They were panting, straining, watching each other, gaze fastened to the same place on the surface of the mirror, watching with a kind of eager, ravenous solemnity as they concentrated, wrapped up in the approaching moment, conscious only of themselves and each other; the whole world, the entire system and universe shrunk to this pulsed, focused joining with nothing else, nowhere else, no-when and no-one else mattering, when the fireworks burst overhead.

The light was furious, shocking. They both stopped moving to gaze open-mouthed at the membrane fabric above. Then, as the noise cracked and thundered down into the room, they looked back into the mirror together and started laughing. They fell back onto the bed, giggling under the multi-coloured lights inundating the soft roof above them.

“What lousy timing,” she said, laughing so hard she laughed him out of her. “Shit.”

“Corn-screen would have had it happen just as we came,” he agreed. He shifted underneath her and she rolled off.

She lay on the bed beside him, gently bit one of his nipples. “You’re not giving up now are you?”

“Hell, no, I don’t want to!” he said gesturing at the roof, where red and green lights strobed and noise like gunfire rattled. “But this is fucking distracting!”

She was still for a second, then bounced off the bed.

“I’ve had an idea,” she told him.

She stopped his ears with little bits of tissue she soaked with her own spittle, and then she did the same to her own ears. The noise of the fireworks was lessened, deadened.

Then she picked up her knickers, lying on the floor at the side of the bed, held them with both hands, and ripped them.

“Hey,” she heard him protest, voice booming dully. “I bought you those…”

She put a finger to her mouth and shook her head.

She tore the delicate, perfumed material into two strips. She put one black band over his eyes, tying it behind his head so that he was made quite blind, and then she did the same to herself, so that in that shared but separate, self-created darkness, and surrounded by that distanced, heavy, undersea sound, they made love with only touch as their guide.

She was blind. Blind and surrounded by mushy, roaring noises and she knew there were lights exploding all around. Some part of her wanted to find this funny because she’d been in just this situation before not all that long ago, but she couldn’t laugh.

Anyway she couldn’t indulge herself, she had the others to worry about. Worrying for all of them; that was her job.

Somebody was calling to her, quietly screaming her name.

Iron taste in mouth. Smell of burning. She felt another part of herself start bawling at her to wake up; burning! Fire! Run! The roaring noise filled her head. Run!

But there wasn’t anywhere to run to. She knew that.

There was something else to worry about, too, but apart from knowing it was important, she couldn’t remember what it was.

The voice in her ears shouted her name. Why couldn’t they leave her in peace? Her head tipped forward; it felt terribly heavy and large. Still a smell of burning, acrid and sharp.

Her nose itched. She reached to scratch it and her left arm suddenly turned into a pipe full of acid, gushing pain into her. She tried to cry out but somehow she couldn’t. She was choking.

She struggled to put her head back. Her helmet clunked hard against something that shouldn’t have been there. Of course; she was wearing a helmet. But it didn’t feel right.

“Sharrow!” screamed a tiny voice through the roaring.

“Yes, yes,” she muttered, coughing and spitting, She acci-dentally tried to make a be quiet motion with her left arm, and the pain tore through her. This time she was able to shout.

She spat again. Noises tinkled and whined in her ears above the continual roaring and the voices shouting her name. At least she thought it was her name.

“Sharrow?” she heard herself say.

“Sharrow! Come in!-Was that her? Keep-! Miz!-debris!-from this range! -only water!-Are you crazy?”

What a lot of babbling, she said to herself, and could feel her brow furrowing as she thought, Miz? Didn’t she have something she was supposed to tell him, some secret?

She tried to open her eyes. But she shouldn’t even need to do that, should she?

She was exhausted. Her left arm wouldn’t move, she felt incredibly heavy and cold and there were lots of other pains and discomforts clamouring for her attention now, too.

“Sharrow! Fate, Shar; please answer; wake up!”

Shut up, she told them. Can’t get any peace these days…

… They sailed through a tunnel. It was dark, but a little paper lantern glowed above them and the air was sweet. He had joined her on the pillows, lean and hard and eager and gentle. They had lain together for a long time later, listening to the warm water gurgle beneath them and the tiny hum of the ship…

The ship! Where was the ship? It should be here, all around her. She tried to shift in the hard, uncomfortable seat but the pain in her arm came back. She heard herself cry out.

“Sharrow!” a voice said quite distinctly in her ears.

“Miz?” she said. It was his voice. She wondered why she was blind and the ship wasn’t talking to her.

“Sharrow? Can you hear me?”

“Miz?” she said louder. Her mouth felt funny. The roaring in her ears pulsated away, heavy and insistent, like some too-quick surf pounding into her ears.

“Sharrow; talk to me!”

“All right!” she shouted angrily. Was the man deaf?

“Thank Fate! Listen, kid; what’s your status?”

“Status?” she said, confused. “Don’t know; what do you-?”

“Shit. Okay; you’re spinning. First we’ve got to stop that. You’ve got to keep awake and stop the spin.”

“Spin,” she said. Spin? Was that something to do with the secret she’d been keeping from him? She made a determined effort to open her eyes. She thought they were open but she still couldn’t see anything.

She brought her right arm up; it was incredibly heavy. She tried to bring it to her face, but the arm wouldn’t move very far. It fell back, crashing into something and hurting her.

She started to cry.

“Sharrow!” the voice said. “Keep it together, girl!”

“Don’t call me girl!”

“I’ll call you anything I fucking want until you get that ship levelled.”

“Prick,” she muttered. She pushed her head as far forward as she could and rammed her right arm up. Heavily gloved fingers thumped into her face-plate. It felt wrong; wrong shape, wrong place. Her nose hurt. Her arm was quivering with the effort of keeping it there against her helmet. She felt down to the helmet rim, took a deep breath, then pushed up.

Snap. She cried out with the pain. Her nose burned; blood filled her mouth. Her arm crashed down into her lap.

But the ship was back; it was there around her. The lid-screens swam into focus while the ship’s systems whispered and tingled and swarmed through her, filtering down through her awareness as the transceiver in her helmet spoke to the wafer-unit buried in the back of her skull. She felt around, looked at the lid-screens and listened to the music of systems status, the roaring in her ears reduced to dull background.

She was a force at the core of sensation. It was like floating in the centre of a huge sphere of colour and movement and displayed symbols; a sphere made of in-holo’d screens, like windows to other dimensions, each one giving a summary of its state and singing a single note of song. She only had to look at one of those windows and will shift to be there, looking down onto the details of that landscape-itself often composed of more sub-windows-all the rest of the screens reduced to a smear of colour on the outskirts of her vision, where a flash of movement or an associated change in their harmonics would signal something needing her attention.