Mercury Going Down

by Brambach, C. S.

  Mercury Going Down

  By

  CS Brambach

  1.

  Awake, Surviving, Alive

  Bad luck either makes a man, or destroys him.

  -A. Kurosawa

  Day 1

  I woke up in a cool, well-lighted space, and I was alive, when, by all rights, I should have been dead. I knew I was alive because my tongue had a coating like moldy twenty year old shag carpet on it and the ceiling was lit with a mild green shade to it which told me I was in the Med-Unit, (green being the most soothing, relaxing color to the human eye), that and the low beeping of the cardiac monitor was a dead give away.

  “Hell...” I managed to croak out and a nurse instantly appeared packing the largest bag of saline solution I had ever seen. This, in retrospect was quite the ironic first word because I had survived a little trot through hell itself and had kind of expected to wake up there.

  After hooking up the new bag of saline, she quickly brought me a large plastic container of chilled water before wheeling up a small table with a pitcher of mixed iced water and electrolytes.

  “The doctor and your wife will be here shortly, sir.” She said in her clipped efficient manner. As efficient as a fast food dispensary and about as personal. Probably a Med-bot.

  The doctor, Dr. Wali, came in with a brisk air and a scuffed clip board.

  “Ah, Mr. Dunn, you experienced hyperthermia, which swelled your brain, and your liver and kidney’s were badly traumatized, we are giving you a new solution that should combat the effects, but we will not know for another 48 hours if you will live or die, but we are hopeful. Have a nice day.” He bowed a curt bow and left before I could ask a question or take a poke at him. The nurse came in briefly and removed the catheter.

  Which was a rush, all in and of itself.

  The wife entered. She looked at me with spitting cobra eyes in that first unguarded rush we experience when we see someone or something we have a love hate relationship with for the first flashing second after some terrible trauma has occurred. She recovered her composure quickly and the mask came back on as she rushed to my bedside. She quickly insinuated herself through the IV’s and around me and started to sob, almost delicately.

  “Oh, Drew, I’m so glad you’re alive...” With her face leaking on my right shoulder her right hand ran down the sheet to find my little buddy, and her touch, as usual worked it’s usual instant magic.

  “You are alive all right. This proves it.”

  “I could use a toothbrush more right now...” I croaked, hoarsely.

  “Bit cranky after your ordeal?” She was dabbing at her eyes with the top of the sheet with her left hand while reaching under it to stroke me with her right, firmly.

  “Shit baby, we’re on camera now.” Looking up at the small video camera mounted in the corner.

  “Fuck ‘em, we’ll give ‘em a show.” She had always had a high kink factor.

  “Here, let me mellow out your mood a little.”

  She pulled down the sheet and pulled up my flimsy hospital gown exposing me, I didn’t get a whiff of rank, so I knew I had had the full sponge bath treatment. She jumped on the bed and straddled me and with in a heartbeat had hoovered my little buddy, who was not very little now, into her warm wet mouth. She had never ceased to amaze me with her ability to deep throat my chubby buddy, it never failed to thrill me to see the tip of her nose touch the bottom of my stomach. She left the shaft wet. She licked and sucked on the head all the while deftly stroking the shaft with a firm well timed precision. After about twenty minutes of her ministrations I felt the sap starting to rise and arched my back, which signaled her to start gently tapping my tightening balls with her free hand.

  “Ooooh.” I moaned gently and she opened her mouth wide without removing it from my little buddy as she brought her hand up the shaft to the head just catching my ejaculate on the back of that hand. She dismounted like a rodeo pro and, after recovering me with the gown and sheet, she walked over to the sink in the bathroom and washed off her hand.

  She was such a pro, I often wondered about how truthful she had been about her past...

  “So much for saving my precious bodily fluids...” She giggled, almost maliciously.

  “If you can’t spare a couple tablespoons for your wife’s lust, maybe you’d be better off dead.” She said with a strange gleam in her eyes.

  I logged that look in the back of my mind and closed my eyes, starting to drift...

  “Thanks, Karen.” She came over and patted my cheek, gently.

  “Love you too honey. Well, I’m late for my shift, though I dare say I’ve a great excuse. You sleep now, you need it, I’ll stop in when my shift ends.” She kissed me on the cheek and left, and I promptly drifted off...

