The Bonds of Orion

by Owen R. O’Neill

  Coming up on her elbow, Mariwen gave her a quizzical smile, watching the flames dance in Kris’ green-turned-hazel eyes. “Shakespeare. Hamlet’s soliloquy. Whatever brought that up?”

  “I dunno.” Kris wriggled over a little, giving Mariwen a hand’s breadth more room. “It’s something Rafe liked to say.”

  “That figures. He does have an outrageous fortune.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She rose to her knees and leaned over Kris, tapping the tip of her nose with an index finger. That was Mariwen’s favorite playful gesture, and it made the spot between Kris’ eyebrows feel very odd. “And you were worrying, weren’t you? That’s your worry look.”

  “That’s my you’re-making-my-forehead-itch look.”

  “Nonsense.” Mariwen wiggled the tip of Kris’ nose in a way that made her eyes want to cross. “Can’t fool me, y’know.” Which was true. When Mariwen looked at her that way, Kris could swear Mariwen was seeing right through her, contemplating her naked soul. “And you know” a pause as Mariwen swooped in for a brief kiss, “that my love for thee is deeper than any sea of troubles. So quit worrying” with a wicked tickle. Kris moved to retaliate, but Mariwen was faster, seizing both wrists and swinging astride her so she could pin Kris’ arms wide apart.

  “You made that up,” Kris said as she tested Mariwen’s grip.

  “Spur of the moment. Give me some time to work on it.”

  “Later. Lemme go.” Grinning, Mariwen released one wrist and slid to Kris’ left, but only so her hand could coast down over Kris’ flat stomach the juncture of her negligently parted thighs. “Aye, there's the rub” rubbing “‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished” with a silvery laugh that overlaid Kris’ soft inward gasp.

  “Stop that.”

  “Why?” Mariwen cooed. “To sleep, perchance to dream?”

  “No way you started this.”

  “Oops! Am I in trouble again?” The tip of her tongue swiped across her upper lip, and her dark eyes sparkled.

  “Damn straight. Besides, it’s not your turn. I want my shot.”

  “Gracious.” Mariwen eased off her, and Kris sat up. “Must I assume the position, ma’am?”

  “You must.”

  Mariwen reclined against the footboard, opening her legs for Kris, incomparably beautiful. “Lady, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.”

  There was a barb hidden in that baited quote, Kris was sure. She ignored it, though, and squirmed into position. The country that confronted her, by no means undiscovered but not yet entirely explored, offered more than a charming vista. There were a wealth of folds and ridges and recesses in this delectably intricate geography, each with its hidden delights, and Kris intended to bring her entire arsenal to bear on every one.

  Mariwen had her arms outstretched as well, hands grasping the top of the footboard near either edge. By unspoken agreement, she would not move them, nor direct nor interrupt nor guide Kris in any way. Moving her hips was allowed, but only within strict limits. Kris set to her work with a will, and soon Mariwen’s breath began to come in short gasps and her hips were in danger of violating the prescribed terms.

  Kris knew a very particular small spot in an enchanting crease, slightly to the right of the spot Mariwen so urgently wanted her to touch, and by applying a light, rapid flicking with the very tip of her tongue while stroking immediately below and using her thumb to expertly massage the quivering tendons at the top of the Mariwen’s inner thigh, Kris could extract a high degree of revenge for Mariwen’s insolence. She proceeded to do so, listening to the quick, agitated breathing, feeling the taut muscles jump under her fingers and noting the sweet central rivers that were beginning to overflow. Testing, she scraped her teeth with infinite precision a couple of millimeters above the tight swollen urgent kernel and was rewarded by a cry that was almost a shriek. Pulling back an inch, she blew gently over that little focal point, now rather less little than usual.

  “What did you mean, orisons?” she asked.

  “What?” a rasping pant.

  “Orisons. What’s that?” And Kris directed another long exhalation through pursed lips, watching the engorged flesh quiver and twitch with her usual fascination.

  “Prayers. It means prayers.”

  “Oh.” Her breath washed the area as she spoke, her lips so close to grazing . . . “I don’t pray, really.”

  “I do.”

  The barest flick of her tongue? No, not yet. Let her feel the heat first. “What do you pray for?”

