metal sphere just barely roomy enough to hold a synthleather-padded couch.
A quarter of the sphere’s shell, to his left, was missing, a large, circular hatch. Sergeant Major Frank Kaminski was standing there in his khakis, fists on hips as he glared belligerently into the virtuality capsule. “So sorry to interrupt your pleasant dreams, Mister Leckie,” Kaminski said. “But your presence is required back at the squad bay!”
Lucky sat up and swung his legs out of the sphere. He was wearing nothing but a terry cloth wrap and a number of skin attachments connected to slender feed cables, gently adhering to five places on his scalp, and on his chest, wrists, back of the neck, and groin.
The wrap was to keep him from making a mess on the couch. The cold, sticky spot he felt against his skin on the inside told him it had already served its purpose, even though he hadn’t been inside for very long. “Jeez, Sergeant Major!” he complained, starting to pull off the skin connectors. “It couldn’t have waited another couple of hours?”
“No, it damned well couldn’t!” He turned to glare at the half-naked man crawling out of the virtuality sphere next to Lucky’s. “And you, Tonelli! Get your ass in gear! Both of you!”
Mamasan Koharu, the manager of the Virtuality, all prim and proper in a conservative woman’s business suit, held out a hot, warm towel with a slight bow and a smile. “You have good time, yes?”
“I want a refund, Mamasan! We paid you one hundred dollars each for four hours! That was the deal, see? We ain’t been inside there thirty minutes!”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! No refund! Cost same, you thirty minute, you four hour!”
“No! I want my money back!”
“It cost same! Still must program computer!” She pointed at the couch. “Still must clean you cum off equipment! Cost same!”
He snatched the towel from her. “Christ, what a gyp!” He tossed the terrycloth wrap on the floor and began toweling off his legs. “I got rights! You can’t rip us off this way. I’ll get some of my buddies together an’—”
“Corporal Leckie!” Kaminski snapped.
“Yeah?”
“Put a cap on it. Get your clothes on, both of you, and muster with me at the entrance. You’ve got ten minutes. Move it!”
Lucky entertained the notion of arguing for all of perhaps two seconds. It wasn’t right, getting taken for a ride that way! He and Tone had spent twenty minutes in the virtual bar with the tequila and beer, and had only just gotten down to the good stuff deeper in. Damn it! He’d wanted to go with all seven women! Man oh man, what a barracks story that would have made! While his physical body had—um—responded almost at once to the sensations he’d been experiencing inside the sphere, the interactive AI program running through his brain should have easily let him experience seven orgasms in a row in his head.
And now they were dragging him back to base, out a hundred dollars and nothing to show for it but a wet crotch and a semen-soaked wrap!
Yeah…he thought about arguing. But there was something about Sergeant Major Kaminski’s bearing—not to mention the pressed-and-tailored perfection of his khakis and that incredible splash of colored ribbons on his shirt—that made even a veteran griper like Lucky Leckie think twice, then back down. It didn’t help that Kaminski was in full uniform while he was stark naked.
The real problem was that Kaminski was a lifer. Those campaign ribbons—for Mars and Garroway’s March and Cydonia, for Luna, Picard and Tsiolkovsky, for Vera Cruz and Cape Town and Havana, not to mention the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with cluster, the Purple Heart, Expert Rifleman—together they created a truly formidable barrier no mere corporal with nothing but a National Defense Ribbon and an SMEU qualification badge could stand against.
Hell, Kaminski would drop-kick him clear back to V-burg if he even tried.
“Aye, aye, Sergeant Major,” he said. Tossing the wet towel on the floor, he turned and followed Tone into the locker room, where they’d left their clothes. Koharu, who’d modestly turned away at his nudity, was already fastidiously scrubbing at his couch with a disinfectant spray.
Hell, he thought, it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen naked men before. Everyone knew you could get real girls at Mamasan’s, not just the computer-programmed ones. He’d even tried them a time or two, and they’d been okay. It was just that the fantasies made possible in the virtual reality spheres were so much better than anything any flesh-and-blood whore could possibly conjure for you. Especially with the newer equipment that let you experience full, all-body sensation without having to have surgically implanted jacks, gimmicks that had never been all that popular except with the most passionately devoted computer jocks. Better than the real thing.
Besides, linking in to an orgy with a roomful of computer-generated women guided by an entertainment AI was the absolute ultimate in safe sex.
Dressed in their civvies, he and Tone returned to the lounge at the building’s entrance, where several pleasant-looking hostesses sat at tables or at the bar. Kaminski was waiting for them.
“Here, you two,” he said, extending two plastic credit slips.
“What are these?” Tone asked.
“Your refunds. I talked Mamasan down to half price for both of you.”
“Shit,” Lucky said. “How’d you manage that?” Mamasan Koharu had the rep of a polite and civilized female dragon who didn’t back down on anything where her girls, her boys, or her business was concerned.
“I talked to her nice, Leckie. Something you wouldn’t know about.” He grinned. “And I told her it would be a shame if word spread among the personnel on the base about what happened to you. I guess she felt that losing a hundred was better than having her business go flatline.”
“Well, hey! Thanks!” He took the credit slip, unholstered his PAD, and slid the data strip end through the reader. His account credited him with fifty dollars as the plastic slip turned from green to black. He tossed the dead slip on the floor.
Kaminski stopped him with a twenty-kiloton-per-second look. “Pick it up.”
“But Sergeant Major—”
“Pick it up, shithead!” As Lucky obeyed, Kaminski growled, “Maintaining decent relations with the civilian population in the area is tough enough, asshole, without you vandalizing the neighborhood with your fucking attitude. Now shitcan your garbage and let’s get back aboard!” He nodded to the watching women. “Ladies.”
Outside, Kaminski’s car, a gray Ford-Toshiba Electric from the motor pool, was parked in the Virtuality lot, tapping a charge from the contact posts. Beyond, traffic whizzed by on Highway One. Tone’s car, a neon-red bubbletop Zephyr, was in the recharge slot nearby.
“So, what’s all the rush, Master Sergeant?” Lucky asked as they trotted down the steps. “Are we on alert?”
“Affirmative. They just passed the word. The launch date has just been moved up. We’re boosting, boys, probably late next week.”
“Holy shit!” Tone said. “I ain’t got any of my shit together.”
“Then you’d
