Home Ch. 02

2

Ravi loped along, humming a happy little tune and smiled to himself, still buzzing with feel-good hormones from Sani's little treat this morning. Each long, bounding stride carried him almost five meters before the weak gravity of the asteroid pulled him back to the crumbling surface. This part of the asteroid was a mix of dusty regolith with a leavening of rocky chunks scattered through it, bound together by small amounts of water ice. So at each step the surface gave way under Ravi's boots, absorbing much of the force he was exerting. It was almost like running through dunes at the beach, only the gravity was one fiftieth that of Duniya.

The inside of Ravi's helmet was crowded with holodisplays; there was no room for things as mundane as air supply and suit temperature - the VI on Tarak station was monitoring those things anyway - instead the displays crawled with feeds from several of the drone teams. Sani must have made some adjustments to the work plans for some teams, because Ravi saw that units from K and I were re-deploying to new ground a little bit to polar north of their previous sites. A couple of the I team units had fallen behind the rest of the group and as Ravi watched, their symbols both switched to hash marks, indicating that they were stopped and that the automated routines to free themselves had failed.

Still humming happily, Ravi took the data in, glancing over at his current priority list. The list was topped by checking on a stopped rare earth harvester that was sifting through piles of regolith left by the I and K drones in their previous work sector. The rare earth harvesters were always a high priority because the materials that they gathered were extremely valuable for the electronics industry back home; factories operated by the Aishywiar caste in particular required large quantities of the materials to produce the advanced processors that controlled and integrated the Elephant Battalions - regiments of the massive armored machines were vital tools in the increasingly-frequent confrontations with the Lesser States.

In this case, Ravi would pass almost right by the drones on his way to the harvester. Without hesitation, he added the two I team drones to the top of the priority list; he would check on them on his way to the harvester. Sani would probably have passed by the two stuck drones and gotten back to them later, that was the way she generally worked. But Ravi was always a little quicker to readjust his priorities; as long as he was fast with getting the drones freed, he would still have the rare earth harvester back online faster than Sani anyway.

Shifting his loping strides slightly away from his previous course, Ravi almost covered the distance to the stuck drones in just a few dozen hops. As he topped a small rise, the dusty red and yellow heat shields of the two drones hove into view; four long strides later, Ravi was within a few meters of the nearer of the pair. Ravi dug his heels into the regolith, braking himself almost to a stop, then hopped over to the drone. Most of the displays on his helmet automatically cleared as he reached the machine and a narrow stip of data began to stream near the top of his field of vision, relaying the current status of the machine.

The I team drones scraped up regolith as they moved about the surface of the asteroid, quickly separating water ice and frozen gases into a pair of fiber hoppers that trailed along behind the unit as it moved about and dropping small piles of other solids in a trail for other units to prospect. Periodically a floating depot drone would pass nearby, connecting a flex tube receiver to the hopper and vacuuming the contents out to to be sorted and processed into usable gases and liquids. By default, the drones always continued scooping and processing material, even when they were issued instructions to move to a new work sector. Somehow these two machines had become stuck and unable to free themselves.

A cursory glance at the drone's data feed showed Ravi that the the unit's fuel cells were in good shape and the electric drive motor was fine. He ran his hands over the brightly-colored heat shield, walking around the drone and visually inspecting it's crawler treads; there was no sign of any problem with them. Finally, Ravi got on his hands and knees and peered under the front of the drone to inspect the scoop and scrapers that broke up the regolith and pushed it into the drone for processing, immediately spotting the problem.

Like the majority of the drones on Chilae the I team units were built mostly of hardened fiber components on a light aluminum frame. The scoop had a narrow lip of metal lining to add a little hardness to its leading edge; anything that couldn't be broken or fractured so that it would smoothly flow into the flexible scoop would push the it up and then let it back down after the obstruction was past. But in this case, the scoop had run into something that sliced straight through it's metal edge and continued into the hardened fiber body, until the increasing resistance of the flexible scoop against the offending material finally brought the drone to a halt. Automatic attempts to back off the obstruction had failed because the object was stuck fast in the body of the scoop; finally the drone had gone into standby and called for help.

