...the ultimate order of a Western-type 'democratic' government is just as severe in its effect as the order of a Stalinist or Hitlerite government.
-- Ferdinand Lundberg The Myth of Democracy
"The god-damned sons of bitches have killed us!"
"Gerry?" Sherry stood to see him shove his way through the door. Sweat covered his face like a thin plastic mask. He was a furious caricature of the Gerald Cooper she knew as he thrust the crumpled newspaper at his wife.
"They've killed us. They voted on humanity's death sentence and passed it!"
She stared at the front page and only saw news of an ax murder in Waukegan, a school bus crash in Seattle, food riots in Sri Lanka, and a preview of the Super Bowl.
"Page twenty-seven," he muttered, looking out of the living room window into their back yard. The scrubby zoysia grass lawn was in need of a thorough trim -- they had canceled the gardener weeks ago as a cost-cutting measure. "Buried with the fur coat ads."
"The treaty?" She read the five column inches swiftly. "The US abstained."
"Abstained!" His hand sought his forehead, found it, pressed tightly against it. "What a noble show. A no vote in the Security Council would have vetoed it. They abstained there, they abstained in the General Assembly. They let it go through without dirtying their hands. The UN is now the sole master of the Universe. For the sake of all the people, which means for the sake of the UN, for the sake of a world state."
"It can't be as grim as that," she said, putting her arm around his shoulder. "You remember how worried I was at first, and how you dismissed it. It really is just a piece of paper."
"So's a death warrant. This is the law, now. Treaties supersede the Constitution. The UN now owns every spaceship on the planet. Even ours."
"No they don't." She shoved the paper in front of him. "Not for a year."
Cooper huffed. "A year. We couldn't put Starblazer up in a year."
Sherry stood and gazed down at her husband. "And why not, Gerald Cooper?"
"Material flow, development time, testing. It's all--"
"Details, Gerry, details!"
"That's what makes rockets fly, Sher--details."
She slapped him with the paper. "Details are what keep rockets on the ground. Vision is what makes them fly. You've let those weevils at NASA eat at you and eat at you until they devoured your dream. Well, I'm not going to stand for it! I want my husband back. I want that dream." The paper crinkled in her grasp. "We have one year and I want us in orbit by then!"
"Zhopu kozina," Colonel Vladimir Tuchapski muttered. The goat's hindquarter in question was the lieutenant who delivered the latest issue of Novii Pravda to the damp blockhouse that served as his office in Novosibirsk. The demilitarization of the former Soviet Union was progressing at its usual turtle's pace: after three months in this frozen wasteland, Tuchapski had succeeded in demolishing only five SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles. They were far from meeting the goals of INERT, and the colonel could hardly have cared less.
Flipping through the magazine, printed on rough, grey paper, he paused to read a short piece about an upcoming UN treaty. His feet slid from the desktop as he sat up in surprise. The Interplanetary Treaty, he quickly surmised, would take control of the entire Russian space program -- what there was left of it -- finishing, in his mind at least, the ravishment that the breakup of the ussr had begun.
Nothing more than internationalist Kazakhs, he thought, throwing the magazine across the small room. He ran a cold hand over his close-cropped blond hair and fulminated. News was slow to reach this frozen part of the planet, and he suspected that the treaty had no doubt been approved. In an effort to shake the constriction in his soul, he pulled a stack of missile reports toward him and turned to the specifications section.
He knew the specs for the SS-18 by heart, but seeing the facts in bold Cyrillic type reassured him that his mother country indeed possessed a mightiness that was once unquestioned.
Designed to deliver atomic death to America and elsewhere, the SS-18 was a powerful liquid-fueled missile capable of reaching targets on the other side of the world. The specifications began to play in his mind. He decreased the payload and attempted to calculate what altitude and final velocity he could achieve. The calculations quickly became too complex for mental consideration, so he withdrew a calculator -- a cheap Chinese knockoff of a Japanese model -- and began working with it and a sheet of yellowed stationery from the desk. The paper bore the insignia of the old Soviet Space Force. The old Russian proverb still rang true for the military: use it till gone, use it till broken, live with it, or live without it.
