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Helium Rules

She lay restless on the rumpled silks of her bed in the apartment set aside for use when she was in Greater Helium by her grandfather, Tardos Mors, Jeddak of the Kingdom of Helium. Though the thin night air was cool to the point of icy, she had thrown aside her coverlet to allow the faint breeze wafting through the open window to caress her naked skin. Her flesh, flawless and taught with a strict daily regimen of exercise and fencing, felt searing hot, not with effort or sickness but instead with an inner boiling passion that seized her night after night, invading her dreams with lurid images of carnal encounters with a hard-bodied Earthman.

Though she knew him by night, in ways to make a courtesan blush, she also knew that she had never met this man. He was a figment of her own depraved imagination that she could not expunge. No matter that she threw herself into her work as a princess and ambassador of her people or panted and sweated over exercise routines with sparring partners, this rude beast would claim her night after night, leaving her full of lust yet totally unsatisfied. Damn him!

She had met many Earthmen by now. They had first arrived in Barsoom more than five Martian years before in their clumsy aetherial fliers and while her people had known of the people of Earth for generations, thinking them crude apes with little in the way of art and no honor at all, they had shown themselves to be very clever in mechanical ways. Their first fliers to arrive on Barsoom had been little more than large tea kettles with hulking motors to drive them jerkily through the aether. Not in the least like the elegant flying yachts of her own folk that raced through the thin air like long-necked birds, landing as gently as a feather.

Yet once the Earthmen had seen one of Tardos Mors fliers and been allowed to examine its inner working, the knowledge of how to improve their own vehicle's designs had spread like wildfire across their home planet. Within less than an Earth year, the designs of the Earthmen's fliers had changed completely. They were still not the graceful swans of the Helium navy, but they were very fast, heavily armed, and massively powerful. Indeed her grandfather had commissioned a dozen of the Earthmen's gunships to support his own forces in the continuing struggle for supremacy with the bestial Tharks and the Empire of Zodonga, Helium's ancestral foe far to the east and north.

In just five Martian years, the Earthmen had all but invaded Barsoom. That first journey had been a spectacular success for Edison and Armstrong, even though their rough vessel had crashed upon arrival. Luckily they had come down in the Kingdom of Helium and been welcomed as honored guests rather than in Zodonga where they would have been exterminated or enslaved and sent to the mines. Of course, the wily Jeddak, Tardos Mors, had motives of his own over and above simple hospitality. He set his scientists and engineers to help the Earthmen repair their vessels, and at the same time learn all they could of this new technology.

Edison and Armstrong returned to Earth within a year. Within another year four more aetherial fliers made the months-long journey from Earth seeking to establish diplomatic relationships with Helium. Tardos Mors spies had also reported that similar deputations had landed in the Kingdom of Zodonga, though there has been no word of how they were received.

Over the intervening time, five Martian years and ten Earth years, a regular flow of traffic between the worlds has been established with vessels arriving and departing every six weeks or so. In the city of Greater Helium, lesser palaces have been granted by her grandfather as embassies for Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. Two other nations, Japan and the United States of America have established trading houses in the city and are in the process of petitioning for diplomatic recognition by the Kingdom of Helium.

Dejah Thoris has met easily a hundred Earthmen and even a dozen Earth women, but none of them is the potent warlord figure who has come to dominate her dreams and fantasies. She has come to suspect that she is either going mad of glimpsing some alternate reality -- some "might have been" encounter in which her life could have taken a very different turn. Another possibility which she refuses to examine too closely less it obsess her every waking moment, is this extraordinary lover is in her future. That she is somehow predestined to meet and be swept off her feet by this Captain Jack Carter.

It is thus her secretary finds her, standing at the window, her lithe naked body silhouetted against the first glimmering rays of the sunrise. he holds his breath for a long moment, drinking in her beauty until his head spins and his loins swell and he is forced to remind himself she is a princess. Far above him in the hierarchy of such things, and that no matter how much he longs for her, she will never think of him in that way.

"Your highness," he taps at the door to alert her to his presence. She turns to look at him with mild curiosity.

"Miktos? You're up early. Can I help you?"

"It's your grandfather, your highness, the Jeddak. he has sent for you. Asked if you would join him for an early breakfast at the palace.

"A new Earth ship arrived last night and I understand there is a delegation from the Americans who wish to petition Helium in some manner. The Jeddak would like your advice."