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She unzipped his fly, pulled him out, and bent down over him. His gasp had very little to do with bad lungs. She had a hell of a mouth, too.
If she’d felt like going on that way till he exploded, he wouldn’t have minded a bit-which was putting it mildly. But, after a little while, she pulled down his chinos, took off her skirt and her girdle, and swung astride him as if she intended to ride him to victory in the Kentucky Derby.
His mouth closed on her nipple. Now she grabbed his head and pressed him to her. He slipped a hand between her legs and rubbed gently. Her breath came almost as short as his, and she’d never taken a bullet in the lungs. When she gasped and shuddered and arched her back, she squeezed him inside her almost as if she had a hand of her own down there. He groaned and came and had to work very hard to remember not to bite.
“God damn,” he said sincerely. “It’s worth fighting with you, just on account of the way we make up.”
“Who says we’ve made up?” Penny demanded. But, whether she wanted it to or not, her voice held a purr that hadn’t been there before.
She slid off him-and dribbled on his thigh. “God damn,” he said again, this time in mock anger. “I put that stuff where it was supposed to go. I’m not supposed to be wearing it.”
“I don’t want it staying where you put it, either,” she retorted. “That’d be the last thing I need-getting knocked up at my age.” She shook her head in what was either real horror or a pretty good imitation. Then, gathering up her clothes, she hurried off to the bathroom.
Auerbach sat there in just his shirt, waiting for her to come out. He wanted another cigarette. All of him except his lungs wanted one, anyhow. What with all the trouble he’d had breathing while Penny straddled him, he let them win the argument for once. Instead of the smoke, he finished the rest of the Lion Lager sitting on the table. It felt like what it was, a consolation prize, but life didn’t hand out so many prizes of any sort that he could turn one down.
When Penny did come out, she smiled to see him still mostly naked. He picked up his pants and used the arm of the sofa to help lever himself to his feet. That took some of the strain off his bad leg, but made his ruined shoulder groan. “Can’t win,” he muttered as he limped past her toward the john. “Christ, you can’t break even, either.” If being in Cape Town didn’t prove that, he was damned if he knew what would.
Gorppet rattled along in a mechanized combat vehicle, heading northwest toward the Tosevite city of Baghdad. Basra, where he’d been stationed, was calm these days-or so his leaders kept saying. Gorppet had seen a lot of nasty fighting after the Race landed on Tosev 3. Basra didn’t feel calm to him, nor anything close. But no one had asked his opinion. He was there to do what his officers told him to do. If that turned out to be stupid, as it sometimes did, he had to make the best of it.
“Too bad about Fotsev,” said Betvoss, one of the males in his squad.
“Truth-too bad,” agreed Gorppet, who didn’t much care for Betvoss. “He was a good male, and a good squad leader. Now you are stuck with me instead.” He swung an eye turret toward Betvoss to see what the other male would make of that.
“I curse the Big Uglies,” Betvoss said. “The spirits of Emperors past will surely turn their backs on them.” His voice went shrill with complaint, as it did too often to suit Gorppet: “I curse them all the more for forcing ginger on the females of ours they had kidnapped, and for using the females’ pheromones to lure us into that ambush.”
“They are sneaky,” Gorppet said. “If you forget how sneaky they are, you will regret it-if you live to regret it.” He put his own worries into words: “I hope they are not quieting down in Basra to persuade us to lessen the garrison there so they can rise up again after we have weakened ourselves.”
“They are not clever enough to think of something like that. I am sure of it,” Betvoss said. Another reason Gorppet was less than fond of him was that he thought he knew more than he did. He went on, “Besides, if we can stamp out the rebellion in this Baghdad place, it will also fade in Basra.”
That might even have been true. Baghdad was a bigger, more important Tosevite center than Basra. Even so, Gorppet didn’t care to admit Betvoss could be right about anything. The squad leader said, “Until we hunt down that maniac of an agitator called Khomeini, this whole subregion will go on bubbling and boiling like a pot over too high a fire.”
