In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (19 page)

It didn’t stop him moving. The seven remaining Martians and Jeremy stood in a circle around the glow-globe, blades and guns pointing outward. Ripping and crushing sounds came from the night’s blackness as the bodies of the dead beasts were eaten by their pack mates. Hibernation didn’t shut down the metabolism completely, just immensely slowed it, and they were probably very hungry indeed. He could hear their wheezing breath, not much different from the engine that ran
Traveler
’s auxiliary. But louder, quite a bit louder.

“Report the status of your ammunition,” Teyud said again, in that living-bell voice.

They did; most were low, and he was nearly dry.

“Blades in hand, then,” she said. “Be ready.”

He tossed his pistol into his left hand and drew his sword. It would be more awkward for him than for the Martians; they were all fully ambidextrous from birth, and he’d only practiced at it. He heard Teyud mutter something under her breath:

“This situation is of excessive difficulty. Exasperation, frustration, annoyance!”

That gave him time for just one snort of incredulous laughter before the darkness came alive with waving tentacles, and behind them, scuttling forms the size of lions. Plate-sized crimson eyes shone like lamps, with pupils like S-shaped slits. A crash of shots, the automatic bucking in his hand and knocking a half-seen shape backward, a wild swipe that took the tip off a reaching limb and jarred him from wrist to shoulder. The muzzle flashes were like strobes of lightning, giving him a flicker of nightmare shapes and then plunging his dazzled eyes into a worse darkness.

Outside the circle of light, feral engines reared, beating at the circle of humans like a storm of whips, the plates of their mouths clacking eagerly as the dust cloud cut visibility to arm’s length. The tentacle that struck the side of his head came out of nowhere. There was a flash of light inside his head, and then something was around his ankles, dragging him over the sand. Huge, unblinking eyes stared at him, growing larger and larger as the robe bunched up around his waist and he slid toward the snapping mouth.

Teyud leapt, moving with a long-striding grace that made her blurring speed seem deliberate. The blade of her sword punched
into one of the scarlet eyes, and the circle around his ankles tightened to just short of bone-crushing pressure and then relaxed. He kicked frantically at the twitching thing and staggered backward onto his feet, wheezing thanks, then collapsed again into a squat, gripping his sword convulsively and panting as the hunting engines had.

Silence fell. The Martians danced in to stab at the nerve-ganglions of the dead or dying beasts, making sure on general principles. Teyud gazed around keenly, greenish blood dripping from the long blade of her sword, looking almost dark enough to be black in the dim, dust-ridden air. A smell like metal and acid filled the air.

“Forty-one,” she said. “Furthermore—”

The
shhhsshsh
of cloven air as the tentacle came down in a long looping swing was the only warning; Jeremy could feel his own throat tightening to shout, but the cry didn’t have time to begin. Teyud had already begun to leap backward and twist before it struck; the air went out of her lungs in a single agonized whoosh as it slammed across her stomach. Then she disappeared upward, the sword dropping from her hand as the thigh-thick length of muscle twisted around her torso, locking her right arm to her side.

Jeremy acted before his conscious mind had recovered from the shock. He came up out of his crouch with all the power of his long legs and of well-trained muscles bred in a gravity three times this. The ceiling where the feral engine hung was thirty feet above his head. He was more than three-quarters of the way there when he passed Teyud and threw his left arm around the tentacle above the point where it gripped her. It felt like hugging a thigh-thick length of living cable wrapped in suede; the muscle surged with daunting power as it jerked them both toward the ceiling, and he barely had time to extend the blade in a
Flying flèche
, some remote fencer’s corner of his mind insisted.

The great eyes were his target, or rather the patch of darkness between them. If the others had been the size of lions, this was a grizzly bear, and it stank with a hard dry scent that was still stunningly intense. The impact as they struck was like being thrown into a stone wall by a catapult with a large de-boned ox for padding. Pain shot up his arm at the slamming impact of the point in thick muscle and cartilage, and then a harder one as the point struck stone, forcing
his fingers to open in reflex. The glowing eyes vanished, and suddenly he was falling with the dreamy slowness of low gravity.

