by Paul Kenyon
His hands on her breasts were trembling. His fingers dug into the softness. She gasped.
Her own hand trembling, she reached down for the torpedo shape protruding between her legs. She tilted her pelvis forward a fraction and bent his cock backward. Its fleshy tip dug into her clitoris. The two swollen buds, lathered with her juices, nuzzled one another like frantic creatures with a life of their own. Flashes of heat began to spread between her legs, all the way to her spine and down the backs of her thighs. She continued rubbing his plum against her, her whole body writhing as if in agony.
He was holding out manfully, helped by the four previous orgasms and the hundred-proof anesthesia. But he was panting, his breath hot and spicy against her ear. He removed one hand from her breast and tried to take his cock from her for a closer fit. She took him by the wrist and put the hand firmly back on her breast. There was still a little farther to go first.
The hospital cot was shaking dangerously. Amar was making automatic mating motions, heaving like a stallion mounting a teaser mare.
It was too much for her. With a sob, she wiggled her bottom and thrust his club all the way into her sheath. She grunted at the sudden rush of pleasure. It fit snugly and warmly in there, radiating heat. She began a slow rotary motion. Amar continued his stallion lunges, the combination making her shivery.
They found one another's beat after a minute, and began a steady rocking movement. The cot shook. After a while its motion synchronized with theirs. The rhythm grew hypnotic. There was a hot breath from some elemental furnace licking away at his insides. The flush spread through her body.
They were moving faster and faster, the cot creaking with their efforts. Amar's fingers were blind claws on her breasts. She hardly felt them any more. Her senses were crowded with what was happening down there, in that zone of intense passion that was blowing up like a cosmic balloon, filled with the heat of a solar furnace. Her insides baked and sizzled at its breath. It was growing, swelling.
And then his seed was spilling through the recesses of her body, a long endless outpouring, a scalding flood that laved those dark interior caverns and washed away the last crumbling dikes of her restraint. He was pushing himself into her as far as he could get, gasping hoarsely, and she could hear little cries that must be her own.
She let it happen. Her insides dissolved. She basked in a simmering ravishment, her flesh melting like butter. There was nothing left of her except a golden flood, pouring itself through a vast glowing tunnel.
The flood collected itself and began to solidify into awareness again. She was lying on a scratchy army blanket, Amar wrapped around her like a drowning man clutching a buoy. His probe was still inside her. She coaxed a few more flutterings out of herself, stirring it around with a circular wriggle. There was an answering gasp of pleasure from him, and then they both lay still for a moment, recovering.
She pulled his shaft out of her, the slithery feeling of it giving her a last little pleasurable spasm. There was a sensation of warm honey running down her thighs as she unstoppered herself. She moved away from the sticky spot on the blanket.
They smiled at one another, both their faces flushed and glowing.
"Will you pass the Scotch, darling?" she said.
"Have I converted you?"
"Hell, no," she laughed. "I always liked the stuff."
* * *
It looked like a cluster of kettledrums: the three enormous brass bowls with the white plastic caps stretched across the tops.
"You can thank Dan for the diaphragms," Sumo said. "He melted down every scrap of the neo-copolymers in our equipment, including the Spyder threads, and cast it in those three-foot disks. They're only a few molecules thick, but they ought to stand up to about forty hours worth of vibrations at five terahertz."
The Baroness inspected the apparatus. She looked like a desert lioness in the tawny, skintight body suit with the flaring hood that camouflaged her jet-black hair. One of Wharton's .45s was holstered at her hip, and there was a belt of grenades slung over one shoulder.
"Where did you get the kettles?" she said.
Eric stepped forward. The phony gold spectacles were gone. He looked hard and tough in his fatigues and combat boots and the bulging ammo pouches.
"They're three thousand years old," he said. "We borrowed them from one of the grave mounds."
The Baroness tapped a drumhead and listened approvingly to the bass rumble. "They trap sound beautifully. You couldn't have done better if you'd had them precision-machined."
