The Outpost

by Mike Resnick

  He was twenty feet away, then fifteen, then ten, and I still couldn’t free my legs—and then, from out of nowhere, Langtry was standing in front of me. She spit full in his face, but even though he only had a couple of seconds of life left to him, his momentum carried him forward and she took the knife thrust that was meant for me.

  I finally broke free, just in time to catch her in my arms. With her dying breath she whispered that she loved me and was happy to sacrifice her life for mine.

  I didn’t have time to mourn, because there were a bunch of aliens taking aim at me, and I was still unarmed. Then one of them screamed, clutched at his chest and keeled over. Another’s head split open. A third flew backward like he’d been kicked by a horse.

  Then an arm reached out and lifted me to my feet. It was attached to an alien female.

  “Follow me if you want to live!” she said, heading off toward one of the barracks.

  She’d obviously shot some of my foes, so I paused just long enough to pick up a couple of guns from alien corpses that wouldn’t be needing them any longer and then fell into step behind her.

  “Who are you?” I asked her. “And why have you come to my aid?”

  “I have heard stories of the great Hurricane Smith,” she said. “And now that I have seen you fearlessly facing overwhelming odds, I have decided that you are too noble to die.”

  “Even though it means turning traitor to your own race?” I asked.

  “I look past the appearance of things,” she replied. “I am more like you than like any of them.”

  I’d have asked her more questions then, but the aliens started firing, and we were preoccupied with staying alive for the next few minutes.

  I noticed that she was a good shot, almost as good as me, and that she was utterly without fear. When a laser beam scraped her shoulder a couple of minutes later, she cursed like an old spacehand.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’ll worry about it later,” she said, aiming her pistol with her other hand.

  “Get behind me and tend to your wound,” I said. “I’ll hold them off.”

  “We’ll hold them off together,” she said, bringing down another alien. Then: “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “My wife,” I corrected her.

  “Then I am doubly sorry,” she said. “We have much in common, you and I. If she was your wife, it shows me that you also look past the appearance of things.” She paused long enough to aim and fire at another foe, who dropped like a rock. “Did you love her very much?”

  “Yes.”

  A momentary silence. Then: “Do you think you can ever love again?”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “It would be very sad if you could not.”

  “Let’s shoot the enemy and worry about it later,” I said, and that’s what we did for the next half hour, until we were the only two living beings left.

  “Thanks once again for your help,” I said.

  “I am only sorry we could not save your wife. I know what it means to lose someone you love.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She pronounced it two or three times, but it was beyond me. Finally she said, “What name would you like to call me? I will trust to your wisdom.”

  I figured if I had all that much wisdom, I must rival Solomon, and since she and I were now partners, so to speak, I decided to call her Sheba.

  “Sheba,” she repeated. “It seems a very melodic name. Who was she?”

  “An ancient queen,” I said.

  “Then I am honored.”

  I decided not to tell her how many wives Solomon had. We spent the next few days getting to know each other better—and if the Reverend makes one of his typical comments, I just may burn his balls off—and then I decided to leave her on Adelaide of Louvain until I found out what kind of reception she would get at the Outpost.

  Anyway, that’s the story of how Langtry Lily sacrificed herself for love—or for me, since to her they were the same thing.

  And it’s also the story of how I met Sheba, who could see beyond the mere shape of things and somehow realized that we were not only meant to be comrades-at-arms but soulmates as well.

  “You know, I had me an alien ladyfriend once,” said the Reverend Billy Karma.

  “It figures,” said Max.

  “Yeah?”

  Max nodded. “No human woman would ever say Yes to you.”

  “Right!” chimed in Silicon Carny and Sinderella.

  “Wait a minute,” said the Bard. “There might be a story here. I don’t know anyone besides Hurricane Smith who’s ever had a relationship with an alien woman.” He turned to Billy Karma. “You want to tell us about it?”

  “Ain’t much to tell,” said Billy Karma.

