The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  And then combat, the final dissipation of any romantic fumes that might have endured the training years. Vidaura’s face in a dozen different sleeves on a dozen different worlds, sharpened with pain or fury or just the intense focus of mission time. The stink of her too-long-unwashed body in a cramped shuttle on the dark side of Loyko’s moon, the slick feel of her blood on my hands one murderous night in Zihicce when she almost died. The look on her face when the orders to crush all resistance in Neruda came through.

  I’d thought those moments had taken us beyond sex. They seemed to scoop out emotional depths that made fucking seem shallow by comparison. The last time I’d visited Vchira and seen the way Brasil leaned towards her - her Adoracion ancestry alone enough to strike sparks of desire off him - I’d felt a vague sort of superiority. Even with Yaroslav and the on-and-off long-term commitment they’d managed, I’d always believed that somehow he wasn’t getting to the core of the woman I had fought beside in more corners of the Protectorate than most people would ever see.

  I adopted a quizzical look that felt like taking cover.

  ‘You think this is a good idea?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said huskily. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Umm. In all honesty, Virginia, I’m rapidly beginning not to care. But I’m not the one attached to Jack Soul Brasil.’

  She laughed. ‘This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.’

  I looked around the suite. ‘He could pop up any minute. So could any of them for that matter. I’m not much for display sex.’

  ‘Me neither.’ She got up and offered me her hand. ‘Come with me.’

  She led me out of the suite and into the corridor. In both directions, identical doors mirrored each other across the anonymous grey carpeting and receded into a pale mist after a few dozen metres. We went, hand-in-hand, right up to the beginnings of the fade-out, feeling the faint cold that breathed out of it, and Vidaura opened the last door on the left. We slipped inside, hands already on each other.

  It doesn’t take long to peel off spray-ons. Five seconds after the door closed, she had my surf shorts to my ankles and was rolling my rapidly hardening cock between her palms. I tugged free with an effort, got her swimsuit off her shoulders and skinned down to her waist, pressed the heel of one palm hard against the juncture of her thighs. Her breathing tautened and the muscles in her stomach flexed. I knelt and forced the suit down further, over her hips and thighs until she could step easily out of it. Then I spread the lips of her cunt with my fingers, traced the opening lightly with my tongue and stood up to kiss her on the mouth. Another tremor ran through her. She sucked my tongue in and bit it gently, then put both hands to my head and pulled back. I dragged my fingertips up the creases of her cunt again, found damp and heat and pressed gently at her clitoris. She shivered and grinned at me.

  ‘And now that you’ve found me,’ she repeated, eyes starting to defocus. ‘What?’

  ‘Now,’ I told her, ‘I want to find out if the muscles in those thighs are as strong as they look.’

  Her eyes lit. The grin came back.

  ‘I’ll bruise you,’ she promised. ‘I’ll crack your spine.’

  ‘You’ll try, you mean.’

  She made a small, hungry noise and bit my lower lip. I hooked an arm under one of her knees and lifted. She grabbed at my shoulders and wrapped the other leg around my waist, then reached down for my cock and pressed it hard into the folds of her cunt. In the moments of conversation, she’d softened and moistened to readiness. With my free hand, I spread her wider open and she sank onto me, gasping at the penetration and rocking back and forth against me from the waist up. Her thighs clamped around my waist with the promised bruising force. I swung us about to get a wall at my back and leaned against it. Got a measure of control.

  It was short lived. Vidaura hooked her grip deeper into my shoulders and began working herself back and forth on my erection, breath coming in short grunts of effort that went up in pitch and rapidity as her orgasm built. Not far behind her, I could feel the tension in my cock gathering heat all the way back to the root. I could feel the rub of her insides over my glans. I lost whatever control I’d had, grabbed at her arse with both hands and rammed her harder onto me. Above my face, her closed eyes flew momentarily open and she grinned down at me. The tip of her tongue came out and touched her upper teeth. I laughed back, tight and locked up. Now it was a struggle, Vidaura arching her belly forward and hips back, working the head of my prick back to the mouth of her cunt and the tightly gathered nerve endings there, my hands ramming her back again and trying to bury myself in her to the hilt.

