Antibodies


Look, I didn't want to write this, OK? The Muse made me do it. Sex scenes and all. And everyone knows I don't do explicit sex scenes, because they're usually ridiculous in print, only this time I have, so if you are of a sensitive disposition, look away now.


I was serving soyburgers, or possibly kebabs, in the spinward commissary when it suddenly morphed into Central Admin, and that bastard Harfurt, who was duty captain, had me stripped, tied to a spit and roasted over my own charcoal for having an open flame in the station. . . at which point I awoke, hot and slightly aching, in a tangle of duvet with my face in the armpit of the naked squaddy lying beside me.

His eyes sprang open, looked at me sleepily – nice eyes, I remembered them, shortly before I remembered – oh fuck, did I really do that in the rec room? I sat up cautiously.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

“You OK?”

“Sure. Just getting up.”

His gaze ran down his own body. “Looks like I already did,” he pointed out, a trifle smugly. “You wanna work on that?”

I’ve got a shift this morning, I started to say, but he just widened that shit-eating grin, and his legs, and well. . . there was certainly quite a bit to work on. Of course, a new horse-sized prick is practically the first bodymod that all the squaddies go for, but this didn’t look like any of the standard commercial models – and believe me I’ve seen enough of them. (The second mod they all buy is the cardiovascular shunt they discover they need to get the new equipment hard without fainting, and at three times the price, but caveat emptor and all that.) No, I reckoned my friend of last night was just naturally gifted, although considering how long he had kept going, and the fact that by the third time I’d been the one to beg for a chance to rest, the inhaler he’d been using in the bar last night was probably a stamina enhancer rather than a simple goodtimes or chatemup virus.

I teased the nubbin of his right nipple with my lips, felt it perk, worked my way down through a tangle of chest hair, followed the honey trail down the sculpted ridges of his abdomen to the coarser bush below. He smelled of sex, rank and male and overheated, like something that lurked in a cave waiting to pounce. It did things to me, that smell, stirred something primitive down at the base of the brainstem that made my back arch and my pupils dilate and my breath come faster: I loved every dangerous, nostril flaring waft of it. His heavy, swollen cock stirred on his stomach, like a cobra swaying to the beat of his heart’s drum, staring at me across a gap of centimetres from its one eye. I leaned forward, ran my tongue up the silky, nubbly skin of the shaft from the base, breathing him in. His hips ground as I licked and teased and kissed, wanting more.

But I wasn’t ready to give him more, not yet. I urged his knees apart, ran my stubbled chin gently across the child-soft skin of the inner thigh, then plunged my tongue into the greasily sweat-slick crevice between thigh and balls. A half-moaned, half-whispered: ‘oh man’ told me that my attentions were well received. His hand slid between my own thighs, found me growing stiffer in my turn, urged my lower half up onto my knees for better access even as my head slid lower between his thighs, to that place where the hidden base of a man’s cock runs back of his balls under the perineum. All the time, nuzzling, licking, choking in his scent, and his hands now were parting my cheeks, a calloused finger probing my sphincter, still lube-slick from the night before.

I dug down, my tongue probing in its turn the dark mysteries between his hard buttocks, reached forward to try to lift him to me, spread his arse for my questing tongue. . .

A large hand pulled me back, and its companion landed stingingly on my raised backside, once, twice.

“Ow!” It was like an electric shock through me, a shudder of something I could hardly name.

“You don’t do that, right? Nobody goes up my arse, not even to lick it,” he growled. I raised myself up onto my knees, rubbed my backside. It stung! The cubicle ceiling was still on the ‘reflect’ setting, and I could distinctly see two red handprints. As I looked at them, my cock stiffened like a ramrod.

He grinned. “So that’s the way it is, huh? You need a bit of military discipline.”

Oh God! It was as if the words were wired directly to my pleasure centres. My cock was suddenly so hard it hurt, and so erect it was as if it had been glued to my stomach by the pre-come that dribbled from it. And by the look of it, the idea did as much for him: his stiffy seemed to gain an extra centimetre or two in girth, and the pearls that dripped from it were so copious that for a moment I thought he had come.

