by Damon Suede
Runt turned the lamp on low and the deep crooning stopped.
Ox rolled over and his craggy face popped up above the arm of the bench, red with shame and apology. He looked cramped on the holo-vid seating.
“That’s nice. Oi! That was nice.”
Ox patted his chest, his throat and chest pinked, and shook his head once in denial. He looked at the floor.
“Yes, you. I didn’t know you could do that. You were singing.”
This time, Ox bobbed his head once and a stubbled smile flickered there for a split second. Content again, he curled on his side and tugged the polyblanket up to his massive pectorals, the fabric snagging on one stiff nipple.
The singing didn’t resume. Instead, Ox rolled his giant skull on the seat, rubbing his scalp in a soothing scrape that seemed to relax him until he settled.
Like a big cat.
Runt felt conscious of the enormous span of unused bed around his compact body . . . the near-meter between the bottom of his feet and the end of the foam pad.
Don’t.
Runt sat up in the sleep-space’s dim bluish light from the clock on the ceiling. The sheets were cool and slightly damp. The first of the suns would rise in a few hours.
Don’t say it.
Across an acre of chilly, gritty sheets, Runt watched Ox’s blunt fingers uncurling as a doze stole over the strapping body on the other side of the habitat, so huge but so fragile. Seeds of doubt looked for purchase in Runt’s chest.
On the bench, Ox twitched and curled tighter, his breathing slow and even, his enormous ribcage filling with damp salt air like a gift. He purred lightly with the simple pleasure of filling his lungs. The bench looked rigid and small underneath him.
Something alien bloomed behind Runt’s ribs and he didn’t recognize his own voice when it rasped the words, “Ox? You cold?”
Ox didn’t turn to shake his head, but it was a definite no.
“I mean, it’s a pretty big bed here.” Runt felt stupid, but now that he’d started, he couldn’t figure out how to stop. “That is, if you wanted. That’s all. Warmer, I mean. Nothing funny.” His face felt hot, like he was blushing, but hopefully the blue dimness hid it.
On the bench across the habitat, Ox turned all of himself over and stared back at Runt from the shadows with glassy eyes. His face looked stiff, almost scared.
Of what? His fists look as big as my head. Runt propped himself on his elbows so they could see one another.
“C’mon. If you promise not to piss the sheet, or crush me with your dinosaur cock, I mean . . . Ox?”
Ox rolled to his knees on the floor, on all fours. His joints cracked. A smile crept over his rugged jaw.
Runt blinked. For one moment, staring at the open face, he had the uncanny feeling that he knew what young Ox had looked like as a teenager digging in the mines, with speech, still, and more human dimensions.
Ox stared at him one last time, asking the question with his hard eyes. Those crazy pheromones ghosted in the air between them, but Runt clamped down on the sweet tickle.
What’s it like to have so much power inside your skin?
Runt shivered but didn’t blink at the big goon. He nodded once and scooted across, giving Ox plenty of bed to claim.
Suddenly he felt like an idiot for letting Ox sleep crumpled the past couple nights, and even more ashamed that Ox hadn’t complained. For a moment, Runt felt even smaller than he actually was.
Ox climbed onto the thick foam pad and clung to the edge as though trying to take up as little space as possible with that humongous body. Even on the broad bed, his feet hung off the end unless he bent his knees.
“You’ll roll off, shitwit.” Runt tugged him onto the mattress with a hand too stubby to even grip the beefy bicep. “We got acres of mattress here.”
Ox scootched over a few centimeters. Even at that distance, the bed felt exponentially warmer.
Again Runt yearned for the soft, sweet-smelling clone wife that his lonely bed deserved, for the litter of kids they’d have in a couple years. He could be patient ’til then. Oh well: you lose some and you lose some more.
Looking over, Ox’s face softened, his mouth a slender bend of satisfaction revealing a deep dimple under his twinkling eyes in the bluish glow from overhead. The warm smile creased his blunt features and made him ugly-adorable as a bulldog puppy.
Or not ugly at all.