  “That figures,” said Silicon Carny.

  “Come on now,” urged the Bard. “Don’t be so modest.”

  “It’s not all that happy a story,” said Billy Karma. “We had a tragic failure to communicate.”

  “How tragic could it be if she’s not with you anymore?” asked Sinderella.

  “If all you’re gonna do is make jokes, I’m not gonna talk about it.”

  “They’re through making jokes,” said Baker, with a look that said they’d better be through. “I want to hear this.”

  “Well, it was a Vandei woman,” began the Reverend. “I hooked up with her while I was out spreading the Word on the Rim. We just hit it right off, and when I left Vanda she came along with me.”

  “A Vandei woman?” asked Baker.

  “That’s right,” said Billy Karma.

  “I hear they’re trained from birth to do nothing but please their mates.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “And with a whole planet of Vandei men to choose from, she fell for you?”

  “Well, kind of,” said Billy Karma uncomfortably. “Actually, I won her in a craps game.”

  Suddenly Bet-a-World O’Grady sat up and looked interested.

  “Anyway, I figured I owed myself a vacation, so I headed to Seascape—that’s Alpha Ribot III—and rented a villa for the next week. Once we were settled in I figured it was time for my Vandei woman and me to get to know each other a little better.” He paused long enough to take a swig of his drink. “First thing she did was come up to me and ask what kind of sex I preferred. She made it sound like there were seven hundred or more different kinds, but I could only think of a few off the top of my head, so I told her that as far as I knew, there wasn’t a man alive who didn’t prefer oral sex if he was being honest about it.”

  “What kind of stakes did you have to put up against her in the craps game?” asked O’Grady with professional interest.

  “Shut up!” snapped Baker. “Go ahead, Reverend.”

  “Well,” said Billy Karma, “the next thing I knew she was sitting next to the bed reading Fanny Hill aloud to me. I didn’t say anything, because I figured this was just her notion of foreplay—you know, a way to get me all hot and bothered and ready for action.” He frowned. “Except that she read and she read and she kept on reading, and finally I fell asleep.”

  Silicon Carny threw back her head and laughed.

  “It ain’t funny!” snapped Billy Karma.

  “It is to me!”

  “Get back to the story,” said Baker.

  “The next night, as we were getting ready for bed, she opened up a copy of The Story of O and read it to me, and the night after that it was The Autobiography of a Flea, and finally, when she opened up Tropic of Cancer on the fourth night, I sat up and asked her what the hell was going on.

  “‘Am I not pleasing you, my love?" she said.

  “‘Look,’’ I said, ‘I like dirty books as well as the next man, but when do we get to the sex?"

  “‘But we are doing the sex," she protested.

  “‘What are you talking about?’’ I demanded. ‘Here I am, all set for some oral sex, and all you do is read at me."

  “‘B
ut that’s what you asked for," she said.

  “‘The hell it is!" I shouted.

  “‘I will prove it," she said, and before I could say anything else she activated the cabin’s computer and ordered up a definition, and out popped the words on a holographic screen—’Aural: of or pertaining to the ear or the sense of hearing.’’ She smiled at me. “I naturally assume this means reading classics of human pornography aloud to you.”

  “‘Now I see what went haywire,’’ I said. ‘You got the wrong idea about things.’” I pulled off my pants. “Put yourself in my expert hands and I’ll lead you through it step by step.”

  “She took one look at me, and her eyes widened, and she said, ‘You’re not going to stick that in my ear!’”

  “Then she was out the door, screaming and running her way down the beach.” The Reverend Billy Karma sighed. “For all I know, she’s still screaming and running.”

  “Somehow it ain’t quite as touching as some of Hurricane’s romances,” said Baker.

  “I think our Catastrophe is a master of understatement,” agreed the Bard. “I also think, in the interest of dignity, I’ll leave that little adventure out of the book.”

  “That’s okay,” said Sinderella happily. “By the time Silicon Carny and I are through spreading it around, everyone in the galaxy will have heard it.”

