by Manda Benson
“We can’t use that,” said Vladimir as she made her way to airlock twelve. “It says it’s out of order.”
“I put that there.” Verity unlocked the door and pulled it back for him. “Now get inside. There’s a lander at the other end.”
As she waited for him to haul himself gracelessly over, Verity put her hand on his backside as he tried to maneuver into the tube and gave him a hard shove inside before pulling herself in after.
Chapter 10
“Look at all of this. Figs, grapes, Martian Red, Lunar Blue, Stilton!” Vladimir hung from the fridge with his back to Verity in the sun-yacht’s kitchen. “Where d’you get all these?”
“I don’t know. It’s Anthony Cornelian’s sun-yacht.”
He held up a dark bottle with an ostentatiously embellished label. “Can I drink this wine?”
Verity shrugged. “I suppose so. We’re not going to get anywhere in the next twenty-four hours, and it’s not as if Anthony’s going to want it back. Drink it in the centrifuge.”
He floated past her into the doorway of the centrifuge, the wine bottle and a box of cheese and fruit under his arm. Verity kicked her way in after him and started the motor. Vladimir slid up against the wall as the centrifugal force grew, and sat on the bed. He poured wine into a transparent plastic glass and began stuffing his face with cheese and biscuits.
From the back of Verity’s mind came the imagined sound of Anthony chuckling. “Don’t you think he looks like a modern Bacchus? I’d love to draw him in a toga and a laurel wreath.”
Verity stared at him in disgust. “You’re still wearing your lab coat! You’re not supposed to eat wearing a lab coat.”
“It’s a clean lab coat. It’s never been in contact with chemicals or biohazardous material. Ahh, it’s been so long since I ate cheese!” He smacked his lips, and took a sip of wine, swilling it about his mouth to wash down what he’d just eaten. “So you’re saying this inquisitor is up to something, because the Magnolia Order--” He rolled his eyes. “--which I’m not supposed to ask about, told you that?”
“Not just the Magnolia Order. That spy I found.” Verity ripped off her bandana and dumped her Sky Forces regimental bag on the bed, pulling it open to reveal two computers with Vladimir’s research papers sandwiched between them. She identified which one was Anthony and removed it, disconnecting the jack from her neural shunt, and put the computer down on the bed. “You remember that computer I found on his body? It had a personality imprint on it, and it’s been talking to me.”
“Personality imprints are just filing and security systems specific to their owners. They don’t talk to people, aside from those owners.”
“This one does.”
Vladimir chewed and stared at the computer. “Why? It’s supposed to protect his personal details and his files, not help the person who killed him.”
“Perhaps it’s because the mission he was sent on here is important. Significant things and objectives that go beyond death could get transferred to an imprint, couldn’t they? And it’s like Ta-- it’s like the Magnolia Order told me. I’m the only person who’s available at this location who has the skills needed for the mission. He needs to help me, or the mission won’t be completed, and there’ll be a coup, and the Meritocracy will lose Callisto.” Verity sat on the bed next to the computer. “You interface to it, if you don’t believe me.”
Vladimir scowled. “No, thanks. Interfering with a dead man’s computer? That doesn’t sound respectful. And when the computer’s...haunted...well, that sounds downright sacrilegious.”
She picked up some cheese and chewed it slowly. Neither spoke for a moment, and the noise of centrifuge motors and jaws grinding biscuits grew prominent in the silence.
Vladimir said, “So if Farron’s masterminding this alleged conspiracy, where is he?”
“Are you sure you didn’t see Farron on the lander or on the orbital?”
“Yes! I’ve already told you I am!”
“He’s right. If Farron’s not on the orbital complex, he must be on Callisto still.”
“Then there must be another complex on the surface somewhere. But there can’t be. Someone would have noticed. To build that, he’d have to ship stuff in--expensive, big stuff, shiploads of it--prefab units, recycling systems, and probably a fusion engine and loads of pressure tanks and stuff, and then all the staff to install and maintain it. He’d have to go to Earth or Mars to get them, and he’d have to have them ferried here and brought down. Someone would have seen.”
