EXTRACT FOR
Allochthon
(Author Unknown)

Chapter 1 - Lust for life



    Bruce Roberts was worried. I'm putting my balls on the line here, maybe literally. He finally decided to check out for himself just how good advanced pattern recognition software had become. Repeatedly, over the last couple of years, he had been caught out by the uncanny way opponents had been able to predict his actions, almost certainly due to application of AI-based tools. 

    He was now kneeling in the garden of his villa in seiza position, breathing slowly in preparation for his early-morning iaido exercises. His right hand rested on the tsuka, the hilt of the katana Japanese sword tucked into the belt of his judo Gi. According to the model output, he had a 98% probability of being attacked within the next five minutes. Although somewhat sceptical about the precision of this prediction, he slipped a tab of a cutting-edge combat performance enhancing drug into his mouth. Better safe than sorry.

    Apart from speeding up his reactions, the drug improved the sensitivity of his senses - in particular hearing and smell. Only because of this, he could now detect the slightest rustling from some dry leaves that he had scattered behind him and the faintest trace of floral shampoo in the breeze blowing from his back. When threatened by someone with superior combat skills, it's important to make the best of every possible advantage.

    The sound of an intake of breath was enough to localise his attacker and triggered his pre-emptive counter. The sword leapt free in a sweeping horizontal cut as his body twisted around with one knee still on the ground. Under other circumstances the view of small woman balanced on one leg with the other cocked back would have been distracting, especially as she was wearing a tight t-shirt and, from his low position, it was evident that this was her only item of clothing. Given his limited iaido skills, to reduce the risk of accidents, his practice sword had no edge but it would certainly do serious damage if it contacted the knee that it was whistling towards. Recognising this, his assailant managed a surprisingly elegant mid-air twist that brought her leg clear of the blade, but at the cost of landing in a crouch. His speeded up reactions again caught her out as the back-handed return cut smacked the flat of the blade against her tight buttocks with a loud crack that preceded her scream of pain. Bruce grimaced as he flowed to his feet and recovered his two-handed grip on the katana. That's got to hurt a lot and, in true iaido tradition, would have crippled her had I used the edge of a live blade. 

    The blow, combined with the shock of pain, toppled the girl forward, but she managed to turn this into a breakfall, rolling to her feet just in time to see the sword whistling towards the side of her head. Despite his confidence, supported by numerous fight simulations, that his opponent could throw herself to the side to avoid the blow, Bruce released his grip on the sword at the last moment and jumped forward instead. It was messy and inelegant, but he landed in top of the tiny Ninja and crushed her face-first into the lawn. I may have less speed and much less technique, but I've got a hell of a lot more weight. The Oriental martial arts have a lot going for them, but here a bit of Western grappling does the job. He smiled as he took advantage of her momentary discombobulation to apply a full nelson lock to her shoulders. "Okay, this time you're not getting out of this."

    His attacker wriggled like an eel, but with his full weight on her back and her arms locked, she had no choice but to tap-out.

    The little redhead was not amused. "What the fuck was that about? You're speeded up on one of Angela's drugs, but you can't just eat those things like smarties. They'll completely fuck you up. You take them only when you absolutely need to and then a clear-up straight afterwards."

    "I know all that. I took the tab about a minute before you attacked."

    "How could you...? You don't have cams secreted everywhere, do you? Our boss will go apeshit."

    "No, but I've been testing this pattern recognition stuff that's been giving us so much grief during the last couple of operations. It's scarily good - as you've just seen for yourself."

    "Well, I guess that an impromptu training session for you could be predicted, but how can software tell you when?"

    "How the code does it?" He shrugged. "I really don't have a clue, but I can see the basic principles involved. A neural-network AI constantly reworks a database containing everything about our team that can be mined from the internet and any monitors within the house and makes extrapolations about what we'll do in the future. The longer it runs, the better it gets. So all I did was ask `when and how will my pain-in-the-arse partner attack me today? ? and this is what it came up with - correct to within a minute or two."

    "I don't see how that's even close to being possible?"

    "I wasn't sure myself, so that's why I set up this test. In any case, that's the end of your surprise attacks on me. It actually allows me to iterate on the predictions so that I can work though all your likely attacks and test to find the best counters to them. You've got to admit that it works well, doesn't it?"

    "But that's not fair," she frowned. "You need this training so that you can respond to attacks that you haven't anticipated."

