by Robin Danner
Max growled deep in his throat and wrapped his arms around Rex's waist, taking his cock deep. The tension built, coiled low in Rex's abdomen and he thrust in time with Max's motions. The warm weight of Max's arms around his hips, the scent of the other man's arousal, mixed with the traces of Lin, wove a coil of sensation around his head and pulled tighter. Max twisted his hand and ran his tongue around the head of Rex's cock. When Max cupped his balls, the sensitive organs tightened and the floodgates inside him burst.
Release washed through Rex. A massive thrust of his hips sent Max's body almost straight out, holding on to Rex by his mouth and hands. Hot bursts of seed emptied from Rex, and with it, some of the hollow ache he'd been carrying around. He groaned, just as much from exhaustion as pleasure, his thundering heart filling his ears for several minutes.
Max spun around, head over heels, and wiped his mouth with the tail of his shirt, planting a salty kiss on Rex’s lips. “There,” he said. “Isn't that better?”
Rex nodded. “We're still not flushing her out the airlock,” he said.
Max laughed as he helped Rex right his clothes. “You and your lost causes. Fine. We'll keep her as an air freshener. She smells good.”
“She's one of us,” he said. “Touched by Diana, even if she's at cross-purposes with us now. We take care of our own.”
“Suit yourself,” Max said over the slight hiss of the sleep inducers. “Just remember, Little Brother, I've got your back.”
* * * *
Space-dreams sucked. Lin got caught in a loop of dizzying nightmares of making love to Rex, only to look down at him and see his youthful face wither and age before her eyes. “I must be more hung up on his age than I thought,” she muttered when she came out of sleep into a groggy consciousness.
Max's voice came over the intercom. “Sorry if you felt that bump,” he said. “A little hairy there with the wobble-and-spin.”
“You think?” Rex called back.
Lin shrugged. “I completely missed it.” It didn't feel like they were moving, so she guessed they’d landed in one piece. She unstrapped and floated upward. “Got any magna-shoes?”
“Storage tub, aft end.”
She floated over to the tub in question and rummaged, careful to keep her movements slow and smooth. The magnetic shoes were on the bottom and she separated a handful of the metal braces out of a snare. She also found a pair of coveralls that gave her far more insulation than a parade costume. She looked back to find Rex staring at her. “You going to put these on by yourself?
His eyes were sad. “If you ask me to, I have to.”
Oh yeah. The binding. “Then do it,” she said, checking her chrono. Four hours to go. She tossed a pair of the shoes in his direction and clipped the magnetic braces to her own short boots. Her feet stuck to the floor and she pushed herself up, testing the fit with a few heavy steps.
She looked up to find him staring at her. “What?”
He shook his head. “I don't understand you,” he said. “How can you sell me out like this? I've tasted your scent—you're not unfeeling.”
She wondered the same thing herself. “Look, just because you had your fingers inside me doesn't mean you know me,” she said. “If that damn pendulum hadn't gone off, we'd have had more fun after the parade. But it did, and I have a job to do.”
He pulled on his own magna-shoes. “And you won't even consider that there might be something off about this.”
She shrugged the top of the jumpsuit up and over her shoulders. The neckline gaped, but it kept her warm. “I'm Diana's Arrow. I'm not supposed to think about it. Arrows don't think about hurting their targets.”
“They don't come for them, either.”
She had the grace to blush. “Look, that's how I am,” she said. “I'm a Truebreed. Sex is like eating. Sometimes you have gourmet at a sit-down place, and sometimes it's protein slabs from a synthafood stall.”
He winced. “Which one was I? Never mind, I don't think I want that answer.” He tilted his head. “Don't you feel it when your body's so disconnected from your emotions?”
She clumped to the hatch and started the release sequence. “That's where you got me wrong,” she said. “For Truebreeds, it's just biology. We like to eat, we eat a lot. We need to sleep, we sleep a lot. We like to fuck…”
“You fuck a lot.”
“That's it.”