  “I pray that in the next ten seconds, you’ll stop teasing me!”

  Kris withdrew two slick fingers, curled them into her palm and nuzzled her knuckles against the wantonly expectant opening.

  “Okay, then,” she answered with a long, firm lick that lifted Mariwen clear off the bed with a loud, shuddering moan, simultaneous with the initiation of a strong slow stroke. “Prayer granted.”

  Chapter 7

  Taos, New Mexico Territory

  Southwestern Federal District, Terra, Sol

  The next day dawned clear, bright and cold; the chill breeze that had frisked so playfully yesterday had settled into a much more serious-minded wind, and after a brief turn on the balcony to enjoy the bracing air, they had retreated inside to finish breakfast and Mariwen ordered them a pair of new coats. The Terran Weather Service took a light hand with such things: they might nudge a category-5 hurricane back to nice wet tropical storm or disperse a nasty rash of tornadoes, but they weren’t going to warm up Taos, New Mexico, especially when the cold snap promised enough new snow to extend the ski season.

  So Kris and Mariwen lingered over their breakfast (Kris had used the excuse of yesterday’s lunch adventure to order a mound of mashed potatoes, accompanied by black coffee) as they waited for their coats to be delivered and Mariwen, in one of her rare chatty moods, talked nineteen to the dozen as gaily as a meadowlark. It was a bit overwhelming. Mariwen was the daughter of a professor of classics, a noted scholar and author of many erudite works on ancient literature. She had a retentive memory, and after beginning with “To be or not to be,” she sang straight through Hamlet’s soliloquy to the end, though she could not get through the line about orisons without laughing and had to repeat it, and somehow (Kris had lost the thread by that point) this led to Homer and Ulysses, with some nonsense about a talking tree mixed in, and some guy named Sophocles who wrote a play about familial doings of a most dubious variety, and then Kris was treated to all Mariwen could remember of the Funeral Oration of Pericles with comments. Now she was talking about skiing.

  Kris sat quietly through all this, happily nursing her coffee, understanding next to nothing, and looking with extreme benevolence on this extraordinary woman she loved beyond measure. She could not, however, bring herself to agree with Mariwen about skiing. Parson’s Acre occupied an elliptical orbit around a contact binary that gave it an unusually high rate of precession. The planet therefore had only two “seasons”, Light and Dark (near perihelion and aphelion, respectively), and the precession caused the climate to vary from hot and arid to cold and snowy over a cycle that fluctuated but averaged roughly eight years. The mid-northern latitudes where Kris had lived were particularly subject to some frightful blizzards during the cold periods, Parson’s Acre being too poor, primitive and remote to have a global weather service.

  In consequence, Kris had no concept of snow at all until she was seven, and by the time she was nine, she was heartily sick of the stuff. She didn’t fully appreciate that on Earth, snow consisted of crystals of water ice, not the nasty frozen mix of water and CO2 that fell on Parson’s Acre. Regardless, the idea that people would strap boards to their feet and go careening down steep slopes at breakneck speeds for fun was totally beyond her. But Mariwen was waxing enthusiastic on the subject and Kris, feeling satiated and exceptionally tolerant this morning, resolved to put up with it as long as things did not progress to actually doing it. She’d rather try on a dress
though that, too, was to be avoided, if at all possible.

  “You’d be so good at it,” Mariwen beamed as she refilled her cup. She was drinking cocoa this AM, which she preferred bittersweet and without milk, in place of her usual tea and picking at a plate of those Normandy strawberries she loved. Kris made a noncommittal noise without altering her pleasant smile and Mariwen, over the space of two strawberries and a sip of cocoa came to see that her audience was not wholly with her. The tip of her pink tongue appeared at the corner of an abashed smile. “Talked your ear off, didn’t I?”

  Kris brushed her auburn hair aside to check. “Nope. Still there.”

  Mariwen dropped her gaze into the cup of cocoa. “Y’know, I don’t think I really deserve you.”

  “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

  A sly peek from those large, thickly lashed, dark eyes. “I ah ” But the rest of the sentence did not appear; she sipped the cocoa that was a similar color to her eyes, though nothing so deep and rich.