After reducing the payload to ridiculously small masses, he took the different tack of clustering the rockets together. Even without factoring in the added mass of explosive bolts connecting the boosters, it was marginal at best. And the reliability of the SS-18...
Still, INERT mandated the destruction of the missiles. To him, it was insane to destroy the rocket when it was only the warhead that was the evil.
Tuchapski stroked at his smooth, cold chin. We are here surrounded by tundra. Who is to know what we blow up? Treaty inspector is bundled up in his office blue with cold. Some kerosene barrels, extra explosive...
The pride that once dwelt within Colonel Vladimir Tuchapski began again to grow. Could he do it? he wondered. Could an individual stand up against the collective will of the world?
He would need help for such ultra-left adventurism. He would pick them from his troops. He had one year.
One year to reach, reactivate, and snatch away from the UN Russia's abandoned outpost in the Cosmos: Mir!
Ace Roberts heard the news from the UN over the little transistor radio perched on his workbench. He shook his head in amusement. Thirty years ago, he might have flown into a rage. Now, he simply continued to polish the surfaces on the third Aerobee engine that lay in pieces on the table. After more than two decades working on his dream, he felt no sense of urgency, simply the calm pleasure of slow, methodical effort aimed at a distant goal.
Not too distant, he thought. By his estimate, the rocket required another eight hundred man hours or so before static testing could begin. Even though he was in no hurry to thumb his nose at the United Nations, he could be ready to within the next year or so.
Hacker shoved the printout under Crockett's nose. "What does this mean to us, Davy?"
Crockett shoved back his coonskin cap to read the article captured from the computer news network. Behind him, the framework of the rocket stood nearly thirty feet tall. Three narrow metal seats surrounded the central support column, heads in and feet out. The rotor blades, each twenty feet long, sprouted from the base of the command module like four popsicle sticks glued to the wide part of an inverted, cone-shaped paper cup. The cup rested atop the fifteen-foot-tall cylindrical framework comprising the fuel and oxidizer tanks.
Crockett shook his head. "Doesn't mean jack to us." He handed the paper back to Hacker. "The same way no one expects gangsters to obey gun laws or squatters to obey zoning statutes or illegal aliens to obey immigration codes. We're space squatters, Hacker, vacuum-backs. Besides" -- he hefted a nitrogen tank to carry over to Penny -- "we'll be up, around, and back before that thing even becomes law. At least, we will if you can calculate that flight program."
"It's not as easy as that, Davy."
"Why not? The basic rocket equation I could do on a pocket calculator. And the rotor gives us greater than ten-to-one thrust augmentation. That's an effective specific impulse of nearly three thousand seconds."
Hacker walked alongside him, adjusting his glasses. "Yes, but the answer you get is worthless unless you can plug that in to higher order equations to yield a trajectory. And even if you can figure out the integration for a specific trajectory, you won't be able to guess what the optimum traject--"
Crockett put the nitrogen canister down with a clang and patted Hacker on the back. "You're right," he said with a grin. "I won't be able to. That's why you're helping us."
"But even I--"
He stabbed a finger into Hacker's chest. "I'm entrusting you with our lives. I have complete confidence in you."
Hacker took a deep breath and let it out, shaking his head. "I've never been responsible for anyone's life before."
"Yeah," Crockett said casually. "Well, college has a way of deferring adulthood for 'way too long. It's about time we grew up, huh?"
Joseph Lester heard two pieces of news that day. The first concerned the Interplanetary Treaty. The second concerned his career. The series of articles he wrote about Laurence Poubelle and Gerald Cooper, picked up by a wire service, had apparently piqued the interest of somebody in the news bureau of GSN. He played back the message on the answering machine in his motel room. Outside, one of the desert's winter storms turned the streets to mud.
"This is Belinda Helman calling from GSN New Orleans. We'd like to talk to you about turning your articles into a series of reports for GSN News. We think there's been enough nationwide coverage that we'd like to discuss your being the on-screen talent, if that's feasible. Call me at--"
Lester jotted down the number and keyed it in. While waiting for the connection, he glanced down at his girth. Six months in the desert, mostly in summer and autumn heat, had inspired him to shed about sixty pounds. Though he considered himself much more trim at two thirty-five, he possessed the objectivity to know that he was still not telegenic enough for GSN. All his professional life had been spent behind a keyboard. He regularly refused to provide his photograph to head up columns in papers that encouraged such a barbaric practice. Yet the allure of television reporting drew him to the full-length mirror on the motel door.
