Marc looked at her and grinned. “Very sexy.” No intercom distortion at all.
“When we get back we should start a fetish sex club.”
< It’s been done. So many, many times.
Kara clipped Marc’s lifeline to the SUT. “Let’s go.”
“You’re still sure?” Marc asked. "What if netherspace doesn’t like you?”
“If there’s a problem Ishmael will get me out of there.”
> Open the doors. If Ishmael knew how terrified she was, would he still do it?
The doors slid open.
< You’ll be fine, Kara. Merest hint of danger and you’re out of there.
Kara stepped into the void to stare at, to be one with netherspace.
It was so much more than the view on a screen. The colours more intense, plenty she’d never seen before, not even in the most technicoloured dreams. Many had a three-dimensional shape.
Colours at war around her. Kara knowing this wasn’t what netherspace was, only how her mind interpreted it. She stood in the open airlock, Marc by her side, his face ecstatic. Kara fixed their safety lines and leaned away from the hull, as if crewing a yacht.
And then it hit her from the soles of her feet up, from the top of her head down, like the greatest punch in the gut she’d ever known, one almighty clout to her arse: the sheer overpowering energy of the reality called netherspace... and how fucking insignificant she was.
Not.
Never.
Kara Jones was loved (maybe) and loved in return (almost for sure). Kara Jones had a mission and Kara Jones would complete it. Kara Jones would bring her people home. None of that was insignificant and fucking netherspace should stop being so bloody full of itself.
Then she realised she was thinking of netherspace as an intelligent thing, like Marc seemed to, and began to laugh.
< That’s better.
> I had a moment.
< Any consolation, me too. I mean, it’s pretty fucking awesome up close.
> Never heard you swear before.
< Never fucking needed to.
A colour moved towards them. A colour she’d never seen before in her life, that made her feel giddy and elated.
“It’s one of the good ones,” Marc said over the suit intercom.
Kara felt it snuffle around her, like a well-fed tigress perhaps wanting to play. She fought back the instinctive panic and tried thinking hello, there’s a good girl, at it... no, better to think how much she liked it. The colour went away.
I’m in netherspace and just said hi to a good entity. Not bad for a sniper/assassin.
“Are all the colours entities?” she asked Marc.
“Only the ones that make you feel funny.”
Kara concentrated on trying to sense Tatia’s trail. It was there but still faint.
“Seems to me,” Marc said, “you should concentrate on what made the bond between her and you special.”
Kara knew exactly what he meant.
* * *
Returning home from the Cancri planet, the SUT quiet after the n-space suicide of an ageing engineer. Kara in her cabin, opening the door to see Tatia with a question in her eyes. And her old AI, who’d died in the Science Museum basement in Exhibition Road, asking if this is wise, does Kara know what she’s doing?
Damn right she does: taking a beautiful, tawny blonde to her bed. Not because said blonde has been through hell and needs to feel human, needs the release. It is not therapy. It is what Kara wants because Tatia is beautiful and Kara is desperate to know, to taste and own her body...
... but so confused...
< Relax. I have the memory set.
Yes. The first time an explosion of want and need. The second lasted so very much, so languorously much longer. It wasn’t a matter of what they did to each other. But what they did together. Afterwards nestled together, breathing each other’s breath while exchanging secrets.
“Marc turned me down,” Tatia had said.
“I’m second best?” Kara teased.
“Never. Just different. I thought you and him?”
“Not possible,” Kara had said firmly. “Did he say why?”
“Wanted more than a quick fuck.”
“Man’s a fool.” She didn’t say that was what Marc had with Henk the medic.
“I love your mouth.”
“My tongue’s jealous.”
“No need. It works so hard.”
They both giggled. The usual intimate whispers that lovers have enjoyed forever...
... and it was that intimacy, Kara realised as she floated in netherspace, that had formed the bond between them, more than all the kissing and fucking. She would find Tatia not because she was great in bed. Not because Kara always brought her people home... or tried really, really hard to do so. But because Kara genuinely cared for Tatia. Loved her as a person, an individual. They’d probably never have sex together again – Greenaway would so not approve – but they would always be the closest of friends. Almost like... sisters? Uh, oh, this is getting weird, Kara thought and the next moment found Tatia’s trail, like a luminous dotted line and stronger than ever.
< Got it. Go back inside.
It wasn’t always so easy. Sometimes Kara had to wait several minutes before the trail was strong enough in her mind for Ishmael to dead reckon their way through what – Kara was convinced – was the archetype of every hell ever imagined. Once she tried to imagine the sequence, from empathy to AI to star drive. All she got was interacting energy fields, and that didn’t help.
Not even a sense of motion.
Except when it felt like she was falling towards the trail. But that was her, not the ship. Sometimes it felt like she was falling away. Human brain forever attempting to interpret, to make sense of a situation beyond understanding. Or she felt the trail go up, move away at an angle that seemed impossible, as Ishmael begged Kara and Marc to get back inside the SUT, close the outer door, now.
They had arrived somewhere Tatia was. Or had been.
It was a nasty little planet, even from space. An angry purple, grey clouds and a few black oceans. They landed in what looked like a swamp.
< Atmosphere
