“I’m in you, darling. I’m feeling everything you feel,” Cama whispered in his ear. “There is still much change and healing to be done inside your cells. You have rather odd cells too. Joining in mind and memory is a faster, more pleasurable way to speed our physical linkage. I’m glad you find Valier so delectable. But I won’t be him for you.”
Moro shuddered. “Wouldn’t want it.” A daring certainty struck him. “Who are you for Val?”
She chuckled. “So you guessed one of his secrets, did you? He’s got a strong connection to me. He’s been a very lonely boy. We’ve had fun, and I’ve kept him reasonably sane. And like you, he’s responsive to both sexes. Does this please you?”
When Moro turned to look, Demetra was gone.
Peridot’s greenish-golden light flooded the summer evening. Fireflies drifted by, casting warmer intermittent glows over Cama’s lightly freckled skin. The lily still bloomed in her curly copper hair. Her pale eyes drank Peridot’s gleam, becoming misty green. Her sleeveless dress was a silky billow of amber fabric hiked up short enough to reveal her thighs, calves, and slender feet. The swell of one rich breast peeked out from the drooping neckline. Her nipples peaked the fabric. Now she smelled of lilies, grass, and a woman’s musky arousal.
He needed to keep Demetra’s memory like a banner of grief and guilt. One of the faces he saw behind every challenger and smirking voyeur.
“Let her go, Moro,” said Cama. “Let all the dead of Ventana go. They’re not helping you now.”
“She and Jost kept me alive in the arena.”
“Are you in the arena now?”
“For the rest of my life,” Moro said even though his head swam from Cama’s nearness and warmth. “You’re not backing down, are you?”
“Not a chance.” She chuckled. “Look in my eyes, Moro.”
He looked. He felt Cama soften those brutal memories. Murder had happened, but like the Diamond’s eight years with Kott, it belonged to someone else’s life.
“Moro, I don’t want the gladiator or the slave, the bonder boy who loved Jost and Demetra, or—or whatever else you are. I just want you,” Cama said.
She was earthy and safe, not beautiful, just a kind stranger smiling a little shyly at him. Her heart-shaped lips opened just enough to reveal the tip of her tongue and her strong white teeth. “Well?” she asked, hooking one leg over his thigh.
“No. Yes,” Moro whispered, startled to feel arousal tighten his balls. “Are you making me feel this?”
“After what Lyton did to you? Never! Moro, what you feel for me and Valier comes only from you.”
“Do you look like this for Val?”
“In dreams, yes.” Cama leaned over to undo his belt and trousers. She eased his cock out of his briefs. She tongued and teased him to full hardness. Her fingers were as clever as Val’s, and now Moro wondered just where Val had learned that! Her mouth was fire and honey, a practiced, strong suction he could barely endure.
Cama swung her hips over his. Her labia folded around his cockhead. Raised on her knees, she paused with Moro just barely inside her, her muscles caressing him in fluttering squeezes.
“Mmm,” she whispered. “Valier thought you liked that when he used his hands.”
Moro thrust up into her, amazed at the tight, silky, pulsing warmth. He hadn’t loved a woman in years. He slid his hands under the billowing dress, cupping her soft breasts and finding her nipples through the fabric with his lips and teeth.
She groaned in sheer animalistic pleasure as if this contact must be as rare for her as for him.
“Worse,” she gasped, riding his big shaft in slow, luxurious lifts and descents. The lily fell from her ringlets, its pollen dusting Moro’s cheek with perfume. “I can spy on my folk sharing joy, though I try to give them privacy. But not many can bring me so—ah!—completely to form within their thoughts. You, oh, you and Valier—”
Moro and Val and Cama. He and Val, making love to this enchantress at the same time, in the same dream. The idea made Moro tremble.
He grabbed her hips and rolled her under him into the soft grass. Amid drifts of amber silk, her legs clasped his waist as he found her wellspring once again. One of her bare feet traced a wavering path down his clothed spine. He tried to match her earlier pace of smooth thrusts and retreats, a sophisticated glide toward climax.
