Vacumn Flowers

He noticed her.

For a moment neither moved. Then the boy fastened his cloak about his shoulders and walked up the rope toward her, gripping the line between his toes. He smiled and showed her what was in his hand.

“Honeycomb.” His dark eyes sparkled. He cocked a hip slightly, bringing his muscles into sharper delineation, and bit into the wax. His mouth and chin glistened. “Want some? My name’s Maxwell.”

“I can’t,” Rebel said helplessly. Brushing open her cloak, she dug out the briefcase. She held it forward, two-handed. “I’ve got to listen to some stuff.”

Maxwell took the briefcase and, holding it upside-down, solemnly examined the lights. “Listen to it in my hut. I’ll feed you honey while you work.”

“All right.”

She wedged the briefcase between wall and pipe as Maxwell pi

The holography opened on a shot of Eros Kluster Traffic Control. The EKTC station was shaped like a barbell andrevolved slowly within a maelstrom of traffic holograms.

“How’s this?” Maxwell asked. The image rippled over his body as he swam to her.

“Mmmm.” Rebel skipped the scene forward.

They were in the interior now, a hemispherical transparent hull crisscrossed by thin catwalks between work stations. The traffic techs looked upset. One man bounded toward an empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

“That can’t be—” someone said. Rebel backtracked the program.

“Open up,” Maxwell said. He popped a bit of honeycomb into her mouth. Sweet.

An operator gave a long, low whistle. “Look what just came up on visual!” His supervisor was at his side at once, a big woman with a bulldog jaw. “Now that ought to be a lightsail,” the man said. “Spectroanalysis gives us a solar signature, ever so slightly blueshifted. But it’s not registered, and it’s headed right down our throats.”

“Velocity?”

“Hard to say.” The tech’s fingers flickered, coaxing up data. “If it’s a standard-size sail, though, and assuming a median range load of five kilotons, then it’ll rip through the Kluster sometime tomorrow.”

“Shit!” The supervisor pushed him from his station.

“Grab something vacant and restructure the programming to give me more capacity. Take it off of, um, the holos. Let them drift a bit. Set them to correct only once every point-zero-three seconds, okay?”

The operator bounded toward an empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

“That can’t be—” the supervisor said. “No, that doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s not an industrial delivery.”

“More honey?”

“Mmm.” Maxwell’s fingers lingered on her lips, and she kissed them absently.

Another tech said, “We’re having trouble estimating mass. There’s something screwy about the way it’s slowing down.” Rebel stopped motion, and asked the briefcase to give her the terminal display. It appeared, a chart in seven colors, showing every pinprick of light as it appeared from the EKTC station. It pulsed, and the lights shifted to an earlier configuration. A speck of light, circled in red, raced sunward, from beyond Jupiter. A sidebar identified it as COMET: COMMERCIAL CARRIER (LUMBERED TREE

FARM).

The EKTC system was crammed with economic warfare programs. Reflexively, it showed the positions of other lumbered comets moving into the system. It also showed a pod of young comets climbing up from the Sun, their tails of ionized gases winking out as new vegetation covered their surfaces. An operator wiped them off the screen.

“What a pig. You’ve got honey on your chin.”

“Hey, I’m busy, okay?”

“Hold still and I’ll lick it off.”

Now a sidebar appeared with the comet’s registry. It was a small, uncolonized comet, carrying a lumbered first growth of some seventy gigatons of oak, teak, and mahogany hybrids. The trees had been grown over one long swing down to the sun and back out to the edge of the Oort Cloud. There, archipelago lumberjacks had coppiced the comet, leaving roots intact for a second growth, and then artificially accelerated it for its trek back into the System. Eros Kluster speculated heavily in timber, but this was not a local deal. The freight was due to Ceres Kluster as per a contract signed some two decades ago. Since Eros had no financial interest in it, the traffic computer had never before seen fit to bring it to human attention.

Maxwell followed a trail of dribbles down the side of Rebel’s neck, toward her breasts. She giggled and pushed him away. “That tickles.”

The display shifted to fast replay. The comet rushed down on Jupiter. It dipped into the giant planet’s gravity well, was slewed around, and emerged on a new orbit. It dumped velocity in the process, shifting to a shorter ellipse that would take it within the orbit of Mercury, and then out again to its client Kluster. The readout shifted momentarily to show the I

“How about this? Does this tickle too?”

“No. That’s nice.”

Midway between Jupiter and Eros, the comet’s brightness quadrupled. There was an explosive flare of light, which quickly fell behind the comet—a lightsail unfurling. It bobbed slightly on the solar wind, tacked gracefully. The computer ran a projected course for it. It was headed straight into the heart of Eros Kluster.

Rebel switched back to live action. “Go on,” the supervisor said.

“The sail is tacked away from the sun. So the drag ought to be easy to calculate. But it’s slowing down too fast for anything I’ve ever seen. Even a single kiloton shipment ought to—”

“Could the treehangers be dumping some kind of bomb on us?” the supervisor muttered to herself. “No, that’s stupid. Maybe they— wait. Try calculating the rate of deceleration for a shortsail with a payload of a third of a ton.”

Fingers danced. “Damn! It works.”

“That’s it, then. One human in a vacuum suit, plus the mass of a frame, controlling mechanism and cables. I’d say that what we’ve got here—” she tapped the screen—“is someone using a small lightsail as a drogue chute.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A drogue chute. Like a parachute—um, it’s hard to explain. Just contact Perimeter Defense and tell them we’ve got a space cadet that needs rescuing. Dump the whole thing in their laps.”

The scene shifted to the exterior of a Perimeter Defense multipurpose cruiser.

“Hey,” Rebel said. “I don’t think you’re going to find any honey down there.”

“Want to bet?” Maxwell was kissing and nuzzling her belly. Now he slowly moved his hands up her thighs and even more slowly pulled down her cache-sexe.

“Please stop,” Rebel murmured. The briefcase shut itself off. In the dim light seeping through the ill-fitting edges of the tin walls, she saw that Maxwell was already naked.

And interested.

Definitely interested.

They made love twice, and then she sent Maxwell out with her bracelet to bring back lunch. He returned with a huge meal and no change. They ate, and then somehow they were making love again. It just seemed to happen. At last she had to say, “No, really. I’ve got to listen to this.”

She flicked the briefcase back on.

The multipurpose cruiser had matched speeds with the lightsail. A dozen Perimeter Defense employees launched themselves at the rigging. Clumsily, surely, they cut away the harness, drew in the sail, and disentangled an unmoving vacuum-suited figure.

Back inside the cruiser, workers swarmed about the vacuum suit. It was worn and frayed; crystalized patching ooze covered several small cuts. “Look,” a medtech said.