He grabbed a nipple and squeezed it hard, sending further shocks of pain and pleasure through me. ‘C’mere boy,” he said. “You’re for it now. I’m going to blister your pretty little arse until you scream for mercy. And then I’m going to spank you some more until you learn to jump to it when I tell you to do something.”

“Please. . .” I whispered, though whether I was begging him to do it or not to do it I wasn’t entirely sure. His hands dragged me relentlessly down across his thighs, his hard cock jammed against my side.

“Please what?”

“Please, sir?”

“Too late, boy. That’s extra punishment for you.” He brought his hand down.

One of the things you learn on a space station is a pretty instinctive understanding of basic Newtonian physics – mass, inertia, acceleration, centripetal force, kinetic and potential energy. If a lever a, of length l, rotates around one end through d degrees of arc, the velocity of the other end, as it might be the end with the hand on it, is equivalent to bloody fast. If an object with a velocity of bloody fast hits a second, softly rounded object immobilised by another lever of length l, the kinetic energy of impact is equivalent to OUCH!

He spanked me long and hard, and every single whack stung like fury. But the thing was, as I bucked and gasped, pinned by the other arm, it was as if the fire and the pain were sparks setting light to tinder inside me. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt – it did, remarkably so – but I was turned on as I can rarely remember being turned on before, my arse raising up involuntarily into each blow as if begging for it.

“Aw – oooh, sir, please sir – agh!”

“Yeah, that’s it boy, you remember who your superior officer is now!” It felt like he had an iron bar pressed up against my side

“Ah! Ow! SIR, YES SIR! Ow! OW! Oh Sir, I’ve learned my lesson, please –ow! Sir!”

“Not yet you haven’t. I think you need a taste of my belt across your backside.”

I groaned, lust and apprehension mixed. My backside was throbbing already. I was sure I wasn’t going to be able to sit down for days without remembering this. He pulled me up.

“Kneel at the side of the bed and lie forward,” he commanded.

“Yes, sir!” It came out practically involuntarily, and hey, I must have really been getting into the whole role-play thing because it made me feel good.

He rummaged in his discarded clothes and I heard the distinctive sound of a belt snicking through belt loops. A little twinge of excitement made my cock twitch under me –for a moment I thought I was going to come there and then, but I got myself back under control with a faint whimper.

“Twelve,” he announced. “You’re gonna get twelve with this belt, and if you don’t count ‘em right I’ll go back to the beginning.”

“Yes, sir.” Fuck! Count them right?

“After each one, you count it and say thank you, got it?”

“Yes, sir!”

It’s a curious thing but the belt didn’t feel – quite – as horrible as it sounded. As it cracked and whistled through the air I could feel myself tensing up as if a meteor strike was coming in, but somehow, although it bit mightily, and left broad red stripes across my arse, it wasn’t  quite as bad as my worst imaginings. So I was doing OK: ‘one sir, thank you! two sir, thank you!’ until I got a bit distracted and said ‘five’ a second time when it should have been ‘six’.

There was an ominous pause.

“Can you count, boy?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, sorry sir.”

“Then I reckon you must want extra. What did I tell you would happen if you didn’t count right?”

“Oh sir, please sir, I never meant. . . it was a mistake.”

“We don’t allow mistakes in the Marines. There’s a war on, you know,” he added drily.

I couldn’t help but grin at this, a comedy catch-phrase from a popular Tri-D show that had become the all purpose comment every time any little thing went wrong, from a delayed shuttle connection to finding your favourite show had been rescheduled in favour of a policy broadcast from the President.

“Oh, so you think it’s funny, do you? We’ll see if you’re still laughing when I finish with you, soldier. Start from one again.”

Now of course, what I should have said to this was: I’m not a soldier, I’m just a short order cook in the station commissary, even if that wouldn’t have been entirely accurate. What I actually heard myself saying was:

“Yes, sir! Whip my sorry arse into shape, sir!”

