‘Dillon’s very good,’ Ella said.
Picking up the wine bottle, Abby poured more into Ella’s glass and then her own. ‘As good as you?’ she said, her tone light.
‘It’s always different with a man. Not better, or worse, but different.’ Ella picked up her glass and took a drink. Almost an entire glass in, Aneka could see her pupils dilating and her skin flushing. ‘You know, us getting drunk is probably not a really great idea. I’ll make suggestions you wouldn’t want me making.’
Abby took a drink from her own glass. Aneka was fairly sure she knew what the black-haired girl was going to say before she said it. ‘Who says I wouldn’t want you to?’
Ella gulped down some more wine and looked at Aneka. Aneka gave her a slight smirk and a small shrug. ‘Oh,’ Ella said.
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Aneka felt, rather than heard, someone slipping into the shower with her, but she carried on washing herself and when there were no hands on her body after a second she knew it was not Ella.
‘You are a lot more forward than you used to be, young lady,’ she said, ‘but I get the feeling you’re not quite as confident as you make yourself out to be.’
Rather than answer the implied question, Abby said, ‘You knew what I was up to before Ella did.’
‘I thought I detected an ulterior motive. You’re smart enough to know what happens to you when you drink, and you must have noticed how Ella reacts to alcohol. I didn’t think you’d have suggested it if you didn’t want things to go the way they did.’ Turning, she reached out and pulled an unresisting Abby under the water, and then reached for the cleaning gel. ‘I’m less sure why.’
There was silence for a few seconds as Aneka began rubbing the iridescent, purple fluid over Abby’s skin. Then, ‘When I was talking to Ella after… well, after what happened, I said I was worried I’d never find a boy that made me feel the way she had. She said I would because I’d find someone I loved and that made all the difference.’
‘And you haven’t?’
‘The Citizen’s aren’t even interested. The boys I meet in class aren’t exactly experienced and the ones outside the cities are… boring.’
‘Ah.’
‘I just… I wanted to feel that good again. I’ve barely had any time just for me in six months.’ There was a slight pause and then, ‘God that feels good…’
‘If you want time to just enjoy yourself… I can accept that. Don’t stop looking for that boy who’s going to love you though. Or girl if you’ve decided you don’t care. I never thought I’d end up with a girl so I’m not going to judge.’
‘R-right now a girl’s n-not looking so b-bad.’
‘I’m taken.’
Abby whimpered. ‘I’m coming…’
Yorkbridge North Beach.
Katelyn Looper was a tall woman, and her nickname, Kat, was appropriate. She was lithe, sensual, and fit. Her dark-blonde hair was always in perfect cornrows, her eyes were dark. The only feature her boyfriend, Dillon, would have changed about her was her breasts, which were moderately large, but he had something of a fetish for bigger ones. Despite this they had been together for several years, so she clearly had other attributes he found even more appealing.
Right now she was sweating like a pig and breathing hard, but that was because she was running with Aneka, and they were on the last half kilometre of the return leg and pushing a little harder. Aneka, of course, was running along in bare feet and a bikini as though it were no effort at all, but Katelyn was not quite so bothered about that as she once had been; it was very hard to outperform a combat robot chassis.
Aneka glanced at her running companion as her navigation system indicated they had three hundred metres to go. ‘Al, how’s she doing?’
‘Her heart rate is hovering around one-forty,’ the AI replied. He was monitoring her identity implant which doubled as a bio-monitor. Aneka pushed up a pace, breaking into a sprint, and Katelyn let out a gasp of a laugh before pulling up beside her. ‘One-fifty,’ Al said. ‘One-fifty-three… stabilised there.’
They ran up to three figures lying on the sand, Aneka pulling to a smooth stop and Katelyn dropping to her hands and knees with a laugh, her lungs working like forge bellows. ‘Oh wow,’ she gasped after a few seconds. ‘That last push was mean.’
‘Her heart rate is coming down quickly,’ Al commented. ‘Down to less than a hundred already.’
‘You can take it,’ Aneka said aloud. ‘You are getting to be one tough lady.’