His face appeared lean enough, at worst athletically stout; his shoulders sloped off a bit, though his arms were not as heavy as they once were. Most of his weight concentrated around in his midriff, the classic pear shape -- the most difficult weight to lose.
Part of him rebelled. Why do I have to conform to some idiotic mass-media notion of good looks? Another part of him pondered the health question. Before dropping the sixty, his breath grew labored after mere moments of mild exertion.
He decided that he would try to lose some weight, but to do so, he based his program on a piece of trivia he encountered in talking to Gerry Cooper about spacecraft design. Every extra pound of payload, Cooper told him, added over three extra pounds to the gross lift-off weight of a rocket, due to the added structure and propellants require to loft it into orbit. If he were an astronaut, every pound he lost would shave three times that from the GLOW of his spaceship. His goal, he decided, would be to reduce the GLOW of an imaginary rocket by one hundred-eighty pounds. At the safe rate of a pound a week of payload equaling three pounds a week of GLOW, that gave him fourteen months. He could do that; he had a reason to.
He glanced back at the article about the Interplanetary Treaty. By the time he lost that weight, Space would belong to the UN. His stomach growled with a gnawing sense of despair.
"I say we need Stark Fist more than ever now, Steve." Barron stared directly at Milton in the NSA director's office. He stood with his hands in his suit pockets while Stansfield sat next to him, hands resting primly on his grey leather attaché case.
Milton gazed back at the pair from the deep recesses of his large executive chair in which he looked like a limp doll propped up in a normal adult seat. He was a small man who commanded a massive and powerful agency.
"I don't see how we can justify it, Monty." Barron's superior nearly squirmed in his chair. "Frankly, the thought of UN control and oversight of Stark Fist gives me the willies. I think we should just terminate the project and destroy all the records. Otherwise, it's strictly can of worms time."
"I say we don't tell them," Stansfield muttered, gazing down at his attaché.
Milton shook his head. "The President backs it. He's been informed about your project. He'd turn it over to the Security Council for their uses. It would still operate to suppress subnationals."
"Look," Barron said, pulling his hands from his pockets to lean on Milton's desk. "This treaty is a pile of crap from that one-worlder Gibbon. We've got files on him going back to Harvard. I can unravel this whole mess with eighty grains of lead. He's the impetus behind it all. Get rid of--"
"May I remind you that he has the full support of President Crane?"
Barron muttered something about an extra two hundred grains, then said, "If I can arrange a demonstration of what Huntress can do, if I can come up with something before the implementation date, will you kill it on paper and keep it operating in deep black?"
Milton simply sat there, breath and pulse rate suddenly racing. He hated this part of the job, circumventing and even subverting the desires of the chief executive.
"Don't embarrass us," was all he replied. He knew that Barron would interpret it the appropriate way, but the NSA chief could always insist he meant the opposite.
Barron nodded. "I won't."
Deniability established to the satisfaction of both parties, Barron turned to leave, followed by Stansfield.
"All we need now is a suitable target," he said sotto voce to his assistant.
"We may have one," Stansfield replied. "Out in California."
Barron snorted. "We've got at least a dozen out there."
One of that dozen lowered the newspaper and grinned at the woman at the other computer. "First congress and now this," Poubelle said. "I think someone's egging me on."
Chemar glanced up from the screen upon which ran a simulation of a drop-tank jettison at Mach 3. "It's going to have a chilling effect on people such as our neighbor, Cooper."
"You think so?" Poubelle folded the paper and set it down. "I'm feeling inspired."
"You think folk hero status will save you?"
"I've got half a million on the mailing list. The project's yielding world-wide coverage. Whether or not we can get it up within the year, what do you think the reaction would be if I called a press conference the day it takes effect and blew Nomad to bits?"
She gaped at him. "You're joking!"
