"One."

"So long, Peery."

"Now wait a second," the pilot said, "you know what I'm dealing with here, the kind of security-" he shot Peery a glance and motioned for Flatnose Jack to follow him to a spot where they continued in private for another full minute. Peery watched them shake hands at last. As the pilot turned to come back, Flatnose Jack waved at Peery, a dark grin on his face.

Someone pulled his harness from behind, letting it snap back hard on his shoulder blades.

"Don't be a stranger,dummy ," Pirtle said.

Lackland stood next to him, the same unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth.

"Lemme give you a hand gettin' outta this," was all he said before releasing Peery from the harness. In no time, Peery was trailing behind the pilot as they entered the Steelhead."You probably get a lot of war reports on the ship, I'll bet," Peery said as cheerfully as he could. "I watch a lot of-"

"Anything you need, any tools or anything?" the pilot asked without looking at him.

Peery shook his head. "No, no, I have every-"

The pilot cut in front of him and stopped abruptly, kneeling down and pulling open a hatch on the floor.

"Down you go, then."

A steel door a few feet in front of them caught Peery's attention. Additional security had been added to the door, an entire line of electronic combination boxes running from top to bottom.

The pilot noticed him staring and gave him a light punch in the leg. "Hey," he said with a frown. "Let's go."

Peery apologized and climbed into the mechanical tunnel, looking up when he reached bottom to let the pilot know he was all clear. Before he could say anything, the pilot closed the hatch.

Peery inched his way down the tube, crawling on his belly until he reached the sending unit. Seconds after transmitting his position over the intercom, he felt the Steelhead launch from the station. He put one hand instinctively over the pocket holding the picture, but tried not to think too hard about home as he operated the sending unit-a real yawn-fest of a job-punch b.u.t.ton, release b.u.t.ton, punch b.u.t.ton, release b.u.t.ton, punch and release, punch and release, punch and release, punch and- - citizens and soldiers alike to spare- - release. He hoped the trip wouldn't be long; otherwise he could easily fall asleep down in this steel coc.o.o.n. Shifting on his side, he raised up to reposition his legs and a sound made him freeze.

-substantial returns for both sides- Voices, then laughter, coming from a vent above his head. A conversation.

"Sides!Yes, of course . . . thegood guys and thebad guys . . ."

Peery knew that voice, had heard it a thousand times or more on as many broadcasts. It was the President.Their President, right here on this ship! He pressed his ear against the vent and held his breath.

". . . mostly civilian, but Capitol City is still important, media-wise-and absolutely expendable given the projected results." A pause, then more laughter. "h.e.l.l, I've only been there twice and hated it both times."

"It would seem a perfectly unprovoked attack . . ." came a different voice, as familiar as the voice of the President, ". . . and we're still in agreement on the optimum time of 2:22 p.m. . . ."

The voice of the enemy. Admiral Chaykin.

His head reeled as he listened to them speak, leaders of separate regimes who were supposed to be mortal enemies, who told their citizens truths they expected those citizens to believe and follow to the letter, truths they were called upon to fight and kill and die for if necessary.Self-evident truths, they were told.

They were planning an attack on Capitol City. Planning to destroy it all-the buildings, the fountains . . .

and the people, three of whom waited in a little house on a quiet street for Peery to return.As he lay there listening, Peery felt his insides grow cold with the realization that it was all lies. The war reports, the battles and strategies, every bit of it lies. The war itself nothing but a financial project, an investment risk with a projected return. It stood to reason that the investors would do anything in their power to generate the largest profit. There was no war. There were only the two investors above him, sitting in a secured room and planning their next move for the highest possible return, their only cost being human currency, enough to keep their investment going until the end of time if they chose.

One month left. One month and then Peery could go back home. To a place that would be little more than a graveyard in a few short hours.

What to do? He would die, of course, either on this ship or from a broken heart upon returning home to find all that he loved dead because he hadn't saved them when he had the chance, when the solution had been handed right to him, when he hadknown . . . and done nothing.

What to do?

The first thing Peery did was depress the b.u.t.ton on the sending unit and lock it in place. The constant flow of oil would run the mixture a little rich, maybe cause a slight change in the ship's performance, but otherwise would go unnoticed. For a little while, anyway.

The next thing he did was find the transmission lines.

The pilot spun his chair at the sound of the opening hatch to see Peery emerge. The oiler brushed himself off and said with a wan smile, "All done."