‘And I love the sight of a woman on her hands and knees,’ Dillon commented. He was a big man, in every sense of the word, though the immediate impression you got when you saw him was ‘slab of muscle.’ He worked out with weights every day, but he was very tall so it did not look out of proportion. He had a rough sort of face, square and solid, but that was softened by long, black hair, especially when he wore it loose.
‘Pervert,’ Katelyn replied, pushing herself upright, then to her feet, and starting to pull off her running gear.
Abby lay silently in the sun, watching the interplay while trying to not look like she was looking. They had had to stop off at one of the shops behind the beach to buy her some swimwear. She had procrastinated over several one-piece suits before actually buying a tiny little Ultraskin bikini, which she was only wearing the bottom half of. Ella was topless, and had a lot more top to show, and Abby was trying to fit in. Aneka remembered that phase herself.
‘Huh.’ Dillon responded. He sat up, which drew Katelyn’s attention, and then nodded toward Abby, raising questioning eyebrows. Katelyn looked questioningly back, pausing in her undressing, so Dillon repeated his gestures, but with more emphasis. Katelyn mouthed ‘oh’ at him and then turned to Aneka, nodded toward Abby, and raised her eyebrows…
Aneka burst out laughing.
‘What’s funny?’ Ella asked, her voice a little drowsy.
‘Nothing, love. Don’t fall asleep, I don’t want you burning.’
‘I’ve got sunscreen on.’ Nevertheless, she turned onto her front, resting on her elbows.
‘Abby,’ Aneka went on, ‘Kat’s a really great cook. Fancy eating at their place tonight?’
‘Uh, well, if it wouldn’t be any trouble…’
‘No trouble,’ Katelyn replied. ‘We’d love to have you.’
Yorkbridge Mid-town.
Dinner was over, food had settled, there had been conversation and wine, and Dillon was ‘having’ Abby. She had been a little nervous about it at first, but had got into it quickly. So quickly that he had taken control, his big hands gripping her hips as she sat straddling his legs, slowing the pace and forcing her to wait for that first climax she had been rushing toward. She had been begging him to let her come after ten minutes.
Now, twenty minutes later, she was almost a rag doll bouncing in his lap, her eyes hooded and her mouth hanging open, but this time Dillon was going to push himself over the edge along with her. He quickened the pace, the smile he had been wearing throughout turning more into a rictus as he neared orgasm, and Abby began wailing as her body was overtaken by pleasure once more.
Katelyn moved in behind the young brunette, lifting her gently up and into her arms. Abby was trembling and making little mewling noises as she was carried to the circular bed where she was laid down with Aneka and Ella, Katelyn slipping down beside her.
‘Enjoy that?’ Ella asked, smiling indulgently.
‘It was… amazing,’ Abby breathed, slipping into English in her post-orgasmic haze.
‘Okay…’ Katelyn said, still smiling, ‘who is she?’
‘She’s not a Jenlay,’ Dillon said, settling onto the bed at the women’s feet. ‘I can’t last that long with Kat or Ella.’
Aneka chuckled. ‘This doesn’t go outside this room, okay?’
‘Of course,’ Katelyn replied.
‘You know there’s a ship from Old Earth in orbit? Well, Abby is the official representative of their government from that ship. She’s Human, rather than
Jenlay.’
‘So that was that “English” you say Federal is derived from?’ Katelyn asked. ‘I mean, I understood that, it just sounded a bit funny.’
‘Sorry,’ Abby said. ‘I didn’t mean to burden you with the secret.’
Dillon chuckled softly. ‘I’m not feeling especially burdened, but we’ll give it a while and you can give us a three-way apology.’
Abby whimpered.
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‘So my faith in finding a man I like has been reaffirmed,’ Abby said as they ate breakfast.
‘Well that’s good,’ Ella replied, grinning.
‘The problem now is, where am I going to find another Dillon?’
Ella giggled. ‘He’s not entirely unique. Get one of those Guardians off those stupid electronic drugs.’
‘He still wouldn’t know what he was doing.’
