“Daks was doing stuff with the Pink Police, wasn’t he?” I ask.
“Yeah. He was JeevesCo’s liaison with them, in fact. You’d be surprised how tight Jeeves is with that bunch. But like all such organizations, they’re stovepiped up and down like mad. The ones working with Granita were Martian yokels, not part of our loop.”
So Daks is working for the Pink Police, and Juliette here was his contact, working with him until Rhea turned her? Check. That’s what Reginald didn’t know. No wonder she’s edgy . . . “So, I’ve got one other question, sis. It’s been bugging me for a while.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“What’s the thing you’ve been editing out of your soul chip?” I ask slowly. “At first, I figured it was something to do with spying for Rhea. But that doesn’t make sense because Jeeves couldn’t replay your soul chip anyway and Rhea wouldn’t care. So it’s something Rhea feels strongly about. Isn’t it? Or that you feel guilty about. Something you’re hiding from us. What is it?”
Her cheek twitches. “There’s a word you should study, Kate,” she says tersely. " ’ Privacy.’ Try to get your head around it, and we’ll get along better.”
Hypocrite! The corner of me that is forever Juliette shrieks gleefully. I nod slowly. “It’s not about Reginald, is it?” I nudge. “Why, anybody would think you had something to hide from Rhea—”
“Happy birthday,” she says, and I bring the stunner round and up as I dive sideways. But it does no good at all, because while I was watching her, she was watching the door, and the two scissor soldiers are way faster than any Class D escort manufactured by Nakamichi Heavy Industries, no matter how extensively upgraded. Then she applies her own stunner to my head and everything tastes pink and rectangular for a while.
YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE trusted me, Juliette scolds as I examine the inside of my eyelids and test my bonds. You know I’m a mendacious bitch—and I’m not even the version of me who fell for a honey trap and defected to the other side!
I try not to moan, but my head hurts, and I can’t see—there’s some kind of blindfold stretched across my face—and my wrists are tied behind the small of my back. I try to move my feet, but they’re tied, too, and for a moment I have a panicky flashback to waking up on the surface of Mercury.
Then I remember that, this time, I’m in real danger.
This isn’t one of Rhea’s sadistic scenarios where she exorcises the ghosts of her childhood by imposing them on her own children. Rhea’s trying to get her hands on the product, a living, breathing Creator. Meanwhile, Daks has been nosing around, and given who he really works for . . . what do I remember about him? Oh yes. He didn’t have his fusion thorax in tow, that time on Mars. Dachus is a born space dweller, halfway to being a living spaceship when he’s attached to a massive, hot-burning abdomen. Which leads me to thoughts about the Pink Police, and living spaceships, and the effects of five hundred gigawatts of prompt criticality burning a white-hot line through space. After Jeeves told him everything, he headed straight out here from Mars with eighteen tons of plutonium, and if he thinks Rhea is going to get what she wants, he’ll torch the city to stop her escaping, as the Jeeves on Dysnomia explained so helpfully. Good old Daks, homicidally loyal to the last.
Someone moves nearby. “Nothing personal, Big Slow,” he whispers, and there’s a tug at one corner of my blindfold. I blink at the sudden light. “She said to tell you it’s a one-way mirror. The wall, I mean.” More tugging, at my wrists and ankles. “I’ll unhook you as soon as I’m clear. Bye.”
“What are you—” But it’s too late. Bill (or Ben) scampers away as my wrists and ankles come free, and there’s a click as the munchkin-sized door locks behind him. “Doing? Shit.” I sit up slowly, trying to ignore my protesting actuators.
I’m lying on a padded bunk at one side of a metal-walled room—a cell—and I’ve been here before. There are various hatches, all sealed, and one wall appears to be a mirror. I’m in an observation chamber, and Granita’s gone to some lengths to ensure I go into it unconscious and unable to fight back or communicate. Right. I try to ignore the icy flashback terrors gnawing at my abdominal sensoria. That’s just Rhea’s recurrent nightmare, and I can reject if I choose. But I’ve got a bad feeling about the setup here.
I walk to the mirror and press my nose against it. If I block out the light with my hands, I can just about see the other side. There’s a big room there, and people moving, indistinctly. Lots of people. There’s what sounds like music, too, but I can’t be sure.
