In any event, as more women arrived from the Moon colony, the redoubt's permanent male population was for the first time in the minority. Bry, Banks, Farrell, Auerbach and even the misanthropic Wegmann acted either like shy schoolboys or Mags in a gaudy house after a long patrol.

  Lakesh followed Domi into the infirmary and saw that both Reba DeFore and Quavell were present in the examination room, Quavell lying on her back on one of the beds. When Lakesh realized a pelvic examination was in progress, he murmured a hasty excuse and an apology and performed a quick about-face.

  DeFore, standing at the foot of the bed between Quavell's outstretched legs, called after him laughingly, "I thought we were all scientists here."

  "I'm an old-fashioned boy first," Lakesh retorted over his shoulder, "and a scientist second."

  As he stepped out into the corridor, Domi called after him, "Don't forget our dinner plans!"

  DeFore eyed the knapsack and moved away from the bed. "What've you got there?"

  A stocky, buxom woman in her early thirties, De- Fore always wore her ash-blond hair pulled back from her face, intricately braided at the back of her head. Its color contrasted starkly with the deep bronze of her skin and her dark brown eyes. As usual, she was attired in the one-piece white jumpsuit most Cerberus redoubt personnel wore as duty uniforms.

  Domi put the sack on a trestle table and began unpacking its contents, placing little plastic bags full of plant matter in a neat row. "Rhubarb root," she said, "golden thread, peony root, ginger, lime flower, yarrow, dandelion leaves—"

  DeFore barely managed to keep a straight face as she listened to Domi identifying the packages as she removed them. When the girl paused for breath, the medic asked dubiously, "Do you know the materia medica of all of those?"

  Domi squinted toward her suspiciously. "The what?"

  "The pharmacology," said Quavell, pushing herself to a sitting position. Her voice was soft and musical.

  "The what?" Domi repeated, this time with an edge in her voice.

  DeFore chuckled. "Do you know the uses all those herbs could be put to?"

  Domi frowned, as if slightly insulted. "Of course I do. How about you?"

  Reba DeFore's smile only widened at the hint of a challenge in Domi's voice. "Actually my knowledge might surprise you. The benefits of herbal medicine were just being rediscovered before skydark. I found a few surviving texts and read up on them."

  Quavell said, "The potentials for therapeutic agents derived from plants are immense. I personally investigated a few."

  "But not for yourself, I bet," Domi commented. Quavell nodded. "No, for the barons, for their use during their annual medical treatments."

  Quavell was a hybrid, a blending of human and so- called Archon genetic material. She was small, smaller even than Domi, under five feet in height. She looked almost as young, despite her claim of being sixty- seven years old. Her huge, upslanting eyes of a clear, crystal blue dominated a face that a poetically minded man might have tried to describe as elfin, with its high, angular cheekbones.

  Her lips were small, but like those of most hybrids, they curved naturally upward so that she always seemed to be on the point of smiling, even when her face was in repose. White-blond hair the texture of silk threads fell from her domed skull and curled inward at her slender shoulders. Although her beauty had the fascination of being an unhuman loveliness, she was still close enough to humanity's feminine ideal to have aroused a man sufficiently to engage in the sex act with her and impregnate her. A sleeveless white gown swallowed her petite form. It only accentuated the distended condition of her belly and the slenderness of her limbs.

  DeFore said, "Did you find any?"

  Quavell shook her head. "Not in the kind of quantities wherein a medicine could be distilled."

  "Well, there's only one of you," Domi pointed out a little defensively. "I think what I have here will be enough."

  Quavell nodded. "Hopefully. If for some reason my physical condition declines, I can be treated with naturally occurring plant remedies. I would prefer them to drugs."

  Domi smiled in relief. "Glad to hear it, since drugs could have some bad effects on you and your baby, seeing as you aren't really..." She trailed off, suddenly comprehending what she was about to say, and quickly provided, "Like us. You aren't really like us."

  Quavell didn't appear to be offended. "Very true. My presence here has been the cause for a number of different adaptations and adjustments on everyone's part.

  "So far," said DeFore, "nothing has arisen good old human ingenuity couldn't deal with. We took care of your nutritional requirements pretty quickly.'

  As a hybrid, Quavell required food that was easily digestible for her simplified intestinal tract. Although Lakesh had spent a lot of time and trouble to make sure the food lockers and meat freezers of the redoubt were exceptionally well-stocked, there was very little in the way of single-cell protein microorganisms the hybrids normally ingested. Oatmeal and ice cream were improvisations, until a way to manufacture the microorganisms could be perfected. DeFore utilized a synthesization process using equipment recently taken from the Moon base. The process had so far proved successful.

  Domi turned toward the door. "If you need any help grinding up the herbs, let me know. I've got to get ready for dinner."

  "Are you dressing for dinner or undressing?" De- Fore asked in a silky voice.

  Domi threw her an impish over-the-shoulder grin. "That depends on whether Lakesh wants dessert first or last."

