‘You’re real,’ she mutters in between. ‘Oh, you’re real.’
And now her hands are moving over me, fingers tangling in the fastenings of my jacket, rubbing at my rapidly swelling crotch, gripping my face at the jaw. She seems unable to decide what to do with the body she’s touching, and slowly the realisation soaks through me that as she slides irretrievably into the crevasse of her orgasm, she’s testing the assertion coming faster and faster across her lips you’re real, you’re real, you’re fucking real, aren’t you, you’re real, oh, you’re real, yes, you fucker, yes, yes, you’re real you’re fucking real—
Her voice locks up in her throat with her breath, and her stomach flexes her almost double with the force of the climax. She twines around me like the long lethal ribbons of belaweed out beyond Hirata’s reef, thighs clenched on my hand, body folded onto and over my chest and shoulder. From somewhere I know she’s staring off that shoulder at the shadows on the far side of the bubblefab.
‘My name is Nadia Makita,’ she says quietly.
And again, it’s like current through my bones. Like the moment she grabbed my arm, the shock of the name. The litany kicks off in my head. It’s not possible it’s not—
I ease her loose from my shoulder, pull her back and the motion dislodges a fresh wave of pheromones. Our faces are a couple of centimetres apart.
‘Micky,’ I mutter. ‘Serendipity.’
Her head darts forward like a bird’s and her mouth fastens on mine, shutting off the words. Her tongue is hot and feverish, and her hands are working at my clothes again, this time with determined purpose. I struggle out of my jacket, unfasten the heavy canvasynth trousers and her hand is burrowing in the gap as they open. Weeks in the Uncleared with barely the privacy to masturbate, a body kept on ice for centuries, it’s all I can do to keep from coming as her hand closes around the shaft of my cock. She feels it and grins in the kiss, lips unsticking from mine, the faintest scrape of teeth on teeth and the grate of a chuckle deep in her throat. She kneels upright on the sleeping bag, balancing with one arm on my shoulder while the other stays between my legs, working. Her fingers are long and slim and hot and clammy with sweat, curling into a practised grip and pumping gently up and down. I force the trousers down past my hips and lean backward to give her space. The ball of her thumb rubs back and forth against my glans like a metronome. I groan my lungs empty and instantly she slackens the pace almost to a halt. She presses her free hand flat on my chest, pushes me towards the floor while her grip on my hard-on tightens almost to crushing. Coiled muscle in my stomach keeps me flexed upright from the floor against the pressure she’s exerting and damps down the pulsing need to come.
‘Do you want to be inside me?’ she asks seriously.
I shake my head. ‘Whatever, Sylvie. Whatever—’
A hard tug on the root of my cock. ‘My name is not Sylvie.’
‘Nadia. Whatever.’ I grasp her by one curved arse cheek, one long hard thigh and drag her forward onto me. She takes the hand from my chest, reaches down and spreads herself, then sinks slowly onto my cock. Our gasps blend at the contact. I search inside myself somewhere for a little Envoy control, settle my hands at her hips and help her lift herself up and down. But this isn’t going to last long. She reaches for my head and draws it down to one swollen breast, presses my face into the flesh and guides me to the nipple. I suck it in and grip the other breast in one hand while she rises on her knees and rides us both to a climax that dims out my vision as it explodes through us.
We collapse onto each other in the dimly-lit bubblefab, slick with sweat and shuddering. The heater throws a reddish glow across our tangled limbs and tight pressed bodies and there’s a tiny sound in the gloom that could be this woman weeping or maybe just the wind outside, trying to find a way in.
I don’t want to look her in the face to find out which.
In the bowels of the steadily thrumming Daikoku Dawn, we levered ourselves up from the crawlspace into a corridor and made our dripping way to S37. As promised, the door flexed open at a push. Inside, lights sprang up in an unexpectedly luxurious space. I’d subconsciously been preparing myself for something along the lines of the spartan two-bunk accommodation we’d had on the Guns for Guevara, but Oishii had done us proud. The cabin was a well-appointed comfort class with an autoform bed space that could be programmed to swell up as twin singles or a broad double. The fixtures showed wear but a faint smell of mothball antibacterials clung to the air and made everything seem pristine.
‘Vvvery nice,’ I chattered as I closed the door on lock. ‘Well done, Oishii. I appprove.’
En-suite facilities were almost the size of another single cabin themselves, complete with airblast drier in the shower cabinet. We peeled naked and dumped our soaked clothing, then took turns rinsing the chill out of our bones first under a pummelling hail of hot water, then in a gently buffeting storm of warm air. It took a while, one at a time, but there was no hint of invitation in Sylvie’s face as she stepped into the cabinet and so I stayed outside rubbing at my chilled flesh. At one point, watching her as she turned with water streaming down over her breasts and belly, trickling between her legs and tugging at a tiny tuft of drenched pubic hair, I felt myself beginning to harden. I moved quickly to pick up the jacket from my stealth suit and sat awkwardly with it covering my erection. The woman in the shower caught the movement and looked at me curiously, but she said nothing. No reason why she should. Last time I’d seen Nadia Makita, she’d been slipping into a post-coital drowse in a bubblefab out on the New Hok plains. Small, confident smile on her lips, one arm wrapped loosely around my thigh. When I finally pulled loose, she only turned over in the sleeping bag and muttered to herself.
She hadn’t been back since.
And meanwhile you dressed and tidied up before the others got back, like a criminal trying to cover his tracks.
Met Orr’s suspicious gaze with even Envoy deceit.
Slipped away with Lazlo to your own ’fab, to lie awake until dawn, disbelieving what you’d seen and heard and done.
Finally, Sylvie stepped out of the cabinet airblasted all but dry. With an effort I stopped myself staring at the suddenly sexualised landscape of her body and went to change places with her. She said nothing, just touched me on one shoulder with a loosely curled fist and frowned. Then she disappeared into the cabin next door.
I stayed under the shower for nearly an hour, turning back and forth in water just below scalding, masturbating vaguely and trying not to think too much about what I was going to have to do when we got to Tekitomura. The Daikoku Dawn throbbed around me as she ploughed southward. When I got out of the shower, I dumped our soaked clothing in the cabinet and left the airblast on full, then wandered through to the cabin. Sylvie was sleeping soundly beneath the coverlet of a bedspace she’d programmed to mould as a double.
I stood and watched her sleep for a long time. Her mouth was open and her hair was in chaotic disarray around her face. The ebony central cord had twisted so that it lay phallically across one cheek. Imagery I didn’t need. I smoothed it back with the rest of the hair until her face was clear. She muttered in her sleep and moved the same loosely curled fist she’d punched me with up to touch her mouth. I stood and watched her some more.