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.”
From the mount, we traveled down, across a low ridge, then up onto the long slope from which we had rescued Tameera. I began to cut down diagonally, and Anders followed me while Tameera and Tholan kept moving along high to where the sheq had been, though why they were going there I had no idea, for we had seen every one fall. Anders was above me when I began to negotiate a whorled hump of stone at the shoulder of a cliff. I thought I could see a sheq caught in some foliage down there. As I was peering through the mist, Anders screamed above me. I had time only to glance up and drive my frame’s fingers into stone when she barreled into me. We both went over. Half detached from her frame, she clung around my neck. I looked up to where two fingers of my frame held us suspended. I noted that her frame — the property of Tholan and Tameera-was dead weight. Then I looked higher and guessed why.
Brother and sister were scrambling down toward us, saying nothing, not urging us to hang on. I guessed that
