War Games (20 page)

An image flashed: I saw a house atop a high mountain. A balcony hung out over a cliff. A woman was chained to the railing. She was naked. Another figure swung an alphalash. Sparks sprayed into the air. I zoomed the image larger. Details became clearer. I could see the face of the chained woman. Elf-fire gleamed red from her eyes. Sparks glowed from her skin, tracing the pattern of the lash strokes. The other figure was also naked. She was almost the twin of the first. But her eyes were green. And she had a penis, erect with excitement. Sweat glistened from her breasts. She swung the lash. Her penis bobbed up and down with the motion.

The image winked out. I looked away.

I was finished with that game.

Grychn took my hand.

We stepped into the forest and were gone.

GRYCHN AND I
fled
through the crystal forests of Titan.

Mostly we had to go on foot. But when we came to clearings, we leaped across them in powered jumps using thruster tubes. That was taking a chance. We should have skirted around the clearings, staying undercover. There could be patrols about. But we wanted to get as far away from Chronus as possible. We were too weak to run all the way.

If we had to talk, we touched helmets—I didn’t want any e-wave transmissions being picked up.

It felt good to be in battle dress again, carrying an autopulsar. Our shapes were barely discernible, vague outlines of blurred movement. We could move as quietly as the wind.

I had my helmet sensors turned to max gain. Several times I spotted elf patrols. Then Grychn and I hid in the underbrush until they passed. Even though I felt like a combrid again, I didn’t fool myself into thinking I could fight like one. Besides, I was a noncombatant now. And a fugitive. The Combrid Corps was as much my enemy as the elves. More so now.

Dawn came and went. We kept going, although we had to make more frequent rest stops. Months of peptide had taken their toll. We encountered no more elf patrols—they were holed up for the day, I suppose. There were no combrid patrols, either—the garrisons must have had to be used for the defense of Chronus. Lucky us. I couldn’t have picked a better time to escape.

But you couldn’t escape the rats you carried with you.

I knew that. That’s why I wanted to be far away when they started chewing on my insides. So there would be no way to yield to the temptation to return to Chronus. I still had a trick or two left.

The first twinge of withdrawal came just before dark. A little early. But then I hadn’t received my usual dose of peptides the night before.

We had come to a canyon about a kilometer across and a half-klick deep. It would take hours either to climb through it or go around. Our only other choice was a powered jump.

“What do you think?” I asked Grychn, “Think you can do it?”

“May as well give it a try. Can’t be any worse than the last time we did something like this together.” She laughed.

“When was that?”

“You remember. When you first captured me. Back when you were a combrid and I was a guerrilla.”

I did remember that time. She’d tried to escape by gliding across just such a canyon. But I plucked her out of the air like a fat butterfly. I smiled to myself. But something about the memory bothered me. There was no point worrying about it now.

I let Grychn go first. She’d learned how to use gravtubes fairly quickly. Not that there was much skill required; for the Corps liked to keep things fairly simple—Iess chance of screw-ups that way. She took a running start, a short jump to the rim of the canyon, then gravved on. Twin cones of pseudograv pushed her in an arc across the gorge.

I followed. As usual, the acceleration made my balls ache, even though they were pulled inside their pouch. But halfway across, another ache began, deep in my joints. You guessed it. Good old peptide withdrawal. I almost doubled up with the cramps. Then they subsided. A prodromal twinge. I knew it would only get worse. That meant we’d have to hole up fairly quickly.

On the other side, we touched helmets. “It’s started for me,” I said. “You?”

“Not yet,” Grychn answered. “But soon, I think.”

I wanted to get away from the rim before we camped. We pushed on into the forest about a klick. Then I began looking for a place to stop. Already my skin was puckered with gooseflesh.

I found the grove I sought. A giant tree had crashed into a stand of smaller trees, forming a hollow beneath its leaning trunk. Not only did it provide natural concealment from above, but anyone approaching on foot would make enough noise that we’d hear them coming before they got to us.