‘No, but that just means he doesn’t have bad habits. You can train him up just the way you like.’
‘That sounds like a military campaign to get yourself a perfect lover,’ Aneka commented.
‘It does,’ Abby agreed. ‘A Guardian might actually like that.’
Ella giggled again. ‘I thought we could go to the Federal History Museum today. Aneka’s never been and it’ll show you a lot about how this society came into existence.’
‘And it means we won’t spend the entire day in bed,’ Aneka added. ‘I approve.’
High Yorkbridge.
The museum was a big, white building out on the eastern edge of the city, near the coast. It was not exactly crowded, but there were people about. Most of them were families, a couple and a child, out to show the younger Federal Citizens the history of the world they lived in. Aneka recognised a few students from the university, and Al pulled up records on each of them indicating that they were studying history.
‘Jenlay aren’t too much more interested in history than we are, huh?’ Abby said as they walked through the reception hall.
‘Some are more interested than others,’ Ella replied, ‘but a lot of Jenlay have a rather selective view of it. Federal history, the important parts, gets taught in school. Beyond that it gets very vague.’
The centre of the hall was occupied by a statue in gleaming, silver metal. Three figures sitting around a small table, their glasses raised toward each other. Jenlay, Torem, and Herosian at the moment the Lorenti Federation was born. This was when the Renewal was first spoken, and the words of that little speech were inscribed around the marble plinth the statue sat on. Aneka looked up at it and frowned. Five hundred and twenty-eight years, almost twenty-nine. Would it make it to five hundred and thirty?
They walked on through a hall featuring the statues of those most influential in creating the Federation. It was noticeable that there were a lot of Jenlay, fewer Torem, and far fewer Herosians among the blocks of bioplastic which had been made to look like stone. Aneka stopped in front of one of the figures, a small woman with intense features rendered serene by the medium they were portrayed in. Most of the other statues had a photograph of the original person on the information display beside them, this one did not.
‘Xenia Winter,’ Ella said. ‘The statue was commissioned after her death, and from descriptions taken from people who knew her. As far as anyone’s ever been able to figure out, there are no pictures of her.’
‘I gather that she is out of favour at the moment,’ Abby said. ‘One of the Representatives suggested that she was some sort of spy for the Xinti.’
‘Some of them think that, yes,’ Aneka said.
‘But it was someone named Winter who sent us the warning about the Herosians.’ She was keeping her voice low, clearly aware that no one was supposed to know about that. ‘The thought occurred to me that a Xinti agent would want to destroy the Federation, and us bringing the Herosian ship here will surely do that.’
It was an interesting thought. It was even quite logical unless you knew that Winter was a Xinti AI. ‘I don’t believe she was a Xinti agent,’ Aneka said, softly. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference. Eventually the Jenlay would have nailed one of those ships, or the Herosians would have escalated their attacks. It’s the Herosians who are trying to destroy the Federation, not Winter.’
‘I came to the same conclusion,’ Abby said, grinning. ‘I just wondered what you would say.’
Aneka laughed. ‘You are getting far too good at politics, young lady.’
~~~
There was a room near the back of the building which Aneka was both dreading and fascinated by. They walked in to discover they were alone; no one else wanted to look at the Xinti exhibits at the moment.
‘That’s what they looked like?’ Abby asked, looking at a pair of life-size models in a display case.
The things within were a little shorter than a Human, and looked vaguely reptilian, or perhaps demonic. The skin was a mottled grey, and it had an angular head, pointed chin and ridged, almost horned skull. The lips were thin to the point of vanishing, there was little in the way of a nose, and the eyes were black. Oddly it had five long fingers on its hands, but three-toed feet on digitigrade legs.
‘Well,’ Ella said, ‘this is what we’ve found at dig sites, but we don’t know whether this is what they originally looked like. We’ve always assumed that this form, which is what they used the most, looks a lot like their original shape, but there are some things about them that don’t make evolutionary sense.’
‘The fingers and toes?’ Aneka suggested.
