Mercury Retrograde

Then there were the weapons.

Yeah, sure there were times -- back a couple centuries ago -- that the robots had been armed with things like full-size flamethrowers or even firearms, but there was always safety factor that had to be observed since they had to have their operator's need to be close by. Here on Mercury, with access to the remote control equipment designed to run the "shit-brick" gathering hod-tender bots ... the kid gloves had come off.

The arena was a large hollowed out, metal lined chamber the mining company had originally designed to be an emergency shelter for the whole mining colony ... back when that number had been only a few hundred and not the several thousand humans now on Mercury. It had sat unused for a few decades once the ore mining had moved into full production but as boredom had set in for the season-on season-off workers the need for simple, cheap recreation had began to build. Some brilliant fool of a mechanic, with more time on his hands than sense, had built a toy robot to play with. Another mechanic -- one who if rumor has it, decided to troll him -- built himself one, but better. They kept trying to one-up each other's robot building skills until one day it almost came to blows between the two men.

Instead, they made their robots fight.

Admittedly, having them do it in the middle of the main cavern probably wasn't a good idea but they were mechanics, not rocket scientists. A full blow metal breaking, circuit board bashing, pride-driven brawl ensued and the noise drew a huge crowd of equally bored off season miners. They were soon cheering and -- once the attempts by the Queen Mining Company official's to bring the fight to an end were abandoned -- bets were being placed.

That was all it took. The exchange of money.

So Mercury had a sport. It had a ready supply of mechanical geniuses. It had tons of scrap that could be up-salvaged to make the bots with. And, once someone got to thinking about it, it had people with snap-point reflexes, skilled at the motion-without-thought instant handling of controls.

Rig pilots.

The need to have a better place for the robots to fight made someone remember the old survival shelter. The company allowed it with many a sigh at what they saw as a waste of precious material that could have been put to a more productive and less time-wasting use. Still, it didn't take long for a few videos of the robot battles to get carried back to Earth ... where it was loved beyond all reason.

Soon not only was Queen Mining not just looking the other way, but they were obliged to make an effort to distributes the footage back to Earth on ever data transfer leaving Mercury.

By the time Roulette had finished her coffee she was awake, up to date, and more than ready to get back to one of the few pleasures in her life. With the caffeine coursing through her, Rue went and dressed and then headed over to the storage garage she shared with a few other ... like-minded people, from this season's workers.

There were several already there getting to work themselves.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

Originally the warehouse had been used to store equipment -- most of which was found to be useless in the mining operations on Mercury but that people back on Earth had to believe was imperatively needed to be present -- till called for. Then as time and a steady winnowing effect emptied the large space it had been all but abandoned. However, once the robot fighting became such a prominent part of daily life, it was turned to a different purpose.

With it's close proximity to the arena it was all but perfect for the housing and repair of the fighting robots.

There were already overhead cranes for moving things about. A bit of divider partitioning and some lockable gates were enough to satisfy the security needs of the often paranoid pilots. People who were as a group more worried about their spare parts being seen than ship full of nuns on "Bath-a-Nun" day .

Robot designers and lunatics are often seen to walk hand in hand.

Rue stepped inside and took a deep breath. The oil and burnt circuitry smell of the place was more of an "I'm home smell" kind of smell than any scent she had ever known.

Waving to the others she moved to the back storage lockers where her two bots hung in the crane gantry hoist rigs. The often tricky locked gate responded to the old fashion key she carried on her necklace. With a sigh she let her eyes settle on the half-disassembled Rabid Rabbit. The larger bot, a survivor of many a bout in the deadly unlimited class,

"Soon, Rabid. I promise."

Taking the crane control off the wall beside the locker she shifted it around overhead and lowered the hooks to the metal loop above her second, smaller robot. Butcher's Billy.

The fighting Goat painting on the side had taken a beating in the last match of last season. There were other burns and a truly vicious looking scar across the metal around one of the powerful rear legs. That wound had come close to tearing that leg clean off.

"You're going to need a fresh coat of pain and shit-load of welding rods, huh, lover girl?"

