Luna: New Moon

‘Toquinho will send you the protocols. I want you to handle it personally. No one else. I want daily reports, encrypted, to Toquinho.’

Lucas reads the distaste on Heitor Pereira’s face. He is a former Brazilian naval officer, cashiered when Brazil privatised its defence forces. He fell from grace with the sea and left it for the moon where, like so many ex-military, he set up a private security company. Those days when Adriana was tearing Corta Hélio from the ribcage of Mackenzie Metals were bloody days, of claim jumping and duels of honour and faction fights, when legal disputes were more quickly and economically ended with a knife in the dark. Lives pressed up close against each other, breathing each other’s air. Heitor Pereira has stopped many a blade for Adriana Corta. His loyalty, his bravery and honour are beyond question. They are just irrelevant. Corta Hélio has moved around him. But the loathing Lucas sees is not for that, not even the surveillance fly. Heitor hates that his lapse at the moon-run party has led him into a yoke and harness. Lucas can ask anything of him, forever more.

‘And Heitor?’

‘Senhor?’

‘Don’t fail me.’

An archipelago of dried semen lies across the perfect hollow of Lucasinho Corta’s left ass cheek. He gently lifts Grigori Vorontsov’s arm and slides out from the boy’s embrace. He stretches, tightens muscles, cracks joints. The Vorontsov kid is heavy. And demanding. Five times he had been tottering on the edge of sleep when he felt the prickle of beard against his cheek, the whisper in his ear – hey, hey – the throb of hardening penis against his inner thigh.

Lucasinho has always known that Grigori is hot for him – mad hot, Afua in the study group had said, in one of those girls’ games where you are never told the rules but are punished horribly if you break them – but not that he was such a consummate fucker. He could fuck for hours. Steady, deep, hard. A relentless fucker. And generous with the reach-round. He had hardly been able even to moan. Who would have known the passion inside the guy across the table, when they met up at their weekly in-person colloquium seminars? It was great, tremendous, the best sex he has ever had with a boy, but no more now, right? No more.

For such as Lucasinho Corta has received, what shall he give? Cake. Since his father cut him off he has little else to give. While Grigori snores Lucasinho searches the cooler. Almost as bare as Ariel’s, but there’s enough to bake up a batch of flourless brownies. Two batches. Lucasinho is thinking of his next bed. He can’t stay another night in this one. He can’t take it. Lucasinho drips a little of Grigori’s stash of THC juice into the mix. They had vaped it last night, sprawled across each other on the couch, sharing smokes and kisses. He glances back at Grigori spread like a star across the bed. So hairy. They say that about the Vorontsovs. Hairy and weird. Touched by space. Lucasinho knows the legends. House Vorontsov descends from Valery, the original patriarch, an oligarch who invested in a private launch facility in Central Asia. Wherever that is. They built the orbital tethers, the two cyclers that loop constantly in a figure of eight between moon and Earth; the BALTRAN, the rail network. Space has changed them. They have bred strange: weird, elongated things born to freefall. No one has seen a cycler crewperson for years. They can never come down. Gravity would crush them like decorative butterflies. But none so strange as Valery himself – still alive, a monster grown so huge, so bloated that he fills all the core of a cycler. The legends can never agree whether it’s Sts Peter and Paul or Alexander Nevsky. That’s how you know it’s true. Stories are always too neat.

Lucasinho waves his hand over the cooker panel to clear the glass, peers in at his batches. He glances anxiously at Grigori. This is not the time for the beast to wake. A few minutes more. And out and cooling. Lucasinho feels the shadow on his skin before the press of Grigori’s hair and muscles.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Baking.’

‘What, like?’

‘Brownies. They’re good. They’ve got hash in them.’

‘Do you always bake like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like no clothes.’

‘It connects me.’

‘I think it’s hot.’

Lucasinho’s heart sinks. Grigori is close and tight against him, getting hard. Is this boy made of cum? Lucasinho picks of a crumb of cooling brownie and turns to slip it between Grigori’s lips.

‘Sweet.’

Then they go back to it again.

Marina has a balcony. It’s small but quite addictive. At the end of each day she returns from her training group bone-weary and aching from the new things her body must learn for Corta Hélio and goes to her balcony.