“Unless there was some other base somewhere on Callisto that’s been decommissioned, perhaps in one of the terraforming stages. It could be possible it’s been forgotten about and he’s taken over it and had it refitted. It’s not unfeasible that he might have been able to smuggle stuff down if it’s just parts for a refit, or stolen them from the main base.”
“How could there be?” Verity said. “If there were old facilities it would be public information. It would be on the ANT. It would be on the company’s report, and I read it on the runner ship when I got transferred to Callisto. There was no mention of anything of the sort.”
“All right. Maybe we’re looking too far afield. Perhaps there’s somewhere within the base itself he’s going?”
“What, somewhere the ANT can’t detect people’s signals? That base isn’t exactly small. It’s built to accommodate a few hundred, but that’s not so big that people can disappear for days on end in it, let alone hide enough people and stuff to organize a coup.”
Vladimir threw a biscuit down on the bed and got to his feet. “You’re just dismissing everything I say. You’re not even considering my suggestions seriously!”
“That’s because your suggestions are all stupid and impractical, and you’re just opening your gob without thinking about them beforehand.”
Vladimir glared at her, and exhaled through his mouth, collapsing his shoulders. “Look,” he began in a loud voice, “you know the company that made Callisto habitable?”
“Dennis Terraforming,” Verity snapped.
“Yes, you told me about it when we were getting those core samples. You said the terraforming company extracted carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen from Callisto’s crust and used that to generate the atmosphere and power the fusion engine. Where do you think the ice and rock came from?”
“From the crust of Callisto You just said it yourself.”
“No!” Vladimir straightened his arms at his sides, drawing himself up to his full height and glowering down at her. “Where exactly?”
“How should I know? I expect they just melted it off the surface.”
“No, that would be inefficient. It would take too much energy to heat up that large an area and transport it to the site. They will have used some sort of wide-bore drill, like a mineshaft. There’s a massive great hole in the ice, and it’ll be right under the refinery plant in that base!”
Verity glared at him. After pausing to consider she said, “I suppose they might have done that.”
“No, that’s what they did do.” Vladimir folded his arms, flared his nostrils and tilted back his head. “Problem solved.”
“He’s right, Verity.”
“Shut up, you!” She stared at Vladimir and sighed. “I suppose we had better set a course back to Callisto then.”
Vladimir’s eyes widened. “You’re so rude and horrible all the time! First of all you insult my nationality, then you have sex with me without bothering to ask first, then you come barging into the orbital and rescue me when I don’t need rescuing. Now when I help you work out where Farron’s hiding, you’re completely ungrateful and unacknowledging.”
As Verity stared at him, an urge came upon her. She wanted Vladimir to irritate her senses the way he did her temper. She wanted to spar with him, physically as well as verbally, in a contest that would end in both winning and losing, and total satiation. Verity leapt to her feet and started toward him. She grabbed him with a hand on either side of his head, pull
ing him down to her and kissing him forcefully on the mouth.
“Ahh, that’s good wine,” Anthony murmured.
Verity seized Vladimir by the lapels of his lab coat, spun him about and hurled him down on his back on the bed. Throwing herself on top of him, she ripped his shirt open.
Breathing rapidly and apparently startled by her attack, Vladimir darted his gaze down from her face to his exposed chest, and his face reddened. “That’s the second shirt of mine you’ve ruined. You’re so violent!”
“I don’t care. I like you better without it,” Verity said. He was enticingly soft and pliant from a generous all-over covering of fat just below the skin. Fascinated by his warm, tactile flesh, she explored his curving rise of his belly and the loose depth of his navel, stroked his chest and slid her fingers over his chubby pectorals while he gazed up at her.
“You’re all fat and wobbly,” Verity said.