  Kris waited out the silence for a minute and then asked, “When are your friends gonna be back?”

  “Probably early afternoon.” Mariwen glanced at her xel. “I pinged them. They’ll let us know when they open.”

  As if on cue, her xel chimed, but it was not her friends: the lodge staff informing them their coats had been delivered. She tapped a request to have them brought up and passed the news along to Kris. “Would you rather wait here, or wander a bit? It’ll probably be a couple of hours.”

  Kris looked out the panorama windows at the sparkling bright day. Chilly, but not bitterly so, at least in the sun. Probably even fewer people out. “I’ll vote for wandering.”

  * * *

  They wandered. At first they explored the trail that looped from the lodge up to the head of the lower run, and a little past that, Mariwen detoured them onto a path marked by a sign that read Advanced Skiers Only. They hadn’t hiked more than five klicks, but they’d kept up a brisk pace. The trail was steep much of the way, and as they turned off onto the path, Kris was puffing great clouds of icy vapor and perspiring inside her new coat. “Hey?” she called. “You wanna take a minute?”

  Mariwen glanced back at her. She, too, was breathing heavily, but not nearly so heavily as Kris, and her face showed a fine healthy glow. “I need to get you in better shape.” She grinned.

  “Remember your promise,” Kris said, unsealing her coat and reveling in the blast of raw biting air. “Where the hell are you taking me anyway?”

  “Don’t you trust me?” eyes wide in dewy innocence.

  “After that stunt you pulled with those Angel whatcha-call-em things? Fuck no!”

  “But trust is vital in any relationship, my dearest.” Mariwen batted her eyes. Kris considered the possibilities offered by a nearby snow drift. No, probably not a good idea. Mariwen had excellent reflexes and was a lot stronger than she looked. Kris resealed her coat.

  “Alright. I’m giving you a chance to redeem yourself. Lead on, ah, what was that guy’s name again?”

  “Macduff. I mentioned that’s not the actual quote, didn’t I? People just like to say it that way?”

  “Yeah, but there’s not much to lay on around here. Without freezing your ass, that is.”

  Mariwen laughed, wreathing her smile in a cloud. “Silly! C’mon. It’s only a little bit farther.”

  ‘It’ was a cliff. They came out of the trees onto a bald spine of rock, and the trail ended so abruptly, Kris almost bumped into Mariwen. It was...well, she didn’t because the near-precipice dropped off for a good thousand feet before flaring into a broad valley below, with everything cloaked in snow a blindingly brilliant white against the dark green of the trees. A narrow river lazed its way in a bright silver ribbon along the valley floor.

  “Isn’t it grand?” Mariwen asked, turning her shining face to Kris.

  “Great,” Kris agreed, batting wind tears from her lashes and looking down the slope that fell away at an angle of seventy degrees or more. “You came here a lot?”

  “A few times every winter. All through my teens right up until we moved to Nedaema.”

  Oh. “What was that sign about skiing from here?”

  “That’s back a ways,” Mariwen said easily. “From here, you use a parafoil.”

  “Parafoil,” Kris muttered skeptically, which earned her a look. What Mariwen did not know, for Kris had not yet told her, was that when she was still at the Academy, but serving on active duty as a midshipman in an attempt to capture Nestor Mankho on Rephidim in the Outworld’s Border Zone, she’d deployed from a stealth corvette in orbit a hundred-fifty klicks up, using a nanobot reentry shield that converted to a parafoil at low altitude. This experience was etched into her memory as ten minutes of stark terror, followed by an hour and half of sheer exhilaration. But she’d never thought to repeat the experience. The gleam in Mariwen’s eye, however, was unmistakable.

  Mariwen, who loved paragliding almost as much as she loved Kris, detected the attitude, and it puzzled her more than a little. She came over and put her arm around Kris’ shoulders. “Have you ever done it?” then, mistaking the tension in the arms holding her, added, “It’s not for everyone, of course.”

  Kris, aware of a subtext in Mariwen’s tone, offered a cautious smile. “Yeah. I have.”

  Mariwen’s eyes lit from within. “You wouldn’t want to, would you? The wind’s not so bad now. We can have a drone deliver a couple from the lodge only a few minutes.”