  The fight dissolved in sensory avalanche.

  Sweat building on our skin, slippery under our gripping hands—

  Hard grins and kisses that were more like bites—

  Breathing tipped frantically out of control—

  My face, buried against the scant swelling of her breasts and the sweat-slick flat space between—

  Her face rubbing sideways on the top of my head—

  One agonising moment when she held herself off me with all her force—

  A yell, maybe hers, maybe mine—

  —and then the liquid gushing of release, and collapse, juddering and sliding down the wall in a heap of splayed limbs and spasming bodies.

  Spent.

  After a long moment, I propped myself up sideways, and my flaccid cock popped slickly out of her. She moved one leg and moaned faintly. I tried to shift us both into a slightly more tenable position. She opened one eye and grinned.

  ‘So, soldier. Wanted to do that for long, have you?’

  I grinned back, weakly. ‘Only forever. You?’

  ‘The thought had crossed my mind once or twice, yeah.’ She pushed against the wall with the soles of both feet and sat up, leaning on her elbows. Her gaze flickered down the length of her body and then across at mine. ‘But I don’t fuck the recruits. Jesus, look at the mess we made.’

  I reached a hand across to her sweat-smeared belly, trailed a finger down into the cleft at the start of her cunt. She twitched and I smiled.

  ‘Want a shower then?’

  She grimaced. ‘Yeah, I think we’d better.’

  We started to fuck again in the shower, but neither of us had the same manic strength that had imbued the first time and we couldn’t stay braced. I carried her out to the bedroom and laid her down soaking wet on the bed instead. I knelt by her head, turned it gently and guided her mouth to my prick. She sucked, lightly at first then with gathering force. I lay backward alongside her slim muscled body, turned my own head and opened her thighs with my hands. Then I slid an arm around her hips, drew her cunt to my face and went to work with my tongue. And the hunger came out all over again, like rage. The pit of my belly felt as if it was filled with sparking wires. Down the bed, she made muffled noises, rolled her weight over and crouched above me on elbows and spread knees. Her hips and thighs crushed down on me, her mouth worked the head of my prick and her hand pumped at the shaft.

  It took a long, slow, delirious time. Chemically unaided, we didn’t know each other well enough for a truly synchronised orgasm, but the Envoy conditioning or maybe something else covered for the lack. When finally I came into the back of her throat, the force of it bent me up off the bed against her crouched body and in pure reflex I wrapped both arms tight around her hips. I dragged her down onto me, tongue frantic, so that she spat me out still spasming and leaking, and screamed with her own climax, and collapsed onto me shuddering.

  But not long after, she rolled off, sat up cross-legged and looked seriously at me, as if I was a problem she couldn’t solve.

  ‘I think that’s probably enough,’ she said. ‘We’d better get back.’

  And later I stood on the beach with Sierra Tres and Jack Soul Brasil, watching the last rays of the sunset strike bright copper off the edge of a rising Marikanon, wondering if I’d made a mistake somewhere.
I couldn’t think straight enough to be sure. We’d gone into the virtuality with the physical feedback baffles locked closed, and for all the sexual venting I’d indulged in with Virginia Vidaura, my real body was still swamped with undischarged hormones. At one level at least, it might as well never have happened.

  I glanced surreptitiously at Brasil and wondered some more. Brasil, who’d shown no visible reaction when Vidaura and I reentered the mapping construct within a couple of minutes of each other, albeit from different sides of the archipelago. Brasil, who’d worked with the same steady, good-natured and elegant application until we’d wrapped the raid and the fallback after. Who’d placed one hand casually in the small of Vidaura’s back and smiled faintly at me just before the two of them blinked out of the virtuality with a co-ordination that spoke volumes.

  ‘You’ll get your money back, you know,’ I told him.

  Brasil twitched impatiently. ‘I know that, Tak. I’m not concerned about the money. We would have cleared your debt with Segesvar as simple payment, if you’d asked. We still can - you could consider it a bounty for what you’ve brought us if you like.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ I said stiffly. ‘I’m considering it a loan. I’ll pay you back as soon as things have calmed down.’

