CHAPTER NINETEEN
Berto opened his eyes and blinked several times. The faint light
shining in from the living room through the still-open doorway lit up the
bedroom ceiling. He glanced right and left, at the two women in bed with him.
Gilly's white body shone in the dim room. She was curled up on her side
facing him, breasts starting to get full again. She'd drunk another two liters
of water before falling asleep. Berto figured that meant that over a third of
all the fluids she drank became milk. Amazing. Asleep, she looked like a
little girl, innocent and beautiful.
Sam was face down on the bed, head half under a pillow, the sheets
covering her to the waist. In the faint light the sharply defined muscles of
her back made her look like a sculpture, an idealized vision instead of an
actual one. Her hair was a black halo around her head, which was turned away
from him. She was breathing heavily, almost snoring.
Carefully he sat up, not wanting to disturb the two tired beauties. He
was tired too, krikes was he tired, but two things had awakened him - a huge
thirst, and an uncomfortable pressure on his bladder. He scooted forward, off
the edge of the bed, and stood up. Neither female so much as twitched.
He had no idea what time it'd been when they'd all finally fallen
asleep. Late. He doubted if artillery fire would wake Sam; not after the night
she'd put them through. Sam had been like a professor, instructing her
surprisingly inexperienced roommate on the finer points of sex. Berto had
enjoyed every minute of the fellatio workshop, and was glad Sam was there to
keep him relaxed and moving slow and easy as he introduced Gilly to anal sex.
Once she got used to the feel of him in her terrifically tight ass she really
enjoyed the experience. He'd popped at least one X-Tend, maybe more; the night
had gone by in a bit of a blur.
Neither woman was a dahlia, technically, and they didn't really go after
each other independently of him, but neither had they shied away at the touch of
female flesh. After Gilly had joined them he'd scooped Sam two or three more
times, and done Gilly twice, including her virginal anal experience. Mostly the
women just played with each other's breasts; whoever he wasn't scooping would
fondle whoever he was, but when Gilly displayed some curiosity Sam didn't waste
a second in spreading her legs to let Gilly taste woman for the first time. For
a long time after that Berto didn't need the X-Tend.
Berto shut off the annoying light first. He didn't need it to see, even
though the apartment was a cave with the blinds closed, and headed into the
bathroom to relieve himself. He didn't bother putting on any clothes. In the
kitchen he found a container of juice that Gilly had left on the counter
half-finished.
Standing at the counter in the darkness, he could hear the faint sounds
of the building outside the apartment. No matter how soundproof the landlords
always claimed they were, he'd never been in an apartment where he couldn't hear
something. Gilly's building, this late at night, mostly made it's own noises -
creaks and tics and groans of the superstructure shedding the heat of the day.
The applause and laughter of a studio audience, very faint, coming from
someone's I-Vid . . . above and behind Gilly's apartment, if he had to guess,
echoing through the air ducts. And across the hall, even fainter, at the very
edge of audibility, the shuddering cries of a woman in the throes of ecstasy.
Whether it was live or a sex-vid he couldn't tell.
He'd just finished the juice when there was a very audible Clink! outside
the apartment door. Berto turned his head just in time to see the front door
slide open and figures enter the apartment. Caught totally by surprise, Berto
stood frozen just long enough for his eyes to register that the four people wore
medium-weight body armor with no visible insignia, helmets, and two of them
carried shock sticks. The other two held small gas canisters.
Berto launched himself over the counter. He was still airborne when his
heel connected with a helmet and the figure toppled to the floor. Before the
other three even realized what was happening Berto twisted a shock stick away
from one of them, reversed it, and expertly jammed it into the gap in his armor
at the base of the figure's throat. When he hit the trigger the man bucked so
hard the stick was wrenched out of Berto's hand.
The two remaining figures finally realized they were in trouble. One
lunged at Berto with his stick while the other activated his canister. Berto
knocked the stick away and fractured the man's helmet faceplate with an elbow
strike. The misty gas filled the room as Berto wrestled with the stick wielder.
He could see wide eyes behind the spiderwebbed, supposedly unbreakable helmet
glass. Berto headbutted the man, hard, and his faceplate went opaque. He
pushed the blinded attacker away and spun to face the fourth intruder, still
holding the spraying canister.. The gas canister seemed to be this person's only
weapon, and he backed up as Berto leaned forward, as if he was going to leap.