  After she was gone, Quavell said softly, "I envy her joie de vivre."

  "She's young," DeFore said bleakly. "It won't last." Quavell regarded her gravely. "How can you be so sure?"

  DeFore gazed at her steadily for a long moment and answered softly, "Because one of the contributing factors to her joy of life is rapidly losing his. But it's not my place to let her know. That should be Lakesh's responsibility."

  "Will he accept it?" Quavell inquired.

  Reba DeFore shook her head and moved back to the foot of the bed. "He's the only one who can. It's his life. Or what might be left of it. Now, let's finish up your examination."

  Chapter 8

  Domi rolled her hips against Lakesh, her knees clasping him tight. She pressed her palms against his chest, raising herself for another deep, downward thrust.

  Lakesh looked up at her, entranced by the lust showing on her beautiful, hollow-cheeked face. "Oh," Domi groaned throatily. "Don't stop, don't dare stop!"

  Giving himself over to his own lust, Lakesh stroked upward, clutching her narrow waist. Domi whimpered uncontrollably with each of his long, deep lunges. The sound of her passion, her pleasure in heat, nearly drove him out of his mind as his need for his own release hammered at his skull.

  Lakesh tried to pace himself, but he started driving harder and allowed his own climax to begin. When he felt Domi trembling violently, he let his body take over from his mind. He sped up the tempo of his thrusts until he was pounding into her furiously and Domi cried out sharply with each one.

  A wail of ecstasy escaped Domi's lips. She sucked in her breath noisily as she ground out her final throes of orgasm against him. She shivered, her skin silvery pale in the dim light of his quarters.

  "Needed that:' She leaned down against Lakesh, sponging up the warmth he gave off.

  Her felt her petite body pressed against him like a comfortable blanket. He wrapped his arms around her, enjoying the feeling of repletion that trickled through him.

  After the final spasms finished playing through Domi's body, she pushed herself up and looked down into his eyes. He was too winded to speak. She playfully nipped the tip of his nose, then lay beside him, the small nipples of her breasts pressing into his ribs.

  "I figured a man your age might already be snoring," she whispered playfully. "Thought I'd better do something to wake you up."

  "You make it difficult to sleep," he said quietly, kissing the top of her tousled head. "Regardless of my age."

  Her fingertips lightly traced the faint blue pattern of burst capillaries on his chest. "No pain?"

  He shook his head. "No, darlingest one. I feel completely healed. Thank you for being so considerate of my rather dissipated physical condition following my encounter with Sam."

  Domi's full lips compressed in an angry moue. "He tried to kill you."

  Lakesh started to refute her statement, but thought better of it, not wanting to engage the girl in an argument in the aftermath of breaking his doctor-ordered period of celibacy. The fact was, Lakesh knew full well that Sam, the self-professed imperator, had not attempted to murder him during their brief standoff in India.

  He still remembered with startling clarity what Sam had said to him, as he writhed in pain across the corridor floor of the Scorpia Prime's fortress: "I will concede my defeat on this occasion, Mohandas, but it's only a small move in a far larger game. But I'm the gamemaster, and it's up to me whether I'll keep you alive to contend against me another day, or kill you at a whim I have plenty of time to make up my mind."

  Months before, upon their initial meeting, Sam had restored Lakesh's physical condition to that of a man in his mid-forties by what seemed to be a miraculous laying on of hands.

  Sam claimed he had increased Lakesh's production of two antioxidant enzymes, catalase and superoxide dismutase, and boosted his alkyglycerol level to the point where the aging process was for all intents and purposes reversed.

  Only recently had Lakesh learned the precise methodology—when Sam had laid his hands on Lakesh, he had injected nanomachines into his body. The nanites were programmed to recognize and to destroy the dangerous replicators, whether they were bacteria, cancer cells or viruses. Sam's nanites performed selective destruction on the genes of DNA cells, removing the part that caused aging.

  Faced with a damaged protein, a cell-repair machine first had to identify it by examining short amino acid sequences and then look up its correct structure in a database. The machine compared the protein to the blueprint, one amino acid at a time. The nanites stimulated the metabolism by resetting cellular control mechanisms.

  "Hope we don't have to deal with Sam again," Domi said grimly, "or that bitch of a mother of his."

  Lakesh couldn't help but smile, recalling that Sam's "bitch of a mother" was well over two hundred years old, too, and was as dependent on Sam for her restored youth and vitality as he was. He said, "I doubt we'll contend with either one of them any time in the near future. We knocked the pins out from under Sam's plan to dominate the Asian subcontinent. He'll be reassessing his resources for some time to come."

  Domi stifled a yawn. "He still has a toehold in Australia. And what happens if he learns he's really Colonel Thrush?"

  "Sam's true identity is still a matter of speculation," Lakesh replied, although he knew otherwise.

