Broken Angels

Glancing down at myself, I saw I was similarly naked.

“Welcome to the loading deck.”

Looking up again, my first thought was that she had already gone to work on herself. Most constructs load on self-images held in the memory, with subroutines to beat anything too delusional—you end up looking pretty much the way you do in reality, less a couple of kilos and maybe plus a centimetre or two. The version of Tanya Wardani I was looking at didn’t have those kind of discrepancies—it was more a general sheen of health that she didn’t yet have back in the real world, or perhaps just the lack of a similar, more grimy sheen of unhealth. The eyes were less sunken, the cheek and collar bones less pronounced. Under the slightly pouched breasts, the ribs were there, but fleshed far past what I’d imagined below her draped clothing.

“They’re not big on mirrors in the camp,” she said, maybe reading something in my expression. “Except for interrogation. And after a while you try not to see yourself in windows walking past. I probably still look a lot worse than I think I do. Especially after that instant fix you loaded into me.”

I couldn’t think of anything even remotely appropriate to say.

“You on the other hand…” She stepped forward and, reaching out low, caught me by the prick. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got here.”

I was hard almost instantly.

Maybe it was something written into the protocols of the system, maybe just too long without the release. Or maybe there was some unclean fascination in anticipating the use of this body with its lightly accented marks of privation. Enough to hint artfully at abuse, not enough to repel. Freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck? No telling how a combat sleeve might be wired at this level. Or any male sleeve, come to that. Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It’s a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you’ll drag up once you start excavating.

“That’s good,” she breathed, abruptly close to my ear. She had not let go. “But I don’t rate this much. You’ve not been looking after yourself, soldier.”

Her other hand spread wide and scraped up my belly from the roots of my prick to the arc of my ribcage. Like a carpenter’s sanding glove, planing back the layering of flab that had begun to thicken over my sleeve’s tank-grown abdominal musculature. I glanced down, and saw with a slight visceral shock that some of the flab really had started to plane off, fading out with the motion of her flattened palm. It left a warm feeling threaded through the muscle beneath, like whisky going down.

Sy-system magic, I managed through the spasm as she tugged hard at me with the gripping hand and repeated the upward smoothing gesture with the other.

I lifted my own hands towards her, and she skipped back.

“Uh-uh.” She took another step away. “I’m not ready yet. Look at me.”

She lifted both hands and cupped her breasts. Pushed upward with the heels of her palms, then let them fall back, fuller, larger. The nipples—had one of them been broken before?—swollen dark and conical like chocolate sheathing on the copper skin.

“Like that?” she asked.

“Very much.”

She repeated the open-handed grasping motion, topping it with a circular massaging action. When she let go this time, her breasts were well on their way to the dimensions of one of Djoko Roespinoedji’s gravity-defying concubines. She reached back and did something similar to her buttocks, turning to show me the cartoon rounding she’d given them. She bent forward and pulled the cheeks apart.

“Lick me,” she said, with sudden urgency.

I went down on one knee and pressed my face into the crease, spearing forward with my tongue, working at the tight whorl of closed sphincter. I wrapped an arm around one long thigh to steady myself and with the other hand I reached up and found her already wet. The ball of my thumb sank into her from the front as my tongue worked deeper from the rear, both rubbing soft synchronised circles amid her insides. She grunted, somewhere at the base of her throat, and we

Shifted

Into liquid blue. The floor was gone, and most of the gravity with it. I thrashed and lost my thumbhold. Wardani twisted languidly around and fastened to me like belaweed around a rock. The fluid was not water; it had left our skins slick against each other, and I could breath it as well as if it were tropical air. I gasped my lungs full of it as Wardani slithered down, biting at my chest and stomach, and finally laid hands and mouth on my hard-on.

I didn’t last long. Floating in the infinite blue while Tanya Wardani’s newly pneumatic breasts pressed against my thighs and her nipples traced up and down on my oiled skin and her mouth sucked and her curled fingers pumped, I had just enough time to notice a light source above us before my neck muscles started to tauten, cranking my head back, and the twitching messages along my nerves gathered together for a final climactic rush.

There was a scratch replay vibrato effect built into the construct. My orgasm went on for over thirty seconds.

As it tailed off, Tanya Wardani floated up past me, hair spread around her face, threads of semen blown out amidst bubbles from the corners of her grin. I struck out and grabbed one passing thigh, dragged her back into range.

She flexed in the water analogue as my tongue sank into her, and more bubbles ran out of her mouth. I caught the reverberation of her moan through the fluid like the sympathetic vibration of jet engines in the pit of my stomach, and felt myself stiffening in response. I pressed my tongue down harder, forgetting to breathe and then discovering I didn’t actually need to for a long time. Wardani’s writhing grew more urgent and she crooked her legs around my back to anchor herself in place. I cupped her buttocks and squeezed, pushing my face into the folds of her cunt, then slid my thumb back inside her and recommenced the soft circular motion in counterpoint to the spiralling of my tongue. She gripped my head in both hands and crushed my face against her. Her writhings became thrashings, her moans a sustained shout that filled my ears like the sound of surf overhead. I sucked. She stiffened, and screamed, and then shuddered for minutes.

We drifted to the surface together, An astronomically unlikely red giant sun was sinking at the horizon, bathing the suddenly normalised water around us in stained-glass light. Two moons sat high in the eastern sky and behind us waves broke on a white sand beach fringed by palms.

“Did you. Write this?” I asked, treading water and nodding at the view.

“Hardly.” She wiped water out of her eyes and slicked back her hair with both, hands. “It’s off the rack. I checked out what they had this afternoon. Why, you like it?”

“So far. But I have a feeling that sun is an astronomical impossibility.”

“Yeah, well, breathing underwater’s not overly realistic either.”

“I didn’t get to breathe.” I held my hands above the water in claws, miming the grip she’d had on my head, and pulled a suffocated face. “This bring back any memories?”

To my amazement, she flushed scarlet. Then she laughed, splashed water in my face and struck out for the shore. I trod water for a moment, laughing too, and then went after her.

The sand was warm, powder fine and system-magically unwilling to stick to wet flesh. Behind the beach, coconuts fell sporadically from the palms and, unless collected, broke down into fragments which were carried away by tiny jewel-coloured crabs.

We fucked again at the water’s edge, Tanya Wardani seated astride my cock, cartoon ass bedded soft and warm on my crossed legs. I buried my face in her breasts, settled hands at her hips and lifted her gently up and down until the shuddering started in her again, caught me like a contagious fever and ran through us both. The scratch replay subroutine had a resonance system built in that cycled the orgasm back and forth between us like an oscillating signal, swamping and ebbing for what felt like forever.