Anesidora

A witch and a geneticist

Content notes and tags: toxic MILF yuri, rough sex, light bondage, fluid swapping. This work is sexually explicit.

In this, as in all things, Prospera applies herself with precision.

Gaining access to the Benerit headquarters is not a particular challenge — she is, after all, technically a member. Gaining access to this specific facility, this specific woman, is something else entirely.

She does not worry about what she has left behind: her daughters are in the safest of places, because obscurity provides its own armor. And more than that, in the last few years she’s gained incredible clarity of purpose. In the moment, it is useless to fret; allowing anything to distract her will lead to mistakes, and fatal ones. She will do what she came to do, and then she will disappear — simple as that, with no one the wiser. A step closer to her objective.

The door opens and shuts soundlessly behind her. For a moment she stands in place, considering what she sees around her. There is a scent of greenery, of growing things — out of place, in this place where merchants of death gather and broker deals — and, more faintly, of fruits.

Prospera walks into a greenhouse: lavishly equipped with panels of false sunlight, trellises, automated hydroponics. Fleeting rainbows in the air, as water scatters light. The ceiling is high, the space expansive, and for a moment one could nearly forget where this place truly is. An imitation of Earth, insofar as that planet still harbors beauty and luxury; a little less each year, as more is gobbled up by the companies. Inching closer to a total wasteland.

And then, the woman herself, back turned to Prospera and seemingly oblivious. Notrette Rembran is slight to the point of delicate — she might weigh two-third of Prospera, if that, with narrow, breakable shoulders and slender arms. Pale-haired and pale-skinned, not the look of a woman who’s seen hard labor. But her jacket is off, draped across some gardening equipment — the exact design and purpose of which eludes Prospera; the harsh reality of her life generally and Mercury specifically precludes the need to learn about how to nurture and grow weak, fragile things — and the woman has her sleeves rolled up and her knees dug deep into dark, rich loam.

What a caricature of care and tending: one of the most powerful women in the system, playacting at manual labor. Not that many people would consider Notrette Rembran the way Prospera does; most know her husband, recognize her only as his wife, the thoughtful scientist married to the veteran with political ambitions.

The woman stands with a grace that reminds Prospera of birds. Of course, Mercury doesn’t have many birds; they must be in the same secret paradise where the green things grow and where families are happy and where her husband still lives. But the pilot has seen diagrams of birds: their colorful plumage, their lifeless eyes and fragile bone structures.

Notrette stands, wiping her gloves on a skirt that would be a week’s wages for a Mercurian miner, and Prospera fantasizes about taking the head of a bird in her hand and giving it a hard twist. Ending her would be simple. Prospera would require no sidearm for the act. Her bare hands suffice in shattering that gracile neck; it would not take long, and it would require such trivial exertion to subject those bones — that larynx — to such force that they can no longer endure. There’s something to having borne witness to an enormous loss of life that changes one’s perspective. Learning the speed at which a world can end, understanding how quickly a massacre can happen: after that, killing comes so much more easily.

“Lady Prospera.” The woman turns: she is in profile, a portrait of fine lines and careful colors. Her white gloves are black with soil samples; what great irony, that the hollowness that runs through a bird’s bones are the hubris that allows it to fly. There are smears of earth on her cheek, too, where she must have carelessly wiped off sweat. “Unless you’d like to be called by a different name, of course.”

“I didn’t expect,” Prospera says mildly, “the wife of a monster to look so elegant, or that she’d dirty her hands gardening.”

“Thank you.” Notrette laughs. There’s no fear in her eyes. “Are you here to kill me?”

Prospera thinks again of what bird bones must sound like when they are stepped on. But she is here for a reason. “What,” Prospera asks, “is Quiet Zero?”

The tea is delicious, a fact that Prospera manages to resent. Notrette is pleasant, does not dissimulate, answers each of the pilot’s questions precisely, without justification or guilt. This, Prospera also hates, if only because it denies her a reason to hate Notrette even more; it’s easier to hate birds if you imagine them with more lifeless eyes.