  It was almost as if I had blinked my eyes and instantly traveled through time. I was seated in the skimmer next to Dave who was driving. We were zipping over the crumbly surface of Mercury at just over 300 k per hour. A robot survey drone had gone down about 600 klicks away from Doheny City, the main mining colony on the planet. Its locator beacon was still functioning, but that was it, no communications with it otherwise, just the same repeating message. “Down, down, down...” Sort of like an ancient rock song, only less peppy and with no poppy hooks.

  Dave was talking about his wife, as any group of two or more men are want to do, (they talk about women). Overhead the Mercurian night was literally awash in the stars of the Milky Way. On the console in front of us, the glow from the ground scanning radar and the infrared video cam monitor cast our faces in an eerie glow. At - 180 degrees C, any heat signature on the nearly flat surface of Mercury would stand out like a huge zit on a porn stars ass in digital high def. Moving along at 300 k per hour it would come up fast too.

  “She won’t let me do her in the butt, and it’s startin’ to kinda bug me.” He was focused on the radar screen.

  “Is that all you two ever do? You’ve only been on planet like six months, don’t burn it out man, hell, give it another six months and then join one of the swap clubs.” There were only a couple thousand colonists on Mercury, mostly married couples, all there for either a three or a five year tour of duty and all there for only one reason, to keep the iron ore, the selenium, the molybdenum moving up out of the ground, into the processors and then on to the ships for transport to Luna City, on Earth’s moon.

  Earth had run out of most raw materials twenty five years before, and all the major manufacturing was done on the Moon, hey, if there’s an industrial accident, or a hazmat spill or other environmentally dangerous incident, who cares if it happens on the Moon, it’s a dead rock...a dead rock loaded with titanium...other than the rotating staff of six to eight hundred scientist’s and researchers stationed at the North Polar Galileo station, the rest of the planets populations main occupation was keeping the robots functioning properly, because that’s who did the real work on Mercury. Robots. Thousands of them.

  From prospector drones to big mechanized diggers to smelters to docking workers. Robots, all robots...

  “Shit man, you can only drink so much synthohol and bowl so much...”

  “Well, there’s the holo suites, sports, the library, movies, club’s...”

  “Man, you can’t really feel the holo’s, not like a real girl, and I did all my reading in college after the military, enough for a lifetime. Most movies, if they’re not porn, bore me, and club’s? Never been much of a joiner, ya know?” He tapped the infrared display.

  “So you didn’t play ball in high school, and what was the military all about?” I said mildly, sarcastically. He was a good kid and a hard worker, we often went for beers after our shifts, after being on planet for just over two and a half years of a three year shift I took a big
brother attitude and had taken to showing him the ropes. How to work the system for an extra dose of synth e or synth coke when his attitude needed a little extra oomph for it’s adjustment, how to ride the clock just right, show up at the latest and leave at the earliest without getting written up, who the cool super’s were, who could be and who shouldn’t ever be fucked with.

  “Well, had to pay for school, had to provide a decent life for my sweetie, she and me were high school sweetheart’s, ya know?” His wife was hot. Tall, blonde, built like the proverbial brick shit house, blues eye’s, killer smile, and bright as 150 watt bulb. Dave was lucky cause this super cool, beautiful woman just loved to fuck his brains out, anywhere, pretty much anytime. By her own admission. Whenever my misses and I hung out with those two, I would always beg her to talk to my wife. Granted, we had a marriage more of convenience, they preferred married couples to staff the mining colonies and we had both wanted off Earth, and had enjoyed a fairly brisk sex life, but true love? Far from it.

  These two were in their late twenties, and had been together since they were in their mid teens, well over ten years and were still giggling and playing kissy face like they were hot to trot newlyweds. It almost made me nauseous. On more than one occasion.

  I attempted to peer through the clear plex view shield, trying to see a world that in two and a half years I had seen with unshielded eye’s twice and each time only briefly during daylight hours. A flat world of blazing hell, till the shades came down, stopping the otherwise inevitable frying of the optic nerves.

  A line from the Qur’an came to mind, ‘How evil a place of wide expanse!’

