by neetha Napew
taking pictures, but that was not the same as having them in the room. She still drew the line there.
Reluctantly, she looked up at the foreign devil. He was very hairy, and had grown a short thick beard that reached to within a couple of fingers' breadth of his eyes. His nose seemed nearer a hawk's beak than what a proper person should grow. His skin was not too different in color from hers.
At least he did not simply ravage her, as one man had the second the door closed behind him. He stood quietly, watching her, letting her look him over. Sighing, she stretched herself out flat on the mat. "Come ahead; let's get it over with," she said in Chinese, her weary voice full of infinite bitterness.
He stooped beside her. She tried not to cringe. He said something in his own language. She shook her head. He tried what
sounded like a different tongue, but she understood no better. She expected him to get on top of her then, but instead he let out hisses and grunts which, she realized after a moment, were words in the Lizards' speech: "Name— is." He ended with the cough that showed the sentence was a question.
Her eyes filled with tears. None of the others had even bothered to ask. "Name is Liu Han," she answered, sitting up. She had to repeat herself; the accents she and he gave the Lizards' words were so different that they had trouble following each other. Once she'd given her name, she saw she ought to treat him as a human being, too. "You— name— is?"
He pointed to his furry chest. "Bobby Fiore." He turned toward the doorway by which the little scaly devils had departed, spoke their name for themselves. "Race—" Then he delivered an extraordinary series of gestures, most of which she'd never seen before but all
obviously a long way from compliments. Either he didn't know his picture was being taken or he didn't care. Some of his antics were so spirited, almost like those of a traveling actor in a skit, that she found herself smiling for the first time in a long while.
"Race bad," she said when he was done, and gave the different cough that put extra stress on what she said.
Instead of answering with words, he just repeated the emphatic cough, she'd never heard a little scaly devil do that, but she followed him well enough.
No matter how they despised their captors, though, they remained captive. If they were going to eat, they had to do what the scaly devils wanted. Liu Han still didn't understand why the Lizards thought it important to prove that men and women didn't go into heat and could lie with each other any time, but they
did. She lay back again. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad this time.
As far as skill went, Yi Min was three times the lover the foreign devil with the unpronounceable second name proved to be. But if he was rather clumsy, he treated her as though it were their wedding night, not as if she was a handy convenience. She hadn't imagined foreign devils had so much kindness in them; few enough Chinese did. She hadn't known any kindness since her husband died in the Japanese attack on her village.
To thank him, she did her best to respond to his caresses, she'd been through too much, though; her body would not answer. Still, when he closed his eyes and groaned atop her, she was moved to reach up and stroke his cheek. The beard there was almost as rough as a bristle brush. She wondered if it itched.
He slid out of her, sat back on his knees, she drew up one leg to hide her secret place— foolish, when he'd just been inside her. He pantomimed smoking a cigarette with such nimble gestures that she started to laugh before she could catch herself. He raised a bushy eyebrow, took another drag on the imaginary smoke, then made as if to crush it out on his chest
He'd so convinced her the nothing between his two fingers was real, she exclaimed in Chinese: "Don't get burned!" That set her laughing again. She groped for words in the Lizards' tongue, the only one they had in common: "You— not bad."
"You, Liu Han"— he said her name so strangely, she needed a moment to recognize it—"you— not bad also."
She looked away from him. she didn't know she was crying till the first scalding tears ran
down her cheeks. Once she started, she discovered she could not stop. She wailed and keened for all she'd lost and suffered and endured, for her husband and her village, for her very world and her own violation, she'd never imagined she had so many tears inside her.
After a little while, she felt Bobby Fiore's hand on her shoulder. "Hey," he said. "Hey." she didn't know what it meant in his language, she didn't know if it meant anything or was just a sound, she did know his voice held sympathy, and that he was the only human being who'd shown her any since her nightmare began. She twisted around and clung to him till she'd cried herself out.
He didn't do much but let her hold him. He ran a hand through her hair once or twice and quietly said "Hey" a few more times. She hardly noticed, so consumed was she by her own grief.
As her sobs at last slowed to gasps and hiccups, she felt his erection pressed against her belly, hot as the tears she'd shed. She wondered how long he'd had it. It didn't surprise her; she would have been surprised if a naked man in the arms of a naked woman failed to rise. What surprised her was that he'd been content to ignore it. What could she possibly have done to stop him if he'd decided to take her again?
His restraint made her want to cry again. She realized how desperate she'd grown when simply not being raped became a kindness worth tears.
He asked her something in his own language. She shook her head. He shook his, too, maybe angry at himself for forgetting she couldn't understand. His eyebrows came together as he looked thoughtfully past her shoulder toward the blank metal wall of the chamber. He tried the scaly devils' speech:
"You, Liu Han, not bad now?"
"Not so bad, Bobby Fiore." When she tried to say his name, she botched it at least as badly as he had hers.