  Testimony had indicated that Sam's mind was actually a receptacle for the mind of the loathsome Colonel C. W. Thrush. However, even if Sam served as the living storage vessel for the Thrush program, apparently he had yet to fully download all the algorithmic data and realise his true identity. Quavell had been the one to theorize that the complete Thrush entity ID was suspended in a kind of a memory buffer, with the Thrush identity compressed and not fully downloaded.

  Domi murmured wordlessly either in agreement or ennui. Lakesh held her in his arms and wondered if she was dozing. Her eyes were closed, the long sweeping lashes reminding him of pine needles dusted with snow. He hoped she slept since he wanted a little time to concoct and rehearse an opening line for the information he needed to impart to her.

  The results of a recent medical examination had shown that the nanites in his body were now inert. They no longer worked to maintain his metabolism at its restored levels. If Sam had exerted control over them, he had either relinquished it on his own accord as a way to punish him or the influence had been broken for another reason. Regardless of the reasons, De- Fore's prognosis was that he would begin to age, but at an accelerated rate.

  He'd had no choice but to agree with her gloomy diagnosis. The worst-case scenario she had offered had him back to his pre-restoration physical condition inside of a year. The absolute best-case situation would be one where he simply began to age normally from the point the nanites stopped working. He knew that was an unrealistic hope at best.

  Without the help of Sam's nanomachines, his body simply could not maintain its present state. In fact, the possibility existed that his cardiovascular system would not be able to withstand the strain of rapid aging and would shut down. To be fair to Domi, he knew she needed to be apprised of the circumstances, but he had trouble finding both the words and the courage.

  He wasn't sure how the little albino girl would react to the prospect that their relationship could conceivably end at any moment. Suppressing a sigh, Lakesh decided to wait until he had more concrete data with which to work before addressing the issue. He would let Domi sleep and catch a nap himself.

  When he felt her hand stealing toward his groin, Lakesh realized Domi had only been feigning sleep.

  He sucked in a breath sharply. "Darlingest one, I don't know if I'm ready for—"

  Domi giggled, her fingers running up and down the shaft of his penis. "I'll get you ready."

  To his surprise and slight consternation, he realized her touch was indeed having its desired effect. He felt his organ thickening, hardening. The celibate weeks he and Domi had observed after Sam's attack had apparently had no lasting effect on his enhanced sex drive. For that, at least, he was grateful to Sam.

  Domi's white-haired head moved down his torso, her soft lips planting kisses along the way. Lakesh groaned slightly in delicious anticipation of when she reached her final destination.

  "Lakesh, are you there?"

  Donald Bry's voice blared out of the trans-comm speaker on the wall. The surprise of hearing it, coupled with its strident urgency, was like a bucket of water drawn from a polar sea dashed onto Lakesh's genitals. Both he and Domi sat up straight in bed, voicing startled, angry cries.

  "Lakesh!" Bry sounded impatient and even angry.

  Turning toward the voice-activated comm, Lakesh demanded, "What is it?" It required a great deal of restraint to prevent him from adding the epithet "asshole" onto the end of his question.

  "The mat-trans sensor lock is registering an anomalous signature from the Luna gateway unit." Bry's tone carried an edge of accusation, as if the situation were one of Lakesh's doing.

  Lakesh frowned. "Anomalous how?"

  "The molecular imaging scanners made a verification lock-on of the incoming matter stream," Bry answered, "but during the reference signal trace, we got some energy readings that the sensors don't recognize."

  Domi snorted, impatient with what sounded like technobabble. Lakesh glanced over at her, regarding him petulantly. "Mr. Bry," he said coldly, "either I'm being uncharacteristically obtuse, or you're not expressing the nature of this so-called emergency very clearly."

  "I didn't say it was an emergency," Bry's voice responded peevishly, "but an anomaly. Every piece of matter, whether organic or inorganic, that has ever been transported to or from our gateway here has a computer record in the database."

  "Yes, yes," Lakesh said, rising from the bed and moving closer to the trans-comm, glad its transmission was audio only. "Our image processor scans for patterns corresponding to those in the record."

  "Well, whoever or whatever is gating in here from the Moon colony is carrying something with a completely unrecognizable energy signature."

  Interested in spite of himself, Lakesh, asked, "Who from here is on Manitius at the moment?"

  "Neukirk gated there yesterday, so I suppose it could be him returning along with a couple of others. But if it is him, he's got something that's never been materialized or dematerialized in this particular unit."

  "'Something," Lakesh repeated in a growl. "By that, do you mean it's inorganic?"

  "Yes, of course," Bry shot back irritably. "I wouldn't bring it to your attention otherwise."

  Lakesh, despite the fact he dearly wished to lambaste Bry with a torrent of profane invective, realized the man was only following established security protocols. Although something of an obsessive-compulsive, Bry was not an alarmist by nature.

  "I'll be right there," Lakesh said. "Until then, divert the matter stream into the pattern buffer and hold it there."

  "That was the first thing I did," Bry snapped. "I'm not a moron, you know."

 

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