Michelangelo shrugged, impassive. Vincent turned, now watching him frankly, and wondered how much of the attraction was–had always been–that Michelangelo was one of the few people he’d met that he couldn’tread like a fiche.

“They offered me a choice. Therapy or forced retirement.”

Michelangelo’s coloring was too dark for his face to pale, but the blood draining made him ashen. “You took therapy.”

Vincent stifled a vindictive impulse. “I took retirement. I don’t consider my sexuality something that needs to be fixed.”

“Sign of persistent pathology,” Michelangelo said lightly, but his hands trembled.

“So I’ve been told. The funny thing is, they couldn’t make it stick. I didn’t even make it home before I was recalled. Apparently I’m indispensable.”

Michelangelo’s thumb moved across his inner wrist, giving Vincent a sympathetic shiver at the imagined texture of the skin. Another glass appeared in the dispensall, but from the smell, this one was fruit juice.

He sipped the juice and made a face. “I heard.”

Vincent wondered if the license was off. “And you?”

“Not as indispensable as Vincent Katherinessen.” He put the glass back and watched as it recycled: the drink vaporizing, the glass fogging. A waste of energy; Vincent controlled the urge to lecture. If they got what they needed on New Amazonia, it wouldn’t be an issue–and anyway, they were on a starship, the one place in the entire OECC where conserving energy wasn’t a civic duty as mandated as community service. “I took the therapy.”

Vincent swallowed, wishing he could taste something other than the tang of atomizing juice. He picked a nonexistent bit of lint off his sleeve. “Oh.”

Michelangelo lifted his chin, turned, and gave Vincent a smile warm enough to melt his implants. He glanced over his shoulder, as if ascertaining the lounge was empty, then leaned forward, slid both hands up Vincent’s neck, and pulled Vincent’s head down to plant a wet, tender kiss on his lips.

It’s a lie,Vincent told himself, as his breath shortened and his body responded. Michelangelo was substantial, all muscle under the draped knits his wardrobe counterfeited. They both knew he controlled Vincent the instant Vincent let him close.

Just as Vincent knew Michelangelo’s apparent abandonment to the kiss was probably as counterfeit as his “hand‑knitted” sweater. It’s a lie. He took the therapy. It didn’t help. His body believed; his intuition trusted; the partnership breathed into the kiss and breathed out again. Sparkles of sensation followed Michelangelo’s hands as they cupped Vincent’s skull and stroked his nape. He knewMichelangelo wanted him, as he had always known. As Michelangelo had always permittedhim to know.

He wondered what the ship’s Governors made of the kiss, whether they had been instructed to turn a blind eye on whatever illegalities proceeded between the diplomat and his attachй. Or if their interaction had been logged and would be reported to the appropriate agencies within the Colonial Coalition when Kaiwo Marudispatched a packet bot.

The relationship between the Cabinet and the Governors was complex; the Cabinet did not carry out death sentences, and the Governors did not answer to the Cabinet. But after the Great Cull, they had begun performing some of their Assessments in accordance with planetary laws. There was dйtente; an alliance, of sorts, by which the Cabinet maintained control and the Governors, with their own inhuman logic and society, supported an administration that maintained ecological balance.

Once, there had been many governments on Old Earth. Industrialized nation‑states and alliances had used more than their share of resources and produced more than their share of waste. But Assessment had ended that, along with human life in the Northern Hemisphere. In the wake of an apocalypse, people often become reactionary, and the survivors of Assessment were disproportionately Muslim and Catholic. And in a society where being granted permission to reproduce was idealized–even fetishized–where every survivor meant that someone else had notlived…those who were different were not welcome.

Over a period of decades, in the face of necessity, resistance to the widespread use of reproductive technology and genetic surgery waned. The Governors did not care about the morality of the human‑made laws they enforced. Or their irony either.

So, throughout Coalition space, that kiss was the overture to a capital case. But just this once, its illegality didn’t matter. That particular illegality was why they were here.

Michelangelo leaned back, but his breath stayed warm on Vincent’s cheek, and Vincent didn’t pull away. “They’ll just separate us again when this is over.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We were useful to them once.”

“Politics were different then.”

“The politics are different now, too.”

Michelangelo disengaged, stepped back, and turned away. “Can’t honestly think we will be allowed within three systems of each other. After New Earth”–Michelangelo’s weight shifted, a guilty tell Vincent could have wasted half a day on if he’d been in the mood to try to figure out how much of what Michelangelo gave him was real–“we’re lucky the Cabinet thought us useful enough to keep alive.”

By Michelangelo’s standards, it was a speech. Vincent stood blinking for a moment, wondering what else had changed. And then he thought about therapy, and the chip concealed in–but isolated from–his wardrobe. Don’t love you anymore.

That would make things easier, wouldn’t it?

“If we pull this off”–Vincent folded his hands behind his head–“The Cabinet won’t deny us much. We could retire on it. I could finally introduce you to my mother.”

A snort, but Michelangelo turned and leaned against the bubble, folding his arms. “If we don’t wind up Assessed.”

Vincent grinned, and Michelangelo grinned back reluctantly. The sour, sharp note in Michelangelo’s voice was a homecoming. “If we bring home justthe technology we’re to negotiate for–”

“Assuming it is either portable or reproducible?”

“–we’re unlikely to find ourselves surplused. I know what a cheap, clean energy source will mean to the Captaincy on Ur. And to appeasing the Governors. What will it mean on Old Earth?”

Michelangelo had that expression, the knitted brow and set muscle in his jaw that meant he agreed with Vincent and wasn’t happy about it. He had to be thinking about Old Earth’s tightly managed population of fifty million, about biodiversity and environmental load and Assessment. Culling.

“On Earth?” Michelangelo would never call it Old Earth,unless speaking to someone who wouldn’t know what he meant otherwise. “Might mean no culls for fifty, a hundred years.”

“That would pay for a lot.” Michelangelo could do the math. Nonpolluting power meant that a larger population could be supported before triggering the Governors’ inexorable logic.

The Governors did not argue. They simply followed the programs of the radical environmentalists who had unleashed them, and reduced the load.

Assessments were typically small now. Nothing like the near‑extermination of the years surrounding Diaspora, because Old Earth’s population had remained relatively stable since nine and a half billion citizens had been reduced to organic compounds, their remains used to reclaim exhausted farmland, reinvigorate desertified grassland, enrich soil laid over the hulks of emptied cities–or simply sealed up in long‑abandoned coal mines and oil wells.

Michelangelo’s nod was curt, and slow in coming. Vincent wondered if he’d been mistaken in pushing for it, but then Michelangelo made him a little present of the smile they both knew tangled Vincent’s breath around his heart. “And if we manage to overthrow their government, steal or destroy their tech, and get a picture of their prime minister in bed with a sheep in bondage gear?”