Winter Song (41 page)

    "Neither side is properly leeward," Loki said, "but I'll open the one away from Gamasol, as it's the more powerful star." The shutter slid up, and the edges of the corona slid past the side window, streamers of ice boiling in the vacuum, forming eerie, spectral banners.

    "The comet should have a name," Karl said. "It's not just a comet any longer."

    "
Fenris
." The name was two distinct syllables, the voice coming from behind Karl. He turned and stared at Ragnar, who was sitting, propped up by Coeo, of all people. The former Gothi looked old, and worn to only the nub of the once-vital man he'd been until recently. One side of his face was frozen into immobility.

    "The destroyer of worlds?" Bera's scepticism was obvious in her voice.

    "It might be," Arnbjorn said. "We hope not, but…"

    "It's a risk," Karl agreed. "But if we do nothing, your people will slowly die. If we can add a decade or so to the colony's time, it may allow your people and Coeo's time to negotiate some sort of peace settlement. Because whether or not I'm there," Karl added, "you need to have reached a settlement to avoid dragging those who answer the beacon into one side or the other of a dirty little local war."

    "I agree," Ragnar said. His speech was slow and hesitant, but it was already stronger than the time he'd spoken before. But each sentence was still molasses slow, each syllable separated by silent effort before and after it. "What is the troll-speak for 'we want peace', utlander?" His mouth formed a twisted half-grin as he said the last word.

    Karl didn't say what he was thinking. Decades, perhaps even centuries will have to pass before your great-great-grandchildren and those of the adapted men will be able to fully trust each other – if ever. Still, at least it's a start. Instead he said, "Nice to see you've not given up the habit of living." Oddly enough, Karl meant it. The old man had tried to kill him and hunted him across half a world. But he had also twice saved Karl's life, and the crucible of vacuum all around them had burnt off much of what had happened below.

    Ragnar tried to speak, but his words were now too slurred to understand. Arnbjorn hushed him. "Rest, Pappi, you've done enough, mighty warrior." As if obeying him, Ragnar closed his eyes, and his head slid sideways.

    Karl covered Bera's hand, which still rested on his shoulder, with his opposite hand. "I don't know quite how to say this–"

    "Try opening your mouth," Bera said, and laughed. She sobered. "What?"

    "I'd quite like to get things in order," Karl said. "I'm sure that everything will be all right, but just in case anything goes wrong… thank you. I mean it."

    Bera's eyes widened. "You're not sure that this will work, are you?"

    "I'm sure it will," Karl said, thinking, If you offered me odds of a thousand to one, I'd consider them generous. But he had to appear confident, or risk panic.

    "What about your family?" Bera said. "Karla and Lisane and Jarl? All this way, and you change your mind?"

    "Do you know," Karl said, swallowing the emotion that was threatening to overcome him, "I can barely remember their faces."

    "Still," Bera said. "To risk never seeing them again, for what – a world of strangers who won't thank you?"

    Karl shrugged. "I'm not doing it for their thanks."

    "Why, then?"

    Karl didn't answer straight away. He tried to find words that didn't sound pompous, but finally gave up worrying.

    "Because it's right," he said. "And I'm not prepared to abandon you. This mad idea will probably kill us all, but if I do nothing the odds are immeasurably greater that you'll die, and I'm not going to let that happen."

    They were silent, alone with their thoughts.

    Bera said, "If we're putting things in order, I have something to say as well." She looked down, licked her lips, then blurted, "Do you know, that I'm actually a virgin?" Karl was silent, unsure of her point. "I've had sex, but no man has ever made love to me."

    "I suppose not." Karl touched her cheek.

    She pressed her face against his hand. "I'd like… I… there's one man, I really, really want…"

    Karl looked across, but the others were preoccupied. He leaned toward Bera, who lifted her chin. He kissed her. She closed her eyes and kissed him back, and slid her arms around his neck.

    Moving them was easy in zero-gravity – he kicked off from a chair and drifted through the doorway, into the corridor. He slid a hand under her blouse, and ran his fingers up her spine.

