Jory ...
His mouth pressed over hers. The mask flaps that grew from his cheeks like a leathery beard tenderly brushed the lower part of her face.
His left hand dropped to her buttock, pulling forward so that her groin dug into his. When her weight shifted, he lifted her right leg up around his hip, and his right hand moved between them, working on the snaps that closed the front seam of her clothing. Where his nails— composed of a fused aramid fiber and periodically replaceable—were too thick to insert between the snap s baseplate and gripper, he just pinched the whole mechanism free of the surrounding cloth.
"No . . . wait!" she said breathlessly, trying to talk around the pressure of his lips and tongue. "I'm not in the moo—"
Jory released his grip a fraction and raised his head.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot," he said, taking up her left hand. The silver charm bracelet swayed around her wrist. Jory pulled it off, bunched it in his palm, tugged open the hook-and-eye closure on her jumpers breast pocket with a brrrip!, and poured the bracelet in. He sealed the tab with a circular motion of his thumb that widened until it took in the firmness of her nipple.
Then Jory pulled Demeter's body even closer, working his hips up and down, pressing the bony arch of his pelvis into her convenient hollowness. Something let go inside her. She began moaning at the back of her throat as Jory reached down to the pouch between his legs and released his expanding member.
Demeter pulled back. But she only meant to peer down at it, rising between them in the dim light.
"This time don't tear my clothing," she warned.
Demeter Coghlan was still bemused by the time she returned to her room at the hotel. Her plans for the day had gotten sidetracked in the cavern somewhere under the city.
That morning she had decided not to see the smooth-skinned little Creole again, hut after five minutes with him, she could think only of rutting until her brains exploded.
Demeter decided she really had to take a firm hand in calling off this—dalliance? This whatever-it-was. Nothing could come of the two of them—and if anything did happen to come of the affair, then G'dad would be purely furious.
Which, come to think of it, might not be all bad.
Even though Demeter had spent most of the afternoon on a mattress, all she wanted to do was climb into bed, pull the covers over her head, and sleep for a week. She made a minimal toilet, set out a water glass, and started to unfasten the bracelet at her wrist.
Oh, right.
She fumbled in her top pocket for the silver bead.
"Now what was that all about?" Sugar asked as Demeter brought her out into the light. "I heard some mighty interesting rustling going on there. Lasted quite a while, too."
"Shut up, Sugar," Demeter said tonelessly as she laid the charm on the shelf and began to turn the glass over.
"Never no mi—yi... ah, wait one, Dem."
"What is it?"
"Message coming in for you. From Earth. Code red."
"Coming on this terminal?"
"Yes," the chrono said. "But Dum-Dum there can't interpret the code. I can. Shall I divert? It's just text."
"Go ahead." Demeter sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Weiss to Coghlan, eyes only,'" Sugar began dictating. "I guess that doesn't include me, huh?'
"Just read."
"Reliable agents in Oakland report and said dispatch of commercial contingent with full consular status sometime late October stop. Given orbital transit times should be coming down on your head any day now stop. Sorry for late warning but this departure held extreme hush and defended most violently endit.'... What's that all supposed to mean, Dem?'
"Shut up and let me think."
"Never no mind."
Where in the hell was "Oakland"? And why would Gregor Weiss have agents there? And if he did, why should it matter to her? Demeter Coghlan was puzzled. "Violently defended" hinted at terrible things: maybe some people dying to get this message back to Dallas and so forwarded on to her. But she didn't know how to interpret it!
Then something occurred to Demeter.
"Sugar, spell 'Oakland.'"
"A-U-C-K-L-A-N-D, Dem. Just like it sounds."
Now that was beginning to make sense. Auckland was the North Zealand capital. So the delegation might be something to do with the Valles Marineris project, which was under the auspices of the North Zealand Economic Development Agency. If so, granting the newcomers diplomatic status could give them the negotiating clout to pull the disputed territory right out from under her.
Still, Weiss's message did not confirm this interpretation.
"Read the whole thing again, Sugar."
The chrono did so, with exactly the same inflections.
The message was, of course, in Weiss s nineteenth-century, secret-agent telegraph slang. But for all that, Gregor was still a meticulous bureaucrat. That grammatical fault in the first code group—"report and said"—simply did not sound like him.
Report and said.
Report and said.
Report... N-ZED!
"Sugar, does the character group N-hyphen-Z-E-D appear anywhere in the text?"
"Of course, Dem. In the first sentence. Just like I read it."
"I've got to get your speech chip fixed, dear."
"Ain't no flies on me, Dem. You're the one ought to get her ears fixed."
Chapter 9
Head Trips
Demeter woke up the next morning with a panicky rush that closed her throat and made her heart pound. The situation here on Mars was rapidly getting away from her. Weiss's message implied that the North Zealanders were about to make some kind of political move on the Valles Marineris District . . . and all Demeter had done so far was take a couple of sightseeing trips and introduce herself to a few of the locals.
Well, what else could she do?
Demeter was officially on planet as a simple tourist, with no diplomatic status. In fact, from what she'd observed so far, Mars didn't seem to have any formal government structure—nothing that she could apply to for accreditation, in any capacity. The upward limits of Martian organization appeared to be a series of local, municipal bureaucracies. The highest official Demeter had ever heard of was a mayor in Solis Planum. The business of government was communications, recordkeeping, taxation, commercial exchange, infrastructure maintenance—and all of it was carried on by an overlay of cyber functions in the ever-present grid.
How the party of Zealander bigshots proposed to establish diplomatic relations with that was beyond her.
There was one thing Demeter herself might try. She could use those informal contacts to make whatever government there was begin working for her.
That was the spark Demeter needed. She shot up from the bed, let it slam against the wall, and climbed into her metered, one-minute shower. With her hair wrapped in a turban and drying slowly, she ordered coffee and a yogurt for breakfast. The hotel offered its yogurt in just two flavors, Dutch chocolate or lemon. She had already found the lemon reminiscent of battery acid; now she discovered that the chocolate tasted like chalk and diesel fuel. It had to be something wrong with the mother culture.
As she brushed her hair, Demeter set out to find her friends. Like all searches on Earth or Mars, this one began with the grid. Demeter faced her room terminal, switched it to privacy mode, and said: "Um, let me speak to the entity known as 'Wyatt,' please."