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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 her 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. N
ow 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.