"What do you mean, 'all done'?" With a nervous glance toward the closed steel door, the pilot stood up. "I thought-"

"I thought a lot, myself," Peery interrupted, continuing to move forward as he talked. "Thought I was a decent person, thought I always did what was best for my family, thought Iknew what was best." He stopped short in front of the console. "Thought I knew at least a few things. Turns out I didn't know anything."

Peery reached behind the pilot and pulled the Avoidance Failsafe module from its socket on the console.

He took a step back, dropped the module to the floor in front of him and stomped down hard a single time, smashing it to pieces.

"Until just now."

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" The pilot didn't wait for Peery's answer. He turned to the console, reaching to key the transmitter.

"Doesn't work anymore," Peery said.

"Listen, yousonofab.i.t.c.h -"

The Steelhead lurched to one side, arcing into a steep turn.

"I've changed the course of the ship from below." He looked down at the shattered Avoidance Failsafe module. "Had to come up here for that, though," he added quietly.

From behind him, the steel door opened. Peery turned to see the President and Admiral Chaykin. It could have been the light, or maybe the same confused expression on both their faces, but standing there next to each other, it was hard to tell them apart."Change it back," the pilot said, the fear in his voice replaced with anger. He was holding a pistol at arm's length, trained on Peery.

There was an expulsion of air from outside the ship, causing everyone but Peery to look out from the console port. An empty Troop Pod floated by the gla.s.s.

"You guys should probably sit down now," Peery said.

The Steelhead completed the turn and shot forward with sudden speed.

Lackland and Pirtle were the first to go and the only men who suddenly forgot the proper way to shift gears on a belay winch. Even though Pirtle shifted faster and shot from the station quicker, Lackland shaded him by a good hundred yards. Pirtle gave up a starburst finale of tiny red polka dots right after clearing the end of the dock, while most of Lackland whizzed by, making it all the way to the Steelhead where an impressive chunk of him hit the nose of the ship like a bug.

Standing frozen in front of the window of his tower office, Flatnose Jack watched it come. His mouth dropped open as the Steelhead covered the gla.s.s until there was no gla.s.s, just more ship. The other stations will have extra customers now, Flatnose Jack realized. His final thought filled him with satisfaction, but it came and went so fast, there was no time to smile.

This d.a.m.n war. d.a.m.n war wa.s.still good for business.

Just not his anymore.

The inside of the ship was filled with clouds only Peery could see. The others were too busy scrambling back and forth as they tried every switch, b.u.t.ton, and lever they could find. They weren't lying on the floor with a bullet in them, quietly bleeding to death as they watched the gathering clouds. Only Peery was doing that. He thought about the reports and wondered what they would make of this latest news from the front.

A defeat or a victory.

The act of a hero or traitor.

Peery closed his eyes and thought about the picture of his family, too weak to take it from his pocket for a final look into the eyes of Donna and the kids. Maybe what he was doing would save them, maybe it would only postpone the inevitable, or cause untold trouble for his family once the investigations had been conducted and the reports issued. But it didn't matter to him what the reports would say now, anyway.

He knew the truth because he had been a part of it and had done his best to keep that truth alive. Truth, he knew, that would never be reported, that no one else would ever understand because of a single, enduring fact.

Like all the others before it, this was a war.

Stately's Pleasure Dome

Syne Mitch.e.l.l

George Stately's Pleasure Dome was the finest bordello this side of the Horsehead Nebula. And that's not just my opinion, it's a proven fact.

Asteroid 8753M-ZX2 had been a source of commercial-grade fluorite once upon a time, before the mechanical borers hollowed it out and left the structure too unstable to continue mining. The orbiting smelters would have to look elsewhere for flux material. Pretty though, the unclaimed fluorite hung in pink and green crystals from the ceiling and streaked the walls with color. When the company moved out, Stately bought it for a song.

He converted one of the old watchtowers into a palace. Standing like a bulb-headed chrome sentinel, it dominated the mining cavern. Stately ripped out the polypropylene carpeting and pressed-plastic furniture and imported the finest reclaimed-rayon velvets and antique wood. He replaced the harsh halide lighting with bioluminescent globes. Their slow pulsing made the velvet-draped walls writhe with shadows.

But the miners and shippers from ten pa.r.s.ecs around didn't come for the decor, if you get my meaning.

