Once outside the lock, the invaders were quickly lost in a miasma of swirling steam. The last Karina saw of Kisia or her soldiers for quite some time was the sight of Kisia pulling frantically at the neck of her silvery garment. The invaders mopped sweat out of their eyes and tore off whatever bits of clothing they could spare. They were desperate to keep themselves from broiling in the 135 degree steam heat of the artificial Turkish bath generated by a combination of Hoa’s weather wizardry and Hafiz s design for another homey little luxury he had planned to add to the Sho.hra.za3.
After a bit, though, the invaders flashed their weapons again, and another of Hafiz’s elegant portals was blown open. “The camels, please,” Hafiz told the computer.
“What will those do, Hafiz?” Karina asked. “Where have you been hiding camels?”
“They are holograms, my beloved,” Hafiz said. “Only holograms, but we have arranged for them to appear to spit great boluses of the most noisome and slimy mixture ever to spoil the high tone of a caravan. Sadly, we did not mix the stuff with acid or poison or something a bit more lethal for fear of harming my own people. These are delaying tactics Only, you understand, but perhaps this spawn of scum-born scorpions will find it sufficiently distracting that we will buy time until assistance may arrive. Meanwhile, the navigation officer is deleting our course from the ship’s computer.”
“Won’t Yasmin have warned them about these things?”
Karina asked. “You did say she knew all of your security precautions.”
Hafiz smiled sweetly. “Not these. The good doctor Hoa and I have been amusing ourselves with these little diversions only since we left Rushima-while you were involved in your spiritual activities, o pot of passion.”
The camel charge was a sight to behold and it certainly did have the element of surprise. If only Hafiz and Dr. Hoa could have made the camels spit something as deadly as it was disgusting, Karina thought, so that these miscreants could be sent back to their creator to have their spirits adjusted and be refitted for their next lives as lizards, snakes, and insects of various species.
The girl pirate’s head was encased almost immediately in a blob of green goo. Soon enough, all the invaders were wiping their eyes, coughing from the fumes, and otherwise displaying their displeasure at the welcome they were receiving from the Shahrazcu). They realized quickly enough that the camels were holograms, of course, but that did not stop them from slipping and falling on the pseudospit, causing their weapons to discharge accidentally. Two of the invaders were “wounded in the struggle.
The ship’s computer tracked their progress on the diagram
of the hull’s interior and showed that the next portal they blasted open led them through a maze of halls that caused them to actually go back the way they had come, though not through the Turkish bath.
Instead, the hologram this time was of a vast and endless desert and the walkway designed to help load the ship before takeoff was looped to operate treadmill fashion. The invaders walked, then ran, then walked, but never escaped the desert hologram, nor its arid climate, also courtesy of Dr. Hoa and the ship’s computer. By the time someone had the presence of mind to shoot into the simulated rolling sand dunes beneath their feet, the tongues of all of the invaders, at least the human ones, were hanging out, and they were looking parched dry and burned from the sunlamps, fixtures from the ship’s spa, that augmented the artificial climate.
The desert disappeared, the portal opened, and the very hot and weary invaders stumbled through to the desert oasis.
“Dancing girls,” Hafiz said. The diagram showed that the invaders had climbed through the desert up to the next level. The oasis looked as inviting as it was supposed to, and featured a hologram of Hafiz s favorite garden with a fifteen-layer cascading fountain looking like a waterfall. At this point, Karina noticed that all of the crew except for themselves, Dr. Hoa, and the fallen captain had disappeared. “Where?” she began.
“Watch,” Hafiz said. “In deference to the pacifistic nature of our dear Acorna’s people, we brought no deadly weaponsbut this does not mean my crew has suffered a lapse of their very fine training that makes them the most skilled of warriors in all manner of martial arts and hand-to-hand combat. See you, my blossom, this is what the intruders will behold.” And a squad of improbably endowed and incredibly agile and flexible dancing girls-well, persons, as Hafiz had added a pair of dancing boys to the troop, all muscles and flashing dark eyes, with skills to match those of the women. Clad, but not very, in peekaboo veils of glowing, translucent silk in emerald, sapphire, garnet, raspberry, saffron, all were likewise adorned with jingling coins of purest gold fluttering from between lush breasts, cascading over rippling abdominal muscles, twinkling with the twitching of hips, sliding over sinuous arms and necks, and flirting from between brows and just under the lower eyelashes where coy veilings began. Two dancers for each invader, Karina saw, and the invaders, who surely knew this must be a hologram also, could not quite bring themselves to shoot. In fact, as the dancers kicked up little sprays of water from the quite-real fountain, quite-real water touched the parched, would-be conquerors, who disregarded their weapons long enough to drink, to wash their hot faces, to reach for proffered flesh.