Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  A sense of total repletion engulfed Verity. All she felt like doing was lying and sleeping for days and days. She sensed the shifting of weight on the mattress, and Vladimir sat up beside her. He fumbled about on the floor, and brought up the wine bottle.

  “No offence,” he said, after swilling it around his teeth, “but I think I prefer the taste of the wine.” He poured a glass. “Try some.”

  Verity tilted the glass to her lips and took a sip of the deep-red liquid. It had a powerful, rich flavor, and soon after she’d drunk it a heavy exhaustion began to spread through her limbs.

  “Good sex with good cheese and good wine,” Anthony commented. “A combination that never becomes tedious.”

  Verity rested her hand on the casing of the computer where Anthony’s ghost resided, and leaned on Vladimir’s chest. He made a much more comfortable pillow than Gecko had. She’d always been able to feel Gecko’s ribs digging into her cheek. His skin smelt spicy, like pencil sharpenings.

  “So Farron is up to no good, and we’ve established he’s hiding under the base on Callisto.” Vladimir’s voice sounded strangely deep with his lungs just under Verity’s ear. “What do we do next?”

  “We set course back to Callisto, we find this hole he’s hiding down, we trash whatever’s down there and we kill him.”

  “But first,” Vladimir slid his palm up over her flank, sending shivery echoes of the climax she’d just experienced running through her nervous system, “let’s finish this wine.”

  Chapter 11

  “Okay, so we think Farron’s hiding somewhere under the base. How are we going to get back to the base without being caught?”

  The forty or so hours it had taken to circumnavigate Jupiter and return to Callisto’s orbit had passed as a hazy orgy of eating, drinking, sleeping and wild sex.

  “Check that store cupboard near where you came in,” Anthony suggested.

  Verity moved away from the centrifuge entrance and pulled herself up the handholds on the walls of the sun-yacht’s lobby. Inside the cupboard, toward the back behind the armor attached to the rail, she found a bulky canvas bag as long as a man is tall with a zip running down its full length.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a hang-glider.”

  Verity unzipped it a few inches. A fine patchwork of silver hexagons of fabric showed inside.

  “Don’t open it in here. You don’t want to try folding that bugger up without gravity. It’ll end up jammed in the yacht’s main access way, and there’s no spare because I used the other one when I went to Callisto the first time. And put some clothes on! You’re supposed to be getting ready to go down.”

  Verity eased out the bag and pushed it toward the entrance to the lander. As she pulled herself away from the cupboard and back toward the bridge, Vladimir moved gracefully from the entrance to the kitchen and caught hold of her from behind, his stomach pressing voluptuously against her back, hands sliding over her abdomen. His breath and lips tickled her neck and shoulder.

  “This boy learns fast,” Anthony said.

  Verity put her arm around his neck, and swiveled about to face him. She met his eyes with a grin, and then their lips pressed together. Vladimir swept his palms over her buttocks and between her legs. To think two days ago, she’d have turned down all this in favor of Farron...Verity grimaced inwardly. Why did Farron have to look the way he did? Why could she not shake off this effect he had on her?

  “Farron’s a scheming ginger tosser,” said Anthony.

  “I have to sort out the orbit course on the bridge.” Verity excused herself, but Vladimir let his hands slide over her hips and thighs as she maneuvered past him, like a fisherman releasing a prize catch back to its lake.

  On the bridge, she checked the sun-yacht’s course data on the consoles while he waited behind her.

  “Have you ever thought, um, of having sex with no gravity?”

  “What, you never thought of that before?” Verity twisted to face him, using a seat for leverage. He’d gone red in the face again. “Everyone in the Sky Forces tries it. It seems to be the first idea that comes into people’s minds when they go into space.”

  “Well, is it any good?”

  Verity laughed. “No. You spend all the time trying to hang onto things, and it takes so much effort you can’t enjoy it.” She remembered doing it with Gecko on the flight between Earth and Mars. When they’d finally arrived, it had felt so much more substantial and real to do it with solid ground to hump against at last, instead of all that drifting about clinging to each other. As she looked at Vladimir’s face, the memory of it seemed less awkward, and she remembered the curiosity she’d felt the first time she’d experienced null gravity, and she added, “But we can try it, if you’d like to. We just need to work out what to hang onto first.”