He wondered if Betvoss would argue about that. Since Betvoss was ready to argue about almost everything, it wouldn’t have surprised him. But the other male only made the affirmative hand gesture and said, “Truth. One of the things we will have to do to carry this world fully into the Empire is to bring the Big Uglies’ superstitions under our control.”
“We ought to do that anyhow, for the sake of truth,” Betvoss said. “Imagine believing some sort of oversized Big Ugly up above the sky manufactured the whole universe. Can you think of anything more preposterous?”
“No. But then, I am not a Tosevite,” Gorppet said, speaking the last phrase with considerable relief. In an effort to be charitable, he added, “Of course, up till now, they have not known of the Emperors, and so have been forming their beliefs in ignorance rather than in truth.”
“But they cling to their false notions with such persistence-we would not be going from one city to another like this if they did not,” Betvoss said. “And if I never hear ‘Allahu akbar!’ again, I shall not be sorry for it.”
“Truth!” Every male in the rear compartment of the mechanized combat vehicle said that. Several of them added emphatic coughs, to show how strongly they felt about it.
“Truth indeed,” Gorppet said. “Any male who has served where they say such things knows what a truth it is. Because it is a truth, we must stay especially alert. Remember, too many of the local Tosevites will give up their own lives if they can take us with them. They believe this will assure them of a happy afterlife.”
“As you said, they know not the Emperors.” Betvoss’ voice dripped scorn.
Gorppet scorned the Big Uglies for their foolish beliefs, too. That didn’t mean he failed to respect them as fighters, and especially as guerrilla fighters. He pressed an eye turret to the viewing prism above a firing port and looked out of the combat vehicle.
He sat on the left side of the vehicle, the one that faced away from the river, so he could see not only the farmland-worked by Big Uglies in long, flowing robes-but also the drier country where irrigation stopped. The landscape, in fact, put him in mind of Home. It was no wonder the colonists were running up so many new towns in the interior of this region, towns watered with pipes from desalination plants by the edge of the nearest sea.
Even the weather in this part of Tosev 3 was decent. The mechanized combat vehicle didn’t have its heater going full blast, as it would have on most of the planet. Gorppet had fought through one winter in the SSSR. He’d told some stories about that when he went into one of the new towns. None of the newly revived colonists believed him. He’d stopped telling those stories. For that matter, he’d stopped going into the new towns. He disliked the colonists almost as much as he disliked the Big Uglies. He disliked everyone except his comrades from the conquest fleet, and, with Betvoss beside him, he was forcibly reminded he didn’t much care for some of them, either.
Before it should have, the vehicle came to a halt, tracks rattling. “Oh, by the Emperor, what now?” Gorppet demanded. None of his fellow infantrymales knew, of course-they were as cooped up as he. He picked up the intercom and put the question to the driver. If he didn’t know, everybody was in trouble.
He had an answer, all right, but not one Gorppet cared to hear: “The accursed Tosevites managed to sabotage the bridge we are supposed to pass over.”
“What do you mean, sabotage?” Gorppet asked irritably. “I am in this metal box back here, remember? I cannot see straight ahead. If I do not look out a viewing prism, I cannot see out at all.”
“They bombed the span. It fell into the river. Is that plain e
nough for you, Exalted Squadlord?” The driver also sounded irritable.
“How did they manage to bomb it?” Gorppet exclaimed, which made the males in his squad exclaim, too. He went on, “Whoever let that happen ought to have green bands painted on him”-the mark of someone undergoing punishment-“and spend about the next ten years-the next ten Tosevite years, mind you-cleaning out the Big Uglies’ stinking latrines with his tongue.”
His squadmates laughed. He was too furious to find it funny. The driver said, “I agree with you, but I cannot do anything about it.”
“How is this column of vehicles to proceed on to Baghdad, then, if we cannot use the bridge?” Gorppet asked.
“We shall have to go on to As Samawan and cross the river there,” the driver replied. “While it is not the route originally planned, it should not delay us too much.”
