Posted by Extranjero on June 08, 2007 at 12:32:31:
WAR WIDOWS (Part 3)
"I was wondering," Leilani said, "why you’re dressed up like the nose art of your plane."
Gemma glanced at her and shrugged. "That was Anna’s bright idea. The art comes from the Old Days. I suppose it turned her on."
"I guess it did," Leilani said, eyeing Gemma’s purple leotard. The blonde girl’s breasts were perfectly defined. The midriff had been cut away to bare her well-toned belly, and the clinging Lycra emphasised her arse. Leilani sensed that she was in two minds about the outfit: half-bashful, half-assertive of her sexuality.
The three of them were walking down a rutted jungle track. The river winked with sunlight through a screen of foliage over to their right. Leilani wore a khaki shirt that reached to her bare thighs, unbuttoned past her cleavage and with nothing underneath but black lace briefs. The shirt was cinched in by a pistol belt round her slim waist. A Beretta bumped against her hip, and she had a Colt Commando on her back.
"I was glad to have the Lady," Gemma murmured. "Katie’s got the Virgin Widow, so they made her wear a fucking nightie …"
Lena wore tight khaki shorts – the pair that matched the shirt – with a black vest top and a pushed-back army cap. An MP5, her favourite gun, was slung against her ribcage. She and Leilani wore calf-high boots, in contrast to the pilot’s soft red shoes.
Gemma had the captured Sten gun hung over one shoulder, and that contrasted with her outfit too.
"Sure you’re okay to walk in those?" Leilani asked her dryly. Gemma gave her a piqued look, as if it was a point of pride for her. There were already stains of sweat under her armpits. She pushed at her leotard’s long sleeves, but matched the others’ pace without complaint.
They crossed a tributary and paused to fill their water bottles. Leilani soaked a length of rag and gave it to Gemma to tie around her neck. Lena waited, glancing round like the bodyguard she was. The trees were full of whirrs and chirrups. Sunlight flickered through the leaves above.
"How far is it, do your reckon?" asked Leilani, straightening up. Gemma peered between the trees and pointed at a pinnacle of rock. It was cloaked in green, like a forgotten watchtower. The river bent below it. "On the far side of that bluff," the pilot said.
Slinging her water bottle, she went forward eagerly, until a sudden hiss of movement made her jump. An arrow out of nowhere struck the tree that she was passing and embedded in the bough with a dull thunk. Gemma flinched back with a gasp, eyes goggling at the missile. Her breasts heaved in her leotard. She fumbled for her Sten.
"No!" Leilani snapped. "Don’t move." She eased her hands well clear of her guns. Lena did the same, her pale eyes watchful. Gemma bit her lip, whey-faced, but spread her hands as well.
Furtive rustling sounds came from the undergrowth around them. "Who is it?" Gemma whispered.
"Just the Rivermaids," said Lena, very calm.
"You mean the Amazons?" the blonde girl quavered. She glimpsed a lissom female body sidling through the brush. Skin like rosewood, hair like ink and muscles like a panther’s. The figure held a bow, drawn taut, the arrow poised to fly at Gemma’s chest.
"They don’t like to be called that," said Leilani.
There were other shapes in the greenery and shadows, their bare skin glistening with sweat as they circled slowly round the trespassers. They were nude apart from closely-fitting loincloths and doeskin boots. Each girl held a drawn bow.
"When you were flying for the Guard," Leilani said to Gemma, "did you strafe their villages sometimes?"
The pilot swallowed nervously. "Er … yeah."
"Good job you flew at night, then," Lena murmured. "So they wouldn’t recognise you from your plane."
One of the Maids prowled forward out of cover. She had a strong, high-cheekboned face and almond-shaped dark eyes. Leilani’s eyes were much the same. The Maid locked gazes with her. Her aim stayed on Leilani’s cleavage. Then she gave her head an upward jerk. Leilani took it as a warning gesture, but didn’t realise why until she heard the growing drone above the trees.
