own face she could see Pilgrennon’s sharp, angular nose and Blake’s intense, penetrating eyes she knew so well from the history books. She willed, as she had often done before, for her ancestor’s faces to take shape from her visage, to bring her wisdom she had not inherited from them, but they did not. Her face remained her own and there was a weird tension in it. Her pupils looked much too large for the slight light the sun filled the room with. She needed to find Vladimir.
Back out in the corridor, she encountered Lloyd bounding toward the main entrance, carrying a hold-all, a suitcase, a box file and what appeared to be a telescope folded up in pieces.
“Morning, Sergeant Verity!” he called. “No time to talk today. The lander leaves in five minutes.”
“Have you seen Vladimir or the Commodore today?”
Lloyd frowned. “Not today. I did see the Commodore yesterday. Very busy with something at the moment, though.”
Verity found herself staring at him. Her breath seemed very loud all of a sudden. Lloyd stared back, and he slowly lowered his luggage to the floor. She moved closer and reached out to him. She had always wanted to run her fingers through that luxuriant coppery mane of his, and now her inhibitions fell away, she found herself finally doing it. He put his hands on her waist, pulling her close to him. It occurred to her that he was exactly her height, and the shape of his body fitted perfectly against hers. She slid one hand round his back, under the warm, furry lining of his coat, still stroking his hair with the other. When their lips touched, he slid his tongue inside her mouth, moving slowly in a way that was strangely both calming and maddening. The emotions he broadcast were so precise, so controlled. She sensed from him that he knew exactly what he was doing. He could play her body like an instrument if she’d let him, torment her to levels of arousal that were near unbearable and hold her at orgasm for as long as he willed, until she begged him to relent. And she wanted that. She’d wanted him for months.
He eased back and relaxed, breaking the vacuum that united their mouths. Verity breathed the smell of him, her lips tingling. “Lloyd, do you know what horses do when they have sex?”
Lloyd let out a mercurial chuckle that seemed to resonate deep in Verity’s chest. “I can quite imagine.” He raised an eyebrow, cocking his head to one side, chin down. The way he looked up at her with his soft gray eyes sent throbbing heat down into her groin.
“Come with me for a while.”
“Ah, tempus fugit.” Lloyd exhaled through his nose and gazed at her dejectedly. “I’m afraid I can’t. The shuttle’s leaving soon. I have to shift this stuff.” He picked up his things.
“Quickly?” Verity suggested.
Lloyd shook his head. “No, really, I have to leave. There’s always time when I come back. You’ve not seen the station before, have you? You’ll have to come up there with me one time.” He waved an arm to the view of Jupiter through the window. “I’ll see you on the first quarter.”
“See you in eight days.”
“Ave et vale,” Lloyd called over his shoulder as he bounded away down the corridor with his luggage.
It was going to be a long eight days. She’d have to find something to read to pass the time. Verity didn’t want to look for Vladimir anymore. After Lloyd, he would be too much of an anticlimax. That would be like turning down steak in order to eat...levigated esculents. She supposed she had better at least go through some sort of procedure. He couldn’t possibly have been in the centrifuge, because she’d been there that morning and she’d not seen him, and someone would have complained to her if he’d ignored the booking procedure. The only other place she could think of where he might have gone was outside. She supposed she ought to go to the tower and use the surveillance telescopes there.
She went to the observation block and ascended the narrow spiral staircase, feet ringing on the thin metal steps. At the top, windows all around the room’s circumference offered a full-circle view of the ice plains.
Verity immediately looked down, checking around the base of the compound. She couldn’t
see anyone within the gates. Scanning the plain, she saw nothing out of the ordinary there, either.
A bright star moved against the dimmer ones still visible in the sky. That was Lloyd’s shuttle, taking him up to the main station. There was the station itself, another bright star as it passed through conjunction with Callisto on its orbit around Jupiter. Verity trained one of the telescopes on it, although it revealed little detail, looking like a reflective metal shaving rather than a star. The shuttle did have some definition to it when she looked. She made out the shape of the fuselage and the long stream of hot gases from its fusion engine.