Even so he barely had time to get his feet beneath him before he landed again, staggering with an
ooff
as his feet sank ankle-deep in the soft sandy dust on the floor. His head craned upward. Two seconds later Teyud fell downward toward him; he snatched at her and caught her, with another
ooff
as her solid weight came into his arms—the equivalent of catching fifty pounds on Earth.

Her arm had gone around his shoulder as they nearly collapsed to the ground. One of his stayed around her torso as she came to her feet again. She didn’t have the fragile, birdlike lightness of most Martians, instead feeling slim but supple-strong inside the curve of his arm. Their faces were close; before he was aware of what he intended, he brought their lips together.

Teyud’s eyes went wide in surprise for an instant. Then she put a hand behind his head and pressed it firmly closer. Her tongue flicked at his lips—

Whomp!

They both sprang backward in reflex at the flash of motion and the heavy impact on the floor not a yard’s distance from him. Teyud landed crouching, her long curved dagger in her hand. Jeremy shot ten feet into the air, fell and hit the sand with his buttocks and one hand, bounded erect and staggered backward, his other hand clawing at the empty pistol holster at his belt.

They both straightened, looking at the dead creature that lay twitching on the floor of the chamber with the hilt of Jeremy’s sword jammed between its eyes. Its remote ancestor had been a sea creature, a distant relation of ammonites and squid. This looked more like a naked bluish cuttlefish flanked by two purple-red-blue sacs, flaccid now that it wasn’t breathing, but with a body that came to a blunt point and then flared out into a single large sucker.

“Excessive excitement,” Teyud said. “I feel a strong desire for uneventful days, even unto tedium.”

“Amen!”
Jeremy said, conscious of how his body wanted to shake and overcoming it with an effort of will.

In Demotic he went on, “Agreement!” together with a posture that added
emphatic mode
, and a posture that said the same thing. That wasn’t good grammar, but it got across what he felt.

They looked at each other for a long moment and began to laugh; Jeremy stopped because some of the surviving crew of the
Traveler
were wounded, and Teyud went forward to nudge the dead creature.

“This is a breeder,” she said. “There are immature buds. At least one must have been abandoned while not bonded to a crankshaft. The others would have been its offspring. They are parthenogenic and enter the reproductive stage if fed high-quality protein. Very strong, and adaptable—the original form was a small, semisessile predator of caves and cliffs. Fortunately they are not very intelligent.”

“Why not?” Jeremy said, unable to keep a slight edge of sarcasm out of his voice. “Everything
else
you people make seems to be.”

Teyud frowned for a moment, then smiled slightly, more a droop of the eyelids than anything else. Her cool voice went on: “That was found to be counterproductive. There is little environmental stimulation in the existence of an engine with its tentacles bonded to a crankshaft.”

“So?”

“They would attempt to escape. Boredom causes engine failure.”

Sally had given him the hairy eyeball and looked like she could barely stop herself from quoting regulations when Teyud matter-of-factly took him by the hand and led him to the captain’s cabin of the
Traveler
, under the prow. He’d given
her
the finger and a big shit-eating grin as he passed.

Damn regulations, and damn Sally, too. She can go find her own fun
, he thought several hours later.

He stretched contentedly, pulling one of the furs up around his neck and watching Teyud as she bent and twisted just an arm’s length away. It felt a little cold to be naked, now that things were cooling down in both senses of the word.

Besides, I like Teyud. A lot
.

Teyud wasn’t bothered by the mid-fifties temperature of the room. She was still cleaning herself with handfuls of a soft, absorbent dust that collected liquid, and then something like a damp
sponge; not, thank God, a
living
sponge, which he’d been afraid of before he used it himself. Things were evidently messier with a Terran, but she didn’t seem to mind that, either.

