"Attention, Patrick Henry. This is Lieutenant Cassandra Niemoller, née Seward. I am broadcasting from the surface of Tellus on the fiftieth day since our departure.

"I am declaring Tellus a political and religious refuge and demanding that all non-persons be released and allowed to descend without harm. You don't want them, so I'm taking them off of your hands.

"They will stay there, because I am also declaring Tellus off-limits to all Marxians, ceilarchs, and similar scum of the sky. You can keep your authoritarian squabbles up there and fight until you rip the worldship apart. I don't know who's in control right now, and at this point, I don't care. You're all worthless.

"The ceilarchs turned the skies into a feudal prison, and the Marxians'll happily turn it into a floating gulag. If you don't know what that is, try looking up some histories of Terra. The original ones, not the revised editions.

“You can have your prisons, but Tellus stays free. You may have forgotten July 4, 1776, but some of us still remember.

"I'm warning you. You have no idea the surprises that are in store if you so much as step foot on my planet."

--Recording recovered from Site Resh, reconstructed 1887 CE (restricted access)

----

17 Rising Withering, 1886 CE

The Patrick Henry

"Merciful Adon," Aoife said, staring at the tower of flesh. She shifted her rifle unsteadily as she stepped between the broken bodies of the aliens Senrii had killed and the sluggish ones staggering about. It seemed like the scrubbers were working. "What's in there?"

"Don't think about that," Senrii said, patting Aoife's shoulder. "Think about what's past it. Home."

"Okay, sure, but I'd prefer to get there in one piece."

"Me, too." Senrii planted a boot on the body of an alien weakly raising its arm-slashers toward her and kicked it away. "Put on your helmet and your breather-moth. We don't know what the atmosphere's like in there." They'd found an ancient yet powerful spacesuit preserved in one of the stasis-lockers. It had gone to Thiyyatt. The non-Magi had to stick with their existing suits.

Clean air and sulfur fought as they climbed up the foundation of flesh to the tower. Thiyyatt, her breathing shallow in Tvorh's arms, snorted and whimpered.

The Master-Mind was working against them. Tvorh hoped the scrubbers would hold long enough for them to escape.

It was good that Aoife couldn't hear what Tvorh could hear. Something liquidy burbled where the biological walls intersected the dirt and the living metal floor beneath it.

Because the alien ship was biological. Tvorh heard pustules pop and bubble on the side of the tower, and a disgusting slurping sound emanated from the sphincter-wound a bit higher up

Tvorh heard slanting hallways of flesh and bone beyond that sphincter. He heard blood pumping up and down the cylinder of the alien heavenwhale. He didn't have to hear its whole length to know that he had seen this sort of heavenwhale before.

He'd lived the memory of one of these things already.

Piotr, declaring it his duty, went first through the wound-sphincter. Tvorh held his breath, only half because he was afraid that something terrible would be waiting for the Tutela on the other side.

The other half was because it stank here.

Piotr's hand emerged. Senrii took it, and he pulled her through, then Eztli; then Aoife helped Tvorh feed Thiyyatt through, and at last they followed.

Tvorh slid out into a tube that reminded him of an empty blood vessel. Tvorh's moth-breather fluttered, indicating an atmosphere that could support Tellurian life. He pulled it off his face, then immediately wished he hadn't.

The stench of death, digestion, rot, and sulfur was overpowering. He had his SOPHIOS close off his sense of smell before he could vomit.

Aoife didn't have that ability. She retched, then wiped her mouth. "Worst trip ever," she grumbled.

They were in a small, damp tunnel of flesh. They followed it for some distance, then pushed through a disgusting door of tendons and pus into an open central tower.

Tvorh's hearing revealed a well-like tunnel, a pit extending up and down for several miles. It was filled with nerves and tendons. A ramp that sounded like a long tongue streaked with blood spiraled around its perimeter. Blisters extruded from the walls.

"What's that?" Senrii asked, dread stronger than curiosity in her voice. She pointed at one of the pustules. It was about as big as Tvorh's torso.

It just sounded like a huge blister. "Am I missing something?" Tvorh asked.

