"So that it decides we're rotary drills that need to be disassembled."
"Uh ... yeah."
CLANG.
"So what do we do when it gets in here?" They had both involuntarily risen to their feet, and stood facing the door. There was not much space, and what little there was they filled. Gunther was acutely aware that there was not enough room here to either fight or flee.
"I don't know about you," he said, "but I'm going to hit that sucker over the head with the toilet."
She turned to look at him.
CLA--The noise was cut in half by a breathy, whooshing explosion. Abrupt, total silence. "It's through the outer door," Gunther said flatly.
They waited.
Much later, Izmailova said, "Is it possible it's gone away?"
"I don't know." Gunther undogged his helmet, knelt and put an ear to the floor. The stone was almost painfully cold. "Maybe the explosion damaged it." He could hear the faint vibrations of the assemblers, the heavier rumblings of machines roving the factory floor. None of it sounded close. He silently counted to a hundred. Nothing. He counted to a hundred again.
Finally he straightened. "It's gone."
They both sat down. Izmailova took off her helmet, and Gunther clumsily began undoing his gloves. He fumbled at the latches. "Look at me." He laughed shakily. "I'm all thumbs. I can't even handle this, I'm so unnerved."
"Let me help you with that." Izmailova flipped up the latches, tugged at his glove. It came free. "Where's your other hand?"
Then, somehow, they were each removing the other's suit, tugging at the latches, undoing the seals. They began slowly but sped up with each latch undogged, until they were yanking and pulling with frantic haste. Gunther opened up the front of Izmailova's suit, revealing a red silk camisole. He slid his hands beneath it, and pushed the cloth up over her breasts. Her nipples were hard. He let her breasts fill his hands and squeezed.
Izmailova made a low, groaning sound in the back of her throat. She had Gunther's suit open. Now she pushed down his leggings and reached within to seize his cock. He was already erect. She tugged it out and impatiently shoved him down on the cot. Then she was kneeling on top of him, and guiding him inside her.
Her mouth met his, warm and moist.
Half in and half out of their suits, they made love. Gunther managed to struggle one arm free, and reached within Izmailova's suit to run a hand up her long back and over the back of her head. The short hairs of her buzz cut stung and tickled his palm.
She rode him roughly, her flesh slippery with sweat against his. "Are you coming yet?" she murmured. "Are you coming yet? Tell me when you're about to come." She bit his shoulder, the side of his neck, his chin, his lower lip. Her nails dug into his flesh.
"Now," he whispered. Possibly he only subvocalized it, and she caught it on her trance chip. But then she clutched him tighter than ever, as if she were trying to crack his ribs, and her whole body shuddered with orgasm. Then he came too, riding her passion down into spiraling desperation, ecstasy and release.
It was better than anything he had ever experienced before.
Afterward, they finally kicked free of their suits. They shoved and pushed the things off the cot. Gunther pulled the blanket out from beneath them, and with Izmailova's help wrapped it about the both of them. They lay together, relaxed, not speaking.
He listened to her breathe for a while. The noise was soft. When she turned her face toward him, he could feel it, a warm little tickle in the hollow of his throat. The smell of her permeated the room. This stranger beside him.
Gunther felt weary, warm, at ease. "How long have you been here?" he asked. "Not here in the shelter, I mean, but ..."
"Five days."
"That little." He smiled. "Welcome to the Moon, Ms. Izmailova."
"Ekatarina," she said sleepily. "Call me Ekatarina."
Whooping, they soared high and south, over Herschel. The Ptolemaeus road bent and doubled below them, winding out of sight, always returning. "This is great!" Hiro crowed. "This is--I should've talked you into taking me out here a year ago."
Gunther checked his bearings and throttled down, sinking eastward. The other two hoppers, slaved to his own, followed in tight formation. Two days had passed since the flare storm and Gunther, still on mandatory recoop, had promised to guide his friends into the highlands as soon as the surface advisory was dropped. "We're coming in now. Better triplecheck your safety harnesses. You doing okay back there, Kreesh?"
"I am quite comfortable, yes."
Then they were down on the Seething Bay Company landing pad.
Hiro was the second down and the first on the surface. He bounded about like a collie off its leash, chasing upslope and down, looking for new vantage points. "I can't believe I'm here! I work out this way every day, but you know what? This is the first time I've actually been out here. Physically, I mean."
"Watch your footing," Gunther warned. "This isn't like telepresence--if you break a leg, it'll be up to Krishna and me to carry you out."
"I trust you. Man, anybody who can get caught out in a flare storm, and end up nailing--"
"Hey, watch your language, okay?"
"Everybody's heard the story. I mean, we all thought you were dead, and then they found the two of you asleep. They'll be talking about it a hundred years from now." Hiro was practically choking on his laughter. "You're a legend!"
"Just give it a rest." To change the subject, Gunther said, "I can't believe you want to take a photo of this mess." The Seething Bay operation was a strip mine. Robot bulldozers scooped up the regolith and fed it to a processing plant that rested on enormous skids. They were after the thorium here, and the output was small enough that it could be transported to the breeder reactor by hopper. There was no need for a railgun and the tailings were piled in artificial mountains in the wake of the factory.
"Don't be ridiculous." Hiro swept an arm southward, toward Ptolemaeus. "There!" The crater wall caught the sun, while the lowest parts of the surrounding land were still in shadow. The gentle slopes seemed to tower; the crater itself was a cathedral, blazing white.
"Where is your camera?" Krishna asked.
"Don't need one. I'll just take the data down on my helmet."
"I'm not too clear on this mosaic project of yours," Gunther said. "Explain to me one more time how it's supposed to work."
"Anya came up with it. She's renting an assembler to cut hexagonal floor tiles in black, white and fourteen intermediate shades of grey. I provide the pictures. We choose the one we like best, scan it in black and white, screen for values of intensity, and then have the assembler lay the floor, one tile per pixel. It'll look great--come by tomorrow and see."
"Yeah, I'll do that."
Chattering like a squirrel, Hiro led them away from the edge of the mine. They bounded westward, across the slope.
Krishna's voice came over Gunther's trance chip. It was an old ground-rat trick. The chips had an effective transmission radius of fifteen yards--you could turn off the radio and talk chip-to-chip, if you were close enough. "You sound troubled, my friend."
He listened for a second carrier tone, heard nothing. Hiro was out of range. "It's Izmailova. I sort of--"
"Fell in love with her."
"How'd you know that?"
They were spaced out across the rising slope, Hiro in the lead. For a time neither spoke. There was a calm, confidential quality to that shared silence, like the anonymous stillness of the confessional. "Please don't take this wrong," Krishna said.