Marani smiled wanly at him. "Sure I do. I just wanted some time with himself. Haven't seen him for weeks. He . . . startled me when he . . . well . . ."

"Pawned you off on me?"

"That's one way of putting it."

"Maybe he really is sore."

"I'm sure he is--at me for seducing you."

"I didn't mean it that way."

"I know. But hoppers aren't exactly physically taxing. We generally take them out a couple of times a week. If he wanted to be with me, he'd have managed."

"Rani." He stopped and pulled her around to face him. "Be honest, with me as well as yourself. Are you still in love with him?"

"Of course. Aren't you?"

He blinked, having expected denial not riposte. "I . . . no. I barely know him."

She shook her head. "Honesty goes both ways, JP. For people like you and me, the Wesser is like a virus. Either you're immune, or you're not. I think you've been infected, and far from negatively, but that's just my opinion. In answer to your question, yes, I love him. Yes, I miss being with him in all senses, but he's got personal issues that I simply didn't fill, so I'm content with what I've got. Right now, I've just plain missed being around him. I was worried about him and need some sort of gut-level reassurance now he's back that he's all right. I need to hear his laugh."

"His laugh."

"Surely you've noticed. It's as if all your concerns just vanish. You can't help but laugh with him."

"Personal issues. Meaning?"

Her laugh held a hint of regret. "His family has a history of finding what some poetically call soul mates. From Seneca on down, according to Wesley, they've found the perfect, lifetime mates. Wesley feels somewhat like the proverbial black sheep in that regard."

The partner business again. "Good god, he's only . . . what . . . twenty-two? He has a fair amount of time yet."

"Not in his book. All the others--his folks, his sibs, Seneca--were married by his age. Translated, he throws everything into a relationship. I think he tries too hard, but there's not much I can do about it except not hold it against him that I'm not The One, as he calls it. Personally, I doubt his 'one' exists. He's not like any of his sibs, certainly not like his father." She shrugged and shifted about, tucking her arm through his, moving them on toward Smith's room. "But he'll have to discover that himself. As for me . . ." She cast him a long-lashed, sideways glance. "My feelings for him remain. Just smelling him makes me horny as hell. Doesn't stop me from finding intimacy elsewhere--"

"Obviously," he murmured, and she smiled a bit wolfishly.

"Obviously. But any partner I have, probably for the rest of my life, will simply have to understand that if Wesley needs me, I'm there for him."

"Loyalty? or love?"

"Both." She pressed the call button.

"You're an unusual woman, Marani Moharrad."

"He's an unusual man."

The door slid open. On the floor, in the middle of the room, Smith lay spread-eagled, moaning. An eye opened in their direction. Closed.

He moaned again. Loudly.

Jean-Philippe glanced at Marani, who tried to avoid his eyes. She couldn't, and immediately burst into peals of laughter.

"I like that!" Wesley groaned and pushed himself over onto his stomach facing the doorway. "Here I am--dying--and all you do is laugh."

"Poor pitiful Pearl," Marani said without a hint of remorse. And with equal ruthlessness, she waltzed in, straddled his body and sank to her knees to sit squarely on his backside. Smith yelped, then groaned in a totally different key as her fingers bit deep into his shoulder muscles.

"Oh, god," Wesley muttered into his crossed arms. "Ohgodohgodohgod. Where were you an hour ago?"

"Working, Smith. And I've got to go back to work at 1300h. So . . . where are your keys?"

"Keys? Don't tell me you're leaving me?"

"Yep."

"Can't talk you into staying?"

"Nope."

Wesley sniffed, lifted his head and propped his chin on his forearms to gaze cross-eyed up at him. "You got a license?"

He raised a brow. "Since I was five."

"Figured. Miner's brat and all. --Any accidents?"

"I'm alive."

"Point to the man with the green eyes." Some of the liveliness left the hazel eyes staring up at him. A hint of unexpected sadness that vanished behind the crossed arms. "Keys are in the armoire. Top drawer. Left. Flying saucer key chain." His head burrowed deeper still. "Got a spare pressure suit downstairs that'll fit you, if you need it."

"Have one in my place, but thanks."

He retrieved the keys, then stood watching the rhythmic thrust of Marani's fingers, noting the disappointment on her face, wondering how in hell to get those keys into Smith's hands rather than his. But even as he searched for a viable argument, Marani leaned forward, running the massage down Smith's arms, drawing them out beyond his head until she lay full length along his back.

"Come with us," she murmured directly into Smith's ear.

"I can't, love. Dying. Truly. Gotta get loose for practice."