* * * *
“I feel sorry for you,” Rex said as they exited the docking bay. Deimos was a small, dark moon, a little dustball whose tunnels inside reflected its dreary outside. Life on Deimos revolved around little else besides refining dirty ice from Mars. Lack of mass meant everything needed to be either bolted down or magnetized to stick to the metal plates of the flooring.
And it was hot. The nature of the small moon made the sunward side toasty, while the humidity from the dirty ice refinery turned the atmosphere into a barely breathable soup. Still, Rex shivered. A clammy tendril of ice snaked up his spine to a place just below his nape. The Lady was here somewhere. And so was her corruption.
“Why?” she asked.
“It must be terrible to be so alone, even when there's another person inside of you.”
Her jaw worked soundlessly and her green eyes flashed. She took a breath.
“Hey! You weren't thinking about leaving me behind, were you?” Max slipped through the door behind Lin just before it closed.
“Yes, we were,” Lin said.
“Revise your thinking.” Max showed his teeth, falling into step on her free side. Deimos had no organized spaceport; the docking bays were all located in the bowl of the Swift crater and opened directly onto the main concourse of the moon's habitable tunnels. A saloon and a commissary opened on the other side of the open space, and a bank kiosk shared the middle with a trade post and a newsstand. Two information terminals marked the space between the recreational area and the industrial warehouse next to it, stacked with cargo containers and shimmering with a faint static field.
Lin made for the saloon and Rex's stomach did a flop. The door was little more than a sheet of Plexiglas scratched to opaqueness and riveted to hinges made of nylon safety webbing. Even so, his kind didn't do so well in saloons. The stench alone put him on edge.
“You didn't come all this way for a drink, did you?” Max said, shooting Rex a look. He circled his finger around his ear, suggesting she was crazy.
“Saloon's the best place to find out where things are on this rock,” Lin said.
“Info-terminals all have downloadable maps,” Rex pointed out as Lin pushed open the door. He had a bad feeling about this.
A body came flying towards them. Max jumped in front of Lin and deflected the stumbling man's flight. Rex's bad feeling got worse as the scent of testosterone and agitation rolled over him, forcing the hairs on the back of his neck to attention. Beside him, Max rumbled low in his throat.
Lin sidestepped the mess and strode up to the bar. The bartender glared at her. “Put your dogs on leashes or leave.”
She scowled. Prejudice is such an ugly thing, she thought. And this guy really can't afford any extra ugly. “They're not dogs. They're people.”
The scarred man threw back his head and laughed. “Right. And Minnie over there ain't no rat, either.” He jerked his head towards the middle-aged woman sitting at the end of the bar. Lin blinked.
The woman's eyes were completely black. Beneath a thin, pointed nose, her front teeth jutted out over her bottom lip. Her coarse brown hair stood up from her head in short tufts all around, and the hem of her bulky coat twitched, even though both feet could clearly be seen on the bottom rail. “Blessed art thou whose genes runneth true,” she said, her voice raspy. , Lin could just make out a battered electronic collar under the grubby coat's lapels. Scorch marks from failed escape attempts marred the collar's ceramic surface.
Sweat trickled down the back of Lin's neck. “I don't want any trouble,” she said.
The bartender snorted. “Picked the wrong rock th
en, honey.”
“I just want to find a house of worship.” She glanced around the low-ceilinged room, taking in the stoop-shouldered people muttering in small, suspicious knots over the prefab tables, and the two fistfighters, still half-heartedly shoving each other.
The barman snorted and set a glass on the bar. “There's a Doomsayer church in Segment 2-E.” He poured a small measure of murky amber liquid from a bottle with no label into it. “Best have one of these, so you'll have a sin to confess.”
“It's a start,” she muttered, pushing back from the bar.
The rat-lady hissed. “Got two good eyes,” she rasped. “If you ain't usin' 'em, I'll buy 'em off ya.”
Lin shoved past her and back out the door, resisting the urge to scrape the atmosphere of the place off her arms. She glanced at the flimsiplast paper posted on the support column. Unrest in refinery—cits wary, mgmt crackdowns predicted was the main headline. Below it, a smaller one read, Vandals continue strikes, mayor swears vengeance. “Sounds like Deimos is a real family place,” she muttered. Before turning away, she noted the Around the solar system segment still bore a headline: Time running out for trapped Lunar miners.