Instead, he landed hard on his face, finally overcome by the gas.
The armored figure shut off the gas and watched the only other member of
the team still standing fall over, as the gas seeped in through his damaged
faceplate.
"Krikes, what a debacle." The voice, while muffled inside the helmet,
was definitely female. She looked around the room at her three wounded
comrades, and Berto. It finally dawned on her that he was nude. "Now what the
hell am I supposed to do?"
Berto awoke in a cell carved out of solid rock. Pale orange rock, with
veins crisscrossing it. He had a headache, a bad one, and a strange taste in
his mouth. He'd been gassed in bootcamp and the taste of it brought back
long-forgotten memories. He tried to sit up, and learned that not lonely was he
in a narrow metal-framed bunk bolted to the rock wall, but his wrists were
locked to the bunk's frame by magnetic shackles. And he was still nude. He
fell back onto the mattress with a groan.
"Why am I not surprised?" he said to the ceiling.
"I don't know. Why aren't you surprised?" Berto turned his head and saw
the two men standing nearby, watching him. One was clad in an expensive-looking
and very flashy tongi, the other in a blue uniform of some sort. Berto glanced
around the rock room. Other than the bunk, and an exposed sink and toilet, it
was empty. He could see part of a hallway if he craned his neck far enough, but
no signs indicating where he might be. He recognized the magfield slots in the
wall near the corridor, though, and felt the collar around his neck.
"You get attacked by four men with stun-sticks and gas, waking up
somewhere strange isn't really a surprise. I should've known something like
this would happen, things were too perfect. Where am I, by the way?"
"You seem awfully relaxed for someone in so much trouble," Espering
observed. "And attacked? From what I hear you're the one that attacked them."
Berto laughed. "Even I can tell you don't believe that. If this had
been my idea I would've put some pants on first."
That got Espering laughing. Whatever else this man was, he was a man, in
the truest sense of the word. They knew who Berto was, of course. His name,
his age, everything. It was all encoded into the wristband he'd been wearing
since he cleared Decontam.
"Why don't you explain to us exactly what you were doing in a restricted
area of the Torbor Building?" Van derMeer asked him.
Berto frowned at him. "I can't say that I've ever been in the Torbor
Building, much less in a restricted area of it."
"You entered the building via a magrail train," Van derMeer told him.
"You proceeded straight down to the G-Milk recovery room, then from there you
got onto a security elevator and rode it up to a restricted area." They'd
retraced his steps with the help of the building's networked alarm and sensor
systems, which kept track of all movements inside the facility. He was easy -
the chip in his wristband acted like a homing beacon.
"Oh, the Dairy building," Berto said. "I didn't know it was the Torbor
anything. That elevator wasn't marked restricted, at least not in Standard, and
I don't think in Monny either. I got a memdump, but my grasp of your local
dialect is a bit shaky. I told it to go to mezzanine level, but it took me all
the way up to the twenty-seventh floor, I think. Then it wouldn't go back down,
and none of the other elevators seemed to be working. I had to wander down a
couple of hallways before I found a working elevator."
The elevator he'd ridden in had been malfunctioning, they'd confirmed
that. It was posted OUT OF ORDER, too; however, that sign had been covering the
"AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" sign. None of the other elevators on 27 responded
to him because he didn't punch the required code into the control panel.
"Who are you, anyway?" Berto finally asked.
"This is Charles Van derMeer, my chief of security," Espering said, then
introduced himself. "It was my building in which you were trespassing."
"Not on purpose," Berto said defensively. "I was lost." He paused a
second, then said, "Is there some particular reason why I feel compelled to tell
you everything?"
"You've been given a shot of TruthTeller," Van derMeer told him.
"Ah, I thought it might be something like that. What about Gilly and
Sam?"
"Who?"
Van derMeer leaned in toward his boss. "The women whose apartment he was
in."
"In your position I would hardly be worrying about them," Espering
observed. In truth that was the only thing his security people had managed to
do right. Calisa had filled their bedroom with sleepgas before they'd stirred
from the bed. "Who do you work for?" Espering asked.
"Self-employed. Part of a partnership. We long-haul delicate items and
charge confiscatory rates." Which jibed with the information they had, but
Espering refused to believe that it was mere chance that got this man to the
27th floor.
"Were you spying in my building? For one of my competitors perhaps?"
"No. Is that the problem?"
"What did you see when you were on the twenty-seventh floor?"
