Caliphate

Flight Seven Nine Three, 23 Muharram,

1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

The city lights of an-Nurber, fewer and fainter now than they'd been a century prior, spread out below the ship to the port side. The crewman being blown by Lee in Ling's body barely noticed. Arching his back and groaning with the orgasm, he held the woman's head and pumped into her mouth like a bull.

You son of a bitch, Ling's consciousness thought at Lee. I'm a houri; I'm not a slut.

Quiet, Lee answered. This is for the mission.

My ass . . . and thank the ancestors you haven't given one of the crewman that yet . . .

Yet . . .

The crewman stopped pumping, then half stumbled back onto the narrow bed in Ling's cabin. "Whew," he gasped. "That was great!"

"Lie down," Lee said. "Relax. I'm not done with you yet."

Obediently—who knew what delights this trim exotic body might hold—the crewman did, closing his eyes as he stretched out on the cot. Lee, meanwhile, rifled through Ling's bag as if for a condom, muttering, "Now where did I put that?"

What Lee withdrew, however, was not a condom but a syringe, an autoinjector containing a serious muscle relaxer. Removing the cap and placing it on the upper part of the syringe to arm it, he struck the thing into the crewman's thigh. The crewman barely got a yelp out, and that a yelp not inconsistent with sex, before relaxing completely.

"One down," Lee said aloud.

Slut, Ling thought.

Nothing wrong with mixing pleasure and business.

Deftly, Lee flipped the crewman over on his belly, then took a roll of high strength tape from the bag. With this he taped the crewman's hands together and behind him, taped the feet together, and then taped the mouth shut. Lastly, Lee ran the tape around the crewman's neck, then to the head of the bed.

"That should hold you."

Before leaving, Lee took the trouble to reapply Ling's smeared lipstick. She knocked on Bongo's door and, when it was opened, said, "Cockpit next."

Lee scratched at the cockpit door like a cat asking to be let in. Retief opened the door.

"May I help you, miss?"

"You may," Ling's sultry, breathy, desperate-sounding voice answered. "I haven't seen my master in two days. He'd kill me if I had sex with a kaffir. And the kaffir is too loyal, he'd report me if I tried. But I'm one of those with the kind of chip that makes me want to have it, to need to have it, every day. Won't one of you or . . . better still all of you, please, please help me?"

"Let the poor girl in, Retief," the unseen captain said. "We can surely help her in her hour of need."

God, Retief thought, what a shitty world when we do things like this to beautiful women. Hell, what a shitty world when things like this are done to anybody.

Bongo looked in on Ling's cabin to make sure the crewman was still alive. Force of habit and training had made Lee hook the needle of the autoinjector through the crewman's shirt.

One won't kill him, the agent thought. Probably. That was the only guard on this deck, too. Time to go down and check on the ship's own loading crew. Better said, time to go recruit.

The loading crew were colored slaves. As such, they didn't automatically rise and bow with deference when Bongo made his appearance in their cramped cabin. They seemed startled, though, when he spoke to them not with the pidgin such people usually learned, but with as clear a diction as any baas. That surprise was as nothing, though, beside what they felt when they noticed the silenced submachine gun in his hand and the pistol strapped to his hip.

"Gentlemen," Bongo began, "please sit and listen. I'd like to tell you a story about a man who died several hundred miles to the south of here, not quite two thousand and two hundred years ago.

"His name was Spartacus . . ."

Lee heard a mental laugh from Ling. Okay, you're a slut. But it just occurred to me that if these Boers knew what the sex was of the mind controlling my body, they'd all try to crawl out of their own skins with disgust.

That's half the fun of it, Lee sent back. I wonder how is Matheson doing down below?

Matheson declaimed, arms thrust up and out with the submachine grasped in the left hand, "'O comrades! Warriors! Thracians! If we must fight, let us fight for ourselves! If we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors! If we must die, let it be under the clear sky, by the bright waters, in noble, honorable battle!'"

"This Spartacus fella, he say that?" asked one of the cargo slaves.

"That, yes, or about that, but in a different language," Bongo answered, with no less truth than the purpose required.

"And what happen to him?"

"He fought. He won many battles. In the end he lost." Bongo hesitated over telling the rest but, "His followers were all killed. Over six thousand of them were crucified."

All the slaves shook their heads at that. No they didn't want to be crucified.

"But we have some advantages," Bongo added, "notably, that we're much closer to Switzerland. And Spartacus lacked machine guns."

Bang! The hatch to the cockpit flew open with a single kick. Bongo . . . no, Matheson again; there was no more need to pretend . . . stormed in with his submachine gun in both hands, and a fierce gleam in his eye. Everyone, except for Ling's body, froze.

He saw that both pilot and co-pilot were in various states of undress, with Ling's body kneeling between the captain's legs, head bobbing and the captain's fingers intertwined in Ling's hair. Retief was sitting at a console, studiously watching a screen and apparently trying very hard not to pay any attention to the minor orgy going on in the cockpit.

"Take thees plane to Habana!" Matheson parodied, yet in a voice full of thunder. The slaves, the soon to be ex-slaves, given any luck, poured in behind him waving knives from the ship's galley.

Lee immediately punched the captain in the crotch, stood, grabbed the shocked captain by the hair, and hauled him out of his seat, tossing him to the floor. He deftly swung Ling's body into place and took control of the airship.

"Are you sure you can fly this thing?" Matheson asked.

"People's Liberation Army Air Force Precision Airship Drill Team," Lee answered, "2109 to 2112. Yeah, yeah . . . we do a lot of silly shit in the CKPLAAF. By the way, dude, your timing sucks."