Roulette looked back over her shoulder at the tall man walking up to her with a shit -eating grin on his face. She rolled her eyes and looked back at what she was doing. The large battle robot swung like a multi-leg dead spider under the gantry crane as she moved it over to one of the repair areas. She hated to admit he was right, but Liam had called it. She was going to have to lay down layer after layer of welding bead into that crack to make it as good as new. Well, stronger than new to be truthful. Not that it was work she wasn't familiar with. The old Butcher's Billy had several such silvery scars across its skin.

Liam stood next to her but was looking back into the cage locker at Rabid Rabbit.

"Still needing a 99Hard-G data block, huh, lover girl?"

Rue sighed.

She hated being called "Lover girl" by this asshole.

"Liam, are you wanting to annoy me about something specific while you can see I'm busy or is this just a general trying-to-piss-me-off conversation?"

The tall man laughed. "Oh no, no, no. This is a I'm trying to get-into-your-pants-and-fuck-you conversation."

With a no-shit grunt, Rue settled Butcher's Billy into the repair cradle. When she turned Liam was right in front of her. He looked from her eyes to her tits and back with a smirk.

Roulette pushed the crane control into his gut making him back up. "Oh, not another one of those. I think I made it plain last time. Not if you were the last man on Mercury, and I was going to die if I didn't have sex, would I fuck you."

"Not even for a brand new 99Hard-G, still in the shipping plastic?" The tall man smiled at her widening of eyes. "Cherry mint condition."

Pausing in disbelief, Rue looked over to where Lasair Lee, another pilot in both the limited and unlimited classes, was watching them out the corner of her eyes. It was clear she was listening hard. Roulette knew that whatever her decision it was going to be making the rounds of the rumor mill within the hour. Time to stomp on this nonsense.

"Look, Liam, I appreciate you're hard up. I can kind-of understand how it must be ... being the only guy on an entire planet that every member of opposite sex refuses to have sex with, but seriously I've got work to do to get Billy here ready for its next match. You don't have a 99Hard-G. I know that none came in on any transport during the last season and I've had people scrounging both base camps this season."

"Oh, I know you have. That's why I went out of my way to secure one. See, I've got a buddy up topside who ... just so happened to have owed me a favor for putting him onto some prime pussy a few years back. I called in that IOU from him, and he was happy to help since it returns the same favor." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a circuit board. "Now. Lover girl. All I want is some normal vanilla sex ... well, maybe a bit of anal, but hey that's negotiable, right ... and it's all yours. Let say ... maybe every night for five nights you put out like a prom queen for me? That sounds fair, right, given how hard it is to find one of these bad boys?"

Rue looked at cigar box sized wafer of crystal and circuitry. She recognized it easily enough. It was a part, admittedly a minor part, of the piece she needed to get Rabid Rabbit back up and kicking.

Then she saw his grin.

Liam believed he had her over the barrel. She glanced over at Lasair. The woman was already working her wrist computer ready to send this out to the world. They both believed her this desperate. Was she? Well, yeah but...

"Plain vanilla, huh?" she asked softly.

The deep throaty laugh. "As plain as sugar and cream."

Roulette stepped towards him.

"Hey, hey, hey!"

"What's the matter lover boy?" She glanced down at the plasma cutter torch she had placed alongside his crotch. Liam was trying to stand on his tip toes and back up at the same time. She moved forward with him a hand going to his chest directing him till his back hit the side of the cage wall behind him. "See, where you fucked up was not in getting the part I need, it was in offer just plain sex. I don't do that any more ... stud. I want things a bit more frisky than that when I take a man."

She clicked the igniter on the torch and the sparks shot between the metal tip and the opening fuel port. There was a small gout of flame that licked across his workshop denim. With a startled yelp Liam tried to back-crawl up the fence.

Rue smiled at him. "Where you going, lover boy?" she clicked it again. "I've come to enjoy a bit of branding play, you know just for foreplay sake. You know just to get my pussy all juiced up and ready for that hard meat." She ran a hand up and cupped his throat. "Oh, and there's my choking fetish. But of course, you have to understand ... I only do it if I'm on top. See I like to look down into your eyes. I enjoy seeing a man's eyes as I pull the belt I have around his throat. I love to see his eyes bulge and his tongue stick out as I strangle him. Oh, a man gets so hard for me then."