  Turning her attention to the chair, she bent over the back of it and gripped the armrests, tipping up her hindquarters and exposing herself to him. “Try it like that.”

  She felt a draught in the air as he pushed across from the entrance. “It kind of looks like space gymnastics.” He pulled himself in with his hands on her waist. A shiver spread up her spine as he pushed inside her, using his grip just above her hips for purchase. Maintaining this position wasn’t exactly comfortable, so Verity just tried to relax as much as she could and submit to his pumping rhythm and the sensation of his deep penetration inside her. Finally she heard him gasp, felt his hands press harder into her flanks and the eruption of his ejaculate into her.

  She let go of the flight chair as he slithered out, the residue from his orgasm dribbling and clinging to her. He rotated her back to lie against his chest, clasping her to him from behind, running one hand up onto her breast and the other down into the mess he’d made.

  “Vladimir?” She reached back to ruffle his hair, sticking up untidily in the absence of gravity. “You’re not coming back down to Callisto with me.”

  He suddenly gave her nipple a sharp pinch, making Verity start with something right on the threshold between pain and pleasure. “Yes I am.”

  “It’s too dangerous.” She shook her head as his fingers delved deeper into her crotch.

  “What, and it’s not too dangerous for you, just because you’ve got a sharpened piece of metal?”

  “I’m the Magnolia Order’s representative now. And I owe it to Anthony to finish what I prevented him from finishing in his stead.”

  “Perhaps I want to help Anthony too. And perhaps if I help the Magnolia Order, they might let me join them, and then I might find out what they actually are.”

  Verity snorted.

  “What?” Vladimir gave her another pinch.

  “I’m trying to imagine you doing iaido. With a katana. It’s not working.”

  “Will you let me practice with yours?”

  “No! Vladimir, you’ve got a career. You want to screw it up by going down there and getting killed, or being arrested for spying? It’s different if I do it. It is my career.”

  “Look, if you go down there, die or get caught, and get denounced as a traitor to the Meritocracy, what’s going to look worse? That I’m down on the base on Callisto, apparently doing the research I’m supposed to be doing there, or that I’m orbiting the moon, eating cheese and biscuits in a spacecraft registered in the name of someone who was killed for refusing to stop after an arrest warrant was issued on him for spying?”

  “I suppose not,” Verity admitted. “I shouldn’t have rescued you, should I?”

  “Perhaps not. But then, a lot of other interesting things might not have happened.”

  Verity reached back and pinched his buttock as he upped his tempo. She arched her back against him in the light of the thousand mirrors and the deep azure curve of Callisto’s upper atmosphere as he brought her to another searing climax.

  She breathed for a few moments, the golden light and the glowing blue world intense and lucid in her eyes. “We’d better get ready to get in the lander and go down there in that cas
e.”

  * * * *

  Callisto’s thin atmosphere roared over the lander’s hull as the broad blue arc grew straighter. Friction brought an unearthly glow to the surface of the windows. Far below, the moon’s icy surface lay sunken in the deep shadows of night. Verity steered down, toward the deep ravine at the base of the scarp. Behind her, Vladimir’s breath faltered. She hit the switch to start the gyromag motor.

  The dark rift of the valley opened before the lander as the altimeter dropped. The craft jolted as the turbulent cushion of charged particles produced by its gyromag thrust caught the rough ice below. Verity concentrated on the green contours the lander’s computer had overlaid on the terrain, as the trench was nearly completely black, unfathomable in the darkness. Walls of ice rushed past on either side.

  “You’ll need to deploy the braking parachute,” Anthony thought to her.