Not if I can help it. And not if that Goddess comes through. Diana had said to bring Rex to Deimos. Lin figured there would be a grove or grotto or something similar to what her own community had set up. Of course, the gap between academic knowledge that not everybody believed the same way, and the reality of it was a wide and deep one. Did the Doomsayers have open circles? Offering tables? “Segment 2-E it is,” she said. “Let's go to Church, boys.”
Rex walked beside her, his feet making deliberate snaps on and off the metal flooring, courtesy of the magna-shoes. The pilot was a complication, but not unduly so. At least she could trust him to get her back to the Moon in one piece when the time came.
Rex’s voice, quiet and threaded with anger, cut into her peace. “You worship Her, and yet you don't know Her at all, do you?”
“What do you mean by that? The Moon's full of Goddess-worshipers. The city council sponsors the major Sabbats. There's an offering altar in the Rec dome that's always full. I've brought half of the offerings myself!” A bit of an exaggeration, but she was a part of her community as much as anybody else was. “I go to the circles, I say the prayers.” She started walking. I can't help it if I'm an outsider among outsiders.
“When I was born, there was a problem with my gene fusion,” Rex said. “Diana took me. Made it better. And made me Hers.”
“But that…how?”
“She's a Goddess. Just because people want the Gods to stay safely in the realm of philosophy doesn't mean they will.”
“True,” she muttered. It had certainly come as a shock to her when Diana had manifested herself as an actual, touchable person, complete with cold hands. “I guess it's easier to worship when there isn't so much…mundane life in the way.” Helium to mine, her condition to take care of. “Did you live with her there? On the Moon, I mean?” she asked.
He nodded. “She kept us in great digs. Fed us well. Kept us happy. When she needed something done, she sent us out.”
“How do you get around without ID…without discovery?” Lin glanced behind them to make sure Max still trailed behind. Outside the common area, the segments shrunk to a single, low-ceilinged tunnel with modular dwellings on one side. Every sixth residential cube served as a social service center—a Security kiosk, an exercise hut, a public library filled with terminals.
“I grew up just like everybody else,” he said. “Went to school, entered training. Just…when Diana called, I went. My family made that bargain and I kept up my end of it. I served in Earth Security for a while, too. Then Diana called me permanently. It was a good life.”
“So why don't you want to go back to it?”
“I do,” he said. “More than you can know. Being in the presence of a Goddess…it's addicting. Heady. Like being oxygen-drunk all the time. You can wallow in the benevolence like a tactile thing.”
“Sounds sensual,” she said. It also sounded right. Like the way she used to feel during a Circle or a Sabbat celebration. Surrounded and warm and safe and loved.
He nodded. “But there's something wrong with her.”
“How's that possible? She's a Goddess. Gods don't get sick.”
“She stopped smelling like one several months ago. There's a stench about her now.” He shuddered.
She noticed he'd slowed down. “A little rude to be saying that, isn't it? Get the lady some perfume if she stinks.”
He turned his head to give her a look. “Don't be thick,” he said. “It's serious enough that the Pack has lost a few members over it.”
“Look, I sympathize. Really, I do. But I have reasons of my own for…” She glanced at one of the residential prefabs and stopped short. “There,” she muttered.
The door of the apartment bore a placard made of scavenged newspaper flimsiplast whose touch-sensitive diode had been smashed, rendering it unprogrammable and permanently blank. On the blank transparent surface, someone had taken paint and sketched an elaborate and detailed sigil containing diamonds and stars and intersecting lines. The door hung partially open. Lin's solar plexus tugged. “There's something here,” she murmured.
“It's a veve,” Max said, approaching from behind them. “A sigil to invoke an Orisha. Here's your house of worship.”
“Of course,” she murmured, pushing the door open.
“Don't…” Rex said, reaching out.
She shook his arm off and stepped through the door. Boxes had been stacked on either side of the doorway, turning the cramped apartment into nothing more than a hallway. Niches had been cut into the bottoms and sides of the boxes, and little diode-lights flickered, running off tiny, tablet-sized power cells. The air felt heavy as she stepped into the dark and cool hallway.