Roulette pushed herself forward till she was now pressing the taller man into the extruded fencing of the cage. "Then I like to dig my thumbs into his checks and make the ball gag stretch his face. A man looks so silly then, I sometimes get to laughing. Of course, I have to really punish him then. You know, the old staple gun to the testicles thing." She grinned and let a bit of drool drip off her bottom lip. "Oh, don't fret about it so, lover boy. I mean, yeah sure it looks terrible, the blood and all, but it's only a few little pricks. How bad can a little price hurt, right?"

Liam began to try and squirm his way away from her as fast as he could but she sidestepped him and ran the still un-lit plasma cutter up his chest. She paused it right before his wide-eyed face.

"Oh, and you will be happy to know I love anal." Rue nodded with a huge smile on her face and then gave a silly-girl giggle. "All you big strong men scream so wonderfully when I ram my fake dick into them. And, when I pound their ass for hours, I just love the moaning and the whimpering." Tilting her head she clicked the plasma torch igniter right before his eyes. "Now, where should we put my first brand?"

With a shove, he pushed Rue back against the work table and fled off through the workshop. Watching him go -- listening with little or no pleasure to the laughter coming from behind her -- she glanced over at Lasair Lee. Reaching down she pulled the oxygen hose up to the handle and plugged it into the cutting torch. With a spark, the noise cutter ignited for real. Over the burning glare, she meets the other pilot's eyes.

"I never get to have any fun. Men are wimps."

Turning down the flame to a stark blue white, she went to work.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

The miners -- in their infinite wisdom when hammered drunk -- had called the best drinking spot on all of Base Camp Two ... The Trash Pit.

A perfect name for the place could have never been found.

When she stepped inside there were a few waved hands tossed up in greeting. She smiled and nodded back, her hands stuffed into her pilot's jackets pockets. She gave a small shiver. The long season aboard Big Alice had accustomed her to the steady temperatures in the control room and the bunk room. This bar had been built into the stone walls of an old lava tube that branched off the larger empty caldera that was the main chamber of base camp. With the sun rising above on the surface the ground temperatures would soon be rising, these chambers would, by the end of the off season, be more than comfortable. To some, they could even be described as warm by then.

Roulette would describe these caverns as hot as balls by the end of the off season

Taking a seat at the bar, she removed a hand only long enough to signal Jimmy "The Man" William that she wanted a beer.

He smiled as he slid the bottle in front of her. "Cold, Rue?'

"I'm freezing my tits off, Jimmy. Will a whole room full of broken down mechanical trash down the hall, can no one find a heater to piece together for this place."

"Oh, we tried that." Jimmy wiped down the bar. "I got a huge cease and desist notice from the company about wasting power to run a heater on a planet that eight hundred degrees."

Shaking her head she took and drink and looked around. At one of the tables, she saw Old Frank, Minnow, and a couple of others who had the mechanical look about them. They were all looking up at a large vid screen. She saw it as a news feed and turned away in disgust.

"Not interested in what's going on back on Earth, huh?" Jimmy asked.

She shook her head. "It's all just Queen Company propaganda crap."

"Hey, come on Rue even you've got to hand it to old Caesar and his family." A hand landed on her shoulder and she looked up to see the drink-filled eyes of Jack'o "They have the moon all but ready. I saw that there are only two more comets to go and they will be done. A bit of crop planting and some water filtration and they will be ready for the first million colonists."

"Wow, a whole million? On a world with what's the last numbers ... eighteen billion? Or is it twenty yet?"

"Well, once they have those first ones settled in, they can start moving more up. Hell the moon will support an easy billion of those ground pounders and -- once they teach a few of those fools some basic living in space safety -- maybe they can move out the way into some of those new O'Neil's and let another few billion move up off Earth. And then there is Mars."

That was too much for Rue.

"Oh, my ass there is Mars. I don't care what crap Earth wants to put on the vid about them using Queen's terraforming to change Mars. Those rich fuckers there will never ... never ... agree to let that happen. They have been there for two hundred years building themselves an empire. They rule Mars like the ancient kings and you think they will just let someone rain comets down on all they've built? Or maybe you think they will simply pack up and go back to Earth for a couple of centuries where they will have to live like everyone else? Not. Going. To. Happen."