I took off my pack and unloaded the tent. Folded, it made a ten-by-ten-cm package about two cm thick. I set it in the center of the clearing beneath the leaning tree, pushed the button on top, and stood back. A small pseudo-grav generator sent vectors of force along conductor struts laminated to the tent fabric. The tent popped open, forming an igloo of space fabric coated with camofilm, supported by hemispherical struts of p-grav. Camofilm blended perfectly with any background. Unless you looked carefully, you wouldn’t see the tent. Even then you weren’t sure it was there. More than one combrid had lost his tent while on bivouac.

We crawled in and I sealed the door slit. I switched on a light. The floor was three meters in diameter; the ceiling vertex was two meters high. Real cozy. The tent functioned as a commodious set of space coveralls. An O
2
converter began making air out of hydrocarbons. Heat was provided by our bodies—space fabric was almost a perfect insulator, so excess body heat was sufficient to warm the inside to a comfortable twenty-five degrees. A small dehumidifier removed exhaled water from the air and dripped it into a flask to be recycled. Two people meant four liters per day. There was a dispoz bag near the door. I don’t have to tell you what happened to waste deposited there, do I? Recycled, of course. Waste not, want not.

The tent had cost good old Mother Earth ten thousand credits to make—I purchased it from an enterprising sergeant major in the Quartermaster Corps for a tenth of that. Still a pretty piece of change. But worth every centime.

In about fifteen minutes the air was warm and breatheable. We took off our battle dress and sat naked on the floor. We had no other clothes to wear. (You wore nothing under combat armor.) The floor had already inflated to provide an air cushion for comfort.

We didn’t eat that night—there was no point in eating and then spending the rest of the night retching into a dispoz bag. Instead I broke out my medical kit. I knew eventually I’d need it. I’d packed two of everything. Does that tell you anything? I suppose it does. I guess my subconscious knew all along I’d bring Grychn with me. My subconscious must be nicer than my conscious mind—I only consciously decided to bring her along when I remembered she had a yacht stashed away. Before then, I planned to let her rot in the mindcasinos. I guess I was getting soft.

My hands shook as I prepared two infusion sets.

Sweat beaded on Grychn’s body. Her skin had become mottled. She crossed her hands over her belly. I still had trouble believing how thin she’d become. And I knew I looked just as bad.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice quavered. Withdrawal was starting for her.

“Fixing us some medicine.”

“You mean peptide? Did you bring some along?” Her eyes gleamed. She licked her lips.

“A little, maybe. Not as much as you’d like.” The only thing that would block peptide withdrawal was more neuropeptide. If you didn’t want the shakes, you had to take more peptide, which produced more tolerance, which meant taking more peptide. The classic vicious circle. The only way to break the circle was to go through withdrawal. Cold turkey, that had around an eighty-percent mortality, depending on the size of one’s habit. But there were ways to improve your chances.

That’s just what I was doing now.

I had to concentrate to keep from fumbling. Each infusion set consisted of a flexible bag, an infusion pump, and a self-cannulating intravenous catheter. The bag already contained desiccated glucose, dextran/albumin, and electrolytes. All you did was add water and any other goodies you cared to spike it with. I carefully added a gram of noscamine to each bag.

“What’s that?” Grychn asked.

“Noscamine. For sympathetic and parasympathetic blockade. Peptide withdrawal causes lots of nervous discharge to occur. That’s what makes you so sick. And kills you. If you can block that nervous energy, you don’t suffer as much. And you increase your chances of surviving the experience. Noscamine is supposed to do that.”

“Supposed to?”

“It’s not a hundred percent effective.”

“How much?”

“Maybe eighty percent. Just enough to keep you from dying. The other twenty will be bad enough. But tolerable, I hope.”

“Me, too.”

I finished with the sets. I strapped one around Grychn’s arm, then let her do the same for me. I felt a sharp prick as a needle found a vein. The infusion pump produced a comforting hum. All we had to do now was keep the bags filled with water. They would keep us alive through withdrawal.

The first was not an insignificant task—have you ever tried to fill a water bag while rats were making nests in your guts, every muscle jerked with hundred-volt shocks, and you tried to puke your rectum out your nose?

But we did manage.

We spent a lot of time holding each other, trying to synchronize our rigors, letting cold sweat become warm between our bodies.

I don’t want to go into any more detail. They say you can’t remember pain. I don’t know about that. Peptide withdrawal you remember. I’ll make book on that.

