Now, with the tributaries of that one delicate member established, he moved to cover her.

"You have me at a disadvantage," he had complained after her robe was back on, the vacuum suit already claimed by a drone. Already, he wished he had seized the moments after they had seen the engine core. But the whole thing had been so sudden: the explosive, unexpected sunrise of a universe.

"What brings you Out this far?" he finished.

She smoothed the garment against her skin, giving rise to the shape of her breasts again. "I'm an agent, too, I suppose. But I don't broker objects; I perform tasks."

He frowned, the design of his mineral features made it a slow, grave motion. Often in the manifold and multiplex economies that blossomed throughout the Expansion, it was necessary to describe one's profession abstractly. The specifics of any job could become meaningless outside the context of planet and culture. But Mira's answer seemed deliberately obtuse. The mode she'd used in Diplomatique didn't forestall him asking, though.

"What sort of tasks?"

She cocked her head, her eyes watching his hands replace the genital jewelry he'd removed to protect it from the hard vacuum around the core. "I hearby declare this airlock to be my legal residence, temporary," she announced.

He had to chuckle. She knew the law and its fictions. Anything she said would now be beyond subpoena, even if the ship were watching, which, he felt sure, it was. And her statement confirmed his suspicions that she was no tourist.

"My tasks are extra-legal."

More vagueness, he thought.

"Whom do you work for?"

"World-class minds, or ships, sometimes. But older, wiser ones than this." She splayed one hand to indicate the Queen Favor, adding the barest of smiles for his benefit. "I make sure certain concepts are never fully realized."

He nodded. A sort of industrial spy, he supposed. Or saboteur. That was all he wanted to know, frankly. Probably all he could understand. It was a story as old as history: any profitable franchise (or guild, or cartel, or operating system) had to protect itself from developments that might result in it being superseded. The future always held bad news for someone. Of course, Mira and her employers were merely stop-gaps. As his own bootstrapped personhood showed, sooner or later the new toys always won.

Her tone had grown more guarded, even in the fiat-secrecy of the airlock. But he didn't want further details. The specifics didn't interest him. He hadn't paid attention to the world of business and investment, outside his own rarefied profession, for a hundred years.

But another question boiled up inside him with uncharacteristic suddenness and intensity. Maybe the result of artificial intuition, the old legend. He didn't think before asking.

"Do you kill people?"

She nodded without hesitation. "People. Biological and artificial."

His reaction caught him by surprise, as unexpected as the question had been. A quickening of senses, of inner processes, of desire. One of the jewels slipped from his fingers (it had been decades since he'd dropped something) and he watched it shatter against the radiation-shielded floor of the airlock: another starburst from this woman. One evening with her left a wake of new sensations that he would be days untangling.

"Come to my cabin," he said. "It's my turn to show you something."

A number of his scintillating muscles left the iron berth of his chest, ventured out to perform heavy work, unsubtle but pleasurable all the same. Four took control of her wrists and ankles, aglitter with their serpentine motion: these were muscles of lifting, not often used for snake-like encirclements. Mira gasped a little, a sound roughened by the cord down her throat. The muscles were scaly and left abrasions in their wake. These restraints were a necessary measure; if she thrashed too much, his smaller, penetrating strands might damage her badly. He shifted more of his crushing weight onto her: masterfulness for its own sake. It was his turn to make her cry.

The last of the extruded muscles—a leathery whip that lived next to his diamond-hard spine—wrapped itself around her neck. This cool member came from deep inside; it carried no phos-phorescents, and left a trail of his inner ichor, the medium in which his nanorepair mechanisms swam, marking a passage darker than her olive flesh. The muscle's grimy coat smelled of ash and animal corruption. It would have been choking, so close to her nose, were her reflexes not so thoroughly compromised.

Between this black collar and the fiber-thin intrusions into her lungs, he could deliver any state between dark asphyxia and blinding hyperventilation.

Now wiry sensory strands moved across her chest. They encircled her nipples, shifted quickly between temperatures that would boil or freeze water, listened to her heartbeat. Her heart accelerated without any direct intervention, pounding like an animal in a sinking cage. There was fear in her sweat, in the rank chemicals of her labored breath. And in its battle against that animal panic, her mind produced another layer of reactions: shudders and flickers of eyes and fingers, the clenching muscles of vagina and anus. Darling bent forward like a mass of quarried earth to kiss her forehead. Before the heavy kiss fell, a brush of sensors spilled from his mouth to taste: her tears, her perspiration, the bright strand of saliva easing from a corner of her hostage mouth.

Thin elements probed the moist spaces of her cunt. Darling remained tentative here, teasing rather than abusing, worrying the clustered nerves with a few shimmering electrical shocks. He painted her labia with a colony of nanomachines, aggressive and acidic; an itch would begin to build there soon, slowly spreading until her entire groin would cry out for rougher measures.

He paused in his lovemaking for a moment, drank in the tremors and murmurs beneath him, the completeness of his control. The mesh of his radiant tongue on her forehead returned brainwaves like those of a violent dream: high-pitched and irregular, but riding the undercurrent of a low sine wave, as if they issued from a deep, hidden place. He tasted her blood: low sugar content except for a little alcohol, and the satisfying metal tang to remind Darling that frail humans had iron in their veins.

She began to struggle now, a soft, annoyed childhood noise gurgling in her throat. The itch in her cunt must be growing, needling and burning the sensitive flesh, but frustratingly tarrying at the threshold of real pain.

He initiated a host of other actions, all calculated to increase the thirst in her loins. A careful measure of pure oxygen began to trickle into her lungs, bringing her mind back sharply from its sensation-drowned state. He released the pressure on her nippies, and listened with feather-delicate strands as blood began to surge back into them. He stimulated the nervous bundles deep in her stomach, producing an unruly excitement like a mix of excess caffeine and a missed night of sleep. His filaments deep in her heart lashed it like a racing animal at the finish, pushing its rate dangerously high.

In moments she was screaming, adrenalin-blasted muscles straining at his steely grasp, fingernails tearing at her own palms. He unsheathed his penis, briefly paused to scale it to her small size. It was furred with minute sensory strands, with hard, unbending metal underneath.

He eased its full length into her vagina, and Mira thrashed so hard he had to tighten his grip, extending it to control knees, elbows. Her howl vibrated the throat-penetrating strand exquisitely; her teeth gnashed it with the sovereign strength of an animal jaw.

His penis stroked her slowly, igniting the dire itch into a torrent of sensations, which spread across the spectra of pain and pleasure like a pocket universe of burning nerves.