by Ian McDonald
Then the flash.
Then the ground shakes.
Then the metal rain.
* * *
Lucasinho’s cock is long and curved, belled with a thick rimmed glans. Abena’s hands slide down the shaft to cup the smooth, full balls, then move up over his perfect belly to his breasts. They are firm, upturned, large nippled. Perfect.
Abena sighs.
She rolls Lucasinho’s nipples between thumbs and forefingers. He purrs. His full glossed lips part. She closes, breasts to breasts, belly to belly. His cock is hard, its head resting in her navel. She runs her fingers through the dark, shiny hair that falls to his ass and draws him into a kiss.
She has been skinning him as a futanari for a lune now. The first time he lifted his adorable little maid tutu and stepped out of his girl pants and his cock slipped free from its bulge, she came. Ecstatic transgression. The second and third time she had network sex with Futa Lucasinho the spice was that he didn’t know what she had done to his avatar. The fourth, fifth, sixth times the electricity was her control over Lucasinho. She could make him anything she wanted. Turn his skin to plastic. Give him a goddess’s multiple breasts. Give him an alien cock. Her haptics would respond. This seventh time she notices that she’s given him much better tits than hers.
She pushes Lucasinho down on to the pad and straddles him so she can watch his breasts jiggle as she fucks him. That dick is a cartoon dick, a manga dick. He’s fantastic with it, all that way down the cable link in Twé, though he doesn’t know what she’s given him. She adores her cock-girl Luca.
When it is finally finished she rolls off him and lies on her side, studying her art.
‘Kojo and Afi are right,’ Lucasinho says. ‘I do have better tits than you.’
‘Shit,’ Abena says.
‘You might have asked.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No, but that’s not the issue.’
Distance sex, like every other style of human sexual expression, is about consent. By sculpting Lucasinho’s avatar without his knowledge, Abena has transgressed.
‘Kojo and Afi shouldn’t have told.’
‘Afi was pissed at you. Some colloquium thing.’
‘That doesn’t mean she can tell you my stuff.’
‘So you would have told me?’
‘Yes,’ Abena lies. Now that he knows, the clandestine thrill has gone out of it. ‘Did she show you?’
‘She did.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I love the cock.’
‘You’re welcome. What about the tits?’
‘I’m still finding out about them. Do they excite you?’
Abena hesitates.
‘I got the idea from Grigori Vorontsov. You know he used to be a big Vorontsov bear. Well, he’s not anymore.’ She nods at Lucasinho’s avatar.
‘Futa?’
‘In real life.’
‘Whoa,’ Lucasinho Corta says. He sits up. Oh gods, look at the ass I gave you, Abena prays silently. Like an apricot. And again, ‘Whoa. Since when?’
‘Back in Capricorn. It took a while for the surgery to heal.’
‘Grigori. I never would have thought.’
‘He’s gorgeous,’ Abena says. Lucasinho’s avatar sits on the end of the pad swinging his legs. Half the moon away, in a network sex cabin in Twé, his physical body will be doing the same. ‘Luca,’ Abena says, ‘do you ever skin me?’
* * *
Grigori Vorontsova is stunning. Everything Abena said is true. The chunky red-haired Russian boy with the bottomless lust for Lucasinho Corta is a slim full-hipped manga-eyed red-haired futanari.
‘Ola Luca,’ she says. ‘Nice to hear from you.’
‘Um yeah,’ Lucasinho stammers. ‘You look…’
‘Fantastic? That’s so sweet. You’re looking hot as ever, Luca.’
In his room in the Oyoko abusua house in Twé, a quarter of the moon away from Meridian, Lucasinho Corta blushes. Grigori Vorontsova always could get her fingers inside his head.
‘So which do you prefer?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Lucasinho stammers.
‘That Grigori or this one? Let me help you decide.’ Grigori steps back from the lens. She wears a tutu dress with a bolero jacket. Fingerless gloves, sheer Capri leggings and pumps. Crucifixes and Theotokos of Konstantin icons around her neck and a golden bow in her hair. Layer by layer, Grigori strips. The bra unsnaps and falls to the ground as Grigori stares a challenge into the camera. Lucasinho gasps.
‘You’ve seen nothing, Lucasinho Alves Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta.’