A propeller plane was coming up the valley. Leilani’s heartstrings tightened with a jerk. She nodded to the Rivermaid and sank onto her haunches. Lena and Gemma followed suit. The huntresses crouched lower in the gloom. The aircraft hurtled overhead like a giant metal buzzard. Leilani glimpsed it through the leaves. It was a Catalina, black as death.
"How many contacts now?" asked Becca as she turned to starboard. Her voice was calm, the lenses of her shades inscrutable. But her large breasts gave the lie to her composure. They strained against her harness as she breathed excitedly.
"We’ve still got the three principals," came the observer’s voice, "but there are half a dozen new contacts down there."
"Amazons, I’ll bet you," Becca murmured. She could picture their bright figures on the bio-scanner screen. If only she’d had the use of that when her girls had cornered Gemma. But the scanner hadn’t been much use with its operator face-down in a ditch.
The new girl was bespectacled and serious. Becca hadn’t had a chance to bed her yet. As the aircraft banked, the observer braced herself in her dark cabin. Her narrowed eyes stayed on the screen. "They’re sitting tight," she said into her mic.
Becca smiled and raised her voice. "Black Cat to Tigress Unit. We’re orbiting the targets now. Move in and neutralise."
Below her in the trees, the Tigress leader touched her headset. "Don’t worry, Miss," she said. "We’ll eat their hearts out." Her oriental eyes followed the Black Cat for a moment, and then she gestured to her waiting squad.
The girls were young and Japanese, recruited straight from high school and transformed into ferocious jungle troops. They wore tight shorts and caps with neck flaps, both in mustard yellow, and their naked skin was streaked with tiger stripes. The dun-coloured paint broke up the outlines of their shapely bodies, contrasting with their beeswax-coloured skin.
Their captain carried an ancestral weapon on her hip: a short sword with a twenty-one-inch blade. But the weapon that she raised was a wood-mounted sub-machine gun, with a perforated barrel and curved clip. She cocked the bolt and started moving forward. The other Tigress girls fanned out and followed in her wake. Whoops and chitters echoed round the canopy above them, but a shroud of silence lay between the trees.
Then there was the sudden whirr and impact of an arrow. One of the soldiers squawked with pain and dropped her gun to clutch at her bare chest. But the shaft was buried deep between her collarbone and cleavage. A stream of blood spilled down her breast, as if to mock her tiger camouflage.
The Japanese girl fell backwards with a whimper. Her comrades sprang for cover and crouched low like watchful cats. Their leader pressed against a trunk, her paint-striped bosom heaving. The nearest soldier raised herself – and a second arrow whacked into her side. The girl reared back, about to scream, and a third shot pierced her ribcage. She gurgled as it split her gullet, clawing at the shaft as she collapsed.
But her captain glimpsed the archer’s furtive movement. She swung around the tree trunk with her sub-machine gun braced. The T-100’s wooden butt kicked back against her shoulder, and her breasts bobbed with the recoil as she sprayed the foliage. The Rivermaid was crouching in the fork of a gnarled tree. The burst tore splinters from the bark and seared into her unprotected flesh. The girl cried out and clasped her punctured belly, then folded and pitched forward like a bird shot from its perch.
The stutter of the gun rang through the forest. Leilani’s dark eyes widened and she twisted round to look. Gemma clutched her Sten, then froze amid the levelled arrows. But nobody let fly at her. It seemed they shared a common enemy.
The Maid who’d warned them of the plane now gestured urgently for them to leave the track and make for higher ground. Leilani nodded once in thanks, unslinging her Commando. The shots had come from somewhere close, but she could see no movement in the dappled gloom.
The three of them began to climb towards the unseen ridgeline, scrambling up between the trees through clinging undergrowth. The Rivermaids closed in behind them, facing the intruders. The Tigress troopers came on fast, as sleek and feline as their naked prey.