    "I possible do, but these have recently become an excuse for you to kick seven shades of shit out of me. It was about the time you got a taste of your own medicine."

    "Actually, that was really sore," the petite ninja twisted round and pulled up her t-shirt to show the livid scarlet band across her buttocks.

    "Ouch! You'd better get some cream on that before it turns into a bruise. It'll be a cracker."

    "Actually, I think I'll just let it go and then get some snaps. Evidence that you get your rocks off by beating up little girls." She looked up into his eyes and pouted, pretending to cry and reminding him how tiny she was.

    "Well, send me a copy and I'll use it as a screen-saver. This just reminds me that I didn't get photographic evidence the last time I whupped your sorry arse."

     Bruce wondered for a second if he had pushed his luck too far, well aware that, now forewarned, the little street-fighter could easily beat him up; the benefits provided by his drug would only slow down the process. He sighed in relief when she suddenly smiled. "Well, I guess I can live with that. Our score must be about five hundred for me compared to two for you."

    "Fine, so go and get someone else to play with and let me enjoy my iaido in peace." The difficult thing now will be clearing my mind, which is essential for this training. The predictive capabilities of AIs that take advantage of the exponentially-increasing power of cloud computing is truly scary. Given how much grief this has caused in the past, we need to think about what the future holds for us.

      

***

      

    After dinner that evening, Bruce brought the team together in what had been the spare bedroom of the villa that was their home for the last six months. This was set up as a high-tech meeting room with four comfortable leather chairs that were set around a circular table with a central holographic display column. Unusually, the three women were all wearing figure-hugging, tube mini-dresses of the type favoured by his boss, Angela. The tall, buxom professor was clad in a glossy, ice-blue number that was almost transparent and made it very obvious that she had skipped underwear. Indeed, it was also clear that the brunette's carpet matched the drapes. Her daughter and research assistant, Eva, was even taller, but with a slim figure that emphasised her spectacularly large breasts. The statuesque blonde was wearing a dress fabricated from smart fibre which was displaying a constantly changing collage of anime characters - also blondes, but with the skimpy clothing typical of this genre.

    At first glance, his miniscule sparring partner with her short red hair almost seemed like a child compared to the other women. Marion's dress was black with what appeared to be a transparent panel at the back, which showed off a huge, goth-style tattoo captioned Totesengel, the little ninja's nom du guerre. From the way in which the image responded to her movements, Bruce was fairly sure that it was a function of the smart material rather than an actual temporary tattoo.

    "Well now, Doctor Roberts, what have you got to tell us?" It was clear that Angela was in academic mode and Bruce hoped that the logic of his analysis was technically watertight. His boss was a Nobel-level microbiologist, but the depth of her knowledge outside of her subject area was quite intimidating. "I know you've got a bit of a bee in your bonnet about these smart machine-learning tools, but is there some threat from these that we're not already aware of?"

    "I ran a little test this morning..." Bruce summarised his success in overcoming Engel's surprise attack on him. "I must admit I was sceptical myself, but the result was unambiguous," he concluded.

    While Angela was digesting the consequences of this revelation, Eva responded with a mischievous smile in Marion's direction. "It's funny that my little Angel seems to have forgotten this exercise," she put an arm around the shoulders of the petite redhead, who was glaring at Bruce.

    "I think it was more luck than anything else," she retorted. "After getting his arse kicked a few hundred times, he's got to luck out once or twice.

    "But Bruce certainly has a point," Angela mused. "As we all know, only Eva has a chance of holding out against you without some kind of help."

    "Maybe 10% of the time, she can," the little Angel responded with a savage grin.

    "Half the time, I make it" Eva grinned back, "but that's not the point. It's the accuracy and precision of the prediction that I find scary. Are these AI tools really so good?"

    Bruce shrugged his shoulders. "We've seen the impacts of this approach since we started working together. In fact, it was such a prediction that set Engel on my trail in the first place and there it was certainly a case of more luck than skill that let me escape our first encounter with my skin intact."

    "But you did make it to recruitment, with your new partner in tow, so the predictions can't have been that good," Angela pointed out.

    "Yes, at the beginning it was a bit hit and miss and, at that time, we had a mole in your organisation which could help explain how our opposition kept on catching up with us during our jaunt to sample extremophiles in Japan," Bruce acknowledged.

    "Booby-trapping the samples and blowing up our lab in Glasgow was certainly due to the mole."