"Yeah. You can't see it, but it's glowing," Senrii said.

"I'd show you, but..." Aoife raised a vomit-streaked hand.

Smiling despite the disgusting circumstances, Tvorh waved off Aoife's offer, then put a hand on the bulbous pustule. "Feels like water."

"It's bright blue," Senrii said. "Not water blue, but starlight-blue. And I don't like the silver dust, either."

"Dust?"

"There's a cloud of it down the hall that way. Just floating there, as if it's watching and waiting."

"Silver sands," Eztli said.

"And burning suns," Senrii replied. "Here and in Synapsis-world, too. Not looking forward to finding out what that's all about."

Tvorh felt the skin of the pustule move against his palm as the water inside shifted. There was something odd about the movement. "There's something inside--"

"Get back!" Senrii tackled Tvorh out of the way as talons slashed the blister open from the inside, spilling fluid onto the tonguelike floor. An alien hunter-killer hound tumbled out, hitting with a wet smack. This one was no higher than Tvorh's knee, but in addition to its talon-tipped arms and legs, a half-dozen umbilicals extended from its body back into the pustule. It opened its tiny mouth, showing its circle of slicing teeth. Its muscles bulged beneath one of the umbilicals.

Tvorh rolled away and came up with his oversized knife in his hand, but Eztli had already drawn a bead on the alien. She shot once, and the thing slumped.

Good thing, too. Tvorh's Symbiont was going to need some more time to heal him back to perfect fighting shape. The Silver Suns Tool's stabbing vines had done a number on his wrist.

"Advanced gengineering," Eztli said, kicking the thing lightly. Tvorh frowned. Had it grown bigger in the few seconds it had been outside the blister?

And was it getting smaller now? Tvorh pointed at the pumping umbilicals as they transferred the creature's mass back into the pustule. "The ship's eating it."

"Blood, bones, and bile." Senrii's lip curled. "Makes 'em up, uses them, eats 'em up when they're dead."

Eztli peered over the edge of the tongue-ramp into the black pit. "We don't have time to descend the ramp. We have a mile and a half to go in fewer than two hours, and every half mile we need to activate a Lifeship outside the tower." Those would be the impaled Lifeship structures on the three continents farther out.

Senrii held up a hand. "Hold on--I'm getting word from Mom. She says the Silver Suns Tool's nerves are connected to this thing."

"That's how it got corrupted in the first place," Eztli said.

"She says the Master-Mind in the tower is fighting her, but she thinks she can activate the Lifeships on twenty-three and twenty-two. The tower's nerves extend out to them, and it's corrupted their computer systems just like it got the Patrick Henry's Tool, but she thinks she can send a release command...Yes. She's in."

"And the one on twenty-one?" Eztli asked. That was the outermost layer in the megastructure surrounding the alien spear-ship they were standing in.

"No. It's disconnected, nothing but space. We'll have to activate it manually."

"We'll barely have time."

Senrii looked around at poor injured Piotr, at barely conscious Thiyyatt on Piotr's back, at the newly red-blooded Eztli, at Aoife who'd apparently taken a hard hit before the Patrick Henry's turrets had come on-nerve, and finally at Tvorh. "I've got no weapons," she said, "but I can move faster without you all. I'll go."

"But--" Tvorh began.

"Take this," Eztli interrupted. She handed Senrii a marble-sized orb and a flat, square device of plastic about as big as her palm.

"This is the 'massless?'" Senrii asked, looking at the orb.

Eztli nodded. The ‘massless potential storage battery’ would provide the power to bring ruined continent twenty-one’s Lifeship online.

Eztli pointed at the plastic square. "Plug this into the slot you find on the terminal."

"Yeah, I know, AIda will pop up and help me release the Lifeship. Got it." She turned to Tvorh and winked. "Kid, you're in charge. Meet you all on twenty-one."

"Don't lose them," Eztli said. "Those are priceless artifacts."

"Hey, Ductrix Eztli. When have I ever let you down?" Senrii gave a crooked grin and bowed flamboyantly.