The fuck? Runt clamped down on that thought, rolling back to look at the ceiling. Where had that come from? He lay there, watching the seconds tick by on the ceiling clock’s indigo digits, feeling not-alone for the first time since they dumped him on HD10307-E in Andromeda’s hair.
Ox finally gave in, scooting closer until only a meter separated them. The yeasty musk of him filled the sleep-space. Not unpleasant, but insistently male. With his friend beside him, Runt didn’t feel small anymore. Ox rubbed his head against the pillow, relaxing himself again and burrowing deeper until he slept.
And after that night, that’s how they slept after working together all day.
Sharing the sleep-space should have been awkward because Ox was so damn enormous, and because Runt had an orphan’s habit of sliding toward any warm bulk when he was asleep. A little freaky at times, but they were both adults, right?
Runt knew he snored, but Ox almost seemed to prefer it to silence. Gradually, Runt realized that his cofarmer loved being close to anything that hummed or purred: motors, thunder, ventilation, transport . . . That made some kind of sense: if his parents had been sub-terrain miners, he’d grown up with the seismic drills. Any low rhythmic vibration calmed him like a mechanical lullaby. And sometimes Ox sang, crooning-purring to himself in that subsonic drone that calmed Runt too.
Most days, Ox was up and washed and dressed before Runt woke, so it hardly affected Runt’s routine. Runt realized Ox remained anxious to protect their individual privacy much as they could. Someone had taught him to be a polite mutant.
Not miners, surely?
Sure . . . a couple of mornings, Runt woke up with an eyeful of Ox’s pisshard bobbing in the air above the soft pubes like a fucking telecom post. Odd’s Gods! Forty centimeters it had to be, and eighteen around, nearly big as Runt’s forearm; fat, warm testes hung like tan lemons in the loose hairy sac beneath. Scared the hell out of Runt the first few times he saw it surging over the sheets like a sea beast, but Ox bobbed his head in apology and was quick to cover himself.
Pretty soon Runt wasn’t even panicked by Ox’s hefty bone anymore. Even soft, it was easily three times bigger than his. And though both of them masturbated, they did so discretely outside the shared quarters. Morning stiffs didn’t matter.
Overnight, possibilities sprouted underfoot like weeds.
Ox turned out to be a fucking machine with unbelievable endurance and pain tolerance, which was lucky because for all that bulk, he injured himself almost hourly. With his help, solar panels went up in four hours instead of four days. The giant wasn’t quick to adapt, but he had a knack for thoughtful strategy when he stayed calm.
By the end of the first week, they’d cleaned the eelbeds properly for the first time in seven months and replanted the seaweed grove that had been picked off by scavengers with Runt working alone. Ox prepped another kilometer stretch of the cove that could take on another species once they branched out from these conger hybrids.
Two weeks to the day of Ox’s arrival, when Runt brought a few kilos of chopped kudzu-lentil leaves to a new litter of caterpillars, he discovered something by accident, and he discovered it alone.
Upslope, Ox had another three hectares to fertilize. Runt had come down early to check the terminal for a HardCell purchase order that was two days late and stopped at the hive with the leaves on his way home.
After spreading damp fistfuls over the pupal trays, he stood in the cool dark watching the bee-moths dozing on the walls. The glare from the doorway hurt his eyes, but crouched in the dim hive and listened to the queen beeping and clicking, he felt
himself begin to nod off.
Just for a minute.
Runt stretched out on his back on the cool sand. The pale constellations of dreaming moths shifted overhead as they flexed their wings and waited for night.
Then a caterpillar caught his eye, not on the trays but on the wall. It crawled down one of the new walls Ox had welded together out of his transport container and planted directly in the earth. The caterpillar drew Runt’s eye, but the knife kept it.
Knife?
It lay on the sandy floor against the wall. A vat-grown bone grip, its blade hid inside like a stiletto, but not steel. This was a sonic knife, which made molecular cuts using vibration focused with atomic precision. Squeeze the grip and the blade would shisk into position. Piercing noise, literally, and it cost a small fortune.
The shining caterpillar inched over the burnished ivory curve. Without a hand to wield it, the blade stayed out of sight. The weapon was so intelligent, a pro could cut an artery almost without breaking the skin. A distinguished end to any career.