“You bet I will, sonny.” The belt whistled down, snapping at my burning cheeks, and the fire it carried seemed to soak through me, hurting and exalting at the same time. I lifted my arse into the strokes as they slammed down, and my thanks were genuine as I writhed back, rubbing my overheated cock against the sheets. The air was so solid with lust and sweat that you could have cut it in blocks and sold it as a sex aid.

“Eleven sir, thank you! Ahh! Twelve sir, thank you!” That last one had been a doozy, he must have put all his force into it. He threw the belt to the ground, and knelt behind me, drew his stubbled cheek slowly across the swollen, scarlet flesh of my bum, then fluttered his lips over, nipped gently.

I groaned with pure sensation. “Fuck me,” I begged. “Please sir, take me.”

“Christ, yeah, you horny little bastard!” He leaned forward, his mouth working its way up my spine, pinned me against the pillows. I could feel his cock – was it his cock? It felt so big it could have been his arm! – probing between my scorched, swollen cheeks. One hand slid down, parted me wider, eased his cock head against my quivering sphincter.

“You need this,” he whispered into my ear.

“Yes sir, oh yes!” I was somewhere not quite in my right mind, somewhere outside of myself, and I knew that this was right and proper and good. I wanted to be taken, to be mastered, to obey.

He forced himself halfway into me, a brief spasm of pain that awakened a deeper, throbbing soreness from last night’s play, as my abused body protested. He paused, allowing me to adjust, pulled back a little, thrust a little deeper. Waited again, hissing slightly with pleasure as flutters of my internal muscles massaged the hard wedge of manliness spearing me apart, then drove deep, up to the root. It was my turn to hiss, as he filled me, the massive head pressing against my prostate from within. Then he pulled himself almost all the way out and drove into me with one long, piledriving thrust that made me groan out loud. And back, and again, building up a rhythm the way he had last night, deep, relentless fucking, the strokes slowly getting shorter and faster. I could feel something building inside me like an itch you couldn’t scratch, like an earth tremor coming, or an unstoppable wave, building higher and higher, and I was going to, I was going to. . .

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh God, I’m going to. . .” and his breathing was as ragged and short as mine, and as I exploded into shuddering, orgasmic explosions of come all over the bedclothes he made his last, erratic, juddering slam into me and I felt his cock pulsing vigorously with the force of his ejaculation inside my willing arse.

We lay together a long while, stickily, with him still inside me, his weight on me like some enormous toasty quilt, his softening prick still inside me, one heavy hand gently stroking the nape of my neck.

“Christ,” he said at last, withdrawing from me gently, and rolling me onto my side so he could snuggle up to me and put his arm around me. “That was amazing.”

I grinned. “It surely was. I haven’t had an orgasm like that since I was sixteen. I think the mess has gone as far as the pillow – good job these bedclothes go to the recycler and not an old-fashioned laundry.”

“I mean, I’ve never had – your arse felt so amazingly hot against me.” He reached a hand round to check. “Still does.”

“Brute,” I complained half-heartedly. “That’s because you punished me so hard.”

“Which you needed.”

“Yes. Which I needed. Thank you. Sir.”

He kissed me. “Any time. Look – we ship out tomorrow to Lagrange-5, three months’ scout duty against Developer ships trying to sneak through the lines to Earth. But when I  complete that tour of duty I’ll have a couple of weeks R&R lined up – can we meet again?”

Now this is the kind of question I hate. Like I said, 8 hours a day I’m supposed to be a cook in the commissary, and what impressionable young man in the commissary who has just had a night (and morning) of mind-blowing sex with a genuine, heroes-of-our-cause, front-line Marine kiteflyer would refuse the offer for a rematch? And I really, really wanted to, which was something that I knew I shouldn’t be wanting at all.

“Yeah. Yeah, why not?” Why not? Because I shouldn’t, and might not be allowed to.

He grinned, sat up and stretched luxuriously, taking a deep breath.

Then he wrinkled his nose. “Smells like a monkey house in here,” he said. “You wanna turn up the aircon?”

“More like a gorilla house,” I said, dimpling at him, and dodging the half hearted swat he aimed at my backside. But he was right – like I said, the air was practically solid with sweat and testosterone, and I turned the venting up high.