  Little did I know...

  “Yeah, I know, she thinks I’m getting a little obsessive about it, but, I’ve had her mouth and her pussy for so long now, I dunno, it would be something new, and exciting...”

  “And dirty, an’ nasty, an forbidden...” I added, paying attention to the display, we were almost two hour’s out of Doheny and should be seeing a ghost of the bot on the forward display soon.

  “Yeah, that’s probably a big part of it, that whole taboo aspect of it.” His parents had raised him as a Mormo-baptist, his Dad had been Baptist and his Mom had been Mormon, and if there was one thing that was taboo, it was wanting to dump your seed in you wife’s poop chute, yup, just the wanting could sentence you to an eternity in the pit of hell, with the rest of the idolaters and unbelievers.

  He started to ease back on the throttle right as the ground radar started to ping excitedly.

  “There it is, dead ahead.” He brought our speed down even more as the infrared monitor started to ping. I turned the volume down on the infrared detector and noticed that the bot was only ten or fifteen kilometers away.

  “Whoa, don’t overshoot it there hotrod.” Dave just smiled and punched up the head lights and swung around the ‘bot in a tight 180 and landed us pointing back towards base.

  “There she is, let’s get out and get it fixed and get back before sun up.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” All missions were planned during dark phase, nightfall.

  Temperatures during daylight reached over 420 degree’s Celsius, that’s pushing 800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt tin, and while the drone bots could handle that temp, and the skimmer could for up to ten, maybe twelve hours, our suits could handle it for maybe two hour’s maximum. Sure the station was built to handle those temps, and the skimmer’s and suit’s could have been made to resist those temps indefinitely, but that was cost prohibitive, and we were at the mercy of the company bean counters, so every activity had to be planned around the optimum efficiency of the systems we had to work with. 12 hour suits with 6 hours of full sun exposure were like one quarter the cost of a full 48 hour suit, with 24 hours of full sun exposure resistance. Shit, we never worked on the suits, if they started to break down we just broke out a new one. Cheaper. More cost efficient. Oh, and it gets better. Believe it.

  As we clipped our helmets on Dave laughed. My suit told me over the comm link that it was sealed properly. I gave him the thumbs up and he depressurized the skimmer.

  “Comm check.” Said Dave in my ear.

  “In the butt check.” I replied which caused Dave to burst out laughing.

  “You know what you could do?” I asked as we began to climb out of the skimmer.

  “What?” He asked as he made his way to the back to get out the tool chest.

  “Try this the next time you’re doin’ her doggie style, wet a thumb and see if you can work it in her ass, if you can get it past the knuckle, you’ve a shot...”

  “Of workin’ my dick in there too?” He asked with a decided tone of enthusiasm in his voice.

  “No.” I said taking my first tentative bounce towards the stranded bot. The gravity was only .38ths that of Earth, so, figuring I weighed a little over 76 kilo’s and the suit weighed about 40 kilo’s, that was 116 kilo’s which meant I weighed like 44 kilo’s tops.

  I could jump like three meter’s on earth but here I could jump ten, fifteen meter’s, without raising a sweat. It wasn’t the take off’s you had to be careful of, no, it was the landing’s, a twisted ankle at low g could still be just as painful.

  “The next time you do her like that you get a vibrator, lube it up good, and slowly work it into her, then turn it up high, and believe me if she isn’t screaming to the star’s workin’ you and the vibrator in and out, well, you won’t stand a chance of ever gettin’ yer dick in there. In her butt.”

  “In her butt.” He echoed and laughed.

  “You could always practice on a Robo-ho.” I suggested in my usual helpful manner. The company, as part of it’s union contract kept a small, but highly advanced staff of robotic sex workers ‘on call’ in an alcove of the ‘entertainment district’ of the base. They were labeled as Amusements/entertainer’s under the Stress-reduction mitigation clauses. A happy, healthy, well adjusted work force is, after all, a more productive work force...

  “Eh, they feel OK, but they don’t respond like a real human woman.”

  “Well if you want to spank ‘em and have ‘em call ya daddy, you just have to program that in before hand.”