Chance’s pants!
He crawled to the hive corner and found a gap in the wall a few centimeters from the knife. A panel had popped in the heat. Runt tugged it open.
And saw a small box of death. He knew full well what he was looking at: a high-end HardCell retirement package, the kind they issued to noncompetition assassins to eliminate heads of state. A kill-kit straight out of a holo-vid, half-open and tucked inside the wall. High temperatures had loosened the lid and the knife had fallen free.
Easily worth an island or two.
Even as a spaceport runaway, he’d never seen so much slaughter per square millimeter. Careful not to trip any booby traps, Runt lifted the case out and opened it on the sand.
He saw a fully stocked murderer’s toy box: hitwire, smart-darts, a pair of grenades, four stacked tubes of neurotoxins, a set of throwing daggers, adrenal pens, even a plasma shunt. All of the materials were organic with no actual metal anywhere, so you could walk this through any security scan. A fortune in death buried here under the insects. This case must have arrived with Ox, hidden in his container.
Ox marks the spot, huh?
Had Ox hidden them on purpose? Ox would never have wasted such valuable tools. He might not even know what was concealed in the walls of his transport. Why leave them out here if he had known? HardCell didn’t fritter away resources. A mix-up at transport, maybe. A robbery or retirement gone wrong. Ox wasn’t a killer. He couldn’t be . . .
Runt picked up the fallen sonic knife. Even in his hands, the cloned-bone weight felt elegant and certain . . . like peaceful resignation. Every corporate executive dreamed of this kind of stylish termination. He popped it back in its cradle next to the other unhappy endings.
He shook his head. His giant partner must’ve welded the kill-kit into the walls by mistake. He had no idea and HardCell had packed them in error or wanted these things lost. Maybe these were evidence in some trial and some swanky corporate lawyers wanted them offworld.
Unless they did belong to Ox. Unless the weapons were a key to the past he couldn’t discuss. If Ox wanted to kill him, he stood no chance.
Except, he hasn’t killed me.
Runt closed the case, then opened it. Best if he said nothing about it to Ox. If the weapons were his, the discovery would antagonize him, and if they weren’t, the kill-kit might make him nervous or give him a reason to make Runt nervous.
No.
This retirement package had become an expensive brick in a hive wall and Runt chose to leave it there. If Ox decided to explain, he’d listen, but he certainly didn’t want to create a crisis with the farm climbing toward solvency.
Runt clicked the case shut, shouldered the wall to close the gap, and promised himself to come out with a hammergun and seal it properly, first thing this afternoon.
He moved the rogue caterpillar-snoop back to the trays and its leafy lunch.
When he got back to the habitat, the HardCell order blinked on his terminal and Runt forgot about the deadly kit . . . until much later.
With Ox’s oversized hands clearing away the grunt work, Runt managed to sneak up sideways on some of their larger problems. He engineered a new well system that watered the germination racks and simultaneously purified the ocean water for intake. He rigged extra storage space for harvests within the pumice cliff that sheltered their habitat. He constructed an eel nursery in the greenhouse that halved production time on both produce and protein.
Runt knew he made mistakes more often, but like all children who grow up in spaceport alleys, he specialized in cutting corners and creative solutions. He found ways to own the land so the land stopped owning him.
By the end of week three, they began to rely on each other as a matter of habit. Cooperating with a giant made him feel bigger, not smaller. Runt stopped surviving and began growing.
For once, HardCell’s ploy worked: they were a perfect team, even in temperament, and they learned each other quickly. Ox lived with a short fuse and got frustrated with himself easily, so Runt learned to keep him calm when they tackled tough jobs together.
A kind of balance stole over the farmstead. Ox came to Runt for miracles; Runt relied on Ox for focus. Productivity improved exponentially and Runt couldn’t remember how he’d been able to live out here alone.
The future took root.
Ox relaxed more, and didn’t hurt himself as often. Runt finally slept regular hours and woke rested, making fewer catastrophic mistakes and rigging crazy solutions to save labor.