Sumo spoke up eagerly. "I mounted Le Sourd's ultrasonic generator inside, the way you told me. The two focal tubes in two of the drums. Those are our mouths. The third drum is for feedback. That's our ear."
The Baroness nodded. "The ear is the key to the whole thing."
They were all standing in the reed-walled compound of the archaeology camp, screened from casual view. The workers all had been sent home. They hadn't been too anxious to hang around anyway. Rumors were flying all along the border that some kind of major battle was shaping up between an army led by the Emir of Ghazal and a bunch of rebels. Prudent men looked after their own concerns at such times.
Skytop squinted at the contraption. "Will someone explain to me what these electronic tom-toms are supposed to do?"
"Easy," Sumo said, looking smug. "They send out an interference pattern. Sound cancels out sound."
"Even ultrasonic sound," Wharton said.
Sumo grimaced. "Including Le Sourd's phonon beams, which are as far beyond ordinary ultrasonic sound as ordinary ultrasound is beyond human hearing. That's why we need Le Sourd's ultrasound buzz saw. Those neocopolymer drumheads will pick up the phonon beams — spread them out and amplify them — but we had to have something that would generate noise in the trillions of cycles in the first place."
"What the hell is the ear?" Skytop persisted.
"It tunes in Le Sourd's wave pattern. Precisely. And matches it exactly one phase out of step — five trillion times a second. The compressions of his waves mesh with the rarefactions of our waves. You get a dead place."
Comprehension dawned under Skytop's shelving brow. "You mean like white noise — those gadgets city people turn on so they won't hear the traffic noises while they're sleeping?"
"Exactly."
"Tell me something," Skytop said slyly. "Where's the computer that controls all this?"
Sumo gave a shamefaced grin. He lifted the lid of the third kettle and pointed inside. There was a lacy blue brassiere there, stretched from rim to rim.
"One of the Baroness' stretch computers," Sumo said.
"I'm glad to make the sacrifice," Penelope said dryly.
She faced her little family of killers. They looked back at her, relaxed and waiting. Skytop was whetting his knife on a stone, a look of unholy anticipation on his face. Inga and Eric stood together, looking Nordic and clean-cut, as if they were carrying skis over their shoulders instead of automatic weapons. Paul was squatting, a grin on his elegant cocoa-colored features, putting fuses into an assortment of plastic charges that were going to blow men and vehicles apart. Sumo, slight and boyish, was serenely passing him the penny-size detonators. Wharton had moved a little way off to mount a .50 caliber machine gun on one of Sheik Hamad's Land Rovers. Yvette stood there, the sleeves of her man's shirt pushed up and a bandanna wrapped around her head, checking the clip of the .32 caliber Beretta Puma she favored for close-in work, only the exquisite protruding bones of her cheeks showing her for the Port-au-Prince beauty queen she once had been. Fiona was beside her, a languid Renaissance vision with her pale luminous skin and flame-colored hair, looking bored and inattentive until you saw the cold light in her eyes and the way her fingers kept caressing the Plainfield Paratrooper .30 caliber carbine with the telescoping wire stock.
"Time to go, children," the Baroness said softly.
She turned and walked over to where Amar's radioman leaned against the fender of his jeep. He was a gawky young man with a big nose
and bad skin, who had watched the proceedings with mute incomprehension. He sprang to attention as she approached.
"We're ready, Corporal," she said. "You can call up Amar now and tell him we're on our way."
Skytop had drifted up silently, the knife he'd been sharpening still in his hand. He used it to gesture toward the three brass bowls on their mounting.
"They'd better work," he said.
Her splendid muscles rippled under the tawny pelt of the body suit. "Yes, Joseph," she said, "they'd better."
17
The harka was an incredible sight.
It spread acre upon acre across the sands, a fantasy kingdom of billowing tents and crimson pavilions, the gold-and-green banners floating overhead in the dawn breeze. The Emir's enclosure was marked off by a maze of silk walls, strung for hundreds of yards on ropes. There was a traveling harem of a hundred women there, in a vast carnival tent guarded by eunuchs in glittering gold costumes. There were the blue-striped tents of the viziers and the plainer canvas tents of the staff officers, radiating in spokes from the Emir's presence. There were immense tarpaulin corrals for the camels and mules and pack horses, and the conical tents of a dozen tribes who had sworn loyalty to the throne.