    Bruce nodded. A sore point for Angela, as Eva was seriously injured in that attack. "Yes, but afterwards, when we were in Switzerland and France, we were picked up again. I'm not convinced that internal communications in your old company were tight, but Angel and I were certainly targeted by a team led by your pharmaceutical competition, Singmed. We were able to escape only when we introduced Eva as a wildcard, as they had no basis for predicting her decisions.

    "Mmm, let's put this on a timeline as I'm having problems getting my head around what our opponents are using here." Angela waved at her daughter, who typed on a virtual keyboard while sub-vocalising the commands needed to set up the holographic display. "Okay, we can start at the beginning, when I discovered the apparently immortal extremophiles. Despite being known to only a few top-level execs in the entire company, enough details of this research must have leaked to justify a corporate sabotage raid, which ended up torching my lab with the loss of all samples."

    "Up to this point, everything can be explained by traditional corporate espionage, as practiced by all major multinationals - especially in very high profit industries such as pharmaceuticals," Eva noted. "The potential value of advances in the areas of rejuvenation and extended longevity could easily explain interest in the work that we were carrying out in Glasgow."

    "These financial rewards would have our competitors in Big Pharma salivating, but the threat that such advances could pose to countries already suffering from the impacts of over-population also explains the wider Network that came together to block our plans. I guess that, at this point, pattern recognition comes into play in the way that they managed to block our recruitment for a number of key roles." Angela looked at Bruce and raised her eyebrow in a quizzical manner.

    "Yes, for microbe sampling under extreme environmental conditions, in my particular case." Bruce peered at the illustrated timeline that was developing over the centre of the table. "From this point on, they certainly know about Angel and me being involved somehow or other. But how much would they know about the project itself? By following our traces, they could work out that radiation-resistant extremophiles were involved. However, the fact that we were searching for these implies that research was still ongoing and there is no reason for anyone to consider the serendipitous event that allowed Professor Angela White to prove that both rejuvenation and very greatly increased longevity could be achieved."

     Angela smiled. "The death of the geriatric Prof White and the team being taken over by her young prot?g?e Prof Flynn seems to have been completely accepted - as there was no reason at all for anybody to doubt it. In addition, that research team being killed in the Glasgow bomb is completely credible, as that was the entire aim of that attack and it would have succeeded if not for Bruce's paranoia."

    "Yes, there's a nice storyline emerging here if you look at everything that happened from the perspective of our opposition," Bruce smiled as pieces began to drop together on the timeline. "It's clear that, despite loss of your team, your sponsors would not drop such an important project and thus setting up another team in Bermuda is a reasonable response. They'd be able to identify this location, because they do know that Angel and I survived - again not surprising as we're only grunts and not part of the scientific team. Nevertheless, because of the clampdown as a result of the Glasgow attack, the opposition would probably stay well clear of the Bermuda lab, or at least any involved Pharms certainly would. Nevertheless, the bugs sampling team would be fair game."

    "When you look at it this way, then the second sampling trip to France also implies that research is still ongoing and that material from highly radioactive areas are a key to this." Angela paused while put her head in one hand and inelegantly scratched an armpit. "Then there was the team's unfortunate choice of an escape route via Singapore, which was taken to imply that they were prepared to sell the goods to Singmed, who we'd already identified as a key player in the Network."

    "That fucking hag Lee," Marion interrupted, clearly feeling a bit left out of this session. "She must be totally fucked-off that her heavy team made us run for it. I'll bet you a lot of heads rolled there. The ones that were left on bodies after we worked them over, that is." 

    Bruce rolled his eyes. The small woman's sadistic grin made her look every bit the Todesengel, demonic rather than any more heavenly appearance that her Angel nickname might suggest. "Anyway, that brings us up to date. I'm sure that the labs in Bermuda are still being monitored, as the rejuvenation research teams are still working there. The problem is the presence of Angel and myself here. Maybe Eva also, if her presence in the last trip was considered significant. The longer that these AI tools run, the better they get and so we can be fairly certain that we're already being monitored here in the Bahamas."

    Eva looked up from her keyboard and frowned. "You already said that you're fair game. So why haven't you been attacked again here?"

    "We're just cannon-fodder and worth attacking only if there's a chance that we might have some samples. The biggest risk is that pattern-recognition picks up Angela, which might put us on the firing line again. Actually, it's amazing that this hasn't occurred as yet."

    Angela frowned. "And why do you think that may be?"

