An uncertain time later Morton recovered enough to focus on the ceiling he was staring up at. He was slumped against the base of the sofa, panting heavily and sweating profusely in contrast to the euphoria he felt. Mellanie giggled contentedly beside him, and propped herself up on an elbow. She’d lost the black cap at some point, allowing her hair to tumble out wildly. Her bra was still attached, twisted around her abdomen.
He smiled at her and gave her a soft kiss before finally finding the bra’s clasp and removing it. That was when he noticed his own shirt was wrapped around his arm. Laughing, she unwound it for him.
“You really do look magnificent,” he said admiringly. His hand stroked along her arm, crossing over to her belly before dipping inquisitively to massage her thigh. “This age suits you.”
“You haven’t changed.”
“Is that good?”
Mellanie gasped in surprise at what his hand did. She’d forgotten how very well he knew her body. “I like some things to stay the same,” she hissed in delight.
“Did you miss me?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
She bowed her head, letting the damp tassels of hair brush his chest. “This much.” Her lips and fingers began their delicate caresses. “This much.” She moved slowly down his belly to where his cock was beginning to stiffen again. “This much,” she growled impatiently.
Morton was convinced he’d never be able to move again, every limb ached in the most disgraceful fashion. They lay side by side on the floor, arms around each other as the light faded from the desert sky outside. For the first time since the trial he began to have regrets about what he’d lost.
“Have you managed all right, since…?” he asked quietly.
“I do okay.”
“I’m sorry; it can’t have been easy for you. I should have made some kind of provision, put some money aside, some cash. I just never considered…”
“I said I’m all right, Morty.”
“Yeah. Jeeze, you look fucking amazing. I mean it.”
She smiled, running her hand back through her hair, combing it away from her face. “Thanks. I really missed you.”
Even now, all he could think of was screwing her again. “So have you…got anyone?”
“No,” she said, a little too quickly. “Nobody special. Not like you. Things have been kinda strange for me. Especially since the Prime attack.”
“I’ll bet. What’s with this job you’ve got? You mentioned Michelangelo.”
“Oh, yeah. I work for his show now. I’m one of their reporters.”
“Congratulations. That must have been a tough gig to grab.”
“I have a good agent.”
“What the hell. It got you in to see me. That’s all I care.”
She rested a hand on his chest, stroking affectionately. “It wasn’t an excuse, Morty. I could have come to see you anytime. You’re allowed visitors.”
“Right.” He didn’t understand.
“The offer is genuine. It took me a little time to put it together, and the show’s lawyers had to convince the navy to agree. But it’s all sorted.”
“You want me to report back from Elan?”
“Yes, basically. You’re entitled to a short personal communications burst at each contact time. That’s part of your service agreement.”
“I never read the small print,” he muttered.
“The lawyers made the navy agree that you could use the burst to send us a report. Michelangelo will pay. It’s a good fee. That’ll mean you’ll have money when this is all over. You can use it to start again.”
“Fine. Whatever. Do I get to see you again? That’s all I’m interested in.”
“It’ll be difficult. I won’t get many chances. And it can’t be long before the navy begins the fight back.”
“Will you come back to see me here?” he asked insistently.
“Yes, Morty, I’ll come back.”
“Good.” He started to kiss her again.
“There’s something I want to show you,” she murmured.
“Something you’ve learned?” His tongue licked eagerly along her neck.
“Something a bad girl would do?”
She took both his hands and held them firmly. He grinned in anticipation. His e-butler told him the OCtattoos on his palms and fingers were interfacing. “What—”
Morton was suddenly standing at the bottom of a white sphere. Faint lines of gray script flowed across the surface, too quick for him to focus on. They reminded him of his virtual vision’s basic standby mode graphics.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” Mellanie said.
Morton turned around to see her standing behind him. She was wearing simple white coveralls. He looked down at himself to see he was wearing an identical garment.
“What the hell happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”
“It’s a simulated environment. Basically, we’re inside your inserts.”
“How the fuck did you do that?”
“The SI gave me some fairly sophisticated OCtattoos while you were in suspension. I’m just starting to learn how to use a few of them for myself.”
“The SI?”
“We have an arrangement. I supply it with unusual information, and it acts as my agent. I’m not sure how much I can trust it, though.”
“You supply it with information?” Morton wished he could string together a sentence that wasn’t a question. He was coming across like a petulant ignoramus.
“Yes.” Mellanie sounded mildly annoyed at the implication.
“Oh, right.”
“We’re linked like this because it’s completely private. There’s no sensor the navy can use to overhear what I have to tell you.”
“What’s that?” he asked cautiously.
“You remember the Guardians of Selfhood?”
“Some kind of cult? They were always shotgunning the unisphere. Didn’t they attack the Second Chance? They believed an alien was running the government. Crap like that.”
“They were right.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s called the Starflyer. It might have triggered the war.”