And around the scene of ancient splendor were the ugly artifacts of modern warfare: the tanks and the jeeps and the armored personnel carriers and the self-propelled rocket launchers.
The Baroness looked down on it all through her binoculars. The faerie vision was disappearing with amazing speed as a horde of sweating men collapsed the tents and packed them up again. The smoke of the cooking fires was fading as a thousand feet kicked sand over them. The sound of motors warming up thrummed across the desert.
"They're moving out," she said. "Let's get them before they get organized."
Beside her, Joe Skytop gave a great, gap-toothed grin. "Gotcha!" he said.
He threw the jeep into gear. The Baroness twisted her head to make sure the other two vehicles were following. She could see the Land Rover, Dan Wharton behind the wheel and Sumo tending the three brass kettledrums of her ultrasound neutralizer. At the. third point of the triangle was the other jeep, Eric and Yvette in front, and Inga hunched over the .50 caliber machine gun mounted in back.
"Hey, ain't enough of them to go around!" Paul chuckled from the back seat. He was surrounded by missile tubes and neatly packaged piles of his custom-made plastic bombs.
The two jeeps and the Land Rover leaped over the ridge and roared straight toward an army of ten thousand men.
"My God, you're right!" Skytop thundered. "We gotta split 'em up among the nine of us!"
The Baroness laughed with the heady excitement of it. These were the best moments of life, heading into action with a crew of trained killers that she cherished more than friends, family or lovers. You had to cherish people when your lives depended on one another.
No one had fired at them yet. The outer fringes of the harka were still two miles away. And three unarmored vehicles couldn't have seemed very threatening. Perhaps it was Sheik Hamad, come to pay a courtesy call. After all, they were on his territory.
"Harka!" Paul shouted above the engine. "It means 'The Burning.' The old sultans used to swarm across the desert like locusts! It was tough on the poor locals who had to feed them!"
"It's still 'The Burning,' Paul," the Baroness said. "Only now he's got a phonon beam to burn with."
"There it is," Skytop rumbled. "Christ, they've got it surrounded!"
She saw it then, the huge squarish sand vehicle, looking like a giant's roller skate with a cannon mounted on it. A cluster of horns blossomed from the cannon's muzzle.
"Get as close as you can, Joseph, and stay close!"
He swung the wheel, and the jeep careened toward the ultrasound weapon. Now there were scattered puffs of smoke from the line of bright ants ahead, and she could hear the popping of gunfire a moment later.
"Hang on!" Skytop yelled.
They'd startled one of the tanks into life. Its driver had been more alert than the others. It lumbered toward them across the dunes, its long cannon swiveling to track them. There was a bright muzzle flash, and then a geyser of sand exploded close by, rocking them.
"Son of a bitch!" Skytop said.
Paul grinned wickedly in the back seat. "Hold her steady, redskin!" he cried.
He stood up, bracing his legs, hefting a Blowpipe cannister to his shoulder. He squinted through the optical finder and manipulated the thumb control. The needle-sharp missile burst through the foil covering the mouth of the cannister and flew like a dart, picking up speed. Nothing happened for a minute, and then the entire turret of the tank lifted up, like a man tipping his hat. There was a gout of flame and they could see the bodies flying into the air.
"Right into the cannon," Paul said happily. "That was their own ammunition."
More tanks were throbbing into life. A couple of jeeps started in their direction.
The Baroness picked up the high-powered rifle from the floor beside her. She leaned past the windshield, bracing her elbow. She could see the driver's face through the telescopic sight. She squeezed the trigger. A star appeared in the other jeep's windshield. The vehicle skidded crazily and overturned, spilling the gunner into the sand.