But in seventy-two hours it was over, although it seemed to last considerably longer. Like forever.

We spent the next seventy-two hours trying to eat food concentrates and sleeping. You don’t do much of either during peptide withdrawal.

It
seemed as if our bodies were already starting to fill out, now that we had flushed the neuropeptides out of them. Grychn started to look less ghastly. Her skin had better color. Her eyes brightened, glowing a warm amber. I found myself admiring her body. Then wanting it. She didn’t seem to mind at all.

We spent another day making love. I won’t say it was the same as the love we made to each other while playing dreamgames. That kind of sex was perfect, with no fumbIing, no hesitation, no confusion, no awkward positions or cramped muscles. But the real kind was still pretty good. And much more esthetic—in dreams you sometimes forgot little details, like certain textures, certain smells, or getting a hair stuck between your teeth.

Eventually there were no more excuses not to go on.

Besides, you get a little stir crazy spending a week in a tent, even if you are sick most of the time.

We put our battle dress back on.

The tent folded as easily as it went up. I stowed it away and shouldered my pack. Though still tired and weak, we made good time. We’d get stronger each day, now that peptides no longer catabolized tissue.

Sunlight burned away hydrocarbon fogs. Crystal trunks glittered with reflections. The sky was as gray as stainless steel—a clear day for Titan. We slipped through the forest like nymphs blown from fine glass.

At midday we stopped by a stream of liquid butane/pentane for a rest. We had a picnic, if you could call sitting together holding gauntlets while we each swallowed food concentrates a picnic. Sure you could. Why not?

Then we saw something that sent us scurrying for cover. Convoys of hoverbuses escorted by gunships flew past, high overhead, heading in the direction of Chronus.

“Where did they come from?” Grychn asked.

“The rescue fleet must have arrived. Apparently the Lord Generals want to keep control of Titan.”

“Will anyone come after us?”

“Maybe. When Chronus is secured. Probably then. How much farther to your ship?”

“About eighty kilometers. I don’t think we’ve come more than twenty or thirty. We’ll reach an elf city first. I’ve got to stop there on the way. OK?”

“If you have to. Come on, we’ve got a long way to go.” And not much time. I knew the spooks would be looking for us. I’d killed one back in Chronus. They’d come for no other reason than that. A vendetta would have been sworn against me. And now I was the only person who knew where the timestone was located. They’d come for that, too.

We pushed on until dark, then camped again. We had covered about twenty kilometers that day.

The next day we made thirty—strength was returning to our muscles. We camped at the edge of a mountain range. On the other side lay both the elven city and Grychn’s gravship.

At first light, we started out, climbing up a ravine to a pass in the mountains. We had to leave the cover of the forest—trees couldn’t grow on such rocky slopes. Loose rock crumbled as we climbed, sending us sliding downhill. It was going to take a long time to reach the pass. Unless we took a chance. Why not? The longer we were out in the open, the more likely we’d be spotted.

I touched my helmet to Grychn’s. “Let’s use thrusters,” I said. She nodded in agreement.

At my hand signal we gravved on. Concentric cones of pseudograv spewed from thrusters. We rocketed uphill, skimming close to the contour of the slope. Wisps of fog streamed by. We passed over talus slides and drifts of hydrocarbon snow. Sure beats walking, as the man said. In a few minutes we’d covered ten kilometers of distance.

We landed in new hydrocarbon powder, raising a cloud of blue with the impact.

“Don’t move,” Grychn said. “They’ve spotted us.”

I didn’t move. I knew “they” were elves. I didn’t want to be shot as an intruder.

Grychn raised her hands and went forward. I half expected to see a pulsar beam fry her on the spot. My oId prejudice. I wasn’t even a combatant anymore, and yet I still didn’t trust elves.

Two of them stepped out from behind a rock. They held their weapons at the ready, but didn’t point them at us. I looked closer and saw a cleverly concealed sentry box. I knew it would be invisible from the air to both eyes and sensors. We must be close to their city. Why else would they guard this pass? Then I looked even closer. Gooseflesh crawled up my back. The mountains bristled with the muzzles of heavy pulsars. There were also heavily fortified field-generating stations. We must be close indeed.