Stately recruited money-minded beauties from the failed colony near Rigel, his "sharecroppers" he called them. He rented the women rooms in the palace and took a percentage of their take.

What else could a poor man do? Stately hadn't their physical gifts to trade on, most of the clientele being of the Tab A looking for Slot B variety. Of the few women who endangered their fertility to work in the high-radiation of s.p.a.ce, fifty percent of those were also looking for Slot B bed companions, and of the rest, they headed towards sweet young things fresh out of the s.p.a.ce academy, and not grizzled old ex-miners like George Stately. No, he had only his business sense and his flair for decoration to support him through his old age.

Lucky for the young beauties, science still can't create a s.e.xbot that's indistinguishable from a human during the carnal act. Turing's test taken to its extreme, there's a false texture to synthaflesh, a wrong note in programmed writhing and moans.

Maybe s.e.x works on a dimension science hasn't mapped yet, perhaps more is exchanged than friction and fluid. All I know is that Stately's kept the sweet young ex-colonists in food and housing, and that was a wonderful thing.

But there was one sharecropper who had ideas above her station. Angel-lips she was called. One look at her angular face with its parsimonious mouth was enough to make you think the name an irony. But she could do things with her nether regions that gave truth enough to her sobriquet. She was a world-cla.s.s athlete in the Kegel region, make no mistake. But the accolades of her customers weren't enough for her.

She had it in her head to start up her own house of pleasure on a nearby rock and cut into Stately's business.

Whether Stately lived in ignorance, or knew about her plans and politely ignored them, no one knew. But Angel-lips was a serpent in paradise, whispering to the women to rise up and rebel.

She approached a few of the men, like me, but I think she had the other male sharecroppers figured as playing on Stately's team. Why she considered me, I'll never know. Must be my winning ways. Or perhaps she wanted me for her pet once she was a lady of leisure. I've talents of my own that make me afavorite with the ladies who appreciated a Tab A, and a few of the men as well.

We served all types at Stately's: all genders, all races-hominid and nonhominid alike. You never knew what would come through the door after the wormhole was created. Thank engineering for the personal force fields that kept us safe. Nanometers thick, they covered the entire body and protected against infection or disease. The latest ones allow a one-way fluid exchange enabling users to take advantage of natural lubrication; all the pleasure of riding without a saddle, without any of the risks.

But in any case, the night I'm talking about, a strange man slithered in. His source of locomotion was nine tentacles in a trilobate pattern that whipped back and forth like rattlers on methamphetamine. On top was a pseudo-hominid structure. I say pseudo, because you never can tell with new races; something that looks like a human head and face is just as likely to be a kidney, or a new hairdo. Giving the structure the benefit of the doubt, he had enormous gray eyes set in an oval egg of a head. A gash only slightly less full than Angel-lips' own mouth broke the smooth monotony from eyes to chin. If he had a nose, it was elsewhere.

Stately crossed the room to welcome the newcomer. The translator blurbled and whooped when the stranger waved his hands. Stately told me later that the computer had engaged in a linguistics exchange with the newcomer's s.p.a.ceship for over eighteen hours before his arrival, but our languages must not have much in common, because the most our machine could make from his flapping hands was something about "stimulating" and "ancestors." The fingers of those hands, I might add, were eighteen each in number and boned like the tentacles that propelled his torso, that is to say they writhed like snakes in intricate three-dimensional patterns.

Stately a.s.sured the man (I should note here that any sentient being is a.s.sumed to be male-by convention-until they demonstrate their right to be considered life-givers) that the facilities of his pleasure dome would be more than adequate to stimulate him and his ancestors both. Then Stately crooked a finger at Angel-lips to approach. Whether he picked her out of deference to her expertise and tenure in the pleasure craft, or it was a punishment, Stately never said. I say a punishment not because of the man's unique physiognomy-for we've seen far more unusual forms at Stately's-but because Stately had a first-time free policy and knew Angel-lips would resent any a.s.signment that did not add to her war chest.

Stately's first-time-free policy applied only to the first individual of a given alien race to visit the pleasure dome, a concession to the inconvenience that arose from his sharecroppers having to puzzle out the pleasure centers of a new alien form.

Angel-lips rolled her eyes and clicked on her force field. It gave her body a neon-fuchsia gleam that highlighted the generous curves nature had given to compensate for a merely average face. She took the alien by a many-tentacled hand and led him to her suite in the top of the pleasure dome.