  A stifled snort from Sierra Tres. I turned on her.

  ‘Something amusing you?’

  ‘Yeah. The idea that things are going to calm down any time soon.’

  We watched the creep of night, across the sea in front of us. At the darkened end of the horizon, Daikoku crept up to join Marikanon in the western sky. Further along the beach, the rest of Brasil’s crew were building a bonfire. Laughter cracked around the gathering pile of driftwood, and bodies clowned about in dim silhouette. In defiance of any misgivings either Tres or I might have, there was a deep calm soaking into the evening, as soft and cool as the sand underfoot. After the manic hours of the virtuality, there seemed nothing that really needed to be done or said until tomorrow. And right now tomorrow was still rolling round the other side of the planet, like a wave out deep and building force. I thought that if I were Koi, I’d believe I could feel the march of history holding its breath.

  ‘So I take it no one’s going to get an early night,’ I said, nodding at the preparations for the bonfire.

  ‘We could all be Really Dead in a couple of days,’ Tres said. ‘Get plenty of sleep then.’

  Abruptly, she tugged her T-shirt cross-armed up over her head. Her breasts lifted and then swung disconcertingly as she completed the movement. Not what I needed right now. She dumped the T-shirt in the sand and started down the beach.

  ‘I’m going for a swim,’ she called back to us. ‘Anyone coming?’

  I glanced at Brasil. He shrugged and went after her.

  I watched them reach the water and plunge in, then strike out for deeper water. A dozen metres out, Brasil dived again, popped out of the water almost immediately and called something to Tres. She eeled about in the water and listened to him for a moment, then submerged. Brasil dived after her. They were down for about a minute this time, and then both surfaced, splashing and chattering, now nearly a hundred metres from the shore. It was, I thought, like watching the dolphins off Hirata’s reef.

  I angled right and set off along the beach towards the site of the bonfire. People nodded at me, some of them even smiled. Daniel, of all people, looked up from where he sat in the sand with a few others I didn’t know and offered me a flask of something. It seemed churlish to refuse. I knocked back the flask and coughed on vodka rough enough to be homemade.

  ‘Strong stuff,’ I wheezed and handed it back.

  ‘Yeah, nothing like it this end of the Strip.’ He gestured muzzily. ‘Sit down, have some more. This is Andrea, my best mate. Hiro. Watch him, he’s a lot older than he looks. Been at Vchira longer than I’ve been alive. And this is Magda. Bit of a bitch, but she’s manageable once you get to know her.’

  Magda cuffed him good-naturedly across the head and appropriated the flask. For lack of anything else to do, I settled onto the sand amongst them. Andrea leaned across and wanted to shake my hand.

  ‘Just want to say,’ she murmured in Millsport-accented Amanglic, ‘thanks for what you’ve done for us. Without you, we might never have known she was still alive.’

  Daniel nodded, vodka lending the motion an exaggerated solemnity. ‘That’s right, Kovacs-san. I was out of line back there when you arrived. Fact, and I’m being honest now, I thought you were full of shit. Working some angle, you know. But now with Koi on board, man we are fucking rolling. We’re going to turn this whole planet upside fucking down.’

  Murmured agreement, a little fervent for my tastes.

  ‘Going to make the Unsettlement look like a wharf brawl,’ said Hiro.

  I got hold of the flask again and drank. Second time around, it didn’t taste so bad. Maybe my taste buds were stunned.

  ‘What’s she like?’ asked Andrea.

  ‘Uh.’ An image of the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita flickered through my mind. Face smeared in the throes of climax. The swilling cocktail of hormones in my system lurched at the thought. ‘She’s. Different. It’s hard to explain.’

  Andrea nodded, smiling happily. ‘You’re so lucky. To have met her, I mean. To have talked to her.’

  ‘You’ll get your chance, And.’ Daniel said, slurring a little. ‘Soon as we take her back from those motherfuckers.’

  A ragged cheer. Someone was lighting the bonfire.