She flexed under him. Her arms pulled him down, and she bit his earlobe. “Drill me, Moro,” she growled, her inner muscles clenching with each word. “Fuck me into the grass.”
He paused above her, fighting the tide of lust.
“And while you fuck me,” she added wickedly, “think of doing it to Val.”
He did and came undone.
TWO MILES FROM the embassy, Val was glad he’d put the cycle on autopilot, just in case.
Through Cama’s linkage, he caught a throb of fierce pleasure and knew every other Camalian alive felt at least a ghost of sensation. Val felt the hard insistent pressure of Moro’s cock against his backside.
Val groaned and marshaled his concentration.
Still asleep, Moro tightened his arms and began to thrust. Val blessed the layers of robe, coat, tunic, and trousers between him and Moro. His own erection surged to life in guilty response.
Val dared a silent, “Cama?”
“Valier, darling,” she said breathlessly into his mind, “I’m a little busy. Shut up and fly.”
Thirty
MARK DAVID MOORE woke to his com pinging about an incoming message. No caller identification, but he recognized Vance’s voice. “Moore? You there, man? I’m forwarding a traffic cam link. Haven’t seen it yet, myself, but one of your fans down at the Transportation Bureau says it was flagged as a possible anomaly.”
“SERO SARDIS? I’VE found an anomaly in traffic scanning.”
Bill glanced up, noting that he and the female security analyst were alone in the Sardis command center.
Lyton had moved Operation Diamond back up to the Sardis main offices in north Saba, leaving Bill to organize it all. As usual. Terise was puttering in her basement lab, refining the newest twist to her mind-switching plans for Lyton. As usual.
Bill decided he needed coffee. And new parents.
“Sero Sardis?”
Oh. The analyst meant Bill. He took another few seconds to process her actual words. “What kind of anomaly?”
“For five or six hours we’ve been seeing registered Camalians converging on their embassy headquarters from all over Cedar-Saba. They do this occasionally, for one of their festivals or whatever. But here’s a shot taken fifteen minutes ago on the Encanto Artery. That’s almost seven hundred miles due north of Vaclav. A float-cycle with a Camalian passenger and a human driver. I’ve got a decent picture of the driver. The cycle’s registration uplink doesn’t quite match its video identification. It could be our missing vehicle.”
Wide awake now, Bill was beside her in a moment. “Let me see.”
“We don’t have long,” she said. “I got in through a side link. Someone clumsy has already been here. Alerts are shutting down outside access. Look.”
The camera had snagged a clear shot, from twenty feet away, of a young male driver leaning forward on a sleek new craft. The driver’s dark face was turned toward the camera. His passenger slumped forward, skull and forehead covered by a knitted cap, his chin dragging over the driver’s shoulder. The masked and gloved passenger clasped the driver’s waist with both arms.
No, Bill realized. The masked passenger was tied to driver and cycle, and unconscious. This was no joyride, either. The driver’s handsome face showed fear, anger, and grim determination.
A sick Camalian being flown to the embassy by a human friend?
Then Bill thought he recognized the passenger’s trim waist, wide shoulders, and the long line of the flexed legs. A disguised and unconscious man on a suspect vehicle. On a straight line from Vaclav. With an unmasked Camalian.
“Erase the image,” Bill said.
“Ser
o Sardis?” asked the analyst.
Bill thought the better of it. “Wait. Can you make the cycle visually match its registry? And seal the information to appear original in Transportation’s database?”
“Please. They’re using eighty-year-old tech. And we’re Rio Sardis.”
Her fingers moved even as she spoke. A wire frame image superimposed over the cycle. A stabilizing fin elongated. A larger cargo pannier appeared behind the riders. One click and the image was permanently altered at its source.
“Now kill the image,” said Bill. “And make our path correspond to the idiots who broke in ahead of us. Give Transportation a big red flag waving over their target.”
“Sero Sardis, it could be one of our affiliates,” she said.
“We’re Rio Sardis,” Bill answered into her short, sleek dark blonde hair. “Do you honestly think the director wants affiliation with someone clumsy enough to expose our private business to the League authorities?”
“No, Sero Sardis,” she answered.
