‘Get ttto the stttern and tttread water between the dock and the hull. You’ll sssee the launchers. Dddddon’t dddrink the water, eh.’
We traded clenched grins and kicked off.
It was hard work, swimming against a body reflex that wanted nothing more than to curl up tight against the cold and shudder. Before we’d gone halfway, Sylvie was falling behind and we had to go back for her. Her breath was coming in harsh bursts, her teeth were gritted and her eyes were starting to roll.
‘Cccan’t hold it tttogether,’ she muttered as I turned in the water and Lazlo helped haul her onto my chest. ‘Dddon’ttt tell me we’re whu-whu-wwinning, whu-winning fffucking wh-what?’
‘Be okay,’ I managed through my own clamped jaws. ‘Hold on. Las, you keep going.’
He nodded convulsively and flailed off. I struck out after him, awkward with the burden on my chest.
‘Is there no other fucking choice?’ she moaned, barely above a whisper.
Somehow I got us both to the rising bulk of the Daikoku Dawn’s stern where Lazlo was waiting. We paddled round into the crevice of water between the ’loader’s hull and the dock and I slapped a hand against the evercrete wall to steady myself.
‘Llless thththan a mmminute,’ said Lazlo, presumably from reference to a retinal time display. ‘Lllet’s hope Oishii’ssss ppplugged well in.’
The hoverloader awoke. First the deep thrum as the antigrav system shifted from buoyancy to drive, then the shrill whining of the air intakes and the frrr-frump along the hull as the skirts filled. I felt the sideways tug of water swirling around the vessel. Spray exploded from the stern and showered me. Lazlo offered me one more wide-eyed grin and pointed.
‘Up there,’ he yelled over the engine noise.
I followed the direction of his arm and saw a battery of three circular vents, hatches sliding out of the way in spiral petals. Maintenance lights showed inside the chutes, a chainlink inspection ladder up the loader’s skirt to the lip of the first opening.
The note of the engines deepened, settling down.
Lazlo went first, up the rungs of the ladder and onto the scant, down-curving ledge offered by the top of the skirt. Braced against the hull above, he gestured down at me. I shoved Sylvie towards the ladder, yelled in her ear to climb and saw with relief that she wasn’t too far gone to do it. Lazlo grabbed her as soon as she got to the top and after some manoeuvring the two of them disappeared inside the shaft. I went up the ladder as fast as my numbed hands would pull me, ducked inside the chute and out of the noise.
A couple of metres above me, I saw Sylvie and Lazlo, limbs splayed between protrusions on the inside of the launch tube. I remembered the wincefish’s casual boast the first time I met him – a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it. It was a relief to see that, like a lot of Lazlo’s talk, this had been an exaggeration. The tube was far from polished smooth, and there were numerous handholds built into the metal. I gripped experimentally at a scooped-out rung over my head and found I could haul myself up the incline without too much effort. Higher up. I found smoothly rounded bumps in the metal where my feet could take some of my body’s weight. I rested against the faintly shuddering surface of the tube for a moment, recalled Oishii’s five-minute maximum and got moving again.
At the top of the chute, I found a bedraggled Sylvie and Lazlo braced on a finger-thin rim below an open hatchway filled with sagging orange canvasynth. The wincefish gave me a weary look.
‘This is it.’ He thumped the yielding surface above his head. ‘This is the bottom-level raft. First to drop. You squeeze in here, get on top of the raft and you’ll find an inspection hatch that leads to the crawlspace between levels. Just pop the nearest access panel and you’re out in a corridor somewhere. Sylvie, you’d better go first.’
We worked the canvasynth raft back from one edge of the hatchway and warm, stale air gusted through into the chute. I laughed with sheer involuntary pleasure at the feel of it. Lazlo nodded sourly.
‘Yeah, enjoy. Some of us are going back in the fucking water now.’
Sylvie squeezed through and I was about to follow, when the wincefish tugged at my arm. I turned back. He hesitated.
‘Las? Come on, man, we’re running out of time.’
‘You.’ He lifted a warning finger. ‘I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her. You keep her safe ’til we can get to you. ’til she’s back on-line.’
‘Alright.’
‘I’m trusting you,’ he repeated.
Then he turned, unlatched his hold on the hatch and was sliding rapidly down the curve of the launcher chute. As he disappeared at the bottom, I heard a faint whoop come floating back up.
I stared after him for what seemed like far too long, then turned and forced my way irritably through the canvasynth barrier between myself and my newly acquired responsibilities.
The memory rolled back over me.
In the bubblefab—
‘You. Help me. Help me!’
Her eyes pin me. Muscles of her face taut with desperation, mouth slightly open. It’s a sight that sends a deep and unlooked-for sense of arousal bubbling through my guts. She’s thrown back the sleeping bag and leaned across to grab at me, and in the low light from the muffled illuminum lamp, under the reaching arm, I can see the slumped mounds her breasts make across her chest. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen her like this – the Slipins don’t suffer from coyness and after a month of close quarters camping across the Uncleared, I could probably draw most of them naked from memory – but something about Sylvie’s face and posture is suddenly deeply sexual.
‘Touch me.’ The voice that is not hers rasps and prickles the hairs on my neck erect. ‘Tell me you’re fucking real.’
‘Sylvie, you’re not—’
Her hand shifts, from my arm to my face.
‘I think I know you,’ she says wonderingly. ‘Black Brigade elect, right. Tetsu battalion. Odisej? Ogawa?’
The Japanese she’s using is archaic, centuries out of date. I fight down the ghost of a shiver and stay in Amanglic. ‘Sylvie, listen to me—’
‘Your name’s Silivi?’ Face racked with doubt. She shifts languages to meet me. ‘I don’t remember, I, it’s, I can’t—’
‘Sylvie.’
‘Yeah, Silivi.’
‘No,’ I say through lips that feel numb. ‘Your name’s Sylvie.’
‘No.’ There’s a sudden panic in her now. ‘My name’s. My name’s. They call me, they called me, they—’
Her voice stops up and her eyes flinch sideways, away from mine. She tries to get up out of the sleeping bag. Her elbow skids on the slick material of the lining and she slips over towards me. I put out my arms and they’re suddenly full of her warm, tightly muscled torso. The fist I snapped closed when she spoke opens involuntarily and the cortical stacks crushed inside it spill onto the floor. My palms press against taut flesh. Her hair moves and brushes at my neck and I can smell her, warmth and female sweat welling up out of the opened sleeping bag. Something trips again in the pit of my stomach, and maybe she can feel it too because she makes a low moaning sound into the flesh of my throat. Lower down in the confines of the bag, her legs shift around impatiently and then part for my hand as it slides down over one hip and between her thighs. I’m stroking her cunt before I realise what I’m doing, and she’s damp to the touch.
‘Yes.’ It gusts out of her. ‘Yes, that. There.’
This time when her legs shift, her whole body tilts from the hips upward and her thighs spread as wide as the sleeping bag will allow. My fingers slip into her and she makes a tight hissing noise, pulls back from the clasp on my neck and glares at me as if I’ve just stabbed her. Her fingers hook into my shoulder and upper arm. I rub long, slow ovals up inside her and feel her hips pump in protest at the deliberate pace of the motion. Her breath starts to come in shortening bursts.