Then she leapt into the pit. Aoife gasped, but Tvorh heard wings and strands of silk unfurl from Senrii's skinsuit as she descended into the depths.

In the lesser gravity here, Senrii might actually be able to fly, not just glide. Tvorh was jealous. "She'll be fine. Let's go--"

The muscles of the tower walls shuddered, and unpleasant fluids scattered.

"The cysts are breaking open," Tvorh said. "They're sending the hunter-killers after us." A distant noise, the squishing of claws on muscle, echoed through the pit. "Down the ramp!"

Eztli jumped first onto the tongue, and its fluids slicked her as she picked up speed, sliding around the outside of the room. Tvorh took rearguard, backing up Piotr. The big man had been spaced only an hour before, and while Thiyyatt wasn't large, she was dead weight, and he was carrying her.

Arteries pulsing in the ceiling dripped blood that spattered Tvorh's face. Terrible sulfurous fumes belched from half-seen digestive rooms as they circled the pit, sliding around and around a ramp covered in disgusting fluids.

"Shots in the hole!" Eztli shouted as they picked up speed. Forgebone bullets cracked, taking a pair of monsters that had just slid out of a tendon-door in the heads. Momentum took them over the edge and they tumbled down the pit, falling in slow motion.

As he slid past the door, Tvorh caught a glimpse of a crowd of alien monsters bounding through the tunnel beyond it.

The tongue quavered beneath him, almost bucking him off. He scrabbled with his fingernails to keep a grip on the slick ramp.

The vanguard of the alien legion clawed onto the tongue after them, but then the tendon-door closed up. Pustules burst with alarming force near the monsters, blowing them out into the pit.

Uxor Principis Oralie was looking out for them, fighting the Master-Mind itself to keep them safe.

Tvorh gritted his teeth as fetid air beat into his nostrils. They picked up speed.

Around and around the outside of the esophagus they traveled.

Then a legion coming up the ramp forced a battle atop a flat portion of the tongue-ramp.

Tvorh didn't even think about the terrors before him. They looked like no Chimeras he'd ever seen, but they would die just the same.

He flung himself to his feet and dove into battle. Knives cutting, bullets flashing, STIGMOS unfurling, they drove the monsters back against the--

Tongue wall. When had the tongue formed a wall blocking further descent?

"They're coming down from above," Aoife said between rifle cracks. She was lying on the tongue, steadying her rifle against it. "Don't know how long we can hold them."

The tongue behind them rose up into a wall as well, cutting off the monsters' advance.

"Thanks, Uxor Principis," Aoife said loudly. "Think she can hear me? Um..." She rolled onto her side, planted her rifle against her shoulder, and shot over the pit, where aliens drifted on insectoid wings toward the embattled warriors.

A pustule on the wall burst, spewing out an embryonic monster at great speed. It smacked into one of the flying aliens. Both went spinning down into the pit.

The tongue shifted as if it was fighting with itself, and the tongue-wall downward disappeared. Tvorh, who'd been in combat next to it, stumbled, and then he was sliding.

Talons on forked arms slashed for his face as he rolled onto his side and parried, splashing blood and saliva everywhere. The slope of descent grew steeper as he slid, and he thrust awkwardly. His knife sank into fetid flesh. He ripped the weapon away, grunted as he slid into the wall, kicked off and shoved the monster over the side.

Bullets plunged into the tongue around him; blood spurted as his team followed him down the ramp. One of the monsters sliding after him caught up to him. He threw up an arm, and his skinsuit caught the brunt of the alien's slash.

Tvorh plunged his knife into what passed for the thing's chin, then grappled it, spinning as they slid through puddles of saliva and blood and bile. He used it as a shield to block the next alien's jab, then enhanced his muscles and shoved against it.

The two entangled hunter-killers went into the pit.

Tvorh rolled onto his back, looking upward as he slid headfirst down the ramp, and watched as the next trio of alien beasts drew in. Electrogenic tissue, he commanded his SOPHIOS.

He slapped his hand onto the tongue, painting its surface with electroplaques.

Closer...

