Spectral Velocity

by Margo Bond Collins

  “That’ll take too long.” Shaking his head, Finlay continued checking other options.

  “And yet, it’s faster than pulling the line to do a visual inspection.” Irritation threaded through Cybele’s voice.

  Finlay paused, his assessing gaze flickering between the readout in front of him and Cybele’s agitated face.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said. With a nod, he began entering the codes required to have the nanites swarm to the affected joint, dissolving and consuming the oxidized iron that fueled them.

  By the time he had finished inputting the codes, Cybele’s irritation had passed.

  Leaning back in his seat and resting against the headrest behind him, Finlay said, “So what would you like to do while we wait?”

  Cybele’s slow, long blink was more out of surprise for his teasing, almost suggestive tone than any attempt at seduction.

  It didn’t seem to matter, however. If their only direct contact had affected Finlay even half as much as it had affected her, there was no doubting the tenor of his thoughts.

  The problem, of course, was that Cybele had no way of knowing if Finlay had been attracted to her as she was to him.

  No way other than asking, at least.

  Always practical, Cybele turned to face him to discuss the issue, only to discover that he had moved closer during her brief interlude of introspection. His lips were now scant inches away from hers.

  I guess that answers that question.

  She pulled her gaze away from his mouth and dragged her stare up to meet his.

  “Hi,” he said softly.

  She swallowed, and the microphone inside her VR helmet picked up the sound, transmitting it so that it echoed through the seemingly enclosed space they inhabited inside the virtual reality environment.

  “Hi.” Her voice scraped through the air.

  Back on the ship, nervous flutters trembled through her belly, and it felt as if she were experiencing them right here in VR.

  With one hand, he reached up and cupped the side of her face. His palm was large enough to almost entirely cover the exposed skin. And although he hadn’t had to, apparently he had taken the time to do a full body scan that even replicated the calluses on his hands for the VR unit to include on his avatar.

  Cybele’s eyes fluttered almost closed as she reveled in the apparent feel of his skin against hers.

  The rasp of his fingertips as he slid them down her face and under her chin tightened all the muscles in her back, pulling them up against her spine until she arched toward him. Touching under her chin, he tilted her face up just enough to lean forward and capture her lips with his.

  His mouth against hers was hot and demanding, the skin of his lips soft, contrasting with the sense of hard muscle in his shoulders and upper arms when she reached up to grab them and steady herself.

  Skin, however, was apparently the limit of the VR unit’s ability to translate. When she attempted to slip her tongue into his mouth, she was brought up against the very definite reality of a virtual reality environment. Her tongue could feel the heat of the outside of his lips, presumably where it brushed against the sensors inside the visor. But that was as far as it could go. There was no sense of damp, or of anything other than softness or roughness, so when she brushed against Finlay’s tongue trying to do the same thing, they rasped against each other, rather like sandpaper, and the two of them sprang apart, staring at each other in surprise.

  Cybele laughed nervously. Finlay shook his head and said, “Okay, next time, let’s try full-body VR suits.”

  Cybele glanced up at him through her eyelashes, a hot blush staining her cheeks. “I knew better than that,” she said.

  Finlay’s lopsided grin brought out a dimple in his cheek, and he ran a hand through his hair as he shook his head. “So did I.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Apparently, you can make me forget pretty much anything.”

  He glanced at the tiny space between the narrow seats they occupied and reached down to twine his fingers through hers. When he looked back up, his gray eyes were heated in a way that showed through even in VR. “Still, right up until the end there, I thought it was going pretty well.”

  Despite the statement, his eyes and his voice both held a hint of a question, and Cybele smiled. “I think so too. In fact, I think we should try again.”

  She leaned forward, twining her arms around his neck, allowing the sense of contact and heat to be enough for now.

  This time, when their lips met, she moved slowly, allowing herself to explore gently, to take in the sensation of his skin brushing across hers, of the way it felt when she drew his lips between hers and sucked gently, creating pressure without the usual, additional sensation of such an action.

  Finlay’s hands dropped to her waist and moved up to her ribs, his thumbs stretching to span her abdomen as he moved back and forth and up and down in his gentle exploration. She knew his hands were investigating the curves, the shape of her avatar’s body, so similar to her actual form. She couldn’t feel anything because she wore no receptors in other parts of her body. But simply watching him as he slipped those giant hands of his down her flat stomach and out along the sides of her hips gave her chills. It was almost as intoxicating to watch him touch her as it was to use her own VR-enhanced hands to find and explore the contours of his body. He was so much larger than she was, with his broad shoulders and muscular arms, as big around as some of the pipes that ran along the inner walls of the Rapunzel-320—and on his avatar, almost as hard. He’d said that the avatar was taken from a body scan, as was hers, that he hadn’t made any significant changes or alterations to it before he sent it in to do the work that they needed to do.

