Free Halo: First Strike by Eric S. Nylund Page B

still calling out rhythmic hoots. 
    Back-and-forth and side-to-side, they swayed as the line lurched
    ahead, and the drummer continued her dervish dance.
     
    When the night had filled with all the sounds, the drummer
    broke through the line, then finished the song with a series of
    rolls and tumbles that brought her next to the other two
    musicians, where she came to her feet and flung her arms up to the
    sound of an orchestral chord, then down to chop it the sound, up
    and down again and again, and so to the end.
     
    The drummer climbed up the backs of the two men, who stood
    with their arms linked; balancing with one foot on each of their
    shoulders, she brought her palms together beneath her chin and
    bowed to the audience, then raised her arms above her head and
    somersaulted forward to land in front of the other two.
     
    "Hoot hoot hoot," said the collective, their line now broken.
     
    The three musicians stepped together and bowed in unison.
     
    Gonzales caught Lizzie looking at him, and their gazes
    crossed, held for an extra, almost unmeasurable instant, and she
    smiled.
     
    The musicians bowed for the last time to the Interface
    Collective's hooting chorus.  Okay, thought Gonzales.  I like it. 
    Hoot hoot hoot.
    #
     
    Lying in her bed, Lizzie turned from side to side, lay on her
    back and stretched.
     
    The two from Earth seemed okay.  Gonzales she would keep an
    eye on, of courseaccording to Showalter, the man was Internal
    Affairs and wired to a SenTrax comer, a board candidate named
    TraynorChrist knew what script he was playing from.  Diana
    Heywood she didn't worry about:  the woman was into something
    stranger than she probably knew, but that was her problem, hers
    and Aleph's.
     
    As Showalter and Horn were her problem.  They would yank the
    plug on this one if anything looked like going wrong.  In fact,
    they would never have let it happen if Aleph hadn't insisted. 
    Aleph and the collective saw Jerry Chapman's condition as an
    opportunity to extend Aleph's capabilities, but the whole business
    just made Showalter and Horn edgy.
     
    Aleph itself troubled herit had been unforthcoming about
    the project and those involved in it, almost as if it were hiding
    something from her  why? with regard to a small project like
    this, one apparently unimportant to Halo's larger concerns?  What
    was the devious machine up to?
     
    So Lizzie lay, her thoughts spinning without resolution, and
    she gave in and called her Chinese lover.
     
    He wore a black silk robe embroidered across the front with
    rearing crimson dragons; his straight ebony hair fell over his
    shoulders.  When he let the robe fall away, his skin shone almost
    gold under lamplight, and his muscles stood with the clear
    definition of youth and endowment and use.
     
    Coarse white sheets slid away from her shoulders and breasts
    as she rose to greet him, and she felt her desire rising through
    her abdomen and bursting through her chest like the rush of a
    needle-shot drug.
     
    She pressed against him, and his rough, strong hands moved
    across her body.  She lay back as he ducked his head between her
    legs, and she spread her legs and felt his first light, hot
    caresses.
     
    After she had come for the first time, she moved up to sit
    astride him, then for some timeless time the two moved to the
    exact rhythms of her needcock and lips and tongue and fingers
    playing on her body.
     
    Physically satiated, she dismissed him then, ghost from the
    sex machine, and pulled the plugs from the sockets in her neck. 
    Then she lay alone, silent in her bed in Halo Cityisolated by
    her job and, she supposed, by her temperament, dependent on
    machines for love.
     
    Maybe it was time to find a human lover.
    #       
     
    Exhausted by travel and novelty, lulled by food and drink,
    Gonzales fell quickly into sleep, and sometime later he dreamed:
     
    He was with a lover he hadn't seen in years.  In the
    background violin and piano played, and