“No, Mellanie.”
“Morty, I’ve been lied to. I’ve been shot at. Its agents tried to kidnap me. Even Paula Myo thinks it’s real.”
“The Investigator?” he asked in amazement.
“She’s not an investigator anymore. The Starflyer got her fired, but she has political connections. I don’t understand it all, but she’s working for another government department now, I think. She won’t tell me anything. She doesn’t trust me. Morty, this is frightening the hell out of me. I don’t know anyone else I can turn to but you. I know you’re safe; you’ve been in suspension while all this has happened. Please, Morty, at least consider the possibility. The Guardians must have started with some kind of reason. Mustn’t they? Every legend starts with a grain of truth.”
“I don’t know. I grant you they have been going an unusually long time, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. In any case, what has all this got to do with me? I’m off to war any day now. I can’t protect you, Mellanie. Even if I snuck off base, the navy has all the activation codes for my wetwired armament systems. They can switch them on and off anytime they want.”
“Really?” She sounded intrigued. “I wonder if I could hack them.”
“Mellanie, I’m sorry, I can’t risk going back into suspension. Not even for you.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I’m asking.”
“What then?”
“I want you to send me information back from Elan.”
“What kind of information?”
“Anything you can get on the Primes which would normally be classified. We can’t trust the navy, Morty, it’s been compromised by the Starflyer. And yes, I know that sounds paranoid. I would have said the same thing myself a year ago.”
“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Morty.”
He waited a long moment before asking: “Would you have come to see me if you weren’t caught up in all this?”
“I would be here no matter what happened to the Commonwealth. I promise. I don’t even care that you might have killed Tara.”
“I probably did, you know. Investigator Myo doesn’t make many mistakes.”
“It doesn’t matter. We were good together, even if I was just a naïve kid. I know we’ve both changed since then, but we have to see what we can be this time around. We both owe our old selves that, don’t we?”
“Damn, you are something else.”
“Will you send me what information you can?”
“I guess so. I don’t want to disappoint you again, Mellanie. So…I suppose you’ve got some foolproof method of smuggling the data back to you?”
“Of course.”
“Yeah, thought so,” he said in a resigned tone. This truly wasn’t that first-life teenage Mellanie with the hot ass that he’d sweet-talked into bed. Not anymore. She’d changed into somebody a lot more interesting. Still goddamn hot, though.
Mellanie pulled a hand-sized square out of her pocket and held it up. It was made up from densely packed alphanumerics that glowed a faint violet as they flowed against each other in perpetual motion, always staying inside their boundary. She peered at it curiously. “Wow, I’ve never seen a naked program before.”
The sheer girlishness made him smile in fond recollection. “What is it?”
“Encryptionware. I bought it off Paul Cramley.”
“I remember Paul. How is the old rogue?”
“Harassed. He promised this will bury your private message to me in the sensorium datastream you send to the show. I can pull it out, but no one else will be able to.” She pressed the square into his hand, and it unraveled, strings of symbols flowering outward to blend into the sphere walls. They chased the gray script around for a moment, before fading into the same semivisible gray as the rest of the symbols.
Morton’s e-butler reported a new program had loaded successfully in his main insert, but lacked an author certificate and nonhostility validation. “Let it run,” he told the e-butler.
“It’ll also decrypt the messages I send to you,” Mellanie said.
“I hope they’re all obscene pictures.”
“Morty!” Her disappointed face melted away into a Dali-esque swirl of color. He was back in the darkened rec room with her warm naked body cuddled up against him.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I’m very grateful.”
“Care to show that? Out here in the physical world.”
“Again? Already?”
“I have been waiting for over two and a half years.”
Chapter Five
The Pathfinder had spent just three days drifting along in freefall, and already Ozzie was facing a decision he really didn’t want to make. A big part of his problem was that they had no destination. Even if they did, getting there would be difficult. Air currents in the gas halo were completely unpredictable. Moderate breezes would carry them along steadily for over half a day before depositing them in pockets of doldrumlike calm for hours on end. They left the sail up most of the time so the raft presented a decent-sized surface area to catch the breezes no matter what their orientation was. Gusts blew up abruptly, fortunately short-lived, filling out the sail as if they were still on the water, and sweeping them along in a giddy tumble. Once they’d actually had to furl the sail in, their little raft was shaking so much. In itself, such a method of travel was an interesting concept. Ozzie was mentally designing a sailing airship that could voyage through the gas halo with considerable finesse; in his mind it looked like a cylindrical schooner that sprouted a cobweb of rigging filled by sails. He could have quite a life captaining that around this fabulous realm. Many lives, actually.
Those were the kind of dreamy ideas with almost infinite possibilities to extrapolate that made his mundane real-time slightly more bearable.
