I drew breath.

—Closer—

And spun, murderous.

“Shit, Kovacs, you want to give me a heart attack?”

Cruickshank was a step away, hands on her hips. The datadisplay glow picked out the uncertain grin on her face and the unseamed shirt beneath her chameleochrome jacket.

The breath gusted out of me. My adrenalin surge collapsed.

“Cruickshank, what the fuck are you doing down here?”

“Kovacs, what the fuck are you doing here? You said a call of nature. What are you planning to do, piss on the datacoil there?”

“What did you follow me down here for?” I hissed. “You going to hold it for me?”

“I don’t know. That what you like, Kovacs? You a digital man? That your thing?”

I closed my eyes for a moment. Semetaire was gone, but the thing in my chest was still coiling languidly through me. I opened my eyes again, and she was still there.

“You going to talk like that, Cruickshank, you’d better be buying.”

She grinned. One hand brushed with apparent casualness at the unseamed opening of her shirt, thumb hooking in and slipping the fabric back to reveal the breast beneath. She looked down at her own recently acquired flesh as if entranced by it. Then she brought her fingers back to brush the nipple, flicking back and forth at it until it had stiffened.

“I look like I’m only looking, Envoy guy?” she asked lazily.

She looked up at me and it got pretty frantic after that. We closed and her thigh slid between mine, warm and hard through the soft cloth of the coveralls. I pushed her hand away from her breast and replaced it with my own. The closure became a clinch, both of us looking down at the exposed nipple squeezed between us, and what my fingers were doing to it. I could hear her breath starting to scrape as her own hand unclasped my waistband and slid inside. She cupped the end of my cock and kneaded at it with thumb and palm.

We fell sideways onto the bedshelf in a tangle of clothing and limbs. A salt damp and mustiness rose almost visibly around us on impact. Cruickshank threw out one booted foot and kicked the cabin door closed. It shut with a clang that must have been heard all the way back up to the party on deck. I grinned into Cruickshank’s hair.

“Poor old Jan.”

“Huh?” She turned from what she was doing to my prick for a moment.

“I think, ahhhh, I think this is going to piss him off. He’s been drifting after you since we left Landfall.”

“Listen, with legs like these, anyone with a male heterosex gene code is going to be drifting after me. I wouldn’t,” she started to stroke, paced a pair of seconds apart. “Read. Anything. Into it.”

I drew breath. “OK, I won’t.”

“Good. Anyway,” she lowered one breast towards the head of my prick and began to rub slow circles around the nipple with my glans. “He’s probably got his hands full with the archaeologue.”

“What?”

I tried to sit up. Cruickshank pushed me back down absently, most of her still focused on the rubbing friction of glans on breast.

“Nah, you just stay there till I’m finished with you. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but seeing as,” she gestured at what she was doing. “Well, I guess you can deal with it. Seen the two of them sloping off together a couple of times now. And Schneider always comes back with this big shit-eating grin, so I figure, you know.” She shrugged, and went back to the timed strokes. “Well, he’s not a. Bad looking. Guy for a Whiteboy and Wardani, well. She’d probably. Take whatever. She can get. You liking this, Kovacs?”

I groaned.

“Thought so. You guys.” She shook her head. “Standard porn-construct stuff. Never fails.”

“You come here, Cruickshank.”

“Ah-ah. No way. Later. I want to see your face when you want to come and I don’t let you.”

She had working against her the alcohol and the pipe, impending radiation poisoning, Semetaire rustling around in the back of my head and now the thought of Tanya Wardani in Schneider’s embrace—still Cruickshank had me there in less than ten minutes with the combination of hard strokes and soft brushstrokes across her breasts. And when she got me there, she pulled me back from the brink three times with pleased, excited sounds in her throat, before finally masturbating me rapidly and violently to a climax that spattered us both with semen.

The release was like something being unplugged in my head.

Wardani and Schneider, Semetaire and impending death all went with it, blown out of my skull through my eyes with the force of the orgasm. I went limp in the narrow bed-space and the cabin beyond spun away into distant irrelevance.

When I felt something again, it was the smooth brush of Cruickshank’s thigh as she swung herself astride my chest and seated herself there.

“Now, Envoy guy,” she said, reaching down for my head with both hands. “Let’s see you pay that off.”

Her fingers laced across the back of my head and she held me to the budding folds of flesh like a nursing mother, rocking gently. Her cunt was hot and wet on my mouth and the juices that pooled and slipped out of her tasted of bitter spice. There was a scent to her like delicately burnt wood and a sound in the back of her throat like a saw blade rubbing back and forth. I could feel the tension welling up in the long muscles of her thighs as her climax built, and towards the end she lifted fractionally from her seat on my chest and began tilting her pelvis back and forth in a blind echo of coitus. The cage of fingers nursing my head between her thighs made tiny flexing motions, as if she was losing her grip on the last handhold over an abyss. The noise in her throat became a tight and urgent panting, sawing towards a hoarse cry.

You don’t lose me that easily, Wedge Wolf

Cruickshank rose on her haunches, muscles locked up rigid, and yelled her orgasm into the damp air of the cabin.

Not that easily

She shuddered and sank back, crushing the air out of me. Her fingers let go and my head dropped back to the clammy sheets.

I am locked in and

“Now,” she said, reaching back along my body. “Let’s see what we… Oh.”

You couldn’t miss the surprise in her voice, but she hid the attendant disappointment well. I was semi-erect in her hand, an unreliable hard-on bleeding back to the muscles my body thought it needed to fight or run from the thing in my head.

Yes. Do you see how the new harvest begins. You can run, but—

Get the FUCK out of my head.

I propped myself up on my elbows, feeling the shutdown settling over my face in tight masking bands. The fire we’d lit in the cabin was guttering out. I tried for a smile and felt Semetaire take it away from me.

“Sorry about that. I guess. This dying thing’s getting to me sooner than I thought.”

She shrugged. “Hey, Kovacs. The words just physical were never truer than right here and now. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”

I winced.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry.” It was the same comically crestfallen expression I’d seen on her face in the construct interview. Somehow, on the Maori sleeve it was funnier still. I chuckled, grabbed at the glimmer of laughter offered. Grabbed and grinned harder.

“Ahhh,” she said, feeling the change. “Want to try anyway? Won’t take much, I’m all wet inside.”

She slid back and arched over me. In the faint glow from the datacoil, I fixed my gaze on the juncture of her thighs with a kind of desperation and she fed me into herself with the confidence of someone chambering a round.

The heat and pressure and the long, tensed body riding me were the fragments I used to keep going, but it still wasn’t what you’d call great sex. I slipped free a couple of times and my problems became hers as the obvious lack of abandonment braked her excitement back to not much more than methodical technical expertise and a determination to get this done.