  “Ya, I know,” Verity thought back. She offlined the engine before reaching to the handle beside the chair and pulling it up. The chute blew out the back with a thump, the deceleration throwing her forward against the straps. The rush of ice beneath the lander’s keel slowed, and the craft slithered without friction over the lumpy surface on its gyro-magnetic levitator. Verity took the gyromag off, and the keel ran aground with a scrape and a sharp stop that lurched both of them forward hard before dumping them back into their seats.

  Verity unfastened her seatbelt and climbed up to open the hatch. Cold air stabbed into her lungs as she pulled herself up and clambered out. “Give me my helmet,” she told Vladimir, straddling the hatch. While she waited for him to find it and hand it up, she once more tied the electromagnetic blindfold she’d fashioned from Anthony’s tie round her neural shunt.

  “Can you still hear me?” she checked with Anthony.

  “Loud and clear.”

  Verity put on the helmet that Vladimir presented, glad for the shelter from the burning cold it provided. She switched on the lamp and scanned the rough ice surface at the base of the ravine. “Now pass up that thing in the bag.”

  After a moment, the bag emerged awkwardly at an angle. Verity pulled it up and dropped it over the side of the lander. “Now gimme your helmet.”

  Verity jumped off the side of the lander into shadow and waited for him to climb out. Vladimir stood precariously on the top of the lander in the beam of her headlamp, and closed the hatch before sliding down to stand next to her. He fidgeted in his armor. “It’s bloody cold!”

  “’Course it’s cold. The sun won’t rise for almost another day.” An odd chill that was not from the environment came upon Verity when she spoke those words. When morning broke on Callisto, it would be Referendum Day, and in this, the most isolated of the Meritocracy’s provinces, people would be voting for whatever Farron had made them think they wanted.

  “Put this on.” Verity held out a second tie, struggling to make out his face in the deep shadow of the valley. He frowned before draping it round his neck.

  “No, I mean put it round your head like I did, so it works as an electromagnetic blindfold. It’s so the ANT can’t detect us when we’re in the base.” She helped him arrange it over his neural shunt and tie a reef knot in it.

  “Now what?” Vladimir put his helmet on. “How are we going to get to the base?”

  Verity held up her hand in the direction of the distant summit. “First, we need to climb to the top of the scarp.” She dug through her bag for the bundle of climbing gear, and threw a pair of hot crampons and a pick in his direction. “Put these on.”

  “Just so you’re aware.” Vladimir squatted on the ice with his head bent over so the light of his lamp fell on the crampons. “I don’t know how to do this. If you can offer me any hints to guard against my falling and dying horribly, they’ll be most appreciated.”

  Verity finished snapping the crampons to the soles of her boots and tested her weight on them. “It’s not that steep, and in this gravity you have to fall a long way before you do yourself serious harm. Make sure you switch the crampons and pick on. The tips of the points heat up and it helps grip the ice.” She slung the long canvas bag over her back, and identified a large, jagged crack running down the wall of the ravine. That would be the easiest way up. “If you fall, you need to get your feet up so you won’t get snagged on the ice, and get the axe under your shoulder and lean down on it.” In practice, if he fell he probably wouldn’t remember, and would do it wrong. It wasn’t a difficult climb and, apart from the initial ascent, it wasn’t vertical. They’d just have to hope neither of them fell.

  She kicked a foothold firmly at the base, knee bent. Her left hand found a ledge as she pushed up. The point of the pick bit into the ice and gripped. Pull. Back leg straight, other knee bent and hot crampons sinking into hard ice. As she climbed higher, crampons and pick rasped on the ice below where Vladimir followed.

  She struck the ice with the pick about twenty times before she reached the top of the ravine where the scarp proper began. An uneven surface a few yards wide lay between the base of the next climbing area and the edge of the crack in the ice, too rough and narrow to ride a horse this way. Verity crouched on hands and knees, and turned to face back down the vertical wall where Vladimir was still climbing. She cracked the point of her pick into the ice by her knees and reached over to pull him up as soon as he climbed within reach.

  Vladimir sat on the ice, pick in hand, breathing heavily. Ice from his breath formed on his helmet. Verity got up and faced the scarp’s base. Sharp crystalline ice formations gleamed all the way up to the summit where the bright face of Jupiter peered over.

