I held onto the first mouthful of whisky, felt it sear the internal cuts where Kadmin had put the boot in and swallowed hastily. I grimaced.
‘Now why would you think that, Mrs Bancroft?’
She made an elegant gesture with one hand. ‘No reason. Do you not want to talk about it?’
‘Not particularly.’ I sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where I was sitting she was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. I kept my eyes levelled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.
‘Well.’ She cleared her throat. ‘What would you like to talk about?’
I waved my glass at her. ‘Let’s start with why you’re here.’
‘I want to know what progress you’ve made.’
‘You can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I’ll file one with Oumou Prescott before I go out. Come on, Mrs Bancroft. It’s late. You can do better than that.’
For a moment I thought she might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her glass in both hands, bent her head over it as if in search of inspiration and after a long moment looked up again.
‘I want you to stop,’ she said.
I let the words sink into the darkened room.
‘Why?’
I saw her lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘Well.’ I sipped at my drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in my mouth to shut down my hormones. ‘To begin with, there’s your husband. He’s made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health. Then there’s the hundred thousand dollars. And after that, well, then we get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be honest, I’m curious.’
‘A hundred thousand isn’t so much money,’ she said carefully. ‘And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place for you to go where Laurens would never find you.’
‘Yes. That leaves my word, and my curiosity.’
She sat forward over her drink. ‘Let’s not pretend, Mr Kovacs. Laurens didn’t contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honour bound.’
‘I’m still curious.’
‘Maybe I could satisfy that,’ she said softly.
I swallowed more whisky. ‘Yeah? Did you kill your husband, Mrs Bancroft?’
She made an impatient gesture. ‘I’m not talking about your game of detectives. You are… curious about other things, are you not?’
‘I’m sorry?’ I looked at her over the rim of my glass.
Miriam Bancroft pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath the sheer material of her leotard.
‘Do you know what Merge Nine is?’ she asked, a little unsteadily.
‘Empathin?’ I dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew I knew back on Harlan’s World, friends of Virginia Vidaura’s. The Little Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. Said it welded them into a tighter team. Bunch of fucking psychos.
‘Yes, empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This sleeve…’ She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. ‘This is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when… aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr Kovacs.’
And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silkenly around her feet and she stepped over it towards me.
Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.
I met her halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapour on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was moulded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.
Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew as well that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.
Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face. Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when we had shed everything we wore the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her and my stubble rasped faintly over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head, and sucked gently.
Blending, our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her. Her thighs clamped around my head. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it came from I was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into mutual sensory overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then suddenly she was laughing at the warm, salty splash over her face and fingers and I was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest swept her away.
For a while there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of flesh against flesh brought sobbing spasms from us both. Then, gift of the long period my sleeve had been in the tank, the sweaty images of Anenome pressed against the glass of the biocabin, my penis twitched and began to tighten again. Miriam Bancroft nudged at it with her nose, ran the tip of her tongue along and around it, licking off the stickiness until it was smooth and taut against her cheek, then swung around and straddled me. Reaching back for balance and hold, she sank down, impaling herself on the shaft with a long, warm groan. She leaned over me, breasts swinging, and I craned and sucked hungrily at the elusive globes. My hands came up to grasp her thighs where they were spread on either side of my body.
And then the motion.
The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the Hendrix piped a slow, deep raga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotches of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it and my perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in coloured light. When I came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.