I tremble, afraid to envision it. Though I know some pilots and jumpers do it jacked in, I always dismissed it as a kink. March doesn’t need wetware, though. I find myself unable to resist the mental images, our bodies straining as he saturates my senses completely, no sense of self, drowning in mutual pleasure.

“Yes.”

I seek his mouth in the artificial darkness, finding it first with my fingertips. His lips part, a flicker of heat as he licks my skin. And I replace my hand with my lips, starving for him. This time I’m the aggressor, nuzzling the tenderness of his mouth to taste him, explore the texture of a rough velvet tongue, the smooth bone of his teeth. His whiskers scrape my skin, contrasting to the softness of our mouths. I want to crawl inside him, devour him.

Can’t remember feeling this way before.

With a muffled groan, he rolls me beneath him, and I know a moment of pure euphoria. He can’t resist, no matter what he said about it being too soon. I want everything he described, everything—

Shakes.

So hard we tumble from the bunk and hit the floor, hard. March is good, but we’re not even having sex yet, so I don’t think I can claim the earth moved. Of all the Mary-sucking luck. I can’t get my breath for a variety of reasons. He landed on top of me, and…I think he broke my rib.

“Shit, you okay?” he asks, crawling off me.

The ship’s alarm sounds on cue.

CHAPTER 44

Lucky we aren’t scrambling to get dressed as we stumble into the corridor.

The Folly listing like this can mean only one thing, and we take another hit as the four of us intersect in the hub. The bombardment continues. I smell something burning, and Dina looks…panicked. Never seen that expression before, so whatever’s gone wrong, she can’t fix it.

Shit.

“We’ve got a breach,” she says, breathless. “Cruised too close to New Terra, and now their Satellite Defense Installation is all over us. No surprise, we’re on the shit list. Only thing we can do now is try to sneak into the atmosphere with the shuttle.”

“Why didn’t someone wake me before we got in range?” March growls. “I didn’t plan on coming up to the front door and knocking!”

“You didn’t tell us to, you brainless hump.” Dina glares at us both. “Besides, you’re the one who left it on autopilot to go roll around with Jax.”

“The only rolling came when we fell off the bed.” That’s probably an unnecessary correction, but trivia keeps me calm.

“There is no time for this,” Doc says. “I suggest we get to the shuttle immediately.”

To think I could still be on Gehenna, wiping baby spit off my shoulder. I spare a thought for Adele and Domina, Mattin and Lleela, and for my lovely glastique flat. I want to go back; it’s home. I want to make love with March there, so it feels like we’re flying.

First we have to live through this, however.

Doc’s logic can’t be argued, so March answers, “Get anything you need from quarters, only necessities, and meet back in two minutes. The shuttle’s leaving in three. Move, people.”

We spring into motion. In my case I’m heading to quarters to grab a change of clothes and my PA. I just unpacked, dammit. It’s hard to tell what I’ve got, but I cram it all in the bag and move down the hall at a dead run. When I reach the hold, I see Dina waiting. She’s got the doors open, and I regard the boxy little vessel dubiously.

“How the hell is this thing going to get us to the surface under fire?”

“It won’t be fired on,” she assures me. “I can trick out the energy readings so our signal will be lost amid the big boom the Folly’s going to make. Just got to time it right.”

“If you say so.” I climb aboard and buckle myself into the second row of seats.

She follows, but she gets in front, choosing the copilot’s chair. Better to make the techno-mojo, I suppose. My hands feel like I’ve been squeezing squid, and my stomach keeps trying to push out my throat. If I hate terrestrial driving, then I hate shoe boxes like this ten times more. A kid on a scooter could take us out, let alone the kind of damage those SDIs are dealing.

March and Doc arrive simultaneously, although the geneticist frets as he clambers in beside me. “I hope I retrieved all my data. Got the Mareq samples…but I’ve discovered some unexpected links since I’ve been studying your most recent scans—”

“Shut up and strap in.” Nice to know March doesn’t reserve his charm for me alone.

“Yes, of course.” Doc piles his things at his feet and complies as the larger ship feels like it’s shaking to pieces around us.

“Life support’s online. We’ve got maybe two hours before the air starts to go bad,” Dina tells us, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about.

“Get the loading doors open, Dina. We’re going for a ride.” I’m disgusted to detect a note of pure exhilaration in March’s voice.

Swear to Mary, he thrives on adversity, and if that’s the case, no wonder he wants me around. Where I used to be charmed, everything I touched turned to gold; since Matins IV, it’s like I stepped through a witching mirror to the other side. But hey, at least March enjoys my jinx, right?

“Sure thing, boss.”

As the doors swing open, I decide there’s nothing scarier than seeing space with just a few centimeters of poly-metal alloy between you and horrible asphyxiation. However, there’s a bright side. If we wind up out there, we’ll only have about ten seconds to feel sorry for ourselves.