"Okay," he said, she did understand that; a city person in one of the films she'd seen had said it. People in the city picked up foreign devils' slang along with their machines and funny clothes.
He let go of her. She looked down at herself, she'd held him so tight, the smooth skin of her chest had the marks of his hair pressed into it. His erection started to droop now that she no longer lay against him. She reached out and closed her hand around him. The Lizards had taken everything she'd ever had, leaving her with only her body with which to thank him.
That eyebrow of his went up again. So did what she was holding. Somehow, the heat of
it against the palm of her hand brought comfort. If it was good this time, if she lost herself in her body, sheer sensation might let her forget for a little while the metal room in which she was trapped and the scaly devils who kept her here to satisfy their own perverse curiosity.
She moaned softly as she lay back on the mat once more. She wanted it to be good, hoped it would be. Bobby Fiore moved beside her. His lips came down on hers; his hand roamed her body. A bit sooner than she would have liked, his fingers found their way between her legs. They didn't go quite to the right place. After a few seconds of frustration, she reached down and moved them to where they belonged.
He frowned for a moment. She hoped she hadn't angered him. Who could say what might anger a foreign devil? He didn't put his hand back where it had been, though. And now it was better, now her eyes closed and
her buttocks clenched and her back began to arch. As if from far away, she heard him laugh, deep in his throat.
She was at the edge of the Clouds and Rain when he took his hand away. Her eyes opened. It was her turn to start to frown. But his weight pressed her against the slick surface of the mat. His tongue teased her left nipple as he guided himself into her. Her legs rose, clenched around him. With her inner muscles, she squeezed him as hard as she could. "Ah," he said, in surprise or delight or both at once. Then she stopped listening to anything but what her body told her.
Afterward, they were both sweaty and breathing hard. The only thing wrong with making love, Liu Han thought as the afterglow faded, was that it didn't really help. All the troubles pleasure had let h
er ignore were still here. None had got any better. Ignoring troubles was not meeting them. She knew
that, but what else, here, could she do?
She wondered if foreign devils had the wit to be disturbed by such worries. She glanced over at Bobby Fiore. His hairy face had turned serious, his own gaze distant and inward. Surely thoughts much like her own were passing through his head.
But when he noticed her looking at him, he smiled and sat up in one smooth motion. He might have been imperfectly skilled in matters of the mattress, but he had a well-muscled body which he handled well otherwise. He also had a sense of foolishness— this time he pretended to smoke two cigarettes at once, one in each hand.
Liu Han laughed. A few seconds later, she rolled over and gave the foreign devil with the funny name a long, grateful hug. Whatever private fears or worries he'd been brooding about, he'd set them aside to make her feel
better. That was something else that hadn't happened since the scaly devils came (and not often before then; she was, after all, only a woman).
As if thinking of the little devils was enough to make them appear, the door to the hallway outside her chamber slid open. The devils who had brought Bobby Fiore in now returned to take him away again. That was how it went: they forced a man on her, then took him away so she never saw him again. Up till now, that had been only a relief. Now it wasn't, or not so much. But the devils didn't care one way or the other.
Or so she thought, until the scaly devil who spoke Chinese after a fashion said, "You do mating two times. Why two times? Never two times before." Absurdly, he sounded suspicious, as if he'd caught her enjoying herself at what was supposed to be hard work. Well, in a way, he had.
she'd learned honest answers worked best with the little devils. "We did it twice because I liked him much more than I liked any of the others. I just wanted to be rid of them. But he is not a bad man; if he were Chinese, he might be a very good man."
The other devil was talking with Bobby Fiore. He answered in his own language. It wasn't Chinese, so Liu Han could make nothing out of it. Because it had no tones, it sounded to her more like animals grunting than speech. She wondered how— and if— foreign devils managed to understand one another. But compared to the hisses and coughs the scaly devils used, Bobby Fiore's foreign devil language was as lovely as a beautiful song.
The little scaly devil who had been talking with her turned and spoke to the one who'd been talking with Bobby Fiore. They made their snaky noises back and forth. Liu Han tried to follow what they were saying, but couldn't:
they talked too fast. She worried. The last time she'd had a moment of feeling partway safe and secure, the scaly devils had turned her into a whore. What new horror were they plotting now?
The one who spoke Bobby Fiore's language said something to him. He nodded as he answered. That seemed to mean the same thing to him as it did to her, so he'd probably just said yes. But yes to what?
The Lizard who knew a little Chinese turned both his eyes back to her. "You want come back again this man?"
The question took her by surprise. Again she gave an honest answer. "What I really want is to go back to the camp you took me from. If you will not do that, I wish you would just leave me alone here and not make me give my body for food."
"This one choice not for you," the scaly devil said. "This other choice not for you, either."