  “Umm . . .”

  “Please?”

  Kris had never heard Mariwen say please in that tone before, and the look in her eyes would have made Prometheus love the eagle. There was a dangerous, uncomfortable, chancy tightness in her chest as her heart banged its edges. Moving her tongue in a mouth gone dry, she no longer cared if Mariwen was asking her to fling herself off a mountain or surrender her liver.

  “Sure. Sounds like a rush. Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  Knifing through pure cold air that had no equal under God’s skies took her breath away. The vast cobalt dome of the sky above, the sharp green spires of the trees below, the details so clear in the piercing light that it seemed you could reach out and touch them with your hand. Kris banked into an easy spiral and spared a glance at Mariwen off to her left and slightly above, curving toward a good-natured updraft off the mountainside that her display had shown her. At least that’s what the readout indicated, and Kris hoped to hell it was right.

  The little drone had made its drop of two parafoils and the necessary gear within a quarter hour of Mariwen’s request, and as they unpacked and assembled them, Kris felt, not a worry, but something that nibbled at the edges of one, because during her first and only experience, she had not done the flying. She’d been tethered to Huron, who maneuvered the thing while she went along for the ride. And it was an active nanobot device, not a standard parafoil.

  Nonetheless, Kris figured she could handle it. These parafoils were nothing fancy: an ordinary sport model, the kind any tourist with a degree of familiarly could use, and they were as safe as modern technology could make an apparatus that suspended you thousands of feet in the air from a thin polyfiber membrane and few carballoy rods.

  The only real worry Kris had was being distracted by Mariwen’s chuckles while doing the safety checks once they had the rig deployed and were harnessed in. Which is to say, it was the only worry she had until she saw Mariwen disabling the autopilot and setting the flight controls to manual. For herself, Kris had picked an easy flight path with a gentle descent profile. The sounders had already mapped the valley to chart any updrafts and the thermals that formed over large patches of snow, even on a day like this. She wanted nothing to do with them. Mariwen, to judge from the look of intense concentration in her dark eyes, felt differently.

  Mariwen had not flown in years, and while she assured Kris it was “just like riding a bike you never really forget”, Kris had found it a little hard to know how much faith to put in the homily. S
he need not have worried. Whatever cobwebs had accumulated about Mariwen's skills were sliced away by the rush of chill air in the first seconds, and soon she was swooping and wheeling, as delighted as a peregrine playing strong-winged games on the edge of a storm.

  It made Kris feel downright stodgy. She kept her eyes on her instrument display, though, and let the autopilot hold her hand as she glided sedately in, while Mariwen flirted and wantoned with the upper air. When they landed in their designated zone and unharnessed, Mariwen, her face wet with joyful tears under her mask and goggles, practically leapt into Kris’ arms and gave her a kiss that must have been the most fervent display of a public orgasm sleepy Taos had ever beheld.

  Then Mariwen’s xel beeped. “Oh, that’s them. It’s over that way not half a mile. Do you mind walking?”

  “No.” Kris stretched her neck and shook both arms against a lingering cramp. “Let’s walk.”

  Taking Mariwen’s hand on hers, both of them still flushed and bright eyed, they did.

  * * *

  The inconspicuous door of Ajaib-Gher Designs stood wide open this time, as if beckoning. Kris and Mariwen did not get a centimeter past the threshold when Lielle Modjeska came bustling down a staircase to their left round-faced, round-bodied, and shedding delight like the rising sun while she called out in a clarion voice, “James! Oh, James! Hurry! They’re here!”

  James Murad, all 1.5 meters of him, emerged from behind a screen taller than he was, looking for all the world like a very dapper, well-groomed black-eyed gnome or maybe a Black-Forest elf, but with a silvery white goatee.

  Kris braced herself for another fuss and was not disappointed. Mariwen’s friends, she was beginning to believe, could not converse within the normal decibel range of human speech, and especially not at anything like normal speed. But she withstood the torrent, smiling: questions posed and half answered before being ridden down by comments, compliments and new questions.

  “You both look well,” Mariwen managed to say when they both miraculously paused at the same time. “How are things? You’ve been busy.”