“One word from me,” she heard, “and you’ll be floating on one of those solar farms. How would you like that? Defending a thousand square kilometers of silicon… is that why you got into this game…?”
“If it helps our cause—”
“Bullshit, Nagel! Bullshit!”
She closed her eyes, and she saw him. For me, he told her. Do it for me. “Lose that goddamn uniform, officer!”
Raven hair was pinned up for the helmet. It came down eagerly, not quite kissing her wide shoulders, framing a face that was a little too strong to be beautiful, solid bones standing behind pale, almost translucent skin. Her black eyes conveyed a hard-won wisdom. When Callene first looked through those eyes, gazing at herself in the surgeon’s mirror, she had noticed that wisdom. It couldn’t be hers. Most likely the eyes were salvaged from a dead soldier. More than the UN would admit, field equipment was being refurbished, then implanted in the new recruits.
“The uniform, Nagel.”
She stepped away from the window, unfastening her uniform with crisp, clean motions, stopping only to let it fall, then stepping out of the pooled blackness, warning Kaybecker, “You’ll be disappointed. I don’t have much of a body.”
It was the kind of body expected of a female officer, an athletic build enhanced by hard training and a slurry of drugs.
“Not too proud, are you?” Kaybecker laughed, undoing his robe while warning her in turn, “Talk about bodies. Let me show you one that’s grotesque.”
He had a broad pale hairless chest and a substantial belly, and, like many overfed men, his legs were too narrow for his frame. Between his belly and legs, almost lost inside a forest of brown hair, stood an augmented cock, purple and eager.
Callene undid her armor, letting it fall.
She had smallish breasts, firm as muscle, and long ebony nipples. Kaybecker grabbed one breast, then the other, thumbs dancing with the nipples. A thin fluid collected on his left thumb. Sweat, he probably assumed. Rubbing his thumb with a finger, he found it greasy, and with a sniff, the odor pungent and unfamiliar. And unpleasant, said his smirk.
“The couch,” he whispered. Then, “You’re on top.”
Callene closed her eyes as she straddled Kaybecker, one hand massaging him, then aiming him, obeying his grunted commands. The grotesque man was blessedly quick. After a few thrusts and a gut-wounded moan, he came. And because this was the best moment—he had explained the biochemical reasons, all of which Callene had forgotten—she took her right breast in her hand and lowered it, feeding Kaybecker the long nipple and the moistened aureole, telling him, “Lick it.” Telling him, “Now.”
A wide tongue obeyed.
There was a small slurp, then hesitation. Was something wrong? Weren’t the potions working? But the tongue returned, circling the nipple, absorbing an oily stew of exotic narcotics, doctored hormones, and swarms of microchines whose only purpose was to burrow into the tongue, then ride the dark blood into the depths of a mind.
The lovers held that pose for most of an hour.
Mammary glands—highly modified; rigorously camouflaged—were finally sucked dry. Only then could Callene pull away, opening her eyes, discovering Kaybecker wearing a strange vast smile that extended to his pale and wet and exceptionally round eyes. He was staring at her. He looked joyous. Enraptured. But he was also afraid, taking a deep breath and half-shuddering, some part of him trying to fend off the swift mad thoughts running through his brain.
“I understand,” she whispered.
She was tempted to say, “Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.”
But he wouldn’t be, of course. And she refused to give him the smallest comfort, smiling bleakly at him, thinking:
This is how I looked. This is how I am with him.
Kaybecker’s cock had never lost its stiffness. Moving, casually shifting positions, the touch of her leg caused him to come again, a thread of semen dangling in the air, then breaking and beginning to dry.
He sobbed quietly, trying to thank her.
“Quiet,” she told him. Just once.
Kaybecker didn’t just obey. He took one of his wide hands and planted it squarely over his mouth, enforcing the silence.
Callene was astonished, and disgusted. This vast man was exactly like her, in a sense. Staring at those living eyes, she knew what he felt as he gazed up at his only love. And with that insight, disgust bled into an unexpected pity. Pity made her pull the hand from his mouth, and she quietly asked, “Do you know what love is?”
“A sickness,” Kaybecker replied.
Callene smiled in a grim fashion. “It’s hormones and it’s electricity. That’s where it comes from.”
“A sickness,” he repeated.
“Do you know what your pineal gland is?”
He shook his head, waiting for enlightenment.
“It’s the third eye in a reptile,” she growled. “Long ago, evolution rolled it back into our heads and made it blind.”
A little nod, and silence.
“What if?” she asked. “What if we could resurrect your pineal gland, making it into an eye again?”
“Is that… what I feel…?”
“We build a new eye, then we make it see exactly what we want it to see. Always. And everything it sees is piped straight into those parts of the brain that feel love.”
Kaybecker contemplated those words, then grinned in a bleak fashion, and with a dangerous, unexpected prescience, asked, “Who do you see…?”
“No one,” she lied, by reflex.
Then with too much force, she added, “Except you, of course.”
The monster had no choice but to smile again, serene for the moment.
Glancing at cameras she couldn’t see, Callene prayed that the AIs were being doctored as promised. Then she told her lover, “I don’t like your captain. Or my new platoon.”
“No?”
“Transfer them,” she demanded. “As soon as possible.”
Kaybecker didn’t simply obey her will. He anticipated her next request, asking, “And who do you want to replace them with?”
“My old unit. From Seattle.”
He shook his head, trying to free it of the crazy images.
“Do that for me,” Callene promised, “and we’ll always be together.”
Each of Kaybecker’s eyes stared up at Her, and, with a voice that bounced from whisper to a near-shout and back again, he asked, “This gland in my head… this new eye… I can’t ever close it, can I?”
“Never. No.”
A sudden enrapturing joy filled the face.
“Good!” he moaned. “Good/”
A spiderweb screen has been stretched between fir trees, projecting an image sent from the moon, from a microcamera hidden in the rebels’ own barricades. Grainy at best and usually badly blurred, it’s nonetheless a remarkable achievement, the camera’s whisper-signal having to pierce ten kinds of jamming and a storm of hard radiation.
Partygoers watch an ocean of blood-red magma swirling beneath floes of blackish rock. An armored rocket races past. A fountain of magma explodes as another nuclear bullet plunges home. The lunar horizon is close and eerily smooth. Decades of war have obliterated Nearside’s ancient craters and mountains. And the culprit stands on the horizon: The earth regards the moon with its night face, the Pacific coastline and Seattle obscured by the forty-minute-old blackout.
People have formed an unbalanced horseshoe in front of the screen, scientists on one side and guests on the other. Kaybecker stands in the middle, his arm draped possessively over Callene’s shoulder. His dinner plate lies at his feet, forgotten. Crickets and odd beetles march in the remaining gravy, some feasting while the rest quietly drown.