Piers Anthony - Chaining the Lady

“Fair deal. Show me your hostage.”

“It is a Solarian officer aboard a Sphere Sol ship in space—the flagship of the Segment Etamin fleet. It will be necessary to mattermit you to a shuttlecraft, that is now completing its voyage to that fleet. After the mission, we will transfer you directly back to your Mintakan body.”

“Very pretty,” Melody remarked. “Were I in a Polarian host, I could think of another manner to abate debt.”

Fltosm glowed. She had paid the Polarian the courtly compliment of suggesting it was a suitable partner for mating. Polarians, like Mintakans and in contrast to Solarians, arranged for mating on intellectual grounds. It was a system that made sense to the mature mind.

“I am jealous,” the Colonel said, smiling. And this was a lesser compliment, for he had seen up her host-legs and was reacting in the Solarian manner. But it reminded her: In this host, sex was not merely a mode of reproduction, but a tool of social influence. She must keep that in mind, in case she had need of it.

*you missed a council meeting, :: *

:: necessary omission swallowed a hard rock progress? ::

*located focus of resistance in segment etamin it is the society of hosts*

:: that will require a special effort ::

*I am sure dash will make it*

:: with what result remains to be noted ::

The fleet was impressive. It was rather like a great city in deep space, or a miniature galaxy. A concentration of planetoids, a diffuse globe—no, a cluster , she decided, with the concentration in the center and thinning bands extending out. Beautiful.

It was of course an anachronism, since such ships were limited to sublight speeds, so could not even traverse a single sphere, let alone a segment, in a normal sapient lifetime. But the rationale was that it might one day be possible to transfer spaceships. At such time as that particular technological breakthrough occurred, the military reasoning went, the Age of Empire would come. So these ships were built and maintained and operated at phenomenal expense—in a parking orbit around Star Etamin. The other segments all had similar fleets. Similar follies, Melody thought. But the fleet was spectacular, at least in the shuttle’s viewscreen.

The shuttle shot toward the center, decelerating with a vigor that caused respiratory discomfort to the host-body. Melody had been phased in to the travel-velocity of the shuttle, which itself was phasing in to the orbital velocity of the fleet; now there was a lot of inertia to counter. But Melody insisted on sitting up so that she could watch the screen. There was also a port, but it was useless; the ships were not visible to her untrained naked eye. So she braced the sagging mammaries with one forearm, clenched her jaw to keep it from drawing down painfully, and stayed with the screen. She had never seen a space fleet before, and never expected to see another; this was interesting.

Beside her, a novice Solarian crew-member also watched. His head-hair was of reddish hue, and at the moment so were his eyes. Melody knew this was from the temporary stress of deceleration on the surface veins of the eyeballs; the normal color of the main part of the ball was white, even on brown or black-surfaced entities. But the contrast of red eyes and blue skin was momentarily striking. Though she probably looked much the same. Her host’s skin, now that she thought about it, was a delicate blue. That was the native color of Outworld. Green , rather; Melody was not yet precise about color vision. It occurred to her, however, that this could be a handy coding system for species with a lot of skin surface, like the Solarians: a different color for each star.

“Isn’t that—something!” the man gasped. Although he had been aboard the shuttle when she mattermitted on, he had not seen the fleet before.

“New to you, too?” Melody asked. This formal query when the answer was either known or irrelevant was one of the little Solarian niceties of interaction.

“Yes. I’ve never been to space before.” Like her, he spoke through clenched teeth, though his jawline still sagged somewhat.

“Neither have I.” Now they had a common framework and she was surprised to discover that it did make her feel more at ease. She paused for several shallow but difficult breaths, aware that his eyes were following the labored movements of her chest. This sidewise torque did his eyeballs no good; he should have clamped down his eyelids for added support. But it seemed the male liked to see even the suggestion of female points of distinction, despite the concealment of cloth and discomfort of gravity. “Who are you?”

He hesitated. “Call me March,” he said at last. There was a suppressed stress on it that did not seem to be entirely due to the deceleration. Was that his real name? But he could not be another transfer agent; his aura was merely galactic norm. Normals could not detect the feel of neighboring auras, but high-Kirlians could. Maybe he had been drafted, and did not like being reminded of his happy past. Possibly he had been assigned to watch her, in case her own inexperience led to complications. Yet he had started the shuttle trip well before she had been summoned to Imperial Outworld. Could he have been a convict, released from the prison-colony planet of this system, now shunted to space service? No; he seemed too young, too innocent. She was inclined to trust him. To a reasonable extent. “Yael,” she said.

“They messaged me… you were coming,” he said. His power of speech was fading; this deceleration was an awful strain. “But they did not tell me”—a pause to catch up on breathing—“how pretty you would be.”

“Hey, I like him!” Yael said.

“Then you answer him,” Melody replied to her. “It’s your body he admires. Mine would sicken him.” And she turned over control of the vocal apparatus.

“Thank you,” Yael said aloud. “You’re not bad yourself. Are you from Outworld?” As though a green man could be from anywhere else.

“The deepest backvines,” March admitted.

“Me too.” They exchanged smiles. Then the stiffening deceleration forced them both to be silent.

Melody faded in and out, and time became expanded or condensed—she was not quite sure which. The view-screen showed them passing the layers of the cluster fleet like a comet swinging in to its star. First there were the small scouts, needleshaped because that made them harder to spot and hit as they moved about. It had nothing to do with atmospherics; they flew sidewise as readily as forward, orienting to keep their smallest cross section facing the enemy. They quested far beyond the main mass of the fleet, poking into whatever crannies of space they spied, like curious insects, maneuvering unpredictably. How convenient the human-host imagery became; there were no insects on Melody’s home planet.

Melody found her human tongue twitching around in her mouth, and her nostrils narrowing. She stopped it; she could not afford such reactions. The specialists of Imperial Outworld had insisted on providing her with a weapon of self-defense despite her protests. Now it was in her nose: two electrically neutral tubelike units whose mechanism could be invoked by the proper combination of air and pressure. She did not dare try to remove the units; they were of the self-destruct variety—or so the Colonel had assured her. But she had no intention of using them. So she quelled her reactions and returned her attention to the fleet.

The next layer consisted of the more disciplined system of attack craft—small, expendable ships which could move out fast and deliver a wallop. Like poisonous reptiles—another analogy lifted from the convenient mind of her host, who seemed to have a ready imagination for such things—they were brightly colored. Perhaps, however, that was merely enhancement by the screen, color-coding them to match the Spheres with which they were associated: Sol, Polaris, Canopus, Spica, Nath… and even her own Mintaka? How beautiful it must look—if she could only be sure which one it was.