Chapter 23 Chapter Fourteen

He heard her voice and turned around.The reflected force field disappeared.Moneta's carcass was covered with sweat and glistened with oil; her black hair was gathered in tufts on her temples; her breasts were firm. "come over." Kassad looked down at himself.His own force field was also gone, and he made it disappear through his own consciousness.Now, he was more hyper than any other day he could remember. "Come here," Moneta called softly. Kassad walked over and picked her up, feeling the sweaty slickness of her buttocks, and carried her to a meadow on top of a wind-eroded knoll, where he laid her on the ground, next to stacks of deportees. Kassad then roughly separated her legs, grabbed both of Moneta's hands with one hand, raised her arms above her head, pinned her to the ground, and stretched himself The long body bent between her legs.

"Well," Moneta whispered, Kassad kissed the lobe of her left ear, pressed his lips to the pulse of her neck, licking the smell of her salty sweat.Lying among the dead.There will be more dead.Thousands.Thousands.Laughter came from the belly of the corpse.Long lines of soldiers emerged from the jumping ships and into the waiting flames. "Mmm," she breathed warmly in Kassad's ear.She twisted her hands away and slid down Kassad's wet shoulders, long nails running down his back, pulling him closer.Kassad throbbed.The teleporter opened, and the long, icy body of the attack carrier drove in.The heat of the plasma bomb.Hundreds of ships, thousands, danced and perished like dust in a whirlwind.Huge cylinders of tight blood-red light cut across the vast area, bathing the target in a turbulent surge of heat, and corpses boiled in red light.

"Yeah." Moneta opened her body to her and opened her mouth too.There was warmth all over her body, her tongue tangled in his mouth, and Kassad felt the welcome of warm friction.He tensed his body, let the warm feeling engulf him, and they began to writhe together.A hundred worlds of heat.Continents are burning with bursts of bright light, and the waves of boiling seas are rolling.The air seemed to be on fire.Seas of superheated air billow, as if warm skin revived by a lover's touch. "Um...um...um..." Moneta's breath brushed his lips warmly.His skin was shiny and smooth as velvet.Now Kassad sped up the action, and as the sensation expanded, the universe contracted.She wrapped him up, tightly surrounded him with warmth and moisture, and her consciousness shrank.Kassad seemed aware of the pressure coming from the center of his being, and now he moved violently in response.strenuous.Kassad grimaced, closed his eyes, and saw...

...the fireball expands, the stars die, the sun explodes in a huge blast of fire, and the galaxies perish in a frenzy of destruction... ...He felt a stabbing pain in his chest, but he still couldn't stop, the speed was getting faster and faster, he opened his eyes and saw... … Huge steel thorns rose from Moneta’s chest, Kassad stopped inadvertently, flinched, the thorns almost pierced him, the blade of the thorns was dripping with blood, and the blood dripped on her carcass Up, up her fair body.Now, the thorns reflected light, and the carcass was cold as dead metal.Kassad watched Moneta through eyes dimmed with passion, her lips were dry and curled, revealing rows of teeth formed of steel blades, and even now her fingers gripped Touching his buttocks, those are some metal blades, slashing there, her legs are like strong steel hoops imprisoning him, her eyes...

...At the last second before orgasm, Kassad tried to get away...His hands were around her throat, holding her tightly...She clung to him like a leech, a lamprey, Always ready to suffocate him...they writhe in dead bodies... …Her eyes are like two rubies, frantically shining hot light (his painful lower body seems to be filled with that heat), spreading like flames, overflowing everywhere... …Kassad slammed his hands on the ground and jumped out of her arms… from its arms… His strength was insane, but it wasn’t enough, the terrible gravity pressed them together… like seven gills The eel's mouth was sucking at him, and he felt like he was about to explode, and he looked into her eyes... the destruction of the world... the destruction of the world! !