A pilot from another rig had heard her and came over to add his two cents worth.

"Yeah, well they might not like it but there is not much they can do when twenty billion people back on Earth demand they get their asses out the way."

Roulette turned to him and gave him a look.

"What?"

She pounced.

"It was proven, beyond a doubt proven, that we could have spent the last two centuries building spinning habitats -- be it O'Neill cylinders or even a McKendree cylinder -- out of asteroids and made more than enough living space for the overpopulation problem to be easily manageable." Taking her beer bottle she pointed at his chest. "But no, that's not what the Queen family wanted to do. Not flashy enough. Instead, they slammed a million chunks of towed-in ice from out of the Oort cloud onto the moon to make it have an atmosphere. Whew ... big whoop. How long will it last? What a thousand years? At best?"

Another person, a mechanic off Black Betty, stepped in.

"Well, that gives us time to figure out other things."

"Like what? How to stop acting like a bunch of arguing school children?" Roulette placed her empty beer bottle on the counter. Jimmy fed it into the auto-cleaner to be sterilized, refilled, and delivered back into the cooler. At her signal, he placed a second beer beside her hand.

"Well, we ..."

"No, Mace, there is no we. That's half the problem. If it was a 'we' situation 'we' could deal with it. It's rich fuckers on Mars, it's rich fuckers on Earth, and it's that family of rich fuckers on Paradise Station that pay all of our paychecks." Rue pointed in the vague direction of the surface. "They don't listen to any facts that might cost them money. And they sure as hell are not going to do a damn thing that will help the people, not if it hurts their bottom line."

Jack'o clinked his beer against hers. "Well, that's just being cynical."

Roulette looked at the merry twinkle in his eyes. "Yes. I've met some of them face to face. They are assholes."

On that, all the bar could at least agree.

Leaving Jimmy to peddle his cheap company beer, Rue moved over to a pool table and played the winner for drinks. Then -- once the alcohol had brought out their real personalities -- offers to take her back to whatever smelly hovel they had crawled from started to fly her way.

Even from people that should know better.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

The arena still smelled like old piss, rust, and burnt rubber.

The forklift crawled along on its treads, the large robotic gladiator hanging limply from the raised forks. Some fresh coats of paint -- and a few dozen new welding burns on Rue later -- and the Butcher's Billy looked as good as new as it swayed and rocked along. Hanging like a marionette puppet, just waiting only for its master's electronic touch on the strings.

Walking ahead of her robot, the Arena forklift following her motion, Rue ignored the pile of smoking scrap that was behind hauled past her. She knew, in some odd way without really paying attention, that the destroyed robot was called Mad Thing. A six-season veteran of the limited arena, Roulette had faced off against it once before ... two or three seasons back. It's pilot, Doc Kenton, was following his broken machine like a mourner at a funeral.

Rue didn't let such sights distract her. She had not only seen them too many times before but she had herself often been in that same position. But not now, and not tonight. Tonight it was time to send someone else scrounging for parts.

Begging for scraps.

Or being offed hard to find parts for sex by scummy fuckers like Liam.

As she walked past it, her eyes cut to the graffiti carved into the stone walls of the tunnel. Dozens and dozens of knives had cut deep the words over the past decade. Often crossing out one bit of vulgarity with another.

Two, as always, caught her eyes.

~In order to die, you must first have lived.~

And...

~Today is a fine day to fuck something up.~

She wasn't sure what miner had carved those words there, but Rue was sure that several dozens other blades had since that first time carved the words deeper into the dark stone wall. She had even done it once herself.

The bright tunnel exit ahead drew near.

As always she thought there should have been the sound of a cheering crowd.

That was the one thing these battles missed out on. That roar of a half-drunken audience. Those rowdy gatherings were taking place in the dozen or so bars scattered through the two base camps. Hundreds of off work miner, mechanics, and base personnel were clustered around large screens. They were drinking the Queen Company provided alcohol, in a Queen Company provided bar, served to them by Queen Company provided bar workers. They were betting terribly hard earned money on which piece of brightly painted -- and soon to be battered metal -- would make it through to the next round.