"No, not at all. I've known of some people who get so wound up the first time that they just freeze. That hardly happened to you, now did it? You'll learn how to make it good for both of us."

"So it wasn't good for you, then?"

She sighed. Even now his mind functioned like a 'ware chip. "This was your night, Fabian."

"But you let me do anything I wanted to you. Anything. You never stopped me."

"Was that so terrible? Didn't you like it?"

"God yes, you're so beautiful. It's brilliant enough just being able to look at you and touch you, but sex with you is like going to heaven."

She had to strain hard not to laugh. He really was cute.

"Sex is whatever you enjoy, providing it doesn't hurt your partner."

He raised himself on his elbows, looking down on her body with a sheepish awe. "Please, Charlotte, show me how to make you enjoy it. I want to thrill you, I want to make you as excited as I am, I want to be the greatest lover you've ever had. Please. Just show me how. Please, Charlotte."

Now how long had it been since she'd had a request like that? If ever. She grinned lazily, and stretched her arms above her head, arching her back. "Do you know what an erogenous zone is?"

"Course I know!"

She giggled. "Ah, but where are they?"

His indignation faltered.

Charlotte caught one of his hands; she gently kissed the tip of each finger, licking with feline provocation, then guided him across her abdomen.

CHAPTER SIX

Suzi was sunbathing on the balcony when she heard the piccolo hiss of the executive hypersonic's compressor fans. Darkness swept over her, accompanied by a wave of half-imaginary cold as the boiling afternoon sun was eclipsed by the little arrowhead plane.

Suzi opened her eyes and squinted up, but there was too much glare to make out the fuselage insignia. Andria sat up beside her, long hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she watched the hypersonic settle on the condominium's roof pad two storeys above them.

"I don't recognize it," the girl said.

Suzi turned on to her back, shuffling her shoulders until the lounger's cushioning was comfortable. "It's an Event Horizon Pegasus CV-1 88D," she mumbled with her eyes closed again. "Their latest marque."

Andria laughed. "No, Suse, I meant, I don't know who it belongs to. I don't think it belongs to any of the residents."

That laugh did things to Suzi's brain that could normally only be achieved by a hefty infusion of proscribed substances, it was carefree and warm, amazingly sultry. She lifted her head to look at the naked girl on the lounger beside her.

Andria was nineteen, her body lean and long limbed, dark wavy hair falling below her shoulders. She had a heart-shaped face with a flat nose, and wide ever-curious eyes that never seemed to stay focused on anything for more than a few seconds. The whole world was a constant delight to Andria, she had to try and see all of it at once. Then there was her shyness, which was a provocative aphrodisiac.

Her pregnancy didn't show yet. Six weeks after the private London clinic specializing in parthenogenetic reproduction had fertilized Suzi's ovum and planted it securely inside Andria, the girl's coffee-coloured belly was still flat and firm.

They had met in a New Eastfield nightclub last October, Suzi celebrating a finance sink deal with some of her team, Andria on a night out with her boyfriend.

It took Suzi three weeks to lure Andria into bed, shamelessly exploiting the girl's sunny, trusting nature. She hadn't pursued anyone with such determination since her Trinities days; it was like being drunk on raw lust. Their first night together was worth every agonizing second of the wait. She used Andria's body to work off fantasy after fantasy, only to find it just left her wanting more. It meant that for the first time in a long while Suzi had been forced to tell someone how much she felt about them.

Andria had moved in permanently at the start of December, though she insisted on keeping her datashuffling job in the office of a local shipping agent. It was that kind of quiet pride which was such a puzzle and fascination to Suzi. A girl who would surrender every inhibition to her at night, yet still refused to become a dependant. Andria was more than erotic satisfaction, she filled the soul's longing.

So in January, just before she started working on the Johal HF deal, Suzi screwed up her courage, and asked Andria to consider having her child.

"But why?" Andria had asked as Suzi lay on top of her.

The air-conditioned darkness of the penthouse's bedroom revealed only the faintest of silhouettes, but Suzi knew the girl had a frown on her face. "Because it's a way out for me," she answered, shrinking inside for showing her vulnerability. "This shit I'm in, I know it's bad, but it's addictive. It gives me a high. I can't get out. There's nothing outside tekmerc territory that can give me the same buzz. I've seen 'em all, dopey bastards who say they'll quit when they've made their wad. Never do; they live wild for a few months, even a couple of years, then they come crawling back, and when they do their edge is all screwed up."

She felt Andria's fingers running lightly round her chin. "You could always set up as a corporate security consultant, your experience must count for—" the girl began.

"Bollocks. Kombinate security wouldn't touch me with a bargepole. Besides, I want right out, the whole way. Got the money, too."

"But what would you do?"

"Get conventional. Shit, I know it sounds fucking stupid. Right? But I'd like to give convention a go. I thought a pub or a hotel, maybe a club."

"If a consultancy wouldn't give you the excitement, then I don't think a pub would be what you need."

"I know someone," Suzi whispered. "Someone who used to do this kind of crap, a real hardliner. He got out, clean and sweet. Jesus wept, one person. One out of all the thousands."

Andria kissed her throat lightly, trying to give comfort through intimacy. "And he did it through being conventional?"

"Yeah." That image came back to spook her again. Greg and Eleanor walking down the aisle of Hambleton's dinky little church, both of them smiling radiantly at each other, not seeing anyone else. Suzi hadn't wanted to go, hadn't known what to wear, hadn't known what present to get. Like a flicking savage figuring out a cybofax. It had come as a harsh shock, finding out just how far she'd regressed from society. "He's got a wife, kids, farm, the whole flicking works. And he never came back."

"Was he your lover?"

"No. Yes. Not really. Good mates, that's all."

"And you think you can follow him?"

Suzi stroked the damp strands of hair from Andria's forehead. She always wanted to be tender afterwards, make up for her earlier fierceness, show the girl she really cared. She knew sex was another of her failings, needing to be on top when it was boys, making the girls submit. She wanted to stop, to be normal. Didn't know how; couldn't figure how the other ways could possibly work like everyone said, all that giving and sharing bollocks. Sex was power.

"Fuck-all chance of doing anything else," Suzi said. "I mean, tekmercs, we screw convention, deliberately. That's what we are. But this jobs and family bullshit, it works, for billions of people, it sodding works. If I just had something that I could commit myself to, something I could feel a bit of pride in." Her voice had risen without her realizing. "Shit, maybe Leol Reiger was right about me when he said I haven't got what it takes. Sometimes I hope he is. But I need something to anchor me to that kind of world. Kid would do that."

"Yes," Andria said simply.

"You'll do it?"

"Of course I will. I love you, Suse."

Andria was still watching the hypersonic above them. The balconies on the eastern end of the Soreyheath condominium looked out over New Eastfield's marina and the gleaming structures of Prior's Fen Atoll away in the lazy distance beyond. They were arranged in tiers, which meant Suzi could see any of the balconies below her, but not the two above. A concrete-enforced statement about social position, she always thought.