Battle Harem

by Isaac Hooke

  “Don’t think I’ll ever get used to that,” Aria said, eyeing the tail.

  Lori lowered the tray down onto the table. “May I present, Umami!”

  The tray contained a plate of freshly cooked fries, with a big vat of ketchup.

  “You brought us all the way here for French fries?” Aria said.

  Lori’s eyes widened, and she seemed suddenly worried. She glanced at Jason, who smiled at her reassuringly. She straightened, and looked down her nose at Aria. “Yes. I did! But it’s not about the fries, but the ketchup!”

  Tara grabbed a fry, dipped it in the ketchup, and then bit into it. She nodded approvingly. “Tastes like real ketchup. She cracked the recipe.” She offered the fry to the greyhound beside her, and the animal lapped it up.

  Sophie fetched a fry from the plate and with it scooped up a generous amount of ketchup, then took a bite. “Yup. This is great.”

  Jason grabbed a fry and dipped it in the ketchup. He took a bite.

  “This is about as real as it gets,” Jason said. “The texture. The taste… you’re going to have to update my entire food catalogue.”

  Lori beamed, and clapped her hands together. “I’d love to do that for you.” She glanced at the others, as did Jason. Sophie and Tara were drilling lasers into Lori with their eyes. Figuratively speaking.

  “For all of you, I mean,” Lori amended. She quickly sat down and shoved several fries into her mouth.

  Aria had seemed unimpressed up until that point. She finally dipped her finger directly into the ketchup vat.

  “Hey!” Lori said. “Don’t do that! How rude!” She slapped Aria’s hand.

  Aria glared at her, and then shrugged. She licked the ketchup off her finger. “Hey, this is good.” Some of the ketchup had spilled down onto her lower lip so that she really did look like a vampire.

  She sat up slightly to fetch a fry this time, while the other girls giggled. Aria realized they were laughing at her.

  “What?” Aria said.

  “Hold still.” Jason reached across the table and grabbed her chin with his fingers, then thumbed the spilled ketchup from her lower lip.

  “Thanks,” Aria said softly, gazing into his eyes.

  Jason realized that all of the other girls were watching him, and he quickly withdrew his hand.

  Aria, for her part, seemed flustered for a moment; then she remembered she still held a fry in her hand, and quickly ate it—forgetting to dip it in the vat of ketchup first.

  Suddenly the other girls began to spill ketchup on their lips. They all looked at him expectantly, but Jason made a point of concentrating on the plate.

  They ran out of ketchup before finishing the fries, and Lori left to refresh it.

  “Why don’t you just materialize it?” Aria asked.

  “We try not to do that here,” Jason said. “It ruins the sense of presence.”

  “Don’t want to be reminded of the illusion, do you?” Aria said.

  “Something like that,” Jason said.

  Aria materialized a big sparkling glass in front of her.

  “What’s that?” Tara said. “Sparkling wine?”

  “No,” Aria said, suppressing a chortle. “It’s soda.”

  Before Lori could return from the kitchen, an alarm sounded.

  Jason pulled up his HUD.

  “One of the cameras deployed above the escape hatch just detected movement,” Aria said.

  “I see it,” Jason said. He accessed the feed of the camera in question, and saw the city street located just above that section of the cistern, well back from the ravine.

  He expected to see a mutant of some kind, maybe an Octoraffe, which had been the most common source of triggers since the installation of the cameras, but instead he saw one of those small silver robots. It had laser turrets protruding from both forearms.

  “Looks like our friends are back,” Jason said.

  17

  After the robot walked from view, Jason shut down the solar collectors to minimize the thermal footprint, and had the tank stop digging into the rock bed. Aria had the other tanks shovel bramble-weeds and dirt onto the collectors to disguise them, then sent out the drones to bury the tanks in a similar manner after they’d returned to their dugouts so that only the turrets were exposed. The standalone laser turrets and other defense platforms were already disguised.