“I appreciate that you haven’t asked me why,” Notrette says as she pours another cup for Prospera, looking out at the greenery below; they are sitting on a patio overlooking the hydroponics, in what must be Notrette’s private chambers.

“In my experience, the world doesn’t care about intentions, for good or ill. You and your life’s work will always be tools in the hands of power, to be used and discarded by the whims of another.”

Something flashes behind Notrette’s eyes. “Is that how you feel about the Vanadis Incident?”

“Is that how you feel about your husband?” Prospera shakes her head with a thin smile, cruel and sad. “I don’t speak of myself, Notrette Rembran. Someday, someday sooner than you might think, someone will use your Quiet Zero as a weapon of untold power. The only world without war you will build will be the peace of a charnel house.”

“But,” Notrette says, almost laughing, “that is why I married him. Do you want to hear about the defense mechanism of certain plants? No? I didn’t marry one of the solar system’s most powerful men because I wanted to give him my life’s work, Lady Prospera. I did it to co-opt his resources, and to use those to ensure he’ll never be able to misuse it. The same reason that has brought you here, is what brought me to marry him: on my own, I lacked state-of-the-art facilities and personnel whose silence can be bought.”

Prospera almost smiles at this, one predator appraising another. She was married, once. She remembers moments of happiness — her husband’s smile when he saw their daughter, the way his brow would crease in concern when Prospera was scheduled to climb back into the Lfrith — but it’s like watching a life through a thick and dirty pane of glass: the figures are silent, their movements grotesque as the warp of the glass distorts the images into nightmarish proportions. Is Notrette happy? Can anything make her happy?

The pilot turns the knife on herself. She was happy, once, she thinks, and now she has become something else. A long time ago, a pilot and a wife. Always a mother, then and still. But she has become a builder, too, constructing a new and terrible future, and with this profession has come the understanding that people are tools: you handle them, apply them to the task at hand, discard and replace them when they grow dull or their purpose is completed.

It is rare to meet another architect, Prospera thinks, one who is so merciless, who builds with cornerstones of bone and mortar of blood. “I’ve never made the acquaintance of someone who shares my same…” Prospera struggles to find the word that correctly sums the odd kinship she feels with this bird of a woman. “… heartlessness.”

Notrette gives a little giggle, her face momentarily squeezing into the perfect facsimile of a harmless and adorable wife. “I feel the same way. It was nice to be so frank with another person. But you really shouldn’t have drunk the tea.”

Prospera is a machine of bespoke gears; she is always aware, painfully so, of how the stuff of her comes together, how the teeth and notches line up, how the springs twist. She has been distracted, for just a moment — the way, she supposes, a human might forget themself when seeing a work of art, or beautiful plumage at the aviary. But she can feel it now: the cloying sweetness that coats her closing throat, the mistick in the perfect choreography of her heart, the hitch in her lungs. Her fingers have already stopped responding; she opens her hand, preparing to lunge, and only succeeds in dropping her cup with a clatter. The prosthetic arm alone responds, but without the proper signals from her brain it grasps and twitches pointlessly.

The scientist takes a final sip from her own cup, content, and then stands. She taps Prospera on the shoulder — the lightest of touches, but enough to topple the immobilized woman from her chair to the floor below. Notrette rolls her onto her back with the tip of her boot, then steps over the prone woman to stand astride, looking down. “Did you think I would just tell you about my life’s work? You, who as good as warned me you would take it and use it to your own ends? I don’t even let my husband touch me like that.”

Prospera realizes she has underestimated the woman, perhaps mortally. The scientist is weaker than her, not a soldier by training or lived experience, but she wields death without a moment’s hesitation, acts without remorse. Prospera is humbled, chagrined by the humbling, impressed by it: a hidden poison, so easily applied, has the weight and heft of years of violent living.

“I’m… witch…” she gasps out, trying to find a purchase from which she can bargain for her life.