As the alien monsters slid over the electroplaques, Tvorh had his SOPHIOS open up their ion channels. The tongue spasmed with an electric shock, flinging the monsters over the edge.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The tongue settled down just as Aoife came sliding over the electroplaques. "Nice move," she shouted.

"How much farther?"

"Not much," Eztli shouted, windmilling her arms to increase her speed and catch up with him.

Of course, that assumed they wouldn't have any more battles on the way.

They did. And that wasn't even considering the wall of terrible hunter-killer flesh as they approached the exit route to continent twenty-one.

That wall didn't count on Maga Ductrix Senrii bowling into it from behind. Hunter-killers went spinning into the pit. Clouds of flesheater bacteria wafted between naphthgel bursts.

Tvorh slid through the newly opened space, almost slipping past Senrii.

"Nope!" Senrii caught him before he could go past. "Help stop the others. Go, go, go! I got the Lifeship running. It's pure vacuum out there. Be ready to stick to the struts. Fifteen minutes to launch. Suit up, moths in!"

Even Thiyyatt, bad off though she was, did her part to prepare herself.

As they fumbled with their equipment, Senrii led them through a hallway in the flesh to a sphincter in the wall.

The aliens were hot on their heels. Everyone pushed through the sphincter.

Sound failed.

Tvorh flailed as the vacuum of space blinded him.

Somebody grabbed Tvorh's hand before he could drift into the darkness. The hand clenched his; a signal. He unfurled his nerves through the skinsuit, through her suit, and bonded with her, then blinked through Aoife's eyes.

Gotcha, she thought to him, guiding him back to the fleshy tower. It hung in the black, a dark spear stabbing toward the stars, lit by Tellus below.

The ruins of living-metal struts glinted from the lumins of their suits. Platforms still remained here and there, stuck to the skeletal residue of continent twenty-one. The rubble of continents twenty-two and twenty-three drifted above his head like an inverted ziggurat, the tower transfixing them to the mostly-intact cylinder of continent twenty-four.

Someone--Eztli, by the looks of the skinsuit--crawled down the tower to a nearby horizontal strut. Clinging to it, she pointed to a hexagonal room that stood intact maybe twenty meters some distance away and perhaps beneath them. The escape pods had to be in there.

Senrii nodded, and the crew silently crawled along the struts. Tvorh's breaths rang in his ears. He kept hold of Aoife's hand, doing his part by extruding clinging hairs within his skinsuit. They distended the malleable flesh of the clothing, allowing him to wrap the extensions around the beams while still keeping out the frigid vacuum.

Senrii's words rattled around Tvorh's head; it was quiet in there except for his breathing around the tendrils of the moth clinging to his face. She'd gotten the Lifeship connected to these struts activated. There was no going back.

In just a few minutes, every Lifeship impaled along the tower's axis would relax and detach from the Patrick Henry.

Then the Lifeships would engage in a coordinated burn toward Tellus, carrying the alien spear with them on a collision course for La Table d'Or.

And Tvorh? He'd be in an escape pod by then. Unless...

Aoife glanced back, bringing Tvorh's vision along. The outside of the tower was crawling with alien hunter-killers, and more forced their way through the sphincter every second.

Great. The entire species was vacuum-resistant, apparently.

As Tvorh watched, the first of the monsters wrapped its too-numerous limbs around the strut and climbed after them.

The crew raced as fast as they dared toward the escape pod room.

Still the hunter-killers came on.

Faster, Tvorh thought to Aoife as they shimmied along.

Senrii somehow managed to get Thiyyatt from Piotr when they swapped to a strut that was vertical compared to the main body of the Patrick Henry. Still the hunter-killers came on.

Twenty meters. Switch to horizontal, if there was such a thing in space. Shimmy. Shimmy a bit farther. They were so close to the hexagonal silvery room. From this angle, Tvorh could see the six pods, like honeycombs, hanging down from the room.

They looked so fragile...

Half-standing, half-crouching on the broken superstructures, Eztli reached the exterior portal and slapped the keypad. Nothing. The massless seating was empty. The pad was unpowered.