The deed done, Bill stood over the analyst’s chair, thinking quickly. He had been chief of operations for fifteen years. He’d walked several thin lines before, but he’d never crossed them. Knowingly. He hadn’t gone to Ventana on Lyton’s stupid Sonta treasure hunt. Nor had he paid much attention to its aftermath, beyond profit-and-loss statements. He hadn’t even known Lyton’s new toy was Ventana-born until after the slave had vanished from Lyton’s bed.
Bill noted the analyst hadn’t stirred from her chair, even after the monitor screen went blank. Her shoulders were slightly hunched forward.
As if waiting for a false-friendly hand on her shoulder.
Lyton Sardis apparently lived for crossing lines, even with his own flesh and blood.
Bill grabbed another armless chair and pulled it alongside her. He sat down, draping himself backward. His hands rested along the top of the seat where she could watch them.
Bill considered her. Late twenties. Nice face, no applied or permanently tattooed cosmetics. No need for them, either, with her olive skin and dark-golden hair. Good hips, slim waist, breasts high and full. Intelligent. Quick thinking. And sane, which he currently found at least as attractive as her body.
“What’s your name, Sera?”
“Zarin Basrali, Sero Sardis,” she said.
“Sera Basrali, are you part of Terra Prima? Speak honestly.”
“No.” Her tone, rich with cultured distaste, told him much. Even at this ridiculous hour, Basrali’s charcoal and platinum-gray Rio Sardis uniform was clean and unwrinkled. Young enough to still be proud of her place in the company, then.
“Rio Sardis is made up of very skilled, very dedicated people, Sera Basrali. People who are too valuable to be bought, sold, and thrown away like disposable commodities. Do you understand what we just did?”
She nodded. “I think we just hid Moro Dalgleish’s stolen float-cycle. He’s with a Camalian.”
“We probably won’t hide it for long,” said Bill. “They could hit another camera any minute. When it comes out, if it’s traced back here, blame me. I did it.”
“Sero Sardis!”
“Better me than you,” said Bill. “I’m not my father. I’m just Bill. People who cross me don’t wind up dead and incinerated in the basement.”
“What does happen to them?”
Bill smiled, quite aware he had Lyton’s infamous, disarming grin. “Oh, it rarely gets to the incinerator stage with me. First I buy them coffee and breakfast and try talking them over to my side.”
BY THE TIME Moore had the damned link open, the information was locked down with an internal Transportation security alert he couldn’t break. The image was rippled and distorted, blocked by either censor filters or data damage from a targeted hack.
Someone didn’t want him seeing it.
He stared at the screen for several seconds before he killed the link.
Thirty-One
CAMA FELT GROWING disquiet as her tiny battalions swarmed through Moro’s body, infiltrating every cell. She still held Moro’s mind in a blissful dream, but outside its refuge, she was afraid.
Thousands of metal and plastic threads grew into Moro’s body and brain from the evil ports in his spine. They paralleled nerve and muscle fibers. Though inert, they drew standby power from Moro’s own cells and waited for the short-range signals meant to activate them. Cama could neither absorb nor destroy them.
Something even odder lurked within his cells. A dark, non-Moro presence simply vanished from each cell whenever one of her own attempted contact. It neither harmed nor helped Moro, so Cama stopped wasting time with it.
His body chemistry was different than she expected. She didn’t know how to regulate it. Already a bacterial infection spilled into Moro’s blood from damaged tissue in his rectum. When her own invaders tried to counter the bacteria, Moro’s immune system reacted violently.
The immune-response damage spread to his internal organs in a cascading shutdown. It would end in shock and a massive coronary.
Cama made Val break radio silence then, screaming for Camalian help.
“Moro, wake up. I’m trying to save you,” she sobbed into the dream of green-golden night. “Stay with me!”
He yawned. “Can’t, Cama. M’sorry. Tell Val, tell Val—” He went silent, eyes closing.
“Moro!”
Dream shimmered into darkness within Moro’s mind, lit by one impossibly distant, impossibly bright white star. Cama watched it like a field mouse might watch a nearby snake, too terrified to look away. Something else had been waiting in Moro’s mind and body all along. Something she finally recognized, from eons before humans left their little planet or were even human.