“Yes, you’re a witch.” Disinterested, Notrette picks up the teapot, weighs it in her hand, and then kneels, straddling Prospera. In one motion — gentle, for all its invasiness, because Prospera can offer no resistance — Notrette pulls the pilot’s ever-present helmet off, and their eyes meet for the first time: Prospera’s sky-blue staring back into Notrette’s storm-gray. If the scientist feels anything from this — sees, in the eyes of the woman she is murdering, any sense of humanity, a pull at her empathy — she makes no sign of it. Instead, she tips the pot over, pouring the rest of the poisoned tea over Prospera’s head, into the woman’s eyes and then her gasping, open mouth. “I think you should die now,” Notrette says, and this — the tone, the casual dismissal of her opponent’s strength, her ability to destroy in service of some greater, ineffable goal — this, Prospera thinks, is the cold and calculating woman that will make Quiet Zero a reality, the woman that no one else but Prospera has seen.

The pilot’s mouth continues to move, silent and robbed of speech, but the witch’s brand at her temple flares to life, vibrant orange under the brown tea that now lacquers her face. Above them, the station’s lights flicker, almost imperceptible, and Notrette cocks her head, listening for something that has now fallen silent — the ever-present hum of life support, the gentle churning of air that keeps this hollow can habitable in the dark of the void. All has ceased. Klaxons that should be blaring in such an event have been likewise muzzled.

“That,” Notrette says with a sigh, “is inconvenient.” She turns back to the dying intruder, assessing; in her fading vision, Prospera is struck with a final impression of a bird of prey, twitching its head back and forth, calculating how best to kill its troublesome meal.

“I’m inoculated against my own venom, of course,” the gray-eyed killer says, her hand closing around her prey’s chin; her long fingers, so like talons, creep up Prospera’s cheeks. “But a side-effect of the genetic manipulation is that my bodily fluids contain the antidote.” Her grip digs into Prospera’s exposed flesh, fingers sinking in to wedge themselves between the woman’s jaw, forcing her mouth open.

Notrette spits into the hole. “If you want to live, swallow.”

Prospera doesn’t actually believe Notrette; to humiliate your opponent by letting them debase themselves a final time is the cruelest joy. But she is desperate in only the way a dying woman can be, and she does as instructed. Almost immediately, there is a physical reaction. She doesn’t regain control over her limbs, but her throat begins to loosen, and breathing comes easier.

“I’m a witch,” she finally manages to spit out between gasps. She doesn’t deign to say I can be useful; she has standards, even paralyzed. “With a single thought, I can vent all the air in this station.”

Notrette stands, and Prospera raises her head, allowing herself a small smile. “We can…”

She trails off when she sees what Notrette actually has in mind: the woman has hiked up her skirt and is beginning to pull off her panties, the same cold and unreadable expression on her features. She lifts her foot to slip her undergarments past her ankle, then uses the opportunity to plant her heel on Prospera’s chin and push her head back down. The only reason Notrette doesn’t continue to step on the woman is because she has to lean forward, positioning her hips directly above Prospera’s face.

There is, strangely, no triumph gleaming in her eyes, only a remote interest, an avian curiosity. “You’re welcome to try and suffocate me by hacking the station’s life support, but I think I can suffocate you first.” She slowly descends to her knees, bracing them on each side of Prospera’s head. Her thighs are soft, her vulva slick. “Like I said — if you want to live, swallow.”

In this, as in all things, Prospera applies herself with precision.

She can only move her tongue at first, her lips, her jaw — tools enough, for someone who knows what she is doing. There is the pride of a job well done, of course: even robbed of her mobility, she can make a woman like Notrette Rembran gasp and quiver with a nibble and a lick. The power Prospera can wield with the tip of her tongue is almost its own reward.

But Prospera needs her to be wet. The scientist wasn’t lying when she said her bodily fluids contained the antidote. Notrette’s spit, her sweat, her cum — Prospera must drink down as much as she can, if she is to escape this gambit alive.