Ox liked to hear Runt’s stories about the spaceport or soldiering. He’d seen some kind of combat himself; the scars on his hands were testament to that, but the larger man’s history stayed off-limits.
Runt knew better than to pry, although he did spend more time than he ought trying to figure out how all this manpower had wound up transplanted to planetoid HD10307-E somewhere in Andromeda’s hair.
Some things are better buried. But some things grow.
When Ox had relaxed some, his knotty sense of humor blossomed as unexpectedly as sea orchids under the tropical suns. As it turned out, he had an appetite for elaborate practical jokes that took prep and patience: mud fights, sea-slugs in the underwear, tickle-tackling Runt in the surf until he wept and begged.
Ox had a poker face like granite and his laughter was silent too; as each goofy ambush unfolded, his guarded chuckle would build and build in his broad chest. Finally his huge smile would crack open and he’d guffaw ’til he choked and crowed . . . even though he never made a sound.
Runt loved to see Ox laughing so much that he came to look forward to the teasing with a kind of comic masochism. Eventually he didn’t even mind being the brunt of so many pranks, and stopped trying to match them. Ox’s affectionate ribbing became part of the cadence of their workdays.
Runt’s anxieties about his cofarmer made the farm funnier somehow, not quite knowing if the kill-kit would appear. Ox never threatened him or shirked his chores, but the potential violence made gentler jobs seem demented. Sometimes Runt thought of the hidden kill-kit and his laughter teetered on the edge of hysteria, but he stopped minding, mostly.
At some point, though he couldn’t say when, Runt forgot that Ox couldn’t talk. They certainly had entire conversations without Ox speaking a word. And Runt found that he talked less, even to himself. There was no need. They grew to be like mismatched brothers and worked together in a kind of seamless symbiosis, until Runt couldn’t remember living solo or wanting to.
As the weeks became a month, the two went from cofarmers to bosom friends. Ox’s HardCell ID indicated they were nearly the same age, with Ox a few years older, but oddly enough, the larger man proved more reckless and playful. For once in Runt’s stupid life he needed to be the grown-up, dressing Ox’s hourly wounds and forcing the bigger man to eat and rest.
Then again, Ox tackled so much of the grunt work and put up with Runt’s addiction to trashy advertainment. He sat through any formulaic crap so
long as Runt scratched Ox’s head like an overgrown cat while some lame holo-vid ran.
Eventually, Runt knew Ox better than he’d ever known another living person, better than his parents or his platoon or the other runaways at the spaceport even, yet knew next to nothing about Ox’s past. Mostly Runt didn’t notice, but sometimes the curiosity grew into a maddening itch. Ox hadn’t offered, and Runt knew better than to nose around. No telling what he’d find and no part of it his business.
One afternoon, Runt did find Ox’s HardCell contract in their data terminal, mostly by accident. He almost wished he hadn’t, but he couldn’t stop himself swiping a look-see.
He hadn’t intended to snoop, but the terms were right there, and as usual, his curiosity clobbered his scruples and he took a peek. They were partners after all; his nosiness was purely friendly. It wasn’t like Ox chatted about his past. Not like he really could, right?
“Gods!” Runt leaned forward, knowing he shouldn’t be looking at all.
According to the HardCell agreement, the Terraformation division had recruited Ox actively, offering him a double stock option as bait and a bonus for signing!
In light of his superior genetics, probably. That made sense, and if Runt felt a little jealous, that made sense too. Only fair. He finishes four times the work I can. If anything, Runt rode Ox’s oversized coattails. They’d both be voting shareholders one day, so it hardly mattered.
So who is he?
A mutant question mark, it seemed. The rushed agreement contained more holes than data. Apparently, his cofarmer had met and signed with HardCell on the spot and shipped from New Baghdad, which explained the surprise arrival.
He left in a fucking hurry.
Ox would be back any second.
Again Runt combed through the contract from the beginning. Apparently, Ox had DNA-signed and verified his identity with three tissue samples: blood, hair, bone. A legal employee at least. Hrmm. Not a clone or vat-grown, but obviously more than natural. So . . . the genetic augmentation predated the HardCell contract.