Ravi's happy humming turned into muttered curses as he shined his helmet light underneath the drone, try to get a better look at whatever it was that had cut into the scoop. The poor angle and swirling dust made it hard to see, but the obstruction appeared to be dull and non-reflective but still vaguely metallic. From his knowledge of Chilae's formation, composition and history, Ravi knew that sharp edges were an extreme rarity on the asteroid. On Likal, the other asteroid being mined above Manigal, the rockier, more metallic composition made sharp points and edges much more common; but Likal had formed in an entirely different era and much deeper in the system, where the heavier materials aggregated. But "rare" didn't mean "none", as the stuck drone proved, so Ravi quickly shifted to thinking about how to free the machine.

Within a few moments he devised a plan to detach and drag away the mostly-empty fiber hopper that was attached to the drone, slightly reducing resistance that the unit's crawler drive would have to overcome to back off of the obstruction. Once the hopper was disconnected and dragged a few meters away, Ravi took position at the front of the drone and issued a verbal command; "Unit I147 engage drive, maximum reverse, ten seconds". The drones' crawler tread immediately engaged in reverse, kicking up dust and debris and creating a heavy vibration that Ravi felt through his gloves as he reached under the heat shield and took a firm grip on an the aluminum frame.

Ravi pushed hard, his booted feet chopping at the ground to gain purchase, trying to generate leverage to get the drone moving. He breathed deeply, grunting and straining with every muscle and kept pushing and churning. When the drones' drive shut off after the prescribed ten seconds, Ravi rested briefly, breath puffing inside his helmet, then commanded the drone to reverse for twenty seconds more. This time he felt the drone slide back off the obstruction a little bit; after a brief rest and another twenty-second push the unit burst free and Ravi lifted his feet to keep from hitting the object as the drone rapidly rolled backwards until the drive shut down.

Chest heaving, Ravi shuffled back and bent to look at what the drone had gotten hung on. It was a dull black triangular protrusion, smooth on both sides and rising to a point. The point was what had sliced into the drones' feed scoop and brought it to a halt. Ravi cautiously ran a gloved finger along one edge of the triangle; it looked pretty sharp. After a moment, he began sweeping regolith away from the object, digging a small bowl out of the asteroid material around it. This exposed more of the object, but it was just the same dull black triangle, widening at what looked like a perfect sixty degrees and disappearing down into the surface of Chilae.

Determined to see more, Ravi kept digging around the object, finally coming to a halt after about ten minutes of steady scraping and pushing away regolith. He had exposed probably half a meter of the black triangle and there was no sign of it stopping or changing in any way. He paused for a moment, debating whether to call Sanira back at the 'hab module, then decided against it. If he knew Sani, she was probably almost done with her workout and headed for her sleep bag. Instead, he queued one of the survey drones to come and take a closer look at the site with low-frequency radar and a seismic sensor. He had seen some really strange things on the asteroid before that turned out to be nothing that unusual once more data was gathered; and he had that second drone to free and a long list of other tasks to complete.

On Tarak Station

Kava Shakuntala leaned back in his chair, watching intently as the latest reports scrolled quickly across the holographic screen floating above the broad expanse of his desk. Much of the information was relatively mundane, including tallies of the resources sent by the projects' mass impellers down-system to orbits close to that of Duniya, the home world, then collected and routed to feed the needs of the Sahakari Collective.

A couple personal messages were also in the stream, including friendly notes from a couple colleagues and a brief video message from his wife. Kava smiled briefly at the familiar face of his spouse, Vaasavadatta. She was ten years his junior and at age seventy still a very handsome woman. Vaasa chattered on about affairs in their household back home, filling him in on minor details of it's running and reminding him that his current absence from home was now over two years. Vaasa closed the brief message by letting him know that she had hired a new groundskeeper, younger brother to one of their daughter Sanira's university friends. From the tone of the message, and knowing his wife, Kava assumed that the young groundskeeper was tending to more than just the shrubs.

Chuckling a little to himself, Kava stopped the data stream and recorded a short reply message to his wife. Live communication back and forth from Tarak Station to Duniya was possible, but the delay of over twenty minutes between saying something and hearing a reply to it made it extremely awkward. It was a measure of her practicality that Vaasa limited herself to sending the recorded messages; she really was a very good wife.

Recalling his final week on Duniya before departing to take up the administration of the project, Kava concluded his message with "I miss you dearly my love, and look forward to returning to you and our home. Until then, please be certain to have your new groundskeeper re-plow the rear grounds behind the house, I worry that it has been untended since my departure. Goodbye." He closed and transmitted the message, grinning wickedly to himself as he took a moment to recall a pleasant memory.