And how Notrette provides. Prospera drinks her fill, and then some more, and then more again, like a woman dying of thirst. Notrette even assists, after a fashion: her long fingers run through Prospera’s hair and clench, jerking the woman’s head up and holding it precisely where she intends; she shifts back and forth, grinding along chin and lips and nose.

Notrette is nothing if not honest, and her body’s secretions nothing if not fast-acting. But Prospera plays the invalid for longer than she needs, only giving exploratory twitches of her fingers and toes. She waits for full motor control to return; the scientist has her head thrown back, her mouth open and panting, when Prospera grips her hips as leverage. Notrette starts and might have reacted in time, if she properly anticipated Prospera’s strength and speed.

In a moment their positions are reversed, Notrette on the floor, her wrists pinned above her and quickly bound in the sleeves of her blouse. Prospera will never have the perfect constitution of her thirties again, but she’s still heavier, stronger, more experienced in hand to hand. She begins tearing up the woman’s skirt, using a free hand and her teeth: a satisfying rip when she succeeds. It’s good fabric, this skirt, no doubt manufactured by one of Benerit’s subsidiaries — such a business empire does everything in-house, from agriculture to infrastructure to education. A factory of death has a long pipeline, and countless cogs working its machines, all the better for each individual to absolve themself. Why would one feel guilt for merely maintaining the janitorial bots? Why feel a pinch of horror when all you’re doing is taking a paycheck to teach a music class to scions of the rich, or when you’re just stacking papers or negotiating bureaucratic permits? To work for Benerit Group is not a last resort; it is aspirational.

Notrette Rembran stares up at her, lips open, tongue licking across. Restrained and pinned in place, near-naked, she looks different now: no longer so cold, so in control. Nor so elegant, with her thighs soaked with her own lubrication. Her mouth turns down into a moue. “I haven’t come yet, Lady Prospera.”

“You should’ve searched me for weapons.” Prospera lowers herself, closing her hand around that fine throat. The prosthetic can crush the entire structure in an instant. There’s a little hum as she clenches the fingers. “Personally, I’d have detached my arm.”

“Ah, a state-of-the-art prosthesis. The GUND format, isn’t that right? You should put knives inside it, or incorporate a gun. But really,” she goes on, voice airy, “I don’t think you have what it takes to kill.”

“And what makes you think that, Notrette Rembran?”

“Because,” Notrette purrs, “my husband is still alive. The man who took your family continues to breathe. What else can it mean, save cowardice on your part?”

Her hand moves almost before she thinks. She slows its arc and its force by sheer will: her nails clip Notrette in the mouth and little more. Blood blooms. With effort, she masters herself. “If he’s dead, how is he going to appreciate the fact that I’m fucking his wife?”

Notrette grins, and then Prospera kisses her, sucking into her mouth that swollen lip, drawing from it yet one more dose of the antidote; best to be sure, after all. While she keeps the woman’s mouth busy, she wraps a strip of skirt around Notrette’s head, knotting it tightly into a makeshift blindfold.

She collects her helmet and, with a hard yank, brings Notrette to her feet. A quick look, then she starts half-guiding, half-dragging the woman off the patio and into the residence.

“What are you going to do with me?” Notrette asks, breathy.

Prospera tightens her hold. “Everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

The bedroom is unlike the greenhouse’s gold illumination, its transient rainbows: here it is cool twilight, the end of a flawless day, where work is done and all tools set aside. Notrette’s bed itself is plush and large, yet something about it resembles no marital bed — everything is meant for one, a single nightstand, an arrangement of solitude. This is a woman who prizes her time apart, for whom marriage is not companionship but a ruthless transaction. Prospera doesn’t waste time speculating whether it’s ever been consummated: of course not. For a geneticist of Notrette’s ability, producing an heir for Benerit hardly requires such.

For a time she holds Notrette in her grip, listening to the woman breathe, feeling the drum of her pulse in the neck. A fluttering bird, captured, though not without talons. Exquisite in her nudity, and eager to see what is in store for her.