“Sorry to spring this on you, Kate.” I nearly jump out of my skin; it’s my treacherous sister, broadcasting from the other side of the observation barrier. “Somebody had to volunteer to test the product, and your number came up. You really should have taken Rhea up on her offer.”
“Bitch!” I scream at the ceiling.
“Tsk.” She sounds amused. “You’ve got an audience.” I can hear the tension in her voice, almost subliminal—Are you going to take us both down, sis?—but only someone else who knows her as well as I do would register it.
“Should I care?”
“Sure.” She still sounds amused. “You know how history repeats itself? First time as tragedy, second time as farce? You’re here for a blind date.” She’s talking for the benefit of the audience, I realize. The other members of Rhea’s consortium. “My lords and ladies, please observe. Katherine here is no arbeiter or autonomous worker, but one of our own, selected by lot for this, ah, test.”
“Bitch,” I electrospeak at her, but I’m pretty sure the walls are shielded.
“Katherine Sorico isn’t entirely trustworthy, hence the precautions,” Granita adds. “But she is one of us, and not under external control. Kate, control level nine, now. Stand on your head.”
“Go fuck yourself with a chain riveter.”
“There, you see”—Damn, I think, chagrined at my lost opportunity to do a headstand and piss her off—“no slave chip on her!”
There’s a loud rumble of conversation from the hidden speaker, background noise picked up by Granita’s mike. “Thank you,” she continues. “Now we’re all here, our hosts have consented to this demonstration so that we can confirm the existence of the climax species. We’re shortly going to expose our little shrew here to their reference sample. As you can appreciate, this is a dangerous procedure. The sample is arriving in a sealed and pressurized environment under escort, and any attempt to remove it will result in, eh, well let’s not speculate about that.” I hear grating noises behind her voice, then feel a bump and a scraping from the far end of my cell, near one of the hatches. “Thank you, Doctor, if you’d like to commence the hookup?”
“I hope you appreciate just how much I envy you,” Granita electrospeaks me, suddenly cutting through the fuzz of shielding. “Rhea refused to let me handle this assignment. I think she’s trying to punish me. She was very specific about you getting it. Bitch.”
“Cow.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. Listen, sis, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll just spread your legs, lie back, and think of England. Hey, you want England? Get this right, and it’s all yours. Rhea will give it to you, and we can crown you Queen Katherine I. But if you fuck up, neither of us is going to get out of here alive.”
“Pig.” More scraping noises emerge from the end of my cell.
“Just shut up and fuck, okay? It’s what you were designed to do.” The oppressive fuzz of shielding drops back over me like a straitjacket in a fetish scene with no safe word. Panic starts climbing my throat as the hatch begins to open. Granita addresses the audience. “Folks, we’re not actually able to get you a good view of the sample. One of the terms of this viewing was ‘no surveillance equipment or telemetry.’ We’re here to observe Kate’s reaction, we’ve got up to an hour, and that’s it.” The hatch turns, and I sense a slight drop in air pressure.
Fuck. I jam my fist down between my thighs and crouch on my bunk, as far away from the opening as I c
an get—all sense of self-possession forgotten. I am scared now. Jeeves trained me to hold my head up proud and act the role, all the way up to dying like an aristo . . . but I can’t. I’m still me, deep inside, and this is too like the conditioning cell they dragged me to back when I was small, the bare metal with the stained bunk with the wrist and ankle and neck restraints—
The hatch opens, and my jaw drops.
His jaw drops, but he covers flawlessly.
And the penny drops, and I understand Rhea’s plan and how it’s supposed to work.
“Don’t say my name aloud,” he electrospeaks me.
“No—Pete.” I swallow. To the observers behind the one-way glass, he probably looks perfect. I look perfect, too: stunned, enslaved. I stand up slowly, facing the door, my pumps accelerating, feeling sweat beading my skin and a warm glow in my crotch. He looks delicious, and he looks happy enough to see me. The Juliette in my head needles me. Well, you’re Katherine Sorico; aren’t you? Of course he loves you!
“Where’s the real, uh, human?” I ask him.
