Mercury Rising - Sex Stories

Mercury Rising

Mercury once resembled our Moon, atmosphere-free and heavily cratered. Now, a thickening orange fog shields it from the dazzling daytime sun and insulates it during the freezing night. The peelers create immense plumes of dust behind them, which, over the seven Earth years of their operation, have completely changed the planet's appearance. Mercury's gravity is so insignificant, it will take centuries for the dust to settle. Meanwhile, the searing solar wind is stripping particles away, casting them into space to form a tail, in much the same way as a comet has a tail. After what we have done to Earth, I should be used to such systematic destruction, but no: I found myself constantly shocked by it. Earth is, after all, our planet; ours to fuck up as we please. Mercury, on the other hand, is not. God only knows what we are doing there. It is an unnatural, obscene desecration on a cosmic scale. * 'In this session, the final video footage from the doomed station will be shown to the court. Beforehand, and as per standard procedure, Counsel for the Claimant will make their opening submissions. Counsel for the Defence will have an opportunity to make a statement at its conclusion. Members of the jury have each been provided with a copy of the transcript which also contains a detailed description of the crew's actions during these final moments. For the benefit of the Claimant, whose sight was irrevocably damaged due to the alleged negligence of the Defendant, the transcript ...

... will be read aloud. Please be aware that some of the following scenes are harrowing and may cause considerable distress.' 'My Lord, my Learned Friends, members of the court. It is the Claimant's case that, on the forty-third day of the year thirty-two twenty-three, my client was critically injured and severely psychologically damaged by events entirely beyond her control. She watched her colleague die, believed herself to be in mortal danger, though miraculously survived. 'Mercury, as any schoolgirl knows, is a dense metallic planet. Closest to the Sun, it has an orbital period - a Mercurial year - of around 88 Earth days, and a rotation - a Mercurial day - that equals approximately 58 Earth days. Temperature variations are vast, from minus 170 Celsius during the extended night, to plus 430 degrees during the long daytime. As you can imagine, it is a hellish place. Were it not for the vast mineral resources the planet offers us, no one would ever have set foot upon it. 'The optimal thermal conditions required for the mining machines' operation exist exclusively at the terminator - the line separating day and night - which progresses westwards at a rate of some three metres per second. Hence, the machines - known as peelers for how they scrape away the surface - must maintain this speed to remain within their operating limits. Outside this narrow zone, the temperature is either too high or too low for the machines to remain commercially viable. The monitoring station remains in ...