Then Prospera throws the woman on the bed; the act rewards her with a sharp, surprised noise.

“The nightstand,” Notrette whispers. “Middle drawer.”

Intrigued, Prospera opens the drawer in question. In it, a case; inside that, resting in a neat slot, is a contraption whose purpose is easy enough to recognize.

The entire time, she has not removed any of her clothing, and it pleases her to continue this way. When she touches a certain part of the device, it comes to life, and her implants inform her that it’s establishing a connection to her permet system. In this regard she is impossible to fool or trap, and she ensures the device is what it seems, not yet another attack vector, another version of Notrette’s venom.

She secures it to her hips, over her trousers. It tightens in place: good, ergonomic design. It’s tempting to leave Notrette this way, bound and unsatisfied, a little humiliated. A petty thought; besides, why forfeit the chance to master this woman? Onto the bed, then, a short climb that indents the mattress — Notrette twitches, expectant. Prospera runs her hand up one calf, hooking a finger behind one knee, thinking again how delicate these structures truly are. The urge, always, to test the durability of each joint.

She takes her time, circling her fingers around an ankle, stroking each jut and dip of bone. Cupping a hip, palming a thigh, grazing her nails across tender flesh. Her partner is reactive, a knee jerking to this touch, breath hitching when Prospera’s thumb circles close and nearly touches her clitoris. A body of need, reduced to it, defined by it.

“Are you going to make me beg?”

Prospera takes the woman’s chin in her hand, tilting it up, stroking the cords of Notrette’s throat. “Not yet.”

The grip she puts on Notrette’s thigh is hard, bruising. The force with which she thrusts into Notrette is harder still.

A whimper, a gasp; something between pain and appetite finally fulfilled. On her part Prospera feels, too, conveyed through the length of the device, its finely tuned receptors that feed into her nervous system. The slickness of Notrette, delirium-hot; the way her cunt grips. Near-zero latency in the sensations, and high fidelity, even if she doesn’t necessarily have a prior flesh experience to compare it to. Notrette arches as she plunges deep, slim legs curling, her cries louder and faster.

Prospera stops. Her hand around Notrette’s throat, she whispers, “Beg.”

“Please.” Notrette’s hands claw at nothing, bound as they are, scrabbling uselessly against the headboard. “Let me — ”

She could drag it out, but she too is on the cusp; why delay her own satisfaction? A few more decisive thrusts, the friction urgent now, and Notrette bucks under her. Her own moment arrives not much later: it is superb, and it is obliterating.

Later she lies on her side, in a bed whose sheets have absorbed the smell of their owner, flowers and soil. It is far from unpleasant. Prospera tries to scent out the poison, but it is absent, or simply odorless. Any human tasked with laundering these sheets might well not survive; distantly she wonders if Notrette does her own laundry. She seems the type, hands-on with everything. Then Prospera wonders too how many people she’s disappeared with that venom. Inconvenient scientists. Workers who try to sell out the secrets of Quiet Zero. The woman is capable of anything, and in that she has found at last a mirror image.

She puts her helmet back on, checking her clothes, her own body. The poison left no mark, and her partner’s nails never had any chance of reaching her — she is unblemished. On Notrette there will be lasting bruises, and other marks besides, but she seems unconcerned about her husband spotting them. A thumbprint on her throat, left there by the prosthetic hand; there is, of course, no fingerprint. But outside of that, there’s plenty of incriminating forensic evidence. Prospera’s genetic material is all over the place.

“I can do better,” Prospera says, suddenly.

“Than me?” This is more teasing than genuinely insulted.

“Than this.” She pats the strap-on that she’s set to the side. “A fine piece of engineering, but there’s plenty of room for improvement.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” Notrette’s voice is languorous, all post-coital gratification. “I notice that you haven’t murdered me yet.”

“Would you like me to?”

“No.” She still sounds amused; the bonds have come loose, and now Notrette slides off her blindfold. “You see, I have a daughter. I’d prefer to see her again.”

