Saturn's Children

Fuck. I jam my fist down between my thighs and crouch on my bunk, as far away from the opening as I can 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 pe

“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: stu

“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 ru

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 ca

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—”