"Gotta move." She began rocking gently side to side. "Come out with us, now. I'll go to my class, then come back here and help you warm up."

"Oh, god. Tempt me not."

"I'll let you ride the Stinger."

Smith's groaning stopped. His body stiffened.

"You're kidding me."

"Nope. You take the Stinger. I'll take the Bomber."

"You are, without question, the most unscrupulous wench I've ever met."

"That's why you love me. So . . . will you come?"

"If I don't, will the offer ever be repeated?"

"Nope."

"Didn't think so." A heavy, audible sigh. "Damn you, woman, get off me backside and help me up. I'll go if it takes the two of you to lift me into the saddle."

One look at the Stinger explained Smith's abrupt turnaround.

With star-strewn space waiting overhead and the station's hull beneath him, Jean-Philippe could only look on in envy as Smith settled into the Stinger's sleek saddle and adjusted the straps. Smith's hopper, the one behind whose dash he sat, was a good machine. State of the art, as he'd expect from Smith, but the gleaming red and gold Stinger was a custom job, and from the way Rani's gloved fingers deftly adjusted the main engine settings, he could guess who the customizing mechanic had been.

"You be careful, Smith." Her voice, coming over the suit's speaker, held the tone of an over-protective mother sending her only child out on a first date."Hear me?"

Smith's gloved hands caressed the handlebars. "TLC, darlin.'" The helmeted head turned toward him and in the suit's internal light, he saw the gleam of excitement on Smith's face. "You set, JP?"

"Ready when you are."

Marani tapped off Smith's leg and shot over to the third hopper they'd extracted from the hangar, a virtual carbon copy of the one he straddled, save for color. His was red, hers blue. While she strapped herself in, he inserted the key card in Smith's machine, and checked the thrusters. Once assured of all systems, he set the thrusters to idle, tapped the mooring pin with his boot to release the tie-down clamps, and gave a slight shove with both feet, setting the hopper in a conservative, non-powered launch.

Once free of the station's hull, he eased power into the thrusters, testing balance and maneuverability. It was, as he suspected, a hotter vehicle of its type than he'd ever ridden, but not (he rapidly determined) beyond his ability to handle.

"How's it feel?" Smith's voice asked in his ear.

"Sweet," he answered. "Very sweet indeed."

"Take a bow, Rani."

"Bow, shmow, you just watch my fenders!"

A raspberry followed by the distinctive vibration of a powered launch as heard from inside a pressure suit answered her. The Stinger lifted free in a high, arcing loop, clearing the hull and achieving free space in a heartbeat, where a series of thruster puffs set it spinning wildly, chaotically.

"Wesley! Goddammit--" Marani's hopper shot after, slowed just outside of the wild orbit as laughter rang out through their localized com line. Three quick puffs, and the Stinger came out in a gentle, easy glide toward her, coming to a precise halt just short of her position.

"Showoff." He tapped the main thrusters, set the homing guide to their position and let the onboard computer determine the decel. As a child back on MStatBeta, he'd ridden hoppers daily, but those days were long gone. He'd had occasion to use the small single-passenger transports over the intervening years, but only for practical moving about between ships, stations, and, for a handful of horrifying months, asteroids. He had none of his companions' easy facility with the controls and wasn't about to risk Smith's hopper or his neck trying to prove otherwise.

Fortunately, unlike the Stinger's swivel thrusters, a complex, delicately balanced system that allowed for those fancy arcs and spirals, his hopper was limited to conventional straight-line maneuvering, and the feel for those simple controls rapidly returned. As he relaxed, the joy of being outside the station, floating among the stars as freely as mankind could, soon caught him up and he found himself following the other two in a rapid-paced scamper between stations, riding high above the commercial flight plane, exchanging waves with other, similarly independent-minded people with expensive hobbies.

Planet to one side of that plane of stations, moons to the other. Everywhere else there were stars or stellar lookalikes. Solar panels formed a gridwork about the stations, generating power, storing it in a localized, subspace bubble that everything within that gridwork, from his computer to the hopper he rode, tapped. It was yet one more manifestation, as were the hyperspace drives of starships, their inter-suit communications, and the Nexus Space ComNet itself, of SS&W's cracking of the multidimentional energy-state matrix.

Their random path led them toward ComNet Authority Station. Smith, not content with his conservative vectors, literally rode circles around him and Rani.

"Evidently not as incapacitated as he claimed," he said on the smallest com-bubble setting, excluding Smith.