  Hiro nodded grimly. ‘Yeah. Payback time for the Harlanites. For all the First Family scum. Real Death, coming down.’

  ‘It’ll be so good,’ said Andrea, as we watched the flames start to catch. ‘To have someone again who knows what to do.’

  PART FOUR

  This Is All That Matters

  ‘This much must be understood: Revolution requires Sacrifice. ’

  Sandor Spaventa

  Tasks for the Quellist Vanguard

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  North-eastward around the curve of the world from Kossuth, the Millsport Archipelago lies in the Nurimono Ocean, like a smashed plate. Once, aeons ago, it was a massive volcanic system, hundreds of kilometres across, and the legacy still shows in the peculiarly curved outer edges of the rim islands. The fires that fuelled the eruptions are long extinct, but they left a towering, twisted mountainscape whose peaks comfortably rode out the later drowning as the sea rose. In contrast to other archipelago chains on Harlan’s World, the volcanic dribbling provided a rich soil base and most of the land is thickly covered with the planet’s beleaguered land vegetation. Later, the Martians came and added their own colonial plantlife. Later still, humans came and did the same.

  At the heart of the archipelago, Millsport itself sprawls in evercrete and fused-glass splendour. It’s a riot of urban engineering, every available crag and slope forested with spires, extending out onto the water in broad platforms and bridges kilometres in length. Cities on Kossuth and New Hokkaido have grown to substantial size and wealth at various times over the last four hundred years, but there’s nothing to match this metropolis anywhere on the planet. Home to over twenty million people, gateway to the only commercial spaceflight launch windows the orbital net will permit, nexus of governance, corporate power and culture, you can feel Millsport sucking at you like the maelstrom from anywhere else on Harlan’s World you care to stand.

  ‘I hate the fucking place,’ Mari Ado told me as we prowled the well-to-do streets of Tadaimako looking for a coffee house called Makita’s. Along with Brasil, she was throttling back on her spinal-fever complex for the duration of the raid, and the change was making her irritable. ‘Fucking metropolitan tyranny gone global. No single city should have this much influence.’

  It was a standard rant - one from the Quellist manual. They’ve been saying essentially the same thing about Millsport for centuries. And they’re right, of course, but it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvi
ous truths irritating enough to disagree with.

  ‘You grew up here, didn’t you?’

  ‘So?’ She swung a glare on me. ‘Does that mean I’ve got to like it?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  We continued in silence. Tadaimako buzzed primly about us, busier and more genteel than I remembered from thirty-plus years before. The old harbour quarter, once a seedy and faintly dangerous playground for aristo and corporate youth, had now sprouted a glossy new crop of retail outlets and cafés. A lot of the bars and pipe houses I remembered were gone to a relatively clean death - others had been made over into excruciating imagistic echoes of themselves. Every frontage on the street shone in the sun with new paint and antibac sheathing, and the paving beneath our feet was immaculately clean. Even the smell of the sea from a couple of streets further down seemed to have been sanitised - there was no tang of rotting weed or dumped chemicals, and the harbour was full of yachts.

  In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic, Makita’s was a squeaky clean establishment trying hard to look disreputable. Artfully grimed windows kept out most of the sun and inside the walls were decorated with reprinted Unsettlement photography and Quellist epigrams in workmanlike little frames. One corner held the inevitable iconic holo of the woman herself, the one with the shrapnel scar on her chin. Dizzy Csango was on the music system. Millsport Sessions, Dream of Weed.

  At a back booth, Isa sat and nursed a long drink, nearly down to the dregs. Her hair was a savage crimson today, and a little longer than it had been. She’d greysprayed opposing quadrants of her face for a harlequin effect and her eyes were dusted with some haemoglobin-hungry luminescent glitter that made the tiny veins in the whites glow as if they were going to explode. The datarat plugs were still proudly on display in her neck, one of them hooked up to the deck she’d brought with her. A datacoil in the air above the unit kept up the fiction that she was a student doing some pre-exam catch-up. It also, if our last meeting was anything to go by, laid down a natty little interference field that would render conversation in the booth impossible to eavesdrop on.