“Mind if I take a shower?” He held up his water-ration card, stationer courtesy. A lot of the army boys don’t bother with that, because they get an indefinite allowance on base. Civilians aren’t so lucky. Water’s an expensive resource here – unlike the Developer clades out in the Kuiper Belt with cometary volatiles to spare, we have to lift most of ours from deep gravity wells.

“Be my guest.”

“Pity it’s so small, you could join me.”

“You cannot seriously want more. . .”

“Oh, I always want more.” His look scorched me like a fusion drive, so much so that I had to lower my eyes like some shy little virgin against the heat and the hunger I saw there. The man was insatiable! Where did they get him from – and were there any more like him at home?

He turned away with a grin and stepped into the little shower cubicle. As he did so, his arm knocked something from the shelves by the basin that fell to the floor with a clatter.

“Shit, sorry.”

“No worries, there isn’t much room I know.” He picked up the canister, read the label and grinned, threw it at me.

“A language virus? French? You wanna learn French?”

“I – yeah. I wanted to read this guy, old author, pre-Failure Earth. In the original.”

“Hugo?” I looked up, amazed. “Hey, I may be a dumb Marine, but I ain’t entirely uneducated.”

“I – never assumed you were.” Yeah, right. “No, Proust, actually.”

“Oh, something to do with memory, isn’t it?”

“Er, yes. Yes, the Remembrance of Lost Time. Something like that.” And yes,  I was impressed. Deeply impressed. These days, with nanotech pseudoviruses that can teach you anything you want to learn in a day or two, at the cost of a mild fever as they build the neural structures in your head, being educated is no great shakes. But so few people bother. I mean, we, our side, we’re supposed to be Preservers, right? Preserving the biological and cultural heritage of humanity from the nasty Developers who want to throw it all away and rewrite human DNA, just the same way we’re preserving and shepherding Earth until it’s fit for humans to live on again. So why do so few of us bother to store that cultural heritage, that knowledge, where it would do the most good, in our own heads?

This guy was – he was great. Dynamite in bed, and he knew who Proust was. And unless I was very careful, I was going to end up falling for him. Which in my line of work was very bad news.

“Kern?”

“Yeah?”

I leaned forward, and kissed him gently.

“Nothing. Just have your shower. And thanks.”

“Hey.” He pulled me to him gently. “I meant what I said. When I come back, I really want to see you again.”

“I. . .”

“And spank you. I’m pretty sure you’ll have been bad while I’m away. Keep a list, and I’ll deal with you.”

I could feel my face going as red as my backside. I pushed him gently away.

“You’ve gone a lovely shade of pink. Both ends,” he observed.

“I’m – it’s very warm in here,” I muttered.

“Isn’t it just?”


It was the third shift-cycle after Kern had shipped out, by which time I could walk straight again, and sit down without wincing, that I got a message in my Inbox. It wasn’t a very exciting message, just a co-ordinate string that translated to a local time and position in the station cluster. But what it meant was – well, I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I doubted it was anything good. For one thing, it meant I had to go see my boss. Not the head of commissary, Rosa Ncube. She’s all right. No, this was my other boss, that bastard McAllister. And for another thing the priority level on it was way, way up. Minus 6. Bet you never knew priority could go below zero. So this was get your arse up here even if you’re dead. The duty captain was Li Chang, luckily, not Harfurt, so I quickly finished up programming the menu I’d been working on – I’d thought sole véronique, something the nano can emulate pretty well, though the grapes, I’m told, are the wrong texture. Wouldn’t know, never tasted the real thing – finished up the programming, as I say, and went to find him.

“Chang – look, I’m sorry, personal emergency. Can I skip out? I’ll make it up next shift, I promise.”

“Ryan, you’re always having personal emergencies. What is it this time, somebody discover you’re balling their boyfriend?”

“No, it’s. . . something medical.”

“You’re sick?”

“No – er, yes, yes, I’m feeling really lousy. I’d better go lie down for a bit.”

He raised an eyebrow and gave me a hard stare.

“No, you’d better go to medical and get looked at. And I want to see an entry in your medrecord next time, OK?”