    "Ah, that's something else I've been doing: running the AI tools in a kind of inverse-mode, looking to see how particular results can emerge from how questions are specified. Extrapolations from a large observational database work with very little steering. Thus, despite the vast amount of information contained in the internet and the fact that it's expanding at an exponential rate, if I search for Bruce Roberts..."

    "It rips information from your past haunts..." Eve contributed.

    "And sleazy pubs, scuba dive shops and brothels with young nymphets - especially if they look like me," Angel added with a smirk.

    "That sort of thing. Anyway, if it's confronted with the less-well specified challenge of relating anything that I'm doing now to the rejuvenation project, then you need to input some background to focus the work. This will include past work for Prof Flynn, but she'll be noted as deceased. As we sent samples from the last trip to Bermuda, there's nothing to suggest that we're working with anyone here in the Bahamas. Indeed, this may well be input as a fact - as it's not plausible that a Pharm would allow any such sensitive work to be outsourced. Thus, the fact that we're sharing a house with two women that work in a bioscience institute may not ring any bells at all."

    "Thinking about it like that, it might even indicate that Eva was some kind of bioscience support to your sampling team and thus simply a contractor to the Pharm. Her job would thus just keep her occupied until the next sampling project comes up. But how would I fit in here?" Angela stared at Bruce while he struggled to find a suitable response.

    "Well, the pattern recognition is very good at identifying the tastes of individuals. For me it would be..."

    "Little schoolgirls, that's clear enough..."

    "Not quite, Marion, I can assure you that he also has a penchant for well-endowed, mature women," Angela pointed out.

    Bruce smiled as Angel rolled her eyes, making sure, however, that her boss couldn't see this. "And then, for Eva..."

    "Lesbo slut, with a penchant for slim girls, bondage and brothels - if not bondage by slim girls in brothels." Angel did a good job of mimicking Angela's enunciation and was rewarded by Eva with a playful slap on the back of the head.

    "But, also here, with a history of association with the same kind of well-endowed, mature women," Angela nodded as she spotted where Bruce's analysis was going. "The pattern does fit, as all accessible records will show I was already working in the institute before Eva turned up. Nowadays, the four of us living together as a polyamorous group isn't particularly unusual."

    "So, we have a pattern that fits. The only problem will be if we break the pattern, which could cause someone to initiate a closer look at us."

    Angela looked at him suspiciously. "I guess this is leading up to a proposal of some sort."

    "Yes, I think that we need to set up another sampling trip."

    Angel jumped to her feet with a whoop of joy. "Thank fuck! Hanging about here was beginning to do my head in."

    "Settle down, Marion," Angela commanded in a matronly tone that betrayed the fact that she was significantly older than the mid-thirties that she seemed to be. "We know how dangerous past sampling has been and there's no way that I can condone it now."

    "But you did for the last two times," the redhead objected.

    "That was different. On the first occasion we had no idea how tricky it would be and the second time was to develop techniques to help Eva recover from injuries resulting from our opponents' response to our successful sampling. I now have everything that I need to further refine rejuvenation, mainly reducing the extent of associated longevity."

    "Ah, but that's a problem in itself," Bruce interjected. "Cessation of sampling suggests that your organisation has the problem cracked, which could act as a spur for our opponents to become more active. If we go sampling again, maybe with a slightly modified target specification, this will take pressure off us for a bit. In fact, as our target gives further information to the bad guys, they are unlikely to interfere until after we've done the sampling. I can select somewhere that's a complete dead-end but will allow us to quickly dispatch samples to Bermuda. As soon as we're shot of them, we again cease to be targets. This will be especially the case if the chosen site is easier for others to sample than the ones that we have looked at previously."

    "Buggeration! Those are actually pretty good arguments. Maybe we'd all be safer if it looks like our progress has stalled." Despite this acknowledgement, their boss looked less than happy with the idea.

    Angel was all smiles. "Where are we going, then? Somewhere with lots of BDSM brothels for the blonde slut, I hope."

    "Mmm, I'm afraid you'll have to put up with just my company for this trip. It would be better for the overall pattern if it looks like Eva's role in the sampling was one-off and her apparent relationship with Angela is strengthened. Indeed, if she can bring another couple in to fill in while we're away that would be even better."

    "Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo!" Eva slapped her girlfriend on the back. "The blonde slut will get a couple of nice Asian girls to give the bondage frame in the basement a good work out."