Kassad screamed and walked away.When he jumped up and rushed to the side, a large piece of his flesh was torn off.The iron teeth closed tightly with a "click", almost biting off his thing.Kassad flung himself sideways, rolled, and fled, unable to hold back his shaking.Some liquid spewed out suddenly, pouring down like a gulp, and spilled on the clenched fist of a corpse.Kassad moaned loudly in pain and rolled over again, curled up like a fetus, and again. He heard a hiss and a rustle, and she was standing behind him.Kassad curled up on his back against the sun, squinting up, enduring his own pain.She stood in front of him with her legs spread apart, a silhouette made up of countless thorns.Kassad wiped the sweat from his eyes and looked at his own wrist, red with blood, as he waited, waiting for the fatal blow.His skin tightened, expecting the blade to slash into flesh.But no, gasping for breath, Kassad looked up and saw Moneta standing in front of him, legs made of white flesh, not steel.Her face was dark from the sun, but Kassad saw red flames dying in the faceted cores of her eyes.She grinned, and Kassad saw daylight glint on her rows of metal teeth. "Kassad..." she whispered, the sound of sand scraping against bone.

Kassad quickly averted his eyes, struggled to get up, stumbled over corpses, over the hot rubble, and fled away in fear.He didn't look back. It took nearly two days before a Hyperion SDF reconnaissance team found Colonel Fedman Kassad.He was lying unconscious on the grassy moor leading to the abandoned Time Fortress, more than twenty kilometers from the ruins of the Dead City and the pod the Ousters had ejected from.Kassad was completely naked, and he was on the verge of death from prolonged exposure and multiple serious injuries.However, he recovered well with emergency field assistance and was immediately airlifted south of the Bridle Range to Keats Hospital.

The reconnaissance team of the Self-Defense Forces marched cautiously towards the north, guarding against the anti-entropy field around the Time Tomb, and guarding against the booby traps left by the Ousters.nothing.The reconnaissance team found only the wreckage of Kassad's escaped machine, and the burnt hulls of two assault craft, two ships the Ouster had blasted from orbit.They had no idea why the Ousters had melted their ship into a heap of slag, and the bodies of the Ousters, both inside and outside of the ship, were too burned for dissection and analysis. Three Hyperian days later, Kassad regained consciousness, and he swore he could remember nothing after stealing the "squid."Then, two weeks later local time, he left Hyperion on a military torchship.

Upon returning to the Web, Kassad resigned from his post in the military.For a while he was active in the antiwar movement, appearing occasionally on Global Network, advocating disarmament.But the attack on Brescia had mobilized the Overlord towards a true interstellar war that no one had imagined for three centuries.At the same time, Kassad's opinion was either ignored or rejected as his guilty conscience as the "butcher of South Brescia". For sixteen years after Brescia, Colonel Kassad disappeared from the Web, from the consciousness of the Web.Although there has been no major war for sixteen years, the Ouster is still the number one enemy of the Overlord.Feldman Kassad has become a slowly fading memory.

By the time Kassad finished his story, it was late in the morning.The Consul narrowed his eyes and looked around.For the first time in more than two hours, he noticed the cruise ship and its surroundings. The Benares was on the main channel of the Hawley.Chains and cables crunched as manta rays blasted turbulent jets through the power plant. The Benares seemed to be the only boat going up the river, but now they could see quite a few boats going in the other direction. The Consul touched his forehead, surprised to see his hands slipping in sweat.It was very warm, and the shadows of the tarpaulin crept away, but the consul didn't know it.He squinted, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and stepped back into the shadows.The robot kept a wine bottle in a cupboard by the table, and the Consul poured himself some.

"My God," said Father Hoyt, "then, according to this creature called Moneta, the Time Tombs are moving against the flow of time, aren't they?" "Yes," Kassad said. "Is that possible?" Hoyt asked. "Yes." It was Saul Winterberg who answered. "If that's true," said Braun Lamia, "then the time you 'met' this Moneta...whatever her real name...was in her past, which was you The future of . . . that is, you will meet in the future." "Yes," Kassad said. Martin Silenus went to the rail and spat into the river. "Colonel, do you think this woman is a Shrike?" "I don't know." Kassad's words were barely audible. Silenus turned to Saul Winterberg. "You are a scholar. In the Shrike myth, is there any mention of this thing being deformed?" "No," said Winterberg.He is preparing a feeding bottle for his daughter.The baby whimpered softly and wriggled its little fingers.