“That sounds like exactly what I’d like to do right now,” he said.
“Me too,” I agreed. “ ‘Ecstatic,’ she said. I could use some of that. How about you, darling?”
“ ‘I’m ready,’ ” he quoted simply.
The trip back to Top Step was as long as the trip out, but there was no further conversation along the way. When we got there we found that four could fit into that airlock at once if they didn’t mind squeezing. The route back to our quarters was one we had taken only once before, on the day of our arrival at Top Step—save that we bypassed Decontam. As we jaunted across the Great Hall, I felt again many of the same confused and confusing feelings I’d experienced on that first day, and hugged Robert tightly. He squeezed back.
Without any discussion, we all headed for my and Kirra’s room, and entered together. Pausing only to store our p-suits and dim the lights, we went to bed.
Actually, the euphemism is misleading: we didn’t use our sleepsacks. I did not want to be confined, needed to feel as free as a Stardancer, and it seemed Kirra did as well.
For over an hour I was almost completely unaware of Ben and Kirra, or anything else but Robert. We caromed off walls or furniture from time to time, but barely noticed that either. Then at some point the two drifting couples bumped into each other in the middle of the room, at a perpendicular so that we formed a cross. The small of my back was against Kirra’s; our sweat mingled. I sensed her flexing her legs and tightening her shoulders, and knew kinesthetically what she was going to do and matched it without thinking: we spun and flowed and traded places. Ben blinked and smiled and kissed me, and I kissed him back. The dance went on. Ben was sweet, bonier and hairier than Robert but just as tenderly attentive. Perhaps half an hour later, we all met again at the center of the universe and made a beast with four backs; awhile later I was back in Robert’s arms, and slept there until Teena told us it was time for dinner.
We ate together without awkwardness, talking little but making each other smile often. After the meal, Ben kissed me, Robert kissed Kirra, and Robert and I went off to my studio together, while Kirra and Ben headed for Le Puis. They were asleep in Kirra’s sleepsack when we got back: we slid into mine and were asleep almost at once.
Glenn was murdered the next day.
We had all been weaned from our umbilicals by that point, and were spending that class touring the exterior of Top Step. Most of the interesting stuff was down by the docking area. We were able to watch the docking of a Lunar robot freighter, carrying precious water from the ice mines. We should not have been able to: that freighter was not scheduled to arrive for another four hours, or Sulke would not have had us down there. Vessels are almost always punctual in space—the moment the initial acceleration shuts down, ETA can be predicted to the second. But while this can was on its way, the Lunar traffic control computer apparently detected a small pressure leak from the hold, and applied additional acceleration and deceleration to minimize transit time. Sulke was angry when the word came over the ops channel.
Oh, we were safe enough: we were at least half a kilometer from the docks. Sulke’s gripe was that the event constituted an unplanned distraction from our curriculum—but we were all so eager to watch the docking that, after consultation with Reb, she reluctantly conceded that it would be instructive, and suspended lessons until it was over. I was pleased, since events had prevented me from watching my own docking five weeks earlier.
Long before we could see the freighter itself, we saw the tongue of fire it stuck out at us as it decelerated. Then the torch shut off, and we could see a spherical-looking object the size of a pea held at arm’s length. It grew slowly to baseball size, then soccer ball, and by then it was recognizable as a cylinder seen end-on. It grew still larger, and began to visibly move relative to the stars behind it as it approached Top Step. Now it could be seen to be as large as the Symbiote mass I’d seen the day before, tiny in comparison to Top Step but huge in comparison with a human. From one side a thin plume of steam came spraying out of the hull to boil and fume in vacuum; on the opposite side you could just make out the less visible trail of the maneuvering jet that was balancing the pressure leak, keeping it from deforming the freighter’s course to one side.
The ship was coming in about twice as fast as normal. But that’s not very fast; dockings are usually glacial. Sulke had run out of educational things to point out long before the ship had approached close enough for final maneuvers. Since our first day EVA she’d generally kept us too busy to stargaze or chatter, but now we had time to rubberneck at the cosmos and ask questions.
“What’s that, Sulke?” Soon Li asked, pointing to a far distant object in a higher orbit than our own.
Sulke followed her pointing arm. “Oh. That’s Mir.”
“Oh.” Silence. Then: “I think someone ought to…I don’t know, tear it down or blow it up or something.”
“Would you want your grave disturbed?” Dmitri asked.
More silence.
“What are those people doing?” Dmitri wanted to know.
We looked where he was pointing, at the docking area itself. At first I saw nothing: those docks are huge, designed to accommodate earth-to-orbit vehicles, orbit-to-orbit barges or taxis, and Lunar shuttles like the one we were watching—as many as two of each at one time. But then I saw the two p-suited figures Dmitri meant, just emerging from a personnel lock between the two biggest docking collars.
“Those are wranglers,” Sulke said. “As soon as that bucket docks, they’ll hook up power feeds and refueling hoses and so on. If there’s a nesting problem, they’ve got enough thruster mass to do some shoehorning too.”
“What’s wrong with that star?” Glenn asked, pointing in the direction of the slowly approaching freighters. She happened to be closest of us to it.
“Which one?” Sulke replied.
“That big one, a little Three-ish of the ship.”
I spotted the one she meant. Indeed, there were three things odd about it. It was just slightly bigger than a star ought to be, and it was the only one in the Universe that was twinkling, the way stars appear to on Earth, and it had a little round black dot right smack in the center of it. That certainly was odd. It grew perceptibly as I watched; could it be a supernova? What luck, to happen to see one with the naked eye…
“Jesus Christ!” Sulke cried out. “Reb—”
“I see it,” he said calmly. “Everyone, listen carefully: I want you to follow me at maximum acceleration, right now.” He spun and blasted directly away from the docking freighter, all four thrusters flaring.
We wasted precious seconds reacting, and Sulke roared, “Run for your fucking lives!” That did it: we all took to our heels, slowly but with growing speed. I cannoned into someone and nearly tumbled, but managed to save myself and continue; so did the other.
“Operations—Mayday, Mayday!” Reb was saying. “Incoming ASAT, ETA five seconds. Wranglers—” He broke off. There was nothing to be said to the wranglers.
The antique antisatellite hunter-killer slammed into the freighter at that instant. There was no sound or concussion, of course. I caught reflected glare from the flash off Top Step in my peripheral vision, and tried to crane my neck around to look behind me, but I couldn’t do it and stay on course, so I gave up. I’m almost sorry about that; it must have been something to see.
The water-ship was torn apart by the blast, transformed instantly into an expanding sphere of incandescent plasma, shrapnel and boiling water. It killed Ronald Frayn and Sirikit Pibulsonggram, the two wranglers, instantly. A half-second later it killed a Third-Monther named Arthur Von Brandenstein who had been meditating around the other side of Top Step, and had come to watch the docking like us, but had approached closer than Sulke would let us.