The barrel of Tholan's Optek was pointing straight at my forehead.
'We can,' he said.
I kept my mouth shut as, one by one, Tameera picked off the remaining sheq and sent them tumbling down into the mist-shrouded river canyon. It was only then that we returned to the slab campsite.
Blue again, but I was certainly ready for sleep, and felt a surge of resentment when the blimp cabin began shaking. Someone was coming up the ladder, then walking round the catwalk. Shortly, Anders opened the airtight door and hauled herself inside. I saw her rioting with some surprise how the passenger cabin converted into living quarters. I was ensconced in the cockpit chair, sipping a glass of whisky, feet up on the console. She turned off her oxygen supply, tried the air in the cabin, then sat down on the corner of the fold-down bed, facing me.
'Does it disgust you?' she asked.
I shrugged. Tried to stay nonchalant. What was happening below didn't bother me, her presence in my cabin did.
She continued, 'There's no reason to be disgusted. Incest no longer has the consequences it once had. All genetic faults can be corrected in the womb…'
'Did I say I was disgusted? Perhaps it's you, why else are you up here?' She grimaced. 'Well, they do get noisy.'
'I'm sure it won't last much longer,' I said. 'Then you can return to your tent.'
'You're not very warm, are you?'
'Just wary-I know the kind of games you people play.'
'You people?'
'The bored and the wealthy.'
'I'm Tholan's PA. I'm an employee.'
I sat there feeling all resentful, my resentment increased because, of course, she was right. I should not have lumped her in the same category as Tholan and his sister. She was, in fact, in my category. She had also casually just knocked away one of my defenses.
'Would you like a drink?' I eventually asked, my mouth dry.
Now I expected her righteous indignation and rejection. But Anders was more mature than that, more dangerous.
'Yes, I would.' As she said it, she undid the stick seams of her boots and kicked them off. Then she detached the air hose from her throat plug, coiled it back to the bottle, then unhooked that from her belt and put it on the floor. I hauled myself from my chair and poured her a whisky, adding ice from my recently installed little fridge.
'Very neat,' she said, accepting the drink. As I made to step past her and return to the cockpit chair, she caught hold of my forearm and pulled me down beside her.
'You know,' I said, 'that if we don't report what happened today, that would make us accessories. That could mean readjustment, even mind-wipe.'
'Are you hetero?' she asked.
I nodded. She put her hand against my chest and pushed me back on to the bed. I let her do it-laid back. She stood up, looking down at me as she drained her whisky. Then she undid her trousers, dropped them and kicked them away, then climbed astride me still wearing her shirt and very small briefs. Still staring at me she undid my trousers, freed my erection, then pulling aside the crotch of her briefs, slowly slid down onto me. Then she began to grind back and forth.
'Just come,' she said, when she saw my expression. 'You've got all night to return the favor.' I managed to hold on for about another thirty seconds. It had been a while. Afterward, we stripped naked, and I did return the favor. And then we spent most of the blue doing things to each other normally reserved for those for whom straight sex had become a source of ennui.
'You know, Tholan will pay a great deal for your silence, one way or another.'
I understood that Tholan might not pay me for my silence. I thought her telling me this worthy of the punishment I then administered, and which she noisily enjoyed, muffling her face in the pillow.
We slept a sleep of exhaustion through midark.
Tameera wanted trophies. She wanted a pair of sheq heads to cunningly preserve and mount on the gateposts on either side of the drive to her and Tholan's property on Earth. Toward the end of morning blue, we ate recon rations and prepared to set out. I thought it pointless to tell them of the penalties for possessing trophies from class C sentients. They'd already stepped so far over the line that it was a comparatively minor crime.
'What we need to discuss is my fee,' I said.
'Seems to me he's already had some payment,' said Tameera, eyeing Anders.
Tholan shot her a look of annoyance and turned back to me. 'Ten times what I first offered. No one needs to know.'
'Any items you bring back you'll carry in your stuff,' I said.
I wondered at their arrogance. Maybe they'd get away with it-we'd know soon enough upon our return to the citadel-but most likely, a drone had tagged one of the sheq, and, as the creature died, a satellite eye had recorded the event. The way I saw it, I could claim to have been scared they would kill me, and only keeping up the criminal fagade until we reached safety. Of course, if they did get away with what they'd done, there was no reason why I shouldn't benefit.
While we prepared, I checked the map in my palm com, input our position, and worked out an easier course than the one we had taken the day before. The device would keep us on course despite the fact that Tholan had allowed no satellite linkup. By the sun, by its own elevation, the time, and by reading the field strength of Myral's magnetosphere, the device kept itself accurately located on the map I'd loaded from the planetary almanac.
We went over the edge as the octupals slurped and splashed in their pools and the sun flung arc-welder light across the land. This time, we took it easy on third-assist, also stopping for meals and rest. During one of these breaks, I demonstrated how to use a portable stove to broil a rock conch in its shell, but Tholan was the only one prepared to sample the meat. I guess it was a man thing. As we traveled, I pointed out flowering spider vines, their electric-red male flowers taking to the air in search of the blowsy yellow female flowers: these plants and their pollinating insects having moved beyond the symbiosis seen on Earth to become one. Then, the domed heads of octupals rising out of small rock pools to blink bulbous gelatinous eyes at the evening blue, we moored our blister tents on a forty-degree slope.
Anders connected my tent to hers, while a few meters away Tholan and Tameera connected their tents. No doubt they joined their sleeping bags in the same way we did. Sex, in a tent fixed to such a slope, with a sleeping bag also moored to the rock through the groundsheet, was a bit cramped. But it was enjoyable and helped to pass most of the long night. Sometime during midark I came half awake to the sound of a voice. 'Slabber gebble-crab,' and 'speg bruglor nomp,' were its nonsensical utterances. The yelling and groaning from Tholan, in morning blue, I thought due to his and his sister's lovemaking. But in full morning I had to pick octupal stings from the fabric of my tent, and I saw that Tholan wore a dressing on his cheek.
'What happened?' I asked.
'I just stuck my damned head out,' he replied.
'What treatment have you used?'
'Unibiotic and antallergens.'
'That should do it.'
Shame I didn't think to ask why he wanted to leave his tent and go creeping about in the night. That I attributed the strange voice in midark to a dream influenced things neither one way nor the other.
It was only a few hours into the new day that we reached the flat-topped mount from which Tameera had slaughtered the remaining sheq. I studied the terrain through my monocular and realized how the excitement of our previous visit here had blinded me to just how dangerous this area was. There wasn't a slope that was less than seventy degrees, and many of the river valleys and canyons running between the jagged rocks below were full of rolling mist. Claw frames or not, this was about as bad as it could get.
'Well, that's where they should be,' said Tholan, lowering his own monocular and pointing to a wider canyon floored with mist out of which arose the grumble of a river.
'If they haven't been swept away,' I noted.
Ignoring me, he continued, 'We'll work down from where they fell. Maybe some of them got caught in the foliage.'
