* * * * * * *
The white had faded away, though Cormick’s ears still rang and colors played beneath his eyelids. The Egg said nothing to him, so he queried it for status. Nothing. Cold nibbled at his face.
His eyes cracked open and, and instead of the sterile lukewarmth of the amniotic fluid and the Egg’s internal displays, they found air – moist, but gaseous – and the glowing face of Darling Bhumi.
Before he could cough up the fluid in his lungs she caught his face between his hands and kissed him, spreading his lips apart with hers so her breath could enter his mouth. Heat flooded his chest, infused itself into his blood and tingled through his body, to the reach of his toes and fingers. His leg kicked like he was waking from a falling dream. He was unrestrained, detached from his Egg, and in freefall. He grabbed at what was nearest to him – Bhumi – and she squeezed back against him. They were both still naked, and their bodies were responding to the proximity of flesh. Her kiss lingered from function to pleasure; he had drawn great lungfuls of the verdant air through his nose and into his fluid-free lungs and now he kissed her back and hooked his leg around the long thigh that had slipped up between his.
She drew away with a blushing smile full of promise. She held him still by the wrist while his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.
He was a thousand kilometers above the planet – high enough to see the horizon curve away and fade from blue to black and stars. High enough to see the bay-hugging shape of the mining colony at an angle, and directly beneath them a blistering cloud of steam and gray ash and fire.
His legs kicked again, and his stomach twisted to adjust to the first sustained micro-g he’d felt in years. Darling Bhumi’s pocket of vaporous air still extended down his arm to envelop his entire body, but beyond that was a sphere of water, clear as diamond glass and more than a kilometer in diameter. Lattices of ice frosted and remelted around the outer surface. The Silver floated off to his right – broken, charred, torn open along the ventral seam with a gash larger than its loading ramp, but its remaining running lamps shone. Byrie’s new Egg floated before him – it, too, had cracked like a nut along the line of the sensor disk, though the hatch door floated freely away from it. Beyond the Egg, in the distance at the crystal ice edge of the lake, he could see the glowing shape of a Nymph’s aura, and within it the speck of her body. The water around her wavered with anticipation.
“Sister Vrahi has been so long without a battle,” he felt Bhumi murmur in his ear. “If we don’t hurry, she may provoke a fight with your starships just to taste their deaths.”
Cormick’s eyes refocused beyond the edge of the lake, at the darkling shapes of a fleet arrayed warily around them. The vessel at the center of the formation, partially obscured behind fanned-out shieldships, bristled with towers and masts and weapons modules; he recognized it immediately as the Blackbie CenComm flagship, MaidenStar. He frowned at the barrel of light swirling at its center. A dark shape eclipsed the MaidenStar for a moment, and he realized the lake had risen into the wreckage field of the Red Battleship.
“Come, Man – wisdom does not suggesting testing the duration of a miracle.’
She led him by the wrist toward the gash in the Silver, swimming for them both though her feet barely kicked. They slipped into the hold and made straight for the door, passing by the third Nymph, the one in the body of the Kitty Brute. Her aura bled out into the water that surrounded her, and into the control panel she embraced with both hands. Her eyes were closed with pleasure; a post-coital smile split her face.
