"Even though I stepped all over your feet?" Brim asked.
"I wasn't really concentrating much on my feet at the time, Commander Brim," she laughed. "Or anybody I danced with, that night either—except you.'' She smiled. "But if I remember correctly, lover, you were exceedingly ready yourself that evening."
Brim nodded, his cheeks burning. "I'll admit that I'm beginning to feel that way right now," he said, experiencing a characteristic fullness in his loins. "If we keep talking like this, I'm not going to be interested at all in supper. At least until we... ah."
Margot smiled, considerable tinges of pink appearing high in her cheeks. "We shall, my lover," she said, raising her goblet. "But first, shall we fuel the fires of our passion?"
"Seems like a more sane idea to me," Brim admitted, raising his own goblet to hers. "That way, we won't have to interrupt anything later. Besides," he said with a smile, "the Palmerston Club is a wonderful place to dine."
"I chose it for a number of reasons," she said, staring with half-closed eyes as she sipped her meem. "The atmosphere and food go without saying—but the location: that serves our other needs as well."
Brim frowned. "They have rooms here?" he asked, instinctively staring toward the ceiling.
"Well," Margot giggled, "not quite upstairs, my impatient lover, but only a short distance away—through a little park—is a lovely country inn, converted from an ancient grist mill; the old millrace is even intact beside it. Part of the Palmerston, of course." She licked her lips sensually. "Since an evening begun in a place like this can only appropriately end in a bed..."
"...It seems natural that they provide the beds," Brim finished with a grin.
"But of course," Margot assured him. "Anything else would be a downright waste. That is why, Commander Brim, I reserved a suite there for us when I called for the table."
Even with that resolved, Brim found himself hurrying through an excellent supper. Some instincts were much stronger than others....
Brim felt just the slightest bit tipsy as he and Margot crossed the street arm in arm and entered the little park across from the Palmerston. Ahead in the dim glow of ancient street lamps, a picturesque inn beckoned from the far end of the path. "Tell me about your scanties tonight," he whispered in her ear, savoring the perfume of her hair.
"You'll have firsthand information shortly," she giggled, squeezing his waist. "How about yours?"
"Probably that's the reason they keep it so dark in there," he replied as a breeze cooled his face, "otherwise a number of us would have been embarrassed." They were approaching a copse of young trees and bushes planted around the periphery of what appeared to be a sizable boulder. Ahead, he could hear the millrace. He listened for a moment, relishing the sound. Then above the rushing water came a momentary scraping ahead in the dark copse. He tensed, hairs bristling on (be back of his neck.
"Did you hear that?" he whispered.
Margot put her hand to her throat and took her arm from around his back. "N-no, Wilf," she replied in a voice suddenly tight with fear. "I heard nothing."
The sound came again. This time, there was no mistaking his imagination. Brim stopped in his tracks. "Something's wrong, Margot," he whispered instinctively, pushing her into a clump of bushes.
"Stay here and don't move," he ordered, then drew his service blaster. At the same moment two dark figures burst silently at him from the left. Whirling while he fired a long, high-energy burst, he saw them jackknife in a froth of blood as the powerful weapon literally cut both in half.
An instant later he sensed scuffling in an archway behind him. Going to the ground again, he glimpsed three figures racing his way, each firing silenced blast pikes from the hip. As he rolled behind a bush, a blinding thunderbolt shredded his hiding place in a blizzard of branches and leaves. Reflexively, he snapped to a firing position and let off another long volley of shots, but these went wild as the trio scattered and dove for the flagstones.
At that moment the energy pack in his blaster bleeped empty.
"Voot, you miserable zukeed!" he swore under his breath, but it was his own fault. In spite of regulations, he habitually neglected his side arms. After all, it was peacetime, wasn't it? Before his assailants could properly aim, he desperately sprinted for the boulder and dove behind its mass through an eerily silent fusillade of wild shots, blinding flashes of light, and stinging stone chips. Struggling desperately to catch his breath, he snapped out the old energy pack and snapped in a new one, forcing himself to take a long, deep breath before tensing his legs in a shallow crouch. A split click later, he came out from behind the boulder firing for all he was worth, but again the men had disappeared.
Or had they?
Spontaneously flinging himself to the ground again, he only just dodged a whole welter of silent discharges that rent the air precisely where he had been standing. Firing blindly, he jumped behind the boulder again, trembling like a leaf, in the instant he'd had to take stock of the situation, there appeared to be at least ten people running toward him from the center of the park, shooting silently as they came.
Brim pursed his lips and frowned. Surprise and audacity had saved him before—and they were his only hope now. That, and saving his one remaining energy pack. With no time to worry about Margot, he thumbed the blaster to its lowest conservation setting—any hit would disable at this distance—and started making his way carefully toward the other side of the boulder. Abruptly he froze in his tracks: someone was running toward him from that direction—and making a terrible racket as he trampled cocksuredly through the weeds. Clearly, whoever it was didn't consider Wilf Brim to be much of a combatant....
The first thing to appear around the side of the boulder was the barrel of a blast pike, extended almost an iral by the ribbed barrel of a silencer. Brim grabbed it and nearly screamed in pain; his fingers instantly froze to the supercooled metal, but he hung on grimly for all he was worth. From that point, things were quick and silent. He jerked the silencer fiercely and pulled with all his might. Clearly surprised by the onslaught, his assailant stumbled and nearly lost his footing, but recovered quickly and tried to bring the big weapon to bear anyway. With the detached calm of a longtime warrior, Brim stepped in close to block the swing, gripped his assailant by both biceps, and brought up his knee hard. With a look of utter agony, the man dropped his pike and sucked in breath for a howl of pain. But before a sound could escape his lips, Brim stiff-armed, crooked his hand into a right angle, then drove it under the man's jawbone like a pile driver. A stab of pain flashed along his arm and shoulder as he heard neck bones crack—his assailant went down like a sack.
Retrieving the blast pike, Brim ran a quick self-test while he peered at the body, already rank with the odor of feces. Masked. Powerfully built. Dressed in black with no obvious means of identification. A professional, he considered with a shudder—probably one of the Leaguer Agnords; they'd made an attempt on his life the previous year. Only Lady Fortune—and a large dose of Leaguer arrogance—had so far saved him from their second try.
The pike sounded quietly as its self-test ended—three-quarters charged. It would do a lot more damage than his blaster. As he replaced the latter in its holster, he heard skimmers brake to a halt out in the park. Turning, he quietly retraced his steps while doors slammed and a sudden fusillade of heavy weapons flashed and snorted to a quick crescendo that quickly evolved into quieter sounds of running feet and muffled grunts of pain. He had just rounded the boulder again when he froze—this time in horror, his heart thumping wildly in his chest.