As she stood astride my prostrate body I didn't really notice her face. My entire concentration at that moment was focussed on the tip of the hand blaster she held at arms length, pointing directly at my nose from a distance of less than half a meter. "Okay pretty boy, get your pants off."
I was too stunned to move for a moment. Surely I couldn't have heard her right? The Amazons had just raided our station, the Pacifiers were sure to arrive at any moment β and she wanted me to strip? It's amazing the fine detail you notice when you're absolutely terrified: I actually saw the tip of her finger whiten as it tightened on the kill button of the blaster. She said, very quietly and menacingly, "I mean now, cocksucker."
I don't think I had ever moved so fast as I did at that moment. Lifting my torso, bearing my weight on my shoulder blades and the soles of my feet, I tore at the belt of my uniform pants and thrust them down my legs, together with my undershorts. Her dark eyes left mine for a moment and flickered to my groin. She didn't look impressed. Well, you try getting sexually aroused when one of the most notorious terrorists in the Sol System is threatening to turn your head into a fine spray spattered across every surface in the room!
This wasn't what I signed up for when I accepted a contract as a systems controller for the Northern Confed's Outreach Program. After three sols' dedicated study at Mare Criseum Academy, then a further two sols pretty much running the university's research program, I could have picked any job I wanted in the sentient technology field. I know for a fact that if I'd defected to Farside, to the huge Indochin station there, I could have earned enough creds to set up on my own in five sols. I even cast nostalgic eyes towards Terra. Like most of us Lunartics, born and bred on the planet's sole satellite, I felt a natural pull towards the crumbling sphere the nostalgics still refer to as Planet Earth. But also like a true Lunartic, I believed that the huge financial rewards such a move offered, together with the unique opportunity to experience natural air, simply didn't compensate for the discreds we'd all heard about: the Sun cancers; the landsink; the nuclear deserts; the 8 million deaths in the North American famine...even in stable regions life expectancy was reckoned to be no more than maybe 93 years (to use the archaic Terran term for sols).
I could have joined one of the glocos. Apple-Virgin had just finished terraforming Enceladus, and I could have stared out of my office window at beautiful Saturn as I made my fortune and my new home world circled the planet every 1.5 T-days. Instead I decided to do the patriotic thing and go into Gov-serv. Okay, the pay was crap, and we got all the best technoware third-hand; but at least it offered job security, and a comfortable retirement for the 70 sols of loyal servitude I was expected to give. Well, I was shipped out to Titania β beautiful name, shithole moon, a mere 2.5 billion kilos from Luna β where I'd been bored out of my mind for two sols creating sentech solutions to nonsensical problems. Nothing exciting ever happened there β at least, it didn't until the Amazons came to town.
Titania has a reputation Lunaside as a wild, crazy frontier zone. That's true if you happen to be located in Condoleezza, near the vast Ignacio Arroya mining complex. But our base, the Jayef-Kennedy Science Center, is more than 400 kilos away, in the shadow of Will Smith Scarp. (Every damned thing on the rock is named after some president of North America or other.) We'd heard about a couple of raids by the Amazons on settlements around Condi in recent months, but the Pacifiers had assured us on several occasions that given our isolation, and the fact that we were primarily a research facility, we were perfectly safe. Of course, our isolation also put us 30 kilos from the nearest Pacifier station in sleepy little Saphangthong.
The Amazons actually call themselves the Daughters of Germaine, whatever the osama that means. The name they're commonly known by refers to some ancient tribe of Terran women, from the Brazilia Dustbowl I think. They claim to be 'a sisterhood of resistance to the phallocentric domination of humin (sic) society through the ages'. Perhaps they haven't noticed that the last three NorCon presidents have all been, well, clitocentric. In truth they seemed to be just a gang of women who liked killing men in enormous numbers; if the newswebs were to be believed, the more painfully and messily the better. They had started out on Terra hundreds of years ago, and were gradually spreading their way, in a loose coalition, across the Sol System. About a year ago we heard that a breakaway group had made it to Titania β and now the most infamous of them was staring at my flaccid cock with her blaster pointing into my face!