Poubelle's teeth glinted white in the center of his grin. "Nomad's a tool, milady. It's a tool to get me into Space, it's also a tool to inspire others. If I have to destroy it to make a point, it'll be the best hundred million I've ever spent."
D'Asaro smiled back at him with mock wariness. "I don't think psychiatrists have a name for your pathology."
"Give that Lester fellow a call. I want to give him another story."
"About what?"
Poubelle eyed his prosthetic arm, rotating it this way and that. "Just something I've had up my sleeve for a while."
Onboard Constitution, the conversation turned on the UN treaty. Only Scott Boyd gave it anything approaching support, and that was more in the form of resigned acquiescence.
"If we have to fly for the UN, we'll fly for the UN," he said, floating amid the salsa's dense foliage. "After all, we just swap this patch" -- he patted the American flag on his left shoulder -- "for a UN one."
"You don't see anything wrong with that?" Reis glared at him suspiciously; she looked that way most of the time now.
Boyd shrugged. "It's not as if we've been conquered. When Congress ratifies it, that makes it legal enough for me."
Kayanja spoke up. "I didn't ratify it. None of us was asked. Yet we'll have to fly them. You people have little experience with the UN. I do. We had peacekeepers in Ethiopia and Somalia, right next door to Kenya. We considered them nothing more than colonial troops. To them, peacekeeping means defending a status quo that retards any attempt at change for the better. That's what they'll do to NASA. They'll freeze us."
"NASA's been frozen since Challenger," Franck said, plucking an unripe bell pepper from its stem and spinning it around in the air between his fingers. "Since way before, even. I'm dropping out when we get back. I've got an offer from a VR firm to develop and market a spaceflight game. I'd be a veep. Have lots of perqs."
"You sound really ecstatic," Tammy said.
"NASA," an acid voice behind them said, "is performing the function for which it was devised." Ludlow Woolsey drifted through the foliage. His face looked puffier and ruddier than ever on the flight -- on Earth, it might have been a flush of triumph; in Space, it merely made him look like a petulant child holding his breath.
He smirked at the other four, most pointedly at Reis. "NASA was created to monopolize space exploration within the United States. Except for one or two rigidly NASA-controlled unmanned launches, it has succeeded magnificently. Now UNITO will monopolize Space on a global scale, with you, the Japs, the Europeans, the Russians, and everyone else jumping through one single, solitary hoop."
"Has the smell in here gotten worse?" Kayanja asked.
Boyd inclined his head and the other three followed him out of the SALSA. "Let's get back to work," he said when they gathered in the mid-deck. "He'll be out of our face within twenty-eight hours and then we can go on with our lives. All right?"
The other two men nodded. Reis, however, frowned and said, "As long as he's on the Space committee, he'll be in our face."
Boyd laughed. "You showed us how to handle him, Tammy. He responded well to a slap in the gyros."
Tammy laughed in spite of herself. "Well, who hasn't had to deal with horny politicians while orbiting Earth in a billion-dollar rust bucket? Happens every day, right?"
Even the usually glum Jon added a smile. "Something for your memoirs, right? Every astronaut writes a book sooner or later."
"More's the pity, my friend," Federico added.
"All right!" The pilot grinned. "We're back up to speed. Let's go through our work list and get this pooch ready for home!"
They went their separate ways, each with a task to perform that had been determined by NASA months before.
Night is an arbitrary thing in space. Orbiting the Earth at 17,590 miles per hour, a spacecraft passes through the planet's shadow every ninety minutes.
Shortly after midnight, orbiter time, Tammy Reis again dreamt of falling, of being onboard Challenger, of hearing the voices she had only heard on the garbled final radio transmissions that NASA had kept secret for so long.
Uh oh.
Houston...
Give me your hand!
She could not breathe. Or shout. Or move. The restraints cut into her flesh like knives. The air screamed. The ocean grew closer, sunlight shimmering on its placid surface.
It had never happened before in the dream: this time she hit.
The awesome force of the nine mile fall shattered the crew cabin as if it were a glass bauble. On impact, the seven astronauts' bodies flew forward through their restraints, the straps cutting them to pieces.
