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The Japanese she’s using is archaic, centuries out of date.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 Sylvie?” Face racked with doubt. She shifts languages to meet me.

“I don’t remember, I, it’s, I can’t—”

“Sylvie.”

“Yeah, Sylvie.”

“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 front 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 fall 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.

“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 S3 7. 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 snowed wear but a faint smell of mothball antibacterials clung to the air and made everything seem pristine.

“Very nice,” I chattered as I closed the door on lock. “Well done, Oishii. I approve.”