Eztli grabbed the massless from Senrii and inserted it, and the pad came to life. Eztli punched the strange eight digit code into the pad--

--07041776--

And the door slid open. Everyone hurried in.

There was another door.

The airlock's space door closed behind them, and the room's main door opened. Air rushed about them.

Tvorh tore off his helmet, pulled the tendrils of the moth-breather out of his throat, and gulped actual air. He wasn't the only one.

"Three minutes," Eztli said after a moment. She grabbed the massless from Senrii, then rushed to a rectangular console jutting up from the floor, in the midpoint between six circular metal trapdoors in the floor. She inserted the massless, and light burst forth. Eztli slid her fingers through the light, indicating several commands, and punched in the eight digit code.

Eztli stepped back from the console, and one of the trapdoors slid open. "Everyone inside."

"That means you, Tvorh," Senrii said, pushing him from behind again.

Tvorh glanced back at the airlock. The hellhounds would be tearing at it in moments. Senrii and Piotr had both lost their weapons, and in any case he was carrying Thiyyatt. Eztli wasn't even a Maga any longer. Aoife's guns were designed for long distance encounters, which this definitely wouldn't be. Tvorh shook his head and unsheathed his knife. "You first. I'm still armed."

Senrii growled. "Bile, kid. Go on, everyone! Get in."

Piotr took Thiyyatt back from Senrii, tilted her so she wouldn't hit her head, stepped over the opening in the floor, and drifted down. Then Eztli, then Aoife, then Senrii.

Aoife shouted in shock as something clacked against the pod. "They're shooting at us!"

Without eyes, Tvorh had no way of knowing, but a hunter-killer must have flung itself from the struts and tumbled into space to get a better angle for flinging its darts at the bottom of the pod. These things had no sense of self-preservation. They'd die by the hundreds just to kill the interlopers in their territory.

"Blood, bones, and bile. Make room for the kid," Senrii said. Tvorh's ears picked up the others shifting around within the tiny escape pod, fitting themselves into soft recliners and strapping restraining belts around their bodies.

"There are only five seats!" Aoife said.

"Don't care. Double up or something--"

"Then we'll all die on impact," Eztli said. "The belts are not designed to hold two. They will fly loose and we'll all be battered to death by one another's bodies."

Five seats. There were six of them. Tvorh was stuck on the outside. Plus, Eztli was right. You didn't play games with the occupancy of ancient life rafts, not if you wanted the inhabitants to survive.

Eztli needed to survive to convince her family to stop attacking Acerbia.

Senrii and Piotr were obviously in love, even if neither would admit it.

Tvorh wasn't even going to think about sacrificing Aoife.

Thiyyatt needed to survive to provide the genophage cure, and to learn what it meant to be a decent woman again. Plus, even if Tvorh could reconstruct the cure from his memory of their Synapsis session--and perhaps he could--he'd never be able to forgive himself for what he'd done to her.

Whether or not she'd deserved it, whether or not his rape of her mind had been the only way, Tvorh had crossed a line that he would never be able to un-cross.

Maybe like this he could redeem some part of himself, at least.

Because they needed a distraction. Without one, the hunter-killers would claw the escape pod to ribbons.

Five seats. Aoife might say Adon and Yesh had planned it this way.

He heard Aoife's frantic frown. "Get in, Tvorh!"

He didn't need to lean over the trapdoor, but he did it anyway, letting them see his face one last time. "Go," he said. "I'll hold them off."

"Tvorh--!" Aoife screamed as he slapped the console to close the door.

Two minutes.

Tvorh shoved his moth's tendrils back down his throat and fixed the helmet back on. Then he planted himself before the airlock, extending grasping hairs sheathed in a thin layer of skinsuit from his back. They grabbed onto the bulkheads and steadied him as he opened both airlock doors.

A blast of wind battered him from behind, trying to tear him free and cast him out into space, where the hunter-killers crawled along the struts like a hive of demented, murdery ants. He heard them like a blurring roar in the wind, but the vacuum was blinding. He wasn't sure, but he thought some of them tumbled off into space, probably trying to get an angle to shoot at the pod, or even to grab onto it.