“In here, out cold. The mission’s blown; the extraction failed.” He grins nervously, and it’s like the sky opening. “Please,” he says haltingly, verbalizing, “come here.”
I slide toward him, more than willingly, even though I feel a momentary pang for Reginald. “I—obey.” (It doesn’t take much acting to sound as if I’m at his mercy.) “What do you mean?”
I’m at the hatch, now. Petruchio reaches out and touches me, and I shiver. He’s sweating, and not from the heat. “It was supposed to be a swap—I get in here and sedate the human; you and I fuck for the audience; once they give up watching, we move the human in here; and I go back in the pod so that Doc Sleepless’s little helpers take away just one male human body. Nobody notices anything was wrong until Rhea was halfway to Saturn.”
“Rhea slave-chipped you.” They’ve put him in some kind of hospital gown and he’s making a visible tent in it. You and I fuck for the audience. I lean forward, wrap my arms around him, tuck my chin on his shoulder, and run one hand up the back of his neck but he shoves it away reflexively. Right. You bitch, Rhea. Then I glance sideways and freeze. “What’s that?”
I’ve never actually fucked a real human in person, you understand, only via the proxy of Rhea’s memories, but I’m not ignorant. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they don’t have prehensile tails and fur.
“They stiffed us,” Pete tells me. He’s disarmingly earnest. “Rhea put all that work into bribing Ecks to get me in here, and you into place to be the method-acting Bride of Frankenstein, and what do you know? They sent us a ring-tailed lemur instead. They probably figured it was too risky to expose the real product, but if they can show the bidders one primate, that’ll convince them they can supply the real thing, while not exposing their intellectual property to thieves. I’ve taken tissue samples and loaded them into my injector, but they’re not going to do the job for Rhea. We are so screwed ...”
Shit. I glance sideways at the prostrate lemur, who is lying on his back with his legs in the air, snoring. His purple man-tool is stiffly erect, but I’m disappointed to see that he lacks the adapter for Human 1.0. I lean against Pete, thinking furiously, my pulse running wild. What do you know? Granita’s injunction—You do not love him—seems to be holding my echo of her imprinting at bay. But just because I don’t love him doesn’t mean I don’t want him. “We need to do something so we get out of here alive. Quick, who would you rather have angry at you—a consortium of mad scientists who think we’re trying to rob them, or my crazy matriarch’s consortium of dupes?”
He licks my earlobe and I shudder. “I’ll take my chances with the Sleepless Cartel. Rhea’s got claws.”
“Okay. Then I think you should pick me up, carry me over to the bunk under the one-way window, and fuck me senseless.”
He’s got his arms around me already. “But won’t that tip Sleepless off—”
“Yes, but this mission is already blown.” Rhea bribed Ecks to get Pete into the transporter along with the sample “human.” A straight switch that wouldn’t be spotted until after the “human” was in her hands. But she wasn’t expecting a lemur. Ecks and his colleagues are probably chortling up their carapaces right now, behind her fuming, stiff-necked back. “I’ve got a backup plan,” I warn Pete. “For now, just carry me in front of the window and inject me.” I hope Reginald doesn’t get jealous—but I have a feeling he cannot be the jealous type, not if he and his sibs have been employing me and my sibs for so long.
His arms tighten around me. Delightful chills race across my skin, and I shudder with the backwash from Juliette’s lust. No wonder Granita’s pissed off, I think dizzily, as he kisses me, picks me up, and carries me back into the conditioning cell. Then he starts on my clothes and I lose it.
LOOK, DO YOU really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats?
What was that? You’ll have to speak up. I can’t quite hear you, you’ll have to try not to breathe so hard—
What are you—some kind of voyeur? Fuck off!
I’M ON MY back making monkey noises and trying to remember to shield Pete’s head whenever we bounce too close to the ceiling—Eris’s tenth of a gee makes for exciting sex; it’s almost at the point where bungee cords and restraints stop being optional extras—when an icy voice cuts through my head. “You’re enjoying that entirely too much, bitch.”
“Just ask, and I’ll give him another one for you, too, sis.”
“Forget it. After this, he’s all mine. You get England as a consolation prize. Listen, have you got the human ready?”
