It was a pleasant enough way to spend the evening, although things got a little awkward as bedtime approached. I probably should have expected it, but somehow it caught me completely by surprise when Azalea delicately asked about my preferences in ‘entertainment’. As in, did I want her or one of the other girls to join me, or should they send for a boy or two?
My blush was so bright, I’m sure the ships in orbit picked up the thermal bloom. Fortunately Emla came to my rescue.
“My mistress is shy,” she told them. “Usually it’s just us, but I’ll let you know if she wants something different while we’re here. Sound good, Alice?”
“Um, yeah,” I managed. “What she said.”
Emla started laughing the moment they left the room.
“Now they’re going to think we’re sleeping together!” I complained.
“We are,” she pointed out.
“No, I mean, that we’re doing it! Oh, you know what I mean. Ugh! Are you trying to embarrass me?”
“Maybe a little,” she admitted. “But hey, I figured it was better than the alternative,” she said. “Do you really want to explain to them why you don’t want anyone? That would be an embarrassing conversation, but if you don’t tell the whole story they might feel insulted. Or worse, their boss might decide they’re not doing a good enough job and replace them. This way they’ll come to me with stuff like that, and I can run interference for you.”
I sighed. “I guess you have a point.”
“Of course, if you want to find out what all the fuss is about you couldn’t pick a better place. I’m sure they could find you some handsome, smooth-talking guy with years of intensive training in how to please a lady…”
I threw a pillow at her.
The bed was strange, built low to the ground with a thinner mattress than I was used to. But the silk sheets were really nice, and I had to admit that having Emla next to me made me feel a lot better about sleeping in a strange place.
The next morning I indulged myself by sleeping in, and having breakfast in bed. But I was used to having a million things to work on, and by noon I was starting to feel a little stir-crazy. Captain Sokol spent the morning on the com, and then went out with Naoko and Chief West to have a bunch of meetings with people. But I didn’t have any work to do, and I couldn’t access the ship’s training libraries from here. There was a collection of vidshows in the suite’s datanet, but they were all ‘cultured’ stuff that seemed stupid to me. The books weren’t any better, and sitting around talking about nothing was going to get old fast.
“Is there a training room we can use?” I finally asked.
“Of course,” Azalea assured me. “What sort of training?”
“You know, martial arts? Emla just got a new body recently, and we haven’t had a chance to try it out properly.”
“This sounds like fun,” Emla put in. “Are you going to teach me that neat style you use, Alice?”
Style? Since when did I have a style?
“We’ll see,” I said.
“The dojo is, of course, open to guests of the oyabun,” Azalea said. “Shall I reserve a space for you?”
“Sure. Where is this place?”
It turned out that the palace had a whole big facility devoted to fighting practice, with lower levels that the inugami used and an upper level reserved for important people. Which apparently included guests, because that’s where Emla and I ended up. It was pretty empty in the middle of the day, with just a handful of men in funny clothes practicing with wooden swords over in one corner. We claimed a stretch of mat on the other side of the room, where the ceiling was high enough to allow for aerobatic maneuvers.
Some instinct had led me to reject the special exercise clothes Azalea offered. Instead Emla wore her skinsuit, and I was back in the dress I’d worn for the audience. I switched it to combat mode as I squared off with Emla, and the skirt instantly divided into strips that wouldn’t get my way. I’d left the shoes behind, of course. I wasn’t about to try fighting in high heels.
“Alright, let’s see what you’ve got,” I told her. “No lethal weapons or AoE effects; we’ll pretend we’re trying to capture each other intact. Ready? Begin.”
She was fast. I’d barely finished the word when her fist tried to cave in my face, and as strong as she was I knew blocking was hopeless. Instead I shifted slightly to one side, grabbed her wrist and elbow, and used her own momentum to throw her.
A human would have been stunned by the impact, but she rolled back to her feet before my follow-up kick could land. Our manipulator fields clashed, negating each other as we traded a series of fierce blows that mostly failed to connect.
She was a lot better than I’d expected. I could tell she didn’t have the instinctive awareness of motion that my physics sense gave me, but Strange Loop Sleuth had set her up with an elaborate set of skill packs that almost made up for it. She was also a good twenty times stronger than me, and she had lots of sneaky tricks built into her. She could change the length of her limbs at will, and deploy cutting edges in all kinds of inconvenient places. She had nonlethal weapons, too. Contact drugs and neurostims, on top of the sonic stunner that our rules excluded.
At first she chased me all over the mat, but I adapted pretty quick. In a few minutes I was holding my own, and then I got her measure and really started to make her work for her hits. I think I learned more about unarmed fighting in the next hour than I had in my whole life.
It was like dancing, only better. A furious chess match where the slightest hesitation meant instant defeat. The fact that Emla’s body was so much tougher than mine only made it more fun. She seemed invincible, and maybe she would be to bare hands. But I had my own advantages. My field was stronger than hers, and far more precise. I was getting a feel for how her body worked, and that gave me ideas about how to beat this challenge.
The first time she managed to pin me she grinned down at me for a second, and kissed me on the tip of my nose.
“Got you, Alice.”
Then she bounced to her feet, and stepped back so we could start again.
I blushed, and didn’t say anything about it. But when I finally figured out how to use my field to pull her components out of whack so I could pin her for a second, I found myself returning the favor.
She looked so adorably confused. She was strong enough to pick up a tank, but with her elbows locked in a half-transformed state she couldn’t move her arms to throw me off.
“What… how… what did you do?”
“Got you, Emla.”
I kissed her nose, and released my grip on her internal parts as I stepped back. The little bits of diamondoid bone slotted back into place, and her joints suddenly started working again. Her eyes went wide as she finally realized what I’d done.
“Alice! You keep your field off my parts, you cheaty super-mistress you!”
“Make me,” I shot back,