Vladimir raised an eyebrow and made an exasperated expression. “That’s the kindest, most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”
She reached to undo his belt, but his hands took hold of her wrists and stopped her, in contradiction to the hard lump she felt through the fabric of his trousers. “Don’t.”
“What are you afraid of?” Verity raised her voice. “You’re frightened of your own sexuality, your own body? You’re scared of ghosts and other people’s minds?”
Anthony’s voice reached her thoughts, remarkably clear and lucid given the circumstances. “Don’t bully him. It might be that something’s happened to him in the past. Or it might be that he’s inexperienced, in which case you’re about to make yourself the something that’s happened in his past.”
“I think you’re crazy,” Vladimir said.
“If you’d let Anthony talk to you, it would make sense.” She reached for the computer. “Look, I don’t have to disconnect from him. I can use this jack and we can both talk to him at once.”
He frowned. “You can’t do that. Computers of that sort aren’t designed to be used in that way. There’s no filter and you’ll get bleed-back from the other person.”
“You would...” A strange realization occurred to Verity. “Is bleed-back really that bad? And why is it bad?”
“It’s just wrong. You don’t want other people’s thoughts in your head. That’s private.”
“There’s people and there’s people. I mean, there’re people you wouldn’t want to get bleed-back off you, but what’s bleed-back between friends? Is that so bad?” Verity unsynced herself and plugged the jack back into her neural shunt. She held out the computer to him.
She could see the curiosity on his face as he looked at it, despite the blushing. After a moment, he reached to his neural shunt and synced himself to it.
“Hi, Vladimir. You need to listen to this slatternous little minx. And then you need to give her a damn good rogering from me.”
Vladimir made a strange expression. He stared at Verity for a moment, then reached for the buckles that secured her breastplate.
“You really don’t have anything on under this, do you?” Vladimir was flushing again.
“She claimed it was because her underwear was dirty,” Anthony said in a tone suggesting he didn’t believe it.
Vladimir struggled to undo Verity’s belt. “How d’you get this off?”
Verity glanced at him slyly. “You’re the one who’s nearly-a-doctor. Can’t you work it out?” She fumbled his trousers undone while he tried to.
Finally he got it unfastened, and cast off the rest of her armor. He shrugged off his shirt and lab coat and kicked away his trousers and underpants, and knelt beside her, drinking in the sight of her with his eyes, his phallus straightening without the restriction of his trousers, a languid string dripping from it toward the mattress. “Wait a minute. Do we need to take precautions?”
“I can’t get pregnant. I’ve got a pituitary implant.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a chip in my brain that reprograms my body to produce constant low levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. It means I don’t cycle, but without menopause or excessive hormone levels.”
Vladimir made a pensive expression. “Idea of it seems strange when I spend my life making animals pregnant.”
Verity laughed. “You’re not making this animal pregnant.”
“So I don’t need to do anything. I mean, wear anything?”
“Not unless you’ve got some kind of a disease.” Verity sat up and gently pushed him down on his back, running her palms over the contours of his chest. She straddled him and lowered herself onto his erection very slowly, letting the head of his cock blunder and slip against the sticky secretions oozing from her before allowing it to slide into position and sink into her. She could feel the throb of his pulse against her G-spot, and he laid his hands on her knees, sliding them up over her thighs, over her abdomen and onto her breasts.
Verity watched his expression change as he began to thrust against her and she stroked his chest. His face tensed, his eyes squeezed shut and he let off a slight wheeze of an exhalation.
“Steady on, laddie!”
Vladimir’s fingers dug into her thighs as his body tensed in orgasm, and the bleed-back from him came upon Verity in a great rush of confusion, ebbing away in pangs of ecstasy she felt inside her own body as sticky pulses, squeezing outward from his prostate. His dick wilted away against her muscles holding it in place, into something soft and feeble that slithered out of alignment when she moved.
His head rolled back and he took a deep breath in and closed his eyes. The bleed-back of his exhaustion and satisfaction mingled with Verity’s own frustration.