"Not much. Looked like the personnel quarters for your security people."
"Did you see anyone?"
"Well, yes. I knew I was lost, and I heard voices from an open door, so
I stuck my head in. Two men - your men, I presume - were just about to have sex
with a woman, so I didn't think it was a good time to interrupt. I kept going
down the hall, turned a corner, found a stairwell, went down a floor or two, and
found an elevator that worked."
"Describe the woman."
Berto shrugged. "Brunette, maybe twenty-five. Pretty. Six, maybe seven
months pregnant. She was nude," he told them. "So were the men. Oh, and she
had a plug-in, or something. Male genitalia," he explained. "Cock and balls.
Wasn't expecting to see that on a pregnant woman."
The two men looked at one another. "What does that mean to you?"
Espering asked him.
"What, that she had a penis? Well, at the time I assumed she was wearing
a plug-in. Prosthesis. I've heard about them, but never saw one before. I
hear a lot of women on Monsipur have them. Dahlias, I assume. Bulls or studs,
whatever they call themselves. But then I heard someone mention that they can
actually grow real ones on women now. I guess they take a few cells and plant
them in the right area, like a seed, so maybe what I saw was actually real, I
don't know."
"That's it."
"Yes. None of the other doors were open. Not that I saw, at least."
Espering turned to his security chief. "Are you sure the TruthTeller is
working?"
Van derMeer nodded. "Oh yeah. He'll tell us anything we want to know.
We just have to ask the right questions."
"All right," Espering said, "then I want to know just how it is than an
unarmed, naked man can put down three men in armor, in an apartment so dark
their SID goggles hardly worked?"
"It was only medium-weight armor," Berto told him. "Half-shell isn't a
problem if you know what the hell you're doing. Krikes, you get a stun-stick,
or a pry bar, wedged into the neck joint? You can pop off that chest plate like
that," and he snapped his fingers. "If I wasn't so out of shape I wouldn't have
had to take a breath before I took your last guy out."
"You were in the military?" Espering asked.
"Yes Sir. League Marines." They'd already established that he was a LM
veteran, but that fact didn't explain his success. When Calisa had brought him
in, still unconscious from the gas, and told Van derMeer what had happened, he
ran Berto through a bio-scan. And found the man's body had been tweaked just up
to the very legal edge of the Accords. Not only was he twice as strong and fast
as a normal man, among other things he could damn near see in the dark.
"What assignment?" That was the important question.
"Seventh Recon after two years in the infantry," Berto told them.
"Seventh?" Van derMeer repeated, just to make sure he'd heard it right.
"Yes."
"When?"
"From '14 to '17."
"Fourteen to . . . " Van derMeer rubbed his chin and looked at his
employer.
"That's a Special Forces outfit, isn't it?" Espering asked him. "I've
heard the name before, but I don't remember in what context."
Van derMeer continued rubbing his chin. "When the feral legions
surrounded the colony on Blight it was a company of the 7th, there training,
that fought their way into the settlement and then defended it until
reinforcements arrived. That was in '16."
Espering's eyes widened. Everyone had heard of the Blight siege. If
even half the stories were true . . . . "Were you on Blight?" he asked Berto.
"Unfortunately."
"Was it as bad as the stories portrayed?"
"We were outnumbered thirty to one, stuck in a position that was
impossible to defend properly, surrounded by well-trained lunatics that took no
prisoners. Our closest reinforcements were three weeks out and we were already
tired and half out of ammo from training. Of the thousand or so colonists,
seventeen made it out alive. Our company suffered a hundred percent casualties,
eighty-five percent KIA. By the end there wasn't a building left standing in
the city. So yes, it was as bad as they said."
"But the damage you wrought . . . unless that was exaggerated?"
"Their twelve thousand dead won't bring back my friends."
"No, I don't suppose they will." The two men exchanged looks, then
turned and slowly moved out of sight down the corridor, talking in low tones.
Berto stared after them for a few seconds, then let his head thump back down on
the mattress.
"I hate my job," he said to no one in particular. Several minutes later
his magnetic bracelets were remotely released and he sat up on the bunk. He
rubbed his wrists and looked around his new home, wondering just how long he'd
be there. He glanced out into the corridor and for the first time noticed there
was another cell there, and it was occupied as well. He stared, and cocked his
head to the side a bit and stared some more.
"You have got to be kidding me."