“Er – yeah. Yes, sure. Thanks.”

“Hmm. Just get out of here. Before I kick your arse across the kitchen the way it deserves, you undisciplined rogue.”

I blinked. That was a bit – personal – for him. Still, I got, while the going was good. Strangely the idea of him kicking my arse had sounded almost attractive – well, Li Chang is an attractive man, but alas, straight as an arrow. I shook my head, and headed to the antispinward transport lock.

There was a transport pod heading to the Admin cluster in 5 minutes, so I took a seat. Actually, I did feel a little off-colour. I run a slightly higher than normal body temperature as a matter of course, but I live with that. Hey, there’s a war on. But I didn’t normally feel so muzzy and light-headed. Maybe I would get someone to check me out. . .

Doors closing, announced the pod. Just as it did so two squaddies came hurtling down the corridor, laughing, and hurled themselves through the doors just as they closed, rocking the pod from side to side.

“You fucking idiot,” grinned one. “Told you we’d be late. I ought to wallop your arse for that.”

“Oh, spank me, daddy! You know I like discipline. Anyway, we weren’t late, we caught it didn’t we?”

“No fucking thanks to you,” growled his mate, swinging a casual swat at him, which he dodged. Jesus, are all these soldiers into it? None of them had ever offered to do it to me before Kern. I sank into a little daydream about Kern, the way the muscles of his six-pack rippled when he sat up. . . No, bad idea Ryan. You do not want to be going to see the boss with a hard-on.

At Admin Cluster instead of heading for Central Admin with everyone else on the pod I turned the other way and headed for the Maintenance stalk. The people I work for – well, I suppose you could say it was a sort of Maintenance at that. At any rate, they don’t much like attention. Officially they don’t exist. Even the section where my boss has his office is shown on the station map as ducting and heat exchangers. I suspected that a fair bit of heat was about to be exchanged.

An unmarked door at the end of the corridor opened for me as it read my biometrics.

“You’re late, Lieutenant Sakamoto.” Yeah, well, it’s sort of a courtesy rank, ok?

“How can I be late, sir, when I didn’t have a specific time for this appointment?”

“Don’t be smart, Sakamoto. Strip.”

“What?”

“Get your damned clothes off. It’s not like you usually have a problem with that.” McAllister glared at me, and jerked one thumb towards the examination cubicle in the corner of his office.

Problem? He’s the one with the problem – he has a problem with the whole Sleeper Corps. Well, admittedly, mainly he has a problem with me, but he thinks that the Corps demean the ethics of Medservice, of which we are officially a part. Medic Lieutenant Ryan Sakamoto, Preserver Medservice, serial number – oh I forget. At your service. Provided you are male, between about 18 and 50, and reasonably fit, at any rate.

McAllister himself fits those parameters, by the way, but I’d sooner go to bed with one of the Developer Deep Clades – hell, they’re probably more human than he is, for all their DNA alterations and cybernetic implants. I reluctantly moved over to the examination cubicle and started to comply. I supposed this meant that they had yet another new variant they wanted to release, and I had to have a med exam first. I hate this bit of the job. McAllister makes me feel like a side of meat. And he has cold hands.

As I sat on the gurney to take off my socks he slapped a medpatch on my arm, picked up a swab and motioned me to open my mouth. “What the hell have you been playing at, Sakamoto? Do you realise what you and this” – he withdrew the swab and pushed it into the analyser unit in his hand – “Kern Harrison have done?”

“Kern?” I probably looked as confused as I sounded. “Kern? What’s he got to do with anything? I mean, yeah, I know what we did, but I didn’t think you got off hearing about those things.”

“I think, perhaps, you are being a little unfair, Captain McAllister.”

I squeaked, and grabbed for the cubicle curtains. Somebody was standing in the doorway that leads into the inner office, a doorway I’ve never been allowed through I might add. A woman, probably in her fifties although if she qualified for rejuve, which judging by the Medic Colonel’s shoulder flash on her regulation T-shirt she most certainly did, she could be anywhere between that and two hundred.

I pulled the curtain tighter around my middle. “Ma’am, I. . .”