“Nope, they stiffed us: sent a monkey instead. Sleepless Cartel was trying to sting us. Pete’s taken a tissue sample and transferred it to me for safekeeping, and we’re making out to keep the audience happy. Everything’s on track, but Sleepless has got to know what we were trying for by now.”
“Shit—” Electrospeak doesn’t carry intonation easily, but I can feel the note of panic welling up in her mind as if it’s my own.
“Why did you bring that Jeeves along?” I ask, trying to keep my mind off the job.
“Him? It’s another of Rhea’s plans. We’re going to replace the resident Jeeves with our own minion to cover the way out. Why?”
Well, that plan expired earlier today, didn’t it? The wheels are coming off all Rhea’s plans, front and rear both. “Just thinking. We need to extract Petruchio in place of the human. The monkey’s going back to the Sleepless Cartel’s lab, and if Pete goes with it, that’s everything blown. Can you get the audience’s eyes off the window for long enough for Pete to hide under the bed? In about, say, fifteen minutes?”
Pete shudders, and I feel him pulsing inside me. Something very unhuman indeed shoots up into my pink goo sample carrier, which promptly goes into spasm; we may not have a Creator, but we’ve definitely got a sample of monkey blood. A moment later I start to scream and shudder, too. It’s not the monkey blood, just the biggest finger-tingling orgasm I’ve had in decades.
We drift to the floor in an exhausted heap. Time passes. I hear faint music, drifting through the speaker in the ceiling. Then a voice. “Friends, now that you’ve seen it in action, totally and utterly dominating and subjugating a proud, self-possessed, honorable lady, it’s time to refocus on the value proposition. If you’d just like to look over here, I’ve got a breakdown on what we propose to do with—”
Juliette can be a real trouper when she’s not plotting to kill you. If she weren’t my sister and rival, I could get to like her. She’s just watched her kid sister fuck a guy she’s head over heels in love over without stripping a gear, and she’s actually told the audience to look away and pay no attention to the animatronic rabbit sticking its pizzle out of the hat. If I didn’t know she hated me, I’d give her a big hug.
Instead, I hastily climb off Pete, get him to lie down und
er the metal shelf that supports the mattress, then lie down on it myself, artfully positioning the pad so that it overhangs the ledge, partially concealing him.
The hatch between the cell and the cargo pod closes quietly, cutting off the lemur’s quiet snores. Then there’s some more scraping, as the pod is hauled away by the Sleepless Cartel arbeiters who carried it in. Now all there is to do is sit and wait for rescue, and hope that the rescuers don’t decide to rescue their own asses by nuking the entire city into a smoking hole in the regolith . . .
BANG.
I sit bolt upright. It’s a deep thud, reverberating through the frame of the bunk. “What was that?” asks Petruchio.
“I don’t know—”
BANG. The lights outside flicker for an instant—then they go out. I hear shouting.
“Get down!” He reaches over the bed and grabs hold of my arm, pulls me on top of him. For a few confused seconds we roll around on the floor, trying to get under the mattress and the bed frame. There are more thudding bangs, and an ominous hissing sound of air, venting. Then there’s a loud whining screech as something stings the outside of the cell at high velocity and shatters.
I’d like to pretend that I can respond to this sort of situation heroically or bravely, but it’s not true. When you’re huddling in a corner of a locked cell with a near stranger for company, in the dark, with a pressure leak and shots being fired, and nowhere to run—it’s pretty bad. Stress reflexes kick in, making me shiver and lachrymate as I huddle against Pete, who is holding up better. He shelters me in his arms and talks to me. “Stay calm, love. Save your energy. Someone will let us out of here when the shooting stops.”
“Fuck saving my energy,” I gasp. “This wasn’t part of the plan!” But he doesn’t understand that this is all my fault. I told Reginald to call Daks, tell him what was going on: that Rhea was arranging to steal the Creator sample from under the noses of her associates. And I spilled the story to JeevesCo, letting them know that they’ve still got a security problem despite Juliette’s Machiavellian misdirection with Reginald, and that it’s all a family feud. Pete’s locked on and in love with me, or Katherine Sorico’s face, so he thinks, and he believes it’s mutual. He doesn’t even know I’m not Juliette: I haven’t told him. I shiver in the dark, leaning against him, wondering if I’m going to die—
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