  She hadn’t made any changes, either—at the time it hadn’t seemed necessary. She knew that her brain-scan interaction with the VR program could cause what the experts had termed “self-perception variations” in her avatar unless she consciously modified those. Now, she almost wished she had intervened in the avatar’s creation—made her hair a little brighter, her eyes a little lighter. She wondered if Finlay sometimes had similar regrets about his own avatar.

  At any rate, if he was telling the truth, then the mountain of a man beside her, the one whose muscular thighs she was currently tracing with her fingertips, was very like the one at the other end of the pipeline she had dropped down to the surface.

  As erotic as it was to explore and examine him without any reservations, or concerns that she might make him too uncomfortable, the freedom she gained didn’t match the potential for mutuality that they had lost.

  But taking it slowly allowed them to avoid any unpleasant surprises like the earlier kiss. Cybele slid her fingers around the back of his neck and into his thick hair.

  Even without the benefit of a full-body suit, it wasn’t long before the sounds of their breathing grew heavier, echoing through the limited space.

  When they finally broke apart, Cybele was wishing for the kind of complete suits the pornography industry used in their shows.

  She leaned her forehead against Finlay’s, catching her breath.

  After a long moment, he drew away from her and brushed her hair back from her face. The gesture was intimate, and less full-body contact meant it felt more realistic, too. The brush of his fingertips against her cheek made her shiver.

  He lifted several strands of her hair and let it run through his fingers. “We don’t have blondes on Old Earth any longer,” he said. A slight smile quirked one side of his lips up.

  A slight laugh puffed out of Cybele. “That’s what you notice now? Anyway, there aren’t enough of you left to support that kind of genetic diversity.” She felt as if her words were running together, spilling out of her in a bright cascade and piling around them with a silent tinkling sound, fragile objects of glass that, once broken, would reveal the breathless pounding of her heart back on her own ship.

  When Finlay spoke again, she could barely remember what they had been discussing.

&n
bsp; “No. The plague took too many of those who stayed behind.”

  She’d never really studied Old Earth history. Now she wished she’d had better foresight.

  “How long after the colony ships left was it before the Gotha plague showed up?”

  “About two generations. The bio-phage that causes it and eats away at the various microflora we humans need began in the ruins of the major cities and took that long to fully develop. And like all plagues, it started fairly quietly and picked up speed. No one even knew it was happening until it was in full fury.”

  Cybele nodded, running her fingers through his silky, dark hair, just barely shot through with silver as he continued speaking.

  “By the time we figured out what was going on and got it under control, there were barely enough Old Earthers left to keep our population stable. Definitely not enough blondes to keep that trait recurring.” Taking her cheeks both sides of her face in his hands, he drew her in for another kiss. This time, she was ready for the oddness of the experience. Yet, even as part of her mind carefully catalogued the differences between VR kisses and real ones, the rest of it was sending information back to her body back on the ship, and she found was responding as if there were no distance between her and Finlay.

  This time, when they pulled apart, Finlay brushed his thumb across her lower lip. “I could do that forever,” he whispered.

  This time was Cybele’s turn to grin. “Someone might notice of we never came out of this particular simulation,” she suggested.

  “Well…fuck them,” he said, in the first display of inappropriate work language Cybele had heard from him. Of course, everything about this interlude had been inappropriate for work, so she really didn’t see a problem with his language.

  But she’d been given to believe that New Terrans were less puritanical about language than Old Earthers.

  After their third kiss, Cybele pulled back and asked, “What are we going to do about the record of all this?”

  Finlay’s serious, gray eyes regarded her steadily for a moment, then narrowed a bit in thought. “I should be able to create a loop in the program to create the illusion that we simply sat here and talked.”

  Cybele nodded, but worry gnawed at her stomach, anyway. “That would be great. Unless, of course, you’re likely to get caught making those changes.”

  Finlay stroked her hair as if he couldn’t get his fill of touching her. “My guess is that no one will even notice any minor discrepancies. They certainly wouldn’t figure it out unless they went looking for problems. And while it’s entirely possible that someone will try to figure out what we’ve been doing when we’re alone together, I sincerely doubt that this is where they’ll start—right now at this moment out of all of them. We should have plenty of warning if things are about to get difficult.”

  “And then what would we do?”

  “Shh. Don’t worry. It won’t be an issue.”

  Cybele didn’t fully believe him, but she was willing to let him deal with the locals since he was one.

  “Kiss me again,” he said, drawing her mouth toward his yet again.

  Chapter 4

  Dear Finlay,

  I’m on the other side of the planet tonight, en route to station number four’s drop point. I keep planning to send these letters to you, but I’m afraid of someone intercepting the transmission. Somehow, I think that might be even worse than having the VR sessions discovered. Not because the consequences would be worse, mind you, but because I can’t stand the thought of anyone on Old Earth or on New Terra knowing how I really feel. If they think we simply couldn’t stand a lack of physical contact, then it makes us—our actions—more believable.

  Rolling eyes emoticon.

  I’ve been working through various possibilities of ways for us to be together. Silly, isn’t it? As if I could possibly discover anything that our scientists hadn’t already considered. I’m a flight jockey, not a biologist.

