War Games by Karl Hansen

voice had become flat. Something was wrong.
    “OK.” But I was, desperate. “After you’ve unpacked your gear, come over to the noncom club. I’ll buy you a mnemone stick.”
    “I think I need to be by myself.”
    “Maybe I can help?”
    “I don’t think so.” She looked at me in a way I remembered.
    But I was too tight with sex steroid to care about my pride. “You’ll come later?” I knew she wouldn’t. I knew that look. I knew that game. But why?
    She turned and entered her room. She paused inside the door and looked back. “I was once a Lady of Telluride,” she said, and her voice told me she’d lost more than I would ever have. Because my nobility had not been taken from me. I had run away from mine. I was an orphan by choice. They couldn’t hurt me anymore.
    The door hissed shut.
    * * *
    I waited by myself at a corner table in the club. A mnemone stick fumed from a bong sitting in front of me. I’d only taken one hit. My thoughts were disturbed enough already. I kept thinking about the sudden change that had come over Peppardine—one minute she was teasing me like a Venusian in heat and the next she was as frigid as an Antirecombinant fanatic. I was feeling sorry for myself. It wouldn’t have mattered except she’d thrown me into a testosterone crisis. All that sex steroid had to be dissipated some way, I knew Peppardine wasn’t going to show up. But I wanted her in the worst way. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to desert from the Corps until I had her.
    Someone sat down at my table. Mnemone fumes blurred my vision. For an instant, hope flared. Then my nictitating membranes blinked away the film. Vichsn sat across from me. She picked up the bong and sucked mnemone deep into her lungs.
    She exhaled slowly. Blue eyes appraised me. “What’s she like?” Vichsn asked. “Though it appears you’ve struck out. “
    “Who?”
    “Who? Who do you think? The new medic. The X-M-R. Didn’t you pick her up at the spaceport?”
    “Sure.”
    “Is what they say about them true?” Her smile was a leer.
    “What do they say about them?” But I thought of her wonderful claws.
    “You’ve heard the stories. They say they have the kiss of death now. Each finger can inject a different neuropeptide hormone. They hold a hundred electric eels between their hands. They can kill in a dozen ways now. And they were killers before. What’s she like?” A bare foot stroked my leg under the table. “Is she a killer?”
    “She seems OK.” But I thought of her fingers, each with a long, curved claw, hollow, connected to a modified venom sac in its pad. And a blue gleam. Her peptides could bring unimaginable euphoria—the ultimate natural high. Of course there was a certain risk. Peptides were the most addictive substances known. My own parents had been pepheads. I knew all about peptide psychosis—that was why I’d had to kill my own parents. But a little peptide couldn’t hurt. I’d stop before I got hooked. Again I glimpsed her body, with smooth muscles rippling. I’d hoped I was going to receive her blue joy. Again testosterone fire flared. Corpus cavernosum engorged with blood. I hoped Vichsn wouldn’t notice the bulge in front of my pants. “She says she was a Lady of Telluride,” I added as an afterthought.
    “You know what else they say?”
    “What?”
    “The ones who become chimeras all have something in common.” She smiled in a sly, sinister way. “They were given a choice—the Corps or the cyborg factories.”
    “A lot of us were given that choice.” But a scenario flashed in my mind: a glimpse of something nasty, something that would disturb even the jaded sensibilities of the wealthy Lords and Ladies of Telluride; craziness, raging passion, fury in the dark of night. And an idea began to form: I pushed it away.
    “They say they killed their lovers. They each committed a crime of passion, destroying a loved one. Something about a particular personality pattern being necessary to