He admired the sight of her. Naked she looked a bit less like
h. sapiens sapiens
than she did with her robes on; the differences in proportion were more apparent, the longer limbs and deeper chest, and the near-total absence of body hair. What little there was showed like fine bronze down against the natural pale olive of her skin, and the muscle moved beneath it like skeins of steel wire. There were interesting marks on the insides of her forearms, too. He’d thought they were tattoos, but apparently Thoughtful Grace had natural birthmarks there, like elongated swirling red-and-black signs.

Martian women didn’t really have much breast, either, just a slight curve like the base of a turned goblet, which made the nipple stand out more.

Odd
, he thought.
You’d expect them to look like Eskimos, short and stocky and padded, with the cold here, in spite of the lower gravity. But they stay warm by other means than subcutaneous fat. And I do like slim. Yeah
.

He’d noticed the coolness of her body, one more point of intriguing difference. He grinned; there were other intraspecies distinctions, some of which had been fun to work around.

She grinned back at him for an instant; not precisely a natural expression, but not forced, either. It seemed more as if she was trying it on for size.

“Aesthetic-sexual appreciation,” he said in Demotic.

“Desire for further intromission?” she said, raising one eyebrow. “If so, I express a favorable response.”

The posture that went with
that
was a rather graphic movement of the hips.

“Regretful inability!” he said.

“Ah. Who knows the powers of the
vaz-Terranan
?”

She chuckled soundlessly as she walked back to the oval bed and raised the sleeping fur and gave him a frank examination. Then she slid back under it herself.

“Pleasant warmth,” she said, sliding into contact and resting her head on his shoulder. “Feelings: repletion, exhaustion, very slight soreness, a surprising degree of affection.”

“Me too.”

She touched his ribs and thigh. “Your pleasantly agreeable personality contrasts in an intriguing manner with the brutish power of your appearance.”

“Ah . . . thanks,” he said.

His mental gears shifted as he made himself hear the real meaning:
You look macho but you’re really sweet and gentle
.

She went on: “You are as strong and resistant to damage as a Thoughtful Grace; stronger, in fact. This is novel to me but agreeable.”

“Agreement-apprehension of inflicting involuntary injury during parareproductive exchange minimizes anticipatory stimulation.”

There was a weird sexiness to talking Demotic in bed, he found. You
couldn’t
talk dirty in it, really. Cursing involved scatology or comments on someone’s inadequate genome—saying “unequal to the environment” was
seriously
insulting. But talking about the body parts and their functions had the same vocabulary whether you were calling out in the middle of things or writing a medical textbook;
I request more energetic intromission, emphatic tense!
was the sort of passionate murmur you could expect.

“Tell me more of your reproductive in-group,” she said.

“Only if you tell me about
your
family,” he replied.

Wish I had a cigarette
, he thought dreamily; the habit had come back since they learned how to deactivate the carcinogens, but nobody was shipping it to Mars.

She remained silent for a while. The
Traveler
was intensely quiet, with only a deck watch; the rest of the crew were in the building they’d selected as base. But he could hear the faint screech of the wind as it scoured around the building that held the landship, and even fainter creaks and metallic noises as the ship shifted slightly on its axles.

“I was born . . . in a remote city,” she said, very softly; he could feel the slight flutter of her breath against the skin where his shoulder met his neck.

“Long ago and far away?” he said, stroking the hard, resilient curve of her back.

“Very far away and thirty years ago,” she said; mentally he translated it as sixty Earth years.

Which gave him pause for a moment, but actually, given their respective potential lifespans, they were about the same age.

“Near the Mountain?” he said.

That was the only place she was likely to have met Eastblockers.

She nodded, and continued, “My mother was of the Thoughtful Grace. An officer of some rank and of excellent lineage.”

“Your father
wasn’t
Thoughtful Grace?” he said, surprised.

She certainly had all the canons of the breed, as far as he could tell, and he’d just had a chance for a
very
close examination.

“No, he was her employer; a male of very high caste and rank in the city-state where she was employed; of the pure Imperial Administrator genome. They had an erotic and emotional bond of some duration and intense commitment, and would have formally contracted for reproductive partnership if that had been practical.”