With Ozzie’s encouragement, Orion had slowly adapted to freefall, though he was never going to be at home in the milieu. However, the boy could now move about the raft with a degree of confidence, although Ozzie made sure he wore his safety rope at all times. He could even keep most of his food down. There wasn’t much Ozzie could do about the way he worried, though. Their pitifully minute ship adrift within the macrocosm that was the gas halo induced a sense of isolation that even gave Ozzie momentary panic attacks.
Tochee was another matter. The big alien was genuinely suffering in freefall. Something in its physiology was simply unable to cope with the sensation. It spent the whole time miserably clinging to the rear decking. It hardly ate anything because it just kept regurgitating any food that did get past its gullet. It drank very little. Ozzie had to keep pleading and insisting to make it do that.
He knew they had to return to a gravity field soon.
Making their big friend drink was only one of the problems they were now experiencing with their water, and it was the mild one. More acute was their dwindling supply. Ozzie had never considered they might run out of water. Fair enough, he hadn’t expected them to fall off the worldlet, which was the root cause of the problem. They’d set sail on a sea that his little hand-pumped filter could easily cope with, providing them with as much fresh water as they wanted when they wanted. In fact, water had been the one dependable constant on every planet they’d walked across.
All they had for storage was Ozzie’s trusty aluminum water bottle, a couple of thermos flasks, and Orion’s one remaining plastic pouch. They’d all been full when they went over the waterfall, but in total they only held five liters. Now they were down to half of the plastic pouch; and that was with facial fluid pooling in their cheeks and throats eliminating the thirst reflex in both the humans.
Ozzie had seen distant gray fog banks the size of small moons wafting through the gas halo, the majority of them tattered nebulas stretching out idly along the air currents, while a few were thick spinning knots like Jovian cyclones. None of them was within half a million miles of the Pathfinder. It would take months, or even years, to reach them.
A third of the fruit that they’d so carefully stacked in wicker baskets before setting off had tumbled off into the void when they went over the water worldlet’s rim. They’d munched their way through quite a lot of the remainder since then, supplementing it from what remained of their prepackaged food. The globes were succulent and juicy, but no real substitute for drinking. They wouldn’t sustain them for more than another couple of days at best.
That left Ozzie considering the other objects or creatures that occupied the gas halo. With little else to do except observe their environment, he’d soon realized the nebula was actually quite densely populated. The largest artifacts were the water worldlets. He’d been wrong with his first guess about their geometry, though. As they were blown farther away from their original worldlet he saw its true shape. It wasn’t a hemisphere; more like a bagel that had been sliced in half. The flat upper surface with its archipelago of little islands was always aligned sunward, with the sea pouring over its entire rim. Water followed the curve around and then began its long climb back up through the central funnellike hole to fill the upper sea again and start the cycle over. The orifice where it surged out on top was always capped by an opaque white cloud squatting on the water, shielding the upwelling from sight. For a look at the gravity generator that made such a thing possible, Ozzie would have cheerfully sold his soul. Not that they could go back to the worldlet even if they were caught up by a wind blowing in the right direction. He simply couldn’t work out a safe way to land (or splash down). Not without a parachute.
So he started looking at the other things orbiting around and around inside the gas halo. There were a lot of bird-equivalent creatures flittering about, either singularly or in huge flocks. Those that had come close enough to see clearly so far had fallen into two categories: a genus with a screwlike spiral wi
ng running the length of their bodies, and others that Orion had named Fan Birds, resembling biological helicopters. They might have been edible, but some of the spiral birds were quite large, almost Tochee’s size, with long sharp tusks that Ozzie didn’t really want an up-close and personal look at. Besides, he couldn’t figure out how to catch one.
The fact that there were so many indicated they must have easily accessible food sources, which was an encouraging prospect. He’d seen a quantity of free-flying trees, globular dendrite-style structures made out of what looked like blue and violet sponge, four or five times the length of Earth’s giant sequoias. He had more hope for them than the birds; they must have some kind of internal water reserve. As yet, none of them had been close enough to try for a rendezvous, especially with Tochee in its weakened state. They probably only had one chance at being towed toward a rendezvous, and the distance was decreasing with each passing day, so he would have to make a very careful choice.
What he really wanted was the kind of reef that Johansson had described. If for no other reason, Johansson had walked home back to the Commonwealth after being on one. So far there’d been no sign of anything like that. There were a myriad of specks everywhere he looked, but he had no way of judging the size and nature of them until they got within range of his retinal inserts.
His handheld array wasn’t helping much, either. For the third time in an hour, Ozzie reviewed the data it was displaying in his virtual vision. Nobody was using the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit in. Nobody had responded to the distress signal he’d been broadcasting constantly since their arrival. Although how far such a signal would travel through the atmosphere of the gas halo was a moot point.
Ozzie sighed in disappointment—once more. According to the clock in his virtual vision it was four hours since he’d last had a drink; when he checked the antique watch on his wrist it read the same. It was time to make that decision he’d been delaying in the hope of a small miracle.