“You got him all worked up,” Anthony chided. “He went off too soon.”
“Come on!” Verity butted against him. “Finish the job!”
He shook his head. “Can’t.”
She found a box of tissues stuck to the wall beside the bed and mopped up the mess. Vladimir’s cock had shrunk back into its wrinkled sheath and it drooped upon his thigh. Verity pinched it gently between her finger and thumb, exploring the squidgy, spongy texture of it under the skin. She squeezed, teasing his crown out from the foreskin.
“Oh!” Suddenly he reached to her hand to stop her. “Leave it alone a few minutes.”
“What, it hurts?”
“It’s just really sensitive after. Almost painful.”
Verity sniggered evilly, and reached to tweak it again. Vladimir pulled his knees together and rolled onto his other back, gathering up his dangly bits and cupping them protectively against his groin in both hands. He stuck his tongue out at Verity.
“When will it be normal again?”
Vladimir shrugged. “Never timed it. It’s called a refractory period. All mammals do it.”
“A lieutenant I used to know didn’t do that.”
He took his hands away, but watched hers carefully. “Yes, well. Lieutenants in the Sky Forces probably have all manner of weird genetic mutations.”
Verity laughed. “Sounds like bollocks to me.”
“Well, it isn’t, it’s scientific fact.” Vladimir slid his hand down into her crotch, and withdrew it with a look of embarrassment.
Verity shifted onto her back. “Keep doing that.”
“Do what?”
“I dunno. Just do stuff to me.”
He sat up and put his hand back, slowly and awkwardly as though he was attempting to steal something without being noticed. She felt his fingers spread her open, and when she glanced down at him, he frowned in a curious sort of expression.
“Haven’t you ever seen one before?”
“I’ve had sex before. A few times, with the same person. She just wasn’t, well, as vulgar as you about it. I think most women aren’t.”
Right. That probably meant he’d had sex twice, not enjoyed it and both participants had kept on their non-essential garments. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. The way you’re lying on your
back with your arms up behind your head. It makes your breasts...not very prominent. Most women wouldn’t do that. It’s not considered feminine. She wouldn’t let me poke about...well...down there. And she had hair there as well, which made it kind of hard to tell what it looked like.”
Verity shrugged. “I thought everyone got rid of body hair. It’s unhygienic.”
“It’s not so fashionable to do that in Russia. Or at least it wasn’t when I last had sex.”
Verity found herself grinning in spite of the situation. “Ya. When you last had sex, and people were hairy and lived in caves.”
His eyes met hers in mock rebuke before he ducked his head toward her groin and sank his tongue into her. His abrupt boldness startled Verity, and the warm sensation of his tongue pushing her labia open and sliding up over her clitoris came as an unexpected delight. An involuntary shudder crept up her back, and somewhere in the recesses of her mind, Anthony made a wordless exclamation.
Vladimir pushed his face in closer, moving her legs apart. Anthony’s mind felt very close to her, reveling in the stimulation of her body and Vladimir’s sensual experience of it as she closed her eyes and surrendered to his licking and sucking. The peculiar musky tang of her own juices filled her mouth as he explored the folds of her vulva. Gecko had always been able to work magic with his tongue, but Vladimir was something else. He used the wet index and middle fingers of one hand to stroke slowly up and down her outer lips, while he sucked and nibbled at the sepals of her inner lips and slid his tongue in and out of her. His other hand fingered her clit.
She felt like jelly under the merciless onslaught of his tongue and lips as the aching anticipation began to spread through her thighs and down her spine. Just as she reached the threshold and the sensation began to spill over into climax, he pulled back the hood of skin with his thumb and slipped his tongue up to put a trembling pressure on her exposed clit, overloading the gathering tension of the impending orgasm into a frenzy of wild stimulation. Her back arched and a shrill gasp escaped her clamped jaws as sensation surged down and imploded into quivering, exquisite thunder upon the point of his tongue until every last shiver died away.