  “That should nearly mask them on thermal band,” Aria said. “Though as soon as any of the defenses fire, that will give away their positions.”

  Jason nodded. “With luck they’ll pass us by.”

  The entrance hatch was already sealed, so there was nothing to do but wait.

  No other alarms were triggered for the rest of that evening. He and the girls stayed awake until one a.m., but apparently the scout had overlooked their base.

  “All right, girls,” Jason said. “You might as well shut down for the night.”

  “What about you?” Sophie asked.

  “I will, too,” Jason lied. He planned to stay awake all night.

  “I’m staying up,” Aria said.

  “All right, thank you,” Jason said.

  He was about to mute all connections to pretend he was asleep, when he received a private message from Lori.

  He accepted, and her avatar appeared in the lower right of his display. She seemed distressed.

  “Can I sleep in your room tonight?” Lori said on a private channel. “I’m scared.”

  “Uh,” Jason said.

  “Please?” Lori said. “I’ll stay on the floor.”

  “Okay,” Jason said. He wasn’t going to be there anyway, after all. Just for a few minutes, until she settled in.

  He switched to his VR, teleporting directly to the master bedroom. Fully clothed, he sat on the bed.

  The door opened, and Lori slipped inside. She was wearing pink pajamas. Her tail wagged nervously.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Jason pointed to the floor. He materialized a sleeping bag.

  “Thanks,” Lori said. She lay down.

  Jason remained sitting on the bed, watching her, waiting for her to fall asleep.

  She glanced up at him. “I can’t sleep with you looking at me like that.”

  Jason sighed, then lay down on his bed. He pulled up his HUD, and waited for her indicator to turn yellow to indicate sleeping. But it remained green. Her breathing also stayed the same.

  She tossed and turned for several minutes.

  “This bed is too soft,” Lori said. “Can I sleep on yours?”

  “On the covers only,” Jason said.

  “Okay!” She leaped onto the bed, and promptly snuggled up against him. Outside the covers, of course. She pinned his left arm to his side.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice close to his ear.

  She was wearing some kind of VR perfume. It was intoxicating.

  Feeling the press of her body against him, the warmth of her breath next to his neck, he couldn’t help the arousal he felt. In VR, he was entirely anatomically correct. His AI core had the full suite of lust subroutines. He could disable them, of course, but why, when it felt so good?

  He tried to ignore it, and kept telling himself that he was going to log out, but he didn’t.

  He found his free hand drifting across his belly, toward her. When he touched her, she gasped softly.

  Her pajamas abruptly vanished. His finger was left cupping something plump, and round.

  His arousal became even stronger.

  Her hand drifted down to his pants, and Jason was done. He dematerialized his clothes, and moaned softly.

  Worried that the girls in the other rooms would hear him, he promptly teleported the bed, and the occupants, to a different VR partition.

  Surrounded by stars and nebulae, Jason rutted her like the best of them.

  When it was done, he lay back, panting.

  “Wow, thank you,” Lori said. “Now I’ll be able to sleep.”

  She closed her eyes, and promptly began
snoring. A glanced at his HUD told him that she was out.

  Jason logged out of the VR, and returned to the real world to keep watch, as he had originally intended to do.

  He worried that this small act had just changed the entire dynamic of the team. He could only hope that Lori would forget what happened.

  Because Jason planned to do just that.

  The next morning, Jason let the Rex Wolves outside to watch their usual guard positions between the turrets, before sealing the entrance hatches. He wanted to keep the base under lockdown. He had Aria keep the tanks concealed, and the solar collectors disabled. Inside the reinforced cistern, the drones were kept locked away inside the storage compartments of their various owners, and the finished 3D printer remained inactive.

  Though they stayed indoors all that day, and the solar collectors were all covered up, there was enough power saved in the batteries attached to the solar cells to replenish everyone’s internal batteries.

  Jason alternated the day between VR and the real world. In the latter, he mostly used his time to cycle between the different camera feeds, keeping an eye out for those robot scouts. He also checked on the Rex Wolves, who remained lounging in their different spots. There wasn’t much else to do, with the mechs shoved in between the pillars of the cistern like that.