  Lab beaker.

  And yet, I continue to try to find a way for us to be together. I think that’s what caused me to realize my feelings for you. I think that I love you.

  Heart.

  The thought of leaving you, of spending the rest of my life not seeing you, not talking to you, not even writing letters to you, alone with this aching emptiness inside of me, makes me want to cry. I know that this is temporary. But I’m devastated by the realization that I am going to spend all of eternity, all that I know of forever, not being with you—

  Broken heart.

  Crying face.

  I don’t know how I’m going to wake up every morning to the realization that you’re still gone, that we’re still not together.

  Broken heart.

  I love you.

  Cybele

  She never sent the letters she wrote.

  Chapter 5

  The next time they met, Cybele wore a full body VR suit. Not the exciting type, like the porn industry used—that kind certainly wasn’t available in the fleet’s gear, and Earth didn’t have the very newest models. But she did have one with better sensors than the standard issue, ones designed to give a space explorer coming across a new planet a way to interact with scans, thereby gaining a sense of what it might be like to physically visit a planet. Early on in space exploration, potential colonists had discovered the value of examining new environments from a distance.

  Cybele hoped she was about to reap the benefits of the fleet’s decision to include a complete VR kit in the Rapunzel-320’s hold.

  She had gotten to the pipeline site early, anxious about how Finlay might be reacting to the previous week’s kiss.

  Several times as she had made her orbit around Old Earth, stopping at various stations to complete the same tasks that she did when she was at Finlay’s station, she’d resisted the impulse to reach out to him via trans-planetary communications. Those communications weren’t always stable, and more to the point, they weren’t secure. Though Old Earth’s government, her own planetary government, and fleet policy all prohibited relationships between New Terran colonists and Old Earthers, Cybele knew they really couldn’t do anything to her. New Terra was four years away, and when it came down to it, Old Earth simply didn’t have the ability to punish her, even if they had wanted to potentially offend the woman who kept their planet safe for habitation and themselves free of the microflora phage.

  They don’t have either the equipment or the nerve to alienate me, she thought to herself more than once.

  But they did have the ability to hurt Finlay. If his planet, either the people or the government, discovered what had happened between them, he would lose his job, at the very least.

  More likely, he would also lose all standing in his community. As the man who had put the planet at risk of by passing the phage on to New Terra’s representative and thereby risking Old Earth’s relationship with the colony, he would almost certainly be ostracized and vilified.

  Cybele couldn’t stand the thought of Finlay alone among his people.

  No, better to continue to keep their relationship a secret. After their last meeting, Finlay had promised to hide the evidence of their kiss—and as an engineer who specialized in the VR interface between his government’s equipment and New Terra’s traveling, moving pipeline, he was the right person to do it, too.

  So now Cybele stood in the otherwise empty VR environment, waiting for him to complete the transition of information and join her.

  She shifted from foot to foot, twining her hands together as anxiously as if she were about to meet him in person.

  All around her was a blank, black field, but she could see the pinpoints of lights flashing in the distance that indicated Finlay was working on setting up their meeting place.

  Not our meeting place, she corrected herself. This is our work environment. This is the pipeline insertion point. This is not our meeting place.

  And yet she couldn’t help but think of it as if it were. A space designed for them, away from the rest of their worlds.
A place and a time apart from anything that might be considered reality.

  Cybele jumped when a landscape popped into being around her, complete and full. The colors were brighter than she remembered them being, probably an effect of the full-body suit, with its enhanced sensory pickups, and superior technology. She was distracted when she saw the pipeline she had inserted into the facility moments ago. Work pulled at her, and she strolled over to check that it had dropped cleanly. With a wave of her hand and a few flicks of her fingers, she pulled up the data she needed to confirm the visual inspection.

  Yes, everything was working perfectly.

  She smiled to herself, glad at the thought of the possibility that she could spend time with Finlay that wouldn’t be necessarily spent working.

  A chance to try out the full-body suit, perhaps.

  When Finlay himself appeared at the entry point, Cybele found herself examining him intently to see if there was any indication of whether or not he had on a full-body suit, too.

  She wasn’t certain whether the differences she saw were due to her own suit, or perhaps one that he was wearing. However, everything about him looked sharper, clearer, as if she had been seeing him through a rain-smeared glass window, without ever even realizing it, and someone had come along and wiped the window clear to allow the sunlight to shine through. Everything about him was brighter, sharper, more easily seeable.

  With a start, Cybele glanced down at her own body, to find much the same effect.

  Uncertain what to say, she watched him approach without speaking. When he was only a few feet away, she offered, “Hi.”

  “I think that’s my line,” he said, smiling.

  With a wave of his hand, he indicated the equipment surrounding them. “How does everything look?”

  “Good,” she said. “I was especially careful with the insertion point today.”

  A lightning flash of a grin crossed his face and his eyes sparkled. “I noticed.”

  “So…” Cybele cast around for something to say. “Is there anything we should check?”