I'm over here, Tvorh shouted silently, raising his blade. He extruded bioluminescent lines into his skinsuit and flickered them at the hunter-killers, trying to get their attention. Come and get me!

Tvorh breathed deeply, wishing he didn't have to spend his last moments with the tendrils of a moth-breather down his throat.

Tvorh couldn't see clearly enough to prepare. He could only wait until all at once the sound in his helmet changed, showing him a hunter-killer sailing through the evacuating wind in the airlock toward him, slashing arms outstretched.

Distraction.

Tvorh swung. So did the hunter-killer. It hit his clasping hairs, unbalancing him. He hit its throat.

It bounced back and tumbled into space, hitting one of its fellows as it did before vanishing into silence.

More came.

Tvorh was stuck in place, but he twisted and ducked, holding his ground as the air outside grew thinner and his sight failed. He planted his forgebone blade in the head of a hunter-killer, then kicked it back; he slashed and dipped and cursed as they cut through more of his hairs.

His grasp was weakening.

One minute.

Tvorh ducked and shoved his blade up into a belly, but the monster's flailing arms cut a swath through the right half of his anchoring hairs. He swung to the left side and smacked into the wall.

The blurry-sounding monster clasped the bulkhead and raised an arm for a killing blow behind Tvorh.

He spun around just in time to hear a charring hole burn through the joints of the monster's talons.

The alien reared back in surprise, and then another hole ringed by burnt flesh burrowed into its head. It fell away into the invisible black.

Someone in a bulky spacesuit hung from one hand from a bulkhead above, or behind, Tvorh. Her other hand was outstretched and holding a sleek pistol, a silent slayer, a sword of light.

Aoife.

To Tvorh, the weapon looked like a gun, if one made after the odd inorganic style common on the Patrick Henry. He couldn't see the beams of coherent light that flickered from its barrel.

But he could see their effects as the laser pulsed across the aliens' skin, tearing into them, ripping their muscles and organs, sending them back out the airlock.

Thirty seconds...

Aoife slapped the controls, and the doors slid closed. Tvorh couldn't see her face behind the helmet, but he was sure she was saying something to him.

The moment the doors closed and the vacuum pressure ceased, the rotational gravity from the ship's inner continents reasserted itself. Aoife pulled Tvorh to his feet. She grabbed his helmet and pulled him so that it touched hers.

He heard the tiny world inside the air of her helmet as she slurred her words around her moth. "A thousand will fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, but it won't come near you. I'll always make sure of it, Tvorh."

Tvorh thought his heart might break.

Aoife hurried him back to the console. She pulled a paper from her pocket, then hit several gleaming holographic lights in the air and punched in a code.

07041776.

A trapdoor to a second pod opened in the floor. Aoife shoved Tvorh in, then followed him in.

He fell into a couch and fumbled for the straps.

Aoife planted herself across from him, threw on the straps, then smacked a console in the wall. A red light turned green.

A shock of acceleration punched Tvorh back for a few short, sharp moments.

Then weightlessness returned as they shot away from the heavenwhale. The console near the door started to glow blue, dimly at first, and showed some circles. Maybe air was beginning to circulate in the pod from reserve tanks?

Aoife heaved in the seat across from Tvorh. She pulled off her helmet, yanked the moth-breather from her throat, and vomited toward the probably-transparent window at the front of the pod.

The fluid drifted in chunks and small spheres, then smacked against the wall.

Tvorh didn't say anything; he didn't move from his acceleration couch; he just breathed.

He was alive. He'd expected to go down with the ship, so to speak. Maybe it had been a silly expectation.

At the moment, he'd just wanted to earn a little bit of redemption. He'd been willing to give up his life to get it. Did that make him a fool?

Probably.

He lay in relative silence, the only sound being Aoife's dry heaves as the sensation of perpetual falling overcame her red-blooded balance. She coughed and hacked for several minutes straight, but no more globules of half-digested meals splattered the inside of the life raft.

