Ian Douglas - Semper Mars

He felt a mild giddiness as the transport pod continued rising up the strutwork tower. There were no windows, so he couldn’t gauge his progress visually, but he could feel the spin gravity dwindling away to almost nothing. Polyakov was designed like a three-bladed propeller on a slender shaft. The strutwork blades supported the hab modules, control deck, and labs some two hundred meters out from the central spine, where one revolution in forty-five seconds mimicked the 0.38-G surface gravity of their destination. On the inward leg of the cycle, the ship’s rotation would gradually be increased to two revolutions per minute, working the Earth-bound passengers up to nine-tenth’s of a G by easy steps.

At the hub of the cycler were the supply modules, fuel, air, and water tanks, the docking bays for cycler shuttles, and, at the end of a long boom extending five hundred meters clear from the rest of the ship, Polyakov’s GE pressurized-water 50 MWe fission reactor.

And, because of the sheer mass of its shielding, Polyakov’s storm cellar was also mounted on the spine, just down the hub from the multiple docking collars, core transport-pod accessway, and main airlock. Only rarely was the big module referred to by its official name, the Radiation Shielded Hab Facility, or RSHF. Usually, it was called simply the “storm cellar,” and with good reason…even if the cycler’s out-is-down spin gravity dictated that Polyakov’s crew had to go up to reach it. Solar flares were infrequent hazards of flight, but when a small patch of the sun’s surface suddenly brightened by a factor of five or ten times, spewing high-energy particles out in a deadly cloud, there was no way that a spaceship en route between worlds—locked by fuel requirements and the laws of physics into its slow-arcing orbit—could turn around and return to port…or even take evasive action, for that matter. The storm cellar was the one compartment aboard ship large enough and heavily shielded enough to give the cycler’s crew and passengers a chance of surviving if they were caught by a bad flare.

It was also, by reason of its relatively remote location, one of the very few places on board a cycler where someone could leave the crowded hab modules and find a little precious privacy….

“Storm Cellar”

Cycler Spacecraft Polyakov

1524 hours GMT

Sex in zero G, David Alexander thought, was wonderful…though it could be even more exhausting than its tamer, gravity-leaded incarnation. The novelty of no up or down, no on top or underneath, as the coupling pair twisted in a thin, hovering mist of drifting sweat droplets, brought an exotic newness to this most ancient of recreations.

Carefully, he leaned back a little, so he could focus on the dozing face of his lovely partner, framed in a golden splash of hair adrift in zero gravity, and as he did, he felt—again—that tiny, nagging pang of guilt. Alexander was married, but not to this woman. It had taken a lot of loneliness—and the rather heavy-handed rationalization that his marriage to Liana was all but over anyway—to get him to the point where he’d surrendered to the very considerable temptation. Mireille Joubert was a beautiful woman and an intelligent one; she clung avidly to the European notion of cosmopolitan maturity that saw nothing wrong with two adults enjoying recreational sex, whether either of them was married or not.

Mireille Joubert. Her first name was difficult…and a delight. She’d had to coach him on the pronunciation, which came out something like mere-ray. He turned his gaze to a drifting wad of clothing a few meters away, remembering fondly how frantically the French woman had shucked off her jumpsuit. Two emblems adorned her suit’s sleeve—a blue UN flag, and a round patch displaying the Cydonian Face. He could just make out the words embroidered around the patch’s rim: Expédition Xenoarchéologique de l’Organisation des Nations unies.

He frowned. There were some who would say that their lovemaking was treason. Well, screw that. Mireille Joubert was his colleague, on her way to Mars to assume her new position as director of the UN archeological oversight team there, a small group of men and women assigned by Geneva to monitor US discoveries and excavations at Cydonia.

He didn’t really give a damn about the political situation, and his only interest in the reports of UN troops on Mars—or of the Marines, for that matter—was to marvel at the stupidity of sending soldiers to the red planet instead of more scientists. He, for one, intended to work closely with his UN colleagues, and the hell with international tensions. Technically, the UN team had no real authority on Mars, though their reports and recommendations could bring political pressure to bear back in the United States on the agencies and foundations sponsoring the Mars digs. Aerologist Dr. Jason Graves, already on Mars with the thirty-some US and Russian scientists on the planet, was the head of the Planetary Science Team. Alexander had worked with the man before and doubted that there would be a problem with his liaison with Joubert. She certainly didn’t seem to think there was a problem with their fraternization.

Alexander started to ease his way from the woman’s sleeping embrace, but the movement set them slowly tumbling, and she opened her eyes. “Mmm. You are wanting to do it again?” Her long, naked legs, clasped about his hips, tightened. He’d thought he was sated, but he could feel the stirrings of renewed interest as she moved against him.

“Do we have time?”

“Quelle heure est-il?”

He knew a little French. She had been teaching him. He glanced at the time display on his wrist-top. “Uh…almost fifteen-thirty.” Shipboard time followed military and European usage, with a twenty-four-hour clock.

“Ah, well…I must go over the site plans with LaSalle at sixteen….”

He sighed. “Perhaps we’d best undock, then.” Zero-G sex, for obvious reasons, had picked up a lot of spacecraft maneuvering terminology. “Docking,” “probe insertion,” and “docking-collar contact” were favorites.

She pulled him closer, nuzzling his ear and enveloping his head in a sweet-smelling, drifting blur of golden hair. Her hips moved in interesting ways. “Oh, but we have much time yet….”

He groaned—happily—then surrendered to warmth and growing hunger. He still felt clumsy with Joubert, even after…what was it? Five times. Or six. He wasn’t sure. Their first time in the storm cellar, they’d used a Velcro strap to keep themselves tied together at their waists; any movement in zero G could have unforeseeable action-reaction repercussions, and when both partners were moving enthusiastically it was difficult to stay docked.

Joubert, though, was an expert at this sort of thing. Either she’d done it before, lots, he thought, or she was a damned fast learner. Superbly acrobatic, she used her legs to keep them tightly joined, flexing knees and thighs like an equestrian to give the necessary friction.

The motion started them turning again, a slow tumble through the mist of their lovemaking. Lazily, he reached out with one arm and caught a stowage-bin handle, checking their spin. Space was precious aboard a cycler. Much of the hexagonal chamber’s interior space was taken up by supply bins anchored by bungee cord and Velcro to the room’s inner surfaces. Fifty or sixty people could have squeezed into the shelter at once if necessary—hab compartments in microgravity acquire a third dimension that makes them far roomier than the same volume of space on Earth—but it would have been a ghastly exercise in claustrophobic conditioning. There were no windows, of course. Ports would have compromised the shelter’s armor. He’d often wished that he could look out into space during one of these sessions….