    "Maybe with a couple of well-hung young lads also." Angela's either also salting Angel's wounds or taking her daughter's outrageous suggestion seriously - it's very hard to tell with that woman. "The girls will be fine for starters but, after all, variety is the spice of life."

    "Anyway, I haven't worked out where we're going yet, but now our boss has cleared it, that'll be our first job tomorrow."

    Angel now seemed torn between her desire to be back in action and the thought of missing out on whatever her lover might get up to in her absence.

    Well, that's us clear to start, but I hope I haven't downplayed the risks too much. Based on past experience, this won't be without dangers.

      

***

      

    After post-prandial drinks, the girls headed off to bed early - no doubt aiming to get in as much action between the sheets as possible before their upcoming separation. Bruce was deep in thought and jumped when Angela tapped him on the head. Only then he noticed that she had already stripped off and was now starting to pull off his t-shit. He quickly stood and helped her complete the process. "Hot tub time, I take it."

    "Right in one lad. I may as well take advantage of your body while I have it to hand." The Rubenesque figure led him to the Jacuzzi on the deck, which was already bubbling wildly.

    Entering the scalding water after his boss, Bruce then had his position on the wide bench organised to suit her desires, ending up with his left arm draped around her shoulders and her head resting on his chest, just above water level. "Let's just relax for a bit while I get my head around this next trip," she murmured. "Are you certain that it's absolutely necessary?"

    Bruce thought for a bit before cautiously responding. "I think that there's really no alternative. The more I think about it, the more that it amazes me that our opponents have gone completely quiet. Your work is as much of a threat to them as it ever was and think about how relentless they were, stopping at nothing to block any progress."

    "Or steal anything that I did develop," the buxom brunette reminded him.

    "Yes, the original Network was a marriage of convenience between partners with very different aims. The Pharm, or possibly several Pharms, had a clear focus on ensuring that that your company didn't gain the huge advantage of being the only source of a rejuvenation drug. They would certainly have completely destroyed your work if that was the only way to stop this occurring. However, stealing the secrets of your work would be even better for them. If not that, then learning enough by industrial espionage that would allow them to compete in this area."

    Angela frowned. "Actually, there may be something that another Pharm would take as evidence that we were still waiting on a breakthrough: the fact that we haven't made any moves to market or patent a product. I'm sure that, even if further development was needed for full commercialisation, just a hint of such a product would send our share prices soaring - making for a lot of very happy shareholders."

    "Actually, that was something I wanted to ask you about." Bruce coughed as he felt the woman's hand begin to slide up his thigh. Momentarily diverted, he struggled to regain the thread of his question. "Yes, your work. When do you think you can release this drug? This is something else that'll take all the pressure of us."

    "Well, it was purely serendipitous that I stumbled over the extremophile culture that provided something close to an elixir of everlasting youth. This was just before my lab was sabotaged and I had to start again from scratch." Bruce recognised that his boss was slipping into her lecturer mode, although she absent-mindedly continued to caress his wedding tackle. "The rejuvenation was unambiguous," she twisted to bring a large, smooth-skinned breast clear of the water, "but I had no idea what the likely increase in longevity would be. Initially, I saw no sign of telomere shortening, which is consistent with the effective immortality of the microbes. However, the extract that I produced from the samples that you subsequently obtained combined rejuvenation with slow aging, probably about half the normal rate."

    "I still can't understand why you dosed yourself with that, knowing that it would restart the aging process."

    "And, as I have repeatedly told you, immortality is a curse - especially for our already over-populated world. Look at how the planet is degrading, for God's sake! The Greenhouse Effect is already moving climate zones, drowning many key areas of low-lying land and inflicted extreme weather conditions - hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons - on a large part of the globe. This is still getting worse with time, with secondary effects like pandemics, migration of starving populations and water-wars becoming more common. The last thing we need is something that'll let people live longer."

    "But you're still working on rejuvenation."

    "Ah, that's a completely different kettle of fish. In addition to the size of the global population, there are also demographic issues, especially in the developed countries with their aging populations that rely on pensions funded by ever-smaller numbers of working-age people. Rejuvenation here would, on the surface, be fine as long as there is no increase in average lifetime. In the best case, you reach your prime and then maintain that physical age until you reach your three score and ten years, or whatever. Then quickly drop dead, without all the long, drawn-out body-degradation that's such a misery. I tell you, lad, I've been through all that and it's not a lot of fun. Browning was off his head with all this `grow old along with me, the best is yet to be` shit. The hospitals are packed to bursting to cope with crumblies with buggered knees and hips, cancers, cataracts, piles and what-have-you."