    Bera groaned, and arched her back so that she pressed into him, changing their axis of rotation. Karl ended the kiss, and as they drifted, moved down to her chin, then her cheek, tracing a line of little kisses so minute that they barely touched her skin for more than a micro-second, down the side of her neck and into her clavicle. She pulled open her blouse and cupping her breast pushed the nipple toward him. Karl traced the areola with his tongue, swirling around and around in a clockwise direction.

    Bera gripped his ear and between moans ground out, "I wish… that you'd… grow… some bloody hair… to hold on to." She scraped her nails down his back, pushing her hands away.

    Karl kicked against a wall, and shoved them into a room off the corridor. It was the room in which Bera had stacked her impromptu nest of items for use on the ground.

    As they sailed slowly toward the pile of objects, he lifted her up so that his face was pressed against the base of her breasts, and then moved down her stomach, still tracing the line of kisses, sliding his hands rhythmically up and down her back.

    Bera pushed down her leggings, and Karl slid them to around her ankles. With a kick she removed first one foot, then the other, the motion sending her and Karl spinning across the room. As they were about to hit the wall, Karl put out a hand to absorb the impact, and they hovered in mid-air, rotating around an axis that ran down an invisible line between them. Karl's tongue continued to kiss Bera's stomach, and then he moved lower, rubbing his lower lip against her bush.

    She pushed his head down, and Karl's lower lip felt moistness. Bera groaned and parted her legs, and his tongue entered her, tasting her saltiness, feeling the richness of her fill his nostrils. She ground against his face, beginning to buck and writhe, sending them back across the room, end over end. Just as her shivers grew to spasms Karl stopped and eeled up the length of her body, her hands tearing off his furs as he did so, so that he too was naked.

    He slid into her, felt her quiver as he did so, and gripping a bracket that had once held a shelf, thrust long and hard and slow, feeling her react in time. He gasped, "I can… have the nanophytes–" Bera put a finger to his lips and he was silent.

    "Don't hold back," she said, then let out a long, low moan and wriggled to let him in deeper. She lifted her bottom so that he could cup her buttocks, and then, still clutching the bracket, he drove with long, slow thrusts, trying to blank his mind so that he wouldn't climax too early. Bera raked his back with her nails and whimpered, and Karl felt his control begin to fail as he pumped harder and harder and he lost himself in her, and in the moment.

    They lay against one another. He could feel her heart fluttering like a butterfly. He stroked her back, breathed in the scent of their sex, and wished that they never had to move, that it never had to end.

    But of course, it had to.

    "We should go back," Bera said. "They'll miss us."

    "Mmm," Karl replied, knowing it was true. He gathered his clothes.

    They fell silent, alone with their thoughts.

    Karl felt the gentlest tug of gravity. "It's started."

TWENTY-TWO

Afterward – as they prepared to blow Fenris to pieces – Karl was to think of the nineteen-day voyage as the Age of Waiting. That he had time to spend together with Bera, with little else to do but make love and get to know one another, was the only good thing to come out of it.

    Karl was still suffused with a post-coital glow, and halfway through pulling his clothes on when the W
inter
Song
shoved its colossal cargo toward Isheimur. The faint pull of gravity was no more than a ghost child's tug on the sleeve but still, they drifted to the floor, Karl spinning so that he landed feet first, Bera in an untidy heap. "We're on our way." Karl felt the need to say something, no matter how self-evident.

    Bera nodded, flashing him a fleeting smile, dressing with more speed than tidiness.

    Walking hand-in-hand onto the bridge with the curious bouncing gait that low gravity induced, Karl was sure that the others would notice a difference somehow, but on one side of the bridge Coeo stared into the steam boiling off the comet, while on the other Arnbjorn and Orn fussed over the still-prone Ragnar. All of them in their own way looked too preoccupied to even notice the lovers' absence.

    Karl took his seat and looked around the bridge. Everything looked the same as before, yet subtly different. It's you that's changed. "Loki, give the others the timetable – as we discussed," he said aloud. That was their personal code for,
Don't give them any bad news.