Judith tried to scream, but realized she was dead. She could not breath. Only a deathly, watery silence covered the broken remains of Challenger. Through a red haze of blood and torn flesh swam a school of fish, intrigued by the scent. They began to feed.
She could not scream. She could not breathe.
An eel tore into her with vicious greed.
"Oh God!"
Tammy Reis awoke with sudden terror to a ripping sound.
She could not breathe. She could not scream.
Duct tape covered her mouth, bound her hands, hobbled her ankles.
She could breathe through her nose, though, and saw the angry face of Ludlow Woolsey as he dragged her from the sleeping bag. He pulled close to whisper in her ear.
"You like it rough, kitten? That's how it'll be. I've waited a month for this. No. I've waited years. Free fall and rough trade."
He wrapped his arms around her and gently kicked off the bulkhead. Tammy struggled against him and tried to form a scream in her throat and nose. It was not loud enough to pass through the thin air and reach the fluid-clogged ears of her crewmates. Together they sailed toward the hatchway to the SALSA.
With all its lush vegetation, SALSA could have been an idyllic Eden in the dead of Space.
For Tammy Reis, it had become Hell.
Woolsey huffed and puffed, pushing feet-first through the hatch. One tennis-strengthened arm pulled his captive by her sable hair. She hissed furiously, the sound erupting through her nose.
On Earth, Ludlow Woolsey IV was a handsome man, winning elections with the aid of men and women who voted as if they were picking beer-buddies or boyfriends. After a month in space, however, his wavy hair -- impossible to coif in free fall -- radiated from his scalp in a madman's frazzle. The exertion, added to the normal fluid buildup, puffed his face into a caricature of an alcoholic.
He sealed the hatch shut and locked it.
The lab itself was a quiet place. Only the steady hiss and click of the nutrient cycler competed with the nearly subliminal whir of air conditioning. In this soothing orbital forest, Woolsey's grunts of effort sounded wild and animal-like.
Another length of duct tape zipped off the roll to bind her wrists to the bulkhead hidden by the broad, thick leaves of an immature plantain banana tree. He produced a Swiss army knife -- the commemorative one with a silver space shuttle inlaid on its crimson side -- and used the blade to split the tape binding her ankles. Legs free, she delivered a kick toward his face that he blocked easily, squeezing her ankle with numbing force.
Her left leg he taped to a grip near the control panel. Her right, far to the other side against a strut. She hung there, wrists together overhead and legs spread, her blue flight suit stretched taut at her crotch.
Woolsey closed the blade of the knife and unfolded the scissors. He rotated about so that his thighs hovered before Reis's face, his head positioned in front of her groin. He held the scissors level with her eyes.
"I know you have a change of clothes," he said. "Don't worry, though. I don't need to shred these. Just a short, inconspicuous little--"
Reis heard but could not see the operation. All she saw was the congressman's body suspended a few inches away, his swollen presence outlined under the fabric of his flight suit.
She glanced desperately around the lab. They had to be in view of one of the video cameras. She located it a few feet beyond his left leg. Its lens pointed directly at them.
Can't they see? she thought. Why don't they wake up the crew?
Then she saw it. She saw and realized at just the instant she felt cold, trembling fingers begin to explore her.
The diode that should have been glowing red was dark. The camera had been switched off.
No one was watching.
No one on Earth knew what was happening.
Then a thought shuddered through her as the congressman flipped about and the sound of tearing Velcro filled the lab like the snarl of some terrifying jungle monster, a thought that robbed her of all hope, all resistance.
What if they did know?
Then she saw the camcorder -- his camcorder -- nearby, taped to a strut with a length of the same silver-grey material with which her captor bound and gagged her.
Tears of terror, rage, and helplessness welled up in her eyes, clouding her vision. In free fall, they did not run down her cheeks, but spread across her eyelids and face like a viscous gel. Though she could have wiped them away on her upstretched arms, she let the tears remain, let her sensations blur. All she sought now was to disappear, to pull away from herself, from the inevitability of her attack.
She closed her eyes.
She was falling.