  “That’s part of it, it’s the lack of spontaneity.” To which I snorted as I reached the drone. I clicked on the headlamp of my suit and the bots shadow appeared to stretch off into the distance. I turned to look at him as he bounced up with the toolbox in tow. He switched off the anti-grav plate and it settled to the surface. I didn’t like them either and would never use one, on the base anyway. It wasn’t the thought, so much, of all the numbers of guy’s, (and women), that had used and abused the Ho’s, it was more the thought that every human they serviced, they recorded every nuance of the performance and could dump that data to the Company, or the Gov’t or anyone savvy enough to hack the system, for cheap thrills even. No, they’d never see a debit on my cred balance for using one, and they’d never eyeball me makin’ it with a machine.

  “Gosh, Susan just likes to do it anywhere, anytime, high on the spontaneity factor that girl, hell, I remember once, we were waiting on the line for like the Ninja 12.5 at Twelve Flags, and it was like 90 degrees out, hotter an’ blazes, and I’m sitting there on the line, leaning up against a big steel I-beam roof support and she sit’s on my lap, straddlin’ me, and she’s in this cute kinda peasanty summer dress, that barely goes past her knees, an’ she doesn’t have any underwear on, and she reaches under and unzips my shorts and pulls me free and slides me into her and she just rode me there, while we were waitin’ in line, surrounded by about a quarter million people, and man, I gotta tell ya, when I finally busted a nut, I thought I was gonna cum out of my ears. And the ride, though much shorter in duration, was fun too.” When I was done laughing at this I just shook my head.

  “Shit, if you spent half the time on some proper preprogramming of a Robo-ho, you wouldn’t have to spend all that time scheming to get into your wife’s butt. You can get a Robo-ho to kneel and worship you, to cry out yer name when y
ou come, and you don’t have to take out the trash or buy her jack shit to do it.”

  “I don’t have to do any of that stuff to get Susan wantin’ it or me, but thanks for the input, you know what, it smell’s like teen...”

  “Hey. Hey. Don’t start that cult crap on me now...” Dave had had a brief brush with the Cult of Nirvana, a minor league cult that had sprung up around the worship of an obscure Seattle based rock band of the late 20th century, a band that had been all but forgotten in the last fifty years, what, they had released like two maybe three albums? Now the Doors Cult was booming back on Earth as the new century had just dawned, it advocated extremes of joy and sadness as a way of reaching a heightened awareness, whereas the Cult of Nirvana espoused giving up and giving in and ultimately suicide as the only way to spiritual bliss. The life of this world sucked no matter how good or bad, so why bother. It had been dying out from the moment it started up, during the Plague years, but then it is hard to keep up your membership rolls if your membership is offing itself at a real regular rate... I hit the off switch on the foremast of the drone and motioned for Dave to hop to the other side of the drone and help me unfasten and remove the hood.

  “Sorry. I always forget what you’ve been trying to tell me, don’t talk about Religion, Sex, and Politics...In the butt.” Said Dave with a mild grunt as he lifted the hood out of the way.

  “In polite company.” I replied after I stopped laughing.

  “Cause we sure talk about sex enough, between guys.”

  “ We’re mild compared to women, believe me, I know, I’ve had enough women friends over the years, and man, they get into details of a filthy manner. Susan long ago got hammered with Karen an’ gave her the lowdown and dirty on you, yer stat’s, the size and shape of your package, yer junk, how you like to have what parts of you licked, when and maybe even the why.” I looked at the guts of the drone.

  “Better set up the tripod light, get rid of the shadows.”

  “Right away boss. In the butt.” He snickered as he hopped back to the skimmer for the light. Everything under the hood appeared kosher, no dust accumulation, no stray rocks gumming up the works. Obviously a chip was down. You could engineer something so well, that it was damn near impossible to have a mechanical breakdown, so what it came down to was the life span, the immutability of the chip’s, the brains. Which was also why live humans were needed to keep the robot’s up and running. Human brains didn’t scramble as easily when exposed to small amounts of radiation. We were more flexible and adaptable in the problem solving skill’s department. I asked Dave to pull up the maintenance schedule for the drone and had him check the age of the main systems chip. In the butt. When he was done laughing he pulled up the info.