She hooks fingers in the waistband of her panties and peels them down.
Then the lights spasm and go off. Grigori Vorontsova blinks out of his lens. The room shakes, dust falls and outside the screaming starts.
* * *
Wagner peers out from under the rover. The rain of rock and metal ended several minutes ago, and now the ground is covered in a hail of small rocks and splashes of molten metal.
‘Report,’ Wagner calls.
Laoda, Zehra says. Laoda from Mairead, and from Ola.
Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball scrambles out from cover. The rover is a mess; a hundred scratches and cracks. Zehra inspects the damage, rerouting damaged cable, patching holed life-support ducts. Wagner and his AKA counterpart meet on the pocked terrain between the two rovers.
‘What was that?’ Wagner asks.
‘Twé reports an explosion at the Maskelyne G power plant,’ Adjoa says.
‘The fusion plant?’ Wagner feels his belly and balls tighten, checks Sombra for radiation spikes. New instincts wired into the moon-born: protect the DNA from radiation.
‘If Maskelyne G had exploded, we wouldn’t be here,’ Adjoa says. ‘Something blew a hole down through to the fifty metres of regolith, clean through the outer and middle shells, and cracked the inner caisson.’
Murmurs on the common channel.
‘An impacter?’ Wagner asks.
‘VTO would have warned us,’ Adjoa says.
‘VTO was supposed to come for us,’ Zehra says from the top of Rover Lucky Eight Ball.
Mystery after mystery. Wagner does not like mysteries. Mysteries kill. There are too many deaths out here in East Tranquillity. The only safe place is deep, with your back turned to the sky and the rock pulled over you.
‘That is one unluckily accurate impacter,’ Zehra says, patching and plugging.
‘Meaning?’ Adjoa says.
‘Meaning, Maskelyne was targeted,’ Zehra says. ‘I ran a few mass and velocity parameters. What hit it was either something big, in which case we would have seen it, or something small and fast-moving.’
‘Did anyone see anything?’ Adjoa asks. Negatives from her blackstars and Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Nothing on cameras.
‘All I’m saying is, it wasn’t us or AKA built those bots we took out,’ Zehra says. ‘The Mackenzies are fighting all over this Quartersphere but they’ve enough sense not to involve Sun or AKA. Maskelyne gets hit. VTO has a mass driver up there at the L2 point. Any way you point it, that’s a gun.’
‘Why would…’ Adjoa begins. Zehra cuts her off.
‘How would we ever know? We’re just the grunts, the surface workers. Collateral.’
‘Are we mobile?’ Wagner says.
‘Just,’ Zehra says, jumping down from the top of the rover in contravention of all safety protocols to land lightly on the regolith. ‘Lost a couple of solar panels. I wouldn’t want to have to try to outrun anything.’
‘Follow us to Twé,’ Adjoa says and swings up into her command seat.
* * *
In the mid 2060s a troop of excavation bots ventured out into the southern Sea of Tranquillity. They unfolded solar generators and began to dig. They dug precisely and carefully, a helix cut into the sea floor of Mare Tranquilitatis. Where the regolith was fractured they sintered it, where it was the hard basalt of the lunar mare they ground forward, centimetre by slow centimetre. A
fter two lunes the excavators had dug a hundred-metre-deep shaft west of Maskelyne crater with three helical ramps cut into the walls. They drove up the winding ramps and into the sun. Then they scooped out shelters and waited.
Over the horizon came Efua Asamoah and her caravan of short-contract workers. They parked their habitat trailers and bermed them over with regolith. From the flatbeds they unloaded universal construction trusses, an extractor that ran hydrogen through a bed of regolith to generate water, and two tonnes of Queen of the South’s shit and piss.
Efua Asamoah sank her fortune into this rifle-barrel in the Sea of Tranquillity. The shit had been particularly costly. Now the work. The construction trusses were assembled into a pylon that ran the height of the shaft and another hundred metres above the surface. The sinterers shaped black-glass mirrors from the regolith: Efua Asamoah and her crew hung them one by one from the spine. The bots spread a cap of translucent impact carbon over the shaft and sealed it. Beneath this roof Efua Asamoah created an ecosystem. By hand she worked Queen of the South’s shit into the pulverised spoil from the excavation until she had a tilth. On that day Efua Asamoah lifted a handful of her soil and tasted it and knew that it was good. Her workers spread it by hand along the helical ledges. They installed water plants and irrigation systems, a gas exchange to handle excess oxygen, motors to guide the mirrors and a pink-light array. Then Efua Asamoah hauled a caravan of seedlings all the way from Queen of the South and under the pink light she and her farmers laboured through the long lunar night, hand-planting the spiral ledges.