She grinned across at him. "Knew it would do him good." Her eyes followed a particularly complex spiral. "Bastard. I'll probably have to let him borrow it again--or give the damn thing to him. You know, the hell of it is, I can build it, but I can't make it do that. First time at the controls, and he's making it dance."

"Maybe you're just not crazy enough."

Her laughter rang in his ears as Smith squeezed into formation between them, demanding to be let in on the joke.

"Never. If you're going to leave the party, you have to accept the consequences. --So, how do you like her?"

"Like her? I'm in positive lust. The AG/CG is phenomenal."

"Do I get an explanation?"

"I put a small grav-field generator in the seat and linked the directional thrusters to its input."

"Gives the unit a functional center of gravity," Smith's voice explained. "Turn it on and all I have to do is shift my butt, and she turns on a dime. Further you shift, the more she turns."

"Energy hungry as hell. You're paying my VEM bill for today, Smith."

"Worth every penny, love." His gloved hands stroked the handlebars. "She is a beauty."

A tiny sigh reached his ear. He couldn't see her past Smith, but something told him Marani had just given her pride and joy up for adoption.

Smith, clueless as a newborn, took off, packing, one would extrapolate, as much into his two-hour test-drive as he could. His swinging, spiraling, rhythmic course took him to the apex side of ComNet Authority Station where he puffed to a relativistic halt, hovering above the third ring, waiting for them to catch up.

Every station in Vandereaux, likely every other human built station in the galaxy, employed standard centrifugal gravity in a half-dozen different basic designs to keep coffee in the inhabitants' mugs. CNAS was no exception. The smooth-lines of the outer shell, looking rather like the earliest of UFO images, hid seven independently controlled rings.

However CNAS, unique among all stations, did not rely exclusively on centrifugal force for its artificial gravity. Its central core rose in elegant, glittering planetary-city-like spires, full of offices and conference rooms, consuming energy ruthlessly in a large, expensive, and oft-times cranky version of that grav-field generator that gave Rani's Stinger its high-performance.

The first born child of the Second Construction Wave, CNAS embodied all the ComNet Alliance had hoped to prove to the universe at large--in architecture as well as in spirit and in substance. It had been designed as a showcase station, a promise of things to come, but the reality was spinning floors, in whatever form, were simply more practical, and so the CNAS towers remained a unique jewel in the art of station construction, a must-see landmark of the system, source of a major local industry, from tours to t-shirts to keychains, and therefore, taxpayers had decided, worth the cost of maintaining.

Somewhere below them, in the smooth lines of the outer shell in the conventional rings, were his real quarters, a student cell differing from his student cell in Vandereaux only in square footage and neighbors. He'd be back there soon, would be back there now, if his initial assignment had remained unchanged. Instead, he was coasting, carefree and happy, above the labs where he should be working.

His life could be worse.

Smith was leaning forward, elbows hooked around the handlebars, staring at the station. Rani, seeing him safely delivered to Smith's side, took off for a bit of her own free-wheeling.

"Tell me what you're thinking, and I'll contribute a milicred toward that VEM bill."

Smith leaned back in the straps.

"She's just inside there. See that service entrance? Go in there, up the ladders and to your left. No locks, no questions, no rules. So close and yet so far . . ."

"And what's keeping you from going in?"

Laughter, infectious, yet holding a touch of bitterness. "You have to get through the lock first."

"Oh."

"That about covers it." More laughter. This time free and easy. Too free. "Wait here."

"Wesley, --wait!"

But he was off. Full speed, headed straight for the spires.

"Wesley!"

Marani shot past him, only to come to a spinning, barely controlled stop when it became clear Wesley wasn't listening.

The Stinger, a bright glittering jewel among the lights of the towers, dodged and darted among them, weaving a complex, random path, disappearing from view for long, heart-stopping moments, only to return, skipping and dancing as if without a care in the universe.

"Damn him," Marani whispered. "He's going to get me--"

A general cease and desist rang in their helmets on a band no legal receiver could ignore. Smith had to hear, had to know he was pissing off CNAS traffic control, had to know the fine was building every moment he continued his manic defiance of that order.

Just as the controller was threatening to launch a team to corral him, Smith made a full speed run straight at the tower, flipping at the last moment to use full reverse thrust, creating what had to be mind-numbing grav pressing him into the padded seat-back, coming at last to a spinning halt directly in front of the observation tower.

Upside-down. Relativistically speaking. The spin slowed, and stopped, the Stinger face to the window.

Over that same open band, Smith's voice said cheerfully:

"Wesley Smith, at your service."