‘It’s not entirely likely, but possible. Humans and Jenlay were heading toward losing their smallest toe. On the other hand, they may have engineered this shape for greater stability, and we think they messed with the internal organs.’
Abby turned. There was another case with a much larger body model in it. More reptilian still, it looked like something from a bad sci-fi movie, and the huge antimatter blaster rifle it was holding did not help with the look. ‘And they would just pick whatever body they needed for the job?’ she asked.
‘Yes. That was their preferred warrior form at the start of the war. Physically powerful, fast, built-in weaponry in the shape of claws. They are actually a lot more precise than you might expect.’
‘The Warrior caste thought of themselves more as warriors than soldiers,’ Aneka said. ‘Those blasters were their signature weapon of war, but they preferred something more precise. My machine pistols and rifle are Xinti designs.’
‘As the war progressed and the Torem brought in some of their old, high-tech weapons, the Xinti turned to a different form.’ Ella turned and pointed at what appeared to be the prime exhibit in the middle of the room. ‘A lot of Jenlay think of that as a Xinti.’
Someone had either reconstructed or carefully rebuilt the humanoid, robotic body. It was all gleaming metal, polished to within an inch of its life, and Aneka somehow doubted that a real Xinti would have gone to war in something you could see from five klicks away. It was basically a heavy, metal skeleton about two metres tall with armour plates smoothing out the contours. The head was relatively small and quite angular, suggesting that it housed sensor systems only, the brain being located within the main body behind all that armour. This was a body built purely for war.
‘They’d given up their ideals by then,’ Aneka said, her tone a little distant. ‘That thing’s like one of those armoured battlesuits we’ve come up against. It’s not something a warrior would use. It’s designed only for war. It’s a soldier’s weapon.’
‘They weren’t losing when they started using them,’ Ella supplied, ‘but they were probably worried they might. Those things and the use of a lot of robots for fighting… that’s why Jenlay don’t like robots and cyborgs much.’
‘Kat and Dillon didn’t seem worried,’ Abby said, one hand drifting to the back of her neck. ‘I mean, yesterday they were pretty intimate with two cyborgs and whatever you classify Aneka as.’
‘It’s been a thousand years,’ Ella replied, ‘and robots are damn useful. Dill
on’s from the Rim and people out there are more used to robots. Kat got to know me before she figured out I had cybernetic eyes and… Well, basically she’d rather have a friend than worry over that friend being a little strange.’
‘They’d figured out I wasn’t Human before they actually heard what I was,’ Aneka said. ‘Kat even said it might have freaked her out if she had known up front, so she was glad she got to know me before her prejudice ruined it.’ She shrugged. ‘Still, I get a couple of hate mails every month from someone who thinks I should be melted down for scrap.’
‘You get far more fan mail,’ Ella pointed out.
‘You get fan mail?’ Abby asked, grinning.
‘She does. I’ll get you a copy of the poster.’
Aneka groaned. ‘Please don’t do that. Just imagine what’ll happen if that gets back to Earth.’
Ella was suppressing a grin. ‘I am. It’ll definitely differentiate you from Manu Dei. She would never be caught dead doing that.’
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Abby was a distinctly different girl sitting behind a desk in one of the offices aboard the cruiser, which had now been declared officially as a diplomatic mission from Old Earth. She was back in her shipsuit, though the ones the Old Earth people used were not translucent like the ones the Jenlay created, and she was all business.
‘So, while I was enjoying myself things have been moving along,’ she told Aneka, Ella, and Gillian. ‘The Hand of God is officially Old Earth territory. I hope you brought your passports. One of your top politicians, a Senator Jackson Elroy, is flying here from Obati…’
‘We know Elroy,’ Aneka said. ‘He’s a good man.’
Abby nodded. ‘He won’t get back here until next year, unfortunately. Prime City has asked me to stay here until he arrives and I’ve said I would.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘I didn’t think I’d get back home for Christmas anyway. Besides, they want me here because your Senate isn’t waiting for more information. They’ve called for a meeting on the first so that the Herosians can explain themselves.’
‘That could go very badly,’ Gillian said, frowning.
Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour Page 9