"Puked it all up already," she moaned between breaths. "Oh, Adon." She heaved again.

Tvorh undid the belts and pushed himself upright. Aoife sounded sickly, staring up at him from her seat, her sweat-slickened ponytail drifting aimlessly about her head. "What do you think you're doing?" she moaned.

"Use my organs," Tvorh said, holding out a hand. The motion caused him to drift unexpectedly. If low-gravity was hard, zero-G was worse. "The Symbiont will help."

"Damned alien poison," she said, but she reached for her straps. Inside her slightly bulky gloves, her fingers trembled. "I can't get them unlatched. Help me."

Tvorh did. He pulled off the latches.

"And the gloves."

Tvorh frowned--she didn't need to remove them; he could push nerves straight through her clothes, as he'd done on the struts--but he loosened the buckles attaching her gloves to her arms and freed her fingers.

They were so slender, so pretty, even to gray echolocation. How had Tvorh never noticed before?

"And the rest," she said.

"I--what?"

Aoife shook her head, making her ponytail lash like a lazy whip. "I'm gross and sweaty and I probably look like a prune underneath all of this. I want out."

"But--"

"We're in a rickety liferaft halfway between heavens and Tellus. If we spring a leak, we're both dead. With or without a suit, either the vacuum will get us or reentry will."

Pleasant thought.

"So help me out."

His own hands trembling so hard he might lose his grip, Tvorh removed the pieces of her suit one by one. He might have no eyes, but he could still hear the shape of the bare skin of her legs, her arms; her stomach.

The flimsy cloth of her brassiere and panties. She was slender and perfect.

Aoife held back only a packet of water to rinse her mouth out with. Tvorh smacked open a small locker and crammed the pieces of the suit inside. They wouldn't want them rattling around the compartment during reentry, and it gave him something to do that didn't involve ogling Aoife. It was a quick job, though, and when he turned back to her, she was still drifting in the middle of the pod in all of her half-naked glory.

He'd seen her before in a novice's golden strips and sweeps of cloth, which probably had only covered her a bit more than she was covered now. Somehow, sweaty, tired, disheveled Aoife in her simple undergarments seemed even more beautiful than the golden girl.

She dropped the empty water packet and held out her hand. Tvorh took it and bound his nervous system to hers. And his circulatory system. And his respiratory system.

Tvorh reached out some grasping hair toward one of the couches, and they took hold on the surface. They sank onto it, sitting on its edge next to one another, sharing their organs, content in silence.

Mostly. After a few minutes, Aoife let out a little moan. Was her hand less clammy? Or was Tvorh's more clammy?

No. She was definitely feeling better. Her free hand drifted toward his knee. He felt the gentle scrape of one of her nails through his skinsuit.

Would she be able to sense his nervousness through their bond? Tvorh avoided a nervous giggle and felt quite proud of that. "When we get back, I'm grabbing an autoreader and a good book, curling up in bed, and listening until I fall asleep for a week."

Aoife's hand firmed on Tvorh's knee, and he almost yelped. "In bed, sure," she said. "Sleeping, no way." That hand shoved him down to the couch. "When we get back down there, Tvorh, I'm going to drag you into my room and do things to you that no unmarried Adonist girl should ever do to a man."

"Sorry?" Tvorh squeaked. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

Aoife loomed over him, beautiful and terrifying and more enticing than Thiyyatt in a field of crushed lavender. How he wished he could see her.

She snarled hungrily, then pushed down against him, catching his lips with hers. The little world of the escape pod fell away, and Tvorh surrendered to the kiss.

Aoife licked and nibbled, growled and teased. Her tongue swept delightfully across the days-old stubble beneath his lower lip. "I'm going to have you screaming my name," she said through clenched teeth between wild kisses. "I'm going to have you--"

"Unmarried?" Tvorh gasped.

She stopped, peering at him. Her heart pounded between their linked palms--or was that his heart? "Don't worry about that," she said. Her free hand pressed his hip down against the couch. "I'll explain later."

She swung a leg over him, straddled him.