"Your ID, sir?"

"Aw, shucks, laddie, ask your boss. She knows. Tell her 'Hi' for me, will you?"

And with that, he was off again, a high curve that let him wave to the tower before heading off full speed on a direct line for Academy Station.

"Damn." The soft curse pretty much summed up his own feelings.

"What the hell got into him?"

"Damned if I know."

"I think maybe I should talk to the controller."

"He'd never forgive you." She shook her head slowly. "Damn you, Smith. --Nothing for it. Let's try and catch him up."

The Stinger was parked and covered by the time they got back to the stalls. Silently as the trip back, they secured their vehicles among the service hoppers and emergency pods and passed together through the air-lock and rotational-sync into the gravity of AcStat, only a short distance from Smith's room.

"Moving fast," he observed. "Guilt."

"I'll believe that when I see it." Marani, angry as he'd never seen her, strode off toward Smith's room, pressure suit and all.

"Rani, wait." He had to run to catch up. "Don't--"

She wheeled to face him.

"Don't what? That was my fucking hopper he used to pull that stunt. It's my fucking neck he's put on the line, and if they confiscate my Stinger, I'm going to fucking kill him!"

She was off down the hall before he could think of any argument that might cool her down. Possibly because there was no excuse and she was fully justified. He hurried again to catch her and just held to her flank, ready to step in should murder appear imminent.

At Smith's door, she didn't bother to announce herself, but walked in, the locks yielding to her bios.

Inside the room, Smith was on vid-phone . . . with CNAS tower.

He was laughing.

The controller on the screen was laughing.

The controller sobered first, his eyes moving past Smith to the woman seething beside Jean-Philippe.

"You'd best look out, Smith. She might have a gun."

Wesley turned, held up both hands. "Wait, Rani. I can explain--"

"I take it you're the hopper-queen Smith told me about."

Marani froze in her slow stalk of Smith.

"It was my machine, sir. I take full responsibility for allowing him--"

"He's explained everything, Ms Moharrad. I must admit, I'd have had a hard time not putting it through its paces myself. --Next time, Smith, take it to the commercial course. Damned if I'll try to explain this twice."

"Honestly, Bill, just send me the ticket."

"Hell, no. I'll have lunch off this one for a week. Just don't repeat, hear me?"

"I hear you, Bill. And thanks. I owe you a drink."

"That, I'll collect."

Smith signed off. His back heaved and with an audible sigh he turned to face them.

"Rani, believe me. I'm sorry. I honestly don't know what got into me. I just . . . saw those towers and had to go."

Marani shook her head. "And you, damn you, got away with it, you slick-tongued bastard. Any normal human would have been diced, fried and served up on a platter to 'NetAt security."

"Helps being a Smith, I imagine," Jean-Philippe observed drily, and regretted the statement in the next breath as both Smith and Marani turned on him, frowning. "I appear to have committed a major faux pax. Smith, I--"

"I'll tell you this once, Beaubien," Smith said slowly. "I never have and never will use Seneca's name to whitewash my own stupidity. I called the tower to clear Marani of all responsibility. I lucked out that Bill just happens to be a hopper racer in his spare time. He asked about the Stinger's unusual maneuverability and I explained. That's it. That's all. I'm embarrassed as hell about the whole thing and wish he'd send me the ticket I deserve, but he's not going to and the important thing is, Marani's out of it, except--" He turned to Marani with a grimacing smile. "I gave him your e-addy, love. He wants the specs on the AG/CG."

"I should kill you anyway."

"And maybe now you'll get that paperwork in like I told you to."

"Bastard."

"I know." He leaned to kiss her, and Jean-Philippe had to wonder if he felt her melt under that casual caress. Probably not, from the easy way he released her. "Thanks, love." A look of wonder filled his eyes, and he gave a bone-popping stretch. "I'm healed!"

She gave a reluctant laugh. "Fuck you, Smith. I'm outta here."

"You'll be back, though. You promised."

"You're healed. I'm superfluous now."

A shadow crossed his face. "Never, love. Come warm me up."

"You're too warm already."

"Please?"

"Bat your lashes at someone who gives a shit. Yeah, scum, I'll be back."

She headed for the door.

"Rani?" Smith pulled the keys to the Stinger out of his pocket. "Catch."

She caught the keys and in one smooth continuous motion tossed them back. "Keep 'em."

"Rani, you can't--"

"Happy birthday, scum. --JP?"

"Mind if I stay here?"

"Only if you promise to remind him at least three times what an idiot I am for what I just did."