She let the telescope wander down until its aperture brought unfocused jagged shapes into view. Verity turned the focus knob until they resolved into ice protrusions on the top of the cliff at the scarp. Surely he wouldn’t be out there. It made no sense, but she had run out of alternatives. Vladimir wouldn’t have gone to the scarp, would he? What could he possibly do there? Why would he want to go anywhere outside the base?
The roving telescope view lit upon something unfamiliar in the landscape of sharp gleaming needles. Some black object draped among the stands of ice on the steep decline down the cliff. With a sharp intake of breath, she deciphered the form of a horse--dead, obviously. None of the horses were out. It had to be the horse John Aaron had taken. She moved the barrel of the telescope frantically, searching for another body. There it was, a pathetic shape, run through the chest by the spiny palisade he’d fallen upon. Verity increased the magnification and adjusted the focus on the face. The hands were still bound. The face--it was still recognizable--Private Aaron.
He must have fallen to his death. He hadn’t been synced to the horse. It would have been so easy for him to lose control, him being unable to communicate danger to an animal unable to feel fear.
Verity stepped away from the telescope, some of the confusion in her mind smoothing away. She checked the ANT again and found a note had been attached to Vladimir Bolokhovski’s name:
Recalled to Torrmede regarding business or research.
He wasn’t missing. He’d just had to go back at short notice for whatever reason. No doubt he’d been on the same shuttle that had taken Lloyd up.
She quickly filed a report with the base’s ANT. “John Aaron and missing horse, sighted both deceased.” Verity read the settings from the telescope. “Thirty degrees, about six miles away. Suggest recovery excursion with climbing gear when convenient.”
Slowly, Verity made her way back down and to her cabin.
Her quarters were far too hot. She stripped off, throwing her sweaty clothes on the floor. She flopped down on her back on the bed, enjoying the coolness of the air and the sheets against her skin, and slid her fingers down into the sticky blood-gorged parts of her body that had been gluing her underwear to her for the past hour or so. There was a full-length mirror on the wall on the opposite side of the room. Verity usually ignored it, but something this time compelled her to look, seeing mostly her own eyes and legs, and study the glistening, reddened bits she was stimulating with her fingers.
She stared at herself until the throbbing in her legs and groin intensified, then lay back and shut her eyes to focus on the sensation. She pressed on in rhythm with the pulse and felt the climax rising and spreading through her until it brimmed over in a seizing of muscles and cramping exhalation.
Verity slowly uncurled from the fetal position she’d finished in, feeling the mad lust melt away and the world return to order. It took her a second to notice there was something else in her head apart from a sense of relief and an imagining of what Lloyd Farron’s face looked like when he orgasmed. It said, “Ugh, don’t be so vile.”
Verity rolled over on the bed and landed on her feet on the floor. The computer with Anthony Cornelian’s ghost in it stood on the table there. “You pervert! And I can’t imagine you never did it! At least not when you were alive, anyway.” Verity caught sight of herself in all her glory in the mirror, and quickly stepped out of its range.
“It’s not the activity I disapprove of. Hey, you’re rather cute too. Do it again, just think about something else other than that disgusting inquisitor!”
“No.” Verity hopped back in front of the mirror. She looked herself up and down imperiously, giving Anthony Cornelian a full eyeful of what he was missing. Turning slightly sideways, she ran her palms sensuously up her toned abdomen on either side of her navel, over her breasts, then down again, sliding her left hand into her crotch. She raised her right hand in a v-sign at her reflection, blowing a raspberry and posturing her loins forward, spreading her labia in a vulgar display. “You don’t get to have orgasms and enjoy sex and naked people, because you’re dead.”
Anthony transmitted a disgusted thought-noise to her. “You’d make a fine porn star. Oh, wait, porn stars have tits and don’t look like boys.”
“Shut up,” Verity thought, going to the bathroom. “What do you care if I look like a boy. You’re bisexual, aren’t you?”
Anthony’s tone of thought felt condescending. “I like people, not labels.”
“There you go, then.”
“What are you going to do in there?” His voice sounded as though he anticipated his money’s worth.