Tvorh wanted this so badly. He wanted her. He wanted to touch and taste every inch of her body. He wanted to stroke and tickle her in the worst way.

The same way she was stroking and tickling him as she gyrated atop him. The skinsuit transmitted the sensation as if it wasn't even there.

But he could tell that she was nervous. There was some part of her holding back, even as she arched her back and ran her free hand up her belly toward her chest. "Aoife," Tvorh managed to say. "You're Adonist." Her gyrations stopped and she looked down at him. "And that's important to you. So... please. Explain."

Her whole demeanor changed. The arch of her back became a bow. Her upward-pressing lips curled tight with dismay. "It's just an Adonist thing," she said, her voice quiet. "Girls are only supposed to sleep with their husbands."

"Oh. That's all?"

Her felt her tense with surprise. "What do you mean, 'That's all?'"

"It's a Gens Nethress thing, too. It's why Gens Nethress doesn't take temporary Uxori from the Sodality, only full wives."

"Oh," Aoife said, looking and feeling thoughtful.

"Some of the other Gentes do it, too. A lot of them."

"Yeah... maybe I didn't learn too much about the other Gentes," Aoife said. A flush of blood and heat tickled Tvorh through the skinsuit over his still-straddled groin. Embarrassment? "You know, what with being an acolyte in Acerbia. Nxtlu territory."

"Not any more."

"Thanks to you." She smiled nervously.

"And you."

So... what was Tvorh supposed to do with this beautiful girl half-ready to tear his clothes off and half-worried about her religion? Could the obvious answer be the right one?

He could give it a try, at least. Tvorh licked his lips. "You know, we could."

"Could what?"

"Could, um."

Here went nothing.

"Could get married."

Aoife drew in a sharp hiss of breath.

"I mean, I love you. I really do, Aoife. And your religion is so important to you, I know. You'd never forgive me if I... uh. If we..."

"You're joking."

"Of course not," Tvorh protested. "I'm serious. We could get married. And then we could. Uh."

Aoife shook her head. "No."

Tvorh's heart fell. He hadn't even realized how much he'd set it on her saying yes. "No? You don't want to--"

"No. You're not getting away with proposing like that." Aoife shivered, a motion that obviously had nothing to do with the temperature, and then painstakingly un-straddled Tvorh.

Oh, fathers. His groin felt like it would burst right out of his skinsuit.

"No, when we get down there, you're going to shower the blood and guts off. And so am I, for that matter." Aoife drifted down to the couch and sat next to him, still holding his hand. "Then you're going to treat me to an unbelievable dinner, the sort of meal fit for a Ductrix."

"Okay?" Tvorh said, befuddled.

"Then you're going to propose. And then I'm going to say yes." Aoife leaned down. Tvorh might not have been able to look into her eyes, yet somehow their gazes met. "Because this whole thing has me terrified."

Well, that was a bucket of cold water. But since he was still linked with Aoife, Tvorh understood what she meant. "Eight months."

"Eight months," Aoife agreed.

Eight months to live. After that, who knew? They had to live while they could and love while they could. They might not be here in a year.

"Here, Tvorh. Take my eyes."

She was probably recovered enough that sharing her eyesight wouldn't stress her body. He extended the bond to vision. The bottom--if that was the right word to use when looking at a thing floating in space--of the lifeboat was a clear material.

Tvorh hardly noticed that it was splattered with vomit. Tellus glowed beneath them, a bright green-and-blue ball in the empty ether. There were no words to describe the sight.

"On second thought," Aoife whispered, squeezing his hand, "I'll give you a preliminary yes now."

Tvorh chuckled and returned the squeeze. "Just tell me one thing."

"Maybe."

"One a scale of one to dead, how much trouble are you going to be in when Thiyyatt realizes you stole her sword of light?"

It was Aoife's turn to chuckle. "I didn't steal it. I borrowed it."

"Yeah. You stole it."

Aoife rolled her eyes, an odd gesture to experience through their bond. "Tvorh. I borrowed it. She gave it to me and told me to help you." She giggled. "That's one command from her I don't mind following."

Tvorh fell silent as they fell toward Tellus.