My erection grew hard, as well, and insistent, and she began to grind against it. One of her hands drifted down to my zipper. She pulled me out and started working me. I gasped, filled my hands with her tits.
She pulled away from me and went to her knees, gently took me into her mouth without using her hands. She bobbed slowly but felt me twitch, knew it wouldn’t be long and picked up speed.
I blasted in her mouth, and she swallowed, kept taking it for what felt like forever. I think I blacked out a little because I blinked and found myself flat on the bed. She had already tugged off my pants. I stripped off the rest of my clothing, pushed her back into a nest of pillows. I sucked a nipple, kissed a trail down to her red thatch and began to attack her clit with my tongue.
She squirmed, moaned. Was she faking or was she programmed to enjoy it, and if so, did that make it more or less fake? I didn’t care. I was hard again and slammed into her. She threw her legs over my shoulders.
I humped and humped, the two of us groaning and thrashing and grunting and heaving until I came inside her and collapsed.
And then I dozed.
* * *
A little while later, I opened my eyes. She was still there, curled up against me, her fingers in my chest hair. But I wasn’t thinking of her. I woke up with another girl’s face hovering in front of my mind’s eye.
The daughter of the Brass Dragon.
Why was the girl with the cultists? The digi-reader didn’t know—there were only guesses.
I knew everything I ever would know or needed to know about the pretend girl who was lying next to me. Knew she was nothing. An illusion. Yet the very real young lady hundreds of thousands of light years away intrigued me without end, simply because I knew nothing at all about her.
But the pretend lady was here, and her hand was slowly heading for my groin. She grabbed me at the base, started pumping and I grew hard again, more slowly this time, but without fail. And then her mouth was on me.
I leaned back into the pillows, closed my eyes.
She came off of me with a wet pop, and her tone and expression were flat and businesslike again.
“Your current session ends in two minutes and nine seconds. To extend for another thirty minutes please authorize payment.”
A nice trick.
I extended for another thirty minutes… and two more thirty-minute extensions after that. It had, after all, been two-hundred and fifty-eight years.
FIVE
The one thing artificial women have over the real McCoy is that they know when to leave. Cassandra slipped away in the wee hours, likely after I was unresponsive to repeated demands to extend for another thirty minutes. I greeted the morning with room service coffee and showered away the cloying scent of her.
Twenty minutes later, I left the hotel behind me and ventured into the sprawling underground city of St. Armstrong. Immediately, I picked up a tail while passing through a low-class residential section. There was something about the overly methodical way he followed me that screamed cop!
I zigged and zagged a few times to keep him honest—nothing too obvious—but I soon decided I needed to use some direct method to make him go away permanently, so I could get on with my business. I paused at the mouth of an alley, looked around like maybe I was lost. I dithered a good ten seconds then turned casually into the alley, making a point not to look back, but I heard his footfalls coming up behind me, plain enough.
I feigned tripping over a piece of garbage and went to one knee, rubbing my ankle like I was injured. The light was just right, and I saw his shadow creeping up on me, then waited until the exact right moment.
I spun, struck hard with a well-placed kick, my heel taking out his knee with a sickening crack. He winced, grunted, and went to the ground, his hand darting into his jacket.
He came out with a huge automatic pistol—a slug-thrower, 12mm by the look of it—but I was already on him, grabbed his wrist, and twisted. He bellowed and his pistol went flying. I punched him hard on the point of his chin, and his eyes rolled up.
The ground shook as two more goons landed on either side of me. I allowed myself a micro-second glance up to see where they’d dropped from, caught sight of the catwalk two stories up. Not only had these other two jokers been tailing me the whole time without my noticing, but they both had to be augmented to make a leap like that and land ready to fight.
I ducked under a high kick from the first one, but the other landed a heavy body blow and I felt a rib crack. Definitely augmented.
Instead of sending a spinning kick back at the one who’d tagged me—the obvious move—I dropped and rolled toward the automatic pistol, grabbed it, and came up in a shooter’s stance. I squeezed the trigger six times, spraying the two of them with lead, the enormous gun bucking in my hands.
The slugs hit in perfect groupings, three each across their chests. The muted metal tunks of armor beneath skin told the story. They flinched, but kept coming for me. These guys had the works. Not just augmentation for speed and strength, but armored skin, too.
I picked one of the goons, aimed at an eye and pulled the trigger. Blood sprayed from the socket, and the back of his head exploded with bone and brain. He came to a screeching halt like somebody had jerked his leash, and then went down.
No time for the other one. He knocked the gun away and wrapped his arms around me, got me in a bear hug. I felt the breath wheeze out of me, little black spots dancing in front of my eyes. It was probably three seconds before the lights went out.
I fumbled in my jacket pocket, my hand closing around the little beamer. I didn’t bother to take it out, the angle was awkward anyway. I aimed it best I could, squeezed the trigger. The red beam burned instantly through my jacket pocket and into the guy’s hip. At this range it wouldn’t matter how he was armored.
He screamed and dropped me.