It was only minutes before she buzzed down to the bar for backup. It seems our new man was a Tab A, Tab B, Slot C, D, E, and F kind of fellow. With the preponderance of female equipment, perhaps we should call him a woman, but the orifices might have just been for show. Perhaps he was simply too polite to object to what some of us ended up doing to his ear. I never have worked up the nerve to ask.

Anyway, it was just six of Stately's finest sharecroppers and the newcomer in his/her naked glory. His skin below the waist was the color of eggplant, shading to pearly white where it reached his upper torso.

The tentacles were soft and sensitive to touch, retracting into themselves like an anemone's at any unexpected or too-vigorous caress.

Stately himself came to watch the research that was underway, but his role was more of a conductor thanan actual player.

The stranger kept burbling on about stimulation and ancestors, and I hoped he wasn't expecting any sort of reproduction. Force fields aside, human-alien reproduction isn't possible outside of a laboratory.

Me and the other croppers were in position and doing the early stages of our thing when Stately blanked the floor. The upper room of the dome is the exhibition hall, and the Persian mosaic that covers the floor is a hologrammatic projection. When Stately turned it off, the polycarbonate floor went clear. Combined with the curving mirror above, it gave all the revelers in the bar below a view to remember.

I was too busy with an athletic move to protest and the alien was similarly distracted times six.

"Ancestors. Ancestors," the man chanted, and for all I knew that was alien for "Yeah Daddy, give it to me harder." In any event his fingers danced around his hands like agitated medusae and the translator chirped and whined and burbled in an increasing tempo with fewer and fewer intelligible words.

The quickening spurred me and the others to greater efforts. I already knew I was going to be sore the next day, but it was a small price to pay to be a part of history. "How's this for a first-contact scenario?"

I shouted at the memory of my wasted education. My academy training was in xenoanthropology. Funny the turns the river of life takes, sometimes it hops the banks entirely and floods off in a whole new direction.

The six of us wriggled and thrust around the hub of the new man. My back was arced near to breaking point when I felt the earth move. Cliches aside, the tower shook and shimmied as the walls of the fluorite mine flexed. For a wild moment it felt as if I was f.u.c.king the asteroid to death, feeling its o.r.g.a.s.mic quiver all around us, the impending moment that would crush us all in one white wave of pleasure.

But then s.e.x strides into the part of our brains where logic dare not tread. Cognition flared back to life in my mind with the second rumble. I exchanged a worried glance with Angel-lips across the stranger's blue-black bottom. But by now he was starting to tremble and jerk, so whatever was happening was already too late. Both our faces firmed with resolve. Better to go out with professionalism than to botch the last trick we would ever do.

The man's tentacles thrashed and flailed, striking like cat-o'-nine tails across my chest. I was close to the final moment and the pain was lost in a crescendo of pleasure. Lights danced behind his huge eyes in what looked like an exothermal reaction. My mind-what was left in that last instant-was a pulsing rush of primal endocrine responses.

A flash, and then searing heat spread out from my groin. I was thrown away from the man along with the other sharecroppers. I thudded against the wall of the dome and slid down to the clear floor.

Dazed and half-concussed, I held up my hand to block the light emanating from our visitor. Each of his tentacles erupted in pink and green, spewing light. Crystals grew in the s.p.a.ces between my fingers.

"Out-out-out," someone shouted. Hands reached under my armpits and dragged me across the floor. I looked up and saw Angel-lips, her face uncharacteristically etched with concern. Her cheek was covered with tiny glittering shards.

"What's going on?" Looking back, I saw the man apparently explode in an eruption of molten fluorite.

My worries for his health were allayed when the translator broke into a clear translation: "Yes! Yes!

Yes!"

After Stately's a.s.surances that the floor of the upper suite was rated for temperatures up to 2200degrees Fahrenheit, and thus in no danger of melting through, we all went down to have a drink, apply ice to our groinal regions, and watch the show. The man's ecstasy looked like a cross between fireworks and a lava lamp. After more than fifteen minutes, half the crowd was concerned for the alien's health-not wanting any of the political troubles that could arise if he snuffed it at Stately's. The other half was jealous.

Nearly an hour later, the alien, his nether half having paled to a sheepish pink color, slithered out of Angel-lips' quarters. The entire room, save for a central chamber and a path that had been hacked out to the door, was filled with glittering fluorite.