“Bad juju,” muttered Max. “I can smell it.”
She approached the end of the hall. On the floor, someone had used regolith—the loose dust kicked up by asteroids nailing a planet—to trace a larger version of the veve on the door. The air hung thick with incense and another heavy, damp odor.
“Find the body,” Rex said. “And then let's go.”
The mambo lay, face down, off to one side and partly behind the wall created by the boxes. The corners of the tiny apartment lay in shadow and, as Lin crouched down, the shadows seemed to creep forward, solidifying and becoming a live thing. She edged out of the way, careful not to scuff the veve.
When she looked at the body, she felt sick. The woman's face had caved in, as if some incredible force had sucked all the…everything…out of her from inside. “She's dead,” she muttered. “Somebody desecrated sacred ground.”
Max edged forward. “Oh, spacedust,” he said. “It hasn't been long.”
“Look!” Rex said, pointing at the shadowy corner. Lin looked up just in time to see something black twist and retreat through the dim grayness into a patch of deeper dark. Fear tightened her stomach. Goddess or no, she didn't want to be here. Beside her, Max growled.
This is wrong. But the tug in her breastbone wanted her to move forward. Diana's beacon pulsed a familiar moon magic that coursed through Lin's blood. This is the place, her heartbeat said. Go into the dark. Her feet began to move.
“Uh-uh, sister,” Max muttered beside her and yanked her shoulders hard. She fell back against him and he wrapped both arms around her. “Time to leave. Rex, pour the last of that rum over the veve. Ogun's gonna be mad enough about losing his horse.”
Max dragged Lin from the dark altar. She tried to help, really she did. But her feet wanted her to stay and the pull to stay physically hurt. “Quickly,” he muttered. “We want to be in preflight check before people start asking questions. Once Security starts poking around, they won't be interested in solving a crime, when blaming a suspect is faster and has the same effect.”
They went back the way they came at double time. Lin's legs burned with the effort of picking up
her feet and putting them down again in what every nerve in her body insisted was the wrong direction, fighting herself and fighting the magna-shoes on top of that. That slimy, squirming darkness called to her and, Gods help her, she yearned for it. She couldn't trust her senses when they told her that sinking into it, feeling the slide of that cold blackness over her body, was home.
Chapter 4
After the shuttle hatch closed, Lin twisted in Max's grip and ran back to it. “Oh no you don't,” Rex muttered, grabbing her around the waist. Max lifted the safety webbing and helped his Packmate secure her in the recliner.
“I'll get us off this rock,” Max said. “You keep her down until we can sort things out.” He disappeared into the cockpit. Rex stretched himself over her, trying to keep the thrashing woman from hurting herself. Through the webbing, she grabbed his shirt.
“Take me back,” she mumbled.
He held her hands in his. “I feel it, too,” he said. “Do you see what I mean?”
She shivered. “I—It's crazy. That place was wrong. I don't know how, but I felt it all the way down in my bones. But…”
“But your senses are telling you it's right. Not only right, but good. Where you need to be or else you'll never feel right again.”
She looked up at him, her green eyes cloudy with tears. “I'm so sorry,” she said. “I've just been thinking of getting the job done, and not how it would affect people. It was just another job, like mining and refining.”
The shuttle hummed to life, and the launch required so little force to leave the little moon that Rex could barely detect it with all his enhanced senses. He stroked her face, and the tension in her body relaxed a little.
“I felt the same way you did,” he said. “Diana's requests started drifting away from what I was used to, but it was hard to speak up. We drifted so subtly from helping people, answering prayers, and dispensing justice to taking vengeance, that I still can't remember when the turning point came.” That confusing time still shook him to the core. To not trust your own nose was unthinkable. “My instincts were telling me something was wrong, but my senses disagreed. And for me, it's hard not to trust my senses.” The doubt still haunted him, and sometimes the urge to return to Diana and pretend nothing was wrong proved too strong to fight. Perhaps that is why you chose her float to hide on during the parade.