I crawled away, shaking my head, trying to make the hot buzzing in my ears go away. I blinked my eyes, focused, looked at my attacker.
He lay two feet away, pale and dazed, his leg sliced off at the hip.
“Oh, Christ. Oh, man, my leg.”
I staggered to him, aimed the beamer. “Forget the leg. You’re not going to need it anymore.”
The killer inside me knew the job. No hesitation was the first thing they programmed into you. The beam sliced across his throat, and the head came off cleanly and rolled away.
I went back to my first attacker, who was trying to crawl away, dragging the leg with the shattered knee.
“Not so fast, sport.” I knelt, grabbed him by the lapel, and shoved the beamer in his face. “You’re not augmented like the other two. So give.”
“I was supposed to brace you for information,” he said quickly. “The other two were backup in case it got rough.”
“Well, it got rough, and here you are on the ground,” I replied. “Who do you work for?”
“Go suck a dick, Nazi faggot.”
I whacked the beamer’s barrel across his cheek, and that took the sass out of him. I fished around in his pockets until I found his I.D.
Luna Security. Strictly local and very amateur. It sort of made sense. St. Armstrong was always playing the rebels and the empire against one another. It was part of their strategy for maintaining a precarious neutral state.
If these guys had made me as an imperial operative, then that meant Mars had a security leak somewhere. I’d need to relay that bit of information back through channels, at my next opportunity.
Sooner or later these goons would fail to report in, and that would crank up the heat on me. I needed to complete my business and get off Luna fast.
I pointed the beamer at his face.
“You know what happens now, right?”
“Do your worst, you cowardly Gestapo shit.”
ZAP.
SIX
My first contact was a priest six levels down who operated a parish kiosk. I figured this was a good risk. If anyone saw me, nobody would think much of one priest v
isiting another. I kept my eyes peeled and used only busy passageways, moving in and out of the crowd.
Father Aju was an alien, a squat orange creature with rubbery skin and eyes on the end of short stalks that protruded from the head. Aliens were scarce this close to old Earth, but it made sense in a way. Even the least ambitious priest wanted to do more than operate an automated confessional kiosk on Luna, so they dumped the shit job onto the aliens. Typical.
Aju was flat on his back under one of the automated confessionals, wires dangling down on both sides. He worked on the unit with two hands, and occasionally scratched himself with a third.
I stood over him, and cleared my throat.
“Use the other booth, my child,” Aju said without looking up. His voice was low, and vibrated roughly. “Satan has rendered this unit out of order.”
“I need to speak with you, Father Aju,” I said. “I’m Father Argus. I arrived this morning from Vatican Five.”
Aju scooted quickly from under the machine, eyes bulging at the ends of his stalks. “Is this a surprise inspection? My prayer log is up to date.” His eyes swiveled, and he looked at the broken confessional. “It has only been out of order for two days. I expect to have it operational by tonight.”
“I’m from the Jesuit Corps,” I said.
If possible, Aju’s eyes grew wider still.
“I have done nothing wrong.”
“We just need to talk. In private.”
His eyes swiveled around again, scanning the chapel like he expected a Jesuit hunter squad to pop out of thin air and slap the cuffs on him. He meekly led me into a cramped little office filled with spare parts for the kiosks. He removed a half-full box of prayer books from the seat across from his desk and motioned that I should be comfortable. We sat.
“I need your help,” I said.
“I am ever at the beck and call of the church,” Aju said.
“Not the church,” I said. “Me—Mars secret police. Activation code 45456.”
Without hesitation Aju stood and shoved aside a painting of St. Sebastian getting his ass filled with arrows, revealing the small safe behind. He entered the code I’d just given him and didn’t seem surprised at all when the little door popped open with a sucking sound.
“This is the first time I have been activated,” Aju said without emotion.
“Must be a thrill for you.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to feel. I am somehow relieved you are not actually with the church.”
“Who says I’m not?”
The eyes at the top of the stalks went even wider than I thought possible, as if they might pop like little balloons.
“You are secret police and Jesuit Corps?”
“Relax,” I said. “The collar is just a cover.”
Some of the tension went out of him as he reached into the safe and came out with the decoder relay. He set it on his desk, then hardwire-plugged it into his computer. It was a compact device, but highly sophisticated. It would send and receive coded signals from Mars without the possibility of having them intercepted or traced. It was as secure as anything in the galaxy.
“It’s routing through the orbital array,” Aju said. “Just another few seconds… Okay, here we go. Identity confirmed, Major Ernst. Top priority, render all assistance. Full clearance. What can I do for you today, Major?”
Major. Last time I’d pretended to be secret police, I was a captain. I hoped the fake promotion represented a real pay raise. A guy can dream.
“I need guidance on a possible enemy contact,” I told him. “I have a list of names, but no local knowledge. That’s where you come in.”
“Infiltration?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s the end purpose?”
I hesitated.
Aju tried to make a placating gesture, but he was doing it wrong and it ended up looking like he was groping invisible breasts in midair. “I understand this information is likely very sensitive, Major,” he said, “but if you tell me what you can, it might help me advise you more precisely.”
