Flesh blackened and shriveled, twisting the creature into a writhing knot. A tongue armed with glittering conical teeth extended from the mouth.
Reed-tops touched the body and clung, sucking greedily.
"Mole slug," Wilding wheezed. He grabbed the motorman's shoulder to balance himself. His pistol wavered in a dangerous circle that included the feet of both men. "Ah, are you okay?"
Leaf bent and seared the vegetation away from his boots. "Yeah," he said, "I'm fine. I'm great."
His mouth was dry. He chewed his cheeks and tongue to release the juices. The warhead had burned out. A breeze carried the remaining fumes toward the jungle.
"I'm as good," Leaf said deliberately, "as I've been since I joined this fucking outfit."
* * *
April 1, 372 AS. 2214 hours.
The hand-lettered sign outside the door announced that Enrique's Bar was closed for a private party. One of the neighborhood regulars rattled the latch anyway. His eye appeared at the small triangular window in the door panel. When he saw that the "private party" was a Free Company's recruiting drive, the man vanished as if whipped away by demons.
Inside, the woman who writhed on top of the bar wore nothing. Her hair was blond. It was held in a high, drifting fan by a process that must have cost as much as a drug dealer in Block 81 earned in a week.
The woman's face was aristocratically beautiful, but her eyes were a million miles away. She rotated slowly, ignoring the thirty-odd young men crowded into the room.
The handsome lieutenant wore a row of medal ribbons on the right breast. Over the left pocket was a nametag reading congreve, in blue letters on silver to match the color scheme of his uniform. "Well, I must have made a mistake," he said in a sneering drawl. "I thought there were men here, but men wouldn't leave a poor girl in that state."
Congreve leaned against the bar in a pose of false relaxation. An electronic data file was open beside him. He watched everything in the room from beneath drooping eyelids.
Tub Caffey stood up suddenly. His brother-in-law tried to pull him back to the table. All the guys on that side of the bar ran with the 3d Level gang.
"I'll give the bitch what she needs!" Caffey muttered. He headed straight for the woman. He could have been on the other side of Venus for all the notice she took of him.
Leaf was the only member of the 5th Level gang in the bar tonight. He knew Caffey pretty well. His index finger absently traced the knife scar up his cheek to his hairline.
Lieutenant Congreve stepped between Caffey and the woman. Jessamyn, the senior sergeant who worked the floor with Congreve, moved his big body between the potential recruit and the friends who might have other ideas for him.
"Here you go, lads," Jessamyn said, holding out three puce applicators on the back of his left hand. The knuckles of the clenched fist on which the drugs balanced were a mass of white scar tissue. "Let's all stay happy, shall we?"
Caffey's brother-in-law and the two men who had jumped up at the same time hesitated, then accepted the applicators and sat down again. Jessamyn smiled. His front teeth had been replaced by metal the cold blue-gray of a gun barrel.
Caffey laboriously signed the screen of the data file. The imager built into the lieutenant's signet ring had already snapped the recruit's retinal prints and encoded them into the electronic contract.
Congreve tapped the woman's instep with a finger. "Back room, Kimberly," he said. He opened the bar's swinging gate so that the new recruit could stumble through.
The woman stepped down and walked through the door into what was normally Enrique's private office and storage area. She didn't look behind her.
Caffey collided with the redhead who came out of the back room as the blond entered it. The door closed.
Someone moved close to Leaf. He looked to his side and saw the sergeant. "Here you go," the mercenary said. He offered a three-striped mauve applicator in the middle of his left palm.
Leaf squinted at it. He didn't recognize the markings. "What's this?" he demanded.
The redhead mounted the bar and began a slow dance. Her diaphanous garments concealed nothing, but she used the floor-brushing length of her own hair as a curtain to display and reveal alternately.
"Tsk," said Jessamyn. "A good time, lad, that's what it is."
The big noncom touched the applicator to the inside of his left elbow and squeezed, releasing the contents into his bloodstream. He turned his hand palm down, then up again with another applicator on it in a feat of minor legerdemain.
Leaf flushed and took the drug.
The redhead turned her back. Her long-fingered hands now lay on the cheeks of her buttocks, spreading and closing the white flesh. Her fingernails were the color of fresh blood.