Free Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress

Again that swooping vertigo, that sense of unreality, took him, and again he fought it off.
    She said, “So you think Soledad should land the shuttle on top of the palace? Is it that big building there? I see a flat section of roof.”
    “Yes. Are you . . . aren’t you steering the egg?”
    “No. Soledad is. My other friend.” Then more strange sounds to the wall, answering sounds, and Aveo watched in fear and awe as the egg slowed over the palace and lowered itself gently to the rooftop.
    “Come here, please, Aveo, I want to try something,” Cam said. “Really, stand as close to me as you can.”
    Every impulse in Aveo resisted. But he stood and she moved next to him, reaching inside her tunic. Then she moved even closer. As tall as he was, she bulked larger, and she smelled of clean hair and female skin. To his horror, Aveo felt his old member, long unused, stir even as he pulled back from her foreignness, and was ashamed of doing so. Hewas—had been—a scholar. The strange should intrigue him, not repel him.
    For the second time Cam reached inside her tunic, and Aveo felt a faint tingling along the side of his body beside hers. He drew back sharply.
    “No, don’t do that. I’m trying to see if the shield—the invisible armor—can cover us both. It covers my gun”—a meaningless sound—“but I don’t know how much area it will—Fuck it, why didn’t the Atoners give me more information?”
    More meaningless gabble, but he was slightly shocked to hear the crudest of all words for copulation come from her mouth.
    “Okay, I’m going to shove you against that cabinet handle—Do you feel that?”
    She pushed his chest against a piece of metal protruding from the wall. Aveo gasped, “No!” She shoved harder, and still he felt nothing except a fear he could not shake, like a low fever. Again and again she experimented with various parts of his body, pushing and pulling at him like laundry in a boiling pot.
    “Okay, now we know. You can be inside the shield but only if you stand behind me and really, really close. Otherwise, the force field . . . the mechanism . . .
it
just snaps you out. Can you do that, Aveo?”
    “I can. I will not.”
    “You
will not
? What are you, crazy? Otherwise soldiers are going to run you through like butter! Look!”
    She waved at the wall window. Warriors poured onto the roof from below, a full battle group without the discipline of Escio’s men but far more heavily armed.
    “I am a scholar of the Hall of Scholars,” Aveo said. “I will not go before Uldunu Four like a child clinging to its mother’s skirt.”
    “Would you rather be dead? I need you to translate because
you
spoke only Pularit to me. And you owe me, Aveo. I already saved your life once!”
    “And took Cul Escio’s.”
    “Saving
you
! God, you people! Now you come with me or I’ll just . . . take you out to the countryside someplace safe, dump you, and start all over learning whatever the fuck language it is that your king speaks!”
    He could imagine that: Cam, alone in the court of Uldunu Four, unableto speak the language, ignorant of even the most basic protocol, insulting the king from the first move on the kulith board. Aveo himself wandering the countryside, hungry and very soon dead. But what matter? All life was ephemeral, all death eternal, and saving one man did not atone for the killing of another because atonement itself was irrelevant. In the vast reaches of time, nothing really mattered any more than moves in yesterday’s kulith.
    But it mattered to him. Even though whatever scholarly knowledge he gained from this bizarre adventure would die with him, anyway.
    He said quietly to Cam, “I will come.”
    “Good! Now hang on tight. I’m going to open—Wait, what about Obu? She’ll have to stay here. There’s no way safe for her—Wait, in that supply cabinet.”
    Obu wouldn’t go. The moment Cam touched her she came to life, shrieking and flailing. Finally Cam jammed Obu