Moro the man slipped out of her grip, his sense of self dissolving into the static of coma.
But the white star burned within his faltering brain.
Thirty-Two
A SECOND TAXI from Kino Hospital brought Hegen and his charges to the front steps of the Camalian Embassy. He noted the great doors were open and guarded by hard-faced folk in amber uniforms and lightweight armor. The gracious white roofs were marred by ugly pulse cannons on swivel mountings. At four in the morning, nearly every window was alight.
“Dr. Hegen paid for our swift passage,” said Johani when two of the guards would have sent Hegen away. “It’s only civilized to repay his kindness.”
One Camalian soldier tapped the communicator curving along her left ear. “Apologies, Sero Hegen, Ambassador Antonin would like to meet you. If you rode in a taxi with two kids, do you mind a whole building full of us?”
Hegen shrugged, still holding the drowsy Phillipe. “I’ve adopted a certain fatalism lately. As long as I can get to a spaceport in the next hour or two, I’m happy.”
Inside the central lobby Hegen’s suspicions were confirmed by the gathered crates and organized people bustling about on disciplined tasks. The Camalians were leaving Cedar in as much hurry as he was.
Johani tapped his shoulder. She held out her hands. “I’ll take him, Sero Doctor.” Phillipe clutched tighter, fighting the exchange. The boy was almost too big for Johani to hold, so she set him down on the floor. Hegen blinked back unexpected emotion when Phillipe reached sleepily for Hegen’s boot.
“Dr. Hegen?” asked a smoky female voice, worn with strain. “Thank you for your humanity in getting my laggard Richesons home.”
He turned, eye to eye with a lean, graceful woman in military uniform. He’d last seen her on Moore’s show, at the premier’s banquet. He recognized the dark walnut skin, aquiline features, full lips, and the cascade of tiny black braids falling halfway down her back. The orange dress was gone, along with the amber-and-emerald hair clasps. She might have been forty or eighty. Since Camalians lived easily into their three hundreds, Hegen couldn’t guess. The woman carried more weapons than a small south-Saba pawnshop.
“Ambassador Antonin?” he asked, making a deep bow. “Please, it was my duty as a doctor, and something of a penance
on my part. Sera Richeson and her children walked into a firestorm about to erupt.”
“Even so, I would be happy to repay you,” began the ambassador. Then she wobbled on her feet. Her dark eyes were wide and unseeing. He grabbed her flailing hand to steady her.
Hegen heard Johani cry out softly next to him, and startled murmurs from nearly every other Camalian in the big room.
“Cama, no!” the ambassador said, her face turning almost sallow. “Breakthrough? Now? Who?”
A young man ran up to her, pointing at his ear. “Valier’s nearly here! I’ve got him on com. He’s dropping in fast on a stolen cycle with a passenger just out of breakthrough, and he says please don’t shoot.”
“Oh dear,” said Johani, blushing. “We haven’t had a successful conversion attempt in two hundred years. Seems apt Valier would have something to do with it.”
Alys dropped Hegen’s hand. She growled a blistering curse and grabbed her assistant’s com from his ear. Jamming it onto her own, she shouted, “You reprehensible little wretch! I’m opening the dome! We’ll have doctors ready.”
Hegen watched Camalian medics scramble to lay out a floating gurney and tiers of monitoring equipment. Others began rigging a circular, six-foot-high fabric screen.
“D’you have a surgery?” he began.
“Can’t get to it in time,” said one of the Camalian medics beside him. Hegen realized his counterparts were alertly listening to something and nodding in unison.
He guessed what it must be. Cama. These sane and reasonable people were all linked silently to each other through their symbiotic infection. Was there any privacy in their minds anymore? For a moment, he felt the revulsion Moore must feel.
But Johani wasn’t a monster. And sleeping Phillipe had clung to him just as Demetra had, all those years ago.
Overhead, the huge white dome irised open.
Hegen heard the approaching whine of an engine taxed to its limit.
“Everyone inside,” roared the ambassador. “Close the front doors!”
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