She shifted her sights to the other jeep. Its gunner was already firing wildly, the bullets falling short at this range. She had no intention of letting them get any closer. She shot him through the chest. He fell out of the jeep, clawing at himself. The driver looked around, saw that he had no gunner, and skeedaddled back to where he had come from.
The edges of the harka were breaking up as more vehicles detached themselves. Skytop began to look worried.
"Where the hell is Amar?" he growled.
"Keep driving, Joseph," Penelope said.
A ring of armored cars began to draw up around Le Sourd's oversize weapon carrier, protecting it. She could see tiny figures on the wide flat bed, working frantically to activate the portable computer. Le Sourd had to be one of them.
"Hurry, Joseph!" she said, "we've got to get closer!"
There was a whole stream of armored vehicles coming out to intercept them. Paul picked up another missile launcher.
"I wanted to save these for emergencies," he said.
"Believe me, man," Skytop said, "this is an emergency."
Another geyser of sand went up beside them. Shrapnel clattered against their jeep.
Paul sighed and hoisted the cannister to his shoulder. The lead tank went up in flames. The others kept right on coming.
Skytop was taking evasive action now, zigzagging Wildly to avoid the deadly puffs of sand that were springing up around them. They were getting closer to the iron ring surrounding Le Sourd, but it didn't look as if they could make it all the way.
And then, on the far side of the harka, miles off across the flat expanse of wasteland, they saw it.
A bobbing line of black dots erupted over the horizon.
Penelope raised the binoculars. Another army was coming toward them.
Amar!
She could see the yellow taxicabs with their balloon tires, the halftracks and jeeps he'd stolen from PFLOAG, the Soviet tanks left over from World War II. The savage nomads he'd recruited were riding hell for leather on their camels and swift desert horses, their fierce honor depending on their not falling behind the armored protection.
It was a brave, motley crew. The Emir's forces outnumbered them three to one.
The Emir's troops saw them too. The tanks and soldiers began to struggle into formation. The work of dismantling the camp came to a standstill. The entire side of one of the enormous silk pavilions was flapping in the air like a colossal sheet on a washline, while hysterical harem ladies scurried around beneath it.
A cannon shell landed somewhere in the middle of the harka. A column of smoke began to rise.
The swarm of vehicles heading toward the Baroness veered toward this new threat. There were only a few jeeps and halftracks coming af
ter them now, followed by one ponderous T-60 tank.
"Now them I can handle," Paul said cheerfully.
He raised another of his precious missile cannisters and took out the tank first. The guided rocket caught it low, ripping off a tread. It began churning up sand. The 115mm cannon rotated, getting off a couple of shells, but Skytop's inspired driving kept them out of the field of fire.
The Baroness was standing, braced, firing over the windscreen. She saw one jeep turn over and burst into flame. Eric's jeep pulled out ahead of her and to one side, while Inga raked the Ghazalis with machine gun fire. In the front seat, Yvette tossed out a grenade and lifted a halftrack off its treads.
Somebody in the harka had called in the air force. The sleek shapes of Phantom jets streaked in from the east. There were five of them. In a few minutes, when Amar's forces mingled with the opposing troops, they'd be about as useful to the Emir as a cavalry charge in a china shop. But now, with an exposed target on the flat, open desert, they'd be deadly. They began to come in for a strafing and rocket run.
"Paul!" the Baroness said sharply.
"I hear you," he said.
He tilted one of the Blowpipe cannisters upward. The Baroness shot a Ghazali gunner who tried to pick him off. The missile went off with a whoosh. Paul watched it through his lenses, thumbing the little control.
One of the Phantom jets started to dodge. Paul smiled thinly. There was a flare of orange overhead, and the plane tumbled out of the sky, shredding pieces as it fell.
Another plane exploded in midair. A rain of metal fell out of the sky. There was a yellow buttercup up there: the pilot had been able to eject and open his parachute.
"Looks like Amar stole himself a couple of SAMs," Skytop said.
The remaining three jets had streaked off for a new approach. They came in low, rockets belching. Amar lost a couple of armored cars.