“Lieutenant Sakamoto, you really don’t need to hide anything. I assure you I’ve seen all those bits before. I’m Medic Colonel Miriam De Soto.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. And begging your pardon, ma’am, but you haven’t seen my particular bits before, and I’m just fine with keeping it that way.”

She smiled, wanly. “Lieutenant Sakamoto – Ryan, isn’t it? We have a bit of a problem, and we think that you might be involved.”

“I’m sorry ma’am, but I’m not aware of anything that I, that I and Corporal Harrison have done wrong.”

“Not intentionally, no. Oh, put your skivvies on boy, and stop standing in that ridiculous parade ground posture. I’m a doctor, not a soldier. And David, you stop hovering like a proximity mine about to go off.” McAllister looked sheepish. I never even realised he had a first name. I hastily pulled my underwear back on and sat, like a good boy.

“OK.” She ran a hand across her face. She looked tired. No, she looked like someone who has been running on sleep suppressors and coffee and adrenaline for several days. “Now, Ryan, when did you last get a source boost?”

I thought back. “Ten shift cycles ago, maybe twelve. I could check. . .”

“That won’t be necessary. Were  you told what it was?”

“Uh – I was told a new variant of morale.” Like I keep telling you, there’s a war on. Preservers and Developers, for the future of Earth, and the future of humanity. Them’s big stakes. And some of that war goes on in space, the sort of stuff you see in the Tri-D action shows. But some of it, the dirty undeclared part of it, goes on here. In the stations. Inside us. Inside you.

Because nano pseudoviruses, NPVs, can teach you anything. They can teach you how to fly a Navy kite, or how to fix blocked plumbing or radiation burns. But they can also teach you that everything you’ve ever believed is wrong. That the other side is right. That you should support something you’ve always believed is totally wrong, only by the time they’ve finished rewiring you, you’ll think it’s totally right.

That’s how we lost Lagrange-3, and the Solomon Habitat. People in them woke up one day, feeling a bit under the weather, and before we were even aware there was a problem they were heading for the Kuiper Belt.

And so they made us. The Corps. A group of professional antibodies. We spread good viruses. Immune system boosts, to help you resist Developer propaganda viruses. And our own propaganda, viruses like patriotism and self-sacrifice (I hated that one, it made me want to give it all up and go and do something noble and stupid; fortunately, my own expensively modified immune system rejected it, as it eventually rejects all the others. Perks of the job). And because very often you want to target your viruses selectively to certain members of the population, i.e. the squaddies, and because the most reliable and efficient way of doing that is by sex, we’re sluts for the cause. Prostitutes for the higher good. Something of that sort. It’s a purely Corps in-joke to call us the Typhoid Marys.

“Yes, it was: morale-27N to be precise, and someone should be put out of a lock without a spacesuit for releasing it, because it wasn’t ready. Instead of the neutered, locked-down form you were given a virus still capable of mutation and contagion. And to make matters worse, it isn’t the only such mistake.”

“It isn’t?” I didn’t like the sound of this. It was sloppy. It was – unprofessional.

“No,” she sighed. “The Marine Corps has been testing out a few viruses of its own, none of which would have passed a Medservice ethics board in my opinion, but that's the military for you. One was a new variant called discipline-4, that was withdrawn because it incorporated some very old fashioned ideas about what discipline was. Kern Harrison was one of the test subjects, and although it was neutralised, it seems the inactive NPV was still in his system. Ready and able to combine.”

Alarm bells started to ring in my head.

“What are you saying?”

“What she’s saying, Sakamoto, is that you and your little friend have caused a Class-3 quarantine breach. You’ve brewed up some unholy mixture of two unstable NPVs that makes people feel good about discipline. Physical discipline. And you’ve spread it all through the station air supply. About 10% of the station personnel are now either turned on by giving corporal punishment or by getting their arses spanked.”

“But the filters. . .”

“Are set to ignore anything tagged with Medservice identifiers. Which thanks to you, this is.”

Shit. “Are you sure?”

She looked at McAllister. He held up the analyser in his hand. We could both see the red light flashing.