Lud completely forgot his stomach awareness. His awareness concentrated about a foot lower. Wild sensations coursed through him, electrifying the thrill of her violation. All his senses, dulled by free fall, grew sharp once again. Every snip of the tiny scissors sounded like the slash of a saber through a harem tent. The scent of the woman, suddenly released, filled his nostrils with its musky aroma of hot, energized fear.
The congressman pondered the historic nature of his act as he reached teasingly inside her, past the harsh, fire-resistant fabric, past the silky undergarments the color of which he could only imagine.
"You've done this before," he murmured. "Gangbanged whole crews, I bet."
Tammy said nothing beneath the silver-grey tape that covered her mouth, did not even make a grunting attempt. Her face glowed a furious red, the skin so taut with blood and hatred she could have burst.
"Don't bother trying to excuse it." He withdrew his fingers and marveled at the way droplets of her sweat and juices behaved in zero-gravity. "It's better than having an all-male crew and their suck fests." He wiped off his hand on her thigh. "Oh, I've heard the stories. They have to be more than rumors. I mean, how could anyone resist trying?" Grasping her slender waist, he hung just a few inches away from her captive form. "Not exactly something you tell the grandchildren, but how many astronauts know for sure if they'll ever get into space again? So they at least go for the Onan Orbit, right? And some are more bold." He tugged at the seal on his flight suit, pulling his arms from the sleeves to let the top half trail behind him. It floated like some bloodless Siamese twin joined below his waist. "You train with your crew for months before a launch. Friendships will form. Grow, perhaps, a bit more intimate on the ground."
His hands grasped the seal on her flight suit, one near her nameplate, the other near her NASA patch. They pulled sharply apart. The Velcro separated with an angry rip that fueled his excitement. He felt a wave of heat escape from inside, as if he had just cut open a doe felled by his arrow. Beneath the blue of the suit, bordered by the twin black stripes of the Velcro, she wore a light tan t-shirt. Body heat had stained it with sweat. "Then you make plans," he whispered, "to consummate that intimacy among the stars."
The tiny scissors snipped at the bottom of the shirt. With a single motion, he slid the blades upward to rend the cloth.
"I knew it," he said, gazing with a sly smile at the blue Jogbra binding her chest. "I knew you were hiding them." He held the Swiss army knife up before her eyes and snicked the scissors twice.
She swung her head rapidly forward in an attempt to hit his. He floated just beyond her reach. Instead, her dark black hair whipped forward like a thousand tiny whips to lash his face. Rather than fall as they would on Earth, they snapped back and forth for a few sways, then floated again around her head like turbulent storm clouds.
He laughed at the flogging. "I might ask for more of that."
The scissors did their work again, unleashing her breasts from their bonds. He casually extended his hand and released the knife. It floated, scissors open, a foot away from them.
He observed the way her struggles made her breasts move. With no gravity to drag them down, they drifted with her motions in a way that excited him madly. They rode high and firm on her, as if they belonged to a teenage girl, the kind who were so plentiful back in California to the first-born son of a powerful senator. Except one. The one who worshipped Space first, then Paul Volnos, and nothing and no one else. The one for whom he no longer had to control his desires.
He gazed at her face, then quickly looked away. It spoiled the moment. Apart from the duct tape across her mouth -- which excited him -- weightlessness caused fluids to amass in her face and permitted flesh to rearrange. Her cheekbones, already high on Earth, looked even higher. Almost Oriental, he thought; that was no good -- he secretly loathed Asians, the epithets japsgookschinks running through his mind like a perverse mantra. Veins in her forehead and neck were swollen, dark semi-circles bulged under her eyes. Her throes of rage only made things worse.
He turned his attention back to other parts of her body. Though he vaguely understood that free fall also shifted her internal organs upward into her thorax, he could plainly see that her waist was as slender as a that of a fashion doll. He wrapped his hands around it and pulled closer to her, rubbing his naked flesh against her exposed chest and flat, muscular belly. Twist as she might, she could not turn away.
He surrendered to the importunate urge within. Whispering every obscenity he knew in a single stream of unconscious hatred masquerading as lust, he sought out the hole in her clothing with trembling fingers, spread her lips, and thrust inside her.
