Camouflage Read Online Free PDF

milk,” she said, confusing it. The fluid it produced that way was not milk, and to fill a glass would take all night.
    She read its expression almost correctly and smiled. “In case I get caught, silly.”
    A little moonlight filtered through the curtains. The changeling adjusted its irises and made it bright as day, watching her slowly unbutton the pajama top.
    It noted the actual size and disposition of breasts, not the way they appeared when she was clothed. The pigmentation and placement of nipples and aureoles. (It had wondered about its own nipples, which seemed to have no function.)
    She slipped into bed next to it, and it attempted to pull down the pajama bottoms.
    “Naughty, naughty.” She kissed it on the mouth and moved one of its hands to a breast.
    The kiss was odd, but it was something it had seen, and returned with a little force.
    “Oh my,” she whispered. “You’re hot.” She reached down and stroked the part that had no name. “Aren’t you the cat’s pajamas.”
    That was pretty confusing. “No, I’m not.”
    “Just a saying.” It moved both hands over her body, studying, measuring. Most of it was similar to the male body it inhabited, but the differences were interesting.
    “Oh,” she said. “More.” It was studying the place that was most different. Deborah began to excrete fluid there. It went deeper. She moaned and rubbed its hand with the wet tissues there.
    She closed her hand over the unnamed part, and stroked it softly. It wondered whether it was an appropriate time to leak fluid itself, and began to.
    “Oh no,” she said; “oh my.” She shucked off her pajama bottoms and slid up his body to clasp him there, with her own wet parts, and move up and down.
    It was an extraordinary sensation, similar to what he had done alone earlier, but much more intense. It allowed the body’s reflexes to take over, and they pounded together perhaps a dozen times, and then its body totally concentrated on that part, galvanized, and explosively excreted—three, four, five times, the pressure decreasing.
    It breathed hard into the space between her breasts. She slid down to join her mouth with its. She inserted her tongue, which was probably not an offering of food. It reciprocated.
    She rolled over onto her back, breathing hard. “Glad you remember something.”

- 7 -
apia, samoa, 2019
    T hey had a lot of company when two tugs began to tow the artifact toward the beach. Three military helicopters jockeyed for space with six from news organizations.
    It was a perplexing sight. The artifact wasn’t visible even from directly overhead, though the shroud over it had been removed. The titanium-mesh net that carried its mass kept it suspended a meter above the ocean floor, and the water was perfectly transparent.
    A newsie photographer with diving gear jumped from a helicopter skid and went down beside it, and saw a sand-colored drape over a long cigar-shaped object. The drape fluttered once and revealed a shiny mirror surface. The mesh of the net was too fine for the newsie to reach through and expose it, but it was moving slowly enough for her to swim alongside and offer pictures and a running commentary, amusing for its lack of content, as the artifact hit the sandy floor and crunched through dead coral on its way to shore. It made a groove a meter deep in the sand, and thecables pulling it yanked tight and thrummed with the force of moving it.
    When the tugs came gently aground, Greg and Naomi dragged a heavy cable through the light surf and dove with it, giving the newsie something to photograph. They cut through the mesh with a torch and pulled back the drape while the other two engineers worked their way down the cable with a large metal collar.
    The collar, a meter round, supported four thick bolts. They slipped it over the shiny metal thing, and drove the bolts down with an air hammer, deafening in the water. When they were done, they took out earplugs and waved at the dazed newsie, and