"What choices do you give me?" Liu Han asked bleakly. Then she realized this was the first time the little scaly devils had offered her any choices at all. Up till now, they'd simply done with her as they pleased. Maybe she had reason to hope.
"Come back again this man one choice," the little devil said. "Other choice come in here new man. You pick choice now."
Liu Han felt like screaming at him. He would not free her, he just let her choose between two kinds of degradation. But any choice was better than none. Bobby Fiore had not hit her; though he'd gone into her, he hadn't forced her; he'd let her clutch at him when she cried; he'd even made her laugh with his silly imaginary cigarettes. And he hated the little scaly devils, maybe nearly as much as she
did.
"I would rather have this man come back again," she said as fast as she could, not wanting to give the little devil a chance to change his mind.
He turned to the other devil. They talked back and forth once more. The one who spoke Chinese said, "Big Ugly male say he want come again, too. We do that, see what happen, you him. We learn plenty, maybe."
She couldn't have cared less what the scaly devils learned, except insofar as she hoped they learned nothing whatever. But she smiled her thanks to Bobby Fiore. If he hadn't been willing to come back to her, then whatever she wanted probably wouldn't have mattered. He smiled back. "Liu Han— not bad," he said, and gave the emphatic cough.
The two scaly devils both made noises like
kettles bubbling over. The one who spoke Chinese asked, "Why use our tongue, talk you, him?"
"We don't know each other's languages," Liu Han answered, shrugging. The scaly devils could do all sorts of things she'd never imagined possible, but sometimes they were genuinely stupid.
"Ah," this one said. "We learn again." He and his companion led Bobby Fiore out of the chamber. Just before the door slid shut and hid him, he raised yet another pretended cigarette to his lips.
Liu Han stood for a while, staring at the closed door panel. Then she noticed, or rather paid heed to, being messy and dripping. The cubicle had a faucet that released a few seconds' worth of water when she pushed a button by it. She went over and cleaned herself as best she could. When she
was done, she didn't feel the need to wash again and again and again, as she had several times before. Once was enough. That, to her, meant progress.
Flight Leader Teerts felt like a longball. Back on Home, two males would toss a ball back and forth, starting out at arm's length from each other. Every time one of them caught it, he'd take a step backward. Good longball players could keep the game going until they were a city block apart. Championship players could go almost twice that far.
The shiplords of the invasion fleet had them all beat. They'd thrown Teerts and his flight of killerplanes back and forth across the whole length of Tosev 3's main continental mass. He'd begun the campaign by swatting Britainish bombardment aircraft out of the sky. Now he was attacking Nipponese ground
positions almost halfway around this cold, wet world.
"There they are." Gefron's voice came through the flight leader's headphones. "I have them on my terrain mapper."
Teerts checked the display. Yes, those were the Race's landcruisers and other fighting vehicles up ahead, their IFF transponders all glowing cheerily orange. Ahead of them lay the Nipponese trench lines in front of— what was the name of the town? Harbin, that was it— which the killerplanes were supposed to soften up.
"That is affirmative, Gefron," Teerts said. "I say again, affirmative. Pilot Rolvar, have you also acquired the target?"
"I have, Flight Leader," Rolvar answered formally, Then his voice changed: "Now let's go smash it!"
Teerts would not have wanted to be one of the Big Ugly soldiers down there. The peaceful night was about to turn hideous for them. At the precise programmed instant, rockets leapt away from his killercraft to slice into the gashed earth in which the Nipponese huddled. The flames from their motors reminded him of knives of fire.
Since he was flight leader, he had a display Rolvar and Gefron lacked, one that showed they'd also launched their rocket packs. A moment later, ground explosions confirmed that: there were far more of them than his own munitions load could have accounted for by itself.
"Let's see how they like that!" Gefron shouted jubilantly. "We should have given it to them a long time ago, by the Emperor."
Pilots got special training so their eyes did not leave their instruments when they heard the
Emperor's sacred name. Teerts kept on paying attention to his cabin displays. He felt the same excitement Gefron had s
hown; it was as close to arousal as a male could know in the absence of females.
He also wished his flight had been able to attack the Nipponese sooner. But there were only so many killerplanes, and so many Tosevite positions to smash. This one had had to wait its turn. It would have waited longer still had the shiplords not thrown his flight east against it.
His aircraft roared low over the shattered trench line. Little dots of flame sprang into being on the ground as the surviving Big Uglies fired blindly at him. The Nipponese were not the only Tosevite army to do that. Teerts had listened to the briefings. He supposed shooting back made the Big Ugly soldiers feel less like the helpless victims they really were. Its probability of doing anything
more than that was very small.
Teerts didn't gamble. Gambling was a vice of support for males who had time to kill, which was not one of his problems. He'd been in action from the start. But if he'd sat down with the little plastic dodecahedrons a few times, he would have understood with his gut rather than just with his brain the difference between a small probability and zero probability.