“I need to contact the resistance, so they can transport me off-world,” I said.
He nodded slowly, scratching the little nub that passed for his chin. “Difficult. But doable.”
“I have a list of potential candidates. Morris Sherman is senior supervisor of baggage handling at the spaceport. I thought he might be able to sneak me aboard an outbound freighter.”
“A reasonable thought,” Aju said. “But Sherman was caught in a roundup of… ah… the usual suspects, yesterday morning. There has been a push for added security lately, likely connected to the recent saber rattling in the Coriandon Quadrant.”
“Coriandon?” Before I’d been shoved into deep freeze, humanity had indulged a brief war with the warlike but generally inept Coriandons, an alien people that looked like four-foot tall piles of snot and moved around like snails. It seemed ridiculous. So much had happened while I was sleeping.
“Yes, the Coriandons have invaded some of the frontier systems,” Aju said, “but this appears to be more than one of their insignificant border raids. Reports are fuzzy, but they appear to be coming across the Demarcation Zone in force, multiple waves of attack corsairs followed by larger support vessels.”
Damn. I made a mental note to read up on the Coriandon and intergalactic politics. But that didn’t change my current need.
“Do you have any suggestions?”
“Meredith Capulet,” Aju said.
“She’s not on my list.”
“She would not be, sir,” Aju said. “She is not an agent of the resistance, but rather a sympathizer. She is the heiress to the Bowel Fragrance line of products.”
“The what?” I asked.
“Pills that make a person’s bowel movements smell pleasant,” Aju explained. “I understand Garden Meadow is quite popular.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“As one of the idle rich, Miss Capulet has thrown her energy into supporting the resistance via society fundraisers and sponsorship of several resistance-friendly political candidates. Many in her socioeconomic circle have turned their backs on her for this, but progressives throughout the system have flocked to her banner… figuratively speaking.”
“What draws her to the plight of the resistance?”
“Publicly, she claims sympathy for the oppressed.” Aju made that odd alien gesture again which passed for a shrug. “My belief is that she is bored and spoiled and enjoys minor flirtations with danger and controversy.”
“And how does that help us?” I asked.
“I believe helping a champion of the resistance…” Aju gestured to me, “…would appeal to her sense of vanity and adventure. She has money and influence and could certainly get you off Luna. As I have stated, however, she is not an agent. We must contrive a way to approach her. The name Eliot Swank is on your list, I would guess.”
“Yes.” In fact, Swank was labeled dangerous. I’d planned to avoid him.
“Through him, you can approach Capulet,” Aju said. “He is well placed with the resistance here on Luna.”
“I don’t suppose he’s an easy man to find.”
“Indeed not, especially with the recent crackdown. I suggest you search for him at Bottom Bob’s. It is a likely place to start anyway.”
“Bottom Bob’s?”
“A dank and disreputable saloon on the bottom level,” Aju said. “Be warned. Local authorities do not patrol the bottom level.”
“Good,” I said. “The local authorities and I aren’t exactly bosom pals.”
SEVEN
The elevators stopped at level eighty. I zig-zagged down rusting metal stairwells to level eighty-four, where there was no longer any power. Chemical lanterns hung at irregular intervals, casting everything in eerie green light.
A seedy man with cheap replacement eyes stumbled at me from a cross-corridor. The red lights in his pupils were startling at first. Probably a war vet gon
e bad.
“Hey, man,” he said in a gravelly voice. “You want blow, smack, harsh, grab, stunk. I can get you anything you want if you got the cred. You want girls?” He glanced at my priest’s collar. “Boys?”
“Beat it.” Something in my voice made him listen.
He turned, walked away fast.
The corridor opened up into a wide chamber, a kind of makeshift market with people selling meat on a stick over an open flame. A mix of torches and chemical lanterns lit the place. The air circulation system, thankfully, seemed to be one of the few utilities that still functioned down here, so the closely packed, unwashed population produced merely a stench rather than a toxic fume. I passed one woman who looked like a fairy tale witch with oozing sores on her face. She stooped over a huge boiling pot, stirring the contents. Might have been soup. Could have been laundry.
Across the market a flickering blue neon sign buzzed the words BOTTOM BOB’S. I walked through the chaos, dodging people trying to sell me secondhand crap, various narcotics, and merchandise that had to have been stolen—digi-readers still in the plastic, medical devices that gleamed new, and a whole stack of those electronic cats that tell the future if you feed them a credit coin.
Finally reaching the other side, I entered Bottom Bob’s saloon and scanned the room.
It was dimly lit. People hunched at tables. The stink of sweat and old beer. The low murmur eased a moment while everyone stopped and gawked at me. All they saw was some dumbass priest. They turned back to their drinks, and the murmur rose again.
I walked up to the bar, and a fat bartender with a five-day beard slouched my way, looked me up and down.
“Yeah?”
“Gin martini, shaken, two olives.”
“No.”
I blinked. “No? Why no?”
“No vermouth,” he said. “And no olives.”
“Then I’ll have gin on the rocks.”
“No.”
Gestapo Mars Page 3