    Bruce broke into what could become a very long rant. "Well, if that's the case, shouldn't you try to get your rejuvenation potion onto the market as soon as possible?"

    "Yes, but I did say the benefits appear to be convincing on the surface. Luckily, what I have at present also causes infertility, so that's one possible issue already covered. Nevertheless, even if I could get to the point where changes in aging rate were negligible, I can't work out how we could possible market this. We already have an effective gerontocracy in politics, religion and commerce. The only constraints on this at present are the frailties of aging bodies and the last thing that I want to do is remove this mechanism without carefully working out what the consequences would be."

    "Okay, but that's only a small part of the population that would benefit from your drug. There must be hundreds of millions of others."

    "There certainly are, but again there's a marketing problem. The infrastructure in the developed world is set up for retirees being gradually less active and requiring extensive - and expensive - medical care. A gradual change to this situation could be managed but, if anyone over sixty years old could rejuvenate, the disruption would be enormous. This would likely result if we priced treatment low and made it freely available. Of course, the company would want to restrict availability and price it as high as the market will bear, as this will maximise profits."

    "But surely slow uptake would be a good thing, reducing the speed of the resultant social changes needed." Bruce would have said more, but was increasingly distracted by the way that his penis was swelling as a result of Angela's caresses.

    "Ah, lad, if only the world was that simple," she let out a weary sigh, indicating that she had been thinking a lot about this. "Due to the increasingly obscene inequality of the distribution of wealth, civilisation is long overdue a collapse if the historical record is anything to do by. The availability of rejuvenation only for the rich could be the final straw, leading to uprisings of the young and poor in many countries - and this not restricted to the third world, like it mainly is at present. I actually think a global shake-up of the fundamentals of world economy is needed to reduce such injustice, but I'd hate to be responsible for a catalyst that sets it off in a completely chaotic manner."

    "Anyway, what's the current status? Surely you can't keep a lid on this for very long, can you? Your sponsors will want to see some sign of progress."

    "Well, they're running the Bermuda lab directly now and I have only a consulting role there. The very few who know anything about my early work realise that repeating my original discovery will be very difficult and, as yet, nobody is aware that I've made any progress at all. It's really tricky now, as Eva and I need to do all the sensitive work ourselves. I know what I'd like to achieve - partial rejuvenation without altering life expectancy - but I don't even know if this is possible. Worse, even if it was, how can I ensure that someone else couldn't improve the performance of this treatment to the level that I know is possible?"

    "Seems to me that you're caught between a rock and a hard place," Bruce observed. "Do you think you'll ever have a product that you could put on the market?"

    "Who knows? I think it may well take decades but I really hope that we can get to the point of being confident enough of success that we can initiate discussion of how the drug would be rolled out ASAP."

    "So, I suppose this would start the development of infrastructure modifications to respond to changes in demographics."

    "Not just that, it could also put pressure on some of the great and the good to get the finger out in terms of fighting global warming. If they thought that they would be able to enjoy it, it might encourage some of the geriatric politicians and captains of industry who could have an impact on this to actually do something to stop environmental degradation rather than simply maintaining the status quo."

    "You really think so?" Bruce cradled a large breast in his hand and began to stroke the prominent nipple with his thumb. "Despite worldwide climatic chaos, these bastards have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid the required complete phase out of fossil fuels."

    "Yes, you're right, that's just wishful thinking from my side," she sighed. "It just seems that my discoveries should by capable of being a boon to Mankind. The problem is that I can't work out how to ensure that I don't do more harm than good. Whatever, the key thing is to keep my work under wraps until we get this sorted out."

    "Is there anything that I can do to help here?" Bruce asked when his boss lapsed into a pensive silence.

    "I'm sure that there is," the large brunette twisted around to extricate herself from his arms and clamber out of the tub. "Enough of this foreplay and get your naked arse into my bed. I need a bit of stress-relief and I can't think of anything better than some sweaty bonking to achieve that."

      

***

      

    The sex was indeed energetic and very sweaty. Afterwards, lying between damp sheets with Angela's gently snoring body sprawled over his, Bruce pondered on the dilemma that his boss was faced with. I may have the odd scar from facing opponents who are often psychopathic nutters, but I'd certainly have an ulcer if I had to deal with the issues that she has on her plate.