A bow twanged, but the arrow missed its target as striped skin blended with the undergrowth. Several troopers fired back; their muzzle flashes blazed like asterisks. The bullets whiplashed through the leaves and bit into the tree trunks. A Maid screamed woefully as wounds erupted in her chest.
More arrows streaked between the trees and some of them found targets. It was a trooper’s turn to wail as a barbed point thudded into her left breast. It punched through the voluptuous flesh to pierce the lung beneath it, and the Japanese girl crumpled, coughing blood.
The Tigress captain fired another burst, still loping forward. A Rivermaid spun loosely round, her dark hair flaring like a mourning veil. The primitives were hopelessly outgunned, but they kept fighting. An arrow thumped into the bough above the captain’s head.
The Catalina made another pass, its engines roaring, it belly seeming barely out of reach. A Maid glanced up, still nocking her next arrow. The distraction cost her dearly, and a blast of bullets jiggled her firm breasts.
The captain watched the girl spin down to lie like a shot rabbit. She peered beyond the body and saw movement on the rising ground ahead. A fleeting patch of purple through the screen of foliage. She spoke into her headset mic. "Our target’s on the slope. Outflank and pounce."
Leilani was in front, but now she paused to check behind her. Gemma was panting in her wake, her blonde hair stringy and her cheeks flushed pink. Lena came after the pilot, covering her backside. And beyond, Leilani glimpsed pursing shapes.
She brought the Colt Commando to her shoulder, bracing herself between two trees as she sighted down the slope. She saw a torso, tiger-striped, and snapped off two quick rounds. One struck the Tigress in the chest and blew most of her heart out past her spine. The girl flipped back, her boots kicked up and she tumbled into shadow. Gemma glanced round nervously. "Keep going," Lena grunted, prodding her.
Sub-machine guns opened fire from further down the slope. Leilani saw the muzzle flashes and shot back. Bullets hacked at branches and kicked up the dirt in fountains. Gemma squirmed around and squeezed a riposte from her Sten.
"Attagirl," Leilani said. "Now move. I’ll cover you." There were more girls moving to outflank them – ghostly shapes with camouflaged bare skin. Lena put her back against a tree, then leaned around it, triggering her MP5. Her bullet struck a Tigress in the brow. The girl’s sloe eyes went wide with shock, and then her head snapped backwards, her tits thrust out convulsively as she dropped onto her arse.
Further down, the last few Rivermaids were still resisting. Their leader drew her bow once more. Her heartbeat raced with fury more than fear. She loosed the arrow at a furtive movement, and a Tigress squealed with pain and clutched her tits. Then a new and sharper stutter echoed round the forest. The greenery around the Maid was whipped and shredded by an unseen squall. She skittered back, then turned and ran with her sisters close behind her. One girl wavered long enough to glimpse the stabbing flicker of the gun. Like Lot’s wife, she had seen too much. The bullets caught and mauled her. She limbo-danced beneath the blast, and hit the ground ten feet from where she’d stood.
The Tigresses had brought a light machine gun into action, its bipod resting on a fallen tree. It was a big T-99 with a box feed like a Bren gun. The gunner held the trigger down as the Rivermaids attempted to escape. Bullets whined between the tree trunks like a swarm of insects, exploding splinters from the wood and chewing foliage. First one and then another Maid were cut down by the barrage, but their leader ducked and weaved between the trees. She floundered through a screen of leaves and saw the river glinting. Her dark eyes brimmed with yearning for it. Then a burning pressure filled her chest. Like a running deer, she hadn’t felt the bullet that had hit her, but the round had burrowed deep and burst a lung. Grimacing, she staggered and pitched forward. There was a single bloody wound beneath her shoulder blade.
Lena flicked her MP5 to automatic fire. She fanned a burst across the trees, then scrambled five yards further up the slope. Her sweaty cleavage heaved against her singlet. A part of her had time to wonder what her arse looked like in her tight shorts.