“I’m afraid so, Ryan.”

“So – what happens now?”

“Well, we can prevent you spreading any more of the virus. . .” Christ, they were going to space me! Could I get past them both and make it to a shuttle? But where would I run to, in this tiny, close-packed set of tin-cans we call home? Strangely, it was McAllister who saw my reaction, and who put a calming hand on my shoulder.

“Sit, Sakamoto, she doesn’t mean you’re going out an airlock in your underwear, good idea though that might be,” he said dryly. “The Colonel has developed a suppressor that will render the NPV non-infectious.”

“So why didn’t you just give it to me when I came in?”

She looked at me. “Because – I’ll be honest, this is crude, rushed, work. Something more refined will be available soon, and we’ll be immunising the whole population. But for now we really need to prevent you spreading this any further, Ryan. It’s just. . .”

“Yes?”

“There is a substantial chance that the effects of the suppressor will leave the virus stable, non-infectious, but permanently integrated into your nervous system.”

“You’re saying that in order to keep everyone else safe, I have to be like this permanently?”

“Not – necessarily. It may not happen, and if it does we may be able to develop something that unwrites it, later on.”

Yeah, sure, like that’s going to be a really high priority on lab time, given that there’s a war on. Still. . .

“Go ahead. I guess I can live with it. There’s a war on, and people get hurt in wars.”

“Usually by more than a few swats to the arse,” said McAllister. “OK, I’ll prepare the suppressor.” He turned and strode into the inner office.

“Thank you, Ryan. Medservice appreciates your sacrifice.”

“One thing, ma’am.”

“Yes?”

“Will Kern be getting this suppressor too?”

She looked at me for a moment, then smiled wearily. “Yes, yes he will.”

I think I’d better buy a few soft cushions to sit on for when he comes back.

“Right, I’ll leave you in Captain McAllister’s capable hands. I’m due back at Clavius Base – I shouldn’t really be here, but I wanted to make sure you made the decision freely.” She shot a shrewd glance at McAllister’s back, and patted mine.

“Goodbye, ma’am.”

“Goodbye, Ryan. Goodbye, David – no, it’s all right, I can see myself out.”

McAllister came back into the room, a jet injector in one hand.

“So, Sakamoto. You really did it this time.”

“Hey, was it my fault that you guys and the Marine Corps can’t design a virus properly?”

“Only you could be kinky enough for the two to come together this way. No-one else has caused us this problem, you damned plague carrier.”

“Listen, you loud-mouthed baboon, why don’t  you take the poker out of your arse and just get on and do your job? What’s with you anyway?” Yes, I know it’s no way to speak to a superior officer. I told you I wasn’t a soldier.

“Bend over.”

“WHAT?”

He indicated the injector. “This needs to go into the butt muscle. Drop your shorts and bend over.”

Reluctantly, I complied, bending over the gurney. It gave me quivers, hearing those words, doing this, even when it was just for an injection. I felt the cold ‘phut’ of the jet injector against my skin, started to stand up.

His arm pushed me roughly down into the sheets.

“Hey,” I said, or tried to say, but my comment was muffled by having the bedlinen in my face. Then I said something else, something along the lines of ‘OW!’ McAllister’s hand had come down hard on my bare backside. And just to prove it was no accident he did it again, and then again.

I managed to turn my head. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, McAllister? Ow! That hurts.”

“What am I doing, you insolent little snot? I’m giving you the good hiding I should have given you years ago.” Well, I’m afraid that did it. It’s the words, you see. They worked on my new wiring like a master harper’s hands on the strings. Only by a masterly effort of will did I stop myself crying out: oh yes, sir, punish me as I deserve, but I didn’t have enough resistance to stop my back curving and my arse from thrusting upwards, eagerly, into his hand.

Oh he had me where I wanted, and he knew it, too. I heard him laugh.

“You just can’t help yourself, can you? And neither can I, and your arse is going to be very, very sore and red as a consequence by the time I finish with you. You see, Ryan, when I told you that 10% of the station population were infected, you forgot to ask who some of them might be. . .”

 

Idris the Dragon

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