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Felless let out along, hissing sigh. Had he forgotten about the herb, or was he going to use this opportunity to show her up and expose her to punishment? It didn’t really matter. He’d left her no choice. She sighed again. “It shall be done, superior sir,” she said, and broke the connection.
She knew what would happen when she stepped out into the corridor and headed for Veffani’s office. The only question was where and with whom. As things happened, she hadn’t gone more than half a dozen steps before she saw Slomikk, the science officer.
He saw her, too. “I greet you, Senior Researcher. How are you tod…?” His voice trailed away as the pheromones she couldn’t help emitting reached his scent receptors. Almost at once, he straightened till he stood nearly as erect as a Big Ugly. The scales of his crest rose along the crown of his head, too, as they did at no other time than during a mating display.
And his visual cues affected Felless just as her scent cues affected him. She bent down till her snout all but touched the floor the mating posture was not so far removed from the posture of respect. “Hurry,” she said with the small part of her rational mind that still functioned. “I must see the ambassador.”
Slomikk wasn’t listening. She hadn’t expected that he would be. He took his place behind her. Of itself, her tailstump moved up and out of the way. The science officer thrust his mating organ into her cloaca. The pleasure she felt was different from what she got with ginger, though she couldn’t have said how.
She remembered from earlier matings that the pleasure would ease the slide down from the heights of ginger. Slomikk hissed in delight as he finished. Felless straightened up and hurried on toward Veffani’s office.
Another male mated with her on the way there. Veffani’s secretary was a female, and so did not notice the pheromones coming off Felless in waves. All she said was, “Go right into the conference chamber, superior female. The ambassador is expecting you.”
“So he is,” Felless said. But not like this. She sighed, wondering if she would lay another clutch of eggs. Matings after ginger seemed less likely to lead to gravidity than those of the normal mating season, but they easily could. She knew that from experience.
Bracing herself for what she knew would happen, she went into the conference chamber. Veffani turned an eye turret toward the opening door. “An, here she is now,” he said. “Senior Researcher, I was just telling the males and females here from Cairo of the strides you have made in unraveling the…”
As Slomikk’s had, his voice trailed away. The ventilation system swept her pheromones toward him and toward the other males and females of the Race. The females didn’t notice. The males did. Almost in unison, they sprang from their seats and stood straight up. Their crests rose. This time, they were displaying to warn off one another as well as to make Felless assume the mating posture.
Assume it she did. One of the females from Cairo exclaimed, “Oh, by the Emperor, she has been tasting ginger!”
Felless cast her eyes down to the ground on hearing the Emperor’s name. Since the carpet was very close to the tip of her snout, she got an excellent view of it. A male-she couldn’t tell if it was Veffani or one of the visitors from Cairo-stepped up behind her and began to mate. Two other males brawled, sending chairs flying every which way. And yet another male, inflamed by her pheromones, went into a mating display in front of a female who was not in her season. The female exclaimed in disgust.
Felless thought every male in the chamber had coupled with her by the time the ginger ebbed from her system. Even as she straightened out of the mating posture, one of the males from Cairo was sidling around behind her to try to mate again. “Enough,” she said, and hoped she sounded as if she meant it.
“Yes, enough.” That was Veffani, who sounded shaken to the core. Looking round the conference chamber, Felless could hardly blame him. One chair lay on top of the table. A male was rubbing at clawmarks that scored his flank, another nursing a bitten arm that dripped blood.
Turning to Veffani, Felless assumed the posture of respect-carefully, so none of the males would take it for the mating posture. “I apologize, superior sir,” she said. “I knew something like this would happen when I came here, but you required it of me, and I had no choice but to obey.”
“You have been tasting ginger,” Veffani said.
“Truth.” Felless admitted what she could hardly deny. Now the after-tasting depression was on her. Whatever the ambassador chose to do to her, at the moment she felt she deserved every bit of it and more besides.
“We depend on high-ranking females to set an example for those below them,” Veffani said. “Senior Researcher, you have failed in this fundamental obligation.”
“Truth,” Felless repeated. Veffani was making her feel even worse than she would have anyhow. “Do with me as you will, superior sir. I do not seek to evade my responsibility.”
Veffani swung both eye turrets toward her. “I know you have not been happy here, Senior Researcher. Accordingly, the most severe punishment I can mete out to you is that requirement that you continue your duties and your investigation of the Deutsche exactly as before.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Felless said dully. Even in the depths of her depression, she had trouble believing she deserved to be punished that harshly.
7
Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker was walking past Peenemunde’s liquid-oxygen plant when loudspeakers throughout the enormous rocketry complex began blaring out his name: “Lieutenant Colonel Drucker! Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker! Report to the base commandant’s office immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Drucker…!”
“Donnerwetter!” Drucker muttered. “What the devil has gone wrong now?” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anyone so summarily summoned to Lieutenant General Dornberger’s office.
He couldn’t report there immediately, either, not when he was closer to the Peene River side of Peenemunde’s flat, muddy peninsula while the commandant’s office lay a couple of kilometers away, hard by the Baltic. He started down the road toward the office, hoping to flag a lift along the way.
No such luck. He made the journey by shank’s mare, and arrived about as sweaty as he could get in a cool, clammy climate like northern Germany’s. “Reporting as ordered,” he told Dornberger’s adjutant, a skinny major named Neufeld who always looked as if his stomach pained him.
“Yes, Lieutenant Colonel. One moment, please.” Major Neufeld pressed the intercom switch and spoke two words: “He’s here.”
“Send him in,” Walter Dornberger said, and Neufeld waved Drucker past him and into the commandant’s sanctum.
Walter Dornberger was in his late sixties, bald but still erect and vigorous. He’d been in the artillery during the First World War, and in charge of Peenemunde since before the start of World War II. He knew as much about rockets and space flight as any man alive.
“Heil Himmler!” Drucker said, and shot out his arm in the Party salute that had also become the Army salute. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”
“Heil,” General Dornberger returned, though his answering salute was more nearly a wave. “Close the door behind you, Drucker, and then take a seat.”
“Yes, sir,” Drucker said, and obeyed. He tried to look brisk and capable and-most of all-innocent. He wondered if he was innocent. If he wasn’t, looking as if he were became all the more urgent. He tried to sound innocent, too, asking, “What’s up, sir?”
“A letter mentioning your name in unusual circumstances came to me.” Dornberger shoved a piece of paper across the desk at him. “Tell me what you think of this, if you’d be so kind.”
Even before Drucker picked it up, he knew what it would be. And it was: a denunciation from the pen of Gunther Grillparzer. Maybe Grillparzer hadn’t believed he was an SS man after all. Or maybe he had, and decided to get him in trouble with the Wehrmacht. I should have killed him when I had the chance, Drucker thought, him and his girlfriend, too.
“Well?
” General Dornberger asked when Drucker set the paper down again.
“Well, what, sir?” Drucker answered. “If you want my head on a bloody platter, this gives you the excuse to take it. If you don’t, throw it in the trash can where it belongs and let’s go about our business.”