“I’m going to wash my hands. I suppose you must never have bothered with such things, and gone about shaking hands with Spokesmen and all sorts with your own mess dried all over them?”
When she’d finished, she lay on the bed with her feet toward the mirror and her legs apart. “Oh, go on, let me look if you’re going to do that,” Anthony goaded. “I could make you come again, if I still had hands.”
“No,” Verity teased him, stretching her arms behind her head and looking at the ceiling. She reached over and picked up the printout of the file fragments from yesterday. If John Aaron had written it and he was now dead and no one had noticed, who could there have been that he’d sent it to? She gazed at the partial signature on the bottom. Not the Commodore, who was still disappeared, because his name was mentioned on the list of people along with Vladimir’s and her own--unless that was a deliberate decoy.
Her fingers tightened on the paper. Unless it wasn’t Aaron’s name... Anthony’s disgust at her fantasy suddenly resurfaced in her mind. It wasn’t Pte Aaron, it was Ir Farron. Inquisitor Lloyd Farron.
Verity quickly got to her feet, facing the computer.
“Do something hot and slutty,” Anthony requested.
“What do you know about Farron? It’s him you were sent here to spy on, isn’t it?”
“Ah, so you do have some skills of deduction. You’re not just a clitoris and a cute face.”
Verity felt a sudden annoyance. “You are dead because of something to do with this. The Magnolia Order is involved, and I’m trying to help you and all you do is treat me like I’m a lap dancer!”
“Verity, Farron is dangerous. You need to keep out of this.”
“Look, the Magnolia Order sent you here, didn’t they? I’m with the Magnolia Order. Doesn’t that mean we’re on the same side and we’ve to help each other?”
“I know you’re with the Magnolia Order. They warned me about you.”
“What? Stop pissing about, this is serious. Vladimir’s missing and so’s the Commodore.”
“Vladimir? The cute young chap with the Russian accent? The one writing the thesis?” There came a pause in Anthony’s transmission, and the voice in Verity’s head carried worry and caution when it continued. “What’s his thesis in? Please don’t tell me he was a genetic engineer.”
Chapter 7
“Now just hold on. What do you think you’re doing?”
Verity finished snapping the buckles on her armor, tightened her katana belt and shoved the computer with Anthony’s ghost on it into the bag with the other things.
“I’m going to break into Farron’s lab and find out what the hell’s going on. There must be some clues in there.”
“When I said the Magnolia Order warned me about you, I meant they
warned me not to get you involved. They considered cutting you in and asking you to act as an inside agent, but they decided you were too young and didn’t have enough experience, and ultimately the risk to you would be too high. They also warned me that you were likely to be the biggest danger to the mission aside from Farron himself. I wasn’t given orders for this contingency. Let’s stop and discuss this.”
Verity put her hand on the hilt of her katana as she walked toward the horse block. “Well, that’s just tough, because I am involved now, and I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to tell the Magnolia Order what I think of them for calling me young and inexperienced! If you’ve got something to tell me, you can tell it to me now!”
“Look, I’ll try to tell you what I know, but it’s not a lot. Farron is up to something. He’s abusing his inquisitors’ privileges and he’s planning something out here. Finding out what it was he was plotting evidently got me killed. If you go barging into Farron’s lab, you’re going to end up with an arrest warrant on yourself, and then where will that get us?”
“You think I haven’t thought of that?” Verity irrupted into the stables. Horses snorted and stamped in response to the anger she broadcasted. She checked every box to be sure no one hid in them before syncing herself to one of the horses and tacking it up. Verity grabbed a bore kit from the store cupboard, bundled it into the bag on the horse and fitted a long-range transmitter to the horse’s head armor over its implant. Leading the horse out into the courtyard, she gave the signal to it to run to a landmark fifteen miles away before returning to the ANT’s beacon. The horse raced away through the main gates and into the glare of the sun. Verity watched its dark shape dwindling on the immense black plain. “There. Now everyone thinks I’m outside doing boring samples.” She dropped the bag from her shoulders and pulled out a roll of gaffer tape and a piece of metal foil.