    "Our journey will last nineteen standard days," Loki said, voice crackling over the antique speakers. "The first nine and a third days we'll accelerate at a hundredth of a standard gravity, which is about half-thrust. That's as much as we think the engines will take."

    "Basically," Karl interrupted, "we're using the W
inter
Song
as a million-tonne tugboat. The thing's built like a tractor anyway." He added, in an aside to Coeo, "I'll explain concepts like tugboats and tractors later."

    "No need," Coeo answered, indicating the speaker. "I'm sure that I can learn from our invisible friend in the box."

    "What happens at the end of nine days?" Arnbjorn said.

    "We spend two hours manoeuvring around to the other side of Fenris, where we'll decelerate at the same rate for another nine and a third days, so that when we get to within a couple of hundred thousand kilometres of Isheimur, we've reverted to our current velocity."

    "The faster we go, the sooner we get there," Karl said. "But the harder we'll hit – and the greater the energy that we'll release in the form of an explosion. Imagine the biggest blast you've ever seen, and multiply it by…" Karl shrugged. "I have no idea of what number to magnify it by – but if we release too much energy…"

    "Boom?" Bera said.

    "Boom," Karl agreed. "So we need to slow down. We could have shaved six days off the journey, but then we'd go in so hard and so fast that the debris thrown up by the blast would kill half the species on the planet."

    "Why couldn't we accelerate at full thrust?" Arnbjorn said. "We could be home in half the time, then?"

    "Not so," Loki said. "We would still need to decelerate, and while it would knock four days off the voyage, there is an eighty-six per cent probability that the engines would overheat."

    "If you're worried about Ragnar's condition," Karl said, "Loki will give you the formula to synthesise anticoagulants in the nanoforge." He waved at the other seats. "So given that we have a few weeks to go, you might as well make yourselves comfortable, lady and gentlemen."

    Karl had Loki activate a counter on the monitor screen, one whose red digits showed the four hundred and seventy-seven hours, eighteen minutes and rapidly decreasing seconds to planetfall.

    Only later would Karl realise what a mistake that was.

    Soon after starting, Orn said, "I'll go and see what drugs I can get out of this nanoforge to help treat Ragnar."

    Arnbjorn had helped Ragnar to a seat, and as Orn left, the younger man looked up. "Looks like Orn's got a new toy," he said with a grin. "You won't see him for the rest of the voyage."

    On the second day with time already hanging heavy, Karl drew up a watch, ensuring that he and Bera were on different shifts. "We still get to spend eight hours a day together off-duty," he said to her disappointed look, although she voiced no complaint. "You'll be on midnight to eight, the first half with Ragnar, the second with Coeo. Though time's nearly meaningless on board." Assigning the crew to watches gave the day structure and them responsibility – even if Loki was capable of running the ship on his own.

    "What shift will you take, Gothi?" Arnbjorn said.

    Karl searched the honorific for traces of irony, but could find none. "Sixteen hundred to midnight," he said, and caught their approving nods. Little by little, they'd shown that they knew about his changed relationship with Bera; not toward him – his position was unambiguous – but by their sudden deference to her. At times he could almost sense them thinking.
Do we
joke with her? Call her Gothi-kona, as if she's his wife?
But his keeping Bera on a separate watch showed them that he would treat her like any other crew-member.

    Even with the new schedule, time dragged for people who were used to working, or lately walking, from dawn to nightfall. So while Bera was on watch, Karl rose early and scoured the eleven decks. To his delight he found a small gym in the ship's cavernous bowels.

    "You are joking?" Orn said later, when Karl told them his new idea. "Do I look as if I need exercise?" The devil's ride that Ragnar had led them on had all but melted the flesh from Orn's frame, left him a wasted shadow of the once-bulky man Karl had known.

    "You do," Karl said. "To stop muscle wastage in micro-gravity. Or do you fancy hiking across country carrying ten men on your shoulders with your legs buckling under the strain?"

    "It can't be that bad!" Orn said. Arnbjorn and Ragnar looked on, grinning.

    "Oh, but it can," Karl said. "You want to suffer a heart attack? Cramps? Brittle bones? And why should the others have to do it, but you don't?"