Leilani took up covering fire as the Tigresses surged forward, her carbine flaring fiercely in the gloom. One of the troopers whinnied like a horse and tumbled backwards. Leilani switched her aim and punctured someone else’s tits. Gemma was still climbing. Bullets cracked and whined around them. The pilot glimpsed a movement from the corner of her eye. A pursuer had outflanked them and was closing from the right. Gemma twisted awkwardly and rattled off a burst. The Tigress jack-knifed with a grunt, and the Sten’s bolt clunked as its magazine ran out.
"Oh shit!" Gemma squealed. She didn’t have another clip. The gun was just a dead thing in her hands; she let it drop. Leilani glanced around and tugged the pistol from her holster. She tossed it to the pilot. Gemma reached out frantically. In that moment, as the pair of them were both distracted, Lena scrabbled into cover – and a bullet struck her just above the hip.
"Awgh!" she yelped. Then: "Bloody hell!" But the curse was full of pain. Leilani turned, eyes dark with dread. She fired a snarling burst between the trees. Then she crouched beside her girlfriend. Lena’s teeth were clenched. The bullet was in her abdomen; her blood oozed vividly. Their eyes met: Lena’s sapphire-blue, Leilani’s like a deer’s. The memories of what they’d lived through swirled between them both. The battle for the Citadel … The fight on the Black Train ... The loving touch of flesh on flesh ...
"I love you," Lena gasped. "Now shift your arse!"
Before Leilani could reply, she rolled back out of cover and slithered down the slope towards the climbing Tigresses.
"No!" Leilani wailed, but Lena was already firing, hitting the nearest troopers in their bellies and their breasts. The Tigresses convulsed and squawked as she tracked her aim across them. Leilani dropped one girl she’d missed. She braced herself to scramble after her.
"Leilani!" Gemma called. She sounded frightened and forlorn. Leilani hesitated. If she gave her life, the pilot would die too. The Tigresses were coming. Bullets stitched the slope below her. But how could she go on without her love?
But Lena had been her bodyguard before she was her lover. As both, she had been dedicated to Leilani’s life. To waste it now would see that dedication come to nothing. Leilani bit down on a sob, then tore herself away and fled upslope.
Lena waited, sprawling on her back, her bosom panting. The sunlight speared down through the leaves. The cries of startled wildlife filled her ears. She saw a movement, raised herself and fired another burst. A Tigress spun like a shot hare. Lena’s MP5 clicked empty and she swore.
She rolled behind the nearest tree and put her back against it. Her stomach filled with scalding pain, and she whimpered to herself. The carbine had a backup magazine clipped to the first one. As she fumbled to reload it, a striped figure loomed out of the greenery. Lena looked round with a gasp and swung her empty weapon as the Tigress captain thrust her short, curved sword.
The wakazashi’s tempered point went into Lena’s midriff just beneath the rounded bulge of her firm breasts. Lena made a winded sound and dropped the useless carbine, then flailed and tried to claw the captain’s face. But the blade drove deep, dividing flesh and organs. Lena whimpered faintly as her strength began to ebb. Then the blade ripped down into her belly, and her sobs became an anguished scream that rang around the forest canopy.
Leilani looked back, horrified, then clambered after Gemma. They were almost at the ridgeline now. The shots were more sporadic in their wake. The Catalina passed again, so low it swirled the treetops. Then they were on the other side and scrambling downhill, weaving through the trees.
"Two contacts escaping, Miss," the observer’s voice reported. "Most of the Tigress troop are down … They aren’t pursuing them."
"For fuck’s sake," muttered Becca as she brought the plane around. She didn’t fancy being debriefed on this. The Catalina’s roar swelled through the body-littered forest. Rivermaids and Tigresses lay crumpled where they’d dropped. Lena stared up blankly as the plane flashed overhead, its shadow briefly darkening her lifeless face.