After the huge party celebrating his impending departure for Tarak Station, Kava and and Vaasa had passed out in the pavilion erected for the party, along with over half the invited guests. In the pre-dawn stillness of the pavilion, Kava woke from his drunken slumber to find himself curled up behind Vaasa, with an inexplicably hard and painful morning erection pressing through his pants against the softness of his wife's ass. There were twenty or thirty people strewn about the pavilion nearby, sleeping off the raging party from the night before.

Kava moved his arm from where it lay around his wife, slowly letting his hand drift down her thigh, carefully gathering the silken cloth of her dress upwards with his fingers until the hem was in his grip. The he gently eased it up until the cloth was bunched at Vaasas' waist, exposing one long, smooth olive-skinned leg, a rounded hip and her bare ass pressed against the straining erection inside his trousers. Next Kava slipped his hand around to gently press against Vaasas' pussy, his fingers easily slipping through the well-trimmed thatch of silky hair that adorned it.

Vaasa began to wake as his fingers gently stroked back and forth across her snatch, one finger dipping between her pussy lips and emerging to moisten and tease her clitoris. She started to speak but Kava pressed his lips close to her ear and whispered "Shhhhhhhh.... take my cock out."

A low moan was her only reply at first, but then Kava slipped two fingers into her dripping pussy and firmly dragged them back out and over her clit, his other fingers tugging her labia wide so that he could press firmly down on the sensitive nub. Vaasa gasped, then reached back between them and fumbled with the sealstrip closure of his pants, finally opening them up and freeing his penis. It pressed hard against Vaasas' ass, hotter and harder than she had felt it in years.

Kava's next whisper was so low and hoarse that it was barely audible, even with his lips pressed close to her ear. "Spit on your fingers and rub your saliva all over my hard tool while I play with your pussy". Trembling and flushed all over, Vaasa obeyed, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and hoping that none of the sleeping guests around them woke.

Vaasa placed three fingers into her mouth, soaking them with nervous saliva that suddenly seemed to gush, just like the juices dripping from her pussy. While Kava stroked two fingers in and out of her pussy, she reached back between them and gently gripped the hard, veiny solidity of his tool, stroking up and down around the flushed head and smearing her spit all over it.

"That's right" he crooned in her ear "get it wet and slick". With that he sped up the movements of his hand, making her give out a barely-stifled gasp as a small orgasmic tremble teased through her body. "Put the head of my cock against your asshole, I am going to fuck you in your tight little shitter" Kava hissed.

Mixed feelings of anticipation, fear and naughtiness flooded her as Vaasa obediently gripped her husbands' hard member in her hand and pushed the swollen head down along the crack of her ass until the slick tip came to rest against the wrinkled star of her anus. She moaned very softly as Kava breathed in her ear "Push your asshole onto my cock", then added a third plunging finger to the pair stroking in and out of her tingling pussy.

Vaasa pressed backwards against the hot, hard spear positioned at her asshole, feeling the slick tip crowned by the slowly spreading ridges of her anus. Pleasure mixed with pain as Kava's stroking fingers plunged in and out of her sopping pussy, curling up to press against her clit, while the trembling head of his cock inched into her extremely tight asshole. When the stretched "O" of her anus had worked almost halfway down the shaft of Kavas' throbbing cock, Vaasa stopped pushing, paralyzed by the painful stretching of her ass and the tingling of an oncoming orgasm brought on by her husband's fingers.

Suddenly, Kava grunted deeply and drove his full length into the clenching tightness of her ass. Her face froze in a rictus of mingled pleasure and agony as a shattering orgasm broke from her hyper-sensitive clit up through the rest of her body. Somehow Vassa kept from crying out as Kava plunged his cock in and out of her ass in short, savage strokes while pressing slick fingers hard against the inflamed pink bud that was sending orgasm shockwaves up and down her spine.

Almost immediately, Kava began dumping spurt after heavy spurt of hot, thick semen into Vaasas' tender ass. He quickly filled every crevice of her tight hole with with slickness that began to ooze out around the root of his pistoning member. Sticky cum dripped out, forming a trail from the crack of her ass down a cheek and onto the carpeted floor of the pavilion. Kava made a last few desperate strokes through her slick anus, feeling one or two final weak jets of come well up through his cock and splash into the hot, damp interior of his wife's ass. Finally his orgasm ended and Kava was still, his breath panting raggedly in her ear.

The next day he began the journey to Tarak Station.

To be continued...