  In VR, he spent his time in the mountain pass near his house. He cycled around the lake. He hiked a few trails. He even did some free climbing—one of his newfound passions now that he didn’t tire, and couldn’t die if he fell.

  He wasn’t sure what the girls were doing, but he occasionally spotted one or two of them in his VR near the house. He spotted Tara and Lori chatting in the kitchen while making ketchup together, and Sophie and Aria jogging together on one of the mountain trails; he did his best to avoid them all.

  He was doing some free climbing late in the evening. It was great, because it cleared his mind of all troubles, and he forgot everything: the threat from the robots, the situation with Lori. He even forgot that his mind was stored inside a mech. There was something about being out there on the rock face, with the entire weight of his body supported by the joints of a few fingers, and the raw exhaustion of simulated lactic acid burning through his muscles, that was liberating.

  And then Tara showed up. When he pulled himself onto a small rock shelf, she was there, sitting crossed legged, admiring the view.

  “Aloha, as we say in Hawaii,” she told him as he sat down beside her to rest. “Quite a sight, isn’t it?” Her hair was tied into a ponytail that hung to the small of her back. She wore her usual white dress, though it was back to being translucent. Distractingly so. And this time, the dress was open at the back so that he could see all the way down to the top of her… yup, definitely distracting. So much so, that at first Jason wasn’t sure if she was referring to herself with her comment, or the landscape.

  “Yeah, quite a sight,” Jason said. He gazed down over the ledge. He could see the whole mountain valley below. The lake was a blue, pearly outline the size of a fist below, while the mountain house was a thumbnail located near the tip of that outline.

  “You think those robots will come back?” Tara said.

  “I don’t know,” Jason said. “They know we’re in the area. You were in the military. What would your commander have done?”

  “If my commander was looking for us?” Tara said. She paused in consideration. “Well, he’d search the area for a few days, and if he still couldn’t find anything, he’d deploy automated cameras and scouts throughout the city, and then move on. He’d garrison a strike force in a base close to the city, however, so that they could respond if any of those cameras detected the target.”

  “So you’re saying that we’re stuck inside for the next little while,” Jason said.

  “If you want to avoid a confrontation, yes,” Tara said. “But that’s still no guarantee the robots won’t ferret out our base. While Aria has disguised the thermal signatures, she hasn’t hidden them entirely. There are clues, to those who know what to look for. And careful analysis of LIDAR data could also reveal our position, based on the turrets alone.”

  Earlier, Tara had suggested they withdraw the tanks and other defense platforms entirely, and bring the solar collectors inside, but Jason was reluctant to do either. For one thing, he didn’t want to leave the opening completely undefended. For another, he figured that if the robot scouts were close enough to the storm drain to discover the tank turrets, then they were close enough to realize that the entrance had been unnaturally enlarged. A quick LIDAR probe would reveal the large hatches located just inside that entrance. He planned to be firing at them with the tanks and defense platforms long before then.

  “We probably won’t be avoiding a confrontation…” Jason said.

  “Never one to sugarcoat things, are you?” Tara asked.

  “No,” Jason replied.

  “You think we’ll win?” Tara said.

  “It’s hard to say,” Jason said. “We haven’t seen their full attack capabilities. If they only have tiny, man-sized robots, we’d definitely win. But if they’re backed up by gunships and bombers, or mechs and tanks, then we’ll be in for a bit of a fight.”

  “Hm,” Tara said, sitting back with a grin. “Well, if there’s one thing I like, it’s a good fight.”

  “You would.” Jason rose to his feet, and reached up to the overhanging ledge. He felt around with his fingers until he found a hold, then transferred his weight to the joint. He pulled himself up slightly, his feet leaving the shelf, and then reached higher with his free hand, searching for another handhold. There, found it.