Build a farm, feed the world, Efua Asamoah had told her investors. The risk was enormous. Efua Asamoah was asking the money to accept that the moon would develop along the equator, not around the pole. That her radical design of farm, using sunlight and lunar regolith, would work, let alone prove cheaper and more efficient than the existing rack farms. Most walked. Only two came for the day that Efua Asamoah opened the shutters and sent the rising sun down the shaft on to the mirror array and woke a garden beneath the Sea of Tranquillity.
That walled garden became two, became five, grew roots and tunnels, became fifty, became the garden city of Twé: three hundred glass domes on the plains of Tranquilitatis.
And it is under siege.
Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball and Adjoa Yaa Boakye’s blackstars crest the low western rille and stop. Now Wagner Corta sees where his missing graders have gone. One hundred dozers are patiently burying the light-domes of Twé in lunar regolith.
Cut off the light, shut down the power to the artificial lighting arrays, and the crops will die. Wagner appreciates this at once. Kill a farm, starve the world.
Wagner joins Adjoa on the edge of the low overlook. His dark-side mind drills through ideas and strategies and discards them. Two rovers-full of surface workers against an army of kill-dozers.
‘Maybe we could counter-hack the dozers, or plant demolition charges,’ Adjoa says.
‘You’d never get close,’ Zehra interrupts. ‘Laoda…’
Wagner is already swinging into his seat. From their scrapes and trenches and revetments encircling Twé, a line of twenty bots charges their position, blades raised.
8: SCORPIO 2105
The two rovers run silent and swift, west across the southern limb of the Sea of Tranquillity. Before them, beyond the horizon, is Hypatia. Behind them are twenty hunting bots.
Hypatia is a hope, a haven. They may reach it on the dregs of power. There may be something at Hypatia that can deal with a score of killing bots. There may be something between their current position and Hypatia that will save them.
Or their batteries may fail, despite the careful husbanding. Then the bots pounce and annihilate them. Every ten minutes Wagner runs up the radar mast to peep over the horizon. They are always there. They are always closer. No hope of losing them: the two rovers leave indelible fresh tracks, aimed like arrows at Hypatia.
Too many hopes and ifs, too many of which end impaled on a blade, but Wagner’s fears and dreads fall around Robson. Death is nothing; that failure might be his last emotion almost paralyses him with horror. Comms are down all over the quartersphere, the sky is silent. He can’t raise TTC. The moon has turned upside down; all parameters have been exceeded and all Wagner can think of is that thirteen-year-old he left behind in Meridian. He imagines Robson waiting, not knowing, waiting, asking Amal, not knowing, asking wider and wider, no one knowing.
Wagner’s earplugs blast deafening noise into his inner ear. His visor blazes white: Wagner is light-blind. He feels Rover Lucky Eight Ball roll to a halt beneath him. Comms are down. He tries to call up Sombra. Nothing. His vision clears in blotches of glowing black and fluorescent yellow. His ears ring. Wagner tries to blink away one dead patch in the centre of his eye and can’t. His lens is dead.
That can’t happen.
He tries to flick up the HUD. Nothing. No read-out from his suit, his life support, his temperature and vital signs, his crew. Wagner tries to command Lucky Eight Ball to move, to report and, when those orders fail, to open the safety bars and set him down on the surface. Nothing. He is locked out of any and every control. Wagner glances at his crew. No names, no tags, no familiars.
There must be a manual release. Every device used on the surface of the moon carries multiple redundancies. Wagner tries to remember his training sessions on the Taiyang XBT rover. A hand reaches up and slaps a switch. The safety bar lifts, the seat drops ungently to the surface. Zehra presses her helmet to Wagner’s.