  She put her foot to the base of the scarp. “Come on.”

  “The way I went was easier,” said Anthony.

  “If I parked that lander where you landed it, they might go and look there again and find it.” Verity found a spike of ice to use as a handhold. Her neck began to ache from alternating between craning up for handholds and looking down for footholds.

  She reached the summit with Vladimir a long way behind. Out of the shadow of the scarp, she switched off her helmet lamp and disentangled herself from the hang-glider bag. She cleared some rubble from a flat area and took a seat, feet resting on an outcrop below, arching her stiff neck.

  As often happened in the dead of night, she found her gaze drawn up to Jupiter’s full circle, the turbulent motion with the oily bands of its clouds barely perceptible, the famous great red spot glaring back at her like an eye inflamed by conjunctivitis. Twenty times the size of the full moon from Earth, the light it reflected cast Callisto in a dirty golden twilight, leaving short dim shadows clustering at the bases of ice protrusions.

  After a few more minutes, Vladimir hauled himself up beside her. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars as he got his breath back. “Not bad for a view.”

  Verity reached across and switched off the light on his helmet. She wasn’t at all sure the ANT’s surveillance reached this far, but drawing potential attention to their location with lights would be asking for it. She unzipped the canvas bag, revealing the shiny fabric it protected.

  “I take it we can’t just walk up there and sneak back in without being noticed,” Vladimir said.

  “No. The surveillance isn’t great, but it’s still good enough that we won’t be able to do that.”

  Vladimir’s eyes moved behind his visor. “This is a base belonging to the Sky Forces, supposedly the most formidable military organization in the Solar system, on a moon that cost who knows how much money to make habitable, and there’s no proper security?”

  “There’re plans to add satellite surveillance and better scanning equipment later. It’s not as if anyone really expects this place to need proper security now. I mean, the nearest place with proper habitation is Mars, and it only comes into conjunction every two years or so.” Verity sighed. “There’s nothing here that’s really worth anything, not for the sake of coming three hundred and fifty million miles to get at any rate. Other than the base and the moon itself, and nobo
dy seriously thought anyone was going to try to steal that. Not until now, anyway. Since the Dennis Terraforming Company’s report didn’t show conclusively that Callisto would be able to maintain a solid crust under the current climate management system, the Meritocracy voted against paying for any installations above what was necessary.”

  Verity slid the long aperture of the telescope she’d brought out of her bag. She dumped her helmet in her lap and held the lens up to her eye, aiming its sight through the palisade of ice spines at the distant shape of the base out on the dark plain. A grouping of irregular blocks formed the main habitation area with a sequence of domes and connected oblongs making up the research sections. Behind the main complex ranged the exhaust stacks and vast walls of the massive fusion engine that had once worked at full capacity to pollute an atmosphere into existence on Callisto and heat the moon up from its uninhabitable hundred and forty below.

  Rotating the barrel in the scope’s midsection switched it to infra red, coloring the fusion engine with a bright bloom. Scanning back to the habitation area and the main gates revealed two bright figures stood like gateposts in the entrance. Guards. Security had been upped since she’d left.

  She handed the telescope over to Vladimir without speaking, and turned her attention back to the hang-glider bag. Verity replaced her helmet and peeled the canvas of the bag back over the silvery object inside while Vladimir crouched on his knees and squinted through the telescope.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “It’s a chameleonic skin.” Verity had the hang-glider loose from its bag and tried to ease it open, an awkward maneuver given the lack of room on the narrow summit of scarp where she and Vladimir crouched. Before the wings would open, she had to pull out the telescoped central handlebar to full length and extend the main rods that supported the frame down its length. Now she could see the control unit in the centre of the handlebar with its fiber optic cables running up the triangle bars to the wing fabric. It had interface, but she wouldn’t be able to sync to it without removing her electromagnetic blindfold and making herself detectable to the base ANT. She would have to rely on manual instead.