  Baker turned to Hurricane Smith. “You ever get any head from an alien lady?”

  “Once,” answered Smith.

  “Yeah? What happened?”

  “Not much. She was a Nexarian, so she still had five heads left.”

  “That’s disgusting!” said the Earth Mother.

  “You think that’s disgusting, you should have seen the head she gave me. It must have giggled for an hour before it realized it was decapitated.”

  “You know,” said Baker thoughtfully, “I think it’s entirely possible we’re talking at cross purposes.”

  “Could be.”

  “Don’t you ever find yourself attracted to a human woman?” asked Baker.

  “I try,” said Smith. “I really do. But they’re all so … so same.”

  “Well, I like that!” said Silicon Carny.

  Smith looked at her. “I got to admit that you’re a little less same than most.”

  “I think someone here might disagree with your assessment of human ladies,” suggested Max.

  “Who?”

  Max jerked a thumb in the direction of Nicodemus Mayflower. “He’s been sitting there, staring at Sinderella and sighing like a schoolboy ever since he got back. I actually saw the two of ’em holding hands.”

  “At least he’s got the right number of hands!” snapped Sinderella.

  Max grinned. “See what I mean? It’s got to be love. What other reason would she have to insult me?”

  “I didn’t know she needed any,” said the Cyborg de Milo, who seemed to have taken a serious dislike to Three-Gun Max during the war.

  “You two went off in separate ships and different directions,” said Crazy Bull. “What happened out there?”

  “Yeah,” said Sitting Horse. “How is it that you left in two ships and came back in one?”

  Nicodemus Mayflower looked at Sinderella. “Should we tell them?” he asked.

  She shrugged, which was still an attention-getter. “Why not?” she replied.

  A Wedding Ring in the Wedding Rings

  I hadn’t planned to wind up in the Wedding Rings at all (said Sinderella). But after I wiped out a trio of ships that were headed to Henry VII, I decided that it might not be a bad idea to hide in the Rings until they found something better to do than hunt me down

  But a bunch of them found her even among all that space garbage (said Mayflower), and I headed out to try to rescue her.

  To assist me (Sinderella corrected him).

  To assist her (Mayflower agreed). The problem is, it’s damned hard to find a ship that’s hiding in the Rings. I mean, hell, each Ring must have close to a billion chunks of rock and ice in it, maybe more, and by the time I’d gotten there they’d crippled her ship.

  To tell the truth (said Sinderella), I think it’s far more likely that a rock hit the ship than an ice chunk. But the result was the same: none of the controls worked, and the structural integrity of the hull was compromised.

  In other words (put in Mayflower), she was losing air. Her radio still worked, though, so she was able to tell me that she was in Anne Boleyn, the second Wedding Ring. It became a race between me and the aliens to see who would find her first. I had her fire a couple of flares, but it’s a mighty big ring and they were mighty small flares, and I couldn’t spot them. Then I finally got the idea of having her climb into her spacesuit and leave the ship after overloading the nuclear pile. I figured when it blew I’d be able to pinpoint the explosion, pick her up, and fly us both to safety.

  Well, the explosion was visible, all right. I think you could have seen it from the surface of Henry VIII. Having my instruments get a bearing on it was easy, but—

  But we had another problem (interjected Sinderella). I wasn’t all that far away from my ship when it blew, and the force of the explosion sent me rocketing backward at a phenomenal rate of speed. I knew if I hit any of the rocks I was done for—and no sooner had I figured that out when I saw that I was on a collision course with a huge chunk of ice. I jettisoned about half my air supply, which acted as a jet and allowed me to miss the iceberg—but I was still racing through space in the middle of all these rocks, and I couldn’t use the jet trick again without asphyxiating myself. Then a tiny rock crushed my suit’s radio, so I couldn’t keep in contact with Nicodemus any longer, and I figured I was done for.