“I give the poor girl thirty seconds,” Dina says, hushed, like someone’s dying.

At first I think she’s talking about me, but then we almost seem to drift off the Folly. March uses power sparingly, and I glimpse the first hint of what Dina meant. With hull splintered, huge hunks of metal adrift, she looks like she’s about to break in two. Yet the SDI fires with the relentless precision of a machine-driven attack.

I can’t watch, so I squeeze my eyes shut. It feels like we’re moving too slow; any minute the SDI could figure out that we’re not wreckage. But maybe that’s the key here, just as it is in nature. In my survival training, we learned never to run from a predator; it just makes it think you’re something that should be chased.

At least my ribs stopped hurting—nothing like adrenaline to cure what ails you.

“Now,” Dina orders. “She’s going to pieces. Head for the surface!”

In such a small craft I feel the speed especially in my stomach, and I become aware of Doc, gray-faced and sweating beside me. He lied to me, so why I should I care if he looks worse than I feel? But we’re a team, whether I like it or not. Wordlessly I offer my hand, and he squeezes it as if he wants to make blood shoot out my fingertips.

We come screaming into the atmosphere like an angry comet. Did we leave a trail? Is anyone coming behind us going to be able to tell what happened? Any minute I expect the shuttle to shake apart, but March manages amid cursing that does Mair proud.

Dina monitors panels and sensors, muttering suggestions. “Ease up, dammit. You’re going to burn out the stabilizers, and I don’t think we want to test impact resistance in this thing.”

He spares her a look. Not just a look, the look. “You want to fly this?”

Huh, I’m not the only one who gets that.

“No, but just remember—”

Oh, that noise can’t be good.

“Told you to ease up.” She sounds so smug, considering that the shuttle wobbles like it wants to start spinning and not stop until we collide, hard, with the ground.

Although I’m not an expert, I tend to prefer that doesn’t happen. They bicker back and forth while Doc crushes the shit out of my hand. Maybe I believe too much in March, but I don’t think we’re going to crash. Sure enough, even with the unsteady shimmy, side-to-side stir-fry action, he manages to slow the shuttle, skimming over the ground as he looks for a place to land.

March puts us down just before the stabilizers crackle for the last time. Doc staggers out as soon as the doors open, falls onto his hands and knees. I turn away so I don’t have to see him getting sick. My stomach still feels shaky, and that’s not helping. I step away, and then scrape a palm over my face. Time to take stock.

We’re in the middle of a field.

If Old Terra is a ghetto world, an urban sprawl stripped of natural resources, then New Terra is its farm colony. Cities here are few and far between. I lived in New Boston, where my parents styled themselves “society,” but this infinite expanse of golden grain boasts no landmarks. Overhead, the sky looms heavy and gray, indifferent, but the wind smells of damp earth and growing things, an echo of my childhood clear as a phantom with twin plaits and a handful of sweets.

“So where are we?” Dina asks. To my vast exasperation, they all regard me with expectant expressions, even March, like I should be able to pinpoint our location via some native global positioning system.

“New Terra.”

Doc straightens, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I believe she meant more specifically, Sirantha.”

No shit? The man really has a penchant for stating the obvious. That’s the trouble with geniuses; most of them seem to lack anything like a sense of humor, so they’re forever “clarifying” for other people when they were, in fact, being smart-asses.

“You know it’s been like sixteen years since I’ve been here, right? And I wasn’t a world traveler before I signed with the Corp, not that there’s too much to see.” I wave a hand at the vegetation, which, thanks to the wind, seems to wave back. “But it’s definitely a Conglomerate world. The Corp has their home office here.”

“Well,” March says, “since we can’t fly the shuttle, we need to get some distance from it. I don’t think we want to be found here if someone comes looking.”

That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard. We have gray men and bounty hunters looking for us. Neither will stop until they bring us in, the former for order and honor, the latter for the payday. Now that we’re stranded in enemy territory, shit’s only going to get harder. March glances at me, smiling. He really does love this.

Dina shrugs. “If we’re going, let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”

I sling my bag over my shoulder while Doc fidgets with various bits of gear. What he took to be essential seems like a lot more than what the rest of us grabbed.

My stomach growls. Can’t remember when I ate last. Jump-travel has a way of lagging the shit out of your biosystems. “Did anyone think to snag some rations?”

“I’ve got a week’s worth of paste.” March doesn’t look delighted by the prospect, though, and he’s the survival specialist.

“Perfect,” Saul says, all loaded up. Good thing he’s strong; he’ll need to be. “It could always be worse, hm?” he adds, sounding determinedly cheerful.

Nobody responds to that, but before we walk ten meters, it starts to rain.

CHAPTER 45