She was dry, which caused him some pain. His body responded with rougher, deeper attempts. She did not groan. She did not scream. No sound emerged from beneath the tape. She did not even breath heavily through her nose. She seemed to be on some distant world now, separated from him, from this event.
She possessed, he decided, no sense of history or their place in it.
He shoved harder, deeper, as if he could find some source of moisture farther in. He glanced at his camcorder, flashed his best re-election grin, and turned back to his pleasure.
Every inward thrust caused his upper body to pull away from her, rotating at his loins. He solved this by grasping her upstretched arms and wrapping his own arms tightly around them. Every outward pull threatened to throw his legs back and away. He slammed his outer thighs up to press hard against her inner thighs, tight and spread wide by her captive posture.
Sweat beaded all over his face, held to the skin by surface tension. A quick shake into her flowing hair wicked it away. He inhaled deeply her musky scent and pulled back for a moment to observe how her breasts moved in so unearthly a manner with every violent motion he made.
He grew closer now. Closer to his particular goal for the space mission. "I'm bringing you down, you haughty bitch," he muttered between grunts. "I brought your little boyfriend down to earth and I can drag you down, too. That's power, whore. The power to change lives."
Tammy drifted, disconnected from the world around her. She closed her soaking eyes and sought solace in the only place she could -- the future. This would be over soon, she tried to assure the terrified child inside, though that part of her feared that it would go on forever.
The thrusts grew faster. Suddenly a cold sensation filled her, as shocking as ice water, and the motions within grew slick and less painful, though they sped up and rammed deeper. The cool spurts continued; she refused to count them.
He was done.
He released his grasp and floated apart from her, connected now only by his one piece of invasive flesh. This he slowly withdrew, fascinated by the long pearlescent strand that stretched between them until it snapped apart into several spheres that drifted away like wandering planetoids.
"Star whore," he muttered. "Space tramp. Shuttle slut." His face twisted into a mask of hate. "Just because you made me come, don't think you have any power over me. Whores don't have power, that's why they're whores. But I'll do you a favor. I have the power to get more flights for you, treaty or no treaty. Maybe I'll even be on one. And maybe I'll share you. With UN astronauts. Whores have no rights, but they receive privileges. Would you like that, you tramp slut? You'd better. No fucks, no Buck Rogers."
He reached out where he had left the Swiss Army knife and encountered emptiness. Glancing about, he saw that the lab's air circulation caused the tool to drift toward the filter vents. He nabbed the slow mover, folded away the scissors, and opened the large blade. This he slid under the tape around her right wrist. His voice changed timbre, softening to a murmur of feigned concern intended as comfort.
"It's time to go back to bed now, little sweetie. Daddy'll put you back to bed for sweet dreams."
The knife sliced through the duct tape, perilously close to veins and tendons. All it cut, though, was her silver-grey bonds. She made no motion. Her arm hung upward where it had been. The same for her other arm. Both freed now, they floated rigidly above her like the arms of a catatonic.
He drifted down to free her ankles. Before he could, she locked her fingers quietly together in a double fist. Using her strapped legs as bracing and her hips as a pivot point, Reis contracted every muscle in her arms and stomach to swing her stiffened limbs downward with swift, crushing force. The fist caught Woolsey in the back of his head with a sickening crack.
Pain seared through her hands and wrists. A scream sought to escape from beneath the tape across her mouth. Bones burned as if broken. A flex or two assured her that they were throbbing but intact.
Lud rotated about from the force of the blow. He vomited, sending a bilious stream of ejecta around the lab. Floating away from his hand, the knife threatened to drift out of Tammy's reach. Once more she contorted, her fingers shooting forward through a quivering, foul mass to seize the tool tumbling just beyond it.
The congressman moaned and grasped the back of his head. She had only seconds. Bending down, she slit the tape around her ankles. Using the blunt side of the knife, she pommeled her attacker twice on the side of his head. The blows rendered him unconscious, but he twitched and jerked in a horrific dance unlike anything she had expected.
No sympathy for his plight welled inside her. She tore the tape from her mouth, taking some skin with it. Then she cradled his head in her arm, steadied the both of them by locking a leg around a stanchion, and poised the knife above his face.
"Kiss the future goodbye, fucker."