  But my sensors had spotted her (said Mayflower), and I started maneuvering through Anne Boleyn, slowly closing the gap between us. After about ten minutes I got within sight of her, and was getting ready to bring her aboard when she pulled out her laser pistol and began firing it wildly—or so I thought. You see, I had told her to fire it at my ship’s nose when she spotted me; it couldn’t do the ship any harm, and it would help me pinpoint her location.

  But she was firing about ten degrees to the left and above me, and since she was only a few hundred yards away, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong—and then, at the last moment, I realized that she was trying to warn me that there was an alien ship coming up on my left. I turned my laser cannon on it just a second or two before it could fire its pulse torpedo at me, and I blew it to pieces. This caused even more problems for Sinderella, because some of the pieces started flying straight toward her. Then I saw what I hoped would be her salvation, and I fired a laser beam at this huge rock, almost an asteroid, that was fast approaching her.

  She immediately grasped the possibilities, and instead of trying to avoid it, she carefully maneuvered herself so that she could land on it. It didn’t have much gravity, but it was moving fast enough so that as long as she stayed on what I’ll call the front end of it, she wasn’t going to get thrown off.

  The rock protected her from all the flying debris, and I was finally able to maneuver my ship right next to it.

  I never thought an airlock could look like paradise (added Sinderella), but this one sure did once Nicodemus opened the hatch. He was standing inside it, and he threw me a line. Well, he tried to throw me a line, but since there was no gravity it didn’t work very well. Finally he just signaled for me to push off from the rock and aim myself in his direction. I was scared to death, but I did what he wanted, and a moment later I felt his hand close on my arm.

  We spent the next two days hunting down the remaining ships that had come after me. They were good, those pilots, but my Nicodemus is superb, and eventually we found them and blew them away. Then it was just a matter of getting out of the Rings and returning here.

  As man and wife (said Mayflower proudly). Show ’em your ring, Honey.

  “Who married you?” asked Max.

  “I did,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

  “You ain�
�t no preacher,” said the Reverend Billy Karma.

  “But it’s my ship, and a ship’s captain has always been able to perform marriages.”

  “Pity,” said Billy Karma. “I’d have presided over one hell of a shindig for a not-unseemly fee.”

  “Yeah,” said Mayflower. “But you’d probably have kissed the bride, and then I’d have had to kill you.”

  “Good God, why?” demanded Billy Karma.

  Sinderella smiled sweetly. “I’d have insisted.”

  “It was lucky you had a wedding ring handy,” remarked Max. “Not a lot of people go to war prepared for that particular eventuality.”

  “Actually, I didn’t,” said Mayflower. “But after we wiped out the alien ships and decided to get married, I took the busted radio on her spacesuit apart and made the ring she’s wearing from its innards.” He smiled. “Now every time she looks at it, she’ll remember how we got together, and that as long as we’re a team nothing can defeat us.”

  “I find that a noble and touching sentiment,” said the Gravedigger.

  “Truth to tell, we just came back to make sure we’d won the war,” said Mayflower. “We’ll have another drink or two, and then we’re off on our honeymoon.”

  “Where are you going?” asked the Earth Mother.

  “Who cares, as long as we’re together,” replied Sinderella.

  “I hear Serengeti is a great planet,” offered Big Red.

  “The zoo world?” said Mayflower.

  “Yeah. Species from all over the galaxy, all of ’em roaming free.”

  “If he can’t think of something better to look at on his honeymoon than a bunch of animals, I married the wrong man,” said Sinderella.

  “Now that you mention it,” said Billy Karma, “you did marry the wrong man, and there’s still time to get out of it and run away with me.”

  “Now I know how we Christianized so many alien worlds and races,” said Big Red. “The man just refuses to take No for an answer.”

  “You know, now that I come to think of it, I ain’t never run into an alien evangelist,” said Baker. “I guess their gods ain’t into recruitin’ as much as ours is.”

  “How about you Injuns?” asked Max. “What’s your God like?”