“What do you see?” asked the captain, her lips close to my ear and her breath so warm on my cheek it almost burned.
It felt a whole lot like a trick question. But I wasn’t smart enough to have a trick answer. “The planet?”
“And if I say I see something else, which of us is the dreamer?”
“You’re going to say it’s me, aren’t you?”
One of her hands slipped to my waist, and the other reached out past me to point with a slender artisan’s finger at the skyscape. “What you see there,” she said, “is nothing but a congregation of vapors.”
“It’s a gas giant. It’s vapors all the way down.”
“To a surfacer, perhaps. But that’s because you’ve only seen the stars with your eyes.”
This wasn’t making her sound any less like a dreamer. And I decided to risk pointing that out. “Whereas you’ve seen them with, what, your soul?”
Instead of a reply, she guided my arm downwards and my fingertips through the slit in her skirt to her thigh, where warm flesh gave way to ivory and metal and neuro-integrated circuitry. “I’ve seen them with blood. And with bone. I’ve seen them in the burning-freezing-burning of my skin as my boat fell out of the heavens. I’ve seen them in the crush of twenty atmospheres against my skull and the gut-deep twist of a gravity we never evolved for. I’ve seen them in the snatching limbs and scything jaws of the Leviathans themselves. That’s how I see the stars. Call it a dream if you like, but it’s for sure awakingdream. A true dream.”
I had enough of my schoolmistress’s instincts to know sophistry when I heard it. But right then, with her hands one at my hip and one at my wrist and mine one on her thigh and one on the star-cold viewing window, I wasn’t really in a formal debate headspace.
If there’s one thing I want, more than anything else, for you to understand about A—my captain, my alpha, my primaryand my principal—it’s that when you were close to her, she defined reality. The whole crew felt it, with only Locke, who had long ago sold their mind and heart to Olympus Extraction State, and Q, whose ways were eternally her own, seeming immune. Under the captain’s gaze her will was all the world and everything that could be seen or touched or felt outside of it was a pasteboard mask.
Which was why, instead of telling her that she was playing semantic games, I turned my face so that my lips were as close to hers as they could come without getting me immediately flogged for insubordination and whispered, “Show me.”
Okay, it waspartlywhy. But also it had been a weird day and I react to weird days in one of two ways. Believe it or not, this was the healthier one.
“You’ll see soon enough,” she replied. “Contact in a few hours. Then the hunt begins.”
She knew what I meant. You didn’t touch somebody like that and then talk about seeing with your body instead of your eyes if you didn’t, on some level, know what you were doing. I brushed my fingertips lightly along the curve of her leg, moving away from the biomechanical connection in part out of respect and in part because it was, in general, the more interesting direction. “Show me,” I repeated.
“If I’d wanted a ship’s whore I’d have hired one on Europa.”
Looking back, I’m still not sure if this was a trick. Part of the captain’s gift was that she so easily guided you to wanting what she needed you to want. I don’t even necessarily think she did it consciously. Some people have an instinct for swaying others, and if they follow their calling they become preachers or executives or ship’s captains. They save or ruin lives.
“Show me,” I said for the third time. I privately promised myself it would be the last because there was a fine line between flirting and begging and I was already tripping hard over it.
Fortunately—short term fortunately, long term is something else—I didn’t need to test that promise. Apparently feeling that I’d had my chance to back out, she lowered her faceto my neck and whispered against my skin. “It starts soft,” she said, “but searing.” And her breath on my neck was sparks and solar wind. “The atmosphere is thin and so there’s nothing between you”—her lips wereso closeto me now, close but not quite touching—“and the hateful glare of Sol.”
Normally, this was where I’d have been closing my eyes, but the Jovian worldscape below me was too entrancing.
“It’s here the elveses live,” she went on, “where they come sharp and sudden”—she brought a hand to my neck and scratched me, sharp and sudden—“and deadly.” Her tongue traced a line across the fading marks. “The beasts you’ll find here are old and close to dying, gasping for thin air and catching lightning in their mouths where they can.”
There were her hands again, there were her fingernails digging into my skin.
“Still, their oil sells. Less well, but it sells. The real prizes lie deeper.” In illustration, the hand at my hip wandered downwards, her fingers slipping beneath my waistband. “It grows colder as you go, until the clouds gather and it rains ammonia, and the pressure”—she pressed firmly down, her fingers tracing the line between my hip and my thigh—“builds until it’s of a piece with the air of Old Earth.”
And although it was a dream, it was a waking dream. My eyes were open but I could still see, as clear as if I’d dropped a tab of Lysergix™(Property of Ovda Recreational Hallucinogenics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aphrodite Pharma State), the turbulent layers of the Jovian atmosphere peeling back before me like some bizarre celestial striptease.
“But thereisno surface,” she went on, so close that I could feel the words on her lips. “Nothisorthat, nohereorthere. Just the slow imperceptible shift”—and again she echoed it with her body, the slightest of changes in her touch sending new and taunting sensations through me, a promise of more and deeper and stranger and darker. More clouded and more secret.
In a spirit of reciprocity I wasn’t always inclined to, I moved my own hand along her thigh, but she caught it and twisted itand pinned it behind my back in a way that stung with just the right edge of pain.
“As you descend,” she said into my skin, “there are no borders or boundaries, butcrossways. There’s barriers there all right. Harsh and violent boundaries.” She turned my wrist just a shade farther and I couldn’t quite stifle a sigh. “Red to white to red, and the great winds catch in the middle and churn and spin.”
She turned me, pressing my back to the window. And with both my wrists pinned to my chest she leaned close and spoke with her lips an atom’s breadth from mine. “And now,” she half whispered, half growled, “we’re in the real Jupiter. And the beasts here are murderous and majestic.”
I’d given up struggling or even playing at struggle. There was something about the captain that demanded submission, and I was more than happy to meet her demands.
“Here”—her fingertips eased inside me—“is where it rains diamonds. Here”—her eyes met mine just for a moment—“is where the hunt begins. Where we pierce the skies”—and I am pierced by pleasure and surrender and the unthinkable monomaniacal power of her—“where it grows hotter and denser and Wyrms flock like sparrows. Where Behemoths swim on a sea with no surface.”