‘We’re dead in the dust.’ Zehra’s voice is a distant, indistinct shout, muffled by air and helmet insulation.
‘Those things are behind us,’ Wagner bellows. ‘What happened?’
‘Electromagnetic pulse,’ Zehra shouts. ‘The only thing that could take everything out at once.’
Dust rises above the eastern horizon. Moments later a squadron of rovers arrives, customised in AKA geometrics. Blackstars drop to the surface. They wear long dark strung objects slung across their backs. When Wagner recognises them their incongruity renders them almost comical. Bows. Things from old madrinha stories of Earth and its heroes. Bows and arrows. The lead rover runs up an over-the-horizon radar mast while a dozen archers take up a perimeter, bows unslung, arrows nocked. The bows may be complex, mean devices, all pulleys and stabilising weights, but they are medieval terrestrial weaponry. The arrows are balanced and weighted and armed with a small cylindrical payload. Wagner’s dark intelligence digs into the incongruity. The ballistics of archery are as precise as those of the BALTRAN. More: the effect of solar wind is lessened on a small projectile. Bows are easy to print: the delivery system is simple human muscle. AIs aim accurately: under lunar gravity AKA’s archers can shoot over the horizon. A smart delivery system for electromagnetic pulse warheads.
Clever.
The colours of the archery squad leader’s suit flow into words.
GET BACK.
The suit blanks, forms new words.
IN THE.
ROVERS.
Those of the AKA squad not on guard are already hitching the dead rovers to theirs. Wagner again fumbles for the manual override. Zehra hits it for him: he imagines a grin through her faceplate as he rides up and locks into the chassis and the safety bars drop.
THEY’RE NOT.
ALL DEAD, the suit says.
That’s the weakness, Wagner thinks as the AKA archers run to their vehicles. Emps are effective at range, but inside their envelope, as he and his AKA counterpart had been, you are as vulnerable as your targets.
Wheels spin. Wagner jolts hard in his harness as the tow cables take up the slack and Lucky Eight Ball is jerked into motion. Insulated in his sasuit, isolated from his world, his crew, his familiar, his pack and his loves, his boy, Wagner Corta looks up at the crescent Earth. He lets its small light pour through his visor. Without anyone knowing, without any declaration or draft, he has become a soldier in a dubious war.
* * *
A kiss.
; ‘Aren’t you coming with us?’ Luna Corta says. Despite the cramp in her old calf muscles, Madrinha Elis crouches, eye to eye with Luna.
‘There aren’t enough places on the train, anjinho.’
‘I want you to come.’
The berçário quakes again. Up there, the machines pile ton after ton after ton of regolith over Twé’s windows, burying it, smothering it. The power has come and gone three times in the same number of hours.
‘Lucasinho is going to look after you.’
‘I will. Luna, I’ll get you there.’
Lousika Asamoah parlayed all the influence of the Golden Stool to book Luna and Lucas on to the train. Madrinha Elis knows that to find those seats, she had bounced two other refugees to a later train. This she will never tell Luna, or even Lucasinho.
‘I’m scared, Elis.’
‘So am I, coracão.’
‘What’s going to happen?’ Luna asks.
‘I don’t know, coracão. But you’ll be safe in Meridian.’
‘Will you be all right?’
‘We should go now,’ Lucasinho says and Elis could kiss him forever for that. She kisses him twice. Love and luck.
‘Go. Lucasinho?’
He is so vulnerable. Here lie the borders of care; a cold land of events and powers impervious to dedication or love.
‘Look after yourself.’
As she closes the berçário door Twé quakes again. The power flickers, comes back in half-light.
‘Lucasinho,’ Luna says. ‘Hold my hand. Please?
* * *
The lights go out. Twé roars. One hundred and twenty-five thousand voices, trapped underground in the dark. Lucasinho snatches Luna to him and holds her tight, cheek to chest, as panicked parents and children push past in the narrow tunnel, trying to find the station, the train, the saving train. The roar does not stop. Bodies large and small crash into him. Why are people moving when the sensible thing is to stay still and wait for the emergency lights? The emergency lights will come on. The emergency lights can only fail if the back-up power fails. He learned that from Madrinha Flavia. And if the backup power fails? He spins Luna to the wall, puts his body between her and the stampede.