Prospera shifts; the sheets slide away from her. “And not your husband, I see.” She has not closely tracked the marriage: Notrette is a private person, not present in the day-to-day administration of Benerit, secreted away like a hothouse rose. Whether they wedded for love, or because Delling Rembran offered resources to which Notrette wanted access, she has not been able to find out. That a daughter exists is semi-public knowledge: the child has to be schooled somehow, and even private tutors tattle and rumor-monger. What a different existence, to be pampered in the most prosperous front, compared to a life on unforgiving Mercury with no friends, no other children for company.

“He’s a busy man and, unlike a little girl, can fend for himself. It’s a marriage of convenience,” she adds, as simply as if she’s just disclosed the thread count of her sheets. “That doesn’t mean it’s terrible, though. But you must think him the solar system’s most irredeemable brute. Nor are you wrong, and I’m complicit.”

“You sound as if you’ve been rehearsing this. Rather defensive,” Prospera adds, allowing herself to sound just as easy, as amused, as if the two of them are sharing gossip: nothing of consequence.

“Because, again, I have an idea of who you are. He is not aware.” Notrette turns onto her back, stretching a little, feline. Her mouth is smeared with her own blood and Prospera’s lipstick. “I met Dr. Cardo Nabo once, at an academic conference.”

She’s trained herself to not react: to remain, at all times, a fine and seamless thing. And so she says nothing now, does not so much as twitch.

“A visionary,” Notrette goes on, “and very charismatic, wasn’t she? She could make you feel like her obsession was your obsession, that her cause was your cause, that the GUND format was the prophecy for humanity’s next step. It is almost apotheotic. The doctor would have been the midwife to a new age.”

Despite all that, she stiffens. The woman will not feel it: they’re not skin to skin. Prospera feels, acutely, that she’s been put at a disadvantage once more. “I assure you that you know nothing about the GUND format.”

“I know as much as anyone not part of Vanadis does. In fact, I believe it is crucial to my project. We could — ” And this is said almost as a purr, sultry. “ — mutually benefit.”

Prospera’s mouth twists. She briefly imagines that Notrette has poisoned her husband a few times. The idea brings her fleeting satisfaction. “I thought we were already mutually satisfying one another.”

“You do have a sense of humor!” Laughter comes easily to this woman — it is unrestrained, no effort to muzzle it with decorum, with refinement. The femme fatale act dissolves beneath it, or perhaps is part and parcel with it. “But I can be your benefactor. Quiet Zero, in its present shape, is a proof of concept — a paper tiger. With GUND, it’d gain the breath and ferocity it requires to declare its intent to the world. In the meantime, Shin Sei Development has little to its name, as I understand it. That can change.”

The poison was, then, a test. “You must think me so easily bought.” Now she takes Notrette’s wrist, turning it in her palm, feeling its narrowness. The illumination has further dimmed. In it, an outline of the woman can be seen, the suggestion of small breasts, the silhouette of a hip. “What are you doing all of this for?”

“To create a future in which my daughter will be safe.”

And it is that which catches her by surprise, which strikes deep; it could well be simple manipulation — how much does this woman know about her? Is she aware? But it’s spoken with sincerity, and from a basal place. This more than anything forms the core of motivation, and briefly Prospera wonders what Notrette would look or sound like, if she were to lose her daughter. How grief would shape her, change her. Whether it’d be a crucible from which she would emerge the stronger, or whether it’d be a fatal wound.

An act of vengeance, or a path toward tomorrow.

Prospera tightens her grip, her thumb hard on the woman’s drumming pulse. There’s life in them both, for now, and children who depend on them. Not yet the time for the torch, the time for the pyre. “To the future, then. To a world without war.”

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy our forthcoming novel The Hades Calculus, pitched as Witch from Mercury meet Greek mythology. The Master of the Underworld, Hades, needs a pilot for her war machine… and she might have just found one in the killer cyborg Persephone.