  He kept hauling himself up like that by the hands until he was high enough to plant his feet against the rock; it was a relief to take the weight off his fingers. He had been close to modifying his VR parameters to give more strength to his fingers.

  As he pulled himself up, Tara appeared beside him. She was still sitting cross-legged, but she floated in midair. He saw her only out of the corner of his eyes: he had to concentrate on the rock in front of him, or he’d fall.

  Jason was reaching up to search for his next hold, when Tara spoke.

  “Lori says she slept with you last night,” Tara said.

  That did it. Jason slipped. The rock face became a blur beside him. The feeling of weightlessness was almost nauseating in his stomach.

  Before he could materialize himself back onto the rock face, he felt confident arms wrap around him and arrest his fall.

  “If you fall, I’ll always be there to catch you,” Tara said, floating underneath him. She flew upward, and deposited him on the rocky shelf once more, then sat down beside him, her feet dangling over the edge.

  Jason sighed. “She told you?”

  “She bragged, yes,” Tara said.

  “She does have a bit of a mouth, doesn’t she?” Jason commented.

  Tara shrugged. “I’d rather you slept with her than Sophie. Or Aria.”

  “Oh,” Jason said.

  “At least Lori is honest about everything,” Tara said. “And doesn’t hide her intentions. I can see myself sharing you with her. But the Princess, or the Vampire? Not so much. If the latter two slept with you, I probably wouldn’t have found out. But Lori couldn’t resist spilling the beans. And that’s good.”

  “Why is it good?” Jason pressed.

  “Because at least now I know there’s a chance for me,” Tara said. “I just have to be persistent.”

  “Um, about that,” Jason said.

  Tara regarded him coolly. “What, I’m not attractive enough, is that it?”

  “That’s not it at all,” Jason said.

  “I can be anyone you want,” Tara told him. Her face became spectacularly proportioned, with her lips, eyes and nose straight out of a fashion magazine. Her breasts grew to twice the size.

  Jason swallowed. “Tara…”

  “I can even be her, if you want,” Tara said. Her dark hair became blond, freckles appeared, and her features trans
formed into Lori’s.

  “It’s not about looks,” Jason said.

  “Then what is it about?” Tara pressed in Lori’s voice.

  “I just…” Jason shook his head. “I just want to climb now.”

  He stood up, and reached up to the ledge above him, and pulled himself upward.

  Thankfully, she didn’t accost him again.

  The rest of that day passed without incident. At night, he recalled the dogs, and locked the doors to the base behind him.

  He decided he wasn’t going to return to VR that night, and instead planned to enter sleep directly from the real world.

  But then he got a private call request from Lori.

  He almost didn’t answer, but he decided he owned her an explanation.

  Lori’s beaming face appeared in the lower right of his display. She looked so happy. “Hi!”

  Jason felt sick to his stomach. Well, he would have, if he had a stomach. This was going to be hard.

  “Hey Lori,” Jason said. “Uh.”

  Lori’s face dropped. “What’s wrong?”

  He sighed. “Look. I’m really sorry, but I don’t think we can do what we did last night.”

  She brightened suddenly. “Oh! I’m not here to sleep with you, if that’s what you’re worried about, silly! I already got what I wanted!” She giggled.

  “Oh…” Jason said. “All right then.” That was easier than he thought it would be. “So we’re good?”

  “Yes, we are!” Lori said.

  “Okay,” Jason said. “Well, have a good night I guess.”

  “Nooo,” Lori said. “You’re not getting away so easily. I’ve been waiting all day for this.”

  “All day for what?” Jason said.

  Lori crossed her arms and pouted. “I’m here for you to live up to your promise.”

  Now he was genuinely confused. “What promise?”

  “You said we’d go skiing together, remember?” Lori said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jason said. “I’m not sure I feel like—”

  “Ah, ah, ah!” Lori said. “Don’t give me that. We’re going skiing, and we’re going